Cold is the Sea

9

Montauk Point was well astern when Keith climbed down the ladders from Cushing’s narrow bridge, through the watertight hatch, and descended into the control room. “We’ll be diving in a minute,” he said to the men on watch. “What’s the sounding?”

“Just on the fifty-fathom curve, Captain,” said one of them, his eyes close to the fathometer window through which could be seen a stylus tracing an exaggerated profile of the bottom. “Mark; fifty fathoms,” he said.

“Control, this is bridge! Sounding!” the control room speaker blared the order from the officer of the deck above. The chief of the watch reached up to the speaker-control panel mounted above his station, pressed one of the toggle switches. “Fifty fathoms, bridge,” he called.

“Is the diving officer ready in the control room?” said the loudspeaker.

Lieutenant Curt Taylor leaned across the chief, pressed the toggle, spoke into the microphone. “I’m here, Howie. Ready below!” He turned to Keith. “I have the first watch, Captain. I’ll relieve Howie of the conn after we’re down.”

Keith nodded. Jim Hanson had arranged all this several days ago. The report was unnecessary, and both of them knew it; but regular ship’s routine required the report to be made, inasmuch as the captain was in the control room. The control room watch, already on their stations, had gradually assumed an aura of expectancy. Keith could not have specified any particular attitude, but he had seen it many times. The way the men lounged at their stations told its own message: an orderly, professional readiness, apparent in the certitude with which they eyed the controls and gauges occupying every available inch of space on the compartment’s bulkheads and the curved skin of the ship as well.

There was a bustle in the hatch trunk leading to the bridge. A pair of dungaree-clad legs appeared, quickly followed by a second pair. Two men wearing foul-weather gear jackets, the hoods drawn tightly by the drawstrings around faces reddened and slightly swollen from the cold wind into which they had been peering.

“Lookouts,” one of them said through stiffened lips to Taylor. This too was part of the regular routine.

“Okay,” responded Taylor. “Get your coffee and come on back here.” The two men shambled stiffly off in the direction of the crew’s mess hall, fumbling with parka strings and zippers.

Again the loudspeaker blared. “Clear the bridge! Dive! Dive!” Almost simultaneously the diving alarm sounded twice: two raucous blasts transmitted on the ship’s general announcing system to all compartments. The chief of the watch, now standing before his diving control console, had forsaken his built-in stool. Alongside him stood Curt Taylor. Both of them kept their eyes fixed on the hull opening indicator panel, which showed two red circles and a series of dashes. This was the successor to the old “Christmas tree,” with its red and green lights, which could never be positively and clearly interpreted under conditions of night adaptation when the only light permitted was red. The chief, fingering a switch on his diving panel, glanced inquiringly at Taylor.

“Shut the induction,” said Taylor. The chief flipped the switch. One of the two circles vanished, was immediately replaced by another of the dashes. The two men continued to watch the panel, relaxed ever so slightly when the last circle changed to a dash. “Straight board, sir,” said the chief to Taylor, unnecessarily loudly because Taylor was standing right beside him, and unnecessarily in any case since Taylor was also looking at the board. But again, this was part of the routine. Not only was Keith in the control room, so were a dozen other members of Cushing’s crew. All of them were vitally interested in the proper conduct of a dive.

“Open the vents,” said Taylor. The chief’s practiced fingers flew across another row of switches on his console. A series of red dashes in a second indicator panel changed to circles, and simultaneously a faint noise of rushing air could be heard. A pair of khaki-clad legs appeared in the bridge access trunk, followed immediately by dungaree-clad legs. Their owners, similarly garbed in dark green foul-weather parkas, with faces reddened from the exposure to the elements like those of the lookouts preceding them, stepped into the operating area around the diving panel.

“Hatch secured,” the one in khaki said to Taylor.

“Aye,” responded Taylor. “I’ll take the dive, Howie.”

