The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [22]
In his calm confidence that he was laying waste another susceptible female heart, Don was completely unaware of the undercurrents of emotion that were sweeping around him yet leaving him utterly untouched. When he suddenly realized that they were twenty minutes late for their appointment in the projection room, he pretended to blame Franklin, who accepted the reproof in a good-natured but slightly absent-minded manner. For the rest of the morning, indeed, Franklin was rather far away from his studies; but Don noticed nothing at all.
The first part of the course was now virtually completed; Franklin had learned the basic mechanics of the warden’s profession and now needed the experience that only time would give. In almost every respect, he had exceeded Burley’s hopes, partly because of his original scientific training, partly because of his innate intelligence. Yet there was more to it even than this; Franklin had a drive and determination that was sometimes frightening. It was as if success in this course was a matter of life and death to him. True, he had been slow in starting; for the first few days he had been listless and seemingly almost uninterested in his new career. Then he had come to life, as he awoke to the wonder and challenge—the endless opportunity—of the element he was attempting to master. Though Don was not much given to such fancies, it seemed to him that Franklin was like a man awakening from a long and troubled sleep.
The real test had been when they had first gone under water with the torpedoes. Franklin might never use a torp again—except for amusement—during his entire career; they were purely shallow-water units designed for very short-range work, and as a warden, Franklin would spend all his operational time snug and dry behind the protective walls of a sub. But unless a man was at ease and confident—though not overconfident—when he was actually immersed in water, the service had no use for him, however qualified he might be in other respects.
Franklin had also passed, with a satisfactory safety margin, the decompression, CO2, and nitrogen narcosis tests. Burley had put him in the station’s “torture chamber”, where the doctors slowly increased the air pressure and took him down on a simulated dive. He had been perfectly normal down to 150 feet; thereafter his mental reactions became sluggish and he failed to do simple sums correctly when they were given to him over the intercom. At 300 feet he appeared to be mildly drunk and started cracking jokes which reduced him to tears of helpless laughter but which were quite unfunny to those outside—and embarrassingly so to Franklin himself when they played them back to him later. Three hundred and fifty feet down he still appeared to be conscious but refused to react to Don’s voice, even when it started shouting outrageous insults. And at 400 feet he passed out completely, and they brought him slowly back to normal.
Though he would never have occasion to use them, he was also tested with the special breathing mixtures which enable a man to remain conscious and active at far greater depths. When he did any deep dives, he would not be wearing underwater breathing gear but would be sitting comfortably inside a sub breathing normal air at normal pressure. But a warden had to be a Jack of all underwater trades, and never knew what equipment he might have to use in an emergency.
Burley was no longer scared—as he had once been—at the thought of sharing a two-man training sub with Franklin. Despite the other’s underlying reticence and the mystery which still surrounded him, they were partners now and knew how to work together. They had not yet become friends, but had reached a state which might be defined as one of tolerant respect.
On their first sub run, they kept to the shallow waters between the Great Barrier Reef and the mainland, while Franklin