He left. Swanson heaved himself to his feet with obvious weakness–except for two brief inspection trips to the engine room, he had not once worn any breathing apparatus during those interminable and pain-filled hours. He called for power on the broadcast circuit, unhooked a microphone, and spoke in a calm, clear, strong voice: it was an amazing exhibition in self-control, the triumph of a mind over agonized lungs still starving for air.
“This is your captain speaking,” he said. “The fire in the engine room is out. We are already reactivating our power plant. Open all water-tight doors throughout the ship. They are to remain open until further orders. You may regard the worst of our troubles as lying behind us. Thank you for all you have done.” He hooked up the microphone and turned to Hansen. “The worst _is_ behind, John–if we have enough power left to reactivate the plant.”
“Surely the worst is still to come,” I said. “It’ll take you how long–three quarters of an hour, maybe an hour?–to get your turbo generators going and your air-purifying equipment working again. How long do you think it will take your air cleaners to make any noticeable effect on this poisonous air?”
“Half an hour. At least that. Perhaps more.”
“There you are, then.” My mind was so woolly and doped now that I had difficulty in finding words to frame my thoughts, and I wasn’t even sure that my thoughts were worth thinking. “An hour and a half at least–and you said the worst was over. The worst hasn’t even begun.” I shook my head, trying to remember what it was that I had been going to say next, then remembered. “In an hour and a half, one out of every four of your men will be gone.”
Swanson smiled. He actually, incredibly, smiled. He said, “As Sherlock used to say to Moriarty, ‘I think not, Doctor.’ Nobody’s going to die of monoxide poisoning. In fifteen minutes’ time we’ll have fresh, breathable air throughout the ship.”
Hansen glanced at me just as I glanced at him. The strain had been too much; the old man had gone off his rocker. Swanson caught our interchange of looks and laughed, the laugh changing abruptly to a bout of convulsive coughing as he inhaled too much of that poisoned, smoke-laden atmosphere. He coughed for a long time, then gradually quieted down.
“Serves me right,” he gasped. “Your faces. . . Why do you think I ordered the water-tight doors opened, Doctor?”
“No idea.”
“John?”
Hansen shook his head.
Swanson looked at him quizzically and said, “Speak to the engine room. Tell them to light up the diesel.”
“Yes, sir,” Hansen said woodenly. He made no move.
“Lieutenant Hansen is wondering whether he should get a straitjacket,” Swanson said. “Lieutenant Hansen knows that a diesel engine is never, _never_ lit up when a submarine is submerged–unless with a snorkel, which is useless under ice–for a diesel not only uses air straight from the engineroom atmosphere, it gulps it down in great draughts and would soon remove all the air in the ship. Which is what I want. We bleed compressed air under fairly high pressure into the fore part of the ship. Nice, clean, fresh air. We light up the diesel in the after part–it will run rough at first because of the low concentration of oxygen in this poisonous muck–but it will run. It will suck up much of this filthy air, exhausting its gases over the side, and as it does, it will lower the atmospheric pressure aft and the fresh air will make its way through from for’ard. To have done this before now would have been suicidal. The fresh air would only have fed the flames until the fire was out of control. But we can do it now. We can run it for a few minutes only, of course, but a few minutes will be ample. You are with me, Lieutenant Hansen?”
Hansen was with him, all right, but he didn’t answer. He had already left.
Three minutes passed; then we heard, through the now open passageway above the reactor room, the erratic sound of a diesel starting, fading, coughing, then catching again– we learned later that the engineers had had to bleed off several ether bottles in the vicinity of the air intake to get the engine to catch. For a minute or two it ran roughly and erratically and seemed to be making no impression at all on that poisonous air; then, imperceptibly almost, at first, then with an increasing degree of definition, we could see the smoke in the control room, illuminated by the single lamp still left burning there, begin to drift and eddy toward the reactor passage. Smoke began to stir and eddy in the corners of the control room as the diesel sucked the fumes aft, and more smoke-laden air, a shade lighter in color, began to move in from the wardroom passageway, pulled in by the decreasing pressure in the control room, pushed in by the gradual buildup of fresh air in the fore part of the submarine as compressed air was bled into the living spaces.
A few more minutes made the miracle. The diesel thudded away in the engine room, running more sweetly and strongly as air with a higher concentration of oxygen reached its intake, and the smoke in the control room drained steadily away, to be replaced by a thin grayish mist from the fore part of the ship that was hardly deserving of the name of smoke at all. And that mist carried with it air, an air with fresh, life-giving oxygen, an air with a proportion of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that was now almost negligible. Or so it seemed to us.
The effect upon the crew was just within the limits of credibility. It was as if a wizard had passed through the length of the ship and touched them with the wand of life. Unconscious men, men for whom death had been less than half an hour away, began to stir, some to open their eyes. Sick, exhausted, nauseated, and pain-wracked men who had been lying or sitting on the decks in attitudes of huddled despair sat up straight or stood, their faces breaking into expressions of almost comical wonderment and disbelief as they drew great draughts down into their aching lungs and found that it was not poisonous gases they were inhaling but fresh, breathable air: men who had made up their minds for death began to wonder how they could ever have thought that way. As air went, I suppose, it was pretty substandard stuff, and the Factory Acts would have had something to say about it; but, for us, no pine-drenched mountain air ever tasted half so sweet.
Swanson kept a careful eye on the gauges recording the air pressure in the submarine. Gradually it sank down to the fifteen pounds at which the atmosphere was normally kept, then below it. He ordered the compressed air to be released under higher pressure, and then, when the atmospheric pressure was back to normal, he ordered the diesel stopped and the compressed air shut off.
“Commander Swanson,” I said. “If you ever want to make admiral, you can apply to me for a reference any time.”
“Thank you.” He smiled. “We have been very lucky.”
Sure we had been lucky, the way men who sailed with Swanson would always be lucky.
We could now hear the sounds of pumps and motors as Cartwright started in on the slow process of bringing the nuclear power plant to life again. Everyone knew that it was touch and go whether there would be enough life left in the batteries for that, but, curiously, no one seemed to doubt that Cartwright would succeed: we had been through too much to entertain even the thought of failure now.
Nor did we fail. At exactly eight o’clock that morning Cartwright phoned to say that he had steam on the turbine blades and that the _Dolphin_ was a going proposition again. I was glad to hear it.
For three hours we cruised along at slow speed while the air-conditioning plant worked under maximum pressure to bring the air inside the _Dolphin_ back to normal. After that, Swanson slowly stepped up our speed until we had reached about fifty per cent of normal cruising speed, which was as fast as the propulsion officer deemed it safe to go. For a variety of technical reasons it was impractical for the _Dolphin_ to operate without all turbines in commission,, so we were reduced to the speed of the slowest, and, without sheathing on it, Cartwright didn’t want to push the starboard highpressure turbine above a fraction of its power. This way, it would take us much longer to clear the ice pack and reach the open sea, but ‘the captain, in a broadcast, said that if the limit of the ice pack was where it had been when we’d first moved under it–and there was no reason to think it should have shifted more than a few miles–we should be moving out into the open sea at about four o’clock the following morning.