The U-19's Last Kill

by Jack Finney

  “I just quit,” I said. “Got time for a coffee?”

  She looked at Herb, who said, “I’ll add your duties to my other responsibilities; go ahead.” Alice thanked him, and we walked out to the elevators.

  We didn’t speak till we were down at the little lunch counter just off the main lobby My coffee came and Alice’s soda, and Alice—unwrapping her straw, not looking at me—said, “So you quit. You didn’t need to for my sake, Hugh; I was going to ask tomorrow for an early vacation.”

  I wondered why she hadn’t asked today, but I said, “Well, you can take your time now; I won’t be back.”

  She nodded, taking a sip of her soda. Then, still without looking at me she said, “All right; I meant what I said Friday.” She looked up at me now. “But I was hoping you didn’t. That’s why I didn’t ask about my vacation.”

  She turned back to her soda, and I sat looking down at the top of her head, at her straw-yellow hair and the clean white scalp at the part. “Maybe I’m crazy,” I said quietly, and I meant it. “I have the feeling now that if I’d just let go a little, just relaxed a bit, I’d have fallen crazy in love——”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it; you don’t know how sad I feel right now. I’d have married you in a minute; I still would, and I wonder if I’ll ever get over you. But you’re not sad; you’re excited I don’t know about what, but you are. Right now, sitting here, looking at me, you’re wondering for a moment whether you made a mistake. And maybe you have. But you’re going to do what you want to do anyway.” She drew herself up, shoulders back, and turned to me, her chin lifting, her eyes sad, but proud too, “Look at me, Hugh,” she said softly, and I did, my eyes meeting hers. “This is what you could have had—me. For the asking. You can’t do much better; and you may do far worse.”

  Suddenly she relaxed her posture, reaching out to touch my hand on the counter for a moment. “But I haven’t any right to put you through this,” she said. “I haven’t any claim on you. You came to say good-by, and I’m glad you did.”

  I was on the edge of saying it: Wait for me; just a few weeks! But I didn’t say it. I hadn’t the right; I might be dead soon or in prison. I could say it to myself: Wait for me, Alice! But all I could say was “So am I, Alice. We had a lot of fun.”

  “Yes.” She nodded rapidly, looking straight ahead. “Maybe you’d better go now, Hugh; I’ll stay and finish my soda, please do: please go now, Hugh.”

  “All right.” I stood up from the stool and put coins on the counter, more than enough to pay for the coffee and soda. Then I reached out for her hand squeezed it, and she squeezed back, hard, then dropped my hand and turned away, and I walked out to the street.

  Lincoln Langley sat smoking a cigar in the jeep, parked in the shadows beside the little country station when Vic and I got off the train that night. It was funny, really—I thought about this later and was amused—we wasted no time in greeting each other. I liked Linc and felt cordial to him, but, reaching the jeep a step or two ahead of Vic. heaving my sea bag into the end, the first thing I said was “How is she?”

  And Linc had no trouble understanding me. “Good,” he said eagerly, yanking the cigar from his mouth. “Moreno’s got cotton waste wrapped around every movable part on the outside. Tied on with wire and soaked with penetrating oil. He’s already chipping rust.”

  I nodded, climbing in beside him. Vic got in back as Linc started the motor, then backed out into the empty little main street, “Lauffnauer back?” Vic said, and Linc nodded, shifting gears.

  “Came back with me; we’ve been here an hour,” he said, driving slowly down the street. “We’ve started work on the Kingstons.”

  From the back seat Vic said quietly, “What do you think, Hugh?” and I saw Linc turn to me, his mouth opening a little, waiting intently for my answer.

  But all I could do was shrug and say, “We’ll know in a few minutes now.” Vic was asking about the batteries; they were the all-important question. For without electrical power the sub couldn’t run underwater—or run at all, for that matter; these diesels couldn’t be started at sea without current from the batteries.

  The shack was lighted, illuminating the path beside it, and down the hill at the shore every crack of the dock building was brightly defined, two rectangles of yellow light from the dusty windows high under the caves lying on the black water beside the building. “See you,” Linc said and, actually trotting down the path, he hurried back to the submarine.

