The decision he had hoped he would not have to make was now upon him. This slow whittling away of the wreckage was not good enough; they would have to use explosives, cutting the fallen derrick at the center, so that the lower, unsupported portion would drop back to the seabed and its weight would no longer pin down the sub.
It had been the obvious thing to do, even from the beginning, but there were two objections: one was the risk of using explosives so near the sub’s already weakened hull; the other was the problem of placing the charges in the correct spot. Of the derrick’s four main girders, the two upper ones were easily accessible, but the lower pair could not be reached by the remote handling mechanisms of the scoutsubs. It was the sort of job that only an unencumbered diver could do, and in shallow water it would not have taken more than a few minutes.
Unfortunately, this was not shallow water; they were eleven hundred feet down — and at a pressure of over thirty atmospheres.
CHAPTER XXIV
‘It’s too great a risk, Franklin. I won’t allow it.” It was not often, thought Franklin, that one had a chance of arguing with a senator. And if necessary he would not merely argue; he would defy.
“I know there’s a danger, sir,” he admitted, “but there’s no alternative. It’s a calculated risk — one life against twenty-three.”
“But I thought it was suicide for an unprotected man to dive below a few hundred feet.”
“It is if he’s breathing compressed air. The nitrogen knocks him out first, and then oxygen poisoning gets him. But with the right mixture it’s quite possible. With the gear I’m using, men have been down fifteen hundred feet.”
“I don’t want to contradict you, Mr. Franklin,” said Captain Jacobsen quietly, “but I believe that only one man has reached fifteen hundred — and then under carefully controlled conditions. And he wasn’t attempting to do any work.”
“Nor am I; I just have to place those two charges.”
“But the pressure!”
“Pressure never makes any difference, Senator, as long as it’s balanced. There may be a hundred tons squeezing on my lungs — but I’ll have a hundred tons inside and won’t feel it.”
“Forgive me mentioning this — but wouldn’t it be better to send a younger man?”
“I won’t delegate this job, and age makes no difference to diving ability. I’m in good health, and that’s all that matters.” Franklin turned to his pilot and cut the microphone switch.
“Take her up,” he said. “They’ll argue all day if we stay here. I want to get into that rig before I change my mind.”
He was wrestling with his thoughts all the way to the surface. Was he being a fool, taking risks which a man in his position, with a wife and family, ought never to face? Or was he still, after all these years, trying to prove that he was no coward, by deliberately meeting a danger from which he had once been rescued by a miracle?
Presently he was aware of other and perhaps less flattering motives. In a sense, he was trying to escape from responsibility. Whether his mission failed or succeeded, he would be a hero — and as such it would not be quite so easy for the Secretariat to push him around. It was an interesting problem; could one make up for lack of moral courage by proving physical bravery?
When the sub broke surface, he had not so much resolved these questions as dismissed them. There might be truth in every one of the charges he was making against himself; it did not matter. He knew in his heart that what he was doing was the right thing, the only thing. There was no other way in which the men almost a quarter of a mile below him could be saved, and against that fact all other considerations were meaningless.
The escaping oil from the well had made the sea so flat that the pilot of the cargo plane had made a landing, though his machine was not intended for amphibious operations. One of the scoutsubs was floating on the surface while her crew wrestled with the next batch of buoyancy tanks to be sunk. Men from the plane were helping them, working in collapsible boats that had been tossed into the water and automatically inflated.
Commander Henson, the Marine Division’s master diver, was waiting in the plane with the equipment. There was another brief argument before the commander capitulated with good grace and, Franklin thought, a certain amount of relief. If anyone else was to attempt this mission, there was no doubt that Henson, with his unparalleled experience, was the obvious choice. Franklin even hesitated for a moment, wondering if by stubbornly insisting on going himself, he might not be reducing the chances of success. But he had been on the bottom and knew exactly what conditions were down there; it would waste precious time if Henson went down in the sub to make a reconnaissance.
Franklin swallowed his pH pills, took his injections, and climbed into the flexible rubber suit which would protect him from the near-zero temperature on the seabed. He hated suits — they interfered with movement and upset one’s buoyancy — but this was a case where he had no choice. The complex breathing unit, with its three cylinders — one the ominous red of compressed hydrogen — was strapped to his back, and he was lowered into the sea.
Commander Henson swam around him for five minutes while all the fittings were checked, the weight belt was adjusted, and the sonar transmitter tested. He was breathing easily enough on normal air, and would not switch over to the oxyhydrogen mixture until he had reached a depth of three hundred feet. The change-over was automatic, and the demand regulator also adjusted the oxygen flow so that the mixture ratio was correct at any depth. As correct as it could be, that is, for a region in which man was never intended to live…
At last everything was ready. The explosive charges were securely attached to his belt, and he gripped the handrail around the tiny conning tower of the sub. “Take her down,” he said to the pilot. “Fifty feet a minute, and keep your forward speed below two knots.”
“Fifty feet a minute it is. If we pick up speed, I’ll kill it with the reverse jets.”
Almost at once, daylight faded to a gloomy and depressing green. The water here on the surface was almost opaque, owing to the debris thrown up by the oil well. Franklin could not even see the width of the conning tower; less than two feet from his eyes the metal rail blurred and faded into nothingness. He was not worried; if necessary, he could work by touch alone, but he knew that the water was much clearer on the bottom.
Only thirty feet down, he had to stop the descent for almost a minute while he cleared his ears. He blew and swallowed frantically before the comforting “click” inside his head told him that all was well; how humiliating it would have been, he thought, had he been forced back to the surface because of a blocked Eustachian tube! No one would have blamed him, of course; even a mild cold could completely incapacitate the best diver — but the anticlimax would have been hard to live down.
The light was fading swiftly as the Sun’s rays lost their battle with the turbid water. A hundred feet down, he seemed to be in a world of misty moonlight, a world completely lacking color or warmth. His ears were giving him no trouble now, and he was breathing without effort, but he felt a subtle depression creeping over him. It was, he was sure, only an effect of the failing light — not a premonition of the thousand feet of descent that still lay ahead of him.
To occupy his mind, he called the pilot and asked for a progress report. Fifty drums had now been attached to the derrick, giving a total lift of well over a hundred tons. Six of the passengers in the trapped sub had become unconscious but appeared to be in no danger; the remaining seventeen were uncomfortable, but had adapted themselves to the increased pressure. The leak was getting no worse, but there were now three inches of water in the control room, and before long there would be danger of short circuits.