Dick nodded as I left, probably both relieved and surprised that I had not questioned him further. A glance at Jim Hay’s diving crew and the instruments before them showed me that Triton was rock steady at the ordered depth and still at ordered speed. Here, at least, things were under control.
Of all the urgent things on my mind at this moment, the condition of the engineering plant was the most critical. I could stay away from it no longer.
I can recall a feeling of resolution as I walked swiftly toward the engineering spaces; this was what Triton was built for. Even though we had to shut down one plant—even though we might have to keep it shut down for the entire remainder of our cruise—there was no reason why the other should have the same bad luck. We could and would carry on. This was the traditional Navy way, and it was, I knew, what Admiral Rickover would have had us do, was in principle what he had himself directed when the prototype of USS Nautilus, out on the flats of Idaho, had made that famous full-power simulated run across the Atlantic Ocean.
When I joined the engineer group, I could see that the news was not good. Don handed me the sheet of paper on which the latest readings had been logged. They were similar to the ones I had seen earlier, but higher.
“We can’t figure it out, Captain,” he said. “This just doesn’t add up, but here they are!”
“Were they taken by the same person?” I asked.
Don shook his head. “I thought of that, too,” he said. “These are an independent set taken by another man.”
Gloom deepened. Everyone fully understood the implications of the situation.
“What do you recommend, Don?” I said, knowing what it must be.
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.
After long minutes, Don looked up. “It looks as though we made a mistake, Captain,” he said. “The first two sets of readings were written down in a slightly different way from Pat’s here, but they made a mistake in working them out. Look, here it is.”
I guarded myself from being overeager to accept this sudden release. “This is too easy, Don,” I said. “You mean, while I’ve been standing here, after we’ve gone through all this flap, now you say there never was any problem?”
Don nodded. “Let me go through this whole thing once more very carefully, Captain,” he said. “It looks as though we have a couple of problems to straighten out, and I’ll be up making a report to you within the hour.”
“Very well,” I said, not knowing whether to be angry or relieved. “Have a fourth set of readings taken—you and Pat had better do these yourselves—I need to know exactly where we stand.”