The survivor Read online

  Added to the discomfort, the crowding, the heat, the bad air, and aU the rest there was, in aU the marines, a fear of the submarine itself. None of them had ever been in one before, and the idea of being under the sea was repellent to them. This fear was not helped at all by the place they were in. Walled in all around by steel there was no escape from this place, no way for a man to go. If the sea came in here . . .

  For a long time after leaving Pearl Harbor they stayed on the surface, protected by the patrol planes flying out of the Islands. On the surface the boat was affected by the wave motion of the upper surface, and rolled and pitched as other boats do in a heavy sea. This violent movement, added to the fear each man had of the moment when the boat would submerge, really got to the marines. One by one they got seasick, and there was no place to get sick in except your helmet. Within an hour the torpedo room was a mess with dying

  marines lying all over the place (and each other), helmets rolling around, and the few who were not sick being driven to it by the general foulup.

  Adam was surprised that Jason, who had seemed to be truly afraid of going under the water, was one of the few who didn't get sick and stayed on his feet, doing what he could to help his buddies.

  By the time the sub passed beyond the protection of the patrol planes, only four marines were still on their feet, and the rest of them were now absolutely sure that they were going to die. They looked forward to it, because nothing could be worse than the condition they were then in.

  There were sounds in the boat—the sound of the waves beating against the outside of it, sounds of voices over the loudspeaker in the torpedo room, sounds of the big diesels panting back aft somewhere, and the smaller sounds of other motors and generators. Adam had grown used to them by now, and so the sounds had passed out of his consciousness.

  Then, suddenly, there was a brand-new sound so different from all the rest that it had no place among them. It came barking over the loudspeaker, loud and raucous, and was the sound of an old-fashioned automobile horn. "Ah-oo-gah. Ah-oo-gah."

  'What is this, the freeway?'' Adam asked. "Maybe we re going slow in the fast lane or something."

  And then, from the loudspeaker, a voice said, quite calmly, "Rig out bow and stem planes."

  *What's going on?" Jason asked and Adam could tell from his face that he suspected.

  Then the voice said, "Clear the bridge."

  Jason looked at Adam, his young eyes asking the question, and Adam said, "I guess so."

  "Bridge clear?" the voice asked over the loudspeaker. "Everybody down?^

  "Bridge clear," another voice answered.

  "Secure the hatch," the first voice ordered.

  "Hatch secured, sir."

  "All right," the cakn voice said, "take her down."

  Voices began to pour through the speaker as Jason stood, staring at the speaker's metal grill as though it were human. Adam saw the muscles in Jason's jaw beginning to jump a little, and his lips fell open as though he were awaiting the clap of doom.

  "Flood negative. Flood safety."

  "Close induction."

  "Green board, sir. Green boardl"

  ''Bleed air."

  "Air in the boat, sir."

  "Eight degrees down bubble."

  "Easy on those bow planes. Easy, this is a deep ocean."

  "Blow negative."

  "Well done. All ahead one third."

  Jason turned to Adam. "When are we going under the water?"

  "I think we are already. It's riding smoother."

  There was now no sense of motion at all. The boat seemed to be standing still, neither rolling nor

  pitching, nor anything else. Adam noticed now that the diesels had stopped and their sound had been replaced by the low, powerful humming of the electric motors. Everything seemed quieter, more peaceful.

  "Is this all there is to it?*' Jason asked, looking around as though expecting the dark sea to come rushing at him from everywhere.

  "That's all there is/' Adam said, "there ain't no more."

  The Southerner rose slowly from the tangled heap of seasick bodies and said, "Suh, it ain't no 'more,* it's it ain't no 'mo'"

  Now, as there was no more motion to disturb them the lean, sick marines began to recover.

  The beak-nosed one sat up and looked around at the mess. "Gloom and misery everywhere," he began to sing.

  As the long voyage dragged on, the marines began to become people to Adam. They didn't stop being marines, but they began to have names and individual faces, tones of voice he could recognize, character.

