On the Beach (22 page)

“I’d say that’s an air burst,” the captain said, turning from the periscope. “Perhaps a guided missile got one there.”

As they approached more populous districts there were always one or two men waiting to look through the periscope as soon as the officers relinquished it. Soon after midday they were off Port Townsend and turning southwards into Puget Sound. They went on, leaving Whidbey Island on the port hand, and in the early afternoon they came to the mainland at the little town of Edmonds, fifteen miles north of the centre of Seattle. They were well past the mine defences by that time. From the sea the place seemed quite undamaged, but the radiation level was still high.

The captain stood studying it through the periscope. If the Geiger counter was correct, no life could exist there for more than a few days, and yet it all looked so normal in the spring sunlight that he felt there
must
be people there. There did not seem to be glass broken in the windows, even, save for a pane here and there. He turned from the periscope. “Left ten, seven knots,” he said. “We’ll close the shore here, and lie off the jetty, and hail for a while.”

He relinquished the command to his executive, and ordered the loud hailer to be tested and made ready. Lieutenant-Commander Farrell brought the vessel to the surface and took her in, and they lay-to a hundred yards from the boat jetty, watching the shore.

The Chief of the Boat touched the executive officer on the shoulder. “Be all right for Swain to have a look, sir?” he enquired. “This is his home town.” Yeoman First Class Ralph Swain was a radar operator.

“Oh, sure.”

He stepped aside, and the Yeoman went to the periscope. He stood there for a long while, and then raised his head. “Ken Puglia’s got his drug store open,” he said. “The door’s open and the shades are up. But he’s left his neon sign on. It’s not like Ken to leave that burning in the daytime.”

The Chief asked, “See anybody moving around, Ralph?”

The radar operator bent to the eyepieces again. “No. There’s a window broken in Mrs. Sullivan’s house, up at the top.”

He stood looking for three or four long minutes, till the executive officer touched him on the shoulder and took the periscope. He stood back in the control room.

The Chief said, “See your own house, Ralphie?”

“No. You just can’t see that from the sea. It’s up Rainier Avenue, past the Safeway.” He fidgeted irritably. “I don’t see anything different,” he said. “It all looks just the same.”

Lieutenant Benson took the microphone and began hailing the shore. He said, “This is U.S. Submarine
Scorpion
calling Edmonds. U.S. Submarine
Scorpion
calling Edmonds. If anybody is listening, will you please come to the waterfront, to the jetty at the end of Main Street. U.S. Submarine calling Edmonds.”

The Yeoman left the control room and went forward. Dwight Towers came to the periscope, detached another sailor from it, and stood looking at the shore. The town sloped upwards from the waterfront giving a good view of the street and the houses. He stood back after a while. “There doesn’t seem to be much wrong on shore,” he said. “You’d think with Boeing as the target all this area would have been well plastered.”

Farrell said, “The defences here were mighty strong. All the guided missiles in the book.”

“That’s so. But they got through to San Francisco.”

“It doesn’t look as though they ever got through here.” He paused. “There was that air burst, way back in the strait.”

Dwight nodded. “See that neon sign that’s still alight, over the drug store?” He paused. “We’ll go on calling here for quite a while—say half an hour.”

“Okay, sir.”

The captain stood back from the periscope and the executive officer took it, and issued a couple of orders to keep the ship in position. At the microphone the Lieutenant went on calling; Dwight lit a cigarette and leaned back on the chart table. Presently he stubbed out the cigarette and glanced at the clock.

From forward there was the clang of a steel hatch; he started and looked round. It was followed a moment later by another, and then footsteps on the deck above them. There were steps running down the alley, and Lieutenant Hirsch appeared in the control-room. “Swain got out through the escape hatch, sir,” he said. “He’s out on deck now!”

Dwight bit his lip. “Escape hatch closed?”

“Yes, sir. I checked that.”

The captain turned to the Chief of the Boat. “Station a guard on the escape hatches forward and aft.”

There was a splash in the water beside the hull as Mortimer ran off. Dwight said to Farrell, “See if you can see what he’s doing.”

