Undersea Quest Read Online Free

courses that civilian universities took four years to present.
    But some of the courses were completely new to me. There were classes on naval warfare and tactics; the employment of naval aviation; military and naval logistics and supply. There were ordnance classes where we had to learn and recite the range, purpose and characteristics of every weapon that could conceivably be used by or against a sub-sea warship, from torpedoes to atomic dust. There were interminable classes on the strategy of naval operations; on the infinitely variable tactical problems of sub-sea operations, far more complex than any other military operation known to man since it was conducted in three dimensions.
    And there was the infuriating detail of Academy discipline to keep in mind every minute of every hour of the day. There was never a second while we were on the Academy grounds (and in that first year we could be off them a maximum of three hours a week—if we weren’t confined to quarters for some infraction) when we were not liable without warning to find ourselves confronted by some officer or upperclassman hot on the trail of an unshined shoe or a failure to make a square turn going around a corner. We never walked anywhere—we marched; we never lounged back and relaxed, even in our own rooms—we sat at attention. We learned all this the hard way—in the long hours of walking punishment tours around the quadrangle, sometimes a hundred or more of us out there at once. But we learned it. And we never forgot.
    For twenty-three hours and thirty minutes out of every day, this was true; but there was the half hour just before the evening meal when, if we weren’t catching up on our punishment tours or frantically boning up for a quiz, we could wander about the grounds as we liked. That half hour, the three hours liberty on Saturdays and the short time between chapel and lunch on Sundays were all of our leisure time. And it was always eaten into by some extra duty.
    But what was left was worth while.
    The Sub-Sea Academy is a very junior institution, when you compare it with Annapolis, from which it sprang, or ancient West Point. But it has a history and a pride of service; and the grounds of the Academy are filled with trophies of the Sub-Sea Fleet.
    Eskow, for instance, was obsessed with the hulk of the old SSN-571—the Nautilus, first of the atomic-powered undersea cruisers. He dragged me there as often as he could and we spent hours of our brief leisure wandering through its cramped corridors and chambers, where it lay moored in the gentle Caribbean swell. It was hard to believe that this fragile tin-can had once been the pride of the Navy; compared with the least of our modern sub-sea corvettes, it was pitifully small and weak. Of course, the builders of the Nautilus had done the best they could with mere steel for its hull and plating; they hadn’t begun to guess, when Nautilus’s keel was laid, that my uncle would develop the thin film of Edenite that, by forcing the pressure of the water back upon itself instead of trying to hold it out by brute force, tricking the pressure itself into furnishing the necessary strength, would make it possible to plunge four miles below the surface.
    My own favorite, though, was Dixon Hall. All the history of the sub-sea service was concentrated in this quiet litde hall, from diagrams of the sinking of the New Ironsides back in that bloody October of the Civil War, the first successful submarine action of history, through the imposing Honor Roll of Academy graduates who had given up their lives in the Service. One whole wall was taken up with a map of the world, on Mercator’s projection—a strange map, for the continents were a vacant black, with only the rivers traced on them in white and a few great cities indicated. But every detail of the ocean floor was recorded minutely. Various shades of color marked the depths; submarine mountains and ridges stood out in relief. I spent hours tracing the