Cold is the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  The others nodded their comprehension. One of the fine points, obviously, was that since the water brake was not an integral part of any submarine, a permanent and “engineered” solution for its overheating was not a matter of urgency or even concern, so long as the jury rig, the garden hose, solved the problem. After a moment, Rhodes went on. “What we do here is operate Mark One just like a submarine underway for a long cruise, and the trainees stand all the watches, along with the instructors. There’s usually several classes going on at the same time, in various stages of the program, so there’s trainees on nearly all the billets. The instructors fill in the rest of them. The only exception we make to shipboard routine is that the watches are eight hours long instead of four. Everything else is exactly like on board ship. We go through all the evolutions of starting, running, maneuvering and stopping, cope with simulated or real casualties to the machinery, do everything the Nautilus could do.

  “We’ll put you fellows right into the system. The only thing different about you is that the normal trainee is here for a year, sometimes longer. So he drives in from Idaho Falls, or maybe Arco, wherever he lives, stands his eight-hours’ watch every day and goes home. Some of them have to be on night watches, but we keep most of the activity for the eight to four shift and leave things pretty quiet during weekends. You three are going to have to cram the whole year’s training program into the fourteen weeks you’ll be out here. So my orders are to fix you up with a place to sleep right here on the site, and you’re to spend all your time in Mark One, as if you actually were at sea.” He paused. “That doesn’t leave you much time free. You didn’t have any other plans, did you?”

  “Nope.” Rich answered for the three of them.

  “Good. You won’t find this site the most comfortable place in the world to live. The quonset huts aren’t bad, but we don’t have a mess hall. You’ll have to get your meals from the slot machines they have around, and things may get pretty stale for you, I’m afraid, but that’s the way it has to be. I even got vetoed on the idea of having you out to my place in the Falls some weekend, just for a change of scenery and a decent meal.”

  “Thanks, Dusty,” Rich said, again instinctively speaking for all, “but really, we’d rather just stay right here. I’ve already had the benefit of one weekend all to myself wandering all over the machinery, and that’s the most valuable time. When there’s practically nobody here you don’t have to worry about interfering with others.” One of the things they would have to do, clearly, was to make their presence as easy for Rhodes as they could. His position under Brighting’s difficult leadership, subject to that prickly personality, must have its problems. No doubt he had already spent time wondering whether his three new trainees would add to them.

  “Well, that’s good then,” Dusty was saying. “I’ll just give you our regular training schedule for our one-year course. Maybe you’ll want to shift some things around because you’ll only be here a quarter of the time, but you’re supposed to complete the entire program, stand all the watches outlined and turn in all the drawings of systems, just like the regular trainees. At the end, after you’ve finished all the requirements, we’ll give you a comprehensive test. If you pass it—you’ll pass it, all right, if you do everything on the training schedule—you’ll get a certificate of qualification as a nuclear operator. That’s the ticket everybody’s after. You can ask any questions you want, and we’ve got plenty of copies of the operating manual. The only rule is you’ve got to do all of the things, each one of you, yourself.”

  Inside the building housing the prototype there was neither night nor day; electric lights kept the windowless cavern bathed constantly at the same level of illumination. The passage of time became a factor of how often one’s wristwatch had been around all the numbers, punctuated periodically by a weekend. Not that a weekend provided relaxation, except in a very particular way. Saturdays and Sundays, when there was only a duty section at the site, were the most valuable times of all because of greater freedom from interference. Gradually a routine emerged. Living on the site, never leaving it, the three trainees easily could be working in the prototype before the day’s workers arrived from Arco or Idaho Falls, and they always remained there until well after the second shift departed at midnight. Meals were haphazard, only a hasty sandwich or can of soup obtained from one of the many food dispensers for whose slots a ready supply of quarters was required. There was no time for relaxation; nor were there any diversions, not even reading material—except for the engineering manuals and operating instructions for Mark One. The best times were the short nightly conversations the three shared in their quonset hut, but even these had a tendency to become curtailed after a succession of eighteen-hour days spent crawling through the cramped innards of the submarine hull, or poring over blueprints.

  Afterward, Richardson had trouble distinguishing any chronology pertaining to his time at the site, or the many memories which remained. Everything was compressed into a set of kaleidoscopic impressions. With no day and no night, there were only work periods and short hours of exhausted sleep. Since there were no women present during the evening and morning watches, it was possible to confirm the suspicion, after a few days, that the ladies’ rest room probably contained a cot. Here a person could lie down between particularly interesting evolutions of Mark One, or when he was totally beat, provided only that he was gone before any early arrivals for the day watch. And so, fortified by a few hours of fitful slumber (for fear of an unaccounted-for female), Keith, Buck and Rich often skipped their quonset hut bunks entirely.

  Frequently, toward the end of their stay, they were not even aware of the change of shifts, except that new faces were at the various posts. Once, during a test for flux density under a new control rod program, Keith noted with mock dismay that they had not been outside the windowless prototype building for two and a half days, or even looked out an opened door, except to determine whether it was day or night (i.e., whether it would be safe to use the cot in the ladies’ room).

