# Down to the Sea/Fifty Fathoms Down

pp. 128–151

### FIFTY FATHOMS DOWN

THE United States submarine torpedo-boat Diver had come to the surface to blow out, to recharge her storage-battery, and to restore her supply of compressed air to its working pressure of two thousand pounds to the square inch. The first two were accomplished, but, there being something wrong with the air-compressor motor, the last was delayed while a machinist and two electricians swore over it—or under it, for it was at arm's-length overhead—and the boat, in the awash or diving condition, ran along under her gasoline engine. Breen, temporary commander, raised his boyish face up through the conning-tower hatch, the hinged lid of which was held upright by a strong spring, and looked around at the night. It was pitch dark and starless, but, over to the east, the upper limb of a full moon was just appearing above the horizon. The hinged lid of the hatch prevented a view astern; the engine exhaust drowned the lesser sounds of the sea.
A curious, rushing sound mingled with the puffing of the exhaust, a voice high above and astern sang out, "Something under the bow, sir!" and a huge bulk of blacker darkness struck the small, semi-submerged craft a glancing blow from astern, heeled it a little, and bore it under. Breen was washed downward by the inrush of water, but held a grip on the conning-tower ladder, and found voice to call out: "Stop the engine! Shut off the gas!" Then, against that almost solid column of descending salt water, he fought his way upward until, face above the hatch again, but looking now into the blackness of the deep sea, he seized the hand-hold of the hatch-lid and pulled it down. It closed with a force that would have shivered anything but armor steel, and Breen, half drowned, fell to the floor of the handling-room. As he raised himself he could hear faintly, through the steel walls from the void without, the lessening pulsations of a steamer's screw.
"Run down!" he gasped, choking the water from his lungs and supporting himself by the ladder, for the boat was rolling twenty degrees. "Anything carried away?"
"Seems not, lieutenant," answered the chief-electrician—"nothing but the auxiliary motor. I've burned it out—had my hand on the switch when the jar came. But we're sinking, sir."
"We've taken in more than the reserve buoyancy, surely," said Breen, looking at the depth-indicator, which already marked forty feet. The hand moved, as he looked, to fifty, sixty—and more.
"Blow out every tank!" he ordered.
The ballast and trimming tanks were emptied, and the scant store of compressed air was further lessened thereby; but, though the indicator hand moved more slowly, it moved as steadily and as surely. The boat was still sinking.
"Start the motor and connect up the pumps!" said Breen. "What am I thinking about—wasting time and air over tanks with all this water washing about?"
"Can't, sir," answered a machinist from the neighborhood of the engine. "The motor's soaked through. A lot came down the air-pipe 'fore I could close it, and all the rest has come aft, too."
Breen looked, and became thoughtful of face. The depressed engine compartment now held the water taken in, and the lower half of the armature was immersed. A sunken submarine, with main motor short-circuited by water and auxiliary motor burned out, without means to pump, to move, or to compress air for power, is in a serious plight. But Breen's face cleared in a moment.
"Man the hand-pump!" he said. "My God!" he added, in a semi-whisper as he glanced at the indicator. It marked one hundred!
As many men as could find room for their hands on the pump-brake put forth their strength, but could force very little water out against the pressure of the sea. They looked at Breen, doubt and anxiety showing in their faces.
"Out with the torpedoes!" he said, bravely and cheerfully. "We had a reserve buoyancy of three hundred, and we're carrying several thousand pounds of steel and gun-cotton that we won't need right away. Disconnect the levers and unscrew the detonator!"
Whitehead torpedoes—mechanical fish—are merely aimed and started by the craft that carries them. They propel themselves by their own motive power, steer themselves in the direction originally pointed, and—at an under-water depth automatically chosen—if they hit nothing within a practical radius, lock their engines and rise by a reserve buoyancy to float and be recovered. Breen's last order carried a meaning to these men that was reflected back in their pale faces as they removed the starting-levers and the small fan-wheel which, by the torpedo's motion, would bring the detonator into action. "Any port in a storm," muttered one. "They're good life-buoys on a pinch." They withdrew the Whitehead always carried in the tube, prepared it like the others, inserted it, and closed the breech; then, opening the bow port, they turned on the compressed air, and a cough, a thud, and an inrush of water testified that the torpedo was out. They blew out the tube, closed the port, opened the breech, and hauled forward another torpedo, while Breen studied the depth-indicator.