  Rosa was making up the last of five metal cots lined up along one wall of the shack. As we walked in with our sea bags she was pulling an olive-drab blanket taut. She glanced up to smile at us. “They are waiting for you,” she said to me, nodding in the direction of the dock, “like children. Can you make their toy run for them, papa?”

  I nodded, lifting my sack onto the cot she’d just finished. “Sure,” I said, “I’ll make it run; one way or another.”

  “Where you sleeping, Rosa?” Vic said; he was sitting on the edge of his cot, pulling blue denims and a work shirt from his sea bag.

  “In my own house,” she said shortly, “alone.” Then she walked ahead into the little area that served as a kitchen and sat down at an enamel-lopped table there, her back to us. On a wall shelf beside the table was a small radio, and she snapped it on. Without turning around she said, “Go ahead, get dressed; they are waiting for you.”

  I glanced at Vic, shrugging, then sat down, untied my bag and began tugging out a pair of denim pants and a shirt.

  We changed clothes quickly then and all of us walked down the path to the dock. Inside it Moreno, wearing dirty tan coveralls and an old felt hat, was standing down in the water in hip boots beside the orange-red sub, chipping rust from the aft dive-plane mountings. He glanced up as we walked in. nodding shortly, and began climbing out of the water as Vic and I walked across the plank to the conning tower, then climbed down the ladder through the open hatch. Lauffnauer and Linc, working in the control room with socket wrenches, were twisting bolts from the stuffing box of one of the big Kingstons.

  Moreno came down the ladder just behind us, and I squatted on the deck. Under the hatch cover, set into the deck beside me, were batteries, others in the forward compartment. Grouping themselves about me, the others stood silent and watching, waiting for what I’d have to say, and I lifted the hatch cover.

  A submarine’s batteries are huge—as tall as a man in a modern sub, and even these ancient batteries were four feet tall. And they weigh tons; they’re actually an important part of a submarine’s ballast. Now I began the routine of inspecting, then testing them, without any real hope. There was acid in the batteries, I found, as I’d expected; it doesn’t evaporate to amount to anything. Now all I could do was to see if miraculously the batteries had somehow held a charge for forty years. I didn’t bother taking a hydrometer reading, but simply tested each cell at the voltmeter panel of the switchboard here in the aft compartment. And now I threw the old knife-blade switch and tested the first cell.

  The needle barely flickered, indicating just a trivial difference in potential. I tried each of the other cells then, everyone watching my face. Then I thought about trying to charge these old batteries. We could run power in to the diesels, rig them to run and try a charge. But I knew it would be so much waste motion, and after a few moments I glanced at the others and shook my head.

  Moreno began to curse, quietly and viciously; then Rosa gave him a little push, and he shut up. The others swung away from the hatch, Lauffnauer jamming his hands into his white coverall pockets, slowly shaking his head: Vic muttered something angrily, and the life seemed to have gone out of Linc’s face. For a moment Rosa stood watching me, then she said, “All right, papa; how are you going to fix it for us?” and the others turned back to stare down at me again.

  I looked at them. “There’s only one thing I know of to try,” I said, “and I don’t like it. But there’s not another single thing we can do.”

  “All
right, all right,” Moreno said irritably, “let’s have it; what can we do?” He was staring down at me, his eyes sharp with a hope he didn’t really have.

  “Use automobile batteries.”

  It was actually a little comical; they were frowning, their mouths opening in astonishment. Vic said, “Car batteries? Ordinary car batteries?”

  “Sure.” I had to smile, looking at their faces. “The sub doesn’t care where the power comes from. A few big batteries or a lot of little ones, the sub doesn’t care; get the juice to the motor and it’ll turn.”

  “Hugh, are you sure?” Lauffnauer said. Then he laughed, the beginning of relief in his voice. “It just does not seem possible, that’s all.”

  I tapped the big sub battery with my foot. “This is only a two-hundred-and-forty-cell battery,” I said. “That’s nothing nowadays, but it’s what this boat had. Well, a hundred and sixty ordinary six-volt automobile batteries will give us a four-hundred-and-eighty-cell bank of batteries. And I can hook them up so that we’ll have, in effect, two batteries of two hundred and forty cells paralleled for operation.”

