Collapse Depth

The next morning, crews were cutting down every tree within five feet of the outer fence line, and the plant was shut down while they all had training on the incident, and discussed the seriousness of what had happened: a reactor that is creating energy and then suddenly has no place for that energy to go. It could lead, they all reviewed, to soaring temperatures, protective actions, damaged fuel. They all worked through equations to calculate the rate and the extent of the potential damage.

Mark had to wait two days for repairs to the resistor bank to have his observed watch; he combated simulated flooding and recovered from an actual scram. He passed with solid marks. He didn’t let the branch incident bother him for more than a few days. After all, it wasn’t like he’d thrown the branch onto the resistors, there would have been a fire even if he’d never gotten near it: his presence there was a coincidence. And all the reactor’s protective mechanisms had worked properly, protecting it from any damage. He graduated third in his class and received orders to the USS City of Corpus Christi. On his way to the west coast, he stopped in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan to marry Muriel, his high school sweetheart.

Mark loved Muriel, but he told her nothing about the fears he had for his own sanity. It was easy to keep from her at first. When they’d dated in high school and during trips home from the Academy, he’d been fine. Muriel was a tough woman, a realist, and Mark knew if he told her, she would immediately seek help, help that would result inevitably in the end of his career. And, in a way, keeping Muriel in the dark made him feel better, just as fooling the Navy shrinks had. Muriel was smart, and perceptive. If she couldn’t tell that Mark was crazy…well then, he must not be that crazy. Of course, when she finally realized everything, he had to leave her. A wife telling the Navy that her husband was crazy was one thing. But a spurned wife telling the Navy that her ex-husband was a nut…the Navy would have to shut down if it listened to every allegation hurled by an ex-wife.

Everyone told junior officers that as demanding as the nuclear power training was, going to sea was harder. When he arrived on his first boat, the USS City of Corpus Christi, it had just begun a refueling overhaul in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. For his entire tour, the boat never left drydock; he had to be loaned out to other ships around Puget Sound to complete his at-sea qualifications.

He completed them with aplomb, pinned on his gold dolphins, received top marks on his fitness reports, and screened for department head with flying colors. The overhaul was demanding and stressful, but Mark got through the entire tour without an episode. He began to think again that he had healed. He did a leisurely shore tour at the ROTC unit at Creighton, then was ordered to report to the USS Alabama, where his optimism disappeared on the first day of his first patrol.

It was after the two-day transit to Point Juliet, two days in which he’d spent all but a few moments in the control room staring at charts. The ship had completed its preparations to submerge, and they’d just taken a sounding, confirming that the water beneath them was as deep as expected. After two nauseating days rolling on the surface, everyone was eager to submerge, so the XO was encouraging the OOD, Lieutenant Kaiser, to hurriedly shift the watch to the control room and get down from the bridge.

The last lookout dropped down from the ladder, directly in front of the conn, and Kaiser came soon after. The Nav noticed that there was only one “Open” indication left on the Chief of the Watch’s panel, a single green “O” in a row of amber lines; the indicator for the lower hatch to the bridge. As Kaiser spun the ring that sealed the hatch, the nav watched the light turn from a green “O” into an amber-colored straight line, a line that continued the length of the COW’s panel. It was an elegant representation of their status: the ship was completely sealed.

Suddenly, his own throat began to tighten, as if the wheel that Kaiser spun also controlled the flow of oxygen into his lungs.

“The ship is rigged for dive,” announced the OOD.

The navigator realized with sudden, overwhelming panic that he was locked in a steel tube driving through the ocean, and would remain so for more than one hundred days. He felt the ship running out of air, his lungs constricting, starving. There was a chorus of voices in control then, the usual yammer of everyone doing their part to get the ship submerged safely. But Mark knew at least a few of those voices muttering in the background were voices in his head, warning him about the danger only he could see.