As i prepared to leave the Viperfish for Los Angeles, a new sense of urgency descended on the submarine. After Captain Harris returned from another trip to the Pentagon, activity increased, day and night, on the Viperfish. The captain provided no announcement on his return-no information to clarify the Viperfish's purpose, nothing about the final search looming in her future. Yet, at this time, when we had been hammered by the events of the past two months, when two of our crew were gone from us forever, when antimilitary sentiment was rampant throughout our families and society, there was not a man on board who was not ready to go out and search again.
Stepping up preparations for another voyage gave further support to these feelings and rallied us around the Special Project, with all its secret implications. One more search was all we asked for. Even though Harris divulged nothing about the Pentagon meetings, a whirlwind of activity stirred the air from the wardroom all the way down to the most junior enlisted man on board.
Lieutenant Pintard, in charge of the Reactor Control Division, cracked his whip on Chief Linaweaver-get the equipment ready to go, finish all the necessary preventive maintenance work, and ensure that nothing will shut us down on our next patrol. Linaweaver turned around and cracked the whip on the qualified reactor operators, and we, in turn, blasted the two new operator trainees, whom we called Dickie-Doo and Robbie Too, with stern admonishments to "get qualified, you non-qual pukes."
As the result of these actions, a new esprit de corps roared throughout the boat. We yanked open electronic panels, recalibrated gauges and meters, and poked hissing vacuum hoses into electrical drawers holding circuits exposed to microscopic amounts of dust. As the men in the wardroom planned the details of our next patrol, the rest of us worked day and night to make sure that the equipment would get us there and bring us back.
Another matter, thought about by all the nukes but discussed by none, was the matter of our diminishing fuel. No matter how much work we might do in preparation for our next effort to find the mystery target, the Viperfish was running out of "gas." The heat from nuclear fission could be produced only by a reactor with enough uranium to sustain the reaction, and Rickover's engineers were about to yank the Viperfish from the pool of operative U.S. nuclear submarines. I had done the calculations before shutting down the plant after our first run, and I knew the allowances necessary for starting up the reactor again. The news was okay but not great. We would have just enough power to get to our previous location in the Pacific and return, if we didn't spend too much time with any significant diversions or emergencies.
Not worrying about such mundane matters as nuclear fuel, the Special Project civilians and officers also worked around the clock to prepare the cable, load the stores, pack replacement parts for the Fish, and get ready for departure, now barely four weeks away. The entire crew of the Viperfish became so optimistic about trying again that I felt almost guilty when I left for California.
On my way to the airport to catch the flight to Los Angeles, I drove a rental car to Tripler Army Hospital to say good-by to Brian Lane. He was in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, the receptionist in the lobby said, in B Wing, with all the others having "that kind of a problem." As I hiked up to the third floor, I felt the same sense of anxiety that I had in the engine room at four hundred feet when Lane looked at me with that strange gaze and said, "You can't get to me."
After talking with a cluster of psychiatric nurses, I was directed far away from the severely disturbed patients in the B wing to the outside exercise area. Brian was in a fenced courtyard of the hospital grounds, an area that looked like a city park, complete with grass, benches, and trees. The compound was filled with Marines from Vietnam, wandering around under the trees, all wearing Tripler robes, most of them with shaved heads, which gave them a strange guru appearance. There were groups of rigidly calm Marines, with frozen expressions and vacant eyes, and other groups of agitated Marines, who were making rapid random movements with their arms or faces. The jolting thought hit me that some of these men might have been with me on my first flight to Hawaii, the ones I had sat with a thousand years ago before reporting to the Viperfish. I searched their faces as I looked for my shipmate, and I felt more of that same basic fear that I had felt on watch with him during our patrol.
"Hello, Roger." The familiar voice turned me in my tracks.
Brian's appearance shocked me, and I stepped back a pace. His skin was pale and covered with acne, his head shaved. A two-day beard darkened the lower half of his face. He was staring at me and smiling a half smile, his strange half smile that had been a part of the engine room during our last weeks at sea. Jesus Christ, Brian, I wanted to say, what have they done to you?
"Hello, Brian," I said. "How's it going?"
He studied me in silence for a couple of seconds too long and then looked down at his watch. "I'm okay," he answered in a drifting voice and continued to stare at his watch.
I tried to think of something appropriate to say while he concentrated on his watch. The puzzled expression on his face suggested that he was struggling with a basic thought process, perhaps trying to determine what the positions of the hands on the watch meant. He shook his wrist. He looked at me and then back at his watch again, and he finally fumbled with the band and removed the watch from his wrist.
"Are you sure you're okay?" I said, feeling my throat tighten and deciding to change the subject. "Everything's going fine on the boat."
My voice sounded strange to me. Everything's fine except that Chief Mathews has just left the Viperfish forever, I was thinking. He has just "non-volunteered" to nonsubmarine duty, and he has departed Pearl Harbor in a manner that suggests none of us will ever see him again. And you, Brian, are losing your mind.
Brian listened to his watch, studied it again, and becoming frustrated, looked like he was going to cry. His eyes appeared to have aged at least twenty years during the past two months as he lifted his face and stared at me.
"I can't understand anything any more, Roger," he said in a frightened voice. "Nothing makes any goddamn sense at all."
I said a few more words, tried to encourage him, and told him that we missed him on the boat and hoped that he would be okay. I mumbled, my words trailing off, my own thoughts becoming confused. We shook hands and said good-by, and I left him standing in the exercise yard, surrounded by the crowd of psychotic patients and holding his watch, while he tried to bring his mind back to the time before the Viperfish.
Burning rubber, I drove away from the hospital, my grip on the steering wheel a crushing force of anger. The rage followed me to the airport and, during the months ahead, clung to me like a curse, telling me without justification that I had in some way abandoned the man. I had not said the right things on watch when he was coming apart. I had driven off and left my shipmate helpless, in that company of psychotic men, with a mind that no longer worked as he struggled with a wristwatch that no longer made sense to him. I could not shake the feeling that I had left Brian in his time of greatest need.
My wedding and honeymoon with Keiko were something close to taking a brief but gigantic leap from the hell of Brian Lane's world straight up into heaven. As Keiko walked down the aisle of the USC Methodist chapel, she looked at me with the radiant happiness of a woman in love. Tears came to my eyes, and I was filled with her beauty. On our honeymoon to Canada, we explored every small town that we found along the way. I ignored newspapers and events of the world around us and shared the time, meant just for the two of us, only with Keiko. We returned to Honolulu with all of our belongings in one suitcase and one seabag and rented a small apartment in the little town of Waipio.