  Apparently the beak-nosed one was not only the highest u). rank and so their leader; he was, as a man, their leader. Although he was congenial enough, even funny at times, he seemed to Adam to be a lonely man and spent most of his time by himself, his long frame stretched out somewhere, his eyes open but not apparently looking at you. His name was Gibbs, but no one ever called him that. He was "Guns" or "Gunny" to the Pfc's

  and corporals; the sergeants sometimes called him "Nose," but not often and always in a friendly way. Like the rest of him, which was just long bone and muscle, Guns had a long and muscular nose which ran on a slight angle down his face, giving him a quizzical look as though his head was always cocked to one side.

  Guns was the only one of them all who never forgot that Adam was an oflBcer; the others would remember it occasionally or not at all, but Guns never forgot it. There was no friction between Adam and Guns as there was between him and a tech sergeant who seemed, from the first, to resent Adam's being there. Guns even called him "Adam" and didn t say "sir" or *'the lieutenant," but Adam knew that he remembered.

  The tech sergeant Adam did not Hke was a communicator, a radio and field-phone expert who let you know it. His favorite story was how, in boot camp, the personnel man had tried his best to get him to take flight training and become a pilot and an oflScer, but the tech had turned it dov^m. His favorite line was that he'd told the personnel people that he wanted to shoot some bullets, not shoot the breeze in BOQ. He wasn't openly hostile to Adam, but he was the only one of the twenty who needled Adam in a subtle way, using his status as an enlisted man to protect himself from the officer. His name was Wirtz, but they called him "Strings .**

  And then there was the Rebel. Adam had known a surfer who reminded him of the Rebel. A clown. A real clown, but he was so good on a surfboard

  that he could be ridiculous on it and still ride it He was so good that he made surfing look simple and easy, and some of the kelp-kickers hanging around the beach declared that, by making it look so simple (riding in backward while he read a comic book and stuff like that), other people tried to do it that way too and broke their necks.

  There was something unreal about the Rebel; in fact, Adam had about decided, everything was im-real. Even his name. For a deep-dyed Southerner, Ezra Stiles was a funny name. And that southern drawl. Adam had heard a lot of Southerners talk, and he'd never heard one of them talk the way the Rebel did. Amos and Andy sounded like college profs compared to the Rebel. It was unreal.

  The Rebel even looked unreal, and even the Marine Corps hadn't been able to change that. He was handsome enough to be in the movies, with good features and cool, gray eyes with straight black eyebrows and lashes long enough for a girl. He was the only marine aboard who didn't look physically dangerous, and yet Jason had told him one night on the cigarette deck that the Rebel was a holy terror in any sort of fight from an alley brawl to a fire fight in the lines. "Maybe it's because he doesn't lose his head," Jason decided. "Some guys fight as wild as the Rebel but his is sort of controlled. He just doesn't go spraying the landscape with ammo. Don't ever tangle with him," Jason advised.

  ''I'm stricdy a no-loud-noise type," Adam had said.

  1 ve been wondering," Jason said. ''How are you in a fight?"'

  "Terrific,*' Adam said.

  Jason sounded skeptical. "Yeahr^

  "Terrific. I've never been in a fight."

  ''No kind of fight?" J
ason asked, surprised.

  "No kind of fight." He could feel Jason looking at him in the dark.

  "You didn't even fight kids when you were a Idd?" Jason asked.

  'There weren't any available," Adam said, thinking about when he was a kid.

  "And you're running around dressed like a marine," Jason said, amazed. "Why?"

  Adam laughed. "I've been trying to find that out myself."

  "Especially in a deal like this," Jason said. "Because I think this is going to turn out to be real hairy."

  *Then stop the boat and 111 get off," Adam said.

  Jason was the easiest of them all to understand, and yet Adam wondered sometimes if he really understood even Jason. If Adam had had a younger brother, it would have been, he decided, a kid like Jason. A good clean-cut kid trying too hard to be a man.

