When Chief Linaweaver entered the engine room, I started to tell him the Coca-Cola story, but I hesitated and then changed the subject. No point in ruining the man's day, I decided. He definitely wouldn't SCRAM the reactor, turn off the electricity, and try to fix it himself, so there was no point in making him worry every time he looked at the circuit breaker during the next two months. I promised myself that I would find an official replacement part as soon as we returned to port. While the Viperfish headed down the channel in the direction of the Papa Hotel point that joined Pearl Harbor to the ocean, I mulled over just how far into outer space Admiral Rickover and every other design engineer would launch me if they ever heard of what I had used to keep one of our vital circuit breakers operational. And, for the next two months, every time I opened a can of Coca-Cola, I paused before taking a sip and thought about the No. 3 circuit breaker.
We cleared the entrance to Pearl Harbor at 0830 and promptly descended into the ocean. Our course was unknown, our speed was full power, and our destination was secret.
To the men in the engine room, our intent was clear. We had one last chance before the fuel was gone, and all of us felt a powerful determination to let nothing stop us. The pot-head students, the Vietnam War protests, the disruptions and turmoil of our society were all behind us now, and we found ourselves concentrating on the job ahead.
We ran out of real milk on the second day, and lettuce was gone by the fourth day. When we reached the Search Zone (as we began to call it), we were down to the usual canned, pickled, frozen, and otherwise preserved foods. Nobody was much interested in watching Regulus missile movies. If we crossed the 180th meridian into the Domain of the Golden Dragon, there was no announcement that we had done so. The machinery worked perfectly as our thundering propulsion turbines pushed us into colder waters. We finally slowed enough to allow for nearly silent operations for a couple of days as we made further progress through the ocean; about one week after departure, we reached our destination.
The civilians scrambled to line up the Fish with the hole at the bottom of the hangar. It was soon leaving the Viperfish and descending toward the ocean bottom, more than 15,000 feet below. To our surprise, we heard no detonations in the water. There was no need for emergency surfacing or sudden changes in depth. Hour upon hour, we slowly pulled our Fish through the water as it searched for a mystery lying somewhere far below.
In the engine room, I sat next to Donald Svedlow, both of us watching our panels and monitoring the various conditions that could shut down the nuclear plant or electrical systems. We didn't talk much about Brian Lane, and we didn't discuss the uncertain future of Paul Mathews. During the first few minutes of each four-hour watch, like a ritual, I lit up a cigar and Svedlow broke out a small can of chewing tobacco. As I filled the area with a cloud of smoke, he took a pinch of the stuff and jammed it into the corner of his mouth. We then sat back in our chairs and quietly watched the meters. To my considerable surprise, the reactor performed flawlessly week after week. We settled into a routine while we waited for an indication from the hangar compartment that something worthwhile was being accomplished. Between watches, I tried to read one of my several books, studied my cursed French lessons again, and, in the privacy of my rack, slowly thumbed through my stack of honeymoon pictures.
Every once in awhile, I downed a can of Coca-Cola and thought about circuit breakers.
After almost four weeks of searching, as our uranium fuel became further depleted, a new problem with the Fish equipment interrupted the flow of information from the bottom of the ocean. It was a fundamental design flaw in the winching system that prevented proper movement of the cable, a flaw that nobody could correct and one flaw that created a new level of frustration in the men working on the Fish. We could feel the contained rage of their failure. During meals, they talked little and poked at their food. Eventually, they dragged themselves back to the hangar to study the problem again and again.
By the fifth week, when the searching operation had come to a complete halt, morale dropped to the lowest level that I had seen since reporting on board.
At this point, Captain Harris turned the situation around for us in the form of a loudspeaker announcement, one of his rare broadcasts throughout the boat to all of us. I was calibrating a nuclear control circuit board at the far corner of the engine room when the speaker above my head came to life. I put down the equipment to listen.
"This is the captain speaking," the deep voice said, the words flowing with the authority of the commanding officer. "We have become hampered by equipment that was designed without benefit of practical experience. The Fish is now back inside the boat, and our search operation has been temporarily suspended. The flaws in this equipment must be corrected for us to complete our job."
I glanced down the passageway and noticed that the other men had also stopped their work to listen.
"We have come a long way during these past months," the captain continued, "but we have a considerable distance to go. The Viperfish has enough fuel for another four weeks, and we are going to remain here for that time as we work to find a solution. The equipment will not give us the answer. It is going to be up to the crew to find the answer." After outlining the details of our dilemma, he concluded the announcement by urging each of us to give our best effort.
Six hours later, as the captain sat in his stateroom and reviewed the design parameters of the winching system, a knock came at his door. Petty Officer Timothy Brown, one of the enlisted men working with the civilians in the hangar, was carrying several pieces of paper covered with penciled drawings. Brown was a big man with a gentle manner. His background was more mechanical than scientific, and he was known by the crew to be more of a worker than an innovator.
"Captain, I'm sorry to interrupt you," Brown said politely as he opened the door, "but I believe I have the solution to our problem."
Harris and Brown hunched over the tiny stateroom table for hours as they reviewed the sketches, criticized and analyzed the new concepts, and bounced fresh ideas back and forth within the cramped quarters.
"We drill a hole here," Brown said, his pencil racing across the drawing. "We insert a pin here; this will stabilize the bearing and prevent the movement of the shaft. And then we bolt this clamp here, like so."
The captain looked up at Brown, his bushy eyebrows drawn together with concern. "There are some pretty strong assumptions, here," he said.
"Yes, sir, there are," Brown answered, simply. "I did have to make some guesses, but I think it can work."
"It could conceivably stabilize the whole assembly," the captain agreed.
"It would take only a couple of days to do this, sir, all of us working together on this thing. There'll still be plenty of time left for the search."
Brown's design was accepted by the civilian scientists and incorporated into the winching system in less than two days. Soon after, everybody began the complex process of lowering the Fish through the hole. The cable moved freely with the revised winching mechanism, and the Fish again disappeared into the black ocean and moved along on its journey to the bottom nearly twenty thousand feet down.