“All right. I’ll pass the conn over to you after you get her under.” Turning to Leone, the officer of the deck said, “Bridge secured, Captain. All clear topside. We’re still on the same course, one-two-five true, speed fifteen. I’ll pass the conn over to Curt as soon as he’s ready.”

As Keith acknowledged the formal report from Lieutenant Howard Trumbull, officer of the deck, he could feel the slight downward inclination of the submarine. Bow and stern planesmen were sitting in their seats near the forward bulkhead of the control room, facing an impressive array of dials in their carefully designed instrument panel. Extending from the floor between the legs of each was a stubby column topped with a steering wheel minus its top quadrant, patterned after the control columns in aircraft and designed to fill almost the identical purpose except that they could be, and frequently were, operated independently. The man on the left, in fact, had already pushed his control column forward. “Stern planes on fifteen dive,” he said to Curt Taylor, who had moved over and was now standing behind him.

“Three degree down bubble,” said Taylor. He turned to the man operating the right-hand column. “Put your sailplanes on full dive,” he directed. Obediently, the man pushed his control stick all the way forward, held it there.

The deck tilted farther under Keith’s feet. There was more sound of air venting from the ballast tanks. The depth gauge quivered, began to show increased depth, and the log speed indicator remained fixed at fifteen knots as the steady throb of Cushing’s single propeller drove her mighty hull down and forward.

Keith’s mind flipped backward. In some ways this was so much like going to sea on a war patrol. But yet so different, and in the space of only fifteen years! In departing from Pearl Harbor, Eel had traveled almost entirely on the surface to her operating area. Except for daily drills and the ever present necessity to dive on appearance of a patrolling aircraft — all the more likely to be encountered as she approached enemy waters — she tried to stay on the surface in order to make more speed. The Cushing, by contrast, could make higher speed submerged. Furthermore, she could manufacture her own atmosphere from seawater, and dispose of unwanted gases, such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, overboard. She was totally divorced from the surface, had no need for it, except for entering and leaving port. She could do everything she had to do submerged, far better than on the surface. She would dive as soon as she cleared the shallow water, and remain submerged until return. She would surface only if necessary.

Eel had been a much smaller ship than Cushing, but she had dived and surfaced more frequently, and her dives were more complicated to execute. There were diesel engines, up to four — five counting the dinky, or auxiliary charging engine — to shut off; for each, as it rolled to a stop, there were two exhaust valves — one hydraulic and one hand-operated — to be closed before the submarine went under (but not before the engine stopped revolving). And there were two big spring-loaded air inlet ducts to be closed in each engineroom with a great clang of metal.

Shutting the even bigger air intake valve, hydraulically operated, was one of the principal control room functions, to be accomplished after the engines had stopped and before the valve itself, located as high as possible under the after part of the bridge deck, went under. Then, as soon as the last hull opening was closed, usually the bridge hatch, there was always a great whistling and roaring as the control room bled high-pressure air into the submarine to confirm that she could hold air pressure and therefore was indeed watertight. A logical practice for a slow dive, right out of overhaul for instance, when some overlooked repair or some shore-based workman’s carelessness might have left an important hole unsealed. But in a fast dive the ship was half under before the last closure, the hatch or the induction valve, was shut, and there was no way to stop her downward momentum. If there were in fact a large hole, such as an open and unnoticed torpedo-loading hatch or a stuck-open air induction valve, the first sign of danger would be an increase in air pressure as the sea came in.

An artificial increase in air pressure during the act of diving would only delay detection of the first sign of danger, not help reveal it. But this had apparently not struck the submarine force authorities of that time. The whoosh of air, accompanied by pressure on the ears, had become part of the symphony of diving, welcomed uncritically by all because it signified orderly accomplishment of an orderly procedure.