  Through it all there was the uncomfortable realization that Admiral Brighting must have ordered Dusty Rhodes to make a daily telephoned report on their activities. More than once, Rich saw Rhodes’ honest face become troubled when they unexpectedly observed him speaking into the equipment, and invariably there would follow an episode of exaggerated warmth and high spirits which confirmed the idea that Rhodes was trying to square his conscience.

  Midway through the time at the site, Richardson got into a telephone conversation, and therefore an angry exchange, with Admiral Brighting. The subject was the proposed construction of a cafeteria near the Mark One building, so that on-site subsistence would not have to depend on lunches and dinners brought from home or, as in the case of Rich, Keith and Buck, who never left the site for any reason, from one of the many sandwich-and-soup dispensing machines which must have been a bonanza for their concessionaire. The cafeteria had already been authorized. Dusty Rhodes had circulated a request for opinions as to the most desirable location for it. The three trainees, whose ideas Dusty had solicited as representative of one of the groups affected, had all responded with suggestions. A building contractor from Idaho Falls had appeared, and Rich had been one of several who had talked with him.

  The denouement was begun by Rhodes, who appeared suddenly, on his hands and knees with an unusually long face, alongside the spot where Rich was lying on his back, under the outside skin of the Mark One simulated submarine, tracing one of the nonconforming hydraulic supply lines. In the Nautilus the line had, of course, been inside the submarine. For Mark One it had apparently been deemed unimportant that actual submarine practice be followed to such a degree of detail, an execrable decision which Richardson had decided was surely never made by Brighting.

  “You’re wanted on the telephone in my office!” Rhodes shouted above the roar of the turbine in the hull overhead.

  “Who is it? Tell him I can’t talk to him now!” Richardson had already spent hours tracing t
his particular system and understanding its function. He was out of sorts because of its inaccessibility, angry at the design stupidity revealed, furious at the necessity to inch his way on his back along the dirty, oil-soaked, evidently never-before-visited concrete underlayment beneath the engineroom.

  “It’s the boss! He wants to talk to you right away! He’s already on the line, and he’s mad about something!”

  “What’s he upset about, Dusty?” Rich had begun worming his way out of the corner into which he had wedged himself. “Is he mad at you or me?”

  “Don’t know for sure, Rich. Both of us, probably.” Long since, Dusty Rhodes had become accustomed to using Richardson’s nickname. “It’s something about the cafeteria, but I don’t know what.”

  “Well, nothing like finding out,” said Rich, brushing his coveralls and striding toward Rhodes’ office. “Richardson here,” he said on the phone.

  “Please hold. The admiral wants to talk to you.” A female voice. Joan! But the line was open, no one on the other end. Protocol required a junior to wait on the telephone for the senior, and well-indoctrinated aides accomplished this automatically. Joan had gone to have Admiral Brighting pick up the connection. Too, she was doubtless carrying out careful instructions, for she had not tarried even for a moment’s personal greeting.

  Brighting’s familiar expressionless voice, as usual, did not bother with salutation or any other of the ordinary preliminaries. “I thought you understood you were to keep your nose out of everything but your studies. Can’t you carry out a simple order, Richardson?”

  “In what way have I not carried out all your orders, Admiral?” Rich knew enough about his difficult superior by this time to speak up directly. Failure to do so would be equated to acquiescence or confusion.

  “Don’t try to play innocent. I hear you want to install a cafeteria at the site for the convenience of you and your friends.”

  “Not so, Admiral!” Richardson was speaking rapidly. Admiral Brighting would not be listening long. “The cafeteria was approved last year. I was asked where I thought it should be located. So were a lot of others.”

  “I don’t need any suggestions about the site from you, now or any other time! You’ll have your opportunity to give orders when you’re on board the Proteus. You have only one job out there, and I expect you to give it your full attention!” Richardson found himself holding a dead telephone.

  Two days later, a downcast Dusty Rhodes handed Rich an official flimsy. It was a carbon copy of a one-sentence order canceling funding for construction of a cafeteria.

  Vice Admiral Brighting’s arrival, several weeks later, was apparently part of a pattern long set. That is, it was unexpected. Rhodes was late driving in from Idaho Falls, the first time in Rich’s memory, and the reason became known when the passenger beside him was seen to be Brighting. Rhodes had received a telephone call at home the previous evening, directing him to be at the airport next morning.

  All this, Rich learned later. His own awareness of the admiral’s arrival came from a sudden appearance in the lower level of the engineroom during a cold start-up procedure being carried out by Keith. Rich’s duties were to draw a steam bubble in the pressurizer in response to Keith’s instructions: a critically important function that allowed him only a brief surprised nod of recognition as he concentrated on his task. When Richardson straightened up, satisfied that the bubble had formed and was in accord with the specifications, the admiral had gone on.

  There was, however, an atmosphere of approval left behind. Rich was grateful, as he thought about it later, that he had been observed carrying out an important evolution instead of, as so often happened, merely monitoring some static condition. Not until that evening did it occur to him that Brighting might well have timed his trip so as to be able to make a personal evaluation of a significant part of the training schedule.

