The Watch Below

by James White

  "We think it will need two people to bring it up to the required number of revs," Wallis added, "but once there it will need only one to keep it going."

  "And there will be enough power," said Dickson, sounding impressed, "to heat the place as well?"

  "Well, no," Wallis said. "The effort required to work the pedals will render its operators comfortably warm, maybe even uncomfortably hot. A stint on the generator would get us nicely warmed up before hitting the hammock, or after taking a bath.

  "The doctor is becoming concerned about our standards of hygiene," he added. "We're beginning to smell, you know."

  Dickson did not reply at once, but when he did his voice was firm with the firmness of sheer desperation. He said, "A bath, a cold, sea-water bath! You can't be serious! The-the drinking water will be gone long before our body odors become, uh, mutually offensive, and by that time the air will be stale anyway! If you ask me, our lives are going to be far too short and uncomfortable as it is without risking premature death from pneumonia!"

  The hacksaw blade skidded off the polished curve of the faucet. Wallis sucked briefly on a skinned knuckle, then said, "We've been working on a method for reclaiming water and another -- the only one possible, we think -- for renewing the air. As soon as you're able to walk we'll introduce you to the head we've rigged in Number Two. The idea there is to keep the, uh, solid and fluid wastes separate. When the generator is working we should be able to boil and distill small quantities of water electrically, using a heater element sealed in a glass tube and immersed in impure water. As I've already said, however, the heating of the living quarters will have to depend largely on our own body temperature and more efficient insulation. . . . What did you say?"

  "I was talking about your feet," said Dickson, "and grass. There isn't much growing under them."

  "I only wish that there was some green grass in here," said Wallis seriously. "It would save us the trouble of trying to grow beans."

  "Beans," said Dickson in a baffled voice. "How, and why ? I thought we had plenty of food."

  "According to the doctor," Wallis replied, "we start by soaking some of our dried beans in water, then sow them m a compost of dust, dirt, packing straw, perhaps wood shavings, and, uh, fertilizer. We'll have to take care that the material we collect for this soil does not contain oil or rust as this would inhibit the growth or maybe kill the plants altogether. And we would not be growing them for food. The area of leafage in bean plants is considerable, according to the doctor, who used to grow roses, and green growing leaves absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. As the process requires light, this is another reason for having the generator, possibly the strongest reason of all.

  "And that," Wallis ended, smiling, "is how we are going to grow beans, and why."

  For a long time the only sound was the steady rasp of the hacksaw biting through metal. The voices coming from the sick bay had stopped or had become too low to be heard, and Dickson seemed to have been rendered speechless. But the condition was only temporary.

  "I'm impressed," he said finally. "I had no idea that you were looking so far ahead, or working on so many projects. . . ." He hesitated, and when he went on his tone had reverted to that of the Dickson which they knew of old. ". . . What bothers me is that if they are successful, I'll have to take a bath."

  Trying to match the other's tone, Wallis said, "We could be rescued before then, or the ship might sink. Try not to worry too much about it."

  The doctor returned shortly afterwards. With the bare minimum of conversation he gave his torch to Dickson and asked for directions for marking the positions of the saddle compartments they hoped to use. Wallis, meanwhile, worked at modifying an initial batch of three faucets, breaking off only when it was necessary to help the doctor carry Dickson to another tank. But when the mate's directions were finally complete and it was time to return him to the sick bay, Radford brought up a subject which he had obviously been avoiding since his return from the other patients.

  He said, "I can't keep that girl under sedation indefinitely, not just for the sake of peace and quiet. Her burns are still uncomfortable, but not painful enough to warrant keeping her doped all the time. In any case I don't have unlimited quantities of medication and what little there is left I would like to save for emergencies."

  The recent movements of his litter and the unavoidable bumps he had received while the doctor and Wallis were pushing and hauling it over scattered heaps of cargo could not have been pleasant for Dickson, considering his injuries -- so unpleasant, perhaps, that he might have felt entitled to some of the dope the doctor wanted so suddenly to ration. But even though Wallis could sympathize with these feelings, Dickson's reaction came as a shock.

  "What the blazes d'you call this!" he yelled suddenly, in a voice too much like the one which had come earlier from the sick bay. "We're trapped in a sinking ship. We're deep ! The whole damn hull could cave in on us at any minute! What bigger emergency can you have than that?"

  "If we were here long enough," Radford broke in harshly, "I can think of several. . . ."

  In the following silence the sound of banging came clearly from the sick bay. There was no screaming, just the banging. Presumably Miss Murray was still asleep and Miss Wellman was awake and worried, and wanted someone to come and tell her what all the shouting was about. Judging by the urgency of the banging she could not have been very far from screaming herself.