In the Cushing things were much simpler. Air bleeding, with its attendant noise, had been abolished. Not only had the disadvantages been at last recognized, there were many fewer hull openings to close and hence less reason for a last-minute air test. There were no air-breathing diesel engines to shut off, no switching to electric motors for submerged propulsion, no haste to get down before an enemy aircraft could get on top of her with a bomb. In her engineroom a dive caused no change of any kind, except that the ship tilted very slightly downward for a short time and then leveled off again. To maintain the ordered speed, the engine throttleman might have to adjust steam flow to the turbine, that was all. If she went deep enough, he would have to close the throttle slightly, to match the reduced resistance to Cushing’s forward motion.

Something all submariners know: the laws of physics hold immutable, even though sometimes they seem to place effect before cause. A great deal of the power necessary to drive a ship through water is wasted in turbulence, visible in the form of wake astern and waves radiating outward from her passage. When a modern submarine is operating at shallow depth with any speed at all, there is nearly as much water disturbance as if she were actually on the surface, an incongruous and startling thing to any observer in the vicinity. But as the submarine depth increases, there comes a point when the pressure of the sea no longer allows turbulence to be formed. At this depth, and deeper, there is no surface evidence of her passage. The depth at which this occurs is dependent, of course, on speed; the faster the submarine is going, the greater her depth must be.

Several other things happen at about the same time, among them a sharp reduction in propeller noise, but most noticeable of all is a sudden increase in speed. The engines now have but one outlet for their horsepower: driving the submarine forward. She is no longer creating waves or turbulence. She has been freed from surface effect, which means there is now reduced resistance to her forward motion. And so she speeds up. To the throttleman in the engineroom, this is evidenced by an increase in propeller speed, and he automatically closes the throttle slightly, reduces the flow of steam to the turbines, holds the rpm to the ordered figure.

Another factor is propeller slippage. Defined as that percentage of propeller revolutions not converted into forward motion, slippage is essentially another measure of power wasted in turbulence. Designers have long known that the deeper a propeller can be, the less its slippage (another reason why the paddlewheel lost out). A deeply submerged submarine experiences virtually no slippage at all. Her propeller speed becomes precisely a measure of her speed through water. The distance she travels over any given time may be calculated with almost mathematical exactitude by multiplying the pitch of her propeller by the number of revolutions it has made, as shown on the revolution counter in the engineroom. For all these reasons, a deeply submerged (and properly streamlined) submarine can go faster than she can on the surface. This is true despite her larger displacement when submerged.

“Make your depth two hundred feet,” said Keith to Curt Taylor. It was an unnecessary order, but part of the ritual. Diving officers (and all planesmen as well) had already been instructed to keep the ship one hundred feet off the bottom, slowly increasing depth as the bottom fell away until ordered cruising depth, four hundred feet, was attained. The drumming noise of the surface had ceased. Air was no longer venting from the ballast tanks. Cushing’s speed stayed rock-steady at fifteen knots, her angle downward at a comfortable three degrees, her depth gauges slowly creeping upward toward the ordered depth. As they neared it, the planesmen without orders pulled back on their control columns, the ship leveled out, and Taylor turned to Keith.

“Two hundred feet, Captain,” he reported. “Fifteen knots, course one-two-five true. There’s a hundred and five feet of water under our keel. I have the dive and the watch, and will take over the conn as soon as Howie is ready to turn it over.”

“You’ve got it, Curt,” said Trumbull, who had been standing unnoticed in the background. “Course one-two-five true. Speed fifteen. Ordered depth two hundred feet, increasing to four hundred cruising depth. There is one ship in sight, well clear to port. No land in sight.”

“Aye, Howie.” To Keith, “I have the conn, Captain.”

It was all so businesslike, so controlled, so routine. There was very little of the thrill of the old-time dive, the split-second timing. Nor was there any need for a stopwatch in the hands of a quartermaster to monitor the time it took to get under.

Fast dives had been necessary in the old days, because a plane coming at two hundred miles an hour could bring disaster in a very short time. Eel had regularly submerged in less than thirty seconds. It had taken the much larger Cushing twice or three times that long, but diving from under aircraft attack was no longer the problem it used to be. In 1961, with a ship like the Cushing, cruising on the surface was for leaving and entering port.

