The Watch Below Read online

  The door set in the forward wall of Number One tank was the same in all respects as the other watertight doors they had passed through, an oval five feet high and two wide whose lower edge was eighteen inches above deck level. The height of this edge had been carefully calculated, it was rumored, to remove the maximum amount of skin from the shins of the people using it, and such doors were generally considered to be a curse and an abomination and an unprintable waste of time -- until something disastrous occurred. Now Wallis, while the doctor held both lamps, was spinning back the wheel which kept the lips of the door pressed tightly together, and he was cursing only because this one seemed harder to turn than any of the others.

  Suddenly he stopped, aware that one side of his face was wet.

  There was water all around the edge of the door, not just a dampness or a steady trickle or even a slow spillage over the lower edge -- this was the fine, misty spray of water under pressure.

  Wallis reversed his pull on the wheel and tightened it until the spray disappeared. For a long moment he leaned his forehead against the cold metal of the door, hearing the oddly loud sound of his own breathing and, now that he was listening instead of tripping noisily over the gear littering the tank bottoms, the metallic creaking and banging and scraping sounds coming from their freshly murdered ship. Then he turned to face the surgeon lieutenant.

  "You don't have to tell me," Radford said suddenly in a slow, harsh voice. "If this ship is riding bows up, then all I can say is that the stern is a hell of a distance down! That water was under pressure ! We're not sinking, dammit, we're sunk ! And . . . and . . ." There was a long, tearing crash which seemed to go on for minutes and made the tank around them ring like a cracked bell, and when it ended the ship seemed to lurch under them. The doctor went on, "Hear that? We're going down, beginning to break up! The lower we sink, the higher the pressure. Any time now the hull will cave in -- you can hear the breaking-up noises already."

  Radford had dropped one of the fiashlamps, and it lay on its back on the deck, throwing up a narrow wedge of light between them. The bottom lighting gave the doctor's features a terrifying appearance, like something out of a Dracula picture, and it was only afterwards that Wallis realized that this was due to the light and that his own face must have looked just as bad. But at the time he was too frightened by the demoniacal aspect of the lieutenant and of what he might do if, as seemed likely, he went berserk to think of anything beyond the immediate necessity of calming him down.

  "I . . . I disagree, Doctor," Walljs said, trying to keep his voice steady. "The watertight door is at the bottom of the coffer dam, and if the dam was flooded with the ship on the surface and completely undamaged there would still be considerable pressure down here. And we are not sinking -- or if we are it is very slowly! The pitch and roll is as bad as it ever was, and if we were even a short distance below the surface the wave motions would have been damped out. My guess is that we're completely awash, maybe with just the poop and bridge decks showing -- these tankers are very hard to sink, you know -- and we could drift that way forever."

  It sounded good, Wallis thought. So eminently sane and logical that he was beginning to believe it himself. When he went on his voice was steady and quietly confident.

  "As for the breaking-up noises," he said, "I think you are mistaken there. Breaking off , yes, but not breaking up. The bows have been hit and the torpedo probably blew the whole forepeak off the ship. The noises we hear are loose plating and deck gear being pushed about by the waves. Some of it is breaking off and falling away. And good riddance, because the more we lose the greater will be our buoyancy and the higher we will ride in the water. . . ."

  Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. The motion of the deck caused the lamp to slide away and the lighting on the doctor's face became less stark. The mad glitter went out of his eyes and the features softened until they again became those of the dour and competent surgeon lieutenant whom they had all known but had not exactly loved. Finally Radford spoke.

  "If you think there is no immediate danger, sir," he said stiffly, "I will return to my patients."

  Wallis nodded. He said, "I'll join you later. At the moment I'd like to have another look around. . . ."

  But when the doctor and his lamp disappeared into Number Three, Wallis did not do anything for a very long time. Alone at last, he was having a fit of the shakes.

  IV

  Someone had tied the girls very securely to a raft when their ship had been going down. Possibly the same person had tied himself to the raft but had not been able to do such a thorough job of it and had been swept off, or maybe he had not been able to hang on, or had not wanted to hang on when the raft drifted into the patch of burning oil. But someone had kept his head amid the flames and explosions and roaring steam to spend precious minutes seeing that two girls were given a chance to live. There was very little known about this person other than that he had been a Lascar seaman with a badly scalded face. The dark-haired girl had babbled this information several times during her delirium even though the doctor had failed to elicit from her her own name. The blonde girl had not spoken at all.

  "We must speak quietly," Wallis said, looking at the two bandaged figures across the room. "This will have to be broken to them gently or they might . . . Well, they've been through a lot."

  Radford nodded silently.

  From the stretcher which lay on the deck between them, First Officer Dickson, his head bandaged, his left arm splinted, and his cracked ribs bound tightly with tape, said, "I couldn't talk loud . . . if you paid me."