The executive dropped the periscope down and put it to maximum depression, sweeping around. The captain said to Hirsch, “Why didn’t somebody stop him?”

“I guess he did it too quick. He came from aft and sat
down, kind of biting his nails. Nobody paid him much attention. I was in the forward torpedo flat, so I didn’t see. First they knew, he was in the escape trunk with the door shut, and the outer hatch open to the air. Nobody cared to chase out there after him.”

Dwight nodded. “Sure. Get the trunk blown through and then go in and see the outer hatch is properly secure.”

From the periscope Farrell said, “I can see him now. He’s swimming for the jetty.”

Dwight stooped almost to the deck and saw the swimmer. He stood up and spoke to Lieutenant Benson at the microphone. The Lieutenant touched the volume control and said, “Yeoman Swain, hear this.” The swimmer paused and trod water. “The captain’s orders are that you return immediately to the ship. If you come back at once he will take you on board again and take a chance on the contamination. You are to come back on board right now.”

From the speaker above the navigation table they all heard the reply, “You go and get stuffed!”

A faint smile flickered on the captain’s face. He bent again to the periscope and watched the man swim to the shore, watched him clamber up the ladder at the jetty. Presently he stood erect. “Well, that’s it,” he remarked. He turned to John Osborne by his side. “How long would you say he’ll last?”

“He’ll feel nothing for a time,” said the scientist. “He’ll probably be vomiting tomorrow night. After that—well, it’s just anybody’s guess, sir. It depends upon the constitution of the individual.”

“Three days? A week?”

“I should think so. I shouldn’t think it could be longer, at this radiation level.”

“And we’d be safe to take him back—till when?”

“I’ve got no experience. But after a few hours everything that he evacuates would be contaminated. We couldn’t guarantee the safety of the ship’s company if he should be seriously ill on board.”

Dwight raised the periscope and put his eyes to it. The man was still visible walking up the street in his wet clothes. They saw him pause at the door of the drug store and look in; then he turned a corner and was lost to sight. The captain said, “Well, he doesn’t seem to have any intention of coming back.” He turned over the periscope to his executive. “Secure that loud hailer. The course is for Santa Maria, in the middle of the channel. Ten knots.”

There was dead silence in the submarine, broken only by the helm orders, the low murmur of the turbines, and the intermittent whizzing of the steering engine. Dwight Towers went heavily to his cabin, and Peter Holmes followed him. He said, “You’re not going to try to get him back, sir. I could go on shore in a radiation suit.”

Dwight glanced at his liaison officer. “That’s a nice offer, Commander, but I won’t accept it. I thought of that myself. Say we put an officer on shore with a couple of men to go fetch him. First we’ve got to find him. Maybe we’d be stuck off here four or five hours, and then not know if we’d be risking everybody in the ship by taking him back in with us. Maybe he’ll have eaten contaminated food, or drunk contaminated water …” He paused. “There’s another thing. On this mission we shall be submerged and living on tinned air for twenty-seven days, maybe twenty-eight. Some of us will be in pretty bad shape by then. You tell me on the last day if you’d like it to be four or five hours longer because we wasted that much time on Yeoman Swain.”

Peter said, “Very good, sir. I just thought I’d like to make the offer.”

“Sure. I appreciate that. We’ll be coming back past here tonight or else maybe soon after dawn tomorrow. We’ll stop a little while and hail him then.”

The captain went back to the control-room and stood by the executive officer, taking alternate glances through the periscope with him. They went close to the entrance to the Lake Washington Canal, scanning the shore, rounded Fort Lawton, and stood in to the naval dock and the commercial docks in Elliott Bay, in the heart of the city.

The city was undamaged. A minesweeper lay at the Naval Receiving Station, and five or six freighters lay in the commercial docks. Most of the window glass was still in place in the high buildings at the centre of the city. They did not go very close in, fearing underwater obstructions, but so far as they could see conditions through the periscope there seemed to be nothing wrong with the city at all, except that there were no people there. Many electric lights and neon signs were burning still.

At the periscope Lieutenant-Commander Farrell said to his captain, “It was a good defensive proposition, sir—better than San Francisco. The land in the Olympic Peninsula reaches way out to the west, over a hundred miles.”

