Undersea Quest

5 Sub-Sea Search

Cadet Captain Sperry didn’t even ask for volunteers.

The sharks—if it had been sharks that the microsonar spotted, and not porpoises or drifting logs—never bothered us as, by crews, we recharged our aqualungs and slipped over the side. The exercise was forgotten; we grouped in crews at the bottom, lights on, and organized a search.

It looked bad for Bob Eskow, but not—I told myself—necessarily fatal. He had air for thirty minutes; if he had merely wandered off and failed to hear the recall signal (though that was next to impossible), he would get back by himself; if somehow he were trapped, we should be able to find him in plenty of time…

But if his aqualung had failed, it was probably already too late.

Over our heads, the whaleboats began dropping floating emergency flares; the flamed like little suns, bobbing a fathom or so beneath the surface, lighting up the whole sea bottom. In orderly squads we patrolled the bottom, following the hand signals of our crew leaders. The leaders blinked code signals back and forth between themselves with their headlamps, and gradually the entire class was spread out from a central point, searching the sea bottom underneath his own swimming form and for a couple of yards on either side.

Bob could hardly have got more than half a mile from the drop point, and there were almost three hundred of us. Swimming porpoiselike through the eerily lighted waters, plunging down to investigate the kelp valleys and the cord caverns, trying to keep contact with the men on either side of me, racing toward every suspicious hummock or mound of sand, I calculated quickly in my mind: If the search circle spread a half mile in each direction, the two hundred and eighty-odd of us would be spread around a perimeter of nearly seventeen thousand feet… say, sixty feet between men all around the circle. Could one man search a strip sixty feet wide? I doubted it, worriedly; and worse, it was certain that even the giant flares from the whaleboats could not illuminate so vast an area. Long before we reached the half-mile mark, we would be relying on the comparatively feeble light of our headlamps.

We pushed on to the half-mile mark…and beyond.

We searched to the limit of our air supply before the recall signal, dimmed by distance, came faintly to our ears. Dejectedly we rose to the surface, stripped off our face masks and swam back to the whaleboats. There was almost absolute silence from the boats as the motors putt-putted us back to the wharf.

We were a defeated lot as we fell into formation at the wharfside, took a roll call and were dismissed. The empty echo that came back when Eskow’s name was called was accusing.

Several of my classmates fell in with me on the way back to quarters with words of sympathy. But what they said seemed hardly to penetrate; I simply could not believe that Bob Eskow was missing.

It was after midnight. We turned in at once—reveille was canceled for the morning after a night exercise, but still we would have to be up by seven to begin classes. I lay in my unbelievably empty room, staring at the dark ceiling, trying to understand what had happened. It was impossible. He had been there with me; and then he wasn’t.

I must have lain awake for hours, staring into the darkness.

But sometime I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew someone was shaking my shoulder. “Eden!” came Lt. Hachette’s excited voice. “Eden! They found him—he’s alive!”

I struggled to my feet. “What?” I demanded, hardly believing.

“It’s true!” Hachette said. “He was picked up by a fishing boat, three miles from the drop point. Heaven knows how he got there—but he’s alive!”

Alive he was; but that was all we knew. There was an official announcement at morning mess: “Cadet Eskow has been rescued by a small Bermudan vessel and taken to a civilian hospital. He is in fair condition, but will require hospitalization for some time.” And a few days later I got a letter from Bob in the hospital; but it had few more details. It was a seven days’ wonder at the Academy: How had he got there? What had happened? But all we had were the questions, no answers, and as the days and weeks passed Bob’s name became less and less likely to crop up.

It was, in a way, a difficult time for me. At the Academy the “buddy” principle was strongly in force; you and your roommate were supposed to work with each other, look out for each other, know at all times where the other person was. If Bob Eskow had been removed from the Academy duty lists I would have had another roommate assigned me—someone whose original roommate had washed out, perhaps; but he was only on sick leave and his room was kept open for him.

It was more than a little lonely. What made the time not only tolerable but fast-flying was, first, the heavy work schedule—we were all far too busy to brood. And, second, there were the letters from my uncle.

There was no telling when one would arrive; I had gone months on end without hearing from him, then suddenly I would get nearly a letter a day, scarlet ink on stiff yellow paper, sometimes short, sometimes marvelously long. Reading my uncle Stewart’s letters was almost like taking the long, deep trip to Marinia; through them I saw the sights and wonders of the watery world he inhabited, which I hoped to make my own. I could almost see him before me as I read, tall, tanned to a dark leathery brown by the violet light of the sub-tea Troyon Tubes, chin fringed with that bronze beard. I could almost hear his soft, whispering voice telling me of the new world waiting.

Almost as real to me as the sun-drenched Academy grounds outside my window were the great sub-sea cities he wrote of—Thetis, Nereus, Seven Dome, Black Camp and the others—secure on the deep Pacific bed under their domes of the Edenite he had invented. For Uncle Stewart was a man of many enterprises. In the years since I had seen him I had begun to learn a few of them—not from his letters, for he spoke always of what I would do in Marinia, seldom of himself—but from the books and newspapers I devoured. I heard of him boring for petroleum in the new fields two miles down; of the platinum prospect he had staked out in the submarine range called Moutains of Darkness because its rugged slopes are bare of the phosphorescent life that much of the sea-mountains show; of my uncle in a thousand ventures, knocking about the floor of the Pacific from the Kermadec Deep to the Tuscarora.

