CHAPTER IV.
A MARVELOUS DEEP-SEA CRAFT.
The Dolphin was ready. We went down to Norfolk with Dr. Plantet upon his last inspection. At least, Polly and I went; Arturo did not go. He was ill, he said, and indeed he looked it. Flushed of face, with cheeks these last days gone thinner; brooding eyes, with an uneasy, restless gaze that seemed always to avoid us.
Sardonic words came from Dr. Plantet that morning when we left. Arturo did not answer them; he moved away in the library, as if suddenly threatened with childish tears. And Dr. Plantet, wounded to the core of him, I know turned his back upon his son and stalked grimly out.
I recall that as we ascended the incline to the air-stage runway I glanced over to the house. At the library window Arturo’s white face was staring after us.
Was he afraid? He had said he would go with us on the voyage, of course. Polly was going. We needed a cook; some one to care for our physical wants. Who could do that better than Polly? It was characteristic of Dr. Plantet that he should thus be willing to expose her to danger. A stoicism, a subversion of all his instinctive inner feelings of fear--and a warm pride in her that she should want to aid us and her world.
How much more keenly, then, did he feel shame for Arturo! Was the boy a physical coward? Arturo had said he wanted to go, of course. He was to record in detail our findings; cartographer upon this adventure to chart the unknown deeps. He had a skill with mathematical drawings; I could imagine such a task thrilling him.
Polly tried to hide for him his lame enthusiasm. His fear? We never discussed it. And I think now it was very strange that we so little comprehended this boy we all loved.
We stood in the Norfolk shops, where the artificial testing canal came up like a dark thread; stood gazing at the Dolphin as she hung in the cradle over the rectangle of water waiting to receive her. A little dolphin of a ship indeed, hanging there with her _ralite_ hull smooth as burnished copper. A dolphin with trimmed tail and sharply pointed nose. Eighty-two feet of burnished hull, sleek as the body of a seal.
We walked around her; Dr. Plantet showed her points with a creator’s pride. Hardly a projection to mar this sleek exterior. The vertical and horizontal rudders might have been a tail; the lateral planes, flexible, sensitive as the wing-tips of a wasp-flyer, were folded in against the hull, so closely that the cracks of them were barely visible. A workman on board slid them out for us--fins opening out to barely a foot of width, trembling in the air like thin steel sheets.
There were tiny stern ports for the atomic exhausts; the man on board swung them to show us how in themselves they could guide the vessel. There were bull’s-eye windows, like freckled patches on the hull; and under the bow, like a mouth, a tiny port swung open to expose a torpedo tube, the craft’s single weapon, with the staring eyes of the Franklin searchlights above it.
We climbed over the spider-bridge and went on board. A small bull’s-eye turret came sliding up for surface cruising; a tiny door gave into it so that we might crouch through and descend the ladder.
The upper slope of the hull had ingeniously opened to form a small level deck upon which we might sit with the ship awash.
Even for the eighty-two-foot length and a bulge at the middle of some twenty-four-foot diameter, the interior of the Dolphin was surprisingly small. Dr. Plantet explained to me his principle of reciprocating pressures, as he called it.
But I could comprehend, this day, no more than its generalities--a mere glimpse of the fundamentals of what now is so famous; and it was many months before I grasped it in detail.
* * * * *
There was an inner hull, so that the interior space of the vessel was considerably reduced. Within these two _ralite_ hulls, each of them reënforced with every modern device, was an intricate core of tiny passages and cells, with water circulating through them under pressure. A strange yet simple principle of hydraulics--so difficult mathematically to grasp that none before had ever imagined it.
It involved many of the intricate laws of modern hydrodynamics--yet in theory simple as all great things must be.
The outer hull, crowded by the immense pressures of the ocean’s depths, would give inward a trifle, to yield its pressure to the water flowing in the core. And that internal water, so swift of motion, converted the pressure we call latent into what now physicists are calling kinetic. Strange term--kinetic pressure. Strange absorption into harmless gurgling motion of this crushing ocean force which for so long had held the deeps impenetrable!
I stared at Dr. Plantet. “Kinetic pressure?” Yet we have accepted as simple enough the conversion of other energies to be lost in motion. Latent energy, kinetic energy--terms simple indeed.
