Franklin swallowed his pH pills, took his injections, and climbed into the flexible rubber suit which would protect him from the near-zero temperature on the sea bed. He hated suits —they interfered with movement and upset one’s buoyancy —but this was a case where he had no choice. The complex breathing unit, with its three cylinders—one the ominous red of compressed hydrogen—was strapped to his back, and he was lowered into the sea.
Commander Henson swam around him for five minutes while all the fittings were checked, the weight belt was adjusted, and the sonar transmitter tested. He was breathing easily enough on normal air, and would not switch over to the oxyhydrogen mixture until he had reached a depth of three hundred feet. The change-over was automatic, and the demand regulator also adjusted the oxygen flow so that the mixture ratio was correct at any depth. As correct as it could be, that is, for a region in which man was never intended to live….
At last everything was ready. The explosive charges were securely attached to his belt, and he gripped the handrail around the tiny conning tower of the sub. “Take her down,” he said to the pilot. “Fifty feet a minute, and keep your forward speed below two knots.”
“Fifty feet a minute it is. If we pick up speed, I’ll kill it with the reverse jets.”
Almost at once, daylight faded to a gloomy and depressing green. The water here on the surface was almost opaque, owing to the debris thrown up by the oil well. Franklin could not even see the width of the conning tower; less than two feet from his eyes the metal rail blurred and faded into nothingness. He was not worried; if necessary, he could work by touch alone, but he knew that the water was much clearer on the bottom.
Only thirty feet down, he had to stop the descent for almost a minute while he cleared his ears. He blew and swallowed frantically before the comforting “click” inside his head told him that all was well; how humiliating it would have been, he thought, had he been forced back to the surface because of a blocked Eustachian tube! No one would have blamed him, of course; even a mild cold could completely incapacitate the best diver—but the anticlimax would have been hard to live down.
The light was fading swiftly as the sun’s rays lost their battle with the turbid water. A hundred feet down, he seemed to be in a world of misty moonlight, a world completely lacking color or warmth. His ears were giving him no trouble now, and he was breathing without effort, but he felt a subtle depression creeping over him. It was, he was sure, only an effect of the failing light—not a premonition of the thousand feet of descent that still lay ahead of him.
To occupy his mind, he called the pilot and asked for a progress report. Fifty drums had now been attached to the derrick, giving a total lift of well over a hundred tons. Six of the passengers in the trapped sub had become unconscious but appeared to be in no danger; the remaining seventeen were uncomfortable, but had adapted themselves to the increased pressure. The leak was getting no worse, but there were now three inches of water in the control room, and before long there would be danger of short circuits.
“Three hundred feet down,” said Commander Henson’s voice. “Check your hydrogen-flow meter—you should be starting the switch-over now.”
Franklin glanced down at the compact little instrument panel. Yes, the automatic change-over was taking place. He could detect no difference in the air he was breathing, but in the next few hundred feet of descent most of the dangerous nitrogen would be flushed out. It seemed strange to replace it with hydrogen, a far more reactive—and even explosive— gas, but hydrogen produced no narcotic effects and was not trapped in the body tissues as readily as nitrogen.
It seemed to have grown no darker in the last hundred feet; his eyes had accustomed themselves to the low level of illumination, and the water was slightly clearer. He could now see for two or three yards along the smooth hull he was riding down into the depths where only a handful of unprotected men had ever ventured—and fewer still returned to tell the story.
Commander Henson called him again. “You should be on fifty per cent hydrogen now. Can you taste it?”
“Yes—a metallic sort of flavor. Not unpleasant, though.”
“Talk as slowly as you can,” said the commander. “It’s hard to understand you—your voice sounds so high-pitched now. Are you feeling quite O.K.?”
“Yes,” replied Franklin, glancing at his depth gauge. “Will you increase my rate of descent to a hundred feet a minute? We’ve no time to waste.”
At once he felt the vessel sinking more swiftly beneath him as the ballast tanks were flooded, and for the first time he began to feel the pressure around him as something palpable. He was going down so quickly that there was a slight lag as the insulating layer of air in his suit adjusted to the pressure change; his arms and legs seemed to be gripped as if by a huge and gentle vice, which slowed his movements without actually restricting them.
The light had now nearly gone, and as if in anticipation of his order the pilot of the sub switched on his twin searchlights. There was nothing for them to illumine, here in this empty void midway between sea bed and sky, but it was reassuring to see the double nimbus of scattered radiance floating in the water ahead of him. The violet filters had been removed, for his benefit, and now that his eyes had something distant to focus upon he no longer felt so oppressively shut in and confined.
Eight hundred feet down—more than three quarters of the way to the bottom. “Better level off here for three minutes,” advised Commander Henson. “I’d like to keep you here for half an hour, but we’ll have to make it up on the way back.”
Franklin submitted to the delay with what grace he could. It seemed incredibly long; perhaps his time sense had been distorted, so that what was really a minute appeared like ten. He was going to ask Commander Henson if his watch had stopped when he suddenly remembered that he had a perfectly good one of his own. The fact that he had forgotten something so obvious was, he realized, rather a bad sign; it suggested that he was becoming stupid. However, if he was intelligent enough to know that he was becoming stupid things could not be too bad…. Luckily the descent started again before he could get too involved in this line of argument.
And now he could hear, growing louder and louder each minute, the incessant roar of the great geyser of gas belching from the shaft which inquisitive and interfering man had drilled in the ocean bed. It shook the sea around him, already making it hard to hear the advice and comments of his helpers. There was a danger here as great as that of pressure itself; if the gas jet caught him, he might be tossed hundreds of feet upward in a matter of seconds and would explode like a deep-sea fish dragged suddenly to the surface.
“We’re nearly there,” said the pilot, after they had been sinking for what seemed an age. “You should be able to see the derrick in a minute; I’ll switch on the lower lights.”
Franklin swung himself over the edge of the now slowly moving sub and peered down the misty columns of light. At first he could see nothing; then, at an indeterminate distance, he made out mysterious rectangles and circles. They baffled him for a moment before he realized that he was seeing the air-filled drums which were now straining to lift the shattered derrick.
Almost at once he was able to make out the framework of twisted girders below them, and presently a brilliant star—fantastically out of place in this dreary underworld—burst into life just outside the cone of his searchlights. He was watching one of the cutting torches at work, manipulated by the mechanical hands of a sub just beyond visual range.
With great care, his own vessel positioned him beside the derrick, and for the first time he realized how hopeless his task would have been had he been compelled to rely on touch to find his way around. He could see the two girders to which he had to attach his charge; they were hemmed in by a maze of smaller rods, beams, and cables through which he must somehow make his way.
Franklin released his hold of the sub which had towed him so effortlessly into the depths, and with slow, easy strokes swam toward the derrick. As he approached, he saw for the first time the looming mass of the trapped sub, and his heart sank as he thought of all the problems that must still be solved before it could be extricated. On a sudden impulse, he swam toward the helpless vessel and banged sharply on the hull with the pair of wire cutters from his little tool kit. The men inside knew that he was here, of course, but the signal would have an altogether disproportionate effect on their morale.