Undersea Quest Read Online Free PDF Page A

lead boat; a score of cadets was in each boat.
    It was well after sunset, though the Western sky was still faintly glowing, and the air was getting cold. We put our gear on in silence, then sat at ease while Captain Sperry and his crew chiefs settled their last-minute plans.
    Overhead the stars were big and clear. The Milky Way looked like a smear of luminous paint; Orion’s Belt lay almost at the horizon and Mars winked red overhead. The starlight seemed captured in the water itself; but it was not reflected light that made the waves sparkle and shine, but their own luminescence. Eskow whispered: “You think it will be as bright as that down below?” I shook my head. I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed to me that I had heard the luminescence was only at the surface. I didn’t know—so many things about the sea I didn’t know!
    But I was learning.
    Overwater the water the call came: “Attention all boats! Check gear! By the numbers—air valves!” There was a multiple snorting from all the boats as every one of us valved a breath of air out of the aqualungs. “Lights!” A couple of hundred fireflies flickered over the water as we checked our headlamps. “Face masks!” I slipped my mask on, along with all the others; I ran my fingers over the line where the rubber made contact with my flesh.
    Everything was in order. There was a moment’s pause, then Sperry’s voice came: “Boat commanders, send your crews down!”
    We slipped over the side.
    It was absolute blackness beneath us.
    As soon as the water had closed over my head, the stars were gone; bright as their light had been, it did not penetrate the surface of the sea. I could see clearly the headlamps of the fourteen crews; it looked like a convention of fireflies. But I could not see a single human figure or object, only the lights; then my eyes grew better adjusted, and I began to make out shadowy shapes moving through the water beside me under the glowing lights.
    We assembled at the bottom, as usual; but there was no marching in store for us. This was a maneuver problem, designed to familiarize us with the problems of hand-to- hand sub-sea combat if we should ever need to use it. Six crews had been designated the Invaders; the other eight, Defenders. It was our job, as Invaders, to pass through the Defending line. If we were intercepted, we were “dead”; the success or failure of each team would be judged by the number of Invaders who got through without a challenge. The Defenders were grouped a hundred yards away. At the signal, they doused their lights—and totally disappeared, as far as any of us could see. Our crew officer signaled with his light, and our crew rose from the bottom and began swimming to the attack.
    We swam several yards before, according to our plan, we all doused our lights simultaneously. That had been Lt. Hachette’s idea—we would let the defenders see our line of travel; then, when the lights went out, we would strike out in a different direction.
    Our crew was the last to turn off its lights. When they were gone, each one of us was utterly, completely alone.
    Then the exercise began to seem more serious to me. It had appeared such a simple-minded child’s game, when the lieutenant explained it to us, in a lecture hall, back on the surface. A sort of underwater tag—nothing for grown men to play at! But in the darkness and alone, swimming through ink toward nothingness, I began to see just how difficult it was. First, there was some element of danger; the big predatory fish, the sharks and mantas and barracudas and so on, would seldom attack a human—but in this darkness, how could they tell what we were? True, the lead whaleboat was equipped with microsonar search gear; if anything the size of a shark came-within a quarter of a mile of us at any rapid rate, the underwater alarm would sound and we would abandon the exercise. But—well, just suppose the sonarman missed up?
    But there were more than two hundred of us;