“Which means nothing. There are plushy Moscow hotels and British and American prisons full of people who had top-grade security clearances. . . . What are you going to do now, Commander? About the _Dolphin_, I mean?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. In the normal course of events the thing to do would be to close the bow cap of number 4 and pump out the torpedo room, then go in and close the rear door of number 4. But the bow-cap door won’t close. Within a second of John’s telling us that number 4 was open to the sea, the diving officer hit the hydraulic button– the one that closes it by remote control. You saw for yourself that nothing happened. It must be jammed.”
“You bet your life it’s jammed,” I said grimly. “A sledge hammer might do some good, but pressing buttons won’t.”
“I could go back to that lead we’ve just left, surface again, and send a diver under the ice to investigate and see what he can do, but I’m not going to ask any man to risk his life doing that. I could retreat to the open sea, surface, and fix it there, but not only would it be a damned slow and uncomfortable trip with the _Dolphin_ canted at this angle, it might take us days before we got back here again. And some of the Drift Station Zebra men are pretty far gone. It might he too late.”
“Well, then,” I said. “You have the man at hand, Commander. I told you when I first met you that environmental health studies were my specialty, especially in the field of pressure extremes when escaping from submarines. I’ve done an awful lot of simulated sub escapes, Commander. I do know a fair amount about pressures, how to cope with them and how I react to them myself.”
“How do you react to them, Dr. Carpenter?”
“A high tolerance. They don’t worry me much.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“You know damn well what I have in mind,” I said impatiently. “Drill a hole in the door of the after collision bulkhead, screw in a high-pressure hose, open the door, shove someone in the narrow space between the two collision bulkheads, and turn up the hose until the pressure between the collision bulltheads equals that in the torpedo room. You have the clips eased off the for’ard collision door. When the pressures are equalized, it opens at a touch, you walk inside, close number 4 rear door, and walk away again. That’s what you had in mind, wasn’t it?”
“More or less,” he admitted. “Except that _you_ are no part of it. Every man on this• ship has made simulated escapes. They all know the effects of pressure. And most of them are a great deal younger than you.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “But age has little to do with the ability to stand stresses. You didn’t pick a teen-ager as the first American to orbit the earth, did you? As for simulated escapes, making a free ascent up a hundred-foot tank is a different matter altogether from going inside an iron box, waiting for the slow build-up of pressure, working under that pressure, then waiting for the slow process of decompression. I’ve seen young men, big, tough, very, very fit young men break up completely under those circumstances and almost go crazy trying to get out. The combination of physiological and psychological factors involved is pretty fierce.”
“I think,” Swanson said slowly, “that I’d sooner have you–what do the English say, ‘batting on a sticky wicket’?–than almost any man I know. But there’s a point you’ve overlooked. What would the Commander of Atlantic Submarines say to me if he knew I’d let a civilian go instead of one of my own men?”
“If you _don’t_ let me go, I know what he’ll say. He’ll say, ‘We must reduce Commander Swanson to lieutenant, j.g., because he had on board the _Dolphin_ an acknowledged expert in this specialty and refused, out of stiff-necked pride, to use him, thereby endangering the lives of his crew and the safety of his ship.’
Swanson smiled, a pretty bleak smile, but with the desperately narrow escape we had just had, the predicament we were still in, and the fact that his torpedo officer was lying dead not so many feet away, I hardly expected him to break into gales of laughter. He looked at Hansen. “What do you say, John?”
“I’ve seen more incompetent characters than Dr. Carpenter,” Hansen said. “Also, he gets about as nervous and panicstricken as a bag of Portland cement.”
“He has qualifications you don’t expect to find in the average medical man,” Swanson agreed. “I shall be glad to accept your offer. One of my men will go with you. That way the dictates of common sense and honor are both satisfied.”
It wasn’t all that pleasant, not by a long shot, but it wasn’t all that terribly bad, either. It went off exactly as it could have been predicted it would go off. Swanson cautiously eased the _Dolphin_ up until her stern was just a few feet beneath the ice; this reduced the pressure in the torpedo room to a minimum, but even at that the bows were still about a hundred feet down.
A hole was drilled in the after collision bulkhead door and an armored high-pressure hose screwed into position. Dressed in porous rubber suits and equipped with an aqualung apiece, a young torpedoman by the name of Murphy and I went inside and stood in the gap between the two collision bulkheads. High-powered air hissed into the confined space. Slowly the pressure rose: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds to the square inch. I could feel the pressure on lungs and ears, the pain behind the ears, the slight wooziness that comes from the poisonous effect of breathing pure oxygen under such pressure. But I was used to it; I knew it wasn’t going to kill me. I wondered if young Murphy knew that. This was the stage where the combined physical and mental effects became too much for most people, but if Murphy was scared or panicky or suffering from bodily distress, he hid it well. Swanson would have picked his best man, and to be the best man in a company like that, Murphy had to be something very special.
We eased off the clips on the for’ard collision bulkhead door, knocked them off cautiously as the pressures equalized. The water in the torpedo room was about two feet above the level of the sill, and as the door came ajar, the water boiled whitely through into the collision space while compressed air hissed out from behind us to equalize the lowering pressure of the air in the torpedo room. For about ten seconds we had to hang on grimly to hold the door and maintain our balance while water and air fought and jostled in a seething maelstrom to find their own natural levels. The door opened wide. The Water level now extended from about thirty inches up on the collision bulkhead to the for’ard deckhead of the torpedo room. We crossed the sill, switched on our waterproof flashlights, and ducked under.
The temperature of that water was about 28°F.–4° below freezing. Those porous rubber suits were specially designed to cope with icy waters, but, even so, I gasped with the shock of it–as well as one can gasp when breathing pure oxygen under heavy pressure. But we didn’t linger, for the longer we remained there, the longer we would have to spend decompressing afterward. We half walked, half swam toward the fore end of the compartment, located the- rear door on number 4 tube, and closed it, but not before I had a quick look at the inside of the pressure cock. The door itself seemed undamaged: the body of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mills had absorbed its swinging impact and prevented it from being wrenched off its hinges. It didn’t seem distorted in any way, and fitted snugly into place. We forced its retaining lever back into place and left.
Back in the collision compartment we gave the prearranged taps on the door. Almost at once we heard the subdued hum of a motor as the high-speed extraction pumps in the torpedo room got to work, forcing the water out through the hull. Slowly the water level dropped, and as it dropped, the air pressure as slowly decreased. Degree by degree the _Dolphin_ began to come back on even keel. When the water was finally below the level of the for’ard sill, we gave another signal and the remaining over-pressure air was slowly bled out through the hose.
A few minutes later, as I was stripping off the rubber suit, Swanson asked, “Any trouble?”
“None. You picked a good man in Murphy.”
“The best. Many thanks, Doctor.” He lowered his voice. “You wouldn’t by any chance–”
“You know damned well I would,” I said. “I did. Not sealing wax, not chewing gum, not paint. Glue, Commander Swanson. That’s how they blocked the test-cock inlet. The oldfashioned animal-hide stuff that comes out of a tube. Ideal for the job.”