Sealab Read online

  In an emergency on a conventional, short-duration dive, a direct ascent to the surface was still preferable to drowning—provided you remembered not to hold your breath, out of nervousness or some other misbegotten impulse, so as not to give yourself a paralyzing, possibly fatal embolism. You’d likely get bent and run the risk of injury from surfacing without making any decompression stops, but you at least stood a chance of surviving, especially if you could get to a chamber quickly and undergo recompression. But for the saturated Sealab I aquanauts, any swim for the surface was out of the question. They were allowed to rise about one atmosphere above the habitat, but any higher and they would run the risk of “explosive decompression,” a virulent case of the bends. The resulting bubbles on the brain would cause a saturated diver to black out en route to the surface—a merciful thing, really, since he would be oblivious to the excruciating pain from the bubbles fizzing throughout his innards. He would be dead before he hit the surface, and the direct ascent from seven atmospheres to one would turn him into a puffy corpse, his body ravaged first by the initial explosion of gas bubbles and then their continued expansion, per Boyle’s law, as the enveloping water pressure diminished.

  During the first week the aquanauts came and went from the lab as they pleased. In the water, they tackled some specific tasks. Barth inspected Argus Island’s support pillars, and a few technical difficulties initially needed attention—a troubled fresh water hose, a valve installed backward on a helium line, a fickle TV monitor cable—but the aquanauts were left with ample time to swim along Plantagenet Bank. They typically stayed within a two-hundred-foot radius of Sealab, being careful not to drift up more than thirty or so feet. Barth and the others didn’t care much for their canned sardines so Barth made a ritual of feeding them to the neighborhood fish. The amberjacks and groupers would snatch them greedily from Barth’s fingertips. Two groupers that became regulars around the habitat were soon named George and Wally, in tribute to Bond and Mazzone. Less welcome were the two sharks that appeared on the third day, causing a stampede of frantic fish. They circled the habitat for five minutes, like curious envoys from the abyss. They were impressive in size, about ten feet long. With any luck the pair would not be hanging around enough to merit nicknames.

  The aquanauts occasionally engaged in behavior that irritated the topside commanders. They covered the lens of the closed-circuit TV camera inside the habitat, scribbled derisive messages on the electrowriter, adjusted their atmosphere without proper approval, or made sorties from the lab without reporting their movements as required. Dr. Thompson upset some topside sensibilities when a camera outside the habitat caught him making what might have been the world’s deepest skinny dip.

  Bond attributed such digressions to what he called the “aquanaut breakaway phenomenon”—a show of independence, in effect, that came from trying to live autonomously on the ocean floor while being constantly watched and hounded with instructions. Falco and Wesly had much the same feeling during Conshelf One. Consciously or not, the aquanauts seemed to resent the intrusions and found little ways to rebel. The most important thing, however, was that they were all surviving, without dramatic mishaps or program-killing catastrophes. In many ways, they were just four guys having the time of their lives. Silly skeptics! Look at us! We’re living in the sea!

  Dr. Thompson was not as experienced a diver as the other three, but Bond had wanted a physician on the team and Thompson had studied marine biology in college. He spent time in the water collecting sea life from around the lab, which made for an informal demonstration of the kind of scientific research that Bond hoped saturation divers could carry out someday from sea floor bases. The only downside to Thompson’s effort was the fishy aroma that permeated the lab.

  The aquanauts’ blood and urine samples were sent to the surface for analysis. Support divers shuttled supplies and equipment between the barge and the bottom, including replenished scuba and Mark VI rigs, but unlike the Conshelf habitats, which received a steady stream of visitors, including Cousteau, Bond wanted to minimize the experimental variables, so Sealab was off-limits to everyone but the four divers.

