The Watch Below

by James White

  "Your winking isn't having much effect these days, he told Wallis on an occasion when they were alone in the garden together. "Whatever it was that you did to make a wink have such good results -- well, to put it bluntly, sir, she needs a booster shot."

  Wallis had to administer several booster shots, because the law of diminishing returns seemed to have come into force in this particular situation. But the medicine was pleasant to administer so he did not mind. He felt, in fact, that it would have been very pleasant indeed if it had not been for the frigid, stinking air, which gave them headaches that threatened to blow the tops off their skulls and which made them pull away gasping desperately for breath after a kiss lasting only a few seconds. Dickson discovered them several times in what he was fond of describing as a compromising situation and as many times suggested that somebody should make an honest woman out of someone. The doctor, however, was strongly against this, for the time being anyway. He said that they should all remain as calm as possible and should not indulge in any strenuous activity, other than on the generator, which might waste oxygen. . . .

  Being able to breathe became much more important than feeling warm. Radford and Wallis, and even the Dicksons, split up during the so-called sleep periods. Perhaps it was a psychological thing, but they felt too stifled under their shared heaps of sacking. So they slept alone with their faces uncovered and their breaths puffing up into the darkness as if they were so many steam locomotives. It was nearly impossible to sleep. All they could do was lie and gasp for breath, and think.

  "I've been thinking," said Wallis one "night" toward the end of July. "On lifeboats we hear of people singing and playing games to keep awake. Our problem is not to stay awake but to keep from going stark raving mad because we can't sleep."

  He stopped to catch his breath and then went an, "In one way the situation is the same. We have to exercise our minds so as not to dwell too much on our surroundings. Physical exercise is out, but there's nothing to stop our exercising our brains. I had in mind a sort of quiz."

  "Talking uses oxygen," said Dickson. "Besides, we already know how each other's minds work. We've talked about ourselves often enough."

  "I'm not so sure that talking wastes all that much oxygen," the doctor said. "In any case the mental benefits outweigh the extra risk if the quiz game really takes our minds off our physical discomfort. Provided we don't shout or get excited, it should be okay. But I must forbid singing for the time being."

  "Pity!" said Margaret Murray. "I'm a top soprano."

  "Me, too," said Jenny Dickson. "And I don't much like quiz games."

  "I'm a Gilbert and Sullivan man myself," the doctor joined in. "In the school operatic society I was Pooh-Bah one year, and another time I understudied the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe ."

  "You never told us that ," said Dickson accusingly. "I would have let you hear me do 'Frankie and Johnny.'"

  "All this is news to me, too," said Wallis firmly, "but I must repeat that singing is out for the time being. And it seems plain that we don't know everything about each other as yet. Also, if this game works out the way I'd like it to, we will do very little talking and a great deal of thinking, so that the oxygen wastage will be negligible. . . ."

  The questions in this quiz game would not be easy, Wallis went on to explain. They would, in fact, be next to impossible. The game would begin by each of them being set a memory test. Something like "How much can you remember about your eleventh birthday party?" or "What was in the last Sunday paper you read, besides pin-ups?" Later the questions would become more difficult, such as how much could be remembered of a particular chapter in a particular book or how much could be recalled of a certain day in the past chosen completely at random. They would each tell what, if anything, they could remember regarding their individual tests, then they would go back repeatedly and go over the memory again and again until it was as complete and detailed as possible. At intervals they would report progesss on their particular assignments, but, as they could see, most of the time would be spent thinking.

  Radford joined in at that point to say that many psychologists believed that no memory was ever lost, that memories were allowed to fade but could be recalled in their entirety by patient and persistent questioning. That they would be asking the questions of themselves made no essential difference. The girls, Dickson, and Wallis himself suggested modifications to the game and they talked about it for a very long time, so much so that they began to fall asleep before they actually got around to playing it.

  The next "night" they started playing the game, awkwardly and self- consciously at first. But very soon the Game took a firm hold on them -- it was competitive, endless, difficult and nobody either won or lost. During the early part of their sleep period it was normal for them all to lie still and silent, breathing and thinking hard, but not thinking, or worrying, about breathing.

  But the air became steadily more foul. The generator was operated by one of them at a time, using a jury-rigged oxygen tent fed by their steadily diminishing store of tanked gas, while the others stayed in the relatively fresh air of the garden, which now covered most of the floor of Number Three. At "night" the Game helped, but still they struggled awake, shouting and kicking, from nightmares of drowning or worse. They all did this, the girls a little more often than the men. The worst part of it was that when they did wake they still felt as if they were choking to death.