  Wallis motioned for the doctor to take the other end of the litter. He said, "I think Mr. Dickson has need of some female companionship, doctor. To keep him from becoming morbid."

  By the time the gear was ready, it had been decided that without power for the drills the only way of piercing the coffer dam bulkhead was to burn a hole in it and risk the wastage of oxygen. They decided on procedure and tried to imagine the things most likely to go wrong and to guard against them. There was no way of measuring the passage of time, but Wallis felt that too much of it had passed while the preparations were going on. The deck was so steady under his feet that they might have been hard aground. But the ship was not aground and the waves above them were moving farther away with each hour that passed -- and there was no way of telling how fast they were sinking or how many hours had passed or if there was any hope for them at all.

  But finally all possible preparations had been made and precautions taken. The cutting torch and tanks and tapered wooden plugs were in place, also the clamps and tongs and strips of thin lead sheeting needed in case the hole was too big and the faucet inlet pipe had to be packed out to size. There was the short length of steel pipe which, when held in position by the tongs, would focus the flame so that it would go through more quickly as well as hold it to the required diameter, and there were the padded hammers and the gauntlets and the face masks which were necessary because when water meets fire there is inevitably a lot of steam. All at once there was nothing left to do but begin.

  The hole itself went through very quickly. There was a sudden explosion of steam and spray, then a solid jet of water struck the cutting torch, knocking it away and bursting against Wallis's chest like a high-pressure hose. He staggered back, blinded, and remembered to switch off the torch before he burned a hole in the doctor.

  Wallis blinked the water out of his eyes. The doctor was trying to get the pointed end of the plug into the hole and each time he tried the jet knocked it away again. On about the sixth attempt he managed to hold it steady enough so that he could throw all his weight into pushing it into position. Wallis added his weight to that of the doctor's and the jet became a trickle and soon died away altogether. To make sure, Wallis knocked it in tight with the hammer, then sawed off the surplus wood so that the plug was flush with the metal wall.

  Checking the diameter of the plug against that of the faucet pipe they found that they had had beginner's luck, because the tapering pipe would fit the hole snugly without being packed. Carefully, they tapped the plug farther into the hole until it was almost through, then pla
ced the faucet in position. With the doctor holding it steady Wallis gave it a good solid smack with the padded hammer. The plug went through to the other side and the faucet inlet pipe took its place, and it happened so neatly that they didn't even get wet.

  A few minutes later acetylene gas was forcing its way through the faucet and bubbling furiously up the inside of the coffer dam, while Radford and Wallis had already begun to repeat the process on the wall of the ballast tank adjoining Seven. With each new installation they became more expert and took much less water aboard, but they did not feel more confident. Finally, when acetylene gas was bubbling into supposedly airtight compartments at five different points throughoUt the ship, Wallis called a halt.

  Their efforts were having no effect.

  When the doctor, Dickson, and himself were together in Seven again, Wallis said, "The aft coffer dam has had the contents of four acetylene tanks pumped into it and is now taking number five. The ballast tanks on each side of Seven here have had three each, and the storage spaces beside Four have had one each. Some of these compartments already contained air, and we ascertained, as accurately as possible, the water level in these spaces, by tapping and listening for the hollow sounds which should indicate air rather than water being on the other side of the bulkhead.

  "The water level in each case was marked with chalk," Wallis went on, "but the water has not gone down to anything like the expected level, despite the volume of gas which we have been pushing into these spaces. I don't understand it."

  He looked hopefully at Dickson.

  Defensively, the mate said, "Even if the gas escaped from the compartments I picked for you it would still be trapped in the storage space above them -- most of it, anyway. I picked them with that in mind. Are you sure your method of finding the water level is accurate enough?"

  Wallis did not reply. At that moment he didn't feel sure of anything.

  The doctor said, "Maybe the gas in these pockets is so concentrated that it gives back a sound indistinguishable from that of water. If such is the case this gas under pressure will be much heavier, volume for volume, than air, so that we will not gain very much in buoyancy. Perhaps we have sunk so deeply that water pressure has increased to the extent that it will not allow the gas to expand. Or perhaps the gas is forcing the water out, but at the same rate as the water forced its way in, which was very gradually over the space of many days. If that is the case we may not be able to regain our buoyancy in time -- "

  "Doctor," said Dickson angrily, "don't be so blasted optimistic!"

  It seemed that there were to be no helpful ideas from either of them, and Wallis knew suddenly that it had been a mistake to stop and talk like this, that anything which gave them time to think too deeply about their predicament was a mistake. As the superior officer his display of indecision had not helped things, either.

  "We have seven more faucets and a practically unlimited supply of acetylene," he said firmly. "We must keep trying."

