Irvin shook his head. “How should I know? But if it does, it’s not going to get S-19! Too many have died to save her.” Suddenly, Irvin snapped a sharp salute toward the island and held it. Tex started to protest, then he understood. Grumbling at himself, he saluted as well. Soon, everyone topside on S-19 was standing straight, saluting not the island but Toolbox, Sid Franks, and all the others they’d left behind. Finally, Irvin lowered his hand and the others followed suit. “So long,” he whispered hoarsely and turned to face forward. “Get that aerial up, Tex. I’d sure love to be able to whistle up a tow, if it comes to that. A lot of folks probably think we’re dead already.”
S-19 gradually increased speed to six knots, a reasonably gentle demand on her single shaft, abused batteries, and the generating capacity of her starboard diesel. The sea remained a little choppy, but not bad enough to button up the boat. She desperately needed airing out after the long confinement of so many filthy and admittedly nauseated ’Cats in her claustrophobic, smoky, ash-filled pressure hull. Add the fact that only the officers’ head was working (the sea valve was jammed on the other one, probably from all the time the boat spent wallowing in the sand), and the slop buckets they’d resorted to made matters even worse. S-19 was a “pig boat” again, in most essential respects.
Sandy Whitcomb worked on the port diesel all night, with the eager assistance of his new “division’s” strikers. He knew the engine would run now; he just had to refurbish it sufficiently that it wouldn’t destroy itself if asked to run too long. Tex Sheider’s strikers had rigged what he hoped was a suitable antenna, and he thought he had the voltage requirements for his little transmitter about right. The crystal receiver had already been rigged, but even at its maximum extension, the warped number two periscope wasn’t as high as Toolbox ’s shortest mast had been. So far they weren’t getting much but hash. Nothing was coming out of Paga-Daan on Mindanao, and anyone else with a transmitter was probably just too far away. They’d almost never been able to hear Manila directly.
Irvin was on the conn tower, leaning on the rail facing aft. It was cramped there, like everywhere on the old boat, and two people wouldn’t have fit. The painfully bright sun hovered almost directly overhead, and beneath him, a ’Cat emerged, bearing a slop bucket and chittering disgustedly. She dumped it over the side of the outer hull superstructure, then waited for water to surge over the pressure hull so she could rinse the bucket out. She was still chittering when she disappeared, never looking up.
“You okay, Skipper?” Tex asked behind him.
Irvin nodded. “Just tired.” He yawned and smiled. “Glad to be underway, though.” He gestured to the southwest, where all that remained visible of Talaud was a pinkish-gray pall, almost fifty miles distant now, then turned to face his exec. “Put on a hell of a light show last night,” he said, chuckling a little self-consciously. “Almost like it was throwing a fit because we got away.”
Tex nodded. “I guess we did, though.” He chuckled too. “I have to admit-now-sometimes I wondered! That damn Danny was starting to give me the creeps!”
Irvin began to reply, but stopped when he saw Tex’s mouth drop open in stunned disbelief. He looked aft again and was too shocked by what he saw to speak himself. The distant, glowing smudge had become a black, sun-blazed mushroom of titanic proportions, roiling upward and outward with impossible speed and power.
It was almost a minute before Irvin managed to say “Jesus!” and in that time, the hideous stain on the morning sky just continued to grow.
“It looks like God just dropped a bomb!” Tex said, hushed.
“Yeah,” Irvin agreed. “A God-size bomb.” For a moment he said nothing more, then: “What happens when a bomb hits the water?”
“Well… you get a really big splash.”
“Yeah…”
After a while, the sea began to roar, loud enough to drown out the sound of the diesel.
“Oh, no,” Irvin said.
“What is it?” Tex shouted. Cries of alarm came from the hatch behind them.
“It’s the sound of the blast! Sound moves four or five times faster through the water!”
Tex’s face went pale. “I’ve heard tidal waves can move almost as fast as a sound through air!”
