Breakthroughs

by Harry Turtledove

  Turning, the Ericsson moved slowly to the southeast. “Hydrophone bearing,” a sailor called back to Lieutenant Crowder. The underwater listening device had two drawbacks. Where along that bearing the submersible lay was anybody’s guess. Also, when the destroyer’s engines were running, they drowned out most of the noise the submarine was making.

  Nevertheless, after a couple of minutes, a messenger hurried back to Crowder from the bridge. The young lieutenant listened, nodded, and spoke to Carl Sturtevant. “Two more depth charges. Set the fuses for a hundred feet.”

  “A hundred feet. Aye aye, sir,” Sturtevant said. Off flew the charges, two bangs in quick succession. The wait, this time, wasn’t so long. The Atlantic bubbled and boiled again. No evidence that the charges had done any good appeared.

  “Is the launcher in proper working order?” Crowder demanded. It had damaged a submersible the last time they used it. Enos thought along with the officer. If it didn’t force a boat to the surface this time, something surely had to be wrong with it…unless the skipper down below was laughing up his sleeve, which struck George as a hell of a lot likelier.

  “Yes, sir.” Carl Sturtevant gave the distinct impression that he’d talked with a hell of a lot of young officers in his day. No doubt the reason he gave that impression was that he had. He went on, “It’s working fine, sir. It’s just that there’s a hell of a lot of ocean out there, and the ash cans can’t tear up but a little bit of it at a time.”

  “We got good results—damnation, we got outstanding results—the last time we used it,” Crowder said fretfully.

  “Yes, sir, but life ain’t like a Roebuck’s catalogue, sir,” Sturtevant answered. “It don’t come with no money-back guarantee.”

  That was good sense. As a fisherman, Enos knew exactly how good it was. Lieutenant Crowder pouted, for all the world like George, Jr. “Something must be wrong with the launcher,” he said, confirming George’s guess.

  Sturtevant sent another pair of depth charges flying into the ocean, and another, and another. And, after that last pair, a thick stream of bubbles rose to the surface, as did a considerable quantity of thick black oil that spread over the blue, blue water of the Atlantic. “That’s a hurt boat down there, sir,” Carl Sturtevant breathed. “Hurt, or else playing games with us.” He turned to the launcher crew. “Now we hammer the son of a bitch.” Ash can after ash can splashed into the water.

  More air bubbles rose. So did more oil. The boat from which they rose, however, remained submerged. “I wonder how deep the water is down there,” Crowder said musingly. “If we’ve sunk that submersible, we’re liable to never, ever know it.”

  “That’s so, sir,” Sturtevant agreed. “But if we think we’ve sunk him and we’re wrong, we’ll find out like a kick in the balls.” George Enos nodded. A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough.

  The Ericsson held her position till sundown, lobbing occasional depth charges into the sea. “We’ll report this one as a probable sinking,” Lieutenant Crowder said. No one argued with him. No one could argue with him. He was the officer.

  Commander Roger Kimball’s head pounded and ached as if with a hangover, and he hadn’t even had the fun of getting drunk. The air inside the Bonefish was foul, and getting fouler. In the dim orange glow of the electric lamps, he struck a match. It burned with a fitful blue flame for a few seconds, then went out, adding a sulfurous stink to the astonishing cacophony of stenches already inside the pressure hull.

  He checked his watch: two in the morning, a few minutes past. Quietly, he asked, “How much longer can we stay submerged?”

  “Three or four hours left in the batteries, sir, provided we don’t have to gun the engine,” Tom Brearley answered, also quietly, after checking the dials. He inhaled, then grimaced. “Air won’t stay good that long, though, I’m afraid.”

  “And I’m afraid you’re right.” Kimball shifted his feet, which set up a faint splashing. The pounding the boat had taken had started some new leaks, none of them, fortunately, too severe. “Damnyankee destroyer was throwing around depth charges like they were growin’ their own crop on deck.”

  “Yes, sir,” Brearley said. The exec looked up toward the surface. “Next interesting question is—”

  “Have they stalked us?” Kimball finished for him. “I’m hoping they think they sank us. We gave ’em enough clues before we slunk away. Only way we could have been more convincing would have been to shoot a couple of dead bodies out the forward tubes, and since we didn’t have any handy—”

  “Yes, sir,” Brearley said, and a couple of sailors nodded. “But if they’re anywhere close when we surface, we’re done for.”