“I know it,” said the captain. “They had a lot of guided missiles out there, like a screen.”

There was nothing there to stay for, and they went out of the bay and turned south-west for Santa Maria Island; already they could see the great antenna towers. Dwight called Lieutenant Sunderstrom to his cabin. “You all set to go?” he asked.

“Everything’s all ready,” said the radio officer. “I just got to jump into the suit.”

“Okay. Your job’s half done before you start, because
we know now that there’s still electric power. And we’re pretty darned near certain there’s no life, although we don’t know that for sure. It’s sixty-four thousand dollars to a sausage you’ll find a reason for the radio that’s just an accident of some sort. If it was just to find out what kind of an accident makes those signals, I wouldn’t risk the ship and I wouldn’t
risk you
. Got that?”

“I got that, sir.”

“Well now, hear this. You’ve got air for two hours in the cylinders. I want you back decontaminated and in the hull in an hour and a half. You won’t have a watch. I’ll keep the time for you from here. I’ll sound the siren every quarter of an hour. One blast when you’ve been gone a quarter of an hour, two blasts, half an hour, and so on. When you hear four blasts you start winding up whatever you may be doing. At five blasts you drop everything, whatever it may be, and come right back. Before six blasts you must be back and decontaminating in the escape trunk. Is that all clear?”

“Quite clear, sir.”

“Okay. I don’t want this mission completed particularly now. I want you back on board safe. For two bits I wouldn’t send you at all, because we know now most all of what you’ll find, but I told the Admiral we’d put somebody on shore to investigate. I don’t want you to go taking undue risks. I’d rather have you back on board, even if we don’t find out the whole story of what makes these signals. The only thing would justify you taking any risk would be if you find any signs of life on shore.”

“I get that, sir.”

“No souvenirs from shore. The only thing to come back in the hull is you, stark naked.”

“Okay, sir.”

The captain went back into the control-room, and the radio officer went forward. The submarine nosed her way forward with the hull just awash, feeling her way to Santa Maria at a slow speed in the bright sunlight of the spring afternoon, ready to stop engines immediately and blow tanks if she hit any obstruction. They went very cautiously, and it was about five o’clock in the afternoon when she finally lay-to off the jetty of the island, in six fathoms of water.

Dwight went forward, and found Lieutenant Sunderstrom sitting in the radiation suit complete but for the helmet and the pack of oxygen bottles, smoking a cigarette. “Okay, fella,” he said. “Off you go.”

The young man stubbed out his cigarette and stood while a couple of men adjusted the helmet and the harness of the pack. He tested the air, glanced at the pressure gauge, elevated one thumb, and climbed into the escape trunk, closing the door behind him.

Out on deck he stretched and breathed deeply, relishing the sunlight and the escape from the hull. Then he raised a hatch of the superstructure and pulled out the dinghy pack, stripped off the plastic sealing strips, unfolded the dinghy, and pressed the lever of the air bottle that inflated it. He tied the painter and lowered the rubber boat into the water, took the paddle and led the boat aft to the steps beside the conning tower. He clambered down into it, and pushed off from the submarine.

The boat was awkward to manoeuvre with the single paddle, and it took him ten minutes to reach the jetty. He made it fast and clambered up the ladder; as he began to walk towards the shore he heard one blast from the siren of the submarine. He turned and waved, and walked on.

He came to a group of grey painted buildings, stores of
some kind. There was a weatherproof electric switch upon an outside wall; he went to it and turned it, and a lamp above his head lit up. He turned it off again, and went on.

He came to a latrine. He paused, then crossed the road, and looked in. A body in khaki gabardine lay half in and half out of one of the compartments, much decomposed. It was no more than he had expected to see, but the sight was sobering. He left it, and went on up the road.

The Communication School lay over on the right, in buildings by itself. This was the part of the installation that he knew, but that was not what he had come to see. The Coding Office lay to the left, and near the Coding Office the main transmitting office would almost certainly be located.

He entered the brick building that was the Coding Office, and stood in the hallway trying the doors. Every door was locked except for two that led into the toilets. He did not go in there.