With Cushing once more on even keel, Keith left the control room, walked thoughtfully forward to his own stateroom. He would keep Cushing on course one-two-five until clear of the hundred-fathom curve. Then he would change the ordered course to due east, and in about three days more, when clear of the Grand Banks, he would order it changed again, to northeast. Cushing would find her way by sound alone, probing constantly by fathometer and forward-beam sonar against the possibility of an uncharted bottom anomaly, or another ship. It was another ship which worried Keith the most. The ocean floor had been well enough charted of recent years to assure against sudden surprises standing on the deep seabed, but the possibility of another ship — a submarine — was a different matter. No U.S. or NATO submarine would be routed through the vicinity of Cushing’s plotted positions, but there was no telling what the submarine of another nation might do. Which was another way of saying that a Russian submarine, routed by its own navy department without relation to anything planned by that of the United States, might conceivably blunder into Cushing’s path. And if the other sub happened to be at the same depth — another remote chance in the huge world ocean — the collision could be catastrophic. But this was not something one worried much about. The mathematical chances against such an incident occurring were astronomical.

In the event of war, of course, it would be different, but even so the main danger of collision would be with submarines on one’s own side. Enemy convoys or task forces could be considered a magnet drawing all submarines in the vicinity. Even as far back as World War II, when diesel-driven submarines pursued enemy convoys on the surface and dived for attack after having attained a favorable position, the problem had been recognized. Coordinating operations so as to avoid the danger of collisions while submerged, or — even more to be dreaded — accidentally torpedoing a submarine on one’s own side as it also sought a favorable attack position, had occupied much thought and careful planning. Ultimately, if submarines continued to increase in number, there might come a time when the danger of collision would require measures similar to those controlling airplanes in the sky. But this time was far in the future. Keith gave it only a second thought, shrugged his shoulders, opened the letter from Peggy. As he read it, his forehead furrowed.

Keith turned the paper over. Although Peggy had digressed into a discussion of the idyllic joys of a permanent home, the flower and vegetable garden she proposed to start (she could have done that anywhere!) and the general peace and contentment long-term permanence seemed to spell for her, his brow remained furrowed. The letter was four pages long, closely written on two sheets of paper. Midway through page three his frown deepened.

Keith clenched his fist, slammed the opened desk top in front of him with it as he turned to the last page of the letter.

There was a little more to the letter but Keith hardly saw it. “Stay away from Laura, Peggy,” he muttered under his breath. It was like her to say nothing to him of all these thoughts she had been having, to hold them within her and then lay them all out when he was unable to answer, unable to prevent her from doing whatever it was she had in mind to do about it. Cushing was already well at sea, deeply submerged. In emergency he could transmit a message, but not about something like this. Even if he could send Peggy a message, what would he say? He felt himself trapped, powerless, his comfort and security at home suddenly destroyed, or, at least, endangered. “Damn Peggy anyway!”

Running deep beneath the surface, her main coolant pumps at half speed, U.S.S. William B. Cushing effortlessly put 360 nautical miles behind her per day. She would make a landfall at Spitsbergen — if indeed a “landfall” was the proper terminology — for the latest report of ice reconnaissance by air had placed the edge of the late winter ice pack well to the south of that frosty land, and the confirmation of position would have to be by sonar and fathometer. Even this, while good conservative practice, was probably of little real use compared to the phenomenal accuracy and dependability of the two inertial navigation sets with which the Cushing was equipped. After Spitsbergen, at the reduced speed required by the operation order upon going under the ice, the North Pole would be some four days’ steaming away.

Normally, the ice would be only a few feet thick at the edge of the pack, gradually — but fairly rapidly — increasing to the average winter thickness of about twenty feet. An iceberg, however, could be much deeper. Granted, bergs are not very apt to be encountered in the pack ice, the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. Icebergs come from glaciers on Greenland, which break off when the glacier hits the sea. As they slowly drift southward, they can be a fantastic hazard to navigation until they have slowly melted into the sea. Generally they stay close to the shore of Greenland, but occasionally an errant one may unexpectedly be caught, like ships of bygone years, in the middle of the ice pack. There, its behavior would be controlled by the circular motion of the drifting ice in the Arctic basin rather than the southbound currents which affect most of them, and it would be carried down into the Atlantic Ocean with the ice pack.

