Undersea Quest

6 The Cruise of the Pocatello

My second summer at the Academy I almost saw my Uncle Stewart.

I had come a long way from the clumsy young civilian who had entered the Academy’s coral gates two years before. We all had. Two solid years of drill, work and study had turned us into—well, not real sub-sea officers; not yet. But certainly something as far removed from our soft civilian days as possible. I could skin-dive to forty feet, lung-dive to seven hundred, suit-dive to limits of the Edenite armor’s capacity. I could name the duties of every crewman on any fighting sub-sea vessel of the service; in a pinch, I could take those duties over—from scrambling eggs for eight hundred men in the galley to conning my ship through a delicate harbor approach.

True, it was all book-learning, or nearly all. I had yet to put most of my new skills into practice; and I had a good two years more of advanced studies ahead of me before I could be commissioned. But it was as a sea-faring man, a certified midshipman of the Sub-Sea Service, and not as a lubber that, with the rest of my class—now less than two hundred strong—I embarked for our round-the- world training cruise on the old SSS Pocatello.

It was to be a ninety-day cruise, across the North Atlantic, through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, through the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, where we would take part in Fleet Exercises; then across the Indian Ocean and the treacherous waters around the East Indies to Marinia. There, I hoped, I would have a liberty and a chance to see my uncle again, before we began the long cross-Pacific leg to the Panama Canal and thence back to our Caribbean base. We had just over thirty thousand miles to go, almost all of it submerged; only at Suez and Panama would Pocatello transit the canals as a surface vessel.

The crossing of the Atlantic was child’s play. I suppose we needed it to break into the routine of sub-ship life; but there was almost nothing for us to do but stand our watches, keep our engines going and wait until the slow eight-day crossing was over. We ran the ship; there was a skeleton complement of Regulars aboard, but their job was only to stand by in case of disaster, and to observe and make reports on us.

Pocatello’ s Second Officer was Cadet Captain Sperry. He was not technically in command, but he had the functions of an exec; and there was enough of a component of command in his post to give Bob Eskow and me uneasy moments. But there was no trouble all the way across the Atlantic.

We drifted in through the Gates of Hercules—the Straits between Gibraltar and the African shore—with our engines stilled, a trick the ancient Diesel-powered submarines used to use in wartime so that they could steal through the narrow passage unchallenged. The shallow Mediterranean is a giant evaporating pan; water is sucked in from the Atlantic continually. Under the hot Mediterranean sun some of the water steams off and a dense salt solution remains; it sinks to the bottom and flows out again through the Straits of Gibraltar—a dense, heavy outgoing current flowing under a fresher, lighter incoming current, never ending, never mixing. We rode in on the upper current but still well below the surface. I was on the bridge, scanning the waters around us through the microsonar as we transited the Straits; it was an eerie sensation to be there in that big old war vessel, the engines dead and the helm unresponsive, and to see the check points in the sonar screen drift by.

“Well done,” said the Regular officer who was standing by, closing his notebook with a snap. “You may take the conn and surface, Cadet Captain Sperry.”

We set course for the fueling base at the Rock itself—not because we needed fuel but because new orders had come through requiring it. There was no explanation of the orders—but a lot of gossip. We listened to all the gossip, Bob and I, and agreed to discount it—which was a mistake, in a way. Because on the same principle as that of the broken clock, which tells the right time twice a day, of all the contradictory explanations the scuttlebutt gave for our new orders, some of them turned out to be right.

We came into the great U.N. refueling base in broad daylight and on the surface. My relief came before we moored, but I was reluctant to go off duty; Bob Eskow, relieved at the same time from his duties as Junior Engineering Officer, turned up in our wardroom and the two of us slipped silently up to the weather deck, staying as much out of sight as we could. There was no reason we shouldn’t be there—the ship was secured against diving—but neither one of us wanted any of Cadet Captain Sperry’s caustic tongue right at that moment.

We looked at the enormous limestone cliff in wonderment. “We’re bound to get liberty,” said Bob happily. “This ought to be good, Jim! We’ll climb up and see the Barbary apes and look across the Straits at Mount Abyla. And there’s a cave—St. Michael’s, the name is—that some people say goes all the way under the water to Africa, and—”

“Attention on deck,” rasped a loudspeaker behind us. “You two cadets on the weather deck. Report to the O.O.D.—you’re both on report!”

We came to crisp attention as the commander’s voice snapped at us. On report! We saluted the bridge and went below, a lot less cheerful than we had been a moment before.

“There goes your climb to see the apes,” I grumbled to Bob at the gangway. “Of all the rotten luck—”

His face was grim. He nudged me and nodded at the bridge. “It wasn’t luck, Jim,” he said. “I doubt the commander would have bothered us, even if we weren’t supposed to be there. But—take a look.”

I glanced up. There on the weather bridge stood the commander, no longer looking at us, carefully supervising the mooring operation. But beside him, and looking our way with a particularly pleased expression, was our Second Officer, Cadet Captain Sperry.

Instead of a liberty at Gibraltar, we spent our off-duty time in port doing pushups in the training area at the fueling base. It wasn’t too bad—ten minutes of calisthenics, and a five-minute break; for two hours at a time. But in one of the breaks Bob spotted something that neither one of us could figure out.

The loading machines were active around the Pocatello—which was normal enough; you expect to see a ship fueled at a fueling station, and the spaced piles of uranium slugs that the machine was working on, each in its own little radiation-proof can, didn’t attract our attention at first.

Until Bob noticed that the slugs were coming off the ship.

“Unloading fuel!” I said, unbelieving. “But that’s crazy—we’ve got thirty thousand miles to go.”

Bob wiped his brow, panting—he took the exercises harder than I did. He shook his head. “We don’t need it,” he said slowly.