"One hundred and ten," he called, "and still sinking! Out with them all, quickly!"
The sinking boat was now slightly "by the stern" from the expenditure of the water that had replaced the torpedo, which water is, under normal conditions, retained in a tank and shifted aft to others as torpedoes are hauled forward, in order to maintain the horizontal trim of the boat; but they were expending weights now, and it mattered not if the boat stood on her tail for a time, provided she floated. She did give promise of the erect attitude, reaching an angle of ten degrees with the release of the third torpedo; but at this moment there was a shock and a shudder through the steel hull, then a bumping, scraping sound.
"Good!" exclaimed Breen. "We've reached the bottom, one hundred and twenty feet down. Three hundred and fifty's the crushing-point."
"But we're scraping along with the tide, sir," answered one of the men, "and we may go deeper."
"Then we'll find the torpedoes right above us," said Breen, promptly. "Out with the other two."
Out they went, one after the other, and after them the water in the tube. The boat lifted her bow to an angle of twenty-five degrees, but the scraping and bumping of the propeller-guard on the bottom continued, and the depth-indicator told them that she was now one hundred and thirty feet below the surface, and dragging down-hill. The men at the hand-pump quit the fruitless labor and joined them. They looked into one another's pale faces. Only Breen's showed decision.
"Draw lots," he said, bringing forth a box of matches from his pocket, "as to who goes first."
"You mean last, sir, don't you?" asked the engineer. "It makes no difference who goes first on the chance of swimming up over a hundred feet to find a torpedo at night; but some one must remain to fire out the last man, sir."
"I remain," said Breen. "No arguments about this. I am the commander, and should have kept a better lookout."
"But, lieutenant," said the other engineer, "can't we shoot the boat up on a slant by the engine? The sparkers are out of water."
"The conning-tower hatch would still be under water, and we would be far away from the torpedoes. They are now right above us. We know that much. Who goes first, now?"
"I will," said one of the trimming-tank men. "But, lieutenant," he added, "we can swim up in two minutes, I should think, and I've held my breath three; but how'll we know which way to swim? It's night up there. We can't see."
If your head and stomach don't tell you, let your knife hang loose by the lanyard. It'll hang down. Swim parallel. Hold on. Keep your shoes on"—the man was shedding them—"take all weights out that you can. Put your coats on, all of you. It's a cold night up above. You'll need your coats riding a torpedo."
"Good-by, sir. Good-by, boys—all 'round. No time to shake hands. If I find a Whitehead, I'll keep singin' out."
He threw open the breech of the tube and crawled in. A man stood with his hand on the compressed-air valve; another stood by the bow-port lever; Breen himself was at the breech.
"Take a good breath when you hear the breech closed," he called in, and was answered. Then he slammed to the swinging breech-door, locked it, and waved his hand to his men. They knew the drill. Water was admitted at once, the bow port was lifted, compressed air was turned on, there was the usual cough and thud and inrush of water, and a man under a pressure of four atmospheres was swimming, somewhere, through water black as night, guided only by his knife lanyard or the feel of his head and stomach.
The tube was blown out and another man said good-by and crawled in. He was ejected. Then the performance was repeated again and again, while Breen watched the dials that told of depth and inclination, and listened for a cessation of the scraping sound of the propeller-guard. There was none, and both inclination and depth registers showed increase.
He himself ejected the last man, and stood up, alone, in a boat one hundred and forty feet beneath the surface of the sea, her bow lifted to an angle of thirty degrees from the horizontal, her main motor drowned and her auxiliary motor burned. There was one chance in a million that he would be rescued; but, as he stood on the slanting floor of the handling-room, the hope of this one chance came to him, for the scraping and bumping had ceased.
