by Nevil Shute
“Okay, sir.”
The captain stood back from the periscope and the executive officer took it, and issued a couple of orders to keep the ship in position. At the microphone the Lieutenant went on calling; Dwight lit a cigarette and leaned back on the chart table. Presently he stubbed out the cigarette and glanced at the clock.
From forward there was the clang of a steel hatch; he started and looked round. It was followed a moment later by another, and then footsteps on the deck above them. There were steps running down the alley, and Lieutenant Hirsch appeared in the control-room. “Swain got out through the escape hatch, sir,” he said. “He’s out on deck now!”
Dwight bit his lip. “Escape hatch closed?”
“Yes, sir. I checked that.”
The captain turned to the Chief of the Boat. “Station a guard on the escape hatches forward and aft.”
There was a splash in the water beside the hull as Mortimer ran off. Dwight said to Farrell, “See if you can see what he’s doing.”
The executive dropped the periscope down and put it to maximum depression, sweeping around. The captain said to Hirsch, “Why didn’t somebody stop him?”
“I guess he did it too quick. He came from aft and sat down, kind of biting his nails. Nobody paid him much attention. I was in the forward torpedo flat, so I didn’t see. First they knew, he was in the escape trunk with the door shut, and the outer hatch open to the air. Nobody cared to chase out there after him.”
Dwight nodded. “Sure. Get the trunk blown through and then go in and see the outer hatch is properly secure.”
From the periscope Farrell said, “I can see him now. He’s swimming for the jetty.”
Dwight stooped almost to the deck and saw the swimmer. He stood up and spoke to Lieutenant Benson at the microphone. The Lieutenant touched the volume control and said, “Yeoman Swain, hear this.” The swimmer paused and trod water. “The captain’s orders are that you return immediately to the ship. If you come back at once he will take you on board again and take a chance on the contamination. You are to come back on board right now.”
From the speaker above the navigation table they all heard the reply, “You go and get stuffed!”
A faint smile flickered on the captain’s face. He bent again to the periscope and watched the man swim to the shore, watched him clamber up the ladder at the jetty. Presently he stood erect. “Well, that’s it,” he remarked. He turned to John Osborne by his side. “How long would you say he’ll last?”
“He’ll feel nothing for a time,” said the scientist. “He’ll probably be vomiting tomorrow night. After that—well, it’s just anybody’s guess, sir. It depends upon the constitution of the individual.”
“Three days? A week?”
“I should think so. I shouldn’t think it could be longer, at this radiation level.”
“And we’d be safe to take him back—till when?”
“I’ve got no experience. But after a few hours everything that he evacuates would be contaminated. We couldn’t guarantee the safety of the ship’s company if he should be seriously ill on board.”
Dwight raised the periscope and put his eyes to it. The man was still visible walking up the street in his wet clothes. They saw him pause at the door of the drug store and look in; then he turned a corner and was lost to sight. The captain said, “Well, he doesn’t seem to have any intention of coming back.” He turned over the periscope to his executive. “Secure that loud hailer. The course is for Santa Maria, in the middle of the channel. Ten knots.”
There was dead silence in the submarine, broken only by the helm orders, the low murmur of the turbines, and the intermittent whizzing of the steering engine. Dwight Towers went heavily to his cabin, and Peter Holmes followed him. He said, “You’re not going to try to get him back, sir. I could go on shore in a radiation suit.”
Dwight glanced at his liaison officer. “That’s a nice offer, Commander, but I won’t accept it. I thought of that myself. Say we put an officer on shore with a couple of men to go fetch him. First we’ve got to find him. Maybe we’d be stuck off here four or five hours, and then not know if we’d be risking everybody in the ship by taking him back in with us. Maybe he’ll have eaten contaminated food, or drunk contaminated water …” He paused. “There’s another thing. On this mission we shall be submerged and living on tinned air for twenty-seven days, maybe twenty-eight. Some of us will be in pretty bad shape by then. You tell me on the last day if you’d like it to be four or five hours longer because we wasted that much time on Yeoman Swain.”
Peter said, “Very good, sir. I just thought I’d like to make the offer.”
“Sure. I appreciate that. We’ll be coming back past here tonight or else maybe soon after dawn tomorrow. We’ll stop a little while and hail him then.”
The captain went back to the control-room and stood by the executive officer, taking alternate glances through the periscope with him. They went close to the entrance to the Lake Washington Canal, scanning the shore, rounded Fort Lawton, and stood in to the naval dock and the commercial docks in Elliott Bay, in the heart of the city.
The city was undamaged. A minesweeper lay at the Naval Receiving Station, and five or six freighters lay in the commercial docks. Most of the window glass was still in place in the high buildings at the centre of the city. They did not go very close in, fearing underwater obstructions, but so far as they could see conditions through the periscope there seemed to be nothing wrong with the city at all, except that there were no people there. Many electric lights and neon signs were burning still.
At the periscope Lieutenant-Commander Farrell said to his captain, “It was a good defensive proposition, sir—better than San Francisco. The land in the Olympic Peninsula reaches way out to the west, over a hundred miles.”
