From earliest childhood I was a three-minute diver, but that was nearly the limit; and by Christmas holidays Bob was able to pace me second for second.
Without air supply, with only the oxygen in our lungs to keep us going, both of us were going down forty and fifty feet, staying down for as much as three and a half minutes. We worked out a whole elaborate system of trials. We checked out a pair of electrolungs and spent a whole precious Saturday afternoon underwater near the raft, marking distances and depths, setting ourselves goals and targets. Then every succeeding Saturday, in fair weather or foul, we were out there, sometimes in pounding rain and skies so gloomy that we couldn’t see the underwater markers we had left.
But it paid off for Bob.
It showed on him in ways other than increased skill beneath the water. He began to lose weight, to grow leaner and wirier. When Lieutenant Saxon checked him over just before the Christmas holidays he gave Bob a sharp look. “You’re the one who passed out in the diving tests?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And now you want to kill yourself completely, is that it?” the sea medic blazed. “Look at your chart, man! You’ve lost twenty pounds! You’re running on nerve and guts, nothing else. What have you been doing to yourself?”
Bob said mutinously: “Nothing, sir. I’m in good health.”
“I’m the judge of that!” But in the end Saxon passed him, grumbling. Bob was wearing himself down to sea-bottom, but there is no law that says a cadet must pamper himself. And the grinding routine went on. Not only the Saturday-afternoon extra-duty swimming with me, but Bob developed a habit of stealing off by himself at the occasional odd hours between times—just after chapel, or during Visitors’ Hour, or whenever else he could find a moment. I knew how worried he was that he might not pass the marathon-swim. I didn’t question him about these extra times, for I was sure they were spent either in the gym or out doing roadwork to build up his wind.
Of course, I was utterly wrong.
Time passed—months of it. And at last it was spring.
We had almost forgotten David Craken—strange, sad boy from under the sea! It was April and then May, time for the marathon swim.
We boarded the gym ship again just after lunch. It was the first time Bob or I had been aboard her since David was lost. I caught Bob’s eye on the spot where he and David and I had stood against the rail, looking back at the Bermuda shore. He saw me looking at him and smiled faintly. “Poor David,” he said, and that was all.
That was all for him. For me, I was seeing something else at that rail—something large and reptilian, a huge, angular head that had loomed out of the depths.
I had seen it many times since—in dreams. But that first time, had that been a dream?
There was no time for dreaming now. No sooner were we well clear of land than Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane called us to fall in in crews, and Sea Coach Blighman put us through an intensive workout, there on the deck of the sub-sea raft being towed through the Bermuda waves by the snub-nosed tugs. We had fifteen minutes of that, then a ten-minute break.
Then we were all ordered below decks. The hatches were sealed, the gym ship trimmed for diving, the signal made to the tugs, and we went to ten fathoms, to continue our voyage underwater. It was ten nautical miles to where we were going; at the nine-knot speed of the towed gym ship, a few minutes over an hour. Ten nautical miles, at 6,000 feet each. Sixty thousand feet. Nearly eleven and a half land miles.
And we would swim those miles back to base, maintaining our ten-fathom depth until we reached the shallows.
Halfway out, we were ordered into swimming gear, flippers, goggles, electrolung and thermo-suits. The suits would slow us down, but we had to have them. At ten fathoms—sixty feet—pressure is not the enemy. Cold is what is dangerous. Yes, cold! Even in Bermuda waters, even in late spring. The temperature of the human body is 98 degrees Fahrenheit and a bit; the temperature of sea water—even there and then—only in the seventies. Put a block of steel the size and temperature of the human body into the Bermuda sea, and in minutes it will cool to the temperature of the water around it. There is a difference between a block of steel and a human body, of course. The difference is this: It doesn’t hurt a block of steel to be cooled to seventy degrees; but at that temperature the body cannot live.
What keeps swimmers alive? Why, the heat their bodies produce, of course; for the body is tenacious of its heat, and keeps pouring calories out to replace the loss. But add to the drain of heat-calories from the cooling of the water the drain of energy-calories of the muscles propelling the swimmer along, and in ten sea miles the body’s outpouring of calories has robbed its reserves past the danger point.
The early surface swimmers—the conquerors of the English Channel, for example—tried to keep out the chill with heavy layers of grease covering every inch of the body but the eyes. Worse than useless! The grease actually helped to dissipate the heat. Oh, some of them made it, all the same. But how many others—even helped by frequent pauses in mid-Channel to drink hot beverages—failed?
There were a hundred and sixty-one of us on the gym ship. And it was the tradition of the Academy that none of us should fail.
As we climbed the ladders to the sea-lock I punched Bob’s arm. “You’ll make it!” I whispered.
He grinned at me, but the grin was worried. “I have to!” he said. And then we were in the lock.
The sea-gates irised open.
The gym ship, trimmed and motionless at ten fathoms, disgorged its hundred and sixty-one lungdivers by crews.
Silently, in the filtered green sunlight from above, we went through a five-minute underwater calisthenic warm-up. Then we heard the rumbling, wavering voice of Sea Coach Blighman on the hailer from the control deck. “Crew leaders, attention! At the signal, by crews, shove off!”
There was a ten-second pause, then the shrill, penetrating beep of the signal.
We were off.
Bob and I were in the last crew, commanded by Roger Fairfane. I had made up my mind to one thing: I would not leave Bob alone. Almost at once our regular formation broke up. I could see ten, twenty, perhaps thirty swimmers scattered about me in the water, looking like pale green ghosts stroking along in the space-eating swim the Academy taught us. I found Bob and clung close to him, keeping an eye on him.
He saw me, grinned—or so it seemed, with the goggles and mouthpiece hiding most of his face—and then concentrated his energies on the long swim before us.
The first mile. Cadet Captain Roger Fairfane came in close to us, waving angrily. We were well behind the others and he wanted us to catch up. I shook my head determinedly and pointed to Bob. Roger grimaced furiously, shot ahead, then returned. He stayed sullenly close all through the long swim. As crew officer, it was his duty to keep tabs on stragglers—and we were straggling.
The second mile. Bob kept right on plugging. We weren’t making any speed, but he showed no signs of faltering.
The third mile. The cold was seeping in now; we were all beginning to feel the strain and weariness. All the others were well out of sight by now. Bob paused for a second in his regular, slow kick-and-stroke. He rolled over on his back, stretched—
And did a complete slow loop under water.
Roger and I shot toward him, worried. But he straightened out, grinned at us again—no mistake this time!—and made a victory signal with his hand.
For the first time I realized that the long months of training had paid off, and Bob was going to make it all the way.
We pulled ourselves out into the surf about a mile down the beach from the Academy compound. It was nearly dark by now; the rest of the swimmers must long since have returned.