He looked at the depth-indicator and waited. No; she was not rising from the expenditure of weights, as he had hoped for a moment; the propeller-guard must have caught on some projection on the bottom, and was holding her from drifting farther with the tide. This was proved to him by a new and faint sound coming through the steel walls of his coffin—the sound of rustling water passing by. But it soon gave way to the bumping and scraping; and when, two hours later, this grew fainter and finally ceased, and he again looked at the depth-indicator, he saw a reading of three hundred. He was fifty fathoms below the surface.
Breen's emotions for the next few hours need not be recorded. They were mainly concerned with that one chance in a million, and ended in prayer; but following the prayer came the much used and abused, homely but practical, reflection that the Lord helps those who help themselves, and he arose from the floor where he had thrown himself and looked around—first, at the air-pressure indicators. All but two registered at zero; he had two tanks at two thousand pounds pressure, and he could have blown out a few more torpedoes, or men, or tanks of water, but not that water washing about aft. He thought of the storage-battery beneath the flooring—ninety large jars of sulphuric acid, in danger from contact with that washing salt water—and, removing the hatch, inspected it. He found that the last jars aft lifted six inches above the water-level, and, knowing that they were designed for an inclination of forty-five degrees, was reassured on this point. Salt water and sulphuric acid are a bad combination in a closed compartment; and his air was already bad enough from the fumes of smoking insulation and the leakage of gasoline from the engine.
He looked at the burned-out motor overhead in the handling-room. It worked the air-compressor and one of the bilge-pumps, the other being connected to the main motor, under water and equally useless. He had a naval officer's knowledge of electricity and motors, acquired at Annapolis, and this told him that it would be hopeless, even for an expert mechanic, to attempt rewinding that small motor with the dried-out wires of the other. He studied the main motor, nearly buried in water. When dry it worked with seventy horse-power. It would pump out, against the pressure of the sea, the water that kept the boat down. If clear of this water it would dry out—in time. In what time? Breen had fifteen days' supply of food and water for a crew of eight—one hundred and twenty days' supply for himself. His air-supply was short, but—suffocation is a long death.
The lower part of the armature and fully half the height of the field magnets were still immersed. He needed more weight forward or less aft; and as his eye roved about the maze of fixtures—pipes, valves, and machinery—it rested upon the useless gasoline-engine—a two-thousand-pound weight. Removing his coat, he first made sure that the gas-feed valve was screwed tight, then, delving for wrenches, spanners, and hammers in the engineer's locker, attacked the engine. He was working for life, and such work is exhilarating for a time. Breen sang while he worked.
Two weeks later he was not singing. His clothing a greasy envelope of rags and shreds, his face haggard, his eyes sunken from too close looking into the eyes of death, he dragged forward with bleeding hands the connecting-rod of the after-cylinder, and piled up a scrap-heap of similar fragments beside the torpedo-tube in the bow. The engine was stripped to the supporting column that bore the weight of the motor and the pump, and the boat was not yet on an even keel; but the last lower coil of the field-magnet was lifted from the water by the shifting of the weight, and when he had cleared the storage-battery wires from all contact with water he rewarded himself with a few deep inhalations from his nearly exhausted compressed-air supply, and sat down to wait—until the insulation was dry.
Being a government officer, not yet relieved from duty, he had kept the log, and knew the flight of time by this and the clock; and in another week he realized with sinking heart that the motor was not drying out. A little reflection told him why: in the sealed-up hull the atmosphere was saturated with moisture, and no more evaporation could take place. In a fit of utter and suicidal desperation he turned on the last few pounds of his air-supply and lay down, weary of work, weary of thought, hoping now, if death would not come speedily, that unconsciousness would—that he might at least be relieved of the torture of headache that now afflicted him. And unconsciousness came, in the form of sweet, refreshing sleep, brought on by the suicidal extravagance in air. And when he wakened there was a thought, or the remnant of one, a lingering survival of something he had dreamed—a phrase repeating itself, and dwindling away, as the details of valve and piping took form before his eyes. It was of gases, this thought—of a drying agent for gases—something he had studied years ago at school. A drying agent for gases? What was it? Then it came to him out of the forgotten chemistry in his subconscious mind: "Sulphuric acid."
