The knocking came again, weird, irregular. The petrified sailors shrank back in alarm. But suddenly the wounded quartermaster slid from his perch, hobbled forward, commenced madly to free the forward door.
“Someone’s still alive in there! Lend a hand here!” He heaved frantically to loosen the dogs he had sledged home.
A hand gripped him, stopped his hammering. Sanders was clinging to his arm.
“Don’t do that, chief!” he begged. “Leave her closed. They’re done for in there anyhow. But if that gas gets into this room, an’ we hafta abandon the controls, then it’s goodnight everybody!”
“Lay off me! They get the same chance we do!” Tom shook off his arm, started beating loose the dogs.
“Pete, stand by here when I open it! You too, Sanders! Drag ’em through, four bells! And quit breathing while you’re at it!”
The last dog was loosened, turned back, clear of the door.
“Stand by, now!” Tom flung the door open, held his breath.
Mullaney dashed through into the yellow cloud beyond, stepped on something soft, hurled it through the opening, seized another body, dragged it back with him.
“S’all!” he shouted as he crossed the coaming. Tom jerked the iron door closed, twisted down the dogs, rammed them tight again, then turned to look. Biff Wolters lay gasping in the water at his feet, Pete was carrying Bill Arnold’s unconscious form aft.
Sanders lifted Biff’s stocky frame erect, held him as his gassed lungs heaved, struggling to expel the chlorine-laden air that he had breathed. With cracked lips, distended nostrils, and watering eyes, Biff looked at them, smiled wanly at the chief quartermaster.
“I knew ye’d hear me, Tom.” His head drooped. “Lemme lie down. I had to help Bill out, he couldn’t walk.” He took a deep breath, another, and another. “Ain’t the air fine!” His huge chest swelled out, inhaling it thankfully. “Lemme lie down a minute, I’m tired.” He exhaled slowly, as if reluctant to part with the air. “Terrible time findin’ Bill ’n draggin’ him down that passage. An’ then to find the door wuz closed!”" He breathed convulsively, leaning heavily on Tom’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t’a blamed ye, Tom, if ye hadn’t opened it. My fault fer not gettin’ out when the word wuz passed. But I had to get Bill. That gas just burns yer guts out. Lemme lie down, Tom.”
The deck was covered with water. No place to stretch out except on the wardroom table alongside Rolfe’s stiffening corpse. Tom shook his head. Where else then? There was the range in the galley. That was above water — and unnecessary now. Hardly able to hobble, he helped Biff aft, watched Sanders assist him up, and saw him relax with a sigh of perfect content, his feet on the drainboard to the sink, his racked body sprawled loosely over the cold burner disks of the galley range.
Biff rolled his swollen eyes, mumbled drowsily, “Ye’re a reg’lar shipmate, Tom. You go ashore with me when we git back ’n I’ll show ye how to make a liberty ye won’t never fergit. Not even when ye got ten hash marks.” He closed his eyes. “Don’t bother with me, Tom, I jus’ wanna breathe awhile.” He lay back, his parched lungs crying for air to wash them free of the irritating chlorine they had soaked up.
Gently Tom left the galley, smiling grimly at Biff’s conceit. Their next liberty. When they got back. Yes, when they got back.
“That’s a good one, chief,” Sanders laughed mirthlessly. “I’ll bet a month’s pay against a plugged nickel that if Biff ever makes another liberty he’ll have to get acquainted with the mermaids. Becoz it looks to me like the L-20’S gonna be the station ship fer these here parts. An’ most of her crew’s permanently signed on already up for’d. You wanna take that bet, chief?”
“I’m low on plugged nickels tonight, Joe, or I’d take you on, but why give up the ship? We’re still alive and kicking, though a hell of a lot of good kicking’ll do us. I wish to Christ I could do a little thinking instead.” He looked into the radio room, where Pete had propped Arnold up on the operator’s bench with his head reclining on the table.
“How is he, Pete?”
“Jist breathin’, that’s all, Tom. He don’t know whether he’s comin’ or goin’.”
“Nothing we can do, I guess. Biff took a hell of a chance getting him out, and we don’t want to lose him if we can help it.” Tom looked at Arnold’s hunched-up figure mournfully. “He isn’t as young as the rest of us, but I’ll bet he comes through yet. Stick with him, Pete, and see he doesn’t roll into the drink and drown.” He paused, looked down at his soaked trousers. “My feet are just about frozen. I’m going back to that manifold.”
