Laura’s face was close to his, her eyes wide open. She nodded her head against his. Her mouth parted slightly, and he could feel her body coming closer. Her arms moved against the small of his back, and then he was kissing her, pushing her down crosswise on the bed alongside the suitcase, fumbling with the buttons of her robe.
Later, lying clasped together in the delicious rumpled aftermath, he said, “Go ahead and call Peggy. Right now, if you want to. Tell her to keep her shirt on, and if she gets any more calls like that to refer them to Admiral Treadway. But don’t get into any long talk with her at this time of the night. Just say she should keep her faith in the U.S. Navy. Then hang up and come back here.”
Laura rubbed her nose languidly against his cheek. “Aye, aye, sir, Commodore,” she said, “if you think you’re up to it. But what do I say if she asks me if I’ve got my shirt on?”
13
The trip northward in the Manta was totally different from any submarine voyage Richardson had ever experienced. It was the first time he had embarked for such a long time and for such a distance in a nuclear submarine. At the beginning he had, of course, known what to expect. Diving was effortless; the diving alarm was apparently sounded more for the sake of tradition than to alert the crew. There was none of the old hurly-burly, no necessity for split-second timing to get engines off the line, exhaust valves shut, huge air-intake pipe sealed. The people on the bridge were allowed to get below with some dignity and without emergency; if one of them was held up for some reason, clothing snagged somewhere or some last-minute function that needed doing — such as securing a collapsible step against rattles during a prolonged submergence — time could be made for it. When the bridge hatch was closed and the lookouts had taken their seats at the diving controls, the diving officer ordered the vents opened, told the planesmen the depth he wanted, and Manta gently angled downward without missing a beat in the even rhythm of her turbines. The initial course led directly off soundings, and as the bottom fell away the planesmen gradually increased depth until they were holding her steady — and stationary, from all sensation that anyone could observe — at the ordered cruising depth of 500 feet.
There was no feeling of motion, no feel whatever for the sea. The interior of the ship was a quiet, cylindrical cavern, full of controlled efficient activity, but they might as well have been buried in the earth, locked up in a cave somewhere. Of forward motion there was no indication whatever, except for the changes in the regular fathometer readings which were constantly plotted on a chart of the ocean-bottom contours, the single clocklike hand of the electronic log indicating Manta’s speed as a fraction over nineteen knots, and the fact that the slightest motion of bow or stern planes was instantly reflected in the depth gauges.
The silence was of course not as real as the senses indicated, for everyone had from the beginning been attuned to the sibilant hum of the ventilation system and relegated it to the nonaware background of consciousness. Occasionally there was a gurgle of the hydraulic machinery, the swishing of confined oil under pressure, a repressed whistle of compressed air, each individual noise telling of some small operation helping to keep the Manta on course, speed and depth. Yet, despite these communications of the submarine’s own inherent being and function, and despite, also, the concentration of the men at the diving stand — two planesmen and the diving officer of the watch — there was no feeling, no forced awareness, that this minute fragment of the world was moving at all.
Immediately aft of the control room, in a sealed compartment beneath the deck, Manta’s heart was pumping out an unceasing supply of steam which passed into the engineroom in two great insulated, convoluted pipes leading to four turbines, two turbo-generator sets and the auxiliary steam line, and finally entered the condensers as fully expanded steam from which all the work had been extracted. The steam provided all the energy for the myriad pieces of machinery which made up the enormously complex synergistic whole and then, in the form of water, was pumped back into the steam generators to repeat the cycle. There, instead of from combustion of oil, gas or coal, heat was returned to it from the pressurized water of the reactor primary loop — water under such great pressure that it could not flash into steam even under the tremendous, controlled temperature of nuclear fission. Here was the secret, for the nuclear power plant needs no combustion anywhere in the power cycle, and the fuel, built into the reactor, lasts for several years.
But as every man aboard the Manta well knew, the power of the atom is not released easily. Tremendously large, extraordinarily designed main coolant pumps circulate the pressurized water constantly from reactor to steam generators and back again. Equally unusual drive motors raise and lower the control rods which increase or decrease reactivity within the reactor. Extraordinary and unusual, because no leakage can be permitted; there can be no joint, no bearing or seal ring through which a drive shaft projects, no contaminating lubrication, no physical contact between driving agent and the driven. No leakage of any kind, not even an infinitesimal amount, can be allowed in the primary loop; for not only would radioactive contamination result, the pressure could not be maintained and the system would not function.
Over it all, monitoring every pressure, every temperature, every device, every important circuit and function, was one of the world’s most detailed and complex instrumentation systems. And over the instruments the most highly selected and trained crew the Navy could put together maintained constant surveillance.
Pumps throbbed, generator sets hummed, turbines roared and reduction gears whined; in the engineroom there was purposeful movement and noise aplenty. But everything was nevertheless static. Every piece of machinery stood in its appointed place, delivered its product through shafts, cables, pipes or air lines, and reported its performance in gauges mounted nearby. Only the blurred revolution of two propeller shafts in the lower level of the engineroom evidenced movement — and even this was hardly visible, for the perfectly balanced shafts, turning at hundreds of revolutions per minute, seemed to be standing as solidly still as everything else around them. Just as the men were
Throughout the engineering spaces, men stood, or sat, before their machines, watching them attentively, occasionally making a tiny adjustment, carefully ministering to their needs, rooted to their duties for four hours at a time, eight hours out of every day.
But no one, encased in the elongated steel cylinder of which he was a part, hurtling northward through the Atlantic Ocean, was unaware of the sea, even though he might pretend to ignore it. Not with the sea pressure of 500 feet of submergence squeezing the steel bubble enveloping him. The sea was unfelt physically, could be joked about, was taken as a matter of course. But not ignored. No matter where one was it was never far away. In some cases only inches. And, like all implacable fluids, it needed only a single entry point to begin its deadly work.
Manta’s annunciators had been placed on Ahead Flank even before clearing Montauk Point, and remained there twenty-three hours of every twenty-four. Her course, decided in advance, had been set on a broad, looping curve that would sweep her around Nantucket, the Grand Banks and Iceland before finally settling on due north. Day after day she burrowed through the North Atlantic, her sonar searching actively ahead and to both sides, her fathometer continuously recording the depth of water beneath her. Her whole being was concentrated on but a single objective: to reach, as soon as possible, the vicinity of position Golf November two-nine on the polar grid.