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  But the Air Force still wanted the divers’ help. So the Sealab support barge sailed out to St. David’s Head, at the opposite end of the hook-shaped island chain from the Navy base, and divers from the Sealab crew, including Bond, Mazzone, and Cyril Tuckfield, Bond’s partner on the 300-foot submarine escape, went looking for wreckage. Charlie Aquadro had arrived in Bermuda just in time to dive for the dead, though officially he was there only as an observer and emissary from Jacques Cousteau, whom Aquadro had begun working for the previous summer, during Conshelf Two. Ever since his days as a scuba-diving medic with the Underwater Demolition Teams, he always seemed to pop up where the action was, such as on Link’s early expeditions to Jamaica and Israel. In mid-1961, Aquadro was part of a group that made perilous dives to three hundred feet, fraught with narcosis, to reach the wreck of the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland for a television documentary. Indeed, to glance at Charlie Aquadro’s peripatetic résumé was to understand why some would call this period a golden age for diving.

  Aquadro, like Scott Carpenter, had been an admirer of Jacques Cousteau and found his way onto the Frenchman’s team by introducing himself at a meeting in Miami. Aquadro apparently made a favorable impression. Before the second Conshelf got under way in the Red Sea, Cousteau invited Aquadro to lunch in Washington and surprised him with an offer to join his team. Delighted, Aquadro arranged to leave the Navy. He took a reserve commission and happily accepted the low pay that had been a disincentive for Scott Carpenter. The other problem for Carpenter, Cousteau had said, was that he didn’t speak French. Neither did Aquadro, but because Aquadro was an experienced diver and a medical doctor to boot, Cousteau may have considered him more valuable than the former astronaut. Now, through an amicable arrangement with the Office of Naval Research, Cousteau sent Aquadro, along with a longtime leader of the Cousteau team, Jean Alinat, to observe during Sealab I. No sooner had Aquadro arrived in Bermuda than the jet crash put him close to the action again.

  Over the next few days the Navy divers made conventional bounce dives from the surface using scuba and ordinary compressed air instead of a helium mix. Down to almost 250 feet the visibility was good. The jet remains were widely scattered, shredded into small pieces. Sharks made frequent appearances. Crabs and other sea life were quick to move in on the human remains. George Bond found this type of underwater work especially unhappy and unrewarding. Bond was a doctor, not prone to squeamishness, and he and the others had brought up dead bodies before. But Bond’s feeling was that except in cases of a simple drowning in shallow water, when a body can be recovered almost immediately, it is kinder to consign human remains to the ocean depths, marking the end with appropriate ceremony, preserving dignity in death for survivors and the deceased alike.

  One of Tuckfield’s finds pretty well illustrated Bond’s philosophy. Tuck came up with a foot that had been severed at the ankle. While making a decompression stop, fuzzy with narcosis, hanging on to a shot rope from the surface, the good-humored sailor felt nauseated by the body part he was holding. Tuck tried to pass it off but no one would take it. Intact bodies proved difficult to find, but Charlie Aquadro had managed to extricate one, then grabbed hold of the dead airman as best he could, wrapping an arm around him and tugging on tattered clothing. Aquadro used his free hand to shinny up a line while kicking like mad. Decomposing limbs could tear off, and bowels could burst from a waterlogged belly. Carpenter, who had just rejoined the Sealab crew in Bermuda, didn’t make any dives but was with the crew aboard the YFNB-12. He was especially impressed with Aquadro, who seemed the least fazed by the depth, the cold, the narcotic haze, and the horrific nature of the work.

  While the Navy divers were carrying out their macabre search and recovery mission, Jon Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit were doing their best to avoid becoming corpses themselves. Four hundred and thirty-two feet down on a fringe of Great Bahama Bank, they were well beyond the reach of scuba divers. They rode down in Link’s pressurized cylinder, which was tethered near the Submersible Portable Inflatable Dwelling as a backup safe haven in case something went wrong with the SPID. Swimming to the surface, even just part of the way there, would be suicide. Their saturated organs would fizz like the contents of a soda pop bottle shaken before opening.

