The young man stubbed out his cigarette and stood while a couple of men adjusted the helmet and the harness of the pack. He tested the air, glanced at the pressure gauge, elevated one thumb, and climbed into the escape trunk, closing the door behind him.
Out on deck he stretched and breathed deeply, relishing the sunlight and the escape from the hull. Then he raised a hatch of the superstructure and pulled out the dinghy pack, stripped off the plastic sealing strips, unfolded the dinghy, and pressed the lever of the air bottle that inflated it. He tied the painter and lowered the rubber boat into the water, took the paddle and led the boat aft to the steps beside the conning tower. He clambered down into it, and pushed off from the submarine.
The boat was awkward to manoeuvre with the single paddle, and it took him ten minutes to reach the jetty. He made it fast and clambered up the ladder; as he began to walk towards the shore he heard one blast from the siren of the submarine. He turned and waved, and walked on.
He came to a group of grey painted buildings, stores of some kind. There was a weatherproof electric switch upon an outside wall; he went to it and turned it, and a lamp above his head lit up. He turned it off again, and went on.
He came to a latrine. He paused, then crossed the road, and looked in. A body in khaki gabardine lay half in and half out of one of the compartments, much decomposed. It was no more than he had expected to see, but the sight was sobering. He left it, and went on up the road.
The communications school lay over on the right, in buildings by itself. This was the part of the installation that he knew, but that was not what he had come to see. The coding office lay to the left, and near the coding office the main transmitting office would almost certainly be located.
He entered the brick building that was the coding office, and stood in the hallway trying the doors. Every door was locked except for two that led into the toilets. He did not go in there.
He went out and looked around. A transformer station with a complex of wires and insulators attracted his attention, and he followed the wiring to another two-storey, wooden office building. As he approached he heard the hum of an electrical machine running, and at the same moment the siren of the submarine sounded two blasts.
When they had died away he heard the hum again, and followed it to a powerhouse. The converter that was running was not very large; he judged it to be about fifty kilowatts. On the switchboard the needles of the instruments stood steady, but one indicating temperature stood in a red sector of the dial. The machine itself was running with a faint grating noise beneath the quiet hum. He thought it would not last very much longer.
He left the powerhouse and went into the office building. Here all the doors were unlocked, some of them open. The rooms on the ground floor appeared to be executive offices; here papers and signals lay strewn about the floor like dead leaves, blown by the wind. In one room a casement window was entirely missing and there was much water damage. He crossed this room and looked out of the window; the casement window frame lay on the ground below, blown from its hinges.
He went upstairs, and found the main transmitting room. There were two transmitting desks, each with a towering metal frame of grey radio equipment in front of it. One of these sets was dead and silent, the instruments all at zero.
The other set stood by the window, and here the casement had been blown from its hinges and lay across the desk. One end of the window frame projected outside the building and teetered gently in the light breeze. One of the upper corners rested on an overturned Coke bottle on the desk. The transmitting key lay underneath the frame that rested unstably above it, teetering a little in the wind.
He reached out and touched it with his gloved hand. The frame rocked on the transmitting key, and the needle of a milliammeter upon the set flipped upwards. He released the frame, and the needle fell back. There was one of U.S.S. Scorpion's missions completed, something that they had come ten thousand miles to see, that had absorbed so much effort and attention in Australia, on the other side of the world.
He lifted the window frame from the transmitting desk and set it down carefully on the floor; the woodwork was not damaged and it could be repaired and put back in its place quite easily. Then he sat down at the desk and with gloved hand upon the key began transmitting in English and in clear.
He sent, "Santa Maria sending. U.S.S. Scorpion reporting. No life here. Closing down." He went on repeating this message over and over again, and while he was doing so the siren blew three blasts.
As he sat there, his mind only half occupied with the mechancial repetition of the signal that he knew was almost certainly being monitored in Australia, his eyes roamed around the transmitting office. There was a carton of American cigarettes with only two packs removed that he longed for, but the captain's orders had been very definite. There were one or two bottles of Coke. On a window sill there was a pile of copies of The Saturday Evening Post.
He finished transmitting when he judged he had been at it for twenty minutes. In the three final repetitions he added the words, "Lieutenant Sunderstrom sending. All well on board. Proceeding northwards to Alaska." Finally he sent, "Closing down the station now, and switching off."
