“Main ballast tank’s empty,” the diving officer reported. His voice was hoarse and strained.
Swanson nodded, said nothing. The volume of the sound of the compressed air had dropped at least seventy-five per cent and the sudden comparative silence was sinister, terrifying, as if it meant that the _Dolphin_ was giving up the fight. Now we had only the slender reserves of the fresh water and diesel to save us; at the rate at which the Dolphin was still diving, I didn’t see how it could.
Hansen was standing beside me. I noticed blood dripping from his left hand to the deck, and when I looked more closely, I could see that two of his fingers were broken. It must have happened in the torpedo room. At the moment, it didn’t seem important. It certainly didn’t seem important to Hansen. He was entirely oblivious of it.
The pressure gauge fell further and still further. I knew now that nothing could save the _Dolphin_. A bell rang. Swanson swung down a microphone and pressed a button.
“Engine room speaking,” a metallic voice came through. “We must slow down. Main bearings beginning to smoke. She’ll seize up any minute.”
“Maintain revolutions.” Swanson swung back the microphone. The youngster at the diving console, the one with the jumping cheek muscles and the nervous twitch, started to mumble, “Oh, dear God, oh, dear God,” over and over again, softly at first, then the voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. Swanson moved two paces and touched him on the shoulder. “Do you mind, laddie? I can hardly hear myself think.” The mumbling stopped and the boy sat quite still, his face carved from gray granite, the nerve in his neck going like a trip hammer.
“How much more of this will she take?” I asked casually. At least, I meant it to sound casual, but it came out like the croak of an asthmatic bullfrog.
“I’m afraid we’re moving into the realms of the unknown,” Swanson admitted calmly. “One thousand feet plus. If that dial is right, we passed the theoretical implosion point–where the hull should have collapsed–fifty feet ago. At the present moment she’s being subjected to well over a million tons of pressure.” Swanson’s repose, his glacial calm, was staggering, they must have scoured the whole of America to find a man like that. If ever there was the right man in the right place at the right time, it was Commander Swanson in the control room of a runaway submarine diving to depths hundreds of feet below what any submarine had ever experienced before.
“She’s slowing,” Hansen whispered.
“She’s slowing.” Swanson nodded.
She wasn’t slowing half fast enough for me. It was impossible that the pressure hull could hold out any longer. I wondered vaguely what the end would be like, then put the thought from my mind, I would never know anything about it, anyway. At that depth the pressure must have been about twenty tons to the square foot; we’d be squashed as flat as flounders before our senses could even begin to record what was happening to us.
The engine-room call-up bell rang again. The voice this time was imploring, desperate. “We must ease up, Captain. Switch gear is turning red hot. We can see it glowing.”
“Wait till it’s white hot, then you can complain about it,” Swanson said curtly. If the engines were going to break down, they were going to break down: but until they did, he’d tear the life out of them in an attempt to save the _Dolphin_. Another bell rang.
“Control room?” The voice was harsh, high-pitched. “Crew’s mess deck speaking. Water is beginning to come in.” For the first time, every eye in the control room turned away from the depth gauge and fixed itself on that loudspeaker. The hull was giving at last under the fantastic pressure, the crushing weight. One little hole, one tiny, threadlike crack as a starting point, and the pressure hull would rip and tear and flatten like a toy under a steam hammer. A quick glance at the strained, shocked faces showed this same thought in every mind.
“Where?” Swanson demanded.
“Starboard bulkhead.”
“How much?”
“A pint or two, just trickling down the bulkhead. And it’s getting worse. It’s getting worse all the time. For God’s sake, Captain, what are we going to do?”
“What are you going to do?” Swanson echoed. “Mop the damn stuff up, of course. You don’t want to live in a dirty ship, do you?” He hung up.
“She’s stopped. She’s stopped.” Four words and a prayer. I’d been wrong about every eye being on that loud-speaker; one pair of eyes had never left the depth gauge, the pair belonging to the youngster at the console.
“She’s stopped,” the diving officer confirmed. His voice had a shake in it.
No one spoke. The blood continued to drip unheeded from Hansen’s crushed fingers. I thought that I detected, for the first time, a faint sheen of sweat on Swanson’s brow, but I couldn’t be sure. The deck still shuddered beneath our feet as the giant engines strove to lift the _Dolphin_ out of those deadly depths; the compressed air still hissed into the diesel and fresh-water tanks. I could no longer see the depth gauge; the diving officer had drawn himself up so close to it that he obscured most of it from me.
Ninety seconds passed, ninety seconds that didn’t seem any longer than a leap year, ninety interminable seconds while we waited for the sea to burst in our hull and take us for its own, then the diving officer said. “Ten feet. Up.”
“Are you sure?” Swanson asked.
“A year’s pay.”
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Swanson said mildly. “The hull can still go: it should have gone a damn long time ago. Another hundred feet–that means a couple of tons less pressure to the square foot–and I think we’ll have a chance. At least a fifty-fifty chance. And after that the chances will improve with every foot we ascend, and as we ascend, the highly compressed air in the torpedo room will expand, -driving out water and so lightening the ship.”
“Still rising,” the diving officer said. “Still rising. Speed of ascent unchanged.”
Swanson walked across to the diving stand and studied the slow movement of the depth-gauge dial. “How much fresh water left?”
“Thirty per cent.”
“Secure blowing fresh-water ballast. Engines all back two thirds.”
The roar of compressed air fell away and the deck vibration eased almost to nothing as the engine revolutions fell from emergency power to two-thirds full speed.
“Speed of ascent unchanged,” the diving officer reported. “One hundred feet up.”
“Secure blowing diesel.” The roar of compressed air stopped completely. “All back one third.”
“Still rising. Still rising.”
Swanson took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck. “I was a little worried there,” he said to no one in particular, “and I don’t much care who knows it.” He reached for a microphone and I could hear his voice booming faintly throughout the ship.
“This is the captain. All right, you can all start breathing again. Everything is under control, we’re on our way up. As a point of interest, we’re still over three hundred feet deeper than the lowest previous submarine dive ever recorded.”
I felt as if I had just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. We all looked as if we’d just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. A voice said: “I’ve never smoked in my life, but I’m starting now. Someone give me a cigarette.” Hansen said: “When we get back to the States, do you know what I’m going to do?”
“Yes,” Swanson said. “You’re going to scrape together your last cent, go up to Groton, and throw the biggest, the most expensive party ever for the men who built this boat. You’re too late, Lieutenant, I thought of it first.” He stopped abruptly and said sharply: “What’s happened to your hand?”
Hansen lifted his left hand and stared at it in surprise. “I never even knew I’d been scratched. Must have happened with that damn door in the torpedo room. There’s a medicalsupply box there, Doc. Would you fix this?”
“You did a damn fine job there, John,” Swanson said warmly. “Getting that door closed, I mean. Couldn’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t. All pats on the back to our friend here,” Hansen said. “He got it closed, not me. And if he hadn’t got it closed–”
“Or if I’d let you load the torpedoes when you came back last night,” Swanson said grimly. “When we were sitting on the surface and the hatches wide open. We’d have been eight thousand feet down now and very, very dead.”
Hansen suddenly snatched his hand away. “My God!” he said remorsefully. “I’d forgotten. Never mind this damned hand of mine. George Mills, the torpedo officer. He took a pretty bad sock. You’d better see him first. Or Doc Benson.”