Jim Stark, however, had made it clear that the situation was not yet desperate. We could hang on a while longer and await developments.
I had just about reached this point in my reasoning when there came a rap on my door, and Dick Harris pulled aside the curtain. He, like Stark, wore a troubled look.
“What’s on your mind, Dick?” I asked. “Have you a kidney stone in your sonar?”
Dick’s face twisted. “Something like that perhaps, Captain,” he said. “It’s the fathometer.”
Constitutionally, I needed much less background information to become excited about a sick fathometer than about a sick kidney, and I was intensely concerned. “What’s the trouble, Dick?” I asked.
As he answered, Dick characteristically chose his words carefully. “We’ve been slowly losing sensitivity with the fathometer,” he said, “and I’ve started checking into it. The strength of the echo is becoming noticeably weaker. I worked on it for a couple of hours last night, but it is still weaker than it should be, even though we seemed to have been able to make some improvement in it. We’re getting only a faint echo, and it could go completely out of commission at any time.”
“Where do you think the trouble is?” I asked. “Is it in the transmitter head, do you think, or the transmitting or receiving section of the set itself?”
“Dunno yet, Captain,” he said. “As far as we can tell, the outgoing signal is about the same strength as ever, but the return signal seems to be weaker. Maybe we’ll find something wrong with the receiver section, and if we can get the right parts, we should have it back in commission soon.”
“Keep me advised, Dick,” I said. “The fathometer is a mighty important instrument for this cruise, especially since we are passing over waters that are basically uncharted.”
Dick tried another twisted half-grin. “I know that, sir,” he said. “‘Whitey’ Rubb is in there helping us with his electronic technicians. Maybe that will speed up the process of figuring out what’s wrong with it.”
After Dick left, I sat for a long moment. Now there were two problems to ponder. Shallow water areas near most of the big land masses of the world are well charted these days, and a surface ship has generally little difficulty picking its way along an unfamiliar coast as long as it has the right chart. But nobody had ever gone to much trouble to make accurate charts of deep waters, the so-called “off-soundings” areas, which comprise ninety-nine percent of the oceans. Our unsuspected discovery of a new and previously uncharted mountain peak as we neared St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks a few days ago was a case in point. The chart of the South American coast showed a number of very shallow spots—just dots on the charts—where evidently some submerged mountain peaks had been discovered more or less by accident as ships passed overhead. Surface vessels had been passing over these peaks in perfect safety for centuries, their existence entirely unsuspected. But our situation in Triton was very much different, for we were traveling many hundreds of feet deeper than a surface ship. At the speed we had to go, our ship would be heavily damaged by even a glancing contact with the bottom, and I didn’t even want to think of the result of striking the vertical face of a cliff like the one we had found a week ago. Traveling in uncharted waters, the fathometer was absolutely vital to us.
Fortunately, an immediate decision on this, too, could be postponed for a little while. At the moment, Triton was proceeding over a particularly deep section of the South Atlantic, and for some hours the fathometer had been showing a relatively flat, level bottom. There would be small chance of sudden peaks, since the topography of the bottom indicated that the granite substructure required for such peaks was most likely not present. In a couple of days, however, we would pass into more shallow areas. There, the structure of the earth could very likely be composed of stone outcroppings of one sort or another, and we would need that fathometer desperately.
In the control room, Chief Sonarman George McDaniel, assisted by Sonarmen First Class Beckhaus and Kenneth (“Shorty”) Remillard, had already removed the cover from the fathometer console, and they were taking electrical measurements of the electronic equipment inside. The space where they had to work also happened to be the Diving Officer’s watch station. And Lieutenant George Sawyer, whose watch this was, appeared to be having a little difficulty staying out of their way.
One deck below and one compartment aft, in the air-control center, where the data supplied by Triton’s radars is plotted and evaluated, Electronics Technicians Gordon Simpson and Martin Docker were huddled with their division officer, Lieutenant Milton R. (“Whitey”) Rubb, over the manufacturer’s instruction book for the fathometer.
It was apparent that all these men, at least, fully shared my appreciation that our fathometer needed to be put back in commission quickly.
In the crew’s berthing compartment, just forward of the control room, I came upon Poole. In spite of Jim Stark’s warning, I was unprepared for what I saw, and was instantly shocked into concern.
Eyes half-closed, face swollen, Poole had risen to his forearms and knees and was quivering with obviously excruciating pains.
It so happened that he had one of the higher bunks in the ship, normally reached by a portable aluminum ladder. The ladder had been placed against the side of his bunk, and First Class Hospitalman Richard Fickel stood upon it in such a manner that if Poole, in one of his uncontrolled movements, were to fall out of his bunk, Fickel would be in a position to catch him or at least restrain him and break his fall.
One or two off-watch personnel, who occupied the same bunking area as Poole, looked uncomfortably at me. The message in their eyes was unmistakable, though they knew that everything possible was being done for him. “Can’t we do something to make it easier for him?” they appeared to ask. One thing I did know—though this did not seem the appropriate time to mention it—Jim Stark had explained that despite his painful writhings and muffled groans, Poole was in fact not fully conscious. Later on, he would remember nothing at all about his sufferings. The morphine would take care of that.
Abruptly, I turned about and went back to the wardroom. There, ignoring the troubled gaze of two or three of the ship’s officers, I silently drew a cup of black coffee and retired to my stateroom. There were a number of things I needed to think out.
Taking the easier one first—casualties to fathometers were rare. I had never heard of one going out of commission before. Fathometers are, after all, not extremely complicated pieces of equipment, and the Navy has been using them for many years. By this time, surely, they should have been perfected, made proof against all the ordinary hazards of shipboard service. Perhaps there was something about ours that was improperly hooked up, perhaps some part in this particular fathometer was a little extra fragile—just enough to cause the trouble. In that case, we’d find it. But the worrisome thing was Dick’s report that the fathometer head was slowly losing sensitivity. Was anything actually happening in the fathometer head? If this were so, there would be nothing we could do about it.
The fathometer lay up in the bows of the ship, adjacent to the keel; the only way it could be reached was by dry-docking the entire ship. In earlier submarines, perhaps with this very casualty in mind, the fathometer had been located in the forward trim tank, where it was accessible. Would that this were true in Triton! Without a fathometer, the hazards of our trip would be infinitely increased. What to do if it proved impossible to repair?