Hanging to the Kingston valve levers, Tom eased himself up the room and then sat stiffly down again on the valve wheels. With Sanders’ assistance, he managed to get both his feet up and rested them on some copper pipes going to the air banks. With a sigh of relief, he propped his head against the diving wheel and lay back, staring at the inner hull of the submarine, arching in a smooth circle a few feet above him.
Unconsciously the quiet of the ocean floor worked on him; slowly his overwrought nerves calmed down, his muscles relaxed a trifle, he looked back more calmly at the events since they had first sighted those clouds of smoke in the early dawn. The crash of depth bombs, the agony of sinking, the whizzing of bullets round his head — how long ago they seemed. He pondered their attack on the cruisers. That, at least, had been successful. A look of satisfaction crossed his face. That was what subs were for. Surface warships were their prey. The L-20 had smashed that raid as neatly as a squadron a hundred times her size could have done. Subs could command the sea if they went at it right. Why bother with helpless merchantmen? But that was all the Germans would attack. And back home people were beginning to think that no sub was any better than a pirate.
Tom shifted his position uneasily so that the little nest of valves he was resting on pressed him in a different spot.
At that, there was something to be said for limiting your attacks to merchantmen. If you were a little careful, the chances of a sub’s getting hit by the pop guns those tubs carried were negligible, and there wasn’t any chance at all of having a shower of depth bombs come raining down to sink you. The German subs were wise. It was a safe game they were playing all right! Attack only merchantmen, keep away from warships. And they were winning the war with it.
Keep away from warships. Knowles looked at the hissing jets of water shooting through their strained plating. That was the secret. Keep away from warships. The Germans were past masters at it. Pure luck that the Walton had ever got close enough to the U-38 to bomb her. And then Erhardt hadn’t been such a fool as to give his position away while they were being bombed. Erhardt! Damn him! But he was good nevertheless.
Well, the Germans were playing it safe. A sub could always see its enemy first. And if that enemy turned out to be a warship, the U-boat stayed far away and well submerged. The limeys had fooled them a few times though. Those mystery ships, decoy tramps with hidden guns, had finished a few U-boats by simulating panicky abandonment and then, when the sub came to the surface, letting them have it from the masked guns. But that was over. The Germans were on to it now. Their subs were staying submerged to periscope depth after attacking, or else moving out of gun range till their victims sank. The mystery ships were getting no more prizes. The invisible U-boats were sinking freighters again faster than ever. And Erhardt was doing more than his share.
Well, he’d nearly got him anyway. Tom’s chilled body warmed a little as he remembered the thrill when the Walton dashed through the smoke abaft the sinking Rolland and sighted Erhardt and the U-38! If only they had been able to get within torpedo range before the U-38 had seen them!
Tom sighed. A sub instead of a destroyer could have done it. Give the L-20 a chance like that, and the U-38 would have been nothing more than a widespreading patch of oil before she knew there was an enemy within a hundred miles. Yes, but why expect the impossible? Subs were too slow, especially submerged. The Walton had raced up from below the horizon in twenty min
utes; it would have taken the L-20 two hours to cover that distance and by that time the Rolland would long since have been sunk and her enemy well on her way to other victims.
But still it was pleasant to imagine what he might have done to Erhardt if only he had had the L-20 close by — a little nearer, for instance, than they had been to those battle cruisers. And the U-38, perhaps at periscope depth, unsuspectingly circling round, a made-to-order target. Some revenge for that night in Manila, for the boys in the C-3! Drowsily he visioned the scene, imagining the L-20 creeping up on her enemy.
Suddenly Tom leaped from his seat, splashed into the water.
“I got it, Pete!” he yelled. The startled seamen in the control room looked up excitedly as he hobbled aft.
“Wot’s ailin’ you?” asked Mullaney, poking his head hurriedly out of the radio booth.
“The U-boats! I know how to lick ’em now!” exclaimed Tom.
The shivering sailors crouching here and there lost interest, fell back apathetically. One of them, looking sadly at the running quartermaster, significantly twirled his index fingers round his temples, whispered sympathetically to his nearest mate, “He’s gone, wheels in his bean!”
