Edward Beach - Around the World Submerged

The watertight door at the far end of the compartment opened and Pat McDonald entered. Immediately following him were Jack Judd and Harry Hampson, both Chief Electronics Technicians. Pat walked directly to Don Fears and handed him a slip of paper. “I took the readings myself this time, Don, just to be sure.”

Don scrutinized the figures, pursed his lips, silently handed the paper to me.

The readings had reached the allowed limits.

“Shut her down, Don,” I said. “As she cools off, get everybody back there and start making a thorough check as soon as you can get into the space. We have to get to the bottom of this immediately.”

Fears excused himself. In a few moments, the mighty beat of Triton’ s huge propellers slowed.

The atmosphere of quiet gloom could be felt, as it settled over the ship. I could sense it in everyone’s attitude, in the subdued manner in which people went about their duties, in the care each man took that nothing he said or did would make matters worse.

Don came back in a moment, sober-faced. “Well, it’s done, but I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Let’s start over again at the beginning.” He pulled a sheaf of papers toward him. “The first sign of anything was when Jim Stark started to notice a steady climb in certain readings …”

We all looked on as Don went through the entire episode.

“An hour later,” he said, glancing at me, “we notified the Captain. “Then we went over everything again …”

Step by step, feeling our way, we reviewed the events of the past two hours. The strenuous training all of us had received during Triton’ s precommissioning period was never more valuable than now, as we tortuously reworked the data.

Finally, Don struck the paper lightly with his index finger. “Here’s the crucial item, right here,” he said.

“That’s what it read, all right,” said Pat.

“Something wrong here,” Don muttered. “Your last reading is one-tenth of what they had the time before.”

McDonald compared the two sheets of paper, side by side. “I know mine was the right reading,” he said, “I read it off the dial myself. The decimal point is tricky, but this is correct.”

Hope suddenly flooded through my mind. The matter was more complicated than a simple misplacement of a decimal point. The readings we were required to take and record were sometimes to the millionth or ten-millionth of a gram or an ampere. A mistake in conversion was understandable.

“If this is right, Don,” I said, “we don’t have any problem at all. Could the readings have changed that much in this short time?”

Don and Pat shook their heads.

“Judd, who took these first two sets of readings?” Fears suddenly asked.

Judd told him the names. “They’re both good men, sir,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.”

“Well, what about this one, then?”

Hampson shook his head. “We saw Mr. McDonald take these readings, sir,” he said. “I know they’re right!”

“Let’s see the calculations again,” said Don.

They were put before him in a moment. Silently, we watched while Don compared one set of log readings to another and checked the three sets of calculated results. Pat McDonald did the same, alongside him and sharing his slide rule. I scratched them out too, on a third piece of paper.

After long minutes, Don looked up. “It looks as though we made a mistake, Captain,” he said. “The first two sets of readings were written down in a slightly different way from Pat’s here, but they made a mistake in working them out. Look, here it is.”

I guarded myself from being overeager to accept this sudden release. “This is too easy, Don,” I said. “You mean, while I’ve been standing here, after we’ve gone through all this flap, now you say there never was any problem?”

Don nodded. “Let me go through this whole thing once more very carefully, Captain,” he said. “It looks as though we have a couple of problems to straighten out, and I’ll be up making a report to you within the hour.”

“Very well,” I said, not knowing whether to be angry or relieved. “Have a fourth set of readings taken—you and Pat had better do these yourselves—I need to know exactly where we stand.”

Both nodded soberly.

“You may not have permission to start the reactor,” I told them, “until you report to me that you’re absolutely sure it’s all right and always has been.”

With a considerably lighter step, I made my way forward once more. We would be absolutely sure of the plant before starting it again, for the instructions were explicit, but it now seemed morally certain that our five hours of concern had been merely a mental exercise. I could feel my confidence in Triton resurging. With the fathometer fixed, the only problem now was Poole, and even he looked improved.

The first of March had been a long day, but we were snapping back. We were going to come out of this all right!

The first of March had indeed been a long day, and at two o’clock on the morning of March second I knew that not all our problems had yet been solved. Poole was having a second attack.

As Jim Stark explained it, perhaps he did not pass the stone a few hours before, despite indications that he had. As a matter of fact, Jim wasn’t really sure that the tiny speck we had seen in the bottle Poole had produced for inspection was a kidney stone. It might have been a tiny grain of sand or dust that somehow had gotten into the bottle after it had been carefully washed. There was always the possibility that Poole had not actually passed the stone; another possibility was that more than one kidney stone might have been involved. This second attack was more severe than the first one, and Poole had to be drugged once more.

Under the morphine, Poole was not too uncomfortable. The question again: what to do? According to Stark, kidney stone attacks frequently clear up by themselves—as Poole’s first one did—and then a second stone causes a relapse. In such cases, the discomfort of the second attack is compounded by the lacerations and swollen tissues resulting from the first. After an hour’s earnest consultation with Jim, I decided we could continue running for Cape Horn. In the back of my mind, however, a firmly rooted thought had taken hold: the nearest help was the Macon, if my several-weeks-old information was still accurate. After that, it was Pearl Harbor or a foreign port. The problem would, somehow or other, have to be sorted out before we rounded Cape Horn.

I had hardly got back into my bunk, it seemed, when the Officer of the Deck sent a messenger to call me. There was a possible submarine contact on the sonar. I was on my feet in a moment, heading for the sonar room.

Some three hundred miles to the west of our course, on the coast of Argentina, lay Golfo Nuevo, a large landlocked bay with a small entrance where, within recent weeks, the Argentine Navy had had a first-class flap. According to the press reports, an unknown submarine had been detected in Golfo Nuevo by patrolling Anti-Submarine units of the Argentine Navy, which had subsequently made several attacks. The submarine, so the newspapers said, had once or twice surfaced in the gulf, and by its maneuvers was apparently damaged. Argentina blocked off the exit to the bay, and at about this time there came evidence of the presence of a second submarine in the same area. Shortly afterward, contact on both of them was lost.

The supposition was strongly supported in the South American press that the second submarine had rendezvoused with its damaged fellow, either to render assistance or, as was considered more likely, to divert attention to itself while the damaged one got away. In my own view, having had intimate experience for many years with the difficulty of making and holding contact on submarines I was not completely ready to accept the story at face value. It is an easy thing for inexperienced people to convince themselves they have made a contact and then, in their gradually increasing excitement and interest, to continue to deceive themselves for considerable periods of time. Whether or not there had actually been a foreign submarine in Golfo Nuevo, however, one thing was pretty certain: ASW units of the Argentine Navy had been convinced of it.