by Damon Knight
“Yes, sir.” Ferguson’s eyes were bright.
Bliss turned away. He was not proud of himself, and the admiring looks of his deputies merely made him feel like an imposter. This was not his line at all, this Hornblower kind of daredevilry. Something Hartman had said, talking of Nelson, had put it into his head—Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen, putting the spyglass to his blind eye and remarking that he couldn’t read the signals. That was all right for Nelson, but not for him. Nelson had been made a viscount afterward; he was simply going to lose his job, and perhaps his life.
When the copter returned with its crestfallen crew, Markey said to his executive officer, “Goddamn it, who is that guy, anyway?”
“Civilian, I think. Maybe he was in the merchant marine before.”
“Well, where did he get that cocked hat?” Markey sat down at the chart table. “Do you realize I’ve got to signal CINCAF and tell them we’ve blown it again?”
“They can’t get away with this forever.”
“Well, what’s going to stop them?” Markey looked gloomily at the table. “Get San Francisco on the phone. Tell them I want a complete set of plans for Sea Venture, right down to the nuts and bolts. This is going to be a dirtier job than I thought.”
49
After a delay of twenty-four hours, the Sea Venture plans began scrolling out of the fax machine. They made a stack more than a foot high. Markey turned them over to his engineering officer, Ed Jensen, and said, “Find something.”
After dinner Jensen came to him with a printout in his hand.
“Here’s what we want. We know one of their lifeboats is gone—that means there’s an empty launching tube.” He pointed to the diagram. “This passage is closed by the door of the lifeboat itself when it’s in the tube. Back here is a watertight door. Get in there, wedge that door open, and then they can’t submerge. If we take them by surprise, we walk into the bridge, what they call the Control Center, and that’s all she wrote.”
“Pretty slick,” said Markey. “Yes, that might just work.”
Lieutenant Avery N. Hamling, Jr., was forty-seven years old, and still the strongest diver in his group. His father, a Navy Commander and a fine swimmer, had taught him from the age of four how to push himself to his limits, and the Special Underwater Section had given him the opportunity to do so. Hamling kept himself fit, and kept his men fit, ready at any time for the most hazardous and demanding duty in the Navy.
He found Markey, Pugliese, and Jensen in the conference room. “You sent for me, Captain?”
“That’s right. Sit down, Hamling, and I’ll fill you in. Show him those printouts, Ed.”
Jensen passed a sheaf of papers across the table. “Here’s a plan and elevation of one of Sea Venture’s lifeboat tubes. As you can see, it’s a cylinder fourteen and a half feet across by thirty-one and a half deep. Here’s the passenger entrance, twenty feet back from the mouth of the tube. It leads to a passage eight feet long with a watertight door at the end. That’s where we want you to go in.”
Hamling studied the diagram. “The door can be opened manually from the tube side?”
“Yes.” Jensen passed him another diagram. Hamling glanced at it, then returned his attention to the tube plan. “Where’s the waterline?” he asked.
“Here, right at the bottom of the tube.”
“And there are no handholds—nothing to grip?”
“Not in the tube. We think there are handrails in the passage. Unfortunately they don’t show on these plans. They’ve got to be there, but we can’t tell you how close they run to the doorway.”
Hamling stared at the diagrams, trying to translate them into an image. “Which way does the lifeboat door open?” he asked.
“Good question,” said Markey, lifting an eyebrow. “Where are those plans, Ed?”
“Wait a minute.” Jensen got the stack of printouts, shuffled through them. “Here we are.” He pushed across a plan and elevation of the lifeboat. “The door opens inboard into the passage, and the hinge is on the left as you face the tube.”
Hamling nodded. “All right, so if there is a handrail, it’ll be on the right side. Next question: Is this tube port or starboard?”
“Starboard,” said Markey. He picked a photograph out of the pile of papers and showed it to Hamling. “Copter got this with a telephoto lens—you can see the empty tube right here.”