But Joe Sanders, leaning against the Kingston valves, roared with laughter as Tom shot by him. Knowles paused, looked round amazed.
“Ain’t that good news, Tom! Wotcha gonna do, now ye know?” Sanders stopped laughing, grinned at him. “Get a trained porpoise to take the secret back to Admiral Sims, or ye gonna wait till ye pass out and then slip it to him through one o’ these here trance artists?” The little quartermaster fairly rocked with mirth. “Say, mates, that’s the first joke since we shipped in Davy Jones’ navy. Thanks, Tom, we kin die laffin’ now, instead o’ chokin’ to death.”
Tom Knowles’ pale face flushed violently. Unsteadily he turned, walked silently back, clambered up again on his uneven seat. Sanders was right. What good was his idea now? It would die with him, sixty fathoms down. Dully he looked through the wrecked submarine — chlorine-filled compartments forward, battened off, filled with dead men; the half-flooded control room with a few stifling sailors mocking him; the deserted machinery spaces aft — silent diesels, useless motors. He felt crushed, as if the entire weight of those sixty fathoms of ocean, clutching the unfortunate submarine, had suddenly fallen on him, flattened him out.
And it was a great idea too. Give him a chance with it, and, in a month or two, the U-boat menace would be curbed at last, the Allies free to fight it out on the Western Front. And if Erhardt ever crossed his path again, he’d square that account for fair. If —
But the sea had them tightly gripped; slowly it was seeping in, making them heavier. Soon it would rise high enough to short the switchboard, leave them in terrifying darkness. And then the few men left would gradually use up the little oxygen remaining, build up the carbon dioxide. In the darkness, in the cold, in the damp, the water would creep up on them; they would struggle frenziedly to the last, clutching at pipes, at conduits overhead to keep their nostrils above that unseen tide, gasping for breath in the foul air; then one by one, like rats caught in a trap, their strength would fade, their nerveless fingers let go. Their torture would be over.
Tom groaned. He had the answer. Revenge on Erhardt, the end of the reign of terror exercised by the U-boats. And he was trapped, gripped firmly by the unrelenting ocean rolling over him.
That damned clutch. He looked down at it. A little thing. But ambition, hope, life — were fading away between its slipping disks.
The minutes ticked slowly off. Another hour went by. The strained breathing of the few survivors, an occasional gasp, a sudden cough, mingled with the hissing of the water squirting in. Rigid muscles, braced against levers, valves, or stanchions, held their owners on strange resting places, clear of the slowly rising water. A vague odour of chlorine tinged the atmosphere, irritated their lungs, gave rise to fits of choking coughs. A little gas had filtered through the opened door when they had rescued Wolters and Arnold.
With his brain swimming, Tom tried to think. They could not get the boat up. All right. Any chance of getting out of her? He figured a little. The weight of the sea above them, how much was it? He calculated it roughly. There was a load of thirty tons pressing down on each little hatch, holding it closed. It didn’t seem possible. Yes, that’s right, thirty tons, the weight of a Pullman car sitting on each little exit hatch, holding it closed. The pressure over the whole hull must be tremendous. He estimated that painfully. About forty thousand tons. The sea had them, squeezing their frail shell with a grip of forty thousand tons. Why didn’t it crush in like an eggshell? He glanced fearfully at the strained plates encircling him, the started rivets, the leaking joints. They were close enough to letting go.
Never mind that, how about getting a hatch open, getting out? But that thirty ton load on each one, foolish to try bucking it. The hatches were jammed down by the sea, their rubber gaskets flattened out, their bronze rims riding metal to metal on the hatch coamings, biting into them, straining to spread their huge load over a little more steel.
Still, there was the conning tower, double-hatched, designed as an escape trunk. If he got into that, closed the lower hatch, flooded the trunk from the sea, the incoming water would squeeze the air in the tower into a little space at the top and balance the pressure inside with the sea pressure outside. That would take the load off the upper hatch, allow him to trip it, perhaps to float out of the conning tower as the bubble of air rushed out into the sea.