  Jason wanted to be an inventor. "I invented a rocket one time," he told Adam. "I wasn't but about four or five years old, I guess, and I stole some of my father's shotgun shells and took out the powder and put it in this rocket I'd invented. It al-

  most blew the back of our house off, but that rocket flew. It really did. It went way up."

  Jason was a tinkerer, a mechanic. '*You should have seen me driving around in a car when I was only twelve years old," he bragged to Adam one night. "I got this old jalopy out of a junk heap and got it to run, but of course they wouldn't let me drive it. But I knew this guy who had a Hcense, so I put two steering wheels in the car and two sets of pedals and an extra accelerator. Then he could sit over in the driver's seat acting like he was driving and all the time I was driving. I think it bugged the cops."

  Jason was a tank man. "I love tanks," he told Adam. 'Tou get inside that tin can on wheels and it makes you feel pretty good. I wish we'd gotten tanks sooner at Guadalcanal. I don't like it in the Hnes, down on your belly in the mud with nothing to stop all those bullets. In the line the bullets go over you whining and whistling and grunting, but in a tank they just go ping, ping, ping and there's so much noise in there anyway you hardly hear them."

  Jason, Guns, the tech sergeant from the Com Section, the Rebel, the corporal who, when he got out of the Marine Corps, was planning to be an undertaker ("I won't have any problem with supply and demand," he explained) and was an expert on fortifications, the Pfc who wanted to be a forester, the Pfc who wrote a letter to his girl every night, knowing it wouldn't get mailed. Marines. But, slowly, as the voyage went on, people.

  *This place is not fit for man nor beast," a marine declared, wiping the sweat off his bare chest with his hands and flicking it down on the already soaking wet deck.

  "That's the stomp-down truth!" the Southerner said. "Ahm gonna write a letter to mah Congressman."

  'Tou got a CongressmanP**

  "Sho' Ah got a Congressman."

  **Ifs a pity you can't write."

  **Ah can make an X," the Southerner said.

  Two of the days had passed, and Adam wondered how many more there were going to be. He didn't think he could endure many more.

  "You're not paying attention," Jason told him. ''You've still got the attitude that this rifle is just a toy. Lieutenant. But one of these days you're going to be looking down the barrel and you're going to see one of 'em, and then it's going to be you—or him. And this"—he patted the rifle—"is what decides who it's going to be. So pay attention."

  "Yassuh," Adam said, mocking the Southerner. "Ah'm givin you mah en-ti-ah attention."

  "Lieutenant," the Southerner said, "you talk like that in Dixie and they take you and dip you in a barrel of hot tar and then in a barrel of duck feathers and then set you on a pole and ride you back across the Mason-Dixon line."

  "Yassuh, boss," Adam said. "Ah'm goin' straighten up and flah raght."

  "No use tryin' to teach him nothing about no rifle,

  Jason," the Southerner decided. ''He got a meagah brain."

  "Pay attention," Jason said, taking the rifle away from Adam and putting it to his shoulder. "Now whoever called it *pull the trigger didn't know any more about it than you do. You *pull' it and you don't hit anything. You squeeze it Not with just your finger. You squeeze it with all your fingers, with your whole hand, with your arm. Everything you are squeezes that trigger, because that's when it counts."

  "I know something better to squeeze than a trigger."

  "But theah ain't none of 'em heah," the Southerner said, "So you pay attention to Jason, because it ain't just you shooting to save yo' life. It may be you shootin' to save mah life. That's what makes it so important."

  "Now the next thing, Lieutenant," Jason said, "is remember you're shooting the rifle, not the target. These sights are Httle, just a httle V here and a stick there, and they're close together. But the target's way out there. You ju5t can't see all three things clearly. If you can see the target clearly, you can't see the sights. But that's what a lot of guys do—they look at the target so hard their sights blur and they don't hit. So remember, look at the sights.'*

  Adam took the rifle and aimed at the pressure dial of the torpedo tube.