Encountering an iceberg at sea in northern latitudes, or in the ice pack, was, Keith knew, of far greater concern than encountering another submarine. For one thing, it would make no noise, unless wind or sea conditions were heavy, causing it to grind against surrounding pack ice. It would simply lie there, a stone-hard cliff hundreds of feet in depth, hanging in the midst of watery space like a gigantic trap for an unwary submarine. Keith saw to it that several hours a day were spent studying the ice patrol reports and the reference material with which he had been provided. Although the packet was a thick one, he took the time to read it all twice, and hold wardroom seminars in addition.

Contrary to popular belief, a submarine crew underway is at least as busy as the crew of any other type of ship. In the first place, the ability to submerge makes the submarine infinitely more complicated than any surface ship; and in the second, the submarine crew is smaller, for her very nature requires the minimum practicable crew, in the most confined of quarters. While underway, everyone except the captain, executive officer, ship’s doctor and the cooks stands two four-hour watches per day. Regular drills, exercises in the many evolutions of which the ship must remain capable, come out of the off-watch time of two-thirds of the ship’s company. So do cleaning the ship, routine ship’s work, repairs to machinery or — the more usual case — regular maintenance. The idea that a submarine crew finds time hanging heavy on its hands while their ship drives her way submerged across an ocean or halfway around the world is unrealistic. A submarine does not even float without attention, like an ordinary ship, but maintains a specific depth at the will of her masters. The days pass swiftly. The pressure of day-to-day routine is inescapable. Keith made the most of the time he had.

The ice pack appeared on schedule. Keith had instructed Jim Hanson to adjust speed in order to reach it during the daylight hours. At the proper time he brought the ship to periscope depth so that those of the crew who were interested could look at it through the spare periscope while the Cushing approached at slow speed. He himself spent long minutes inspecting the thin white line which appeared on the horizon just at noontime, interspersing his own looks with letting an eager sailor have a turn. Cushing’s other periscope had been turned over to the crew entirely, but it soon was apparent that a single ’scope could not suffice for everyone to have the long look he obviously wanted. And Keith had to admit to himself that he was in truth exercising a skipper’s privilege with the other, that a major portion of his own interest was purely personal curiosity.

Seen from a distance, the ice looked like a heavily demarcated horizon, a solid white line between the gray of the sea and the leaden blue of the sky. As the Cushing drew cautiously nearer it was evident that it was not solid, for what appeared to be the edge was a mass of broken blocks, crumbled off the solid ice behind by the combined action of sea movement and the weakening effect of melting. Most of the pieces nevertheless were of quite respectable size, several tons in weight and many feet across; and when Keith decided he had approached as close as was prudent he turned to a course parallel to the putative frontal edge for a close and leisurely inspection, all the while maintaining a continuous and careful watch ahead. It would not do to damage valuable periscopes by ramming them against a miniature iceberg during a quixotic rubberneck tour for crew members!

The coloration of the ice and ice blocks was fascinating, even though he had been prepared by his reading. White on top, of course, and white on the broken-off edges, down to the waterline. But where the ice entered the water it assumed a greenish tinge. Some of the blocks were wallowing gently in the nearly motionless sea, enough that he could see a foot or more below their normal waterlines, far enough to note that the light green shaded swiftly to almost black. Some of the pamphlets he had read had explained it: This was the norm for much of the Arctic, though not for all of it. The discoloration was the combined result of normal sea growth and water action on tiny organisms frozen into the ice when it was formed. These organisms, and growth on the ice under surface, formed much of the food for the wildlife — the seals, porpoises, whales and fish — and through them for the bears and man himself. The white mass was essentially snowfall over the frozen sea ice, built up during the years it had slowly circulated around the Arctic basin.

