“Just for once, old boy, the hell with your Navy regulations,” Jolly said politely. “The main thing to remember, Commander, is that I’m aboard this ship, too. Let us remember that we all–urn–sink or swim together. No joke intended.”
“But you don’t know how to operate those sets–”
“I can learn, can’t I?” Jolly said with some asperity. He turned and left.
Swanson looked at me. He was wearing goggles, but they couldn’t hide the concern in his face. He said, curiously hesitant: “Do you think–”
“Of course Jolly’s right. You’ve no option. If Benson were fit you know very well you’d have him down there in no time. Besides, Jolly is a damned fine doctor.”
“You haven’t been down there, Carpenter. It’s a metal jungle. There isn’t room to splint a broken finger, much less–”
“I don’t think Dr. Jolly will try to fix or splint anything. He’ll just give Ringman a jab that will put him out so that he can be brought up here without screaming in agony all the way.”
Swanson nodded, pursed his lips, and walked away to examine the ice fathometer. I said to Hansen, “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”
“You can say that again, friend. It’s worse than bad. Normally, there should be enough air in the submarine to last us maybe sixteen hours. But well over half the air in this ship, from here right aft, is already practically unbreathable. What we have left can’t possibly last us more than a few hours. Skipper’s boxed in on three sides. If he doesn’t start the air purifiers up, the men working down in the machinery space are going to have a hell of a job doing anything. Working in near-zero visibility with breathing apparatus on, you’re practically as good as blind: the floods will make hardly any difference. If he does start up the purifiers in the engine room, the fresh oxygen will cause the fire to spread. And when he starts them up, of course, that means less and less power to get the reactor working again.”
“That’s very comforting,” I said. “How long will it take you to restart the reactor?”
“At least an hour. That’s after the fire has been put out and everything checked for safety. At least an hour.”
“And Swanson reckoned three or four hours to put the fire out. Say five, all told. It’s a long time. Why doesn’t he use some of his reserve power cruising around to find a lead?”
“An even bigger gamble than staying put and trying to put out the fire. I’m with the skipper. Let’s fight the devil we know rather than the one we don’t.”
Medical case in hand, Jolly came coughing and spluttering his way back into the control center and started pulling on a suit and breathing apparatus. Hansen gave him instructions on how to operate it, and Jolly seemed to get the idea pretty quickly. Brown, the enlisted man who’d helped Cartwright into the control center, was detailed to accompany him: Jolly had no idea of the location of the ladder leading down from the upper engine room to the machinery space.
“Be as quick as you can,” Swanson said. “Remember, Jolly, you’re not trained for this sort of thing. I’ll expect you back inside ten minutes.”
They were back in exactly four minutes. They didn’t have an unconscious Ringman with them, either. The only unconscious figure was that of Dr. Jolly, whom Brown half carried, half dragged over the sill into the control room.
“Can’t say for sure what happened,” Brown gasped. He was trembling from the effort he had just made; Jolly must have outweighed him by at least thirty pounds. “We’d just got into the engine room and shut the door. I was leading, and suddenly Dr. Jolly fell against me. I think he must have tripped over something. He knocked me down. When I got to my feet, he was lying there behind me. I put the flashlight on him. He was out cold. His mask had been torn loose. I put it on as best I could and pulled him out.”
“My God,” Hansen said reflectively. “The medical profession on the _Dolphin_ _is_ having a rough time.” He gloomily surveyed the prone figure of Dr. Jolly as it was carried away toward the after door and relatively fresh air. “All three sawbones out of commission now. That’s very handy, isn’t it, skipper?”
Swanson didn’t answer. I said to him, “The injection for Ringman. Would you know what to give, how to give it and where?”
“No.”
“Would any of your crew?”
“I’m in no position to argue, Dr. Carpenter.”
I opened Jolly’s medical kit, hunted among the bottles on the lid rack until I found what I wanted, dipped a hypodermic and injected it in my left forearm, just where the bandage ended. “Pain-killer,” I said. “I’m just a softy. But I want to be able to use the forefinger and thumb of that hand.” I glanced across at Rawlings, as recovered as anyone could get in that foul atmosphere, and said: “How are you feeling now?”
“Just resting lightly.” He rose from his chair and picked up his breathing equipment. “Have no fears, Doc. With torpedoman first class Rawlings by your side–”
“We have plenty of fresh men still available aft, Dr.Carpenter,” Swanson said.
“No. Rawlings. It’s for his own sake. Maybe he’ll get two medals now for this night’s work.”
Rawlings grinned and pulled the mask over his head. Two minutes later we were inside the engine room.
It was stiflingly hot in there, and visibility, even with the powerful beam of our flashlights, didn’t exceed eighteen inches; but for the rest it wasn’t too bad. The breathing apparatus functioned well enough, and I was conscious of no discomfort. At first, that was.
Rawlings took my arm and guided me to the head of a ladder that reached down to the deck of the machinery space. I heard the penetrating hiss of a fire extinguisher and peered around to locate its source.
A pity they had no submarines in the Middle Ages, I thought; the sight of that little lot down there would have given Dante an extra fillip when he started in on his Inferno. Over on the starboard side, two very powerful floodlights had been slung above the huge turbine: the visibility they gave varied from three to six feet, according to the changing amount of smoke given off by the charred and smoldering insulation. At the moment, one patch of the insulation was deeply covered in a layer of white foam–carbon dioxide released under pressure immediately freezes anything with which it comes in contact. As the man with the extinguisher stepped back, three others moved forward in the swirling gloom and started hacking and tearing away at the insulation. As soon as a sizable strip was dragged loose the exposed lagging below immediately burst into flame reaching the height of a man’s head, throwing into sharp relief weird masked figures leaping backward to avoid being scorched by the flames. And then the man with the CO2 would approach again, press his trigger, the blaze would shrink down, flicker, and die, and a coat of creamy white foam would bloom where the fire had been. Then the entire process would be repeated all over again. The whole scene with the repetitively stylized movements of the participants highlit against a smoky, oil-veined background of flickering crimson was somehow weirdly suggestive of the priests of a long-dead and alien culture offering up some burnt sacrifice on their blood-stained pagan altar.
It also made me see Swanson’s point: at the painfully but necessarily slow rate at which those men were making progress, four hours would be excellent par for the course. I tried not to think what the air inside the Dolphin would be like in four hours’ time.
The man with the extinguisher–it was Raeburn–caught sight of us, came across, and led me through a tangled maze of steam pipes and condensers to where Ringman was lying. He was on his back, very still, but conscious: I could see the movement of the whites of his eyes behind his goggles. I bent down till my mask was touching his.
“Your leg?” I shouted.
He nodded.
“Left?”
He nodded again, reached out gingerly, and touched a spot halfway down the shinbone. I opened the medical case, pulled out scissors, pinched the clothes on his upper arm between finger and thumb, and cut a piece of the material away. The hypodermic came next and within two minutes he was asleep. With Rawlings’ help, I laid splints against his leg and bandaged them roughly in place. Two of the fire fighters stopped work long enough to help us drag him up the ladder, and then Rawlings and I took him through the passage above the reactor room. I became aware that my breathing was now distressed, my legs shaking, and my whole body bathed in sweat.