Like the other aquanauts waiting to take their turn living in Sealab, Barth had spent his days working topside. There wasn’t room for everyone to live on the Berkone so he and the others would ride a boat to and from the beach at Scripps each day. Making the ten-minute trip at night, Barth was struck by the sight of the Berkone, its myriad lights twinkling in the darkness that fused sea and sky. The hum of its machinery echoed across the water. Barth had been looking forward to living and working in the sea again, but he was not happy to learn that his latest effort was going to cost him money. Some stingy bureaucrat had decided that the aquanauts, while working their fifteen days in Sealab, were not entitled to the standard $16 per diem for travel expenses, so Barth and the other Navy divers would be out two hundred and forty bucks. But Barth had made sacrifices for the program before. He wanted Sealab and his friend George Bond to succeed, and right now Scott Carpenter could use his help, per diem be damned.
Throughout his days as team leader, Carpenter spoke frequently over the intercom with Bond and Mazzone. Papa Topside, while delighted to have the former spaceman on the team, had to admit that he was getting his fill of Carpenter’s persistent questions. Carpenter seemed to raise questions about everything, even something as straightforward as the proper functioning of a pneumofathometer, a common depth gauge affixed to the end of a hose. The “pneumo” had been a standard and reliable piece of diving equipment for years. So it was perhaps a sign that Carpenter was back to his old self after the scorpion sting when the questions started coming over the intercom again. Bond fielded them like a patient father.
A thinly veiled response to Carpenter’s queries could be found in one of the first homespun Sunday sermons Captain Bond planned to give throughout the experiment. The topic: faith. “Our Lord gave us the admonition that if man has faith so small as a grain of mustard seed then he has faith enough to accomplish any of the ends which he might desire in this life,” Bond preached over the intercom from inside the topside command van. His distinctive baritone drawl filled the Sealab II habitat as if piped in straight from the Church of the Transfiguration. He picked up a preacher’s rhetorical steam as he warned about those who would accept nothing on faith and instead question everything presented to them. Of course neither Carpenter nor anyone else would have been down there in the first place if they didn’t have more than a mustard seed worth of faith—faith in Captain Bond, faith in Captain Mazzone, in the concept of saturation diving, in so-called mail-order equipment and the many prototypes on which their survival depended.
One prototype was an electrically heated wet suit developed to improve upon a standard wet suit’s limited ability to fend off the water’s bone-biting chill. With an ordinary wet suit of rubbery black neoprene, a thin layer of water is trapped between the skintight suit and the diver’s skin. The body warms the water and the suit provides insulation from the cold outside, although more water typically seeps in past the elastic around the wrists, ankles, head or neck, a sensation akin to getting an ice cube shoved down your collar. Breathing a gas rich in heat-sapping helium didn’t help, and because the external pressure compressed and thinned the wet suits’ porous neoprene, the suits were more like bedsheets than thick, cozy blankets. Berry Cannon could get chilled within a half-hour or so, even before his breathing gas had run out. Others felt shivers coming on in just ten minutes or so. It wasn’t unusual to see an aquanaut pop up through the liquid looking glass, his arms shaking uncontrollably and teeth chattering like castanets. There were a couple of showers in the foyer around the open hatch and after a dive the sensation of that fresh, hot water piped down from above was “unbelievably delicious,” as Carpenter put it—or “better than sex,” according to Barth. They would stand there, stripping off their wet suits and gear, uttering absurd Chipmunk moans of relief.
Eight aquanauts, a few from each team, had been fitted to try out the electrically heated wet suit. It looked like an ordinary wet suit, but wires ran like copper blood vessels throughout the jacket, hood, trousers, boots, and mitts. An outer suit was worn like a coverall to protect the underlying rubber suit from scuffs, tears, or punctures. This “snag suit” was light-colored and slightly rumpled, like a space suit, and used the novel fastener Velcro instead of zippers. The electric suit was powered by a half-dozen brick-shaped batteries that hung around a belt, like extra ammunition.