He had ninety jars of it under his feet. He had lead and copper piping in his scrap-heap forward. He had two electric fans used for ventilation on the surface, and a blower, fixed in the air-pipe, but available on a pinch—all four wired and ready, with a thirty-six-hundred-ampere-hour battery to drive them. Wild with hope, he sprang to his feet and went to work. In three hours he had constructed from the back of his coat a cone-shaped funnel that stretched around the wire guard of a fan-wheel; and this he fitted onto the end of a length of lead pipe, the other end of which was all but immersed in the acid of a battery jar in the hold. With the fan buzzing and blowing into this funnel, and a stream of air ruffling the surface of the acid, he yet went on contriving; and with another fan, unscrewed from its shelf and rewired to a new location, he caught this dried air as it rose and drove it aft over the motor. Smiling like a child with a toy, Breen sat down and watched it, his mind intent upon chemistry, that he once had hated, that he had so completely forgotten.
The air was again very bad; his head was aching as it had ached before, and he needed no clear recollection of the forgotten science to know that the dominant irritant was the carbonic-acid gas from his lungs. How to purify the air he did not know. This boat was not equipped with the apparatus for such purpose that he had read of in plans and specifications, and all the chemistry that would come to him was the old, familiar class-room test for carbonic-acid gas, or—as he liked to call it now, with his mind on chemistry—carbon dioxide. This testing reagent was lime-water, but the chemical term for it was beyond him. He went to sleep at last, thinking of lime-water—lime-water, and the chemical name for it.
As he slept, fitfully, with intervals of half-waking thought, chemical terms, long forgotten and bearing no seeming relation to lime-water, ran jumblingly through his head—potassium chlorate, manganese dioxide, chloride of sodium, chlorhydric acid. These persisted through the jumble, and remained when he had wakened. He repeated and remembered them. But what had they to do with lime-water? Nothing, that he could remember. Chloride of sodium was common salt, he knew, and he had plenty of it, dissolved in water—more than he wanted. Chlorhydric acid—hydrochloric acid—muriatic acid—an acid containing no oxygen, the on€ gas that he needed so badly—formed of hydrogen and chloric—chloride, chlorine gas. Good, so far. Chlorine—also a constituent of the salt in his bilge-water. But what of it? It was oxygen that he wanted. Potassium chlorate—chlorate of potassium. This contained chlorine. Manganese dioxide contained oxygen; but what did it mean? Why should these elements and compounds come to his mind? He had something of blind faith in the relevancy of thought, but he wanted to know only of lime-water, with which he could catch the carbon dioxide in the air and free the oxygen. This last thought was an advance, but he could go no further in this direction. His mind returned to chlorhydric acid, to hydrogen, to chlorine. How were they made? They were all there—in his sea-water. But why these persisting thoughts? His waking thought of sulphuric acid as a drying agent meant something. Did it mean more? Sulphuric acid, one of the most powerful chemical reagents known—the most powerful electrolyte-electro—electrolysis—"Hurrah!"
He bounded to his feet. He had it. Electrolysis of water yielded oxygen and hydrogen. But why had manganese dioxide and potassium chlorate so persisted in his mind? And lime-water—what had that to do with his problem, now solved by electrolysis?
Slowly the memory of school-day lessons learned by rote filtered up from the past—of the test-tube manufactured of oxygen by the union of these chemicals in the presence of heat. And lime-water, with its affinity for carbon dioxide? There was no lime on board, hence no lime-water. But there was water—too much. Where was the affinity? It was slower in coming, but it came—the old lessons learned by rote and forgotten. "Carbon dioxide is soluble in water, volume for volume." "Oxygen is but slightly soluble in water—about three parts in a hundred."
"I see how it is," he said, with the infantile smile that had come to his boy's face in this trouble. "It's the subliminal self that remembers everything; and when you've guessed all around the subject it pops out and hits you when you've touched it."