  Neither Keith, Buck Williams nor Rich had paid much attention to the other two quonset huts in the tiny complex of wartime surplus buildings. One of these, it developed, had been designated for Brighting’s exclusive use, and it was here that the three trainees found themselves summoned. To Rich’s surprise, there was no one else present. Not even Dusty Rhodes was there. The day shift had long since ended, and, no doubt carrying out specific orders, Dusty had climbed into his station wagon and driven off at his usual time.

  The routine developed over the weeks by Rich and his companions involved spending all the night shift, a portion of the morning watch after midnight, and full time over weekends actually in the engineroom or reactor compartment of the prototype. At these times the reduced manning level made possible thorough and even leisurely study of the fascinatingly intricate mechanisms. During the day watch there was a steady schedule of operational drills to participate in, with result that there was little time for investigation of the “why” as well as the “how” of what was going on. This had to be done at night. Early in the game it had become necessary to set up a rigorous schedule of work and sleep if they were ever to be finished. Admittedly ambitious and several times revised, this schedule was now so tight that interruption of even a single night’s work would be directly reflected in a reduction of the six hours of sleep they had allotted themselves for “regular” nights (defined as not having critical evolutions forcing emergency use of the cot in the ladies’ lavatory). Admiral Brighting’s invitation was welcome but, like everything else about him, not without its cost.

  Never had any of the three seen their chief so relaxed. The flat monotone speaking voice was unchanged, but now there was added a subtle difference, a puckish quality never before evident. “Now do you see what I’m trying to do?” he asked, looking mildly and yet shrewdly from one to the other.

  “Yes, sir,” said all three together. Keith and Buck glanced toward Rich, willing him to continue the response.

  “I think we do, Admiral,” Rich said. “None of us has ever been through a training period this tough, nor this satisfying.”

  “It’s doing you a lot of good, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re learning the operational concepts of a totally new source of power, and a totally new engineering development. And we’re learning them more thoroughly than we’ve ever learned anything.”

  “You admit all the training you’ve had before was wasted.”

  “Not wasted, Admiral, but clearly not on a par—”

  “You know it’s been wasted. You could have learned twice as much in half the time if you had been forced to put your mind to it. That’s the trouble with our Navy. People are more interested in organization charts than they are in what really counts. That’s why so many things break down. The designers and operators are all incompetent!”

  Richardson felt they were being baited. There was a set to Admiral Brighting’s mouth, the manner in which he pursed his lips, that conveyed as much. But he could not be certain, decided to try another tack. “There’s one thing sure, and that is your nuclear power plants have been making records for reliability ever since the Nautilus went to sea. That ought to prove something.”

  “They’ve been making records like that ever since Mark One went critical in 1953!” The words were words of pride, but the puckish look remained.

  “Of course, but it’s when the Nautilus began to operate that everyone recognized it,” Rich began. As before, Brighting interrupted.

  “That’s exactly the point, Richardson! You’re like all the naval officers. You’re not interested in real performance. What good is a four-hour full-power run? A twenty-four- or forty-eight-hour run would mean something, but what naval battle is going to be decided in four hours these days? A four-hour run doesn’t mean a thing!”

  Richardson was about to expostulate that he had made no reference to the regular engineering performance standard, a four-hour run at full power, that in fact he had been about to point to the Nautilus as having far exceeded this on her first day at sea, but Brighting swept on without pausing. “Before Nautilus
was even launched, her prototype, right here, made a full-power run the equivalent of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. No new power plant has ever been put to this sort of a test before. If some of them had, perhaps we’d have had fewer problems with some of our ships!”

  The simulated transatlantic trip was, of course, well known throughout the nuclear power program. Every four hours the theoretically attained position had been marked on a chart. Mark One had been relentlessly kept at full power, her single turbine screaming its high whine, her reduction gears roaring, clouds of steam rising from the cooling pond, the water brake steadily rising in temperature so that it had to be bathed continuously in a spray of cold water to prevent failure of the simulated propeller, the enthusiasm of the prototype crew building to an emotional crescendo as the regularly plotted line on their chart approached the coast of Ireland. Some of the more conservative engineers, worried about breakdown of turbine, water brake, main bearings or the steam generators themselves, had counseled shutdown once the ability of the plant to attain its designated operating characteristics had been demonstrated. It was Brighting, monitoring the test from his Washington office, who had refused all such requests, assumed all responsibility, insisted the run be carried through to completion.

  Predictably, Brighting’s detractors had pointed out that a breakdown at this early stage would have delayed the entire program, that such a severe test of new machinery was not good engineering practice under any circumstances. Some whispered their belief the test run was more for the personal aggrandizement of Brighting than for any other reason. No one mentioned the fact that the nuclear reactor, the heart of the entire nuclear power effort and the only really new, innovative item in all of Mark One, had flawlessly provided the energy source for the entire “trip” without difficulty of any kind. It had been fear for the other machinery, all of it standard off-the-shelf items, even the main turbine and the water brake, which had caused the concern of their manufacturers’ representatives.