Without another word he about-faced and mounted the steps.
That was my introduction to the Sub-Sea Academy. I didn’t even know his name.
Thirty times around the quadrangle, which is a hundred yards on a side, is seven miles.
I made it. It took me a little more than three hours, and the last few laps were in a state of near-coma.
At the twenty-fifth lap it crossed my mind that no one was counting the laps but myself. At die twenty-seventh I had to fight myself to make my legs carry me on, around that dizzying square.
But plain, homely stubbornness kept me going. The Academy was for honorable men, and—even though at least one upperclassman was obviously a sadistic brute—I was going to follow every order I received to the letter, as long as I wore the uniform.
But, at last, it was over.
I picked up my scattered gear where it lay. Dozens of cadets had climbed the steps while I was walking my tours, but none had given it a glance. I found my way to my room.
As I opened the door, a short and astonishingly young- looking lubber like myself jumped to attention. He relaxed when he got a look at me.
“Oh, you must be Eden,” he said, sticking out his hand. “My name’s Eskow. Tough luck; I saw you out there.”
He was grinning; I liked the friendly look of his grin. “I guess you got a head start on all of us,” he went on. “Well, you won’t be the last. We’ll all be out there sooner or later. If I know me, I’ll be one of the ‘sooner’ ones—and often.”
I mumbled something and dumped my gear on my cot. It made an untidy picture. The unmade bed, with clothes and books and equipment strewn all over it—as untidy and unkempt as I felt.
I looked across at Eskow’s bed. It was neatly made, with an extra blanket taut across the pillow; his footlocker lay with the lid open, showing all his equipment shipshape and stowed away. Eskow himself was pink-cheeked from a bath and shave…though, at a guess, he could have skipped the shaving for quite a while before the fact became obvious.
I must have shown my feelings.
“Cheer up,” said Eskow. “I’ll give you a hand. We don’t have anything to do until dinner, and there won’t be any inspection till after we eat. Take a breather.”
I slumped in the chair while Eskow began cheerfully to sort and stow my possessions. In a couple of minutes I began to feel better and got up to help him. It would be a long time before the soreness went out of my feet; but it looked like all my luck today was not bad. If Eskow was going to be my roommate for the next four years, judging from the first look I had at him I could call myself a lucky man.
At dinner that night I saw the upperclassman again, sitting by himself at a little table at the end of the dining hall. I nudged Eskow and pointed to him.
Eskow whispered, out of the corner of his mouth—first-year cadets were not permitted the privilege of conversation at meals—“Sperry’s his name. Sorry to say it, Jim, but he’s our Exec. You’ll be seeing a lot of him until he graduates.” Eskow hesitated. “Sperry,” he repeated, looking ramrod-straight ahead of him. “I wonder if he could be—”
One of the upperclassmen was looking our way, so Eskow never did say quite what he wondered.
But I knew. And the answer was yes: Executive Cadet Officer Brand Sperry, Cadet-in-Charge of Fletcher Hall, was the son of Hallam Sperry, the millionaire mayor of Thetis in Marinia.
Something about young Sperry’s face had seemed familiar to me at the time—familiar and, oddly, almost dangerous. At the time I couldn’t quite place it.
But now I knew. I had seen Hallam Sperry’s picture many times, and the cadet at the little table now looked like Hallam Sperry when the picture was taken—a picture of the older Sperry, my own father and my Uncle Stewart, when all there was of Marinia was a couple of tiny sub-sea outposts and all three men were young, long before the bitter struggle that divided Sperry from the Edens—
Long before my father had died, his name famous and bright, but his fortune and holdings gone.
I lifted my fork to my lips in the approved square-rigged motions of the Academy—where the combined heritage of old Annapolis and West Point and the Air Academy in Colorado produced a wealth of tradition and a thousand rules to bewilder first-year lubbers like myself. But I hardly tasted the food.
If the son of the man who had defrauded my father and tried to do the same to my uncle was going to be my commander, I had a hard mission to accomplish in the Sub-Sea Academy. And our first meeting, certainly, had been a bad start. Could it have been that he recognized me—that he deliberately picked the quarrel to make sure I knuckled under?
I couldn’t believe it. No matter what Brand Sperry’s father might be, the son was a cadet officer of the Sub-Sea Service, and while we were in service together there would be no trouble between us of my making. I promised that to myself, on the spot.
All the same, I did not enjoy my first evening meal in the SubSea Academy.
3
Sons of the Sub-Sea Fleet
Reveille was at 4:45 in the morning. The stars were still out!
We stood there in the pre-dawn light, three hundred of us, shivering and trying to stand at attention. We must have been a strangely lubberish sight in the sacred grounds of the Sub-Sea Academy. I can hardly blame Cadet Captain Sperry for his expression of disgust.
After roll-call, we returned to our quarters and got ready for inspection. After an enormous meal—getting up before daybreak did wonderful things to your appetite!—we fell out for the beginning of our first day of training.
Every one of us had been primed for that first day from the age of ten or twelve on. We were as fit and ready as any first-year class of teen-age youths could be. Each of us had studied as much of the basic subjects we would have as our young heads could hold—and not only the mathematics and science and naval lore, but a curious assortment of widely varying studies, from art to engineering, from ballistics to the ballet. For years the tendency in schools was more and more to specialize—but for us, the future officers of the subsea fleet, the whole world of knowledge and learning was ours to grasp.
We were ready. And we went right to work, sweating on the athletic fields in our fatigues, at rigid attention at our desks in our undress whites, parading across the drillfields in our high-visibility dress scarlet tunics.
It was hard work.
It was intended to be hard. No weakling could rise to command a sub-sea vessel. The service could not afford it. One moment’s weakness or hesitation might mean destruction, down in the mighty depths of the sea, where the enormous weight of miles of water overhead could crush any steel or iron object like cardboard. Only one thing made it possible for our submarines to cruise twenty thousand feet and more below the surface; only one thing kept the dome cities of Marinia alive.
The name of it was: Edenite.
Bob Eskow was the first of my classmates to connect the word
“Edenite” with the name of his roommate, Cadet James Eden. He asked me point blank if I were related to Stewart Eden, the inventor.
In the years since I first saw my uncle, I had found out what the name of Stewart Eden meant. I tried to keep the pride out of my voice as I said: “He’s my uncle.”
“Uncle!” Bob was impressed. He thought for a moment, then ventured cautiously, “There’s a story that he’s working on something new, something—”