He released the button, waited for the face mask, then began to climb over the side of the cockpit, placing his feet carefully on the rungs welded to the outside. He would inspect quickly for whatever damage could be seen from the surface. Doubtless there would be little or nothing he could see, but it would give him solitude to consider what next to do.
Keith was grateful to the supply officer whose forethought had included white paint among the special Arctic equipment with which the Cushing had been loaded. While he was thawing out in the after part of the warm engineroom, watching Curt Taylor and his machinist’s mates as they crawled among the heavy foundations of the propeller shaft and reduction gears, another half-dozen men were eagerly earning their rations of medicinal brandy by hastily daubing a coat of white paint over all visible portions of the ship.
Damage assessment was dismaying. The other submarine had bumped and scraped some distance along Cushing’s bottom and marked its passage with a series of dents visible from inside. To withstand sea pressure at depth, the pressure hull and framing of submarines, particularly the large-diameter hulls of modern missile submarines, are far stronger than comparable structures of any other type of ship. Keith was amazed at the reports of dents between frames in the Cushing’s single hull section, had to inspect them himself before accepting what had been reported to him. He could conjecture what must have happened to the thin outside plating of the double hull section. The other submarine, having been struck in her upper works, must have suffered major damage as well.
Although the Cushing’s hull was sound, despite the dents, the shock to her propulsion machinery had been enormous. Most significantly, her huge propeller was undoubtedly badly damaged, and the propeller shaft showed measurable travel from side to side as the electric “creep motor” slowly rotated it. When a few faster revolutions ahead and astern were attempted under turbine power, the instantaneous vibration transmitted to the whole huge structure of the shaft bearings and reduction gears was frightening. It had been intended to go up to fifty or sixty rpm, the ship still being held fast in the ice, but the shaking was so strong that Keith ordered the shaft stopped when it reached twenty rpm.
“Whew!” muttered Curt Taylor, mopping sweat off his ample face. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything like that! I wonder what’s on the end of the shaft. It must be really bent out of shape!”
“It looks bad,” agreed Keith, in an equally low voice. He had been listening on a telephone handset, now hung it up. “It took more steam than usual to turn the shaft. The motor was drawing more amperage, too, I saw. Curt …” His voice became even more grave. He drew the chief engineer farther away from the others. “Curt, we’ve got to hope at least one blade of that screw can still give us some thrust, somehow. The emergency propulsion motor is completely gone!”
Curt Taylor’s eyes widened as he took it in. “It was rigged out, that’s right! I’d forgotten — we were using it to help maneuver. What do you mean, it’s gone. Is it beyond repair?”
Keith nodded. “It’s gone. Wiped clean off. There’s nothing left of it.”
Cushing, like all the big missile submarines, had been designed with a retractable electric-powered “outboard motor,” in the auxiliary machinery compartment just forward of the engineroom, which could be hydraulically extended below the keel for maneuvering in close quarters, or, if necessary, for emergency propulsion. Normally it was carried completely housed; even the opening in the ship’s bottom was closed over, so there would be no break in the smooth continuity of the underwater body. Keith had been using it to help position the ship under the frozen lead, and by consequence it had been sheared off in the collision.
Her secondary propulsion having been stripped away, Cushing would be totally dependent on her main drive for any movement. Taylor’s face showed the seriousness with which he viewed the situation. “Skipper,” he said, “we had the shaft up to twenty rpm, but I don’t think we could even keep that up for long. It looked to me she’s definitely bent out of line. That’s why it took more power to turn it. Also, there’s that vibration. Whatever it was that hit us, it ruined the propeller. Who knows what we have out there now on the end of our propeller shaft!”
“If it can drive the ship at all, Curt, we’ve got to use it. Control reports the ship didn’t even try to move in the ice while we had the shaft turning, but we didn’t keep it turning very long. We’ll have to give it another try. I don’t want to drop out of this polynya until we’re sure we can travel, or at least come back to it if we need to. Keep your boys on it. Figure out anything you can do, maybe loosen some of the foundation bolts so the shaft can turn more easily. We’re going to have to get some people in the water with diving outfits to inspect—”
The telephone buzzed. “For you again, Captain,” said the man who answered it, as he held out the instrument. Keith listened, put it back on its cradle with a terse “thanks.” He turned back to Taylor. “They need me up in control, Curt. Do everything you can. We’re in real deep trouble.”
From the after end of the engineroom to the control room was a distance of over 300 feet, the major portion devoted to the sixteen silos in the missile compartment — sixteen tremendous cylinders, set vertically, extending from the bottom of the submarine through all the decks between and through the cylindrical hull on top. Strangely, despite the formidable complexity of everything about the Cushing, here, in the place that it was all about, where her firepower was located, there was none of the profusion of equipment so characteristic of the rest of the ship. Except for a few chests of spares ranked outboard against the curved side, and the umbilical cords plugged into each silo — reaching through to the missile at their upper end, disappearing beneath the deck at the other — the compartment seemed bare, in marked contrast to the rest of the ship. And yet, were these sixteen silos fully loaded with war-ready missiles, which at the moment they were not, they would carry within them more explosive power than the total used by both sides in both world wars!
The missile compartment, from which all this destruction could be unleashed upon command, actually presented a scene of peace and serenity. The sixteen huge vertical tubes, cork-insulated around their exterior, painted a light coral tone, had never failed to impress Keith with their total lack of malevolence. Perhaps it was that the mind of man simply could not encompass the dreadful intent, the terror, for which they had been built. Nor the fear which had inspired them.
Even now, as Keith sprinted the length of the passageway alongside the ranked missile tubes, the old philosophical reverie roused itself from some dormant part of his mind. But there was no time for contemplation today. He reached the watertight door at the end, hurriedly spun the handwheel to undog it, pushed it open. The man standing in the passageway readily understood Keith’s wordless signal to dog down the door once more, and Keith continued his hurried trip past the navigation center into the cluttered open space which was the nerve center of the ship.
Jim Hanson, Keith’s tall second-in-command, sprouting the red beard which would come off before return to port, was standing on the raised periscope station, facing the lowered starboard periscope. There was a look of helpless concern on his face. “I lowered the periscope, Skipper,” he said as soon as Keith appeared. “There’s an airplane out there, and I figured we’d be a little harder to see with it down.”