The Deep Range

CHAPTER XXIII

Franklin was boarding the plane that would take him to the hearings when the “Sub-Smash” signal came through. He stood in the doorway, reading the scarlet-tabbed message that had been rushed out to him, and at that moment all his other problems ceased to exist.

The SOS was from the Bureau of Mines, the largest of all the sections of the Marine Division. Its title was a slightly misleading one, for it did not run a single mine in the strict sense of the word. Twenty or thirty years ago there had indeed been mines on the ocean beds, but now the sea itself was an inexhaustible treasure chest. Almost every one of the natural elements could be extracted directly and economically from the millions of tons of dissolved matter in each cubic mile of sea water. With the perfection of selective ion-exchanged filters, the nightmare of metal shortages had been banished forever.

The Bureau of Mines was also responsible for the hundreds of oil wells that now dotted the seabeds, pumping up the precious fluid that was the basic material for half the chemical plants on earth — and which earlier generations, with criminal shortsightedness, had actually burned for fuel. There were plenty of accidents that could befall the bureau’s worldwide empire; only last year Franklin had lent it a whaling sub in an unsuccessful attempt to salvage a tank of gold concentrate. But this was far more serious, as he discovered after he had put through a few priority calls.

Thirty minutes later he was airborne, though not in the direction he had expected to be going. And it was almost an hour after he had taken off before all the orders had been given and he at last had a chance of calling Indra.

She was surprised at the unexpected call, but her surprise quickly turned to alarm. “Listen, dear,” Franklin began. “I’m not going to Berne after all. Mines has had a serious accident and has appealed for our help. One of their big subs is trapped on the bottom — it was drilling a well and hit a high-pressure gas pocket. The derrick was blown over and toppled on the sub so that it can’t get away. There’s a load of VIP’s aboard, including a senator and the director of Mines. I don’t know how we’re going to pull them out, but we’ll do our best. I’ll call you again when I’ve got time.”

“Will you have to go down yourself?” asked Indra anxiously.

“Probably. Now don’t look so upset! I’ve been doing it for years!”

“I’m not upset,” retorted Indra, and Franklin knew better than to contradict her. “Good-bye, darling,” he continued, “give my love to Anne, and don’t worry.”

Indra watched the image fade. It had already vanished when she realized that Walter had not looked so happy for weeks. Perhaps that was not the right word to use when men’s lives were at stake; it would be truer to say that he looked full of life and enthusiasm. She smiled, knowing full well the reason why.

Now Walter could get away from the problems of his office, and could lose himself again, if only for a while, in the clear-cut and elemental simplicities of the sea.

‘There she is,” said the pilot of the sub, pointing to the image forming at the edge of the sonar screen. “On hard rock eleven hundred feet down. In a couple of minutes we’ll be able to make out the details.”

“How’s the water clarity — can we use TV?”

“I doubt it. That gas geyser is still spouting — there it is — that fuzzy echo. It’s stirred up all the mud for miles around.”

Franklin stared at the screen, comparing the image forming there with the plans and sketches on the desk. The smooth ovoid of the big shallow-water sub was partly obscured by the wreckage of the drills and derrick — a thousand or more tons of steel pinning it to the ocean bed. It was not surprising that, though it had blown its buoyancy tanks and turned its jets on to full power, the vessel had been unable to move more than a foot or two.

“It’s a nice mess,” said Franklin thoughtfully. “How long will it take for the big tugs to get here?”

“At least four days. Hercules can lift five thousand tons, but she’s down at Singapore. And she’s too big to be flown here; she’ll have to come under her own steam. You’re the only people with subs small enough to be airlifted.”

That was true enough, thought Franklin, but it also meant that they were not big enough to do any heavy work. The only hope was that they could operate cutting torches and carve up the derrick until the trapped sub was able to escape.

Another of the bureau’s scouts was already at work; someone, Franklin told himself, had earned a citation for the speed with which the torches had been fitted to a vessel not designed to carry them. He doubted if even the Space Department, for all its fabled efficiency, could have acted any more swiftly than this.

“Captain Jacobsen calling,” said the loudspeaker. “Glad to have you with us, Mr. Franklin. Your boys are doing a good job, but it looks as if it will take time.”

“How are things inside?”

“Not so bad. The only thing that worries me is the hull between bulkheads three and four. It took the impact there, and there’s some distortion.”

“Can you close off the section if a leak develops?”

“Not very well,” said Jacobsen dryly. “It happens to be the middle of the control room. If we have to evacuate that, we’ll be completely helpless.”

“What about your passengers?”

“Er — they’re fine,” replied the captain, in a tone suggesting that he was giving some of them the benefit of a good deal of doubt. “Senator Chamberlain would like a word with you.”

“Hello, Franklin,” began the senator. “Didn’t expect to meet you again under these circumstances. How long do you think it will take to get us out?”

The senator had a good memory, or else he had been well briefed. Franklin had met him on not more than three occasions — the last time in Canberra, at a session of the Committee for the Conservation of Natural Resources. As a witness, Franklin had been before the C.C.N.R. for about ten minutes, and he would not have expected its busy chairman to remember the fact.