  They soon needed their safe haven. During the first hour there was a problem with the scrubber for purging exhaled carbon dioxide and the two divers were panting like winded dogs. They took refuge in the nearby cylinder and spent several hours crammed into the aluminum tube, waiting for a functioning filter to be lowered from the surface so they could fix the scrubber. Once resettled inside the SPID their heater failed. They put on several sweaters and shivered through the first night, the heat-sapping, helium-rich atmosphere abetting their persistent chills. A lightbulb imploded from the whopping fourteen atmospheres, cracking like a gunshot. Helium speech rendered them virtually incomprehensible, their falsettos all the more garbled by the pressure. At times they communicated with Sea Diver and the topside crew by Morse code. Rather than struggling to decipher each other’s helium gibberish, the divers scribbled notes back and forth, sometimes using the inside wall of their undersea pup tent as a blackboard.

  Their prototype shelter had its shortcomings, but it was working and the divers could simply drop through the open hatch in the floor and into the sea. They were limited to a distance of fifty feet, the length of the umbilicals that fed breathing gas to their specialized dive gear. Aqualungs would have been little use because under the pressure of fourteen atmospheres, scuba tanks would have emptied within minutes. The two men aimed to dive for several hours a day. The water temperature was about seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit—not bad, considering the depth—but combined with the heat-sapping effect of helium Sténuit nearly froze, especially after tearing his custom-made wet suit. He took pictures of Lindbergh working on their dwelling, hopeful that his would be the deepest photographs ever shot by a diver. Lindbergh was able to get a heater working, and on the second night they might have slept better if not for the unnerving thuds against their rubber tent made by some grouper fish.

  Forty-nine hours after Lindbergh and Sténuit first entered the rubber dwelling, Link called down to congratulate them. They had made the longest deep dive and reached their goal. Having gotten things under control, the divers thought they might as well spend the rest of the week down there, extending the duration of their deep dive. But Link thought they had been fortunate, both in terms of weather conditions and the prototype equipment. They had proven a point about the potential of saturation diving and, as he told them, there was nothing more to be gained by extending their stay on the bottom. It was true that in theory, once the divers were saturated, their decompression would be the same whether they stayed another day, a week, or even longer. But Link was not going to put the divers at risk to prove the theory. His decision would cause the Sealab crew to say that the SPID experiment had been little more than a stunt—neatly timed to beat them to the bottom.

  Upon Link’s order, Lindbergh and Sténuit packed up and swam out of their inflatable dwelling and into the cylinder. They closed its lower hatch, sealing the pressure inside, and rode it like a slow-moving elevator back to the surface. The Sea Diver crew maneuvered the cylinder onto the deck and shortly after three in the afternoon on July 2, they affixed the hatch end of the cylinder to a separate decompression chamber, as planned. The saturated SPID divers then made an airtight transfer, crawling from cramped cylinder into the more spacious and comfortable chamber, and waited out their three-day decompression schedule as Sea Diver sailed back to Miami.

  Supervising the decompression were Link’s three medical specialists from the University of Pennsylvania, with whom Link had been collaborating in advance of the four-hundred-foot sea trial. They also had the decompression schedule that Dr. Workman had devised while Sea Diver was still berthed at the Navy Yard. Workman later followed up with a similar chamber test to four hundred feet and passed the results along to Link.

  As
Lindbergh and Sténuit were nearing the end of their decompression, Sténuit felt a burning sensation on the inside of his leg. It was a sure sign of the bends, just like that ache in his wrist two years earlier at Villefranche. To err on the side of safety the two divers’ decompression schedule was extended by a day to almost four days, nearly twice as long as they had spent on the bottom. Lindbergh felt fine but would have to wait for Sténuit’s symptoms to subside before they could both leave the chamber. It was another reminder that decompression schedules were not a one-size-fits-all proposition, despite the deft calculations of a maestro like Dr. Workman and Link’s Pennsylvania doctors. Under the record-breaking circumstances, it was not surprising that one diver would be symptom-free while the other got bent, but why? It might be a common case of differences in the divers’ physiological makeup, or perhaps the decompression schedule needed adjustment, or both. Or had living in a helium-rich artificial atmosphere at two hundred pounds per square inch of pressure for two days taken them to the limit that most human bodies would tolerate? Had they hit some kind of barrier?