Ice, to Keith, should be white; or at least clear, like frozen water. But he had learned it could be a number of other colors, the slimy blue-green of the undersides of these blocks being only one of several manifestations. It was also hard, both from the cold and from the compression to which it was so often subjected, and deserving of respect. Cushing had been built with an ice suit, one of the reasons she had been chosen for this mission. Her sail was specially strengthened, as were her propeller, hull and control surfaces. In addition, her sailplanes were designed so that they could be put on ninety degrees rise, straight up and down, to facilitate breaking through the ice if necessary. She could cope with the ice, if handled intelligently, but she could not ignore the facts of physics, either. For the next few weeks he and his ship would be spending all their time in intimate relation with this common, yet most unusual, substance. It behooved him to learn what he could of it at first hand.

Sunlight was waning when Keith decided that his crew and he had had enough opportunity to inspect the ice under which they would henceforth be operating. He housed the periscopes, retracted the radio antenna masts, ordered deep submergence and set the course due north. Jim Hanson had obtained several Loran fixes, and the next thing would be to detect the nearest part of Spitsbergen, Prins Karls Forland, on sonar and Fathometer, in the place where it was supposed to be. This would confirm the practicability of avoiding unwanted shallow water should there be difficulty with other navigational equipment. From this time onward, except for occasional tests of missiles, Cushing would be divorced even from periscope view of the surface of the sea, confined — except for thinner ice in a rare winter polynya — beneath a virtually impenetrable layer of ice twenty feet thick.

In obedience to his operation order, Keith set a slower speed of advance than before, and when the upward-beamed fathometer showed that block and brash ice had given way to solid cover he doubled the sonar watch. As the Cushing drove ever northward, her echo-ranging sonar probed ahead, on a secure and varying frequency, listening for the somewhat mushy return which would spell danger. If there were a return echo, any attempt to halt Cushing’s forward progress would be useless. Like all nuclear submarines, however, especially the whale-shaped ones, she turned on a dime, far more sharply than any surface ship could possibly hope to match. Here lay her safety. Keith’s orders to his officer of the deck and helmsman were simple and direct. “If deep ice is contacted ahead, immediately put the rudder hard over away from it, and then call me.”

It was not, however, Keith’s intent to proceed directly to the North Pole. If there were time, he might do it later. Likewise, the slow counterclockwise rotation of the ice pack had long been plotted by explorers and scientists. This was a factor of interest, not of immediate concern. Cushing’s mission was to proceed to several specified geographical positions and determine if she could depend upon being able to fire her missiles within a given radius of each as the ice slowly drifted overhead. The operation order said she was to be the first of a number of submarines sent to determine whether the possibility of firing missiles in the Arctic Ocean could be guaranteed during all periods of the year.

Of all the navigation instruments with which ships have been fitted since the beginning, the most important has always been the compass. The early mariners had nothing else. But a compass in the Arctic Ocean is essentially valueless, a fact dramatically brought out when one contemplates that at the North Pole all directions are south. The rotation of the earth no longer gives any directive force, and the gyrocompass, that marvel of the industrial age, wanders at will. A magnetic compass might theoretically be able to point to the nearby north magnetic pole, which ever so slowly drifts around among the icebound islands of Canada’s northern archipelago, but at this close range the magnetic pole is very broad and very weak. Inside the steel hull of a submarine a magnetic compass, moreover, is not dependable.

This problem had presented itself with the voyage of the Nautilus across the top of the world, not quite three years before. It had been resolved by installation of the guidance system of an early missile, and by redrawing the map of the Arctic so that Nautilus’ northward course, as she headed toward the Pole, continued to be “north” after she had passed through it and was heading in a southerly direction — and remained so until normal functions of the gyrocompass could be restored. The grid system resulting made it at least possible to orient one’s location in relation to navigable water and land masses. Three years later, Cushing had a much more sophisticated system designed specifically for submarines and useful anywhere in the world. A good segment of Keith’s training and that of many of his officers and crew, before ever reporting to the Electric Boat Shipyard, had been devoted to learning the intricacies of the Submarine Inertial Navigation System, which, inevitably, became known as SINS.