  “That’s a fact,” Kimball agreed. “But it’s also a fact that we’re done for if we don’t surface pretty damn soon.” He came to a sudden, abrupt decision. “We’ll bring her up to periscope depth and have a look around.”

  Even that was risky; if the U.S. destroyer waited close by, bubbles on the surface might betray the Bonefish. The submersible rose sluggishly. Kimball had expended a lot of compressed air in feigning her untimely demise. When the periscope went up, he peered through it himself, not trusting anyone else with the job. Slowly, carefully, he went through a complete circuit of the horizon.

  Nothing. No angular ship silhouette far off against the sky—nor menacingly close, either. No plume of smoke warning of a ship not very distant. Kimball went through the circuit again, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

  Still nothing. “All hands prepare to surface,” he said, adding a moment later, “Bring her up, Mr. Brearley. We’ll get fresh air into the boat, we’ll fire up the diesels and cruise for a while to recharge the batteries—”

  “We’ll flush the heads,” Ben Coulter said. Everyone in earshot fervently agreed with the petty officer as to the desirability of that. The pigs on the Arkansas farm where Kimball had grown up wouldn’t have lived in a sty that smelled half as bad as the Bonefish.

  After the boat had surfaced, Kimball climbed up to the top of the conning tower to undog the hatch. Ben Coulter climbed up behind him to grab him around the shins and keep him from being blown out the hatch when it was undogged: the air inside the hull was under considerably higher pressure than that on the outside, and had a way of escaping with great vigor.

  Out streamed the stinking air, like the spout of a whale. Somehow the stench was worse when mingled with the first fresh, pure breezes from outside. When altogether immersed in it, the nose, mercifully, grew numb. After the first taste of good air, though, the bad got worse.

  Still, a few lungfuls of outside air went a long way toward clearing Kimball’s fuzzy wits. His headache vanished. From below came exclamations of delight and exclamations of disgust as fresh air began mingling with the nasty stuff inside the Bonefish.

  The diesels rumbled to life. “All ahead half,” Kimball called down; Tom Brearley relayed the command to the engine crew. The wake the Bonefish kicked up glowed with a faint, pearly phosphorescence.

  Brearley mounted to the top of the conning tower. He looked around and let out a long sigh that was as much a lung-clearer as a sound of relief. “We got away from them, sir,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to get away from them,” Roger Kimball growled. “I wanted to sink the Yankee bastards. I would have done it, too, but they must have spotted the periscope. Soon as I saw ’em pick up speed and start that turn, I launched the fish, but the range was still long, and it missed.”

  “We’re still in business,” Brearley said.

  “We’re in the business of sending U.S. ships to the bottom,” Kimball answered. “We didn’t do it. Now that destroyer’s either going to go on south and try to strangle the British lifeline to South America, or else he’ll hang around here and try to keep us from going after his pals. Either way, he wouldn’t be doing it if we’d sent him to the bottom like we were supposed to.”

  Kimball kept on fuming. His exec didn’t say anything more. Th
e darkness hid Kimball’s smile, which was not altogether pleasant. He knew he alarmed Tom Brearley. It didn’t bother him. If he didn’t alarm the Tom Brearleys of the world, he wasn’t doing his job right.

  When the sun rose, he halted the boat and allowed the men to come up and bathe in the warm water of the Atlantic, with lines tied round the middles of those who couldn’t swim. They put on their old, filthy uniforms again afterwards, but still enjoyed getting off some of the grime.

  And then the Bonefish went hunting. Kimball had got used to patrolling inside a cage whose bars were lines of latitude and longitude. He supposed a lion would have found cage life tolerable if the keepers introduced a steady stream of bullocks on which it could leap.

  Trouble was, he wasn’t a lion. Battleships were lions. He was a snake in the grass. He could kill bullocks—freighters. He could kill lions, too. He’d done it, even in their very lair. But if they saw him slithering along before he got close enough to bite, they could kill him, too, and easily. They could also kill him if he struck and missed, as he had at that nasty hunting dog of a destroyer.

