“Yes, sir.” It went on from there; it wound up with an order to spend the next day’s half-hour before-dinner rest period at attention in front of the bulletin board, memorizing the orders of the day. I could stand that well enough; what hurt was that Cadet Captain Sperry had been within easy earshot when the classmate had called to me that Eskow was back in our room. He knew why I had been hurrying, and why I was absent-minded.
He knew, and yet he jumped on me for what was, after all, the smallest of offenses. I was finding it very difficult to live under the rule of Cadet Captain Brand Sperry.
But five minutes later, in our room, Bob Eskow made up for much.
I pumped his hand in a storm of warm feeling. “Bob!” I said, inarticulately. “I never expected to see you again!”
His grin wavered. In a dour tone, he said: “You may not see me for very long, at that. I’m on probation.”
“Probation! But—”
He shrugged. “They’re right, in a way,” he said. “Wait a minute, and I’ll tell you everything that happened. Back at the night maneuver, I went down for the exercises right behind you and we all started off for the defensive line. I remember turning my headlamp off. And I remember wondering how in the world I could tell if I was swimming up, down, sidewise or what. Then—” he hesitated and shook his head—“then something happened, Jim. I don’t honestly know exactly what. The doctor said something about abnormal sensitivity to pressure and blacking out—I don’t know. All I know is, all of a sudden, everything got foggy. I couldn’t seem to get my breath, and things were getting black—although everything was so black to start out with that it was kind of hard to tell. Then—” he spread his hands—“then I was on the deck of a little fishing ketch; they’d pulled me up in the nets.”
I said, “But, Bob—”
“I know,” he said. “I’d been in the water for a long time—I was just about out of oxygen, they told me. But I was alive. They didn’t have any radio in the ketch, and they didn’t see why they should be bothered bringing me in to the Academy wharf, so they took be to their home port. And then they phoned the Academy, and a Regular medical officer from the Sub-Sea Base came down and got me—and there I was, in the hospital.”
“But what knocked you out?”
He looked at me somberly. “The medical officer asked me a lot of silly questions about that. First he thought it was a malfunction of the breathing apparatus, but then he got an engineering report that wrecked that idea. So he just patted me on the head and told me some people were more susceptible to these things than others and, after all, I could have a perfectly good life as a lubber civilian…”
I gaped at him. “Bob, you’re not washed out?”
He grinned and poked me on the shoulder—but the grin wasn’t as happy as it could have been. “Not quite,” he said. “Not quite, but it was pretty close. They had a hearing, right there in the hospital, as soon as I was able to sit up and take notice. And I managed to convince them that, after all, it might have been malfunction of the apparatus, so they allowed as how they might give me another chance. But—well, it’s on my record, Jim. It isn’t any disgrace to get washed out of the Academy for medical reasons, I know that—but I don’t want to get washed out for any reason. Any little thing now—anything that might ordinarily get me a hard time from the Commandant, for instance—and I’m out.”
I said indignantly, “Bob, there’s been some kind of mistake. That’s not fair! Maybe it was punk equipment—they can’t put that kind of a mark on your record unless they’re sure. Did they take into consideration your record here? All the calisthenics, and the other underwater exercises, and—”
He wasn’t smiling at all now. He said soberly, “They sure did, Jim. You might say that was the biggest part of it. They had sworn evidence that, from my first day at the Academy, I had been consistently showing signs of being unable to keep up with the rest of the class—puffing and panting and not quite making the number of pushups and so on.”
I was aghast. “But—”
“But nothing! That’s the story, Jim. I won’t deny that maybe I haven’t got as many muscles as you do—who does? But I think I’ve held my end up in everything we did. Only—the testimony said different.”
“What testimony?” I demanded. “Who told them a cock-and-bull story like that?”
“He made it mighty plausible, Jim,” Bob said gently. “It was a good friend of yours. He showed up right at the hospital, and he was just the model of a perfect sub-sea cadet while he was answering questions. You know who I mean—Cadet Captain Brand Sperry, himself.”
6
The Cruise of the Pocatello
My second summer at the Academy I almost saw my Uncle Stewart.
I had come a long way from the clumsy young civilian who had entered the Academy’s coral gates two years before. We all had. Two solid years of drill, work and study had turned us into—well, not real sub-sea officers; not yet. But certainly something as far removed from our soft civilian days as possible. I could skin-dive to forty feet, lung-dive to seven hundred, suit-dive to limits of the Edenite armor’s capacity. I could name the duties of every crewman on any fighting sub-sea vessel of the service; in a pinch, I could take those duties over—from scrambling eggs for eight hundred men in the galley to conning my ship through a delicate harbor approach.
True, it was all book-learning, or nearly all. I had yet to put most of my new skills into practice; and I had a good two years more of advanced studies ahead of me before I could be commissioned. But it was as a sea-faring man, a certified midshipman of the Sub-Sea Service, and not as a lubber that, with the rest of my class—now less than two hundred strong—I embarked for our round-the- world training cruise on the old SSS Pocatello.
It was to be a ninety-day cruise, across the North Atlantic, through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, through the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, where we would take part in Fleet Exercises; then across the Indian Ocean and the treacherous waters around the East Indies to Marinia. There, I hoped, I would have a liberty and a chance to see my uncle again, before we began the long cross-Pacific leg to the Panama Canal and thence back to our Caribbean base. We had just over thirty thousand miles to go, almost all of it submerged; only at Suez and Panama would Pocatello transit the canals as a surface vessel.
The crossing of the Atlantic was child’s play. I suppose we needed it to break into the routine of sub-ship life; but there was almost nothing for us to do but stand our watches, keep our engines going and wait until the slow eight-day crossing was over. We ran the ship; there was a skeleton complement of Regulars aboard, but their job was only to stand by in case of disaster, and to observe and make reports on us.
Pocatello’ s Second Officer was Cadet Captain Sperry. He was not technically in command, but he had the functions of an exec; and there was enough of a component of command in his post to give Bob Eskow and me uneasy moments. But there was no trouble all the way across the Atlantic.