Now they were using their SINS for real, in the trickiest of situations, the high northern latitudes, and applying it to the same old grid system. Even though he had been well prepared for it, both in briefings and in his studies of previous northern voyages, Keith felt a surge in his adrenaline when Cushing’s ice detector showed that the ice above was solid.

There was an underwater television transmitter mounted on the main deck several feet forward of the sail, controllable in train and elevation from a small console located near its receiver in the control room. Two strong searchlights had also been installed, synchronized in direction with the television head. It was hard to see far underwater in the best of conditions, but the water was at least clear, the lights powerful. Keith estimated that he could see for about a hundred feet in any direction. The only things visible, however, were Cushing’s rounded bow, if one trained the head down and forward, and bumpy ice overhead.

The comparison to the plastered ceiling of a room flashed into Keith’s mind. Surprisingly, despite the fact that his research into previous under-ice voyages had prepared him for it, the undersurface of the ice was far from smooth. Great rounded projections extended downward, reflecting additional thickness above. From his reading, Keith knew that such projections usually resulted from jamming together of the ice floes and the consequent rafting, or piling up, of broken segments of the once smooth surface when they did so.

One of the books had been written by survivors of a whaling ship which had been caught in the Arctic and had had to spend two horrible years there. It told how their ship had ventured into a wide lead at the edge of the ice pack, how it had unwisely gone too far between solid floes, how the lead began to close at the same time as the wind died, so that finally, in desperation, the crew had tried to tow her by getting out on the ice and pulling on hawsers.

Two or three times the lead reopened, bringing hope and causing renewed effort, but finally the ship was caught fast. Efforts to keep the ice broken up around her waterline were totally unavailing, and the squeeze began. Driven by far-distant winds and currents, the ice floes between which she was caught pushed inexorably together. Great blocks of ice popped up from the pressure, lying askew on top of those below. Many more were driven below the surface. A regular pressure ridge formed where the original lead of clear water had been, and the poor whaler was part of it, embedded in it.

The grinding pressure was slow, but irresistible. The ship’s wooden ribs bent, finally broke in a number of places. At the same time, by good fortune, she was heaved up, out of the worst of the pressure, so that her hull, though dangerously wounded, was still sound. Listing over heavily on top of the ice hummock created by the rafting together of the floes, she remained in this situation for two years, her crew suffering unbelievable privation from lack of food and the fierce cold. Ultimately this particular ship was fortunate. She had been stove in, but not excessively so. Her crew had been able to make the most critical repairs. When the ice floe released its pressure, which luckily for her it finally did, she was able to remain afloat and sail home. Most ships in her situation were not so fortunate and sank as soon as the ice opened up again.

The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had deliberately taken advantage of these circumstances when he made his exploratory voyage across the Arctic Ocean in the last years of the nineteenth century. His ship was specially built, so designed that when frozen in the ice and subjected to the squeeze of the ice floes, she would rise up on top rather than be crushed. The little Fram endured a three-year freeze in the ice during which she actually did slowly progress across the Arctic Ocean, and finally, when the ice let her down once again into the free sea, sailed home to Norway, triumphant.

All of this was history; but now Keith was seeing the same situation from underneath. Although ocean currents and slow melting gnawed at the bottom side of the rafted ice floes and blunted their initially jagged edges, the hummocks nevertheless projected far deeper into the sea than their corresponding grinding edges extended above it. And in the water, as Keith well knew, the floes he was observing were teeming with life — primarily microscopic life — so that, even under the Cushing’s pair of powerful searchlights, the undersurface was dark.