Two aquanauts on Team 2, Wally Jenkins and Bill Tolbert, were among the first to wear the new wet suit on a dive. Both were civilian oceanographers from the Mine Defense Lab, and Jenkins, who was thirty, was a Navy veteran. He had a youthful face and a bald head. A few years earlier he’d wrapped up a four-year stint at the nearby Miramar Naval Air Station during which he often drove out to the coast at La Jolla to dive. Tolbert, who at thirty-nine was among the older aquanauts, was especially grateful to have been picked for a Sealab team. His leg had been crushed by an ice truck in a boyhood accident, and it left him with a slight hitch in his gait—and prevented him from going out for the football and basketball teams. To be part of something as extraordinary as Sealab II was a welcome consolation for the sporting opportunities missed in his youth. For Tolbert even a menial task could be a joy. As one of his first jobs he was handed a bag of trash to send up to the surface. He swam out of the shark cage, let the buoyant bag go, and gleefully watched as it vanished overhead. He couldn’t help but marvel: This was garbage detail like no other.
While the first team was often focused on setting up the Sealab II encampment, Team 2 would have more time to devote to undersea research projects, such as those Tolbert planned with George Dowling, another oceanographer from the Mine Defense Lab. One was to release scores of detectors resembling mechanical portobello mushrooms around Sealab. As the hours passed, they would observe how these partially buoyant objects drifted over time, which could yield insights into how to track fragments scattered on the sea floor, one of the problems that had arisen during the search for the Thresher. The two scientists also planned to set up a bioluminescence meter—as soon as Dowling got over a mysterious and rather severe case of rash and swelling. Like astronomers training their sights on twinkling stars, the oceanographers wanted to measure the light produced by plankton and other phosphorescent undersea creatures. Tolbert said that seeing the dark water lit up, as if by fireflies, was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen: “You are completely enclosed in a layer of sparks. You can wave your hand through the water and the movement makes it bright enough to see for ten feet.”
Before that project got under way, Tolbert swam out with Wally Jenkins to put up four “targets,” which looked like little road signs. The targets were eye charts of sorts, with different shapes and colors designed to test the aquanauts’ ability to see in their surroundings. Jenkins donned a standard wet suit but Tolbert put on an electrically heated prototype. The visibility test had to be set up beyond the reach of Sealab’s lights. The two were swimming along the seabed when Tolbert realized he was drifting upward. The battery packs around his waist weighed thirty-five pounds and were doubling as a weight belt, but the belt had somehow slipped toward his knees.
He cocked his legs to keep it from falling completely off, but up he went, as if swept up in a vertical rip tide. The bulky battery belt had got caught on the bypass switch near Tolbert’s tailbone. Normally the bypass was a fail-safe mechanism the diver activated by yanking a ring to inject extra bursts of fresh gas into the Mark VI breathing bags. But in Tolbert’s case, the belt was holding the bypass switch wide open and the gas kept flowing, overfilling the vest so that it inflated like a helium balloon. It popped up around his neck and made him rise faster still. He had no voice communication, so he couldn’t shout for help. He tried to reach around and shut off the bypass but couldn’t dislodge it from the battery belt. He swam for the bottom as hard as he could but made scant progress, like a man walking down an ascending escalator.
Wally Jenkins saw that his buddy was in deep trouble and swam over to him. Jenkins cranked the exhaust val
ve wide open on Tolbert’s ballooning vest. With the valve open, Jenkins literally gave Tolbert a big hug to squeeze the excess gas out of the overinflated vest. At the same time Jenkins kicked furiously, adding some propulsive power to Tolbert’s own effort to stay near the bottom. It crossed Jenkins’s mind that if the battery belt slipped any further or fell off, Tolbert could become buoyant enough to take them both on a deadly rise to the surface.
Tolbert managed to hang on to the belt and they were within twenty feet or so of the lab when another aquanaut, Ken Conda, saw Jenkins and Tolbert doing their emergency tango. Conda helped get Tolbert to where he could grab hold of a tether leading back to the shark cage. Tolbert then followed the line, using it like a handrail, until he finally popped up through the liquid looking glass. As an oceanographer, Tolbert had spent hours diving in the sea, but nothing had ever scared him quite like this. It was as close as they had come to losing an aquanaut since Tiger Manning collapsed under Sealab I.