“I know it,” said the captain. “They had a lot of guided missiles out there, like a screen.”
There was nothing there to stay for, and they went out of the bay and turned south-west for Santa Maria Island; already they could see the great antenna towers. Dwight called Lieutenant Sunderstrom to his cabin. “You all set to go?” he asked.
“Everything’s all ready,” said the radio officer. “I just got to jump into the suit.”
“Okay. Your job’s half done before you start, because we know now that there’s still electric power. And we’re pretty darned near certain there’s no life, although we don’t know that for sure. It’s sixty-four thousand dollars to a sausage you’ll find a reason for the radio that’s just an accident of some sort. If it was just to find out what kind of an accident makes those signals, I wouldn’t risk the ship and I wouldn’t risk you. Got that?”
“I got that, sir.”
“Well now, hear this. You’ve got air for two hours in the cylinders. I want you back decontaminated and in the hull in an hour and a half. You won’t have a watch. I’ll keep the time for you from here. I’ll sound the siren every quarter of an hour. One blast when you’ve been gone a quarter of an hour, two blasts, half an hour, and so on. When you hear four blasts you start winding up whatever you may be doing. At five blasts you drop everything, whatever it may be, and come right back. Before six blasts you must be back and decontaminating in the escape trunk. Is that all clear?”
“Quite clear, sir.”
“Okay. I don’t want this mission completed particularly now. I want you back on board safe. For two bits I wouldn’t send you at all, because we know now most all of what you’ll find, but I told the Admiral we’d put somebody on shore to investigate. I don’t want you to go taking undue risks. I’d rather have you back on board, even if we don’t find out the whole story of what makes these signals. The only thing would justify you taking any risk would be if you find any signs of life on shore.”
“I get that, sir.”
“No souvenirs from shore. The only thing to come back in the hull is you, stark naked.”
“Okay, sir.”
The captain went back into the control-
room, and the radio officer went forward. The submarine nosed her way forward with the hull just awash, feeling her way to Santa Maria at a slow speed in the bright sunlight of the spring afternoon, ready to stop engines immediately and blow tanks if she hit any obstruction. They went very cautiously, and it was about five o’clock in the afternoon when she finally lay-to off the jetty of the island, in six fathoms of water.
Dwight went forward, and found Lieutenant Sunderstrom sitting in the radiation suit complete but for the helmet and the pack of oxygen bottles, smoking a cigarette. “Okay, fella,” he said. “Off you go.”
The young man stubbed out his cigarette and stood while a couple of men adjusted the helmet and the harness of the pack. He tested the air, glanced at the pressure gauge, elevated one thumb, and climbed into the escape trunk, closing the door behind him.
Out on deck he stretched and breathed deeply, relishing the sunlight and the escape from the hull. Then he raised a hatch of the superstructure and pulled out the dinghy pack, stripped off the plastic sealing strips, unfolded the dinghy, and pressed the lever of the air bottle that inflated it. He tied the painter and lowered the rubber boat into the water, took the paddle and led the boat aft to the steps beside the conning tower. He clambered down into it, and pushed off from the submarine.
The boat was awkward to manoeuvre with the single paddle, and it took him ten minutes to reach the jetty. He made it fast and clambered up the ladder; as he began to walk towards the shore he heard one blast from the siren of the submarine. He turned and waved, and walked on.
He came to a group of grey painted buildings, stores of some kind. There was a weatherproof electric switch upon an outside wall; he went to it and turned it, and a lamp above his head lit up. He turned it off again, and went on.
He came to a latrine. He paused, then crossed the road, and looked in. A body in khaki gabardine lay half in and half out of one of the compartments, much decomposed. It was no more than he had expected to see, but the sight was sobering. He left it, and went on up the road.
The Communication School lay over on the right, in buildings by itself. This was the part of the installation that he knew, but that was not what he had come to see. The Coding Office lay to the left, and near the Coding Office the main transmitting office would almost certainly be located.
He entered the brick building that was the Coding Office, and stood in the hallway trying the doors. Every door was locked except for two that led into the toilets. He did not go in there.
He went out and looked around. A transformer station with a complex of wires and insulators attracted his attention, and he followed the wiring to another, two-storey, wooden office building. As he approached he heard the hum of an electrical machine running, and at the same moment the siren of the submarine sounded two blasts.
When they had died away he heard the hum again, and followed it to a power house. The converter that was running was not very large; he judged it to be about fifty kilowatts. On the switchboard the needles of the instruments stood steady, but one indicating temperature stood in a red sector of the dial. The machine itself was running with a faint grating noise beneath the quiet hum. He thought it would not last very much longer.
He left the power house and went into the office building. Here all the doors were unlocked, some of them open. The rooms on the ground floor appeared to be executive offices; here papers and signals lay strewn about the floor like dead leaves, blown by the wind. In one room a casement window was entirely missing and there was much water damage. He crossed this room and looked out of the window; the casement window frame lay on the ground below, blown from its hinges.
He went upstairs, and found the main transmitting room. There were two transmitting desks, each with a towering metal frame of grey radio equipment in front of it. One of these sets was dead and silent, the instruments all at zero.