But then? At the bottom of the ocean, three hundred and fifty-one feet from the surface, with the sea pressure suddenly gripping his body, and a hundred and twenty yards of icy water for him to fight his way up through. What chance? Even if his ribs did not immediately crack, his chest cave in? Hopeless. But if by a miracle he got through that, then the surface. The deserted sea, no land near, no ships to pick him up. A few feeble strokes in the cold water, waves washing over him, spray driving into his nostrils, then the end. It was night up there, the long northern night. There would be not even a brief glimpse of the glory of the sun before the waves swallowed him up, and he sank again to rest at last in the ooze beside the stricken submarine.
No use. Whichever way his panicky thoughts turned, there was no escape. Trapped. Inexorably. Hopelessly. His brain fell into a torpor, mercifully easing the horror of facing what lay before.
His mind wandered away, subconsciously attempting to ease the strain of his immediate peril. He dozed over the past. Annapolis. His plebe summer. Ten-oared cutters moving awkwardly up the Severn. Blisters on his hands from that young tree they called an oar which he struggled with while the upper class coxswain sarcastically discussed his stroke. His youngster cruise. Berlin before the war. Those marvellous strawberries and cream in that inn high above the Bergen fiord, looking down on the deep blue water, mountains mirrored there, battleships swinging idly at anchor, far from the sea. Annapolis again. June week. Girls. Parades. The Farewell Ball. More girls, with the moonlight shining over Chesapeake Bay.
He sighed at that, twisted uneasily on his manifold, shifted his wounded leg a trifle to ease the pain.
And then the Fleet. Mercifully his mind skipped over the C-3, his years of wandering, of agony in the reeking tramps, the filthy forecastles, as he roamed the China Sea. Boston. The Charlesbank, Washington Street, Boston Common. His wild days as a riveter. Easy money, no responsibility, no future. Whisky. Girls. Plenty in Boston. And Quincy too. Hard work though, bucking up against that rivet gun. The old preliminary tap-tap, then the clatter of the flying die, the quick trimming with the chipping hammer, the hurried finishing off with the gun, floated again through his ears. Rivet after rivet, the endless rattle and bang of the guns against the red-hot metal. Scaffolds, the gaunt ribs of the unfinished ship. Dirt, smoke, noise. You had to be good to be a riveter. And in hot weather or cold, you got those rivets down in the sweat of your brow and the sweat of your palms. Easy money. Not when you earned it. Only when y
ou came to blow it along Washington Street. Those dollars were as slippery, as hard to hang to as a rivet gun after you’d driven up the first hundred rivets and your leather gloves were oozing sweat from your straining palms. Right.
Vaguely he recalled his last day in Quincy, dwelt a moment on his last rivet. The bucking gun had jerked from his slippery gloves and shot the die all the way across the deck. He had had to hustle to retrieve it, rub his gloves in the dirt and the rust to get a good grip on his gun, and get that rivet down before it cooled off. His last rivet. He sighed with satisfaction. He’d won; hammered it home in spite of that slip. A good job too. Slippery or not, no rivet gun could get away from him, spoil his work.
Tom’s reverie broke, his unseeing eyes came back from far away, he shifted a little, looked down behind the maze of pipes and valves. Slowly his face lighted up; the hopeless resignation vanished. A queer idea took shape in his mind; he regarded the high-pressure pump clutch below him with a new interest. Slippery, yes. Just like his old riveting gloves. And he’d licked that. Those clutch disks were inaccessible, they couldn’t get bolts through them, you could hardly touch them, but they wouldn’t slip again. But this time he’d shut up about his idea till he was ready.
Carefully he crawled from his seat, clung to the diving wheels to steady himself while he brought a little life back to his cramped and numbed legs. Then he started aft. Sanders, curled up on top of the gyro compass bowl, watched him pass without a word, hardly lifting his drooping head. In the radio booth, Mullaney was squeezed on the little bench alongside Arnold, both motionless, both with shoulders sprawled out on the radio desk, jammed together as if trying to keep each other warm. Another trying step. Tom was abreast the galley, peered in. Biff lay as before, his arms over his breast, his feet dangling loosely in the sink, his lungs still heaving occasionally. They all seemed far gone. Could they help him when he called?
Painfully Tom hobbled along, panting fiercely. Movement was difficult, breathing an effort. A terrible load seemed to press on his wavering knees as he struggled to walk. His heart pounded, his straining lungs inhaled and exhaled far above their normal rate, striving to extract enough oxygen to support his exertions.
Pigboats Page 14