He found some spare insulated wire among the stores, and rigged two lengths from the poles of the battery, scraping the ends and immersing them in the salt water. A few bubbles arose, then ceased.
"Funny how things come back when you need them," he said, as he pulled up the wires. "I want platinum electrodes and solder and soldering fluid—chloride of zinc—zinc cut by hydrochloric acid. Wonder if I'll have to make my acid?"
He did not. He found a soldering outfit in the locker, then rummaged his scrap-heap forward for platinum sparkers, and, finding very little of the precious metal, ruthlessly smashed all but three of the electric bulbs that lighted his prison, robbing them of the platinum wires that led the current into the carbons.
Clumsily—for he was but a theoretical mechanic—he soldered the ends of the platinum wires and fragments to the copper ends of his terminals, about half to each, making brush-like electrodes of the largest possible surface-exposure. Then he immersed them, and was gratified at the result. Bubbles arose in generous quantity.
"Now, which is which?" he said, as he leaned over them. Let's think. Water—hydrogen and oxygen—H$_2$O—two parts hydrogen to one of oxygen. But the bubbles seem about the same size."
He stopped and inhaled deeply of the air over one column of bursting bubbles; a little of this brought on a curious feeling of faintness, with a desire to draw a longer breath.
"Hydrogen, surely," he said. "Now the other."
A half-inhalation over the other bubbles sent him back, coughing and choking, with a bitter, astringent taste in his throat.
"No," he said, as he pulled up the wire. "That is not oxygen. It's some other gas. I must separate them, somehow."
He racked his brains for the rest of the day—until his clock told him that sleeping-time had arrived—but could not remember more of his chemistry. He could only fix in his mind a few chemical facts not forgotten: that he was using up the existing oxygen by combining it, in his lungs, with carbon to form carbon dioxide, ten per cent. of which, in the air, might be fatal; that the hydrogen which he would make, with his oxygen, was non-poisonous, like the nitrogen of the air, but that, there being less of it as a diluent, he might suffer from a preponderance of oxygen; and that this astringent gas that would also evolve from the salt water was a deadly poison to be got rid of. But how? Was it carbon dioxide? He did not need to sleep on the problem; he had already slept upon and solved it. It came to him suddenly in the formulated sentences of the morning. Water would absorb carbon dioxide, volume for volume, while oxygen would only give up three parts to a hundred.
"What a fool I am!" he muttered. "I can simply blow the whole mixture back into the water again and again, and get rid of everything but the oxygen and hydrogen."
The motor was dryer to the touch, but still much too damp for use; so, for the present, he left his air-drying apparatus intact, and constructed a supplementary pneumatic feed system that would have scandalized a mechanical or electrical engineer, but was a triumph of driven genius to poor Breen, dying of headache at the bottom of the sea.
First, he reversed the polarity of the fixed blower in the air-pipe overhead, so that it worked downward; then he propped up and secured a section of gas feed-piping that would catch the mixed bubbles as they burst, and deliver the mixture to this blower. Below this fan he suspended a fairly air-tight funnel formed of the seat and one leg of his trousers, and to the funnel secured another length of copper piping, the lower end of which he hammered flat, so that it would spread the flow of gases to a fan-shaped stream conducive to a large number of smaller bubbles. This end he immersed in the deepest part of the flooded engine-room, sacrificed his shirt to form a hood over the bubbles that would rise, and under this hood arranged his original funnel and fan that drove air through the lead pipe to the sulphuric acid. He had contrived an apparatus to manufacture two volumes of hydrogen to one volume of oxygen, with an unknown quantity of poisonous gas—that would suck into itself the foul air of the closed hull and drive it, with the mixed gases, in a divided stream into the purifying water—and that would force the oxygen which arose onto the drying sulphuric acid, to be then sent back over the damp motor. Arranging his battery wires in the water, he turned on all the fans and tested the result by his sense of smell. There was but the slightest bad odor in the blast from the last fan—not enough to distress him; and utterly tired out, Breen went to sleep as happy as a man may be on the cold sea-bottom without shirt or trousers and barely reprieved from lingering death,
When he awakened, his fans still buzzed merrily, his headache was gone, and the motor much dryer to the touch. His problem seemed to have been solved, for there were no more chemical terms or "guesses" remaining from his sleep. Yet, as he felt of the damp motor and noticed the hydrogen bubbles rising and escaping into the air without going through the drying process, he felt, and obeyed, a strong impulse to turn them into the pipe that caught the others.
