Undersea Fleet Read Online Free Page A

take the sea, don’t try to hide behind ear plugs; all they’ll do is let the pressure build up a little more—a very little more—and then they’ll give in, and you’ll have a burst eardrum, and you’ll be out of the Academy! Just like Dorritt, here!”
    It was too bad for Dorritt—but it saved us for the moment.
    But only for the moment.
    We weren’t more than a yard out of the lock when Bob swayed and stumbled.
    I caught his arm, trying to keep him on his feet at least until we were out of range of Coach Blighman’s searching eyes. “Bob! Buck up, man! What’s the matter?”
    He looked at me with a strange, distant expression; and then without warning his eyes closed and he fell out of my grasp to the floor.
    They let me come with him to the sick-bay; they even let me take one end of the stretcher.
    He woke up as we set the stretcher down and turned to catch my eye. For a moment I thought he had lost his mind. “Jim? Jim? Can you hear me?”
    “I can hear you, Bob. I—”
    “You’re so far away!” His eyes were glazed, staring at me. “Is that you, Jim? I can’t see—There’s a green fog, and lightning flashes—Jim, where are you?”
    I said, trying to reassure him: “You’re in the sick-bay, Bob. Lieutenant Saxon is right here. We’ll fix you up—”
    He closed his eyes as one of the sea medics jabbed him with a needle. It put him to sleep, almost at once. But before he went under I heard him whisper: “Narcosis…I knew I’d never make it.”
    Lieutenant Saxon looked at me over his unconscious form. “Sorry, Eden,” he said.
    “You mean he’s washed out, sir?”
    He nodded. “Pressure sensitive. Sorry, but—You’d better get back to your crew.”

3
Dive for Record!
    At seven hundred feet I swam out into blackness.
    The powerful sub-sea floodlamps of the gym ship could no more than shadow the gloomy deck. There was no trace of light from the bright sun overhead, and only the dimmest corona, far distant, to mark the bow superstructure.
    I felt—dizzy, almost sick.
    Was it the pressure, I wondered, or was it my friend Bob Eskow, back in the sick-bay? I had left him and gone back to the trials, but my thoughts stayed with him.
    I tried to put him out of my mind, and stroked forward through the gloomy depths toward the faintly glowing bow superstructure, where my number had to be put out.
    There were only seventeen of us left—the rest had completed a few dives and been disqualified by the sea-medics from going on, or had disqualified themselves. Or, like Bob Eskow, had cracked up.
    Two were left from our original twenty-man crew—myself and one other—and fifteen from all the other crews combined. I recognized David Craken and the boy from Peru, Eladio; there was Cadet Captain Fairfane, glowering fiercely at the two foreign cadets; and a few more.
    I left them behind and stroked out. There was no feeling of pressure on me, for the pressure inside my body was fully as great as the pressure without. The chuckling, whispering electrolung on my back supplied gas under pressure, filled my lungs and my bloodstream. Clever chemical filters sucked out every trace of chlorine, nitrogen and carbon-dioxide, so that there was no risk of being poisoned or of “the bends”—that joint-crippling sickness that came after pressure that had killed and maimed so many early divers.
    A column of water seven hundred feet tall was squeezing me, but my own body was pushing back; I couldn’t feel the pressure itself. But I felt ancient, weary, exhausted, without knowing why. I was drained of energy. Every stroke of the flippers on my feet, every movement of my arms, seemed to take all the strength in my body. Each time I completed a stroke it seemed utterly impossible that I would find the energy and strength necessary for another. I would be so much easier to let myself drift…
    But somehow I found the strength. And somehow, slowly, the greenish corona at the bow grew nearer. Its shape appeared; the