Yet it could not be the same as before. Could never be, could not even approach it. There was too great a difference in the situations, and the people, not to mention between Manta and Eel. He would not be sailing again with Keith and Buck in a well-found ship, but on an emergency mission with one of his most trusted friends to the rescue of another. That in itself was an incentive, of course, and of the strongest kind…
“Your modesty does you credit, Richardson.” That was Admiral Donaldson piercing through in his best Chief of Naval Operations voice, “but I’m going to have my way on this. The place for you is aboard the Manta, overseeing your own brainchild. I’m sure Commander Williams won’t agree that you’ll be a weight”—Buck was shaking his head visibly in agreement—“and besides, I want someone up there who can take special initiative on his own, if the occasion demands.”
The eyes that returned Richardson’s puzzled look were as free of hidden meaning as a child’s. Rich wanted to pursue the matter, ask him to explain the apparently offhand comment, but could not.
Manta’s bridge was as different from Eel’s as it could possibly be, narrow and streamlined for minimum underwater resistance, totally enclosed except for a tiny cockpit just forward of the periscopes and retractable masts, devoid of armament of any kind. The main deck, from its flatness superficially resembling Eel’s, was narrow, smooth, free of all protuberances, slick except for a sandpaperlike nonskid surface. Its most noticeable feature, other than absolutely clean lines, was a recessed T-shaped rail in the center, to which, at strategic points, a movable safety belt could be attached, running its length and curving around the sail. The mooring cleats ranged along both sides had already been locked in their folded underway positions, showing only a smooth underside flush with the main-deck surface. Lifelines and their stanchions had been stowed in deck lockers. The capstans used to handle lines while alongside Proteus were in the process of being demounted and likewise stowed for sea as the submarine proceeded slowly down the Thames River.
Richardson, a useless extra number on the bridge beside Buck Williams, savored the cold morning river-mist despite two nearly sleepless nights in a row. He had become well acquainted with it during the past weeks. The only difference was that he had been less fatigued, and this time, instead of a short jaunt a few miles to sea for testing, Manta was setting out on a long voyage thousands of miles to the north. At its end, trapped under the Arctic ice cap, lay a crippled submarine unable to communicate, whose only chance for survival rested in the efficacy of a pair of new and untried (though well-tested) devices loaded in Manta’s two stern torpedo tubes. That, and the ability of the people on board to cope with the extraordinary and unexpected conditions they were sure to encounter.
A couple of hours’ sleep had partly alleviated the need which Rich recognized nevertheless as just over the horizon, waiting to claim him as soon as the heightened excitement from getting underway had worn off. Buck, he knew, was not much better off, except that he had had no last-minute personal preparations to make before departure. A system which demanded so much of its principals just before sending them on special missions ought, somehow, to be improved — a mental observation Rich was oblivious of having made at least a dozen times.
The Thames River air was bracing: cold, but not chilling; mist rising off the water, diffusing the angular outlines of the ancient buildings lining its banks on both sides. A broad waterway to adventure, between the great industrial complex of the General Dynamics Electric Boat shipyard to port, on the Groton side, and old Fort Trumbull to starboard, on the New London side, which now housed the Navy’s underwater sound laboratories. Farther downstream the vista softened, became less industrialized, with pleasant riverfront homes on both banks, broken only by the refinerylike complex of the Pfizer pharmaceutical laboratories. Manta was the only ship underway in the channel, slipping quietly and effortlessly at slow speed through the placid river water.
No roaring diesels spewed a mixture of water and smoky exhaust through mufflers beneath the main deck aft, no open induction valve in the after part of the sail sucked in a torrent of air to supply demanding engine air-intake blowers. Astern a purposeful current surged backward, frothed with white edges against the undisturbed water on either side, burbled under the thrust of two deep-lying propellers — and inside Manta’s smooth-lined hull a torrent of steam was spinning four deceptively small, heavily insulated turbines, two connected to each set of micrometer-matched speed reduction gears. All this had been brought about by raising control rods built into the top of her reactor: a great, inverted, stainless-steel jug in the bottom portion of which, in carefully configured geometry, lay the active nuclear material that provided the heat, and thus the power. This was the product of that strange, difficult, gnomelike man, Admiral Brighting, who, because of his intransigencies, his temper tantrums and his disregard of the human qualities, had made himself hated in the U.S. Navy even as that same Navy, at the same time, acknowledged the incomparable debt.
There had been an extraordinary change in submarining since the war. Had the Navy possessed but a few vessels equivalent to the one Rich now rode, and dependable torpedoes to match their performance, the entire course of the Pacific war, and possibly of the Atlantic as well, would have been different. For one thing, no submarine skipper would have feared any enemy task force, nor been forced to give over pursuit and impotently watch it pass by out of range. The strenuous and dangerous (when there was possibility of enemy air cover) surface “end-around” to reach an attack position ahead would have been unnecessary, replaced by a straight-out submerged chase from which no merchant ship and only the fastest warships could escape. ComSubPac’s problems would have become much more heavily weighted in logistics than they had been anyway, to keep those few extraordinary submarines supplied with the torpedoes they would have needed. If the torpedoes had worked properly, as they finally did, the Japanese would have been driven from the sea in a year. And, on the other side of the coin, there would have been no water mole, nearing exhaustion of its already depleted battery, writhing in the agony of repeated depth charges, groping blindly — and so slowly — to avoid the threatened dissolution, the terror of the crushing death or, in shallow water, the more generous, if slower, suffocation as the air gave out in an immobilized steel tomb.
Being at sea in a nuclear submarine always caused Richardson to think this way, but as squadron commander there had been little opportunity to leave his desk except for the occasional underway inspection of one of the boats in his squadron — until the near daily series of test runs in Manta, for which he had somehow been able to free himself. Now, what he had wanted most of all, a long cruise to savor the nuclear changes fully, was beginning. There was guilt mixed with the pleasure, however, for the mission on which he was embarked was a desperate one. Yet the pleasure was undeniable. He willed himself to concentrate on Keith, and the ship and crew whose lives hung in the balance — and found himself instead thinking of Admiral Donaldson with gratitude and uneasiness combined.