Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

Don looked back squarely. “We’ve gone over every reading, every bit of the instructions, and all the prints. We’re logging another set of readings right now with a third man taking them. I would have taken them myself, but I wanted to stay here to check over what we’ve already got. We’ll just have to keep checking until we’re sure, until we know exactly what’s happened. We haven’t hit the limit yet.”

The whirring of the main turbine and the great throb of the reduction gears sounded as though nothing could ever disturb them. But this was not so. A minor dislocation somewhere else, in some important control circuit perhaps, down in the reactor space where we could not get to it, could still them at any time.

My face must have mirrored the gravity of my thoughts. A bell tingled. The telephone. Someone answered it, listened briefly, handed it to me.

“It’s for you, sir.”

The caller was Harris, with good news.

“We’ve found the trouble with the fathometer, Captain, and I think we have the right parts on board. We’ll have her going again in a couple of hours.”

This was, at least, a weight off my mind. We would be approaching shoal water shortly, and would need this piece of equipment.

“Good, Dick,” I said. “Tell your people that was a fine job, and I’m very much relieved and grateful.”

“Will do, Captain,” Dick said, sounding pleased.

I hung up. “Well,” I said, “that’s one problem solved. The fathometer’s OK, anyway.”

But our somber mood could not be lifted for long. Triton’s machinery was too well designed, her research engineers and builders too careful for anything to go wrong. And yet, the evidence could not be denied. Instinctively, I realized, we were all waiting for the check observations, even then in the process of being taken. But we all knew what the results must be.

The watertight door at the far end of the compartment opened and Pat McDonald entered. Immediately following him were Jack Judd and Harry Hampson, both Chief Electronics Technicians. Pat walked directly to Don Fears and handed him a slip of paper. “I took the readings myself this time, Don, just to be sure.”

Don scrutinized the figures, pursed his lips, silently handed the paper to me.

The readings had reached the allowed limits.

“Shut her down, Don,” I said. “As she cools off, get everybody back there and start making a thorough check as soon as you can get into the space. We have to get to the bottom of this immediately.”

Fears excused himself. In a few moments, the mighty beat of Triton’s huge propellers slowed.

The atmosphere of quiet gloom could be felt, as it settled over the ship. I could sense it in everyone’s attitude, in the subdued manner in which people went about their duties, in the care each man took that nothing he said or did would make matters worse.

Don came back in a moment, sober-faced. “Well, it’s done, but I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Let’s start over again at the beginning.” He pulled a sheaf of papers toward him. “The first sign of anything was when Jim Stark started to notice a steady climb in certain readings …”

We all looked on as Don went through the entire episode.

“An hour later,” he said, glancing at me, “we notified the Captain. “Then we went over everything again …”

Step by step, feeling our way, we reviewed the events of the past two hours. The strenuous training all of us had received during Triton’s precommissioning period was never more valuable than now, as we tortuously reworked the data.

Finally, Don struck the paper lightly with his index finger. “Here’s the crucial item, right here,” he said.

“That’s what it read, all right,” said Pat.

“Something wrong here,” Don muttered. “Your last reading is one-tenth of what they had the time before.”

McDonald compared the two sheets of paper, side by side. “I know mine was the right reading,” he said, “I read it off the dial myself. The decimal point is tricky, but this is correct.”

Hope suddenly flooded through my mind. The matter was more complicated than a simple misplacement of a decimal point. The readings we were required to take and record were sometimes to the millionth or ten-millionth of a gram or an ampere. A mistake in conversion was understandable.

“If this is right, Don,” I said, “we don’t have any problem at all. Could the readings have changed that much in this short time?”

Don and Pat shook their heads.

“Judd, who took these first two sets of readings?” Fears suddenly asked.

Judd told him the names. “They’re both good men, sir,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.”

“Well, what about this one, then?”

Hampson shook his head. “We saw Mr. McDonald take these readings, sir,” he said. “I know they’re right!”

“Let’s see the calculations again,” said Don.

They were put before him in a moment. Silently, we watched while Don compared one set of log readings to another and checked the three sets of calculated results. Pat McDonald did the same, alongside him and sharing his slide rule. I scratched them out too, on a third piece of paper.