"Can't do any harm to dry the hydrogen," he mused; "and it would mix with the oxygen later, in any case, while the water won't absorb it—only the carbon dioxide."
A few moments later he noticed an utter absence of the bad odor in the blast from the acid to the motor, and felt only a slight increment of gratification. It was long after, with a larger experience of and dependence upon the infallibility of subliminal promptings that he realized that it was not to dry the hydrogen that he had turned it into his pipes.
From this on his problems were mechanical; he was interested in the rapidly drying motor and its potencies when he dared turn the current into it. He realized these potencies—he knew that the seventy-horse-power motor could pump out the water and bring her to the surface; but knowing, too, that under the coils moisture would remain long after the surface windings were dry, and that a short-circuiting of coils might rack the insulation to pieces by the formation of steam, he waited a full week after the last dampness had apparently gone; then, uncoupling the motor from the shaft and turning on the switch, he carefully moved the controller and gave it momentary contact. A thin cloud arose from the motor and the armature moved an inch. He inspected the cloud; it seemed to be steam, not smoke, and he tried it again with longer contact. The armature moved farther, and again he shut off the current, assured himself that there was no burning, and turned it on. This time he left it on, and stood over the motor, watching the steaming armature slowly turn at about the rate of a steamboat's paddle-wheel, while the commutator brushes threw out sparkings six inches long. His theoretical knowledge of electricity told him that these sparks indicated a waste of current; and he noticed that when his body interposed between the motor and the blast of dried air from the last fan in his system the sparks were reduced to minute points, hardly visible. With nothing to do now until his motor gained power enough to pump, he busied himself in constructing a hood that would enclose the commutator and brushes, using his undershirt for material and singing as he worked. A man may be joyful at the bottom of the sea, shivering with cold in one garment, provided he is hopeful. And Breen was hopeful; his hood was a success; it stopped the extravagant sparking, but did not save enough current to work the pump, which fact he learned by connecting it. The armature moved faster, but stopped short against the small resistance of the inert water in the induction-pipe. So he turned off the current, overhauled and lubricated the pump, and waited.
He was very happy now, singing and talking to himself, while his heart beat a thumping accompaniment to the music, and the steel walls of his sunken prison rang with his words, delivered in shouts. He was not in the least cast down when two of his lights burned out, and he danced forward in ragtime step, secured the remaining bulb, and danced aft with It, adjusting it just forward of the motor, where it would illumine his system of buzzing fans and bursting bubbles.
He did not enter up the log this day, nor keep further track of the passage of time, being too lofty of soul to concern himself with such trifles ; nor did he go to sleep when the time for it came around. Who would sleep with a seventy-horse-power motor dying out and needing attention, with a beautiful plant manufacturing, purifying, and drying air—sweet, cool air, to be breathed by himself, and no other? How pleasant it felt to his burning face and tingling fingers when he placed himself in its way' The world above, with its millions of men, had millions of cubic miles of air to breathe no better than his, that he had made for himself. This thought so pleased him that he put it to rhyme, and sang it to the steel walls in the voice of a boatswain's mate in bad weather. Louder he sang, and louder, until the music went out of his voice and left it a screech.
There were a few hours of this, when he fell down near the motor and lay there.
Years later, as it seemed, he awakened in pitch-black darkness, with an irritating, pungent odor in his nostrils, a burning sensation in his throat, a clattering, rushing, roaring sound in his ears, and a pain in his head such as he had never felt before. Only one sensation could he place—the odor in his nostrils, the astringent action that he knew so well. Then his position and plight came back to him by degrees. His last light had burned out. His air-plant was still working, but the poisonous gas was escaping. How and why?