Emergency situations like this were what the Navy had in mind when Tuffy was brought into the Sealab fold. Tuffy, an Atlantic bottlenose porpoise, was part of a cadre of marine mammals the Navy rounded up to see how they might be useful in underwater work. Tuffy was no astronaut or celebrity diver, but he might also draw some favorable attention to Sealab. Porpoises and their dolphin cousins had lately leapt into the public imagination through Flipper, the dolphin star of a hit TV series.
In recent weeks, a few designated Sealab aquanauts joined Navy trainers to focus on teaching the porpoise some tasks applicable to Sealab II or a similar sea-based operation. One was to act as a courier for fast delivery of tools or other small objects, either from the surface to Sealab or between divers. But most important, Tuffy was trained to act as an undersea St. Bernard by responding to the sound of a buzzer and racing to the aid of a lost or ailing aquanaut, or one in unexpected danger, as Tolbert had been. A web of tethers had been set up around the lab and the aquanauts usually took a come-home line with them on a dive. But if anyone dropped a line, didn’t have one, or somehow got lost in the liquid shadows, he could press a buzzer and the 270-pound porpoise would speed to the rescue—in about a minute from his holding pen at the surface. The aquanaut could then hook on to Tuffy’s harness for a tow back to Sealab.
That was the idea, anyway, but even with a buzzer in hand, Tuffy’s aquanaut trainers on Team 2 couldn’t always get him to respond properly during several days of simulated rescue and delivery exercises. Tuffy seemed to be wary of the droning Berkone generators, the web of heaving lines and transfer pot cables, and the floodlights around Sealab. But he had enough success to show that porpoises had the potential to work with future Sealabs, especially as habitats were placed at greater depths. When news of the porpoise’s mixed results made it into some papers, it was given a light touch, as if aquanaut rescue was of no real concern. “Porpoise Tuffy Chickens Out on Sealab Test,” a mirthful headline in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner said.
Carpenter, Barth, and the rest of Team 2 were scheduled to make a series of deeper dives from Sealab that shared the pioneering spirit of Ed White’s space walk earlier that summer. Tethered by a twenty-five-foot golden umbilical, White had become the first American astronaut to crawl out of his orbiting capsule. He drifted effortlessly into the vacuum a hundred miles up, and considering the way he floated, this historic half-hour could have rightly been called a space dive, but space walk entered the lexicon. The eight-hundred-seat auditorium in the new Manned Space Center in Houston wasn’t big enough to hold all the newspaper, magazine, radio, and television reporters and cameramen. NASA had to lease an additional building for the news horde.
The Sealab aquanauts’ dives had so far been limited to the same depth as Sealab itself, about two hundred feet, give or take an atmosphere. Going too far up toward the surface was definitely out—lest they risk drifting into the dreaded realm of explosive decompression. A plan to make deeper dives—“excursion dives,” as Walt Mazzone called them—constituted an important step in learning to live in the sea. They would test the premise that someone saturated at a particular depth, living and breathing in a helium-rich artificial atmosphere, could spend some time working at a deeper depth and then swim directly back to his undersea base.
The goal was to make the excursion a no-decompression dive, like one that typically begins and ends at the surface. In recent months, Bond and Mazzone had been captivated by the potential of deep excursions and had run a series of experimental dives in their new chamber at New London and at the Experimental Diving Unit in Washington, with animals and with Navy divers. Dr. Workman wielded his slide rule to formulate schedules for allowable depths and durations, and the results were promising enough to give the researchers faith that a saturated aquanaut could survive a deep no-decompression excursion. Still, like Ed White on his space walk, the aquanauts would be taking a risk. No one had ever made excursion dives at such depth, and the aquanauts would be making these inaugural dives at sea, a more dangerous setting than the controlled confines of a chamber. Cousteau’s Conshelf Two oceanauts had made some excursions, but with shallower starting depths and different breathing gas mixtures. Even if the celebrity diver had produced substantive physiological data—Mazzone never saw any—the Cousteau team’s findings would have been based on such different circumstances that they wouldn’t have been readily applicable to the Sealab excursions.
