Richardson was looking at his watch again, rising from the table, his countenance expressionless. “That’s okay, Buck,” he said. “Joe Blunt was my first submarine skipper, and I wish none of that had happened, that’s all. But I think we’d better go back topside. Seeing San Francisco Bay like this is too good to pass up.” He strode purposefully into the passageway, did not hear Keith’s savage, low-voiced comment to Williams as they busied themselves with the cleanup Richardson had forgotten.
“What in God’s name made you bring that up, Buck? Both of us know it was about the only thing we could do, but I bet he’s been killing himself over that ever since. We never made any official report about giving Blunt that mickey, you know, and haven’t you heard some of the weird stories on the wives’ circuit?”
“No. What stories?”
“Peggy says the rumor is he didn’t die of a brain tumor at all!”
“What did he die of, then? That’s what the doctors found when we brought him back!”
“That’s what they said they found, Buck. Some folks will see dirt anywhere. You know that!”
“Like what, for Christ’s sake!”
“Like maybe someone did him in, if you want it cold turkey! We were pretty desperate during that depth charging, remember. He damn near got us sunk! Rich saved us. No one else could have. The whole crew knew it. The way we all felt after that, maybe someone could …”
“That’s crazy, Keith!”
“You know that. We all know that didn’t happen. But don’t forget, we were in damn bad shape. The idea must have crossed quite a few minds, about then. A lot of rumors get started that way. After the fact. And when did the truth ever stop one? It’s been fifteen years, and Peggy said some gal whispered it to her a while ago. I just hope it never gets back to Rich or Laura!”
“Do you think there’s a chance of that?”
“How should I know? I just know nobody better say anything like that around me. But I thought you must not have heard it.”
“Thanks, Keith,” said Williams somberly, as the two friends reached the watertight door leading to the control room. “Depend on me to keep my smarts from now on. This is plain sick—” They ducked through the door.
Richardson was standing there, one hand on the ladder leading to the conning tower, much as he had been accustomed to in times past. “I thought you might have gone up ahead of me,” he said. “I just took a quick turn through the after compartments. The dehumidification machinery did a pretty good job. She looks clean and neat, just the way we left her. I didn’t see any rust or moisture stains.”
“We’ll probably have one last tour through with the Brazilians, won’t we?” said Keith. “Isn’t that what ComSubPac wants?”
“No doubt, but this is our last look while she’s still ours.” Rich stopped. “You know,” he said after a moment, “I don’t know what I expected to find, or feel. It was good to sit in the wardroom and talk, and think about things that used to go on. For a minute it almost felt like those old days. But it isn’t the same to stand here and look at all this cold equipment. Even when we walked off the last time, back then, it didn’t feel like this. Up to now, I’ve always thought of this control room as being full of people, with plenty of room for all of them to do their jobs. Now, I can’t see where we put them all. It’s exactly the same place, and yet it isn’t. And I don’t think it ever will be again. It’s the same with the galley and crew’s mess hall, the whole after battery, and the engineroom. She’s a dead ship, and you can feel it.”
Keith and Buck nodded their understanding. Much the same thought had occurred to them as well. It was not something one could lay one’s hands on. The old atmosphere was gone. Their attempt to revive it in the wardroom had succeeded only for the instant, had collapsed because there was no way it could be perpetuated.
Richardson broke the silence. “Maybe this is why Admiral Brighting sent all three of us for this job that any one of us could have done. Matter of fact, anybody at all could have done it. I’m sure the Brazilians won’t really care very much who presents the ship to them, and I’ll bet ComSubPac doesn’t care either, just so it’s done right. That’s why we’re down as volunteers, so they couldn’t turn us down. This is Brighting’s way of showing us that you can’t live in the past.” He swung up the ladder, disappeared. Keith found Buck staring at him, unblinkingly.
Topside, a brilliant sun bounced countless glitters from the tall shafts of San Francisco’s skyline, accentuated because many of them stood on hills already high above sea level. To the right, high enough for the tallest ship to pass beneath, gleaming red above the infinite western sea, a great bridge leaped from promontory bluff to promontory bluff. The swooping curve of its suspension cables, the delicate traceries of wires supporting the roadbed, the complex steel structure of the span itself, all resembled an extraordinarily well-ordered spider’s weaving. The Golden Gate Bridge.
This was the Mecca of the war years, that one thing, above all others, which symbolized coming home again. Violently opposed before its building by claims it would disfigure one of nature’s masterpieces, when complete this bridge over the spectacular entrance to San Francisco Bay came to epitomize the meaning of the land. Men had died to build it. Novels had been composed around it. Movies had been made of it. Daredevils had dived from it, and some had lived to tell of their feat. Suicides had jumped from it. Ships had collided under it, or with its concrete piers. Songs had been written expressing the yearning for which it stood. It was the gateway to adventure and the all-embracing arms of the motherland welcoming home the traveler, at one and the same time.
To the left, the silvery suspensions of two more great bridges, end to end, spanned the bay from San Francisco to the mound of Yerba Buena Island with its flat, man-made beaver’s tail, Treasure Island. A tremendous truss-and-cantilever structure, tailing off to a long curved causeway, spanned the distance from Yerba Buena to Oakland, on the east side of the bay. Silent for long minutes, the three naval officers stood absorbed in the grandeur and the beauty, each feeling a stirring of the spirit within himself.
The tug, phlegmatically puffing along, was aiming to pass to the left of the tremendous block of concrete which joined the two Bay Bridge suspensions. Rich, Keith and Buck inspected them with interest through their binoculars as they drew nearer. Autos were crossing on two different levels, those traveling toward San Francisco on the upper level, those going to Oakland on the lower. The ceaseless movement of multicolored machines was steady, regular, as though they were connected by some invisible linkage. It wasn’t so, of course, for each car was driven by a different set of compulsions. But from the distant perspective of the water surface far below, the only impression that could exist was that of order, not the hurly-burly of highway traffic that must be there.
Not all was motor cars and traffic, however. There were workmen on scaffolds, painters carrying out the ceaseless maintenance the tremendous structure required. There was something else, too, and the three pairs of binoculars on Eel’s damaged bridge focused almost simultaneously on it. “Something’s wrong over there,” said Keith.