He reached out, felt the supporting column of the engine, and located himself; then he crawled to the different parts of his pipe-and-fan system, inspecting them by the sense of touch. Everything was as he had left it—the wires still fed bubbles into the pipe to the upper fan, the last fan still caught the air as it rose from the acid and sent it over the motor. Perhaps the motor would now work the pump. He found the switch and controller in the darkness, turned on the current, and felt his way back. The armature was turning—just a little faster than before. Shutting off the current, he coupled on the pump, and again gave power to the motor, only to find that the pump stopped it. The solid, inert, incompressible water in the induction-pipe could not be stirred. Yet there was power in the motor; he had tried to stop the armature with his hands, but could not. Two men could not—nor three, by the way it felt. If he could multiply that power. If he could give it purchase? If the water were more yielding—compressible—so that the motor, once started, would go on? Compressible, like air?
Air—compressible air. He had too much air—bad air, too. It gave him the pain in his head and the roaring in his ears. Crawling forward as far as he could go, he found a sweeter atmosphere, and thought it out. There was little logic or coherency in his thoughts; he only wanted to devise means to get rid of that poisonous flow of gas, which came from he knew not what defect in his apparatus, but which he could only stop by stopping the supply of oxygen. The air-compressor motor was burned out, otherwise he could pump air into any of the tanks, and outboard when the pressure was great enough. Could he turn that rotary bilge-pump into an air pump? Could he make an aperture in the induction-pipe above the water? Crawling aft into the stifling atmosphere near the motor, he found an elbow in the induction-pipe made up of a T-joint and a plug. Securing a wrench that fitted, he removed the plug and laid it on the motor-bed. Then he turned on the current, assured himself that the motor was turning over, and crawled forward out of the fumes Here he remained, and after a long time, when a new sound as of the clapping of an outlet valve came to his burdened ears over the uproar, he shouted approval and again was happy. He was pumping bad air out of the boat, and all was well with him. He was not even hungry nor thirsty; but, after a time, when the clapping of that valve in the outlet pipe had become a familiar sound, and his head had stopped aching, he felt somewhat sleepy; and, as the pile of machinery on which he lay was a hard bed, he crawled aft a little, where the greasy oilcloth flooring was softer. He went to sleep here, face upward, directly beneath the conning-tower hatch.
Years, generations, centuries passed while he lay there, and he wakened once or twice in a decade, listened to a far-away, roaring sound punctuated by the clapping of a valve, and went to sleep again. He wasted no energy in thinking about these sounds; they were the only sounds in the universe, and beyond his care and control. But at last a new sensation came to him, one that affected not his ears nor his organs of taste or smell; these were dead, killed long ago by that terrible, blistering gas. The sense of touch was lost in the all-pervading pain that saturated his whole body. The sense of light was but a memory, lost in the darkness that had engulfed him with the burning-out of the last bulb. But now, as he lay there on his back, the sense of light and sight seemed returning. Through his half-closed eyelids a dim glimmer of yellow and gray came into his brain. He opened them wide, and took in the details of the conning-tower ladder, the circular tower just above, and an occasional flickering image of the starboard deadlight moving up and down, back and forth, on the port inner surface of the tower. Light! Where did it come from? He arose painfully to his feet, and fell down. The boat was in motion, pitching somewhat, and rolling—ever so slowly—while, water still washed around among the battery jars. He arose again, supporting himself by the ladder. The motor, dimly showing in the gray light, was spinning rapidly, the fans were still buzzing, the outlet valve still clapping at regular and more frequent intervals. The boat was afloat. He slowly climbed the ladder, found the hatch unscrewed—unconfined from within—exactly as he had left it ages before when he had fallen, half-drowned, from the ladder. Exerting all his strength, he pushed upward, but could not budge it. The outlook was gray through the deadlights, and only as the craft rolled did the occasional glimmer of yellow light come in from the starboard. She was on the surface, but with the top of her conning-tower awash—all below it buried. Even had he succeeded in opening the hatch against the slight weight of water sliding over it, he would only have swamped the boat and gone down again to another eternity. He looked at the motor, buzzing noisily and working a rotary pump that pumped—air.