  The habitat was kept in the mid-eighties Fahrenheit, a comfortable temperature in the pressurized, helium-rich atmosphere. Still, a variety of physical discomforts was noted, some with more concern than others. On the first day everyone’s joints ached, which Genesis had shown they could expect as their bodies acclimated to the pressure. The pain in Barth’s left shoulder lingered longer than he would have liked. Dr. Thompson and Manning had headaches one day, a possible sign that something was wrong with the artificial atmosphere, but the various gauge readings appeared to be normal. Thompson and Anderson spiked fevers and remained feverish for a couple of days, but neither one showed symptoms and both said they felt fine. Thompson had periods where he felt he didn’t write or think clearly, but his vital signs seemed in order. One afternoon they all complained about rapid breathing and traced the problem to an elevated carbon dioxide level, the serious problem that had forced Lindbergh and Sténuit to evacuate their inflatable dwelling. They put in fresh canisters of carbon dioxide absorbent and injected another three hundred liters of oxygen into their artificial atmosphere for good measure.

  Living in the sea was bound to have its share of surprises, as Dr. Thompson was harshly reminded on the very first morning. He nearly burned his lips when he sipped a cup of instant coffee, even though it showed none of the telltale signs of bubbling or steaming. Water boils and bubbles at a lower temperature at high altitudes because of the lower atmospheric pressure, as any mountaineer knows. Under the pressure of seven atmospheres it’s just the opposite. A pot of water on the Sears hot plate didn’t reach the boiling point until it was more than three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. To prevent future scaldings, the Sealab crew checked liquid temperatures with a thermometer.

  Settling in for their three-week stay, the aquanauts added a few homey touches to their humble habitat. Barth taped a couple of Playboy pinups to the wall—tactfully placed beyond the omnipresent eye of the camera. One showed a nude blonde sitting poolside, a pensive look on her face as she extended a hand toward the water. The gesture—reach for the deep—seemed vaguely symbolic. A half-dozen books were propped up on the lone table, an odd assortment that included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, though not her earlier work, The Sea Around Us, and a guide to Caribbean seashells, although they were miles from the Caribbean.

  In the evenings, Captain Bond, ever the raconteur, recited prose and poetry to his captive aquanauts, perhaps a few passages from Beowulf or Chaucer he had committed to memory or “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” a Bond favorite. He knew all eight hundred words of the galloping Robert Service ballad by heart. On the first Sunday, Bond read a bit of verse he penned for the occasion. He called it the “Sealab Prayer” and it began with a paraphrase of the lines that had inspired him in the Book of Genesis:

  “Almighty God, who declared through Holy Scripture that mankind would one day acquire dominion over the seas, and the creatures therein, grant that this day fulfillment of Thy word is at hand. To the brave and dedicated men who have committed themselves to this project, grant Thine unending watch and safeguarding care in all the many hours of their life under the sea. Give unusual wisdom to each of us topside who might somehow control their work and safety as they perform their duties below. And when their work and Thy will together be done, grant us all a safe and worthy respite from our labors for a time to come. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

  The Lord may have been watching over them, but the aquanauts could be fairly certain that their countrymen were paying little attention. They had hooked up a ham radio and when they reached several ham operators in the United States, they got only perplexed responses when they tried to explain, in their Chipmunk falsettos, that they were living in a Navy capsule on the ocean floor.

  Fish feeding, sightseeing, skinny-dipping, specimen collecting, and ham radio chats—to Captai
n Melson it looked like undersea summer camp. He was not pleased. An attempt to perform the sort of useful work Melson found lacking came at the end of the first week with the arrival of Star I, a one-man submarine. The teardrop-shaped mini-sub, brought out to the support barge for an open-sea test, was a prototype designed to reach a sunken submarine under its own power. Star I could then attach itself to an escape hatch, like the old McCann Rescue Chamber, without the need for cables or tethers to the surface. Barth and Dr. Thompson placed a dummy hatch near Sealab. The aquanauts were then supposed to photograph the mission and come to the sub’s aid if it ran into any trouble. The mini-sub pilot, Albert “Smoky” Stover, was a retired Navy diver the aquanauts had known at New London. Stover was to practice “landing” on the dummy hatch, as if for a real rescue. The aquanauts also set up a TV camera outside Sealab so Captain Bond and the others in the command trailer could witness the little sub’s maneuvers. The scene began to resemble the artist’s rendition of an undersea future that had appeared in The American Weekly, with mini-subs ferrying divers around a colony on the sea floor. Here was Bond’s vision as vérité.