Hamling examined the photograph. “When was this taken?”
“This morning.”
“Looks like the swells are coming in from her starboard quarter. Every time one of those swells hits the tube, there’s going to be a hell of a surge. What are the chances the weather will be calmer in a day or two?”
“Zero,” said Markey. “Typhoon Tony is due to pass over us two days from now.”
They were silent a moment. “If it was up to me,” Markey went on, “I’d wait for decent weather. But there are civilians on board with urgent appointments. CINCAF wants us to get them off right now, if not sooner.”
“When do you want us to go?”
“Oh-four-hundred tomorrow.”
Hamling was silent for a minute. “We can do it.”
“Sure?” asked Markey.
“Yes.”
“All right, now here’s the other part of the problem. We can’t get near Sea Venture in daylight, and we don’t dare use a minisub—they might be listening for the motors. The best we can do is drop you before dawn, as near as we can get to the position where Sea Venture ought to be when she surfaces. That’s going to be partly guesswork. How close do you want to be to make that swim underwater?”
“Anything up to five miles would be good.”
“All right, that we can do. If we don’t, though, your men are going to have to stay in the water, holding onto the raft, until we can pick you up after nightfall. It’ll be a long day.”
“I understand.”
50
In the cone of yellow light from the helicopter, all they could see was the raft bobbing on the swells and the gray water around it: the rest of the world was empty black. They swam to the raft and climbed in; already the copter was rising. The light blinked out, the blackness pressed closer.
As the dawn light spread over the silvery wrinkled sky, Hamling stood up on the pitching raft, supported by Martinez and Orr, and began to scan the ocean with his binoculars. For a long time nothing happened.
“There it is.” The upper works of Sea Venture were thrusting above the horizon.
“How far?”
“Wait a while—she isn’t all the way up yet.” Hamling watched, and finally said, “Five miles, maybe six.” He lowered the binoculars and tucked them into his belt pouch. “You want to swim a little, or would you rather hang around all day to be picked up?”
The men helped each other on with their liquid-air tanks, checked regulators, rubbed the compound on their faceplates. Orr and Martinez opened the valves of the flotation cells. As the raft sank, the five men slipped into the water.
After the fourth hour, Hamling surfaced long enough to catch a glimpse of Sea Venture and adjust the lubber line on his compass; then they went down again to five feet. An hour later, the hull of Sea Venture loomed ahead of them. They swam toward the stern. Hamling surfaced once more and peered at the black opening just above the waterline.
As each swell struck, the gray water foamed into the tube. He timed the surges: each one took six seconds, and the tube was barely emptied before the next one went in.
He tried to visualize what was happening inside the tube. The water hurtled in at an angle, slapped the forward side, filled the open passenger entrance, then rebounded from the back of the tube and washed out again. The direction of the surge was in their favor, but the water was going in at roller-coaster speed. Unless position and timing were exactly right, a man would come back out with broken limbs or a concussion.
Hamling uncoiled a line from his waist and handed the end of it to Martinez, signaling the others to link up. He tur
ned on his back and swam close to the hull. Overhead he could see the pearl-gray lines of the troughs going in. He let himself become part of the rhythm. He visualized himself rising, catching the surge. He did not think of failure.
He counted seconds, then turned onto his side and propelled himself upward with three powerful strokes. He felt himself hurtling inward: in the blinding smother, he reached out, caught the smooth rail just where it ought to be, and hung on with all his strength as the backwash tried to suck him out again. Gasping and triumphant, he pulled himself into the passenger corridor and tied his line to the handrail. When the next surge went out, he tugged on the line. After a moment he felt it go slack, and pulled it in hand over hand as fast as he could. Martinez, with his face mask knocked awry, came in over the sill.