  “And it’ll be the equivalent of the sub’s batteries?” Linc said eagerly.

  “No, certainly not,” I shook my head, “It’ll give us maybe ten to fifteen per cent of the normal operating potential of the big one, at best.”

  “And what the devil does all that mean?” Moreno said angrily.

  I grinned at him. “It means that if you need power you can get it from any battery regardless of its nature, including car batteries. But not for long. We’ll get all the power of the big batteries from the hundred and sixty little ones, but not for anywhere near the same length of time. They won’t begin to store the power of the big ones; it’s like a bucket compared to a great big tank. We can go under for”—I hesitated, then shrugged—“twenty minutes, say. May be a little longer, though I’d hate having to try getting more than a half hour out of them. And get this straight”—I glanced around at all of them. “We can go under one time only. Then our batteries will be as dead as this”—I patted one of the big cells. “And there’ll be no recharging them; not at sea, anyway.”

  “Why not?” Vic said.

  “With what?” I said, “The ship’s generator would pour in more juice than any little car battery could take; it’d be like trying to fill a washbasin with a high-pressure fire hose. They’re still little six-volt batteries no matter how we hook them up, and you use anything much more than an ordinary car-battery charger, you could burn them out. We put a full charge in them here, then we go out; and we can dive once. And for about twenty minutes, and fifteen would be safer. And that, my little ones”—I grinned at Rosa—“is the very best that papa can do.”

  After a moment or so, Lauffnauer said, “And those batteries will cost what?”

  “Well, besides batteries, Frank, we’ll need chargers—fast chargers and overnight chargers with a capacity of several batteries at a time. Plus connectors, and so on. No way in the world to do it, short of stealing the batteries, for any less than three thousand dollars.”

  Linc whistled slowly, then we all looked at Moreno. “Well,” he said, shrugging, “everyone who can is to turn in a thousand bucks, as you all know. I can, just barely, And Rosa can; you got insurance money left, haven’t you?” He looked at her, and she nodded shortly. “Vic?” he said then.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I’ve got it with me.”

  “So have I,” I said, “in my sea bag.”

  “And I can’t,” said Linc.

  Moreno nodded. “And Linc can’t. He told us that from the beginning; he just hasn’t got it, not a dime, and that’s that. Frank turned over eight hundred dollars to me an hour ago. It’s every cent he’s got, and after all”—Moreno smiled—“he’s contributing the sub. So we have forty-eight hundred dollars to get this boat operating, and to live on. I could scrape up a little more, maybe. And maybe Rosa could too. How about you, Vic?”

  “Yeah; maybe another five hundred, But that’d be the end of the line.”

  “Hugh?”

  “About the same; maybe a little less.”

  “O.K.” Moreno shoved his hat back off his forehead “We got forty-eight hundred bucks now. And say sixty-five hundred tops if we need it. So we’ll spend three thousand dollars for power, because we’ve got to have it and there’s not another darn thing we can do about it. We’ll get by on what’s left if we have to quit eating.” He grinned lightly. “Linc, what about the radio?”

  “We don’t need this type of wireless. We need only a small, portable outfit of very limited range. Our best bet is to buy it and forget this one. I’d say perhaps a hundred pounds—three hundred dollars. Maybe less; I haven’t priced them in America lately.” He smiled.

  “All right.” Moreno nodded. “We’ve got plenty of fuel; I checked it today. So now we start buying batteries—at every gas station, garage and auto-supply place for fifteen miles. And in New York; every time someone has to go in. And from the mail-order houses. We’ll buy no more than two at any one purchase; and we’ll take turns buying.” He said to me. “You take care of the chargers?”

  “Yeah, I’ll run into New York with the jeep for them.”

  “O.K. Bring back as many batteries as you have room for, too; maybe Linc can run in with you and bring back his radio and a couple rafts. Now, let’s get organized.” He held up one hand and began ticking off on his fingers the next things to be done. “We’ll start work on the diesels right away. Then overhaul the Kingstons, the air compressor and all vents. Get the engines and air compressor working, refill the air flasks, and we can test the tanks a few dozen times.”

  “What about the rudder and dive planes?” I said.