  Anderson had a slight fever that day and asked Manning to take his place on the dive and shoot motion pictures while Barth and Thompson snapped away with waterproof still cameras. Anderson would stay on watch inside the lab. The three men in the water could soon hear the approaching whir of electric motors. The sub wasn’t much bigger than a Chevy van. Barth hadn’t seen Smoky Stover in a year or two but recognized him in the clear water behind the sub’s hubcap-sized front window. They waved at each other and exchanged hand signals. At one point Stover found himself unable to go forward. Barth had grabbed on to a piece of the sub and the propeller whirred in place like an eggbeater. Stover haplessly gunned the sub’s electric motors as Barth and Manning giggled hard enough to flood their face masks.

  When Manning ran out of film—each magazine held only fifty feet—he swam back to the lab to reload, making his way through the shark cage and up the entry trunk. He gave the camera to Anderson, who then handed the reloaded camera back. As Manning swam the twenty yards or so back to the demonstration site and resumed filming, no one noticed that bubbles had ceased to burp from the shoulder of his Mark VI rig, a very bad sign. Within minutes Manning suddenly swam for the lab. On the TV monitor, Bond could see him scurry off the screen, but Manning appeared to be going to reload his camera again, so no cause for alarm. The divers had no voice communication, so neither Bond nor anyone else could know that a crisis had begun to unfold.

  As Manning swam for the safety of Sealab, he pulled the ring that hung near his tailbone to activate the bypass, a fail-safe mechanism that was supposed to inject a fresh burst of gas into the Mark VI system. Nothing. A former training tank instructor and skilled breath-holding diver, Manning was not prone to panic. As he made it into the shark cage, Anderson heard a clang and put down his cup of instant coffee. He figured it must be Manning back for more film, and walked over to the pool of seawater in the floor. Anderson looked down and there was Tiger Manning, curled up on the sea floor as if taking a nap. Anderson jumped through the looking glass and lifted up Manning’s deadweight, managing to get Manning’s head high enough to reach above the waterline. When he pulled out Manning’s mouthpiece Manning bit his tongue, so Andy stuck his index finger in his mouth to clear it. He and Manning were wedged awkwardly inside the trunk. Manning was the shortest of the aquanauts by a good measure, but stocky and muscular, and he had more than a hundred pounds of diving gear strapped to his body. As Andy struggled to loosen Manning’s Mark VI, he shouted for help and rapped on the steel trunk to send an SOS to the other divers. Those watching the topside TV monitors still assumed Manning had gone for film.

  Tiger Manning began to wheeze.

  “Breathe! Breathe deep!” Anderson shrieked, in Chipmunk falsetto. “Take all the air you can get!”

  Manning’s entire face, lips, too, were as blanched as the sandy sea bottom. Dr. Thompson was closest and swam over when he heard the SOS. He helped Anderson pull off Manning’s Mark VI and get him into the dry lab. Barth followed and Manning finally flopped onto the Sealab floor. By then, mercifully, he started breathing. He was weak, speaking but not making much sense. He insisted nothing was wrong with him. Captain Bond and the topside crew, who by then had been informed of the accident, awaited the results of Dr. Thompson’s checkup of Manning.

  Thompson soon reported that Manning’s vital signs were back to normal. Manning even beat Anderson at cribbage that night. The only trace of the accident was in the whites of Manning’s eyes, which had turned a devilish bright red. Manning had suffered a case of “face mask squeeze.” Once out of breath, he was unable to equalize the pressure inside his face mask through his nostrils. The blood vessels in his eyes then swelled as if locked into a suction cup. “I’ve seen eyes like those before,” Captain Bond would say, “but mostly they were on dead men.”

  That evening the aquanauts received a special supper from above. Steak and potatoes were sent down in airtight containers—a welcome change from the canned fare. But also on the menu that night was a good talking-to from Captain Mazzone. They needed stricter discipline down there, he told them, including tracking of gauge and equipment functions and reporting when anyone came or went from Sealab. And no more solo swims. They had to stick to the buddy system.