When they were all inside, Hamling waded to the watertight door at the end of the passage. The control wheel was in the center of the door. He turned it counterclockwise. It was frozen at first, then it gave. He pushed it open. While the rest of them got out of their gear, Martinez took a rubber wedge from his kit and drove it under the door with blows of a mallet. He tested the wedge with his hand and held up thumb and forefinger in an “OK” sign.
51
At twelve hundred hours, when the shift changed, Bliss dropped in at the Control Center for a look around before lunch. Ferguson was just being relieved by Deputy Womack; the new comm officer was Peter Gann. At twelve-fifteen, Bliss was on the point of leaving when Womack sat up straight and said, “Chief, you’re not going to believe this, but we’ve got another lifeboat-door signal. It’s the same one as before—Lifeboat Fifty-three.”
Bliss said nothing. Now what? Could somebody have got out through the empty tube? What would be the point of that? Or—oh, God—could somebody have got in? “See if you can shut the door,” he said.
Womack shook his head. “It’s still telling me the door is open. Maybe just a malfunction?”
“No. It isn’t. Try opening the door, then closing it.”
“I’m getting a status signal—door opening.”
“Close it.”
“Door closing.” After a moment Womack turned. “Still the same signal—it isn’t shut.”
Bliss looked at the clock. How long had it been since the signal came on? Five seconds, ten? If they were really there, what were they doing now?
Under their wetsuits, the five men were dressed in white skivvies and shorts. They took Navy Colts from their pouches and belted them on. Martinez stood guard at the entrance to the lifeboat bay; the rest, with Hamling in the lead, set off up the corridor at a trot.
“Down to plus one seventeen, Mr. Womack.”
“Plus one seventeen? Yes, sir.” After a moment he said, “Chief? If that door’s really open, we’ll flood the Boat Deck.”
“I know,” said Bliss.
When the next surge came, an inch of water flooded into the lifeboat bay where Martinez was standing. Instead of washing out again, the water rose. Suddenly there was a clangor of alarm bells. Martinez saw the watertight door descending just in time to grab an air bottle and shove it underneath.
In the corridor, the fluorescents abruptly went out, replaced by the sullen yellow glow of emergency lights. Life rafts dropped from the ceiling and swung at the ends of their cords.
Ahead of the four frogmen, a watertight door was descending. Hamling broke into a splashing run toward it, but he was too late. The flood reached the closed door and kept on rising.
“Let me sit here, if you don’t mind. Mr. Womack,” said Bliss. “You and Mr. Gann watch the foretop screens, please.” Bliss sat down at the console and called up a Boat Deck status display. Watertight doors were down at both ends of Corridor Y where it intersected with cross corridors, but the door at the entrance of the lifeboat bay was not closed. A real malfunction, this time, or had they jammed it with something? The water level in the corridor was just over two feet.
“Copter in sight, Chief,” said Womack suddenly.
Bliss felt a sudden paradoxical relief. That meant, at least, that he had not made a grotesque misjudgment.
Submerged, Sea Venture was like a whale, a shape as portly and to all appearance ungraceful as Bliss himself. Only Bliss, perhaps, fully realized how delicately trimmed she was, how easy it would be to make her dance.
He did a mental sum. The isolated section of the corridor was eighty feet long and ten feet wide, ergo eight hundred square feet, times two made sixteen hundred cubic. That was about a hundred thousand pounds of water—fifty tons. Was that enough? Probably, but he wanted to take no chances. Bliss reached out and turned the depth control to plus one twenty-six. Sea Venture descended gently another foot. Now the sensors showed three feet of water in the corridor.
He glanced up at the monitors. The little speck of the helicopter was plainly visible.
Bliss overrode the interlock and began to pump water out of the port-side trim tanks. He watched the clinometer, feeling the vessel tilt almost imperceptibly under him. One degree: two. It couldn’t be much more, or he’d be having a lot of old people falling over and breaking their hips. He adjusted the depth control again to positive one hundred twenty-nine. Sea Venture began to rise.
Womack said, “Chief, the helicopter—!”
