Cold is the Sea (5 page)

“Here's where you'll be staying, Mr. Richardson.” The car had stopped in front of one of a small group of quonset huts of wartime vintage. “I'll help you with your luggage, and then I'll take you over to the prototype and start you off. It's warm in there, so don't bother with a jacket or a tie.” The speech had been rehearsed. Admiral Brighting's instructions must have been very specific. Rhodes tried to look squarely at Rich, but his gaze faltered. He was, clearly, having difficulty overlooking the thousands of Navy precedence numbers by which Rich was his senior. Until recently, his indoctrination had been all the other way.

“Fine, John,” said Richardson, searching for the way to start off his study period on the right note. “Look,” he said, “I'm here for one thing only, to learn everything you fellows can teach me. So why don't we just knock off the rates for the time being—that will make things a lot simpler. My friends call me ‘Rich,'” he continued. “Is yours ‘Dusty,' like all the Rhodes in the Navy?”

“Right—uh—Rich. Nobody calls me ‘John' anymore. I guess I sort of like ‘Dusty.'”

“Okay, and don't forget that ‘Rich' business.” Rhodes' handshake contained considerably more warmth than at the airport. “That goes for everybody else here, too, Dusty, and now that's settled, is there time for me to shave before coming over?”

“I really don't think so, Rich.” This time Rhodes' eyes were unflinching, and again Richardson had the sense of a hidden message, some concealed urgency, behind the words.

Once in the prototype building, however, Richardson was surprised to discover only a duty section, a very small percentage of the total force, present. Rhodes had a small office suite opening directly into the cavernous interior housing Mark One, as the prototype reactor for the
Nautilus
was known, and there were desks for an assistant and two secretaries, all three vacant. The main room of the building, occupying almost all of its interior from concrete floor to metal roof, had the air of being full of activity even though few persons were present. Toolboxes, workbenches, storage lockers, equipment bins and boxes were everywhere. Mark One was festooned with steel ladders, catwalks, wire cables, steam piping and waterlines, the ordered confusion of the paraphernalia of many functions and many workers.

And, of course, Mark One itself, a horizontal cylindrical section of a huge submarine's pressure hull projecting through the side of a tremendous circular steel tank the size of a big swimming pool and filled with light green seawater, instantly captured Rich's attention. He had already read of the pool and seen a photograph of it, but the reality of the beige-colored pool walls, green seawater and dark gray hull cylinder was breathtaking. The purpose of the salt water, he knew, was to duplicate the radioactive shielding effect of the sea around the simulated submarine's reactor compartment. The submarine hull section was identical to the
Nautilus
' reactor and engine compartments, except that, for economy, only a single turbine and propeller shaft had been installed. The water level in the pool surrounding the reactor compartment was the same as it would be with
Nautilus
fully surfaced, since that was the condition of least shielding.

“There she is, sir—Rich. You're to be here fourteen weeks and learn all about it. Then we'll give you an examination, and if you pass it you'll be a qualified reactor operator.” Dusty Rhodes was looking with proprietary satisfaction at the surrealistic monster. It was humming softly. Richardson thought he could detect the noise of ventilation blowers buried amid the other sounds, but the rest meant nothing to him. Rhodes answered his unspoken question. “We've been keeping her self-sustaining for the past
couple of weeks. What you're hearing are the electric turbo-generator sets, one of them, that is, and the main coolant pumps in slow speed. The main turbine isn't running.”

Rich nodded his acknowledgment, though he was far from clear as to the information imparted. But it was then that Rhodes, his guard let down perhaps because of his companion's ready acceptance of his role as a student, forgot himself. “You'll have two days' head start on the others,” he said. “The class won't really begin until the other students get here Monday morning.” The moment he spoke the words Rhodes realized they were beyond recall, and the consternation he felt reproduced itself on his face. Richardson struggled to keep his sudden anger from showing.

Dusty Rhodes' slip regarding the other students made little difference, Rich assured him. He would have known soon anyway, and he was too grateful for Admiral Brighting's change of heart, whatever the cause, to quibble over his pettiness. Rich kept a second reason for silence to himself: whatever or whoever had changed Brighting's mind—Joan maybe—was owed something too. But the internal anger remained until it was replaced on Monday by the pleasure of welcoming Keith Leone and Buck Williams. It had been years since they had been in the same duty area as Rich. Despite occasional correspondence, the closeness brought on by wartime service together had begun to dim. Now, magically, it was all restored. All three felt it, and Rich was forced a few times to emphasize that, as students under Brighting's control, the old official relationship had no place on the site. Not until Richardson had spent several hours guiding his newly arrived friends in a thorough inspection of Mark One did he realize that there were no other new students. Keith, Buck and he were the entire class. It must have been organized and scheduled just for them.

“You're here to participate in the actual operation of a submarine nuclear reactor,” Dusty Rhodes told them that first day. “The whole function of all this machinery is to turn that propeller shaft.” The four were standing on the floor of the mammoth enclosure—“room” was hardly the proper word—in which Mark One rested. “As I guess you know, we call this Mark One because Mark Two is the
Nautilus
herself. They were building her in Groton at the very same time they were building
Mark One here out in the desert. Only, Mark One was kept a few months ahead. Everything was tested and proved out before its duplicate was allowed to be installed in the ship. All changes that were found to be needed here were automatically done there, too.”

It was obviously a speech that Dusty Rhodes made to every new group of trainees, but there was also a note of pride in his voice. It had been one of the extraordinary engineering feats of the time. Mark One was a monument to the genius of its designers and constructors, particularly that most demanding and irascible construction engineer of them all, Admiral Brighting. And now he, Lieutenant Commander Dusty Rhodes, had been entrusted with its total and exclusive charge.