But, though rafting was frequent, particularly in the area near the edge of the ice pack, it was by no means consistent. Most of the ice was a broad, thick sheet, solidly covering the surface of the sea. This was what Keith expected, having read all the accounts of the early under-ice explorations. As long as Cushing remained submerged in deep water, and barring the possibility of an iceberg frozen in the vast expanse of sea ice, he need fear no danger. In an apt analogy, one of the accounts had compared the Arctic Ocean to a huge room full of water, with a submarine the size of a matchstick suspended from the ceiling. On this basis the ice would be the thickness of the paint on the ceiling of the room, and the occasional rafting could be compared to carelessly laid or cracked plaster, bulging it downward.

Indeed, one could include polynyas in the metaphor by suggesting that the plaster had cracked open in several places — and icebergs by comparing them to occasional walnut shells, glued to it. In any case, in the deep Arctic Ocean basin, actually two basins, the only problems were those associated with its ceiling.

Next day, with the ice solid overhead, Keith ordered Cushing’s speed slowed to the minimum creeping speed and gently planed upward, raising a periscope long before there was danger of contact with the ice above. This permitted him to see the ice directly, from a much closer range, to confirm the reports he had read and the visual impressions given by the television transmitter. There was danger to the periscope, of course, should Cushing inadvertently come too close to a hummock. In one of the early explorations Nautilus had bent both of hers in such an accident.

To maneuver the ship into the shallowest portion of the ice floe, however, to find a polynya (inevitably frozen over in winter) and surface through it, or fire missiles through it, use of the periscope was imperative. It was as much for drill as for anything else, but it was nevertheless with extreme curiosity that Keith followed his periscope up from the floor. He put his eye to it as soon as the eyepiece came out of the periscope well, almost as though he were making an observation during a wartime approach on an enemy ship.

By careful calculation, the top of the ’scope was no closer than twenty-five feet from the bottom of the ice floe. Nevertheless, Keith had momentarily forgotten that even in low power it had a magnification of one and a half times, and his first reaction was alarm as the huge menacing cover filled the delicate lens. He had deliberately chosen the time of maximum daylight, and there was a moderate lighting of the nearly impervious ice. Except for color, it looked much like the frosted glass viewer upon which people spread their colored slide transparencies for comparison. Training the periscope forward he could see the powerful rays from the searchlights of the television set beaming upward through the water and reflecting upon the bottom of the ice, giving it an eerie surreal effect. To either side, with less benefit from the searchlights, the ice appeared like heavy green-tinged rain clouds, except much closer and more menacing. The best view was dead ahead, where he had the most light, and he could see, as the television had shown from farther below and with less resolution, that while it contained many small bumps and a few large ones from rafting, the undersurface of the ice was relatively free of jagged edges. He would never dare run at more than creeping speed this close to it, however. An unseen hummock of deep rafted ice, detected too late by the upward-beamed fathometer, could easily destroy a periscope and even damage the tough steel of Cushing’s sail.

Cushing had only just entered the ice pack. Perhaps there were thinner patches of ice ahead. Perhaps a polynya, or a lead, more thinly frozen over than the main floes. But already the vista was discouraging. Fifteen or twenty feet of ice were far too much to shoot a missile through, no matter what stratagems were employed. Cushing would have to break through and launch her test missiles in the surface mode. And, so far, the ice detector had found no areas of thin ice at all. Thoughtfully, Keith motioned for the periscope to be lowered. The entire time it was up had been one of tension. He was afraid of damaging the delicate instrument, but mainly his tension was due to the menace of the ice cover.

With a sense of concern, Keith ordered Cushing’s depth increased. His mission was going to be more difficult than he had imagined. There were millions of square miles of solid ice in the Arctic Ocean. This reality brought home the implacability of the environment against which he was pitted. On his side, he had a fine ship with a sturdy hull and a magnificent, ever supplying heart, the reactor. But compared to the vast expanse of solidity under which he must maneuver, Cushing was indeed a matchstick, suspended by an infinitesimal thread, under a flat ceiling of ice. And the ice stretched as far as the eye or the imagination could reach, in every direction.