  “I’m freeing them now. We’ll have to use a blowtorch some places, but they’ll work. We’re going to be repairing, improvising, patching up, making do, doing without and maybe even reinventing. But so what?” He moved one of his heavy shoulders under the rust-streaked coveralls. “We’re not going on a world cruise in her, either. Or standing inspection. This tub’s like an old jalopy; if it gets us there and back, that’s all we need.”

  “If,” Linc murmured, and I saw Rosa’s lips move, and she very quickly, surreptitiously, made the sign of the cross on her forehead with a thumbnail.

  But Lauffnauer was smiling faintly. “She is a good ship,” he murmured, glancing slowly around the ancient little sub. “I trusted her once, and I will trust her again.” He said it with such simple, absolute faith that sudden conviction surged through us all. And when Moreno, smiling, too, now, said, “O.K., gang, let’s get to work,” I actually tossed him a mock salute, delighted to obey.

  He and I and Vic climbed out then, and Moreno got down in the water beside the sub to resume chipping rust from the aft hydroplanes, his hat shoved back on his head, and whistling softly. Vic and I each picked out an open-end wrench from the tools, such as he had, which Moreno had laid out on the dock. And when we climbed back to start work on the diesels in the engine room, Lauffnauer and Linc were hard at work on the Kingstons again, discussing the difference between these and the ones Linc had seen on a British sub.

  At this moment I loved these people—all of them. And I began then, unscrewing a bolt from a diesel water jacket, the best moments and days of my entire life—the happiest I will ever have, in many ways. I’m certain. And I think the others felt the same way.

  TO BE CONTINUED

  Could the old sub survive the fearful test ahead, or would it be a coffin for its crew?

  She is a good ship,” Frank Lauffnauer said about his little sub. “I trusted her once, and I will trust her again.”

  In 1918, as a young German sailor, Lauffnauer abandoned the U-19 off Long Island, after influenza killed most of its crew. Now, forty years later, Lauffnauer found the sub, under 100 feet of water, but still watertight. With the help of his confederates—Vic, Moreno. Linc, Rosa and Hugh—he raised her. The vessel was to serve somehow in his plan to seize a fortune i
n paper money being taken from Argentina to Europe by Reinhold Kroll, an unapprehended Nazi war criminal.

  Corrosion had ruined the sub’s batteries, but Hugh suggested using a large number of ordinary automobile batteries instead. Here is Hugh’s account of the tremendous job the conspirators faced in readying the U-19 for action.

  IV

  For ten days then the pattern hardly varied. We’d awaken in darkness, dragged out of sleep by the ruthless, insistent rattle of the alarm clock; I can hear it yet. There’d be a moment of drugged confusion, my muscles, for the first few days at least, stiffened and begging for more rest. Then the same single thought would flare up in my mind again—The boat!—and my eyes would pop open, a surge of deep pleasure bringing me wide awake. Rosa would arrive within minutes and quickly prepare our breakfasts; then it was down to the sub again and work, work, work, till eleven at night, till twelve, till after one o’clock sometimes.

  We had to interrupt work occasionally, one or the other of us taking the jeep to a nearby village or town for groceries, a tool, a piece of equipment. And once Moreno and Rosa made the trip to Fire Island and our rented cottage again, taking over several suitcases full of city clothes for each of us, food, razors, toothbrushes and other supplies. Each time any of us went out we bought batteries—at a dozen or more garages, filling stations and stores for ten or fifteen miles around and in New York. And we ordered batteries by mail, Rosa filling out and mailing the orders. They were shipped in by express to various nearby towns to invented names, and during the afternoons Rosa drove around picking them up, paying for them with cash; we acquired a dozen or so a day.

  With the first of the batteries, Vic and I started, tested and then adjusted the diesels. We’d found nothing really wrong with them; they’d been in good condition forty years ago, and nothing had happened to them since. But the gaskets for the water jackets enclosing the cylinders were of copper and asbestos; they were squeezed flat by forty years of constant pressure, all elasticity gone, and we had no way of replacing them. All Vic and I could do was tighten the bolts to the last fraction of possible turn, but they leaked still, and we knew our engines might run hot.