“I can’t make any promises, Senator,” he answered cautiously. “It may take some time to clear away all this rubbish. But we’ll manage all right — no need to worry about that.”

As the sub drew closer, he was not so sure. The derrick was over two hundred feet long, and it would be a slow business nibbling it away in sections that the little scoutsubs could handle.

For the next ten minutes there was a three-cornered conference between Franklin, Captain Jacobsen, and Chief Warden Barlow, skipper of the second scoutsub. At the end of that time they had agreed that the best plan was to continue to cut away the derrick; even taking the most pessimistic view, they should be able to finish the job at least two days before the Hercules could arrive. Unless, of course, there were any unexpected snags; the only possible danger seemed to be the one that Captain Jacobsen had mentioned. Like all large undersea vessels, his ship carried an air-purifying plant which would keep the atmosphere breathable for weeks, but if the hull failed in the region of the control room all the sub’s essential services would be disrupted. The occupants might retreat behind the pressure bulkheads, but that would give them only a temporary reprieve, because the air would start to become foul immediately. Moreover, with part of the sub flooded, it would be extremely difficult even for the Hercules to lift her.

Before he joined Barlow in the attack on the derrick, Franklin called Base on the long-range transmitter and ordered all the additional equipment that might conceivably be needed. He asked for two more subs to be flown out at once, and started the workshops mass producing buoyancy tanks by the simple process of screwing air couplings onto old oil drums. If enough of these could be hitched to the derrick, it might be lifted without any help from the submarine salvage vessel.

There was one other piece of equipment which he hesitated for some time before ordering. Then he muttered to himself: “Better get too much than too little,” and sent off the requisition, even though he knew that the Stores Department would probably think him crazy.

The work of cutting through the girders of the smashed derrick was tedious, but not difficult. The two subs worked together, one burning through the steel while the other pulled away the detached section as soon as it came loose. Soon Franklin became completely unconscious of time; all that existed was the short length of metal which he was dealing with at that particular moment. Messages and instructions continually came and went, but another part of his mind dealt with them. Hands and brain were functioning as two separate entities.

The water, which had been completely turbid when they arrived, was now clearing rapidly. The roaring geyser of gas that was bursting from the seabed barely a hundred yards away must have sucked in fresh water to sweep away the mud it had originally disturbed. Whatever the explanation, it made the task of salvage very much simpler, since the subs’ external eyes could function again.

Franklin was almost taken aback when the reinforcements arrived. It seemed impossible that he had been here for more than six hours; he felt neither tired nor hungry. The two subs brought with them, like a long procession of tin cans, the first batch of the buoyancy tanks he had ordered.

Now the plan of campaign was altered. One by one the oil drums were clipped to the derrick, air hoses were coupled to them, and the water inside them was blown out until they strained upward like captive balloons. Each had a lifting power of two or three tons; by the time a hundred had been attached, Franklin calculated, the trapped sub might be able to escape without any further help.

The remote handling equipment on the outside of the scoutsub, so seldom used in normal operations, now seemed an extension of his own arms. It had been at least four years since he had manipulated the ingenious metal fingers that enabled a man to work in places where his unprotected body could never go — and he remembered, from ten years earlier still, the first time he had attempted to tie a knot and the hopeless tangle he had made of it. That was one of the skills he had hardly ever used; who would have imagined that it would be vital now that he had left the sea and was no longer a warden?

They were starting to pump out the second batch of oil drums when Captain Jacobsen called.

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news, Franklin,” he said, his voice heavy with apprehension. “There’s water coming in, and the leak’s increasing. At the present rate, we’ll have to abandon the control room in a couple of hours.”

This was the news that Franklin had feared. It transformed a straightforward salvage job into a race against time — a race hopelessly handicapped, since it would take at least a day to cut away the rest of the derrick.

“What’s your internal air pressure?” he asked Captain Jacobsen.

“I’ve already pushed it up to five atmospheres. It’s not safe to put it up any farther.”

“Take it up to eight if you can. Even if half of you pass out, that won’t matter as long as someone remains in control. And it may help to keep the leak from spreading, which is the important thing.”

“I’ll do that — but if most of us are unconscious, it won’t be easy to evacuate the control room.”

There were too many people listening for Franklin to make the obvious reply — that if the control room had to be abandoned it wouldn’t matter anyway. Captain Jacobsen knew that as well as he did, but some of his passengers might not realize that such a move would end any chance of rescue.

The decision he had hoped he would not have to make was now upon him. This slow whittling away of the wreckage was not good enough; they would have to use explosives, cutting the fallen derrick at the center, so that the lower, unsupported portion would drop back to the seabed and its weight would no longer pin down the sub.

It had been the obvious thing to do, even from the beginning, but there were two objections: one was the risk of using explosives so near the sub’s already weakened hull; the other was the problem of placing the charges in the correct spot. Of the derrick’s four main girders, the two upper ones were easily accessible, but the lower pair could not be reached by the remote handling mechanisms of the scoutsubs. It was the sort of job that only an unencumbered diver could do, and in shallow water it would not have taken more than a few minutes.

Unfortunately, this was not shallow water; they were eleven hundred feet down — and at a pressure of over thirty atmospheres.