The Watch Below Read Online Free PDF

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