  So much of patrol duty was endlessly, mind-numbingly boring. More often than not, Kimball chafed under such boredom. Today, for once, he welcomed it. It gave the crew a chance to recover from the long, tense time they’d spent submerged. It gave the diesels a chance to recharge the batteries in full. If that damned destroyer had stumbled across the boat too soon, she couldn’t have gone underwater for long or traveled very far. A submarine that had to try to slug it out on the surface was a dead duck.

  A quiet evening followed the quiet day. The crew needed to recharge their batteries, too. A lot of them spent a lot of time in their hammocks or wrapped in the blankets they spread next to or, more often, on top of equipment. The odor of fried fish jockeyed for position among all the other smells inside the pressure hull—Ben Coulter had caught a tuna that had almost ended up dragging him into the Atlantic instead of his being able to pull it out.

  “You know what?” Kimball asked his exec. They’d both had big tuna steaks. Kimball wished for a toothpick; he had a shred of fish stuck between a couple of back teeth, and couldn’t work it loose with his tongue.

  “What’s that, sir?” Tom Brearley asked.

  “You know the Japs?” Kimball said. “You know what they do? They eat tuna raw sometimes. Either they dip it in horseradish or bean juice or sometimes both of ’em together, or else they just eat it plain. Don’t that beat hell?”

  “You’re making that up,” Brearley said. “You’ve told me enough tall tales to stretch from the bottom of the ocean up to here. I’ll be damned if you’ll catch me again.”

  “Solemn fact,” Kimball said, and raised his hand as if taking oath. His exec still wouldn’t believe him. They both started to get angry, Kimball because he couldn’t convince Brearley, the exec because he thought the skipper kept pulling his leg harder and harder. At last, disgusted, Kimball growled, “Oh, the hell with it,” and stomped back down to the solitary albeit cramped splendor of his bunk.

  He and Brearley were wary with each other the next morning, too, both of them speaking with military formality usually ignored aboard submersibles in every navy in the world. Then the lookout let out a holler—“Smoke off to the east!”—and they forgot about the argument.

  Kimball hurried up to the top of the conning tower. The lookout pointed. Sure enough, not just one trail but several smudged the horizon. Kimball smiled a predatory smile. “Either those are freighters, or else they’re warships loafing along without the least little idea we’re anywhere around. Any which way, we’re going to have some fun.” He called down the hatch: “Give me twelve knots, and change course to 135. Let’s get in front of the bastards and take a look at what we’ve got.”

  The Bonefish swung through the turn. Kimball peered through his binoculars. “What are we after?” Brearley asked from below.

  “Looks like supply ships,” Kimball answered. “Can’t be sure they haven’t got one of those disguised auxiliary cruisers sneaking along with ’em, though. Well, I don’t give a damn if they do. We’ve still got plenty of fish on board, and I’m not talking about that damned tuna.”

  Skippers who paid attention to nothing but what was right in front of their noses did not live to grow old. While Kimball guided the Bonefish toward her prey, he kept another lookout up on the conning tower with him to sweep the rest of the horizon.

  He jumped when the sailor tapped him on the shoulder. Apologetically, the fellow said, “I hate to tell you, sir, but there’s smoke over on the western horizon, and whatever’s making it looks to be heading this way in a hell of a hurry.”

  “Thanks, Caleb.” Kimball turned, hoping the sailor was somehow mistaken. But he wasn’t. Whatever was making that smoke was heading in the general direction of the Bonefish, and heading toward her faster than anything had any business traveling on the ocean. He raised the binoculars to his eyes. Almost as he watched, the ship crawled over the horizon. He counted stacks—one, two, three…four. Cursing, he said, “Go below, Caleb,” and then bawled down the hatch: “All hands prepare to dive! Take her down to periscope depth.”

  The Bonefish had no trouble escaping the U.S. destroyer. Depth charges roared, but far in the distance. Tom Brearley said, “We spotted her in good time.”