If I had stopped to think, I might have found myself asking many questions. Petroleum, platinum and other ores; rare deep-sea creatures whose dead carcasses provided the raw materials for astonishing new drugs; his royalties (I didn’t know then that he had never been able to collect them) on the Edenite process itself … my uncle should have been a multi-millionaire many times over. But he never mentioned money, and never seemed like a man of wealth.

He also never mentioned Hallam Sperry, the father of my executive officer.

Significant gaps! I could scarcely have guessed how closely they were connected!

I had not realized how important Bob Eskow was to me until he was away. I kept in touch with the hospital, but it was a complete surprise, all the same, when one of our classmates hailed me as we returned from the evening meal to say that Bob was back.

I raced into Fletcher Hall and into the elevator, grinning all over, oblivious to everything else as I punched the button for my floor.

A little too oblivious, maybe. “Mis-ter Lubber!” crackled a familiar voice, and I leaped to attention. It was Cadet Captain Brand Sperry, standing arms akimbo outside the elevator. The door started to close, and hastily I punched the Stop button. Sperry’s whiplash voice snapped: “Stand at attention, Mr. Lubber!”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“The Orders of the Day, Mr. Eden,” he said sharply. “Have you had an opportunity to read them?”

“Yes, sir.” I knew what was coming.

“Oh?” He affected to look surprised. He shook his head. “I cannot understand that, Mr. Eden. It is very prominently posted on the bulletin board—I can see it from here—that from 0600 this day onward until further notice, elevators will not be used. That is a general order, Mr. Eden, put forth by higher authority in an effort to conserve power. Or weren’t you aware that there is a power shortage? Uranium is in short supply, Mr. Eden; without uranium, power must be conserved. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.” It went on from there; it wound up with an order to spend the next day’s half-hour before-dinner rest period at attention in front of the bulletin board, memorizing the orders of the day. I could stand that well enough; what hurt was that Cadet Captain Sperry had been within easy earshot when the classmate had called to me that Eskow was back in our room. He knew why I had been hurrying, and why I was absent-minded.

He knew, and yet he jumped on me for what was, after all, the smallest of offenses. I was finding it very difficult to live under the rule of Cadet Captain Brand Sperry.

But five minutes later, in our room, Bob Eskow made up for much.

I pumped his hand in a storm of warm feeling. “Bob!” I said, inarticulately. “I never expected to see you again!”

His grin wavered. In a dour tone, he said: “You may not see me for very long, at that. I’m on probation.”

“Probation! But—”

He shrugged. “They’re right, in a way,” he said. “Wait a minute, and I’ll tell you everything that happened. Back at the night maneuver, I went down for the exercises right behind you and we all started off for the defensive line. I remember turning my headlamp off. And I remember wondering how in the world I could tell if I was swimming up, down, sidewise or what. Then—” he hesitated and shook his head—“then something happened, Jim. I don’t honestly know exactly what. The doctor said something about abnormal sensitivity to pressure and blacking out—I don’t know. All I know is, all of a sudden, everything got foggy. I couldn’t seem to get my breath, and things were getting black—although everything was so black to start out with that it was kind of hard to tell. Then—” he spread his hands—“then I was on the deck of a little fishing ketch; they’d pulled me up in the nets.”

I said, “But, Bob—”

“I know,” he said. “I’d been in the water for a long time—I was just about out of oxygen, they told me. But I was alive. They didn’t have any radio in the ketch, and they didn’t see why they should be bothered bringing me in to the Academy wharf, so they took be to their home port. And then they phoned the Academy, and a Regular medical officer from the Sub-Sea Base came down and got me—and there I was, in the hospital.”

“But what knocked you out?”

He looked at me somberly. “The medical officer asked me a lot of silly questions about that. First he thought it was a malfunction of the breathing apparatus, but then he got an engineering report that wrecked that idea. So he just patted me on the head and told me some people were more susceptible to these things than others and, after all, I could have a perfectly good life as a lubber civilian…”

I gaped at him. “Bob, you’re not washed out?”

He grinned and poked me on the shoulder—but the grin wasn’t as happy as it could have been. “Not quite,” he said. “Not quite, but it was pretty close. They had a hearing, right there in the hospital, as soon as I was able to sit up and take notice. And I managed to convince them that, after all, it might have been malfunction of the apparatus, so they allowed as how they might give me another chance. But—well, it’s on my record, Jim. It isn’t any disgrace to get washed out of the Academy for medical reasons, I know that—but I don’t want to get washed out for any reason. Any little thing now—anything that might ordinarily get me a hard time from the Commandant, for instance—and I’m out.”

I said indignantly, “Bob, there’s been some kind of mistake. That’s not fair! Maybe it was punk equipment—they can’t put that kind of a mark on your record unless they’re sure. Did they take into consideration your record here? All the calisthenics, and the other underwater exercises, and—”

He wasn’t smiling at all now. He said soberly, “They sure did, Jim. You might say that was the biggest part of it. They had sworn evidence that, from my first day at the Academy, I had been consistently showing signs of being unable to keep up with the rest of the class—puffing and panting and not quite making the number of pushups and so on.”

I was aghast. “But—”

“But nothing! That’s the story, Jim. I won’t deny that maybe I haven’t got as many muscles as you do—who does? But I think I’ve held my end up in everything we did. Only—the testimony said different.”

“What testimony?” I demanded. “Who told them a cock-and-bull story like that?”

“He made it mighty plausible, Jim,” Bob said gently. “It was a good friend of yours. He showed up right at the hospital, and he was just the model of a perfect sub-sea cadet while he was answering questions. You know who I mean—Cadet Captain Brand Sperry, himself.”