Bliss glanced at the monitor. It was close, but there was still time. “We must rise before we can descend,” he said. In the Boat Deck screens, he could see a torrent of water pouring into the ocean. The green light on the panel that indicated the lifeboat-bay door turned abruptly red. The obstruction must have been swept away. Instantly Bliss typed in another override and raised all the watertight doors. The torrent continued. In the screens, Bliss saw five men struggling in the water. When the rush of water stopped, he lowered the doors again and turned the depth control to plus ten.
Sea Venture gently slipped under the surface, all but its upper works, as the helicopter soared closer. A few minutes later, Bliss had the satisfaction of seeing the copter lower a sling to pick up the frogmen.
52
Early in the morning the hospital annex called and told Bliss that Dr. McNulty had awakened. Bliss went down an hour later and found him looking weak and bewildered. “How do you feel, Doctor?”
“Got a sore nose,” said McNulty. “Now I know what it feels like. I was dreaming. I dreamed—” He closed his eyes.
Later in the day Bliss dropped in again; McNulty was looking more alert.
“Doctor, we’ve missed you badly. While you were ill, we’ve been playing cat and mouse with a helicopter carrier—they want to take off our Very Important Passengers.”
“They can’t do that.”
“I know, and I’ve been able to stave them off so far, but it can’t go on forever. Our only chance is to get rid of the parasite somehow in the next few days. If anything at all occurs to you—”
McNulty shook his head. His eyes filled with tears; Bliss, embarrassed, went away.
Paul Newland realized that his deliverance was not far off. He was very weak now, and he slid down into a fuzzy half-consciousness every now and then, but in the intervals his mind seemed clear enough. He had written a note to Hal, and another one to Olivia Jessup. He had gone over his life in memory, as drowning people were supposed to do, and had made his peace with it. There were things he had done that he might do otherwise now if he had the opportunity, but they had been the best things he knew how to do at the time.
It really was quite easy to die; he would have preferred not to do it all by himself, perhaps, but that was a minor complaint. He did not expect anything afterward: he believed that his personality was a unique set of wave forms which after the dissolution of his brain would fade into the background noise of the universe. He was grateful to have had the use of this body and this mind for sixty-four years; he had realized long ago that he did not want it forever.
He was quite sure now that John Stevens must have put him into the lifeboat, perhaps on orders from Bronson’s group. He felt no vindictiveness, only a
kind of melancholy regret. The world was going to turn without him. Probably Sea Venture would not survive; perhaps the L-5 program would. Was that a good thing or not? He no longer knew.
He awoke from one of his periods of half-consciousness and knew that the time had come. I’m not sorry for anything, he thought, and drifted away into the long dark.
By midafternoon heavy swells were overtaking Sea Venture from the east; the barometer was falling. At seventeen hundred hours. Bliss ordered the upper decks cleared and Sea Venture submerged to fifty feet.
Hartman was standing with Bliss and Deputy Davis in the Control Center after dinner. He could feel a faint but perceptible rise and fall of the deck under his feet.
“Why this particular depth, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Navigational problems,” Bliss said. “We could easily get a smoother ride by going a bit deeper, but the deeper we go, the more northing, and we’re already far north of where we ought to be. Excuse us a moment, Davis.”
“Yes, sir.” The deputy stepped aside.
“Here we are,” said Bliss, pointing to the red dot in the center of the display. He pushed a button. “Here’s our projected course for the next twenty-four hours. As you see, we’re going to pass between Rota and Tinian, and that’s bad enough, but farther north the currents are a nightmare, and there’s a risk of being carried into a sort of mini-gyre south of Kyushu.”
“That’s the drawback of steering by currents, then, isn’t it?”
“Quite right, and it would be much safer to cruise these waters in the summer, but then we wouldn’t get the tourist trade, so there you are.”
“Well, the carrier will never find us in this weather, at least. That’s something.”