  “That’s not the point, goddammit,” Kimball growled. “The point is, she made us break off the attack on those other Yankee ships. They’ll get away clean while we’re crawling along down here. She did what she was supposed to do, and she kept us from doing what we’re supposed to do. Nobody does that to me.” His voice sounded the more menacing for being flat and quiet. “Nobody does that to me, do you hear? I hope that destroyer hangs around this part of the ocean, ’cause if she does, I’ll sink her.”

  Sylvia Enos felt like a billiard ball, caroming from one cushion to the next. She got off the trolley not by her house, but by the school a couple of stops away. After Brigid Coneval’s husband stopped a bullet with his chest, Sylvia had had to enroll George, Jr., in kindergarten. He was enjoying himself there. That wasn’t the problem. Neither was his staying on the school grounds till she got out of work. A lot of boys and girls did that. The school had a banner out front: WE STAY OPEN TO SUPPORT THE WAR EFFORT.

  The problem was…“Come on, George,” Sylvia said, tugging at his hand. “We’ve still got to pick up your sister.”

  George didn’t want to go. “Benny hit me a while ago, and I haven’t hit him back yet. I’ve got to, Mama.”

  “Do it tomorrow,” Sylvia said. George, Jr., tried to twist free. She whacked him on the bottom, which got enough of his attention to let her drag him out of the schoolroom and back toward the trolley stop.

  They missed the trolley anyhow—it clattered away just as they hurried up. Sylvia whacked George, Jr., again. That might have made him feel sorry. Then again, it might not have. It did make Sylvia feel better. Twilight turned into darkness. Mosquitoes began to buzz. Sylvia sighed. Spring was here at last. She slapped, too late.

  Fifteen minutes after they missed the trolley, the next car on the route came by. Sylvia threw two nickels in the fare box and rode back in the other direction, to the apartment of the new woman she’d found to watch Mary Jane. “I’m sorry I’m late, Mrs. Dooley,” she said.

  Rose Dooley was a large woman with a large, square jaw that might have made her formidable in the prize ring. “Try not to be late again, Mrs. Enos, if you please,” she said, but then softened enough to admit, “Your daughter wasn’t any trouble today.”

  “I’m glad,” Sylvia said. “I am sorry.” Blaming George, Jr., wouldn’t have done any good. She took Mary Jane’s hand. “Let’s go home.”

  “I’m hungry, Mama,” Mary Jane said.

  “So am I,” George, Jr., agreed.

  By the time they got back to the apartment building, it was after seven. By then, the children weren’t just saying they were hungry. They were shouting it, over and over. “If you hadn’t dawdled
on your way to the trolley, we’ve have been home a while ago, and you would be eating by now,” Sylvia told George, Jr. That got Mary Jane mad at her big brother, but didn’t stop either of the children from complaining.

  They both complained some more when Sylvia paused to see if any mail had come. “Mama, we’re starving,” George, Jr., boomed. Mary Jane added shrill agreement.

  “Hush, both of you.” Sylvia held up an envelope, feeling vindicated. “Here is a letter from your father. You wouldn’t have wanted it to wait, would you?”

  That did quiet them, at least until they actually got inside the flat. George Enos had assumed mythic proportions to both of them, especially to Mary Jane, who hardly remembered him at all. One corner of Sylvia’s mouth turned down. She wished her husband had mythic proportions in her eyes.

  “If you read it to us, Mama, will you make supper right afterwards?” Mary Jane asked. Her brother’s bluster hadn’t worked; maybe bargaining would.

  And it did. “I’ll even start the fire in the stove now, so it will be getting hot while I’m reading the letter,” Sylvia said. Her children clapped their hands.

  She fed coal into the firebox with care; people at the canning plant said the Coal Board was going to cut the ration yet again, apparently intent on making people eat their food raw for the rest of the war. Glancing in the coal bin, she thought she probably had enough to keep cooking till the end of the month.

  As soon as she walked back into the front room from the cramped kitchen, George, Jr., and Mary Jane jumped on her like a couple of football tackles. “Read the letter!” they chanted. “Read the letter!” Some of that was eagerness to hear from their father, more was likely to be eagerness to get her cooking.

  She opened the envelope with a strange mixture of happiness and dread. If George had come into port to mail the letter, who could guess what he was doing besides mailing it? As a matter of fact, she could guess perfectly well. The trouble was, she couldn’t know.