Hymns to Neptune III, continued
[Continued from previous post]
The men who went to sea in the Starfish were constantly studying their habitat. When they were not actually on watch or sleeping or eating, they were weaving their way through the submarine, moving along inside the skin of the submerged ship, flashlight ready for dark corners, a set of ship’s plans and pad and paper in hand, laboriously tracing out and sketching some fuel system or the path of a particular hydraulic line through the ship or the route of the ventilation system through the boat, much as medical students might trace out nerves, tendons, trachea, and spleen in the dissecting lab. They were like interns inside a huge breathing patient, studying everything that gave life to that vast and intricate body, nursing the life carefully, massaging the heart with grease and supplying fuel intravenously, freeing the lungs by opening the bulkhead flapper valves and closing them against the foul air from the batteries, administering physics of high-pressure air to the sanitary tanks a hundred feet down for a vast submerged bowel movement, constantly taking all manner of measurements and recording them, charting them, worrying over them, gathering in little clumps before the charts, noting the hour-by-hour condition of their patient, now and then one of them donning operating costume of grease-stained overalls (often less grease-stained than their clothing over which they were donned, as if to keep the grease from their clothes off the machinery). They performed minor surgery with stillson, crescent, and clamp. Occasionally, more rarely and because of that with even greater intensity, a group of consulting specialists, brought in from other compartments with all the quiet excitement and prestige of experts gathered from neighboring cities, performed major surgery deep within the bowels of engine room or battery well while a tight straining circle of colleagues looked tensely down through the neatly unbolted or jagged torch-cut incision, offering engineering advice so explicitly obscene that a strange would think two robots were mating down there, delivering their remarks between sharp anxious glances overhead in that peculiar reflex of submariners who know full well that if water is going to spurt in from anywhere it will probably come from the part of the boat which is deepest in it, yet who continually glance upward, as if, being sailors, they can accept the fact of water beneath them and on either side of them but are continually appalled that now it is on top of them too.
As the transit south to the operating area for Operation Wind was completed and the actual exercise began, [Captain Sampson H.] Greice was much more in evidence. If he was not physically more apparent (he still remained invisible behind his green curtain or in the dim restricted darkness of the conning tower), at least for a change everyone was aware of what he was thinking about. He was holding regular meetings, and he was concentrating on the conclusion of Operation Wind. When he concentrated in public it was an awesome thing.
At almost any hour of the night or day a little group, perhaps just to or three, or even one, but often four or five of the ship’s officers might be seen clustered before the door of his stateroom. Sometimes he would actually be addressing them through the drawn green curtain. Harry would never forget the spectacle of several bright young officers huddled in the narrow passageway, addressing themselves eloquently to the opaque curtain, nodding solemnly as the whirring voice drilled back through it, probing for the soft places in their thinking.
The captain’s hair grew rapidly. Sometimes he would go to the forward torpedo room and sit on an upended bucket and Concepción would drape him with a white sheet and trim his hair. The captain would either read during this operation or use the time to summon his officers for an audience. It made quite a sight: the huge gray head thrust through the top of the billowing sheet while, surrounding him, Concepción and the summoned officers stood in an uncomfortable half-stoop, ministering to him.
Harry continued to study toward his Qualification. He went through compartment after compartment of the Starfish, explaining to Crogan what each valve was for, and how it would be rigged for normal operation and for a dozen different emergencies, and what each pipe, wire, and cable was that passed through the compartment, where it went and where it came from.
Often he groped his way blindfolded, touching valves, lines, and gauges called out at random by Crogan, the men in the compartment going about their business with complete unconcern, writing letters, playing acey-deucey, or reading quietly while Harry made his way blindly among them shouting irritably in response to the endless questions and corrections barked at him by his examiner. All the men relaxing knew the compartment so thoroughly that when Crogan shouted (for instance), “Where is the flood valve for number-three fuel-ballast tank?” the sailor sitting on that valve would automatically and without interrupting what he was doing raise himself to make room for Harry’s groping hands, returning to his seat as soon as Harry found the valve and had gone on, so that if Harry were doing well and going from one valve to another with some rapidity the men in the compartment looked like parts of some giant steam calliope moving up and down in rhythm to the cadence of Crogan’s shouted questions.
For the first time in his life Harry found himself totally concerned with something other than himself. In the privacy of his bunk, he groped in his mind to fit together various pieces of equipment with their names and their functions and recall exactly how they looked in the light and felt in the dark and what it looked, felt, and even smelled like when something had gone wrong. But after a few minutes of such agonizing, he would fall off to sleep with a sweeping fatigue that stole suddenly through him and in seconds rendered him unconscious. It was a strange, delightful feeling to go to sleep that way, almost like being drunk. (The air was normally less than pure, however, and he got so used to waking up with a headache that he missed it when it was not there. So if he had his intoxication he had his hang-over too.)
Something seemed to take place in his mind as he slept, the unbelievably complicated parts of the metal anatomy he was learning began to take permanent form and meaning, and somewhere during Operation Wind the whole began to emerge. It seemed to Harry like a sort of magic. Whole pieces of interrelated systems began to pop into his mind full blown. He began moving through the ship and the ship’s routine with a new assurance. The days - that is, the time during which he was not sleeping, which he learned, like everyone else, to think of as daytime, though for each of them it was a different time - piled themselves one atop the other in a structure of increasing confidence and strength.