  It became impossible to sleep at night, so they slept in the garden during the electrically lit "day" instead, passing the night by playing the Game. This helped everyone for a while, until the ship began to sink once more, and once more the angry, bitter arguments raged over whether they should use their remaining oxygen to reduce depth or keep it to breathe and have the hull cave in on them, whether to die of asphyxiation through carbon-dioxide poisoning or through simple drowning.

  Then the hull began to emit creaking sounds, very soft as yet, and a sort of loud, metallic sighing. Gulf Trader was beginning to break up.

  XIII

  It was an incredibly slow process, so slow that they had time to get over their private or public panic and settle down merely to listen to the ship breaking up all around them -- though, to be quite accurate, most of the noises seemed to be coming from the stern and the others may have been reverberations.

  With the irregular sighing noises aft there came the grinding and the hollow, underwater screaming sounds of tearing metal, also irregular but increasing in frequency. They could feel the deck shuddering under them even through the sacking. The grinding and tearing seemed to go on for hours.

  "This is going to take a long time," said the doctor suddenly. "The air would be . . . fresher in the garden with the generator going. Lying here just listening is . . . making me feel morbid."

  "The salt water will ruin your crops," said Dickson. Jenny was hanging onto him tightly and looked ready to cry again, so he probably felt obliged to make a crack to keep up her morale, or both their morales. Wallis was holding Margaret Murray's hand, and she was holding his so tightly that his fingers ached, but he could not think of anything smart or cheerful to say.

  "I wonder why all the noise is coming from the stern," he said. "We're down by the stern, but not more than twenty or thirty feet and that . . . isn't enough to make a big . . . pressure difference. The engine room took a hit, so the hull is weak there, . . . but so did the bow, and nothing is happening for'rard."

  A few seconds after he had stopped talking there was a tearing crash from the bows and the sound was repeated at short intervals, seeming to come closer along their starboard side. With each crash the deck shook and the Trader began a definite list to port. It was easy to imagine the steadily mounting pressure finding weak points in the hull where the two torpedoes had struck, then slowly squeezing open the hull along the line of one of the longitudinal welds. There was another crash for'ard and grinding, tearing sounds marched remorselessly towards them, this time along the port side.

  "You and yo
ur big mouth," said Dickson, quickly adding, "sir."

  They lay waiting for the tank walls to buckle inward and for the crushing weight of water to smash down on them, spin them about, and thrust its way into their straining lungs. The din around them reached a crescendo, but still the walls held, and there was no sound of water flooding through the holds even when the crashing began to die down. Wallis, who had been gripping Margaret's hand as tightly toward the end as she had been gripping his, pried open her fingers and felt around for the torch. When he switched it on he saw that the walls of the tank were still bone dry. A few minutes later after a single and relatively soft crash the ship became silent and still again.

  "You know," said Wallis, in a voice which was nearly falsetto with joy, "I don't think we're sinking at all! I think we've run aground!"

  They did not believe him at first, but then they considered the facts in the shape of the recent crashes, creaks, and bumps in conjunction with this new theory and found that they fitted it very well. Trader might very easily have drifted under the influence of tide or current onto a gently sloping bottom, the stern touching first so that the ship had swung around to continue the drift bow first. The shelving bottom must have been sandy, judging by the earlier sighing sounds, but with many outcroppings of rock. The more dramatic noises must have been caused by plating loosened by the torpedo astern being pulled off as the ship touched bottom, and later by the hull drifting over or alongship rocks. Eventually the ship had come to rest -- at high tide, presumably, because there were no later indications that she would drift off -- and jammed herself solidly onto a sea bed whose slope followed the original stern-down attitude of the ship so closely that to those inside there was no detectable difference.

  "We're very lucky," said the doctor.

  "Maybe we were all born to be hanged," said Margaret.

  "That's still too close to asphyxiation for comfort," said Dickson. "Couldn't we be born to die in bed?"

  So they went back to working the generator one at a time while the others stayed in the garden. Then sometime in mid-August Dickson found that he could pedal for a considerable time without the bulky oxygen tent, and very soon they did not need oxygen at all. Once again they could walk the length of the ship without discomfort and they could sleep without dreaming that they were choking to death. They still had eight tanks of oxygen and one of acetylene, which had been overlooked in the general confusion, to hold against possible emergencies.

  The doctor's garden was a success.

  But for some reason the doctor seemed more angry than pleased when they tried to praise him. And it was not until after Wallis had asked the first mate and acting-captain (of the merchant service) to perform the nuptial ceremony and had been married and excused from generator detail and the Game for a three-day honeymoon that Wallis discovered the reason for the doctor's anger. They were alone at the time in Seven, working on another distillation apparatus, and Wallis had just tried again to compliment the surgeon lieutenant on the success of his garden.