The other set stood by the window, and here the casement had been blown from its hinges and lay across the desk. One end of the window frame projected outside the building and teetered gently in the light breeze. One of the upper corners rested on an overturned Coke bottle on the desk. The transmitting key lay underneath the frame that rested unstably above it, teetering a little in the wind.
He reached out and touched it with his gloved hand. The frame rocked on the transmitting key, and the needle of a milliammeter upon the set flipped upwards. He released the frame, and the needle fell back. There was one of U.S.S. Scorpion’s missions completed, something that they had come ten thousand miles to see, that had absorbed so much effort and attention in Australia, on the other side of the world.
He lifted the window frame from the transmitting desk and set it down carefully on the floor; the woodwork was not damaged and it could be repaired and put back in its place quite easily. Then he sat down at the desk and with gloved hand upon the key began transmitting in English and in clear.
He sent, “Santa Maria sending. U.S.S. Scorpion reporting. No life here. Closing down.” He went on repeating this message over and over again, and while he was doing so the siren blew three blasts.
As he sat there, his mind only half occupied with the mechanical repetition of the signal that he knew was almost certainly being monitored in Australia, his eyes roamed around the transmitting office. There was a carton of American cigarettes with only two packs removed that he longed for, but the captain’s orders had been very definite. There were one or two bottles of Coke. On a window sill there was a pile of copies of the Saturday Evening Post.
He finished transmitting when he judged he had been at it for twenty minutes. In the three final repetitions he added the words, “Lieutenant Sunderstrom sending. All well on board. Proceeding northwards to Alaska.” Finally he sent. “Closing down the station now, and switching off.”
He took his hand from the key and leaned back in the chair. Gee, these tubes and chokes, this milliammeter and that rotary converter down below—they’d done a mighty job. Nearly two years without any maintenance or replacement, and still functioning as well as ever! He stood up, inspected the set, and turned off three switches. Then he walked round to the back and opened a panel and looked for the name of the manufacturer on the tubes; he would have liked to send them a testimonial.
He glanced again at the carton of Lucky Strikes, but the captain was right, of course; they would be hot and it might well be death to smoke them. He left them with regret, and went downstairs. He went to the power house where the converter was running, inspected the switchboard carefully, and tripped two switches. The note of the machine sank progressively in a diminuendo; he stood watching it till finally it came to rest. It had done a swell job and it would be good as ever when the bearings had been overhauled. He could not have borne to leave it running till it cracked up.
The siren blew four blasts while he was there, and his work now was over. He had still a quarter of an hour. There was everything here to be explored and nothing to be gained by doing so. In the living quarters he knew he would find bodies like the one that he had found in the latrine; he did not want to see them. In the coding room, if he broke down a door, there might be papers that would interest historians in Australia, but he could not know which they would be, and anyway the captain had forbidden him to take anything on board.
He went back and up the stairs into the transmitting office. He had a few minutes left for his own use, and he went straight to the pile of copies of the Saturday Evening Post. As he had suspected, there were three numbers issued after Scorpion had left Pearl Harbor before the outbreak of the war, that he had not seen and that no one in the ship had seen. He leafed them through avidly. They contained the three concluding instalments of the serial, The Lady and the Lumberjack. He sat down to read.
The siren blew five blasts and roused him before he was half way through the first instalment. He must go. He hesitated for a moment, and then rolled up the three magazines and tucked them under his arm. The dinghy and his radiation suit would be hot and must be left in
the locker on the outer casing of the submarine to be washed by the sea water; he could roll up these hot magazines in the deflated dinghy and perhaps they would survive, perhaps they could be decontaminated and dried out and read when they got back to the safe southern latitudes. He left the office, closing the door carefully behind him, and made his way towards the jetty.
The Officers’ Mess stood facing the Sound, a little way from the jetty. He had not noticed it particularly on landing, but now something about it attracted his attention and he deviated fifty yards towards it. The building had a deep verandah, facing the view. He saw now that there was a party going on there. Five men in khaki gabardine sat with two women in easy chairs around a table; in the light breeze he saw the flutter of a summer frock. On the table there were highball and old fashioned glasses.
For a moment he was deceived, and went quickly closer. Then he stopped in horror, for the party had been going on for over a year. He broke away, and turned, and went back to the jetty, only anxious now to get back into the close confinement and the warmth of fellowship and the security of the submarine.
On deck he deflated and stowed the dinghy, wrapping up his magazines in the folds. Then he stripped quickly, put the helmet and the clothing into the locker, slammed the hatch down and secured it, and got down into the escape trunk, turning on the shower. Five minutes later he emerged into the humid stuffiness of the submarine.
John Osborne was waiting at the entrance to the trunk to run a Geiger counter over him and pass him as clean, and a minute later he was standing with a towel round his waist making his report to Dwight Towers in his cabin, the executive officer and the liaison officer beside him. “We got your signals on the radio here,” the captain said. “I don’t just know if they’ll have got them in Australia—it’s daylight all the way. It’s around eleven in the morning there. What would you say?”
“I’d say they’d have got them,” the radio officer replied. “It’s autumn there, and not too many electric storms.”
