Undersea Quest Read Online Free PDF Page B

the bottom, lights on, and organized a search.
    It looked bad for Bob Eskow, but not—I told myself—necessarily fatal. He had air for thirty minutes; if he had merely wandered off and failed to hear the recall signal (though that was next to impossible), he would get back by himself; if somehow he were trapped, we should be able to find him in plenty of time…
    But if his aqualung had failed, it was probably already too late.
    Over our heads, the whaleboats began dropping floating emergency flares; the flamed like little suns, bobbing a fathom or so beneath the surface, lighting up the whole sea bottom. In orderly squads we patrolled the bottom, following the hand signals of our crew leaders. The leaders blinked code signals back and forth between themselves with their headlamps, and gradually the entire class was spread out from a central point, searching the sea bottom underneath his own swimming form and for a couple of yards on either side.
    Bob could hardly have got more than half a mile from the drop point, and there were almost three hundred of us. Swimming porpoiselike through the eerily lighted waters, plunging down to investigate the kelp valleys and the cord caverns, trying to keep contact with the men on either side of me, racing toward every suspicious hummock or mound of sand, I calculated quickly in my mind: If the search circle spread a half mile in each direction, the two hundred and eighty-odd of us would be spread around a perimeter of nearly seventeen thousand feet… say, sixty feet between men all around the circle. Could one man search a strip sixty feet wide? I doubted it, worriedly; and worse, it was certain that even the giant flares from the whaleboats could not illuminate so vast an area. Long before we reached the half-mile mark, we would be relying on the comparatively feeble light of our headlamps.
    We pushed on to the half-mile mark…and beyond.
    We searched to the limit of our air supply before the recall signal, dimmed by distance, came faintly to our ears. Dejectedly we rose to the surface, stripped off our face masks and swam back to the whaleboats. There was almost absolute silence from the boats as the motors putt-putted us back to the wharf.
    We were a defeated lot as we fell into formation at the wharfside, took a roll call and were dismissed. The empty echo that came back when Eskow’s name was called was accusing.
    Several of my classmates fell in with me on the way back to quarters with words of sympathy. But what they said seemed hardly to penetrate; I simply could not believe that Bob Eskow was missing.
    It was after midnight. We turned in at once—reveille was canceled for the morning after a night exercise, but still we would have to be up by seven to begin classes. I lay in my unbelievably empty room, staring at the dark ceiling, trying to understand what had happened. It was impossible. He had been there with me; and then he wasn’t.
    I must have lain awake for hours, staring into the darkness.
    But sometime I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew someone was shaking my shoulder. “Eden!” came Lt. Hachette’s excited voice. “Eden! They found him—he’s alive!”
    I struggled to my feet. “What?” I demanded, hardly believing.
    “It’s true!” Hachette said. “He was picked up by a fishing boat, three miles from the drop point. Heaven knows how he got there—but he’s alive!”
    Alive he was; but that was all we knew. There was an official announcement at morning mess: “Cadet Eskow has been rescued by a small Bermudan vessel and taken to a civilian hospital. He is in fair condition, but will require hospitalization for some time.” And a few days later I got a letter from Bob in the hospital; but it had few more details. It was a seven days’ wonder at the Academy: How had he got there? What had happened? But all we had were the questions, no answers, and as the days and weeks passed Bob’s name became less and less likely to crop up.
    It