Irvin snatched his binoculars from his chest and focused them at the base of the distant, towering plume. In the gathering light of the sun, not yet engulfed by the expanding blackness, Irvin saw a distinct white line rising, far away, between the cloud and the deep blue sea. The horizon gave the impression of being almost slightly humped. The binoculars in his hands began to shake. Wrenching his eyes away from them, he turned and looked at Tex. “Rig for dive!” he shouted.
“ Dive? We can’t dive! We’ll never come up!” Irvin thrust the binoculars at him and Tex took a look. “God almighty. That was one hell of a splash!” he said. He spared Irvin a look that could have said, “God help us,” “It’s been nice knowing you,” or “Why’d you let me volunteer for this?” but immediately stepped to the hatch.
“Rig for dive!” he bellowed down below. “Secure all hatches this goddamn instant!”
“Clear the bridge!” Irvin yelled, and reached for the dive alarm before remembering they’d never fixed the switch on the conn tower. The suddenly terrified Lemurian lookouts plunged down the ladder, followed closely by Tex. Irvin didn’t even take another look before he dropped down after them. In the control room, he twisted the roundknobbed switch three times.
Arrgha! Arrgha! Arrgha!
“Dive! Dive! Dive!” he said into the microphone. Almost immediately, the various station phone lights lit up. Expecting panicked demands for an explanation, he continued: “Trust me on this, people, it’s dive or die! Porter and Hardee, report to the fore and aft berthing spaces to pass instructions! Stay off the phones unless there’s an emergency.” He looked at Tex, who shrugged. “Mr. Sheider and I have the dive,” he said. He hoped they did. “Secure the starboard engine, close main induction. Answer bells on batteries!”
Tex took a breath. “Open all main vents! Vent negative!”
“Flood safety, flood negative!” Irvin continued. He heard Tex bark a laugh.
“Ah, pressure in the boat, Skipper,” Tex apologized. “The board’s green!”
Feverishly, desperately, Irvin, Tex, Porter, Hardee, and Whitcomb shouted, cajoled, explained, and pleaded with their otherwise Lemurian crew to learn and execute procedures most had never remotely expected to perform. Hardee had been just a frightened child the first time he submerged with the boat, but he’d been interested and picked up a lot then-and since. There were a few “Crazy Cats” who thought it would be fun, and had actually wanted to dive the boat all along, but not many. S-19 was designed as a submarine, but no one had ever expected her to be one again. Not on this world. With aching slowness, the scratch submariners feverishly struggled to force S-19 beneath the waves they’d tried so hard, so long, to put her back upon.
The sub’s bow planes and damaged stern planes clawed at the sea, and her port screw drove with all its might. Sluggishly, the boat started down. The starboard shaft packing sprayed water at twenty feet, and more water gushed down from the number two periscope packing at thirty-five. Water seeped and dripped from her riveted, tortured seams in every compartment. At fifty feet, water exploded inward from the crew’s head, and the high-pressure pumps were already being overwhelmed. Irvin risked a look above with the number one periscope, and though it should still have been three feet above the sea, sea was all he saw-like he was looking down at it. As he’d feared, it wasn’t an ordinary tidal wave, but a bore-a “splash” wave, as Tex had described it. It wasn’t curling over them like surf breaking on the beach, but he couldn’t see the top, since S-19 wasn’t equipped with a lens adjustment to search the sky for aircraft. Irvin couldn’t even estimate how far away it was. He sounded the collision alarm.
Somehow, the old submarine had made it fifty feet beneath the sea. She was critically overstressed, but she could have even surfaced again on her own. The wave didn’t give her a chance to try. It brought the boat up. Suddenly, after all her desperate effort to escape Talaud’s death wave, the depth gauge in S-19’s control room swept backward, and in mere moments, the rusty old hull lay exposed in the depth of an immense trough, naked beneath the mountain rising against her. It pounced. In seconds, S-19 went swirling from the surface like a twig caught in an underwater vortex. Down she went, almost tumbling, shedding dive planes, superstructure, anchors- and life, as the mountain surged by above.
The vortex released her at last, drifting helpless, twitching like a storm-battered fish, bleeding air and oil at four hundred feet-twice as deep as she was ever meant to go.