  In all probability it was late in the day after they had been torpedoed, although they were not sure of this because the doctor had banged his watch against the coaming of one of the watertight doors and there was now no way of telling the time. But enough time had passed for the early feeling of panic to disappear. Panic, it seemed, was an extremely violent and short-lived emotion. When it was not followed shortly by escape or death or some other form of relief it degenerated quickly into simple fear. And when their surroundings remained steadfastly, monotonously the same -- no change in the attitude of the ship, no failures of watertight doors, no threatening occurrence of any kind -- even their fear began to subside.

  Wallis had spent a long time going through the tanks and searching among the cargo and equipment they contained for he knew not what. And while he was searching Nine he had heard voices coming from the sick bay. He had joined the doctor there to find that Dickson had come to and was demanding to know why the engines had stopped. Together they had talked to him until his panic also became simple fear and the fear, like that of their own, subsided into a sort of intense, gnawing anxiety -- the state of mind, Wallis thought, that a person might have if the doctors had given him only a short time to live.

  After that they had opened a can of powdered eggs and made tea by boiling up a kettle with a blowlamp. Because they were all very tired and there was no good reason for staying awake they had gone to sleep then, and the fact of their sleeping made them morally certain that this was another day. And now Wallis was faced with the problem of talking about the future in terms of hours and days and weeks when there was no way of measuring these periods of time.

  "To begin with," Wallis said quietly, "we must accept the fact that we are in a dangerous but not hopeless position. We are drifting submerged or partly submerged, judging by the wave action we feel -- either the sea above us is rough and we are a short distance below it, or it is calm and we are practically on the surface. The important thing is that if we can feel waves a whole day after being torpedoed we can be fairly sure that we are not sinking."

  At least, he added silently to himself, not very quickly . . . .

  Aloud, he went on, ". . . And that the hull is buoyant at a depth which is too small for us to be in any great danger from pressure. All the tanks are dry inside -- not a sprung seam or a sweating rivet anywhere. We are in no immediate danger, and anyone who has been adrift in an
open boat in this weather might consider us lucky. But there is still the problem of getting off the ship."

  Perhaps he sounded too bright and confident, Wallis thought suddenly, and perhaps he was talking this way to reassure himself as much as any of the others. It was likely that the doctor was aware of this self-deception, too, judging by the sardonic twist of his mouth. Dickson was holding one of the lamps in his good hand, directing the beam upwards, so that very little light reached his own face. Wallis could tell nothing from the first officer's expression beyond the fact that his eyes were open.

  Wallis continued, "There are three possibilities here. The first is that we devise some means of signaling our predicament to someone on the surface. Second is the possibility of our being towed home. The Trader is a very valuable ship and if the anti-submarine patrols report us several times as in a derelict but not sinking condition they might send tugs and an escort vessel to tow us home. The third possibility is that we drift aground on sand or shelving shoreline with our superstructure exposed -- "

  "Suppose we run aground on rocks," Dickson cut in. "The west coast of Ireland . . . has stretches . . . that could tear the bottom out."

  "That is a possibility, too," said Wallis.

  "And another," Radford put in softly, "is that we won't run aground at all, and will continue to drift indefinitely. There is the matter of food, water, and air, sir. How long before our air goes stale?"

  Wallis had been devoting a good deal of thought to these questions, and he said carefully, "Let's consider the worst that can happen, that we drift submerged without being spotted or running aground for a very long time. First off, food is not and never will be a problem: we have hundreds of tons of the stuff. As for air, well, this is a large ship with a lot of empty space in its tanks. You might liken it to being locked in a cathedral with all the doors and windows sealed, and ask yourselves how long it would be before the air grew stuffy. Then as well as the air in the tanks there are the cylinders of compressed oxygen used with the oxyacetylene gear. I don't know how many there are exactly, we'll have to make an inventory of these and similar useful items as soon as possible, but the forward tanks are littered with them.

  "However," Wallis continued more seriously, "while there is no immediate danger from shortage of air, we must take steps to see that it lasts as long as possible. There must be no wastage in the shape of fires for warmth or for heating meals. Instead of direct heating to keep warm we will have to exercise and/or insulate ourselves against the cold. Perhaps you, Doctor, will be able to suggest a high-calorie diet to help us in this when we have a better idea of how the food cargo is made up -- "

  Dickson raised his good arm suddenly, making Wallis break off. The first officer said, "You're talking as if we had all the time in the world. I don't think we're as watertight as you think, sir. There is a leak up top somewhere. It's small, but it could get worse, and there may be others like it. The sound of the drip kept me awake. . . ."

  Obviously the thought of the leak was bothering Dickson so much that he had practically forgotten about his ribs. He had only stopped for breath twice.

