“Stopped.”
Mills tugged the heavy lever. It moved an inch or two, then struck. “Pretty stiff,” he commented.
“You torpedomen never heard of anything called lubricating oil?” Hansen demanded. “Weight, George, weight.”
Mills applied more weight. The lever moved another couple of inches. Mills scowled, shifted his feet to get maximum leverage, and heaved just as Hansen shouted, “No! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!”
He was too late. He was a lifetime too late. The lever snapped clear, the heavy circular rear door smashed open as violently as if it had been struck by some gigantic battering ram, and a roaring torrent of water burst into the for’ard torpedo room. The sheer size, the enormous power and frightening speed of that almost horizontally traveling column of water was staggering. It was like a giant hose pipe, like one of the outlet pipes of the Boulder Dam. It caught up Lieutenant Mills, already badly injured by the flailing sweep of that heavy door, and swept him back across the torpedo room to smash heavily against the after bulkhead; for a moment he half stood there, pinned by the power of that huge jet, then slid down limply to the deck.
“Blow all main ballast!” Hansen shouted into the microphone. He was hanging on a rear-torpedo door to keep from being carried away, and, even above the thunderous roar of the waters, his voice carried clearly. “Emergency. Blow all main ballast. Number 4 tube open to the sea. Blow all main ballast!” He released his grip and staggered across the deck, trying to keep his balance in the madly swirling already footdeep water. “Get out of here, for God’s sake.”
He should have saved his energy and breath. I was already on my way out of there. I had Mills under the arms and was trying to drag him over the high sill of the for’ard collision bulkhead and I was making no headway at all. The proper trim of a submarine is a delicate thing at the best of times, and even after those few seconds, the nose of the _Dolphin_, heavy with the tons of water that had already poured in, was beginning to cant sharply downward. Trying to drag Mills and at the same time keep my balance on that sloping deck with knee-high water boiling around me was more than I could do: but suddenly Hansen had Mills by the feet, and I stumbled off balance, tripped over the high sill, and fell backward into the confined space between the two collison bulkheads, dragging Mills after me.
Hansen was still on the other side of the bulkhead. I could hear him cursing steadily, monotonously, and as if he meant it as he struggled to unhook the heavy door from its standing catch. Because of the steep downward pitch of the Dolphin’s deck, he had to lean all his weight against the massive steel door to free the catch, and with his insecure footing among the swirling waters on that sloping, slippery deck, he was obviously having the devil’s own time trying to release it. I let Mills go, jumped over the sill, flung my shoulder against the door, and with the suddenly added pressure, the latch clicked free. The heavy door at once swung half shut, carrying us along with it and knocking us both off our feet into the battering-ram path of that torrent still gqshing from number 4 tube. Coughing and spluttering, we scrambled upright again, crossed the sill, and, hanging on to a latch handle apiece, tried to drag the door shut.
Twice we tried and twice we failed. The water boiled in through the tube, and its level was now almost Jipping the top of the sill. With every second that passed, the downward angle of the _Dolphin_ increased, and with every extra degree of steepness the task of pulling that door uphill against the steadily increasing gravity became more and more difficult.
The water began to spill over the sill onto our feet.
Hansen grinned at me. At least I thought for a moment he was grinning, but the white teeth were clamped tightly together and there was no amusement at all in his eyes. He shouted above the roar of the water: “It’s now or never.”
A well-taken point. It was indeed now or never. At a signal from Hansen, we flung our combined weights on to those latch handles, each with one hand to a latch while the other braced against the bulkhead to give maximum leverage. We got the door to within four inches. It swung open. We tried again. Still four inches, and I knew that all our strength had gone into that one.
“Can you hold it for a moment?” I shouted.
He nodded. I shifted both hands to the lower corner latch, dropped to the deck, braced my feet against the sill, and straightened both legs in one convulsive jerk. The door crashed shut, Hansen jammed his latch home, I did the same with mine, and we were safe. For the moment we were safe.
I left Hansen to secure the remaining latches and started knocking those of the after collision-bulkhead door. I’d only got as far as the first one when the others started falling off by themselves. Petty officer Bowen and his men, on the other side of that door, needed no telling that we wanted out of there just as fast as possible. The door was pulled open and my eardrums popped with the abrupt fall in air pressure. I could hear the steady echoing roar of air blasting into the ballast tanks under high pressure. I hoisted Mills by the shoulders, strong, competent hands lifted him out and over the sill, and a couple of seconds later Hansen and I were beside him.
“In God’s name!” Bowen said to Hansen. “What’s gone wrong?”
“Number 4 tube open to the sea.”
“Jesus!”
“Secure that door,” Hansen ordered. “But good.” He left at a dead run, clawing his way up the sharply sloping deck of the torpedo storage room. I took a look at Lieutenant Mills–one short look was all I needed–and followed after Hansen. Only I didn’t run. Running wasn’t going to help anybody now.
The roar of compressed air filled the ship, the ballast tanks were rapidly emptying, but still the _Dolphin_ continued on its deadly dive, arrowing down for the dark depths of the Arctic. Not even the massive compressed-air banks of the submarine could hope to cope so soon with the effects of the scores of tons of sea water that had already flooded into the for’ard torpedo room: I wondered bleakly if they would ever be able to cope at all. As I walked along the wardroom passage, using the hand rail to haul myself up that crazily canted deck, I could feel the entire submarine shudder beneath my feet. No doubt about what that was: Swanson had the great turbines turning over at maximum revolutions, the big bronze propellers threshing madly in reverse, trying to bite deep into the water to slow up the diving submarine.
You can smell fear. You can smell it and you can see it, and I could do both as I hauled my way into the control center of the _Dolphin_ that morning. Not one man as much as flickered an eye in my direction as I passed by the sonar room. They had no eyes for me. They had no eyes for anybody: tense, strained, immobile, with hunted faces, they had eyes for one thing only–the plummeting needle on the depth gauge.
The needle was passing the six-hundred-feet mark. Six hundred feet. No conventional submarine I’d ever been on could have operated at this depth. Could have survived at this depth. Six hundred and fifty. I thought of the fantastic outside pressure that represented and I felt far from happy. Someone else was feeling far from happy also: the young seaman manning the inboard diving seat. His fists, were clenched till the knuckles showed, a muscle was jumping in his cheek, a nerve twitching in his neck, and he had the look of a man who sees the bony finger of death beckoning.
Seven hundred feet. Seven hundred and fifty. Eight hundred. I’d never heard of a submarine that had reached that depth and lived. Neither, apparently, had Commander Swanson.
“We have just set a new record, men,” he said. His voice was calm and relaxed, and although he was far too intelligent a man not to be afraid, no trace of it showed in tone or manner. “Lowest recorded dive ever, as far as I am aware. Speed of descent?”
“No change.”
“It will change soon. The torpedo room must be about full now–apart from the pocket of air compressed under high pressure.” He gazed at the dial and tapped his teeth thoughtfully with a thumbnail–this, for Swanson, was probably the equivalent of going into hysterics. “Blow the diesel tanks: blow the fresh-water tanks.” Imperturbable though he sounded, Swanson was close to desperation for this was the counsel of despair: thousands of miles from home and supplies, yet jettisoning all the diesel and drinking water, the lack of either of which could make all the difference between life and death. But, at that moment, it didn’t matter; all that mattered was lightening the ship.