Dr. Plantet started up the pumps. With my ear near the inner hull I could hear the water circulating. Bubbling, gurgling at first; and then, as its speed increased, humming with a sound almost electrical. And at the windows, which now I knew to be double bull’s-eyes, I could see the water circulating. A thick flat sheet of it flashing past with a queer, oscillating, wavelike swing so swift the eye could scarce remark it.
“These pumps operate automatically, Jeff. A faster flow, as our depth increases.” He moved the switch-lever over to another contact; the humming went up to a higher pitch. “Put your hand on the hull, Jeff.”
The burnished cold surface was gradually warming. He shut off the pumps. He added: “Curiously enough, Jeff, it gives us heat against the cold of the depths.” He smiled. “Rather too much heat, if we use the pumps for more than an hour. But I have a refrigeration coil to help cool it. I think we shall have no trouble, even when running deep for considerable periods of time.”
We were not long on board the Dolphin this morning; there was so much that Dr. Plantet had to do. A center passage like a narrow spider-bridge hung midway of the vessel’s interior.
Beneath it, in the center, the Parodyne engine lay in its terrace of burnished blocks, with coils and dials and intensifying tubes glowing dimly yellow in the gloom as Dr. Plantet started it at its lowest operating force. Almost silent--a vague burring sound as the electrons were tossed fluorescent in its storage globe--a green fountain of burring light, running into the outlets, through the pressure valves of the water-jacket, to plunge at last into the sea beneath our stern. Tiny electronic streams--there were six of them--reconverted by the water’s contact from negligible electric mass into ponderable gas of radiolite, striking the ocean and forcing the Dolphin forward as a rocket is thrust upward by the fire-stream from its tail.
* * * * *
We stood watching the Parodyne for a moment as it worked up its energy from the morsels of pitchblende it was breaking down into freed electrons. An ounce of fuel to run us for a day. So silent, so free-running, one could hardly hear it. A little jewel of a modern engine, so recently developed that there were only three, even of this small size, in existence.
We inspected the several tiny rooms which hung in frames to the sides of the passage, with the ballast and water tanks and pressure chambers beneath them. A tiny galley for Polly. Three rooms with bunks; a narrow space, by courtesy called the diner, with folding table and chairs.
Forward, beyond the end of the passage, the full conical interior was built as an instrument room, with the torpedo tube running under it to nearly amidship, where the torpedoes were stored. The Franklin projectors were here in the bull’s-eye windows, by which, gazing along the light, through the jacket of humming water, we could see into the ocean ahead. I noticed here a score of familiar instruments, and others strange to me. But Dr. Plantet did not stop now to explain them.
We went back to the stern. A similar room, rather larger, held charts and instruments of navigation. A table at which Arturo would work over the log and the diagrams. And here I saw the apparatus for air purification--cylinders of oxylithic powder, moisture coils, tubes for absorbing carbonic acid and all the waste products of our breathing.
We climbed back to the floor of the shop. By to-morrow our little vessel would be fully equipped, provisioned, and ready. The Australian Flyer, westward bound from London to Melbourne, leaving London at 5 P.M. to-morrow evening, would stop and pick us up. The magnetic cranes lowered the Dolphin into the dark rectangle of canal at our feet. She lay awash, quiescent, waiting. Polly, trembling with the thrill of it, christened her with proper ceremony, and the little group of engineers and workmen cheered.
We flew back home to “Sea End.” The servants had been given a holiday, and the house was silent as we entered. I recall a sudden pounding of my heart--the flash of a thought that Arturo might really be ill!
“Arturo! Arturo!” Polly’s voice held a quiver of anxiety. The lad should have been at the gateway to greet us, of course. “Arturo!” Her voice echoed as she ran upstairs. “Arturo--father, Jeff, come here!”
We rushed up. Arturo’s room was disordered. Some of his clothes and his luggage cases were gone. His small personal sending radio was gone from its accustomed table. In its place was a sheet of paper: a penciled radio code which evidently he had invented. And a note--a few brief words in his familiar scrawled handwriting.
We bent over it; pathetic, scrawled little note:
FATHER DEAR: Please try to believe in me. Keep the code and at midnights listen. If I need or want any one, it shall be only you. I am all confused. I want to do what is best, and I don’t know. Please try to believe in me.
ARTURO.