  Neither Link nor Cousteau was producing the physiological data to answer questions like these, a fault George Bond considered a scientific sin. To push further down the continental shelf safely, and ultimately achieve Dominion over the Seas, they were going to need more of the kind of data Bond compiled during Genesis and was now seeking during Sealab I. And as the world well knew, a similarly detailed process of discovery was taking place in outer space. A year earlier, in the sixth and final Project Mercury mission, Gordon Cooper successfully completed more than thirty-four hours in orbit so that NASA could continue to assess a man’s ability to endure the long trip to the moon—about four days of space travel each way. In addition to issues of physiology, the well-being of an astronaut was of course inextricably tied to the proper functioning of equipment. Diving was no different.

  Lindbergh and Sténuit were coming out of their long decompression when the end of a high-pressure air tank blew off, causing enough of an explosion to rock Sea Diver. Shrapnel badly bloodied the legs of Annie Sténuit, Robert’s wife, and one of the lead crew members was struck in the ribs. The blast dented Sea Diver’s steel deck. Ed Link, who prided himself on precision, was upset but also relieved that the accident wasn’t worse. The injured were patched up at a Miami hospital, and Link later traced the problem to human error, an omnipresent wild card more likely to turn up under experimental conditions. Someone had incorrectly hooked up the air tank.

  Sténuit and Lindbergh had emerged from their prolonged decompression on July 6, six days after they had begun living under pressure and just in time to witness the explosion. When they reached Miami, the Belgian diver still had some odd sensation in his shoulders and a kind of paralysis around his ankles. When he tried to lift his feet and stand on his heels, nothing happened. Usually, such physical aftershocks from the bends could be expected to subside, and they eventually did—not that the world was holding its breath for Robert Sténuit.

  9

  “BREATHE!”

  From the Navy base at Bermuda, Sealab I was towed twenty-seven miles to Plantagenet Bank, a seamount chosen for its level topography and the presence of a Navy observation platform called Argus Island. Standing alone out in the Atlantic, its two-story building and construction crane perched some six stories above the waterline atop a handful of steel pillars, Argus Island looked like a misplaced section of a pier.

  As the Sealab team went through the tricky process of lowering the lab, the sea kicked up a steady roller coaster of swells. The line handlers were trying to keep the habitat from slamming into the barge when Sealab suddenly vanished. Captain Bond’s heart sank with the lab. It was like Panama City all over again. Despite new precautions, Sealab had somehow flooded and sunk to a depth of about sixty feet before they stopped it. Had the line snapped, the lab would have dropped two hundred feet down to the bottom, and the Bermuda Triangle could claim another victim. Fortunately, they were able to raise the flooded lab and reel it in to the barge, then return to Bermuda for another round of cleaning and drying. Considering the negative reaction from Washington after the flooding at Panama City, Bond had good reason to worry that this latest accident might end the experiment.

  Back at the base, Bond and Mazzone were called into a conference with others working on the project, including Captain Melson and his top engineer, Al O’Neal. Bond listened to complaints about the monstrous handling difficulties and the near loss of the flooded lab. Some on-the-surface support crew seemed to be saying, in so many words, that the job was hopeless, at least with the materials and methods their limited budget afforded. Bond had heard this kind of pessimism before. It was a source of tension aboard Your Friendly Navy Barge, but so, too, was Captain Bond’s attitude that he was the one running the show. As the senior medical officer and principal investigator, Bond had his share of responsibility, including the well-being of the aquanauts, but he was a medical officer, not a line officer, and in the Sealab chain of command he was outranked by other officers, namely Roy Lanphear, Melson’s on-scene commander, who had been summoned to Washington for a chastening after the first flooding. There was also William “Red” Hollingsworth, the officer-in-charge of the YFNB-12. Both men were sailors and divers with impressive credentials. Lanphear complained to Melson that Bond ignored his commands. Even Mazzone, who was usually accepting of Bond’s unorthodox, sometimes Walter Mitty ways, reminded Bond, none too gently, of the basic hierarchical fact: A medical officer cannot accede to command!