  Sometime later -- the doctor estimated it at between twenty and thirty hours, but Dickson, who had had nothing much to occupy him in his litter except holding torches and occasionally talking to Jenny, insisted that it was more like three days -- they had to stop trying through sheer fatigue. Despite recent practice each installation had begun to take more time. Radford fumbled his job with the plugs and staggered around the place as if he were half-drunk, and Wallis, through sheer carelessness, neglected to cover his face with the sacking mask and cowl, the result being a scalded forehead. It wasn't a very serious injury, but the cold made it sting.

  Back in the sick bay they found the two girls asleep and Dickson wide awake, his teeth clenched tightly, sweating and staring into the darkness above him. He did not look at them or reply when they spoke. Radford shook two tablets out of a bottle, hesitated, then made it four. He said, "You need to go to sleep, Mr. Dickson."

  To Wallis he said, "One good thing about all this is that we've been working so hard that we are going to go to sleep warm for a change."

  But Wallis did not go to sleep at once or, at first, completely. They had closed all taps and disconnected all the acetylene tanks before returning to the sick bay, but there was still an awful lot of bubbling and gurgling going on all over the ship. Wallis tried to tell himself that this was a good sign, but then he would contrast the total air space within the tanks with the relatively tiny amount by which they hoped to increase it and he would wonder if it was enough. He would argue then that the tanker had been drifting close to the surface for more than a week and if it was sinking only now, it must be sinking very slowly and that surely a minute increase in over-all buoyancy would tip the balance.

  But he did not know for certain, and while his mind argued wearily to itself it began to drift more and more frequently into sleep -- a sleep composed of a series of brief, terrifying nightmares in which his fear became reality and where the bubbling and gurgling noises became the sounds of their hull breaking up and a solid mass of water crashed down on them and they tore at the metal walls around them and at each other with their bare hands and screamed and screamed. . . .

  Eventually his body's weariness would not let him wake himself from these nightmares and somewhere along the way they changed. Wallis dreamed that he was on the bridge of a destroyer somewhere in the Med, to judge by the weather. It was a very pleasant dream, sheer wish-fulfillment. The sky was blue and cloudless, the sea calm with a slight swell, the sun was hot even through his whites, and a patch of sunburn on his forehead itched slightly just to remind him that this wasn't Heaven. Wallis would have been content to stay in that dream forever, but for some reason it began to change horribly, and fade.

  The sky darkened suddenly, in patches, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle and somebody was taking pieces away. It was much too cold, he realized, to be wearing tropical whites. And all at once the rail of the bridge felt like coarse sacking and the salt tang of the wind became a clammy, almost unbreathable poison which stank of sweat. But the dream did not fade completely.

  His forehead still itched, and below him the deck moved gently with the action of the waves.

  VIII

  In the Unthan flagship the problem, after twenty days of constant study and twice-daily discussions, seemed no nearer solution. Now it was the first discussion period of the twenty-first day and the engineer had just asked permission to speak.

  "Since two coolings will cause such mental degeneration as to make it impossible for us to operate the ship," the engineer said, "my suggestion is that we do not risk putting ourselves into Long Sleep until the process has been made safe."

  It was normal for their problem to be restated many times -- too many times -- during the course of these discussions, but his idea was so glaringly obvious that it must simply be a preface to a more important suggestion. And there was something about the engineer's manner, a peculiar air of tension which was foreign to him, which made Deslann listen carefully to every word.

  I have been wondering," the engineer went on, "if it is possible to correct the malfunction in the Long Sleep equipment or, alternatively, evolve a form of treatment or medication which would negate the equipment's effect on our minds. I realize that this would necessitate the use of an experimental, uh, subject of our species and that this subject might expect to sustain mental or physical injury or perhaps even death. At the same time the reputation and ability of Healer Hellahar, who is a specialist in this particular field, is such that I feel confident that if any harm befell me it would be necessary to the research and therefore unavoidable."

  There was a highly uncomfortable silence when the engineer finished speaking, and Deslann wondered why it was that in this sophisticated and perhaps degenerate age an act of bravery could give rise to as much embarrassment as it did respect.

  "Your confidence in me is flattering and perhaps misplaced," the healer said awkwardly when the silence had begun to drag. "We do not have the resources aboard ship to conduct such research, nor have I, in my opinion,
the ability."

  "In any case," Gerrol said in a tone aimed at further dispelling the general embarrassment, "we could not spare you. Every single member of the crew will be required to guide in the main body of the fleet and to land this ship -- "

  "Then why not simply cool ourselves now," one of the computer team joined in, "and set the warm-up time so that we waken, say, a year before the calculated arrival date, putting everything on automatic. That way we would -- "

  "Get hopelessly lost," Gerrol finished for him. He went on, "We have insufficient reaction mass for large-scale maneuvering should we arrive wide of the target system. Our reserves are enough only for periodic and minor course corrections."