  Within a couple of days of Manning’s mishap, hurricane conditions were picked up on radar seven hundred miles to the southeast and forecasters predicted that high winds and high seas would pass uncomfortably close to Argus Island within twenty-four hours. A tropical tempest was not much of a problem for Sealab. On the seabed, nearly two hundred feet down, a major storm would pass virtually unnoticed. At the surface, however, it could tear the support barge from its four-point mooring, or slam it into nearby Argus Island, pulling out Sealab’s umbilical in the process.

  The engineers had anticipated that a storm might force Sealab to cut its ties to the surface and tried to make the lab at least temporarily self-sufficient. They built in tanks of oxygen and helium, packed extra carbon dioxide absorbent and a modest reservoir of fresh water. Electrical power could be drawn through an auxiliary cable from Argus Island. The barge could sail back to Bermuda and return after the storm had passed, and in the meantime, the aquanauts could live out their twenty-one days as planned.

  The aquanauts were ready, even eager, to hunker down and take their chances with the backup systems, but Bond and Melson and the topside crew agreed that it was best to raise Sealab before the storm hit. Bond was satisfied that after ten days they would have adequate physiological data to advance the concept of saturation diving, and ample experience with the habitat and its equipment. But how to bring the lab and the aquanauts safely back to the surface became another source of tension between Bond and the other commanders.

  They settled on a plan to begin two-plus days of decompression inside Sealab as the Argus crane gradually raised the thirty-ton lab to the surface. One concern was that surging storm swells could strain the crane to the breaking point, sending everything crashing to the bottom, aquanauts included. When Sealab began its slow ascent at midnight on July 29, the sea was dead calm and a three-quarter moon glowed. The ascent rate was to be three feet per hour, ideally in increments of eight to twelve inches, with corresponding adjustments made in the breathing gas mixture. The cable connecting the top of the crane to Sealab was about the length of a football field, and the crane operators were up on Argus Island. Bond and Mazzone controlled the gas changes in the artificial atmosphere from the barge and had to coordinate their adjustments with the crane operators. It was a little like having one driver steer and another operate the foot pedals.

  By late in the afternoon the next day, they had brought Sealab to a depth of 112 feet. At that point, with enough oxygen in the mix to light a match, Anderson and Barth promptly swam into the adjacent air space for a smoke. As the night wore on, swells of up to fifteen feet began rolling through. The to
pside crew opted for the first of many holds so the lab wouldn’t yo-yo too hard on the crane. Between holds, Mazzone coaxed Sealab I up to ninety feet below the surface. When Bond awakened in his trailer bunk, the support barge was bucking like a bronco. He could hardly brush his teeth. By seven-thirty in the morning Sealab had been inched up another ten feet. The growing seas and increasing winds were turning the lab into a noisy, slow-motion roller coaster. The bridle of cables slung around Sealab scraped and drooped and then went taut as the lab rose and fell. The water in the lab’s open floor hatch sloshed and gurgled.

  Bond had hoped the aquanauts could complete their decompression inside Sealab, for safety and comfort. But when dynamometer readings showed that the crane was reaching the breaking point, Bond had to concede that it was time for his aquanauts to move to the Submersible Decompression Chamber. Support divers struggled in the roiling sea to remove the train axle ballast, lightening the load as Sealab rose, and attach Sealab to four large mine buoys so that the crane could be freed up to handle the SDC.

  When the SDC was nearby, hanging vertically like a big tin can on a string, Anderson, Barth, Manning, and Thompson all took a last breath of the Sealab atmosphere, dropped through the looking glass, swam over, and crawled up through the open hatch. Once inside, the aquanauts sealed the hatch in the floor to maintain the chamber’s high pressure as they were lifted onto Argus Island. Anderson avoided looking out the porthole as the SDC dangled like a wrecking ball on the crane cable, more than seventy feet above the waterline. He had no qualms about living on the sea floor, but he did not like the sensation of swinging in the stiff breeze, crammed inside that confounded chamber.