“It’s the boss! He wants to talk to you right away! He’s already on the line, and he’s mad about something!”
“What’s he upset about, Dusty?” Rich had begun worming his way out of the corner into which he had wedged himself. “Is he mad at you or me?”
“Don’t know for sure, Rich. Both of us, probably.” Long since, Dusty Rhodes had become accustomed to using Richardson’s nickname. “It’s something about the cafeteria, but I don’t know what.”
“Well, nothing like finding out,” said Rich, brushing his coveralls and striding toward Rhodes’ office. “Richardson here,” he said on the phone.
“Please hold. The admiral wants to talk to you.” A female voice. Joan! But the line was open, no one on the other end. Protocol required a junior to wait on the telephone for the senior, and well-indoctrinated aides accomplished this automatically. Joan had gone to have Admiral Brighting pick up the connection. Too, she was doubtless carrying out careful instructions, for she had not tarried even for a moment’s personal greeting.
Brighting’s familiar expressionless voice, as usual, did not bother with salutation or any other of the ordinary preliminaries. “I thought you understood you were to keep your nose out of everything but your studies. Can’t you carry out a simple order, Richardson?”
“In what way have I not carried out all your orders, Admiral?” Rich knew enough about his difficult superior by this time to speak up directly. Failure to do so would be equated to acquiescence or confusion.
“Don’t try to play innocent. I hear you want to install a cafeteria at the site for the convenience of you and your friends.”
“Not so, Admiral!” Richardson was speaking rapidly. Admiral Brighting would not be listening long. “The cafeteria was approved last year. I was asked where I thought it should be located. So were a lot of others.”
“I don’t need any suggestions about the site from you, now or any other time! You’ll have your opportunity to give orders when you’re on board the Proteus. You have only one job out there, and I expect you to give it your full attention!” Richardson found himself holding a dead telephone.
Two days later, a downcast Dusty Rhodes handed Rich an official flimsy. It was a carbon copy of a one-sentence order canceling funding for construction of a cafeteria.
Vice Admiral Brighting’s arrival, several weeks later, was apparently part of a pattern long set. That is, it was unexpected. Rhodes was late driving in from Idaho Falls, the first time in Rich’s memory, and the reason became known when the passenger beside him was seen to be Brighting. Rhodes had received a telephone call at home the previous evening, directing him to be at the airport next morning.
All this, Rich learned later. His own awareness of the admiral’s arrival came from a sudden appearance in the lower level of the engineroom during a cold start-up procedure being carried out by Keith. Rich’s duties were to draw a steam bubble in the pressurizer in response to Keith’s instructions: a critically important function that allowed him only a brief surprised nod of recognition as he concentrated on his task. When Richardson straightened up, satisfied that the bubble had formed and was in accord with the specifications, the admiral had gone on.
There was, however, an atmosphere of approval left behind. Rich was grateful, as he thought about it later, that he had been observed carrying out an important evolution instead of, as so often happened, merely monitoring some static condition. Not until that evening did it occur to him that Brighting might well have timed his trip so as to be able to make a personal evaluation of a significant part of the training schedule.
Neither Keith, Buck Williams nor Rich had paid much attention to the other two quonset huts in the tiny complex of wartime surplus buildings. One of these, it developed, had been designated for Brighting’s exclusive use, and it was here that the three trainees found themselves summoned. To Rich’s surprise, there was no one else present. Not even Dusty Rhodes was there. The day shift had long since ended, and, no doubt carrying out specific orders, Dusty had climbed into his station wagon and driven off at his usual time.
The routine developed over the weeks by Rich and his companions involved spending all the night shift, a portion of the morning watch after midnight, and full time over weekends actually in the engineroom or reactor compartment of the prototype. At these times the reduced manning level made possible thorough and even leisurely study of the fascinatingly intricate mechanisms. During the day watch there was a steady schedule of operational drills to participate in, with result that there was little time for investigation of the “why” as well as the “how” of what was going on. This had to be done at night. Early in the game it had become necessary to set up a rigorous schedule of work and sleep if they were ever to be finished. Admittedly ambitious and several times revised, this schedule was now so tight that interruption of even a single night’s work would be directly reflected in a reduction of the six hours of sleep they had allotted themselves for “regular” nights (defined as not having critical evolutions forcing emergency use of the cot in the ladies’ lavatory). Admiral Brighting’s invitation was welcome but, like everything else about him, not without its cost.
Never had any of the three seen their chief so relaxed. The flat monotone speaking voice was unchanged, but now there was added a subtle difference, a puckish quality never before evident. “Now do you see what I’m trying to do?” he asked, looking mildly and yet shrewdly from one to the other.
“Yes, sir,” said all three together. Keith and Buck glanced toward Rich, willing him to continue the response.
“I think we do, Admiral,” Rich said. “None of us has ever been through a training period this tough, nor this satisfying.”
“It’s doing you a lot of good, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, sir. We’re learning the operational concepts of a totally new source of power, and a totally new engineering development. And we’re learning them more thoroughly than we’ve ever learned anything.”
“You admit all the training you’ve had before was wasted.”
“Not wasted, Admiral, but clearly not on a par—”
“You know it’s been wasted. You could have learned twice as much in half the time if you had been forced to put your mind to it. That’s the trouble with our Navy. People are more interested in organization charts than they are in what really counts. That’s why so many things break down. The designers and operators are all incompetent!”
Richardson felt they were being baited. There was a set to Admiral Brighting’s mouth, the manner in which he pursed his lips, that conveyed as much. But he could not be certain, decided to try another tack. “There’s one thing sure, and that is your nuclear power plants have been making records for reliability ever since the Nautilus went to sea. That ought to prove something.”
“They’ve been making records like that ever since Mark One went critical in 1953!” The words were words of pride, but the puckish look remained.
“Of course, but it’s when the Nautilus began to operate that everyone recognized it,” Rich began. As before, Brighting interrupted.
“That’s exactly the point, Richardson! You’re like all the naval officers. You’re not interested in real performance. What good is a four-hour full-power run? A twenty-four- or forty-eight-hour run would mean something, but what naval battle is going to be decided in four hours these days? A four-hour run doesn’t mean a thing!”
Richardson was about to expostulate that he had made no reference to the regular engineering performance standard, a four-hour run at full power, that in fact he had been about to point to the Nautilus as having far exceeded this on her first day at sea, but Brighting swept on without pausing. “Before Nautilus was even launched, her prototype, right here, made a full-power run the equivalent of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. No new power plant has ever been put to this sort of a test before. If some of them had, perhaps we’d have had fewer problems with some of our ships!”