  "I thought it would work," Radford said angrily, "but I didn't think there was enough time. I thought we would all be dead and on the bottom by now. Instead we have food and water and air, and we're alive!"

  "Is that bad?" said Wallis, smiling.

  "It isn't altogether good," said the doctor sharply. "There are complications when people stay alive. One of them -- well, let's say that one of our biological clocks has stopped."

  "Oh," said Wallis.

  "Yes," said the doctor. "It isn't to be mentioned to anyone yet, you understand. They don't feel very well about it. This isn't the sort of place to bring a kid into the world. In fact it's about the worst place I know of for the baby and its mother, and the parents realize it. You can be sure it wasn't deliberate, but under the circumstances . . ." He shrugged angrily and bent over the workbench again.

  "I understand your feelings," Wallis said seriously. "But you're an even better doctor, Doctor, than you are a gardener."

  "You think you understand," said Radford, who then went on to detail some of the preparations and problems involved in having a confinement in the dark, frigid hold of a sunken ship with no medical facilities except a few rolls of adhesive plaster. It was with great difficulty that Wallis got him off that subject and onto ideas for improving the interior of their living quarters and the comfort of the ship generally.

  Despite the many odd jobs and major alterations which had to be done, they still had too much time with nothing at all to do, and there were times when bordom became such a crushing, smothering weight that it affected them much as the foul air had done in earlier days. Plainly the only answer was to increase the scope of the Game. There were many possibilities now that there was air and they could talk and jog each other's memories and perform various psychological tricks instead of lying silent and thinking most of the time. But when Wallis was with Margaret that night the original subject came up again.

  He had brought it up himself, but without mentioning the Dicksons, and had talked all around the subject, and was beginning to go round again in his efforts not to say anything which would give offense. After all, they had been married for just three days -- three "days" and four sleeping periods to be exact -- and he was on dangerous ground.

  "I don't think this is a place to have a baby, either," Margaret said when he had finally bogged down. "Nobody in their right mind would consider it for a minute. But there have been times, these past few days, when neither of us was in his right mind -- at least, I know I wasn't. What I mean is, it's going to be very hard not to . . . to . . ."

  "Practically impossible," said Wallis softly.

  "Yes," she said, and sighed. "But you brought the subject up, you know, not me. Did you have something, some sort of answer, in mind?"

  "Well,'~ said Wallis lightly, "there are always twin, uh, heaps of sacking."

  "You beast !"

  "I was joking," said Wallis quickly.

  He felt her body stiffen in his arms and for a long time she lay silent, then suddenly she relaxed and snuggled close.

  "Close that eye," she said, "and kiss me."

  The complicated techniques evolved by the Dicksons for getting together were no longer quite so necessary since the temperature had risen in the ship until it was uncomfortably cool rather than unbearably cold. Shallow water and possible warm currents were the probable reason, and there were periodic increases in temperature, which were undoubtedly caused by the ebb-tide flowing back from sun-warmed sand or rocks. The ship's interior had become a relatively comfortable place by mid-September, with the generator and garden and distillation gear all going well -- so much so that Dickson volunteered for, and actually took, the first bath.

  He did it just to please the doctor, Dickson told everyone, and not because his best friends were telling him. . . .

  Despite the many improvements made in their living quarters and the projects which Dickson, the doctor, and Wallis were always working on, there was not enough to do in the ship to keep their minds occupied. They had no idea where they were, although Wallis thought that they might have drifted as far south as the coast of France or Spain, and they had not heard a ship's engines since a month before they had run aground. Their chances of being detected and rescued were vanishingly small, and it was so as not to think about this that they played the peculiar mixture of parlor psychology and medieval inquisition which was the Game.

  Apart from the Handbook of Marine Engineering, Part One, and a number of greasy blueprints there was nothing to read on the ship, so that the Game had become a method of reading each other a page -- or more accurately, an hour or a day -- at a time. It would begin by the victim's being asked to remember all that he or she could regarding a date in his past chosen at random, which was usually nothing at all, at first. But then the other four would question the victim closely until some small fact would be remembered, and they would persist, for days if necessary, until the memories of that tiny segment of his lifetime were reco
vered intact. The process would leave both the victim and interrogators feeling more worn out than if they had just come off a long stint on the generator, so that the Game helped them to sleep as well.

  Sometimes the memories being sought involved the victim's recounting conversations he or she had held or had overheard, and on these occasions he or she was expected to fully describe the people concerned and to do his or her best at reproducing voices and mannerisms. The interrogators would have run the victim through the incident so many times that they would know it as well as the victim did. Very often, too, they would end by each of them playing the part and performing the actions of one of the characters in the memory, a memory which a short time previously the victim had not even known he possessed.