  Wallis said, "I know about that drip. It bothered me as well until I tracked it down. There is a section of piping, cut off and sealed at both ends during the modifications, going to the aft pump room. It projects about four feet from the forward wall of this tank at a height of about sixteen feet. The water dripping from it is gritty but not salty, which means that it is caused by condensation. . . ."

  When Lieutenant Radford had asked for another sick bay to be set up below decks, a corner of Number Ten had been partitioned off for him. This had been done by wedging wooden uprights between the metal floor and ceiling of the tank, lacing ropes between the uprights and hanging sacking and old tarps from the ropes so that the new sick bay would have a measure of soundproofing as well as be able to retain most of its heat. Now that the residual heat from the ship's engine room had long since been sucked away by the frigid ocean, the sick bay was the warmest place in the ship. The reason for this was the body heat and respiration of the five people in the compartment, but since the projecting pipe was at the much lower, outer-hull temperature and since the ship was down by the stern, their hot little breaths were condensing on it and dripping off the end.

  ". . . which brings us back to our most serious supply problem, that of drinking water," Wallis continued. "That pipe, when we clean off the rust and dirt so as to make the process a little more hygienic, will be an important means of reclaiming lost water. Perhaps the doctor will be able to suggest other methods for reclaiming water when he has had a chance to think about them -- "

  "I am thinking about some of them," Radford broke in, his tone and expression reflecting extreme distaste. "We would have to be very thirsty to use them."

  "We probably will be," said Wallis.

  There was a long silence after that, during which the quiet background noises from the ship seemed to grow in volume until they became downright obtrusive: the muffled clanking and creaking of loose deck gear and plating, the gurgle of water from the bilges and storage compartments where air was still trapped, and the soft sighing of the slow underwater waves running the length of the ship. It was so quiet that the breathing of the two girls at the other side of the compartment could be plainly heard, while the breathing of the men was visible as well as audible as it hung in the air between them, outlining the tiny beam of the flashlight so sharply that it looked like a miniature searchlight.

  Suddenly the doctor spoke. He said, "Distillation is the simplest method, but it has the disadvantage of requiring heat, which means wasting oxygen. However, we know that there were several large drums of water placed down here for the use of the men working on the modifications, because these tanks are not connected to the ship's hot and cold water system, and the men had to have fresh water for cooking and washing when the mess deck up top became overcrowded. We don't know how much there is left, exactly, but whatever is left can be stretched.

  "There is a level of salinity at and beyond which water becomes an emetic and undrinkable," Radford went on, "while below this level the salt content does no harm. Since there is plenty of sea water available I propose diluting the drinking water with it so as to . . . What's wrong, Mr. Dickson?"

  Dickson was moaning and holding his chest with his good arm. It was a few seconds before he was able to say, "The thought of watering down the water . . . I mean, you oughtn't to make me laugh, it hurts my chest."

  "I didn't think it was funny," said the doctor.

  "You haven't got broken ribs," said Dickson.

  Radford spent a few seconds groping perplexedly for some connecting thread of logic in this peculiar dialogue; then he smiled and said, "Or a sense of humor, either. . . ." They were both grinning at each other now, and one of Wallis's worries began to fade. Morale among the survivors promised to be good.

  Dryly, Wallis said, "I think you should take greater care not to make Mr. Dickson laugh, Doctor. Your Hippocratic oath demands no less. However, there is a serious side to this business, and the first step is to make a detailed inventory of our resources. This we will begin at once. The doctor and I will work together, both for the sake of increased efficiency and to conserve flashlight batteries.

  "You, Mr. Dickson," he went on, "can keep an eye on the patients. I'll find you something so that you can bang on the deck for the doctor if any of them need attention. All right?"

  Dickson whispered that it was all right and so a few minutes later they left him with a heavy spanner and a flashlight placed conveniently on his chest to begin the long job of taking stock.

  They started in Number One and they intended working aft from there, systematically listing everything they found which might conceivably be of use. But the inadequate lighting and the fact that the storm had jumbled together the contents of many of the tanks tended to slow the work, and several times they came to crates or other containers which could not be examined without moving a lot of over
lying stuff. Rather than waste time during the early part of the search on these items, they noted their size, shape, and position so that they could ask Dickson about them later.

  As Trader's first mate Dickson had had access to the cargo manifest. When questioned, however, he admitted to reading the manifest but said that he could not at the moment remember it in detail, adding that his knock on the head had probably brought on temporary amnesia. The doctor disagreed with this diagnosis, pointing out gravely that the head in question was in good shape physically and that the trouble might stem from one or more forms of congenital idiocy. Radford was going into this subject in detail when Wallis firmly directed the conversation back to the subject of the cargo.