Weakly and painfully he descended and crawled aft into the blistering fumes to where he had left the T-joint plug and the wrench; and without waiting to stop the motor he turned that air-pump back into a bilge-pump, heard the gurgling sound of water in the pipe that accompanied the last few heaves he gave to the wrench, and crawled forward to where the air burned and choked him—just a little—less. Here he waited, listening to the new cadence and slower rhythm of that clapping outlet valve and the blessed sound of gurgling water in the pipe, while the light above grew stronger and the growing hope of life in his heaving breast strove vainly to formulate itself into words of prayer to pass his cracked and bleeding lips. Then the buzzing of fans and motor softened, the rhythmic cadence of the clapping valve lessened and lowered, the gurgling sound of water ceased, and, though the fans still whirled slowly, the pumping came to an end. The thirty-six-hundred-ampere-hour battery was exhausted, but the work was done.
Breen again climbed the ladder and pushed upward on the hatch. It yielded, and when the lifting spring was past the center it flew upright. Raising his head and shoulders through the opening, he looked across a dark, heaving sea at a full moon hanging above the horizon. He had seen it last a month before.
And the air that he took into his poisoned lungs cut like myriad knives of ice.
Three members of the Board of Inquiry, that later exonerated Breen from misuse of government property, met at the Army and Navy Club long before he was able to answer questions, and unofficially discussed him. One was a captain, another a surgeon, and a third an engineer who was also a naval constructor and an electrical expert.
"One thing we'll have to find, surely," said the captain; "that is, that the course in chemistry at Annapolis is not thorough. I passed in the subject; but what did I know? What do I know now? Who but a specialist like Breen could save the boat and his life in that manner—if he did save his life. How about that, doctor?"
"He'll pull through," said the doctor. "His hair will turn dark again, and the wrinkles will go in time. Lord, how he looked!—sixty years old, gray-haired, and emaciated. Shows what an excess of oxygen will do, even diluted with all those poisonous gases. His lungs and throat are just so much raw meat."
"But it's funny," said the engineer. "No one can deny Breen's knowledge of chemistry—that's understood. Yet—he was in my class, you know—Breen just pulled through his exams by the skin of his teeth. Chemical symbols were worse than Greek to him, and chemical equations a deep, dark mystery. And yet, down there in the dark, at the bottom, he took a chance that nothing but utter desperation would induce me to take, and made a discovery in chemical reactions not down in any text-book and never announced by any one that I know of."
"What chance? What discovery?"
"Well, this. Electrolysis of water is easy, as we all know, and the product is oxygen and hydrogen, which can be breathed for a time; but it is an explosive mixture that would have blown him to eternity had enough of it touched a spark from either of those three fans."
"But he had enclosed the commutators."
"Yes, but that was his chance, nevertheless. Here is another: He turned both wires into the pipe leading into his fan system. He was evolving large quantities of chlorine gas from the salt in the water, and this is equally explosive when in contact with hydrogen, not only from sparks, but from strong light. Now, he was in pitch darkness, of course, and every pipe feed led directly in front of the next fan, so that the mixed gases did not touch the sparks and explode But what he risked was the poisoning effect of that free chlorine before he made his discovery"
"And it did poison him," said the surgeon. "Ripped his mucous membrane to shreds and smithereens. But what did he discover?"
"That hydrogen and chlorine gas, mixed in utter darkness and violently agitated, will combine without explosion into hydrochloric-acid gas. Water takes up four hundred and fifty volumes of this gas, but only two and a half volumes of free chlorine, and less of hydrogen. His discovery saved his life."
"But," said the captain, dryly, "he made a much greater practical demonstration. He has proved that men may be safely ejected from torpedo tubes, that a Whitehead will support two men in the water, and that the man left to die can turn into gas and expel by the bilge-pumps the weight of water that holds down the boat. How much—in this case? Did you figure it out?"
"About a pint," said the engineer; "I must ask Breen, though, about the new reaction. It's not quite clear,"
But Breen did not enlighten him.