On The Beach

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 Penninsula 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 southwest for Santa Maria Island; already they could see the great antenna towers. Dwight called Lieutenant Sunderstrom to his cabin. "You all set to go?"

"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 a 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."