  Jason sat on the wet steel deck and observed him. Then he took the rifle back. "I guess I'd

  better show you the four positions. Standing, kneeling, sitting, and prone. With the sling.''

  "Now, Jason," the Southerner said, "tell me the truth now. Did you evah see any marine at all in the line shootin' from any of those positions? And did you evah see any marine use his sling for anything but to tote that gun with?^

  "I never did," Jason admitted, 'l3ut they made me learn all those positions."

  "Don't inflict the Heutenant with all that. Just teach him to make that gun part of his hand. Part of him. Because I don t think wheah we're going is going to be healthy. At all.**

  The whole business still seemed unreal to Adam. Squatting in this submarine with a bunch of, by now, bad-smelling marines, learning how to shoot a rifle. He kept asking himself, "What am I doing here?" And there seemed to be no answer.

  He was yawning now, and even Jason was beginning to drift oflF. But by this time Adam knew why and knew, with dread, that there were going to be some hoiu-s now which were going to seem absolutely endless. He was going to hve through an eternity of misery in the next few hours. He wondered if the marines who just passed out weren't luckier than he was?

  The submarine was now far into the territory of the enemy, and without its torpedoes it was a helpless thing. It could not risk beiug seen by the enemy and so, at dawn of each day, it would submerge and stay submerged through the long,

  bright day, coming up only after the sun was well down and the night dark.

  The only other navy man the marines had any real contact with was an old chief torpedoman who thought the torpedo room was his personal kingdom. At first he blamed the marines for the foul air. "There's supposed to be seventy people breathing this air and there's air enough for them. Then you phony heroes come in here and make it ninety-two men all gulping the same air and fouling it up.**

  But as each day was the same, the chief finally admitted that something was haywire with the auxihary air system and, until they fixed it, it was going to be rugged. (They never got it fixed.) The marines found out the first day that the chief had stuff that could absorb the carbon dioxide that was making them sick. They were little cakes, like soap, which he could spread around. But getting him to break them out and use them was almost useless. **These are for emergencies," he told them.

  **What you think this is?" the Southerner demanded. "Ah m dyin', an' that's an emergency."

  "Die," the chief said, "itll be good for you."

  The hours under the water were torture. By noon you had a headache of such intensity that the pain disarranged everything you did. And as the oxygen grew more scarce, there wasn't much you could do. By midaftemoon the marines had stopped almost all movement. The talking died out, the card-playing drifted to a stop, reading or writing became too painful to endure. There was nothing they

  THE DEEP, DARK SEA «5 />
  could do but stand or sit or squat or, for the lucky-ones, lie down in the bunks or torpedo racks or on the deck.

  Orderly thought gave way then to the fear which began in the late afternoon and kept building up, hour after hour.

  '^Atmosphere."

  Adam had never thought about it before. Atmosphere. It was just something that was always there, all around you. All around the whole world. Everybody had atmosphere so you didn't have to think about it.

  But now, in these afternoons, the marines thought about it

  The chief torpedoman had told them about "atmosphere." "Atmosphere," the chief had said, "is just air. But in a submarine atmosphere is all the air there is in the boat. When we submerge we take aboard as much air as we can, and that, friend, is all there is—there ain't no more. Now you Gyrenes keep horsing around and telling all these stories about how you're heroes, and that uses up the atmosphere."

  'Where do hit goF* the Southerner asked him.

  ''It goes into CO2," the chief told him. "Carbon dioxide. The same stuff that puts out fires—and it'll put you out, too. Now you take ordinary atmosphere, the stuff you breathe outside, that's only got three hundredths of one per cent of carbon dioxide. But by the time you Gyrenes get through teUing everybody how great you are, the CO2 count

  goes way up—maybe two, two and a half per cent."

  "How far can it go?" Adam asked him.

  *'Now, that I don't know," the chief said. "All the way, I guess, but the important thing is how far can you go. Some guys I know pass out when the CO2 count goes above two point five. Some can stand it as high as two point eight. But nobody can stay conscious when it hits three, and at four per cent you're dead."