He took his hand from the key and leaned back in the chair. Gee, these tubes and chokes, this milliammeter and that rotary converter down below-they'd done a mighty job. Nearly two years without any maintenance or replacement, and still functioning as well as ever! He stood up, inspected the set, and turned off three switches. Then he walked round to the back and opened a panel and looked for the name of the manufacturer on the tubes; he would have liked to send them a testimonial.
He glanced again at the carton of Lucky Strikes, but the captain was right, of course; they would be hot and it might well be death to smoke them. He left them with regret, and went downstairs. He went to the powerhouse where the converter was running, inspected the switchboard carefully, and tripped two switches. The note of the machine sank progressively in a diminuendo; he stood watching it till finally it came to rest. It had done a swell job and it would be good as ever when the bearings had been overhauled. He could not have borne to leave it running till it cracked up.
The siren blew four blasts while he was there, and his work now was over. He had still a quarter of an hour. There was everything here to be explored and nothing to be gained by doing so. In the living quarters he knew he would find bodies like the one that he had found in the latrine; he did not want to see them. In the coding room, if he broke down a door, there might be papers that would interest historians in Australia, but he could not know which they would be, and anyway the captain had forbidden him to take anything on board.
He went back and up the stairs into the transmitting office. He had a few minutes left for his own use, and he went straight to the pile of copies of The Saturday Evening Post. As he had suspected, there were three numbers issued after Scorpion had left Pearl Harbor before the outbreak of the war, that he had not seen and that no one in the ship had seen. He leafed them through avidly. They contained the three concluding instalments of the serial, The Lady and the Lumberjack. He sat down to read.
The siren blew five blasts and roused him before he was halfway through the first instalment. He must go. He hesitated for a moment, and then rolled up the three magazines and tucked them under his arm. The dinghy and his radiation suit would be hot and must be left in the locker on the outer casing of the submarine to be washed by the sea water; he could roll up these hot magazines in the deflated dinghy and perhaps they would survive, perhaps they could be decontaminated and dried out and read when they got back to the safe southern latitudes. He left the office, closing the door carefully behind him, and made his way towards the jetty.
The officers' mess stood facing the Sound, a little way from the jetty. He had not noticed it particularly on landing, but now something about it attracted his attention and he deviated fifty yards towards it. The building had a deep verandah, facing the view. He saw now that there was a party going on there. Five men in khaki gabardine sat with two women in easy chairs around a table; in the light breeze he saw the flutter of a summer frock. On the table there were highball and old-fashioned glasses.
For a moment he was deceived, and went quickly closer. Then he stopped in horror, for the party had been going on for over a year. He broke away, and turned, and went back to the jetty, only anxious now to get back into the close confinement and the warmth of fellowship and the security of the submarine.
On deck he deflated and stowed the dinghy, wrapping up his magazines in the folds. Then he stripped quickly, put the helmet and the clothing into the locker, slammed the hatch down and secured it, and got down into the escape trunk, turning on the shower. Five minutes later he emerged into the humid stuffiness of the submarine.
John Osborne was waiting at the entrance to the trunk to run a Geiger counter over him and pass him as clean, and a minute later he was standing with a towel round his waist making his report to Dwight Towers in his cabin, the executive officer and the liaison officer beside him. "We got your signals on the radio here," the captain said. "I don't just know if they'll have got them in Australia-it's daylight all the way. It's around eleven in the morning there. What would you say?"
"I'd say they'd have got them," the radio officer replied. "It's autumn there, and not too many electric storms."
The captain dismissed him to get dressed, and turned to his executive. "We'll stay right here tonight," he said. "It's seven o'clock, and dark before we reach the minefields." With no lights he could depend upon he did not dare to risk the navigation through the minefields of the Juan de Fuca Strait during the hours of darkness. "We're out of the tide here. Sunrise is around zero four fifteen-that's twelve noon, Greenwich. We'll get under way then."
They stayed that night in the calm waters of the harbour just off Santa Maria Island, watching the shore lights through the periscope. At dawn they got under way on a reverse course, and immediately ran aground upon a mud bank. The tide was ebbing and within a couple of hours of low water; even so there should have been a fathom of water underneath their keel according to the chart. They blew tanks to surface, and got off with ears tingling from the pressure reduction in the hull, reviling the Survey, and tried again to get away, twice, with the same result. Finally they settled down to wait irritably for the tide, and at about nine o'clock in the morning they got out into the main channel and set course northwards for the open sea.