The preliminary Navy tests indicated that from a habitat at, say, 430 feet, the aquanauts could work at depths down to six hundred feet for more than an hour without having to decompress on the way back to their habitat. Even if there was some decompression penalty, making deep excursions could have an advantage over placing the habitat at the deeper depth, in part because a deeper habitat is much more expensive to operate. There’s the additional breathing gas needed to maintain a higher-pressure artificial atmosphere, and final decompression would also take longer and thus cost more.
Bond and Mazzone could foresee a time, possibly within a few years, when an aquanaut living at six hundred feet could journey down to seventeen hundred feet, nearly a third of a mile below the surface, do a job and return to his base at six hundred feet. Perhaps, as Secretary Morse said at the christening, living and working at such depths might become as commonplace as jet travel. Also, as Bond had envisioned in his “Proposal for Underwater Research,” sea floor shelters could be placed like way stations at depths corresponding to appropriate decompression stops. An aquanaut could carry on with undersea work, gradually moving from deeper stations to shallower ones, instead of returning to the surface and whiling away days in a decompression chamber.
The aquanauts were instructed to take their maiden excursions cautiously. Bond and Mazzone set an initial excursion depth limit of 266 feet—conservative, but that still added another two atmospheres of pressure. It was also deep enough to allow the aquanauts to explore the canyon rim, a bold step that Captain Bond, in his poetic way, believed would yield greater insights into an aquanaut’s psyche than fiddling with test gadgets in the psychomotor arcade or filling out mood checklists.
Scott Carpenter and Barth took a first excursion but theirs and several others were cut short, in part because of concerns—and more queries from Carpenter—about the accuracy of their depth gauge readings. Time was nearly up for the second team, including Carpenter, who was about to complete his record thirty-day stay. The next day Carpenter set out with Wally Jenkins, the Navy veteran who came to Tolbert’s rescue. The two swam along the bottom for what seemed to be about fifty yards—distance could be deceptive in the saltwater fog. The lights of Sealab dissolved into darkness as they followed a gentle downward slope in the ocean floor, swimming along until they reached the rim. There, the sea floor dropped out from under them. It reminded Jenkins of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, except that the view was less grand. The beams from their diving lights revealed lonely outcroppings of soft gorgonian coral, waving like barren trees along the rocky canyon rim. A few drab solitary
fish hovered around, including the ubiquitous sculpin.
At 253 feet, Carpenter noticed a discrepancy in depth gauge readings and feared they would overshoot the limit of 266 feet. The two divers stopped where they were, suspended in darkness, then retraced their strokes, swimming up the canyon wall, over the rim, and back to the habitat. They had been out for about a half-hour. After reviewing the gauges it became clear that they had reached their depth goal, and they had done so in open water, not in some laboratory wet pot. It was good news for the concept of excursion dives, but not a milestone that brought out the droves of reporters who covered the space walk.
On the other side of the blue planet, Jacques Cousteau had just lowered Conshelf Three deep into the Mediterranean near Villefranche, where Ed Link first tested his cylinder. Shortly after midnight on September 22, Cousteau’s six oceanauts reached a depth of almost 330 feet, more than a hundred feet deeper than Sealab and many atmospheres beyond Cousteau’s first undersea houses. Accordingly, this third Conshelf habitat’s design was altogether different, but like Starfish House it was an eye-catching bit of undersea architecture. Conshelf Three was a steel sphere, eighteen feet in diameter, its exterior painted in a checkered pattern of yellow and black. The living quarters were like those of a modest yacht, with a laboratory, lounge, and dining area in the upper sphere, and bunks, bathrooms, and a spacious dive station down spiral stairs. The checkered sphere sat atop a rectangular base, like a globe on a shoe box. The box contained food storage, ballast tanks, and nine tons of fresh water, one of several features that made the Conshelf Three habitat more autonomous than its predecessors and even Sealab II.
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