“One fuel load would carry this tub around the world two or three times, easily enough. That’s just our emergency reserve. But it’s funny, all the same.”

We agreed it was funny, and then the whistle blew and the dozen or so of us who were working off demerits began our pushups again. But we forgot it—for a while.

By nightfall Pocatello was on her way again, to the naval base at Naples. It was an uneventful voyage. We surfaced just outside the Gulf of Naples, and rode in between the twin islands of Ischia and Capri just at sunrise. I had the morning watch, and I saw the sun come up over the gently steaming cone of Vesuvius.

It was there that we got the bad news:

The cruise was called off.

Officially, there was no reason given; simply a terse mailgram order for Pocatello to return to base. But the scuttlebutt had the explanation, and remembering what Bob and I had seen at Gibraltar I couldn’t doubt that it was true:

Uranium shortage.

I don’t suppose there was a man on the ship who didn’t take it hard when the word got out—all of us had looked forward to that training cruise for a long time. But to me it meant losing something more than a pleasure trip. I had been looking forward, more than I realized, to the chance of being in Marinia, and seeing my uncle, Stewart Eden.

Well, that was out, for now.

It was early morning when the orders came to return to Bermuda. Pocatello was being provisioned, and couldn’t be ready to leave before night. Bob Eskow and I had liberty for the afternoon, but we were in pretty dismal spirits in the whaleboat.

But our spirits lifted once we were ashore. Neither of us had ever been so far from home; Naples seemed like another world to us, as remote from my New London and Bob’s New York as the moon.

We toured the ancient, narrow streets, walked along the broad boulevard at the water’s edge, stopped for strong, thick coffee in a glass-roofed galleria in the heart of the city.

As we sat drinking our coffee, a slim, dark-featured man with a warm smile came over to us. “Scusi, signori,” he said. He wore a sea-blue uniform with the fouled anchors of the Italian Sub-Sea command. Bob and I stood up hesitantly. I said:

“Hello. We—we don’t speak Italian, sir.”

The man shrugged. “Perhaps I speak a little of English,” he said, slowly but with very little accent. “I pray that you excuse me for interrupting, but you are of the submarine American, are you not?”

“Why, yes,” Bob said, grinning. “I’m Sub-Sea Cadet Eskow, and this is Cadet Eden.” He stuck out his hand. The Italian took it, beaming.

“I knew!” he said. “Permit me to welcome you to Napoli, gentlemen. I am Sotto-tenente Vittorio di Laterani, at your service.”

Both Bob and I realized at the same moment that we were talking to a commissioned officer; we stumbled and flustered and made quick salutes. He returned the salutes with profound courtesy; he expressed his pleasure at the presence of our ship in the harbor, and offered us his services as guide for the remainder of the afternoon.

Bob and I looked at each other. We didn’t have to say a word; we both were delighted with the offer.

Lieutenant di Laterani was very little older than Bob and myself; he was just twenty, and had been commissioned only the year before. He was attached to the Naples base for the time being, his own sub-sea cruiser—the Pontevecchio—having been drydocked for major overhaul. His time was pretty much his own until the overhaul was completed; when he suggested that he get his car and take us on a tour of the Base, we were only too quick to accept.

It was a wonderful afternoon. But it had a dismal ending.

The clouds had been piling up around Mt. Vesuvius all through the afternoon. Even now, I can hardly bear to remember it: We were in a tiny hotel on the side of Mt. Vesuvius for one last cafe-espresso and a look at the Gulf of Naples when the storm struck.

Tenente di Laterani leaped to his feet at the first rumble of thunder. “Madre mio!” he cried. “Come, gentlemen—let us hurry. The road down the mountain, it is impassable when the rain is heavy. And if you must make your sailing…”

We didn’t make it.

We got to the dock where Pocatello had tied up less than an hour after sundown; but it might as well have been a year. Pocatello was gone.

We tried everything. The tenente, covered with shame because he had made us miss our ship, roared with us in his tiny automobile to the Base Headquarters and set about getting us transportation—torpedo boats, aircraft, anything that would get us to Pocatello before she got clear of the land and submerged for the long cruise back. But the storm had grounded the aircraft; and by the time di Laterani had wheedled the torpedo-boat commander into agreeing to take us to the ship, the Base radar shack sent over a visual: “American sub-sea cruiser submerged and out of recall range.”

We had missed our ship.

The only thing to do was to report to the American section officer and take our medicine.

It was bitter medicine to take.

I think it would have been all right, under the circumstances, if we had been able to rejoin Pocatello even at Gibraltar. But it was not to be. The section officer took pity on us and radioed Pocatello our story, with a plea to surface at Gibraltar so that we could fly there and rejoin the craft. It seemed hours before the answer came back:

Request denied. Subject cadets will return to Academy by air.

Brand Sperry, Second Officer

Acting Commander

The next morning we boarded a commercial jet liner for the long, dreary trip back.

When we arrived at the Academy, we met with a flint-faced reception. The commandant himself called us in. We were a disgrace to the service, he said; Eskow’s accident of his first year now seemed, in the light of this new happening, to have been deliberate; I, he said, had been trading on my uncle’s and father’s illustrious reputation. We were given our choice: Resign from the service, or face a court-martial.

I think that my father would have taken the court- martial. But it would have done no good for Eskow to refuse to resign; in view of his first accident, the court was sure to find against him. And I could not accept the possibility of myself staying in the service while Eskow, for the identical fault, was dismissed without honor.

We resigned.

It did not occur to me, even then, that something more than mere discipline was behind our difficulties.

With a heavy heart I sent my uncle a long radiogram to tell him what had happened, and began to pack my bags.