“I don't see any propeller, Dusty. How do you simulate the resistance of the water? Just turning a big thing sticking out of the end of a fake submarine hull isn't the same. To get horsepower you have to do work.” Keith's question was one he knew Rhodes would have the answer for.

“We thought of that, all right,” said Rhodes, picking up the cue. “When you get into your schedule, one of the things you'll be learning about is the water brake. It duplicates propeller resistance. Makes the turbine think there really is a propeller out there—even puts thrust on the thrust bearing. There is some trouble with it, though. Since we're not really driving a ship, what we really do—the work we do—is make heat. You'll be calculating the BTUs before you're through here. We make a lot of heat, and this damn things heats up too easy. We have to have a garden hose spraying water on the outside casing of the water brake whenever we stay at full speed for long.”

The others nodded their comprehension. One of the fine points, obviously, was that since the water brake was not an integral part of any submarine, a permanent and “engineered” solution for its overheating was not a matter of urgency or even concern, so long as the jury rig, the garden hose, solved the problem. After a moment, Rhodes went on. “What we do here is operate Mark One just like a submarine underway for a long cruise, and the trainees stand all the watches, along with the instructors. There's usually several classes going on at the same time, in various stages of the program, so there's trainees on nearly all the billets. The instructors fill in the rest of them. The
only exception we make to shipboard routine is that the watches are eight hours long instead of four. Everything else is exactly like on board ship. We go through all the evolutions of starting, running, maneuvering and stopping, cope with simulated or real casualties to the machinery, do everything the
Nautilus
could do.

“We'll put you fellows right into the system. The only thing different about you is that the normal trainee is here for a year, sometimes longer. So he drives in from Idaho Falls, or maybe Arco, wherever he lives, stands his eight-hours' watch every day and goes home. Some of them have to be on night watches, but we keep most of the activity for the eight to four shift and leave things pretty quiet during weekends. You three are going to have to cram the whole year's training program into the fourteen weeks you'll be out here. So my orders are to fix you up with a place to sleep right here on the site, and you're to spend all your time in Mark One, as if you actually were at sea.” He paused. “That doesn't leave you much time free. You didn't have any other plans, did you?”

“Nope.” Rich answered for the three of them.

“Good. You won't find this site the most comfortable place in the world to live. The quonset huts aren't bad, but we don't have a mess hall. You'll have to get your meals from the slot machines they have around, and things may get pretty stale for you, I'm afraid, but that's the way it has to be. I even got vetoed on the idea of having you out to my place in the Falls some weekend, just for a change of scenery and a decent meal.”

“Thanks, Dusty,” Rich said, again instinctively speaking for all, “but really, we'd rather just stay right here. I've already had the benefit of one weekend all to myself wandering all over the machinery, and that's the most valuable time. When there's practically nobody here you don't have to worry about interfering with others.” One of the things they would have to do, clearly, was to make their presence as easy for Rhodes as they could. His position under Brighting's difficult leadership, subject to that prickly personality, must have its problems. No doubt he had already spent time wondering whether his three new trainees would add to them.

“Well, that's good then,” Dusty was saying. “I'll just give you our regular training schedule for our one-year course. Maybe you'll want to shift some things around because you'll only be
here a quarter of the time, but you're supposed to complete the entire program, stand all the watches outlined and turn in all the drawings of systems, just like the regular trainees. At the end, after you've finished all the requirements, we'll give you a comprehensive test. If you pass it—you'll pass it, all right, if you do everything on the training schedule—you'll get a certificate of qualification as a nuclear operator. That's the ticket everybody's after. You can ask any questions you want, and we've got plenty of copies of the operating manual. The only rule is you've got to do all of the things, each one of you, yourself.”

Inside the building housing the prototype there was neither night nor day; electric lights kept the windowless cavern bathed constantly at the same level of illumination. The passage of time became a factor of how often one's wristwatch had been around all the numbers, punctuated periodically by a weekend. Not that a weekend provided relaxation, except in a very particular way. Saturdays and Sundays, when there was only a duty section at the site, were the most valuable times of all because of greater freedom from interference. Gradually a routine emerged. Living on the site, never leaving it, the three trainees easily could be working in the prototype before the day's workers arrived from Arco or Idaho Falls, and they always remained there until well after the second shift departed at midnight. Meals were haphazard, only a hasty sandwich or can of soup obtained from one of the many food dispensers for whose slots a ready supply of quarters was required. There was no time for relaxation; nor were there any diversions, not even reading material—except for the engineering manuals and operating instructions for Mark One. The best times were the short nightly conversations the three shared in their quonset hut, but even these had a tendency to become curtailed after a succession of eighteen-hour days spent crawling through the cramped innards of the submarine hull, or poring over blueprints.

Afterward, Richardson had trouble distinguishing any chronology pertaining to his time at the site, or the many memories which remained. Everything was compressed into a set of kaleidoscopic impressions. With no day and no night, there were only work periods and short hours of exhausted sleep. Since there were no women present during the evening and morning watches,
it was possible to confirm the suspicion, after a few days, that the ladies' rest room probably contained a cot. Here a person could lie down between particularly interesting evolutions of Mark One, or when he was totally beat, provided only that he was gone before any early arrivals for the day watch. And so, fortified by a few hours of fitful slumber (for fear of an unaccounted-for female), Keith, Buck and Rich often skipped their quonset hut bunks entirely.

Frequently, toward the end of their stay, they were not even aware of the change of shifts, except that new faces were at the various posts. Once, during a test for flux density under a new control rod program, Keith noted with mock dismay that they had not been outside the windowless prototype building for two and a half days, or even looked out an opened door, except to determine whether it was day or night (i.e., whether it would be safe to use the cot in the ladies' room).