  As Melson became aware of this uneasy tug-of-war between Bond and Lanphear, his worst suspicions about Bond seemed to be confirmed. Tampering with the chain of command! Such insubordination was worthy of court-martial, Melson believed, but he did not pursue it. He and Bond were, after all, accidental allies in this quest to live in the sea. Melson did have a serious talk with Bond, and Bond was politic enough to avoid getting sidelined.

  During the otherwise downbeat meeting after the flooding at Argus Island, O’Neal suggested what sounded to Bond like an ingenious approach: They could use very large buoys to lower and raise Sealab on chains with jacks. Bond had always liked the engineer for his can-do attitude. But not everyone agreed with O’Neal, and someone suggested relocating the test to a sheltered spot in the bay at Bermuda, not far from the Navy base in the Great Sound. The depth there, however, would be just seventy feet, no deeper than Cousteau’s Deep Cabin experiment.

  Melson listened to the various difficulties and possible remedies and gruffly noted that those in the room had apparently spent more time figuring out why the job could not be done than how it could. It was about then that Bond and Mazzone exchanged hopeful glances. Melson said the best way to lower Sealab would be to use the big crane on Argus Island. It had been off-limits to the Sealab project, but he would see that they got access to it. He left it to O’Neal and the others to work out the details.

  After seven years of butting heads throughout the Navy hierarchy, Bond was relieved to have someone in a position of authority stand up for the cause of undersea living, even if he and Melson didn’t always see eye to eye. Unfortunately, no sooner had Sealab been given another reprieve than they got some bad news about Scott Carpenter. A blazing front-page headline in the Bermuda Sun pretty well summed it up: “Astronaut Comes to Grief Here.” It added, cheekily: “He may be a whizzo in space but he was let down by a bicycle.”

  On July 15, Scott Carpenter had talked Charlie Aquadro into renting the little single-horsepower motorbikes popular with tourists. The newly acquainted colleagues rode the ten miles into the colonial capital of Hamilton and as the night of socializing wore on, Aquadro headed back to the base. Sometime after midnight, he was awakened and called to the dispensary. Captain Bond was summoned, too. It was Carpenter. As soon as they saw him, the two doctors could tell that the thirty-nine-year-old spaceman would be in no condition to take up residence on the ocean floor. On the ride back from Hamilton, about halfway to the base on the g
ravelly road, Carpenter had dozed off at the handlebars and crashed into a coral embankment. He suffered a compound fracture in his left arm and a pulverized joint near his big toe. The accident left him looking badly bruised and battered. It wasn’t the first time Carpenter had encountered hell on wheels. He had totaled half a dozen cars in his youth. At twenty-one, on another drowsy late-night drive, he had nearly killed himself in his beloved ’34 Ford coupe along a winding mountain road outside Boulder, Colorado, his hometown.

  Before Carpenter was taken by helicopter up the island chain to Kindley Air Force Base, and from there to Houston for further treatment, Bond had to tell him that he was off the roster for Sealab I. Carpenter seemed more pained about getting scratched from Sealab than about his scrapes and injuries. Bond, too, was sorely disappointed. He expected that Carpenter’s presence on the bottom would have drawn welcome attention to the new undersea program.

  There was no shortage of divers who would gladly have volunteered to be among the first to live in the sea—three weeks at two hundred feet! Unbelievable!—but Bond stuck with the four-man crew he had lined up prior to Carpenter’s arrival, including Bob Barth and Tiger Manning, the hospital corpsman who was Barth’s chamber mate for two of the three human Genesis experiments. Bond also wanted a doctor on the Sealab crew and chose Robert Thompson, a younger submarine medical officer he had known at New London. Dr. Thompson, a lieutenant commander, had graduated from the University of Southern California medical school and had additional graduate degrees in nuclear science and radiobiology. The fourth diver was Lester “Andy” Anderson, who had spent much of his Navy career diving and was working at the Experimental Diving Unit during Genesis D. Unlike some of his more skeptical fellow divers, Anderson had been enthusiastic about the week-long hundred-foot test and told Captain Bond that he would gladly volunteer for any future saturation diving ventures.