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  The chamber was minutes from being lowered onto the Argus platform when a cable caught on an exterior fitting and snapped it off. The aquanauts heard a pop, followed by the eerie sound of their high-pressure breathing gas whistling out of the chamber. Dr. Thompson was standing near the leak and stuck his thumb over the hole. The blood blister on his thumb was minor compared to what a sudden drop in pressure could do to their saturated bodies—explosive decompression for one and all. As soon as the SDC landed on Argus the support crew hurriedly plugged the leak and dodged disaster.

  The cylindrical SDC had been fitted with a box-shaped frame so it could be turned on its side and double as a decompression chamber. The SDC, like many early prototypes, lacked amenities that would come later, but the little World War II–era chamber at least had a medical lock, an airlock about the size of a suitcase, for moving supplies into and out of the pressurized chamber. Coffee, served in mayonnaise jars, and air mattresses were locked in. The men lay like fish in a barrel; if one moved on his mattress, they all moved—and sloshed in several inches of residual seawater. The mayonnaise jars, once emptied of hot coffee, served as makeshift urinals. One jar fell off a ledge and broke. By the last night they might as well have been locked in a cesspool.

  On August 1, shortly after midnight, adjustments were made to finish the decompression process by about half past seven that morning. A dozen or so reporters were due to arrive from Bermuda to see the aquanauts emerge after nearly twelve days under pressure. No divers had ever stayed down so deep for so long, and for that the Sealab four could arguably be called the first men to live in the sea. The boat ferrying reporters and photographers to Argus hadn’t yet arrived when the long decompression was complete, but Captain Bond wouldn’t let his aquanauts out until the press was there. The reaction inside the chamber was enough to blow the hatch off. Barth, for one, was holding in more than just frustration. A proper toilet and a moment of privacy were just a few steps away and there were limits to what Barth and the others could or should have to do in a mayonnaise jar. Finally, at about eight-thirty that morning, reporters made it to Argus and watched as the American aquanauts, grimy and stubble-faced, emerged from their decompression of almost fifty-five hours.

  An informal press conference was held in a small dining area and a couple of microphones were thrust at the aquanauts, who sat on one side of a table. Manning wore sunglasses, hiding his eyes, which were still discolored from his close call. Anderson smoked a Camel and sipped coffee. Thompson was shirtless. Barth was annoyed. The reporters wouldn’t know the difference between jock itch and air embolism. Barth was never a big fan of the press, but for Captain Bond, he would squelch his smirk and cooperate as best he could.

  After a few days of rest, they would have a more formal press conference, this one inside a cavernous hangar at the base in Bermuda. Every word said over the PA system ricocheted off the brick walls, as did the triumphal refrains of “Under the Double Eagle” coming from a record player. The aquanauts sat on a temporary stage, this time in service dress khakis or whites, along with Bond, Mazzone, and some Navy brass, including the chief of the Office of Naval Research. Manning again wore sunglasses. There were more men onstage than in the front row, which was reserved for the press. A couple of dozen people, mostly Navy personnel, were scattered around the room in the remaining folding chairs.

  Bond felt some adrenaline when it was Lester Anderson’s turn to speak. Anderson looked sharp in his crisp dress whites, tattoos adorning his powerful forearms—including the one of a lady in a champagne glass, which his wife detested. Bond was concerned that Anderson might lapse into his trademark salty syntax, but as Anderson sat down, Bond breathed a sigh of relief. He figured old Andy had just made his longest printable statement.

  As Sealab I ended its run, The New York Times, like many papers across the land, was filled with coverage of the spectacular lunar photographs that had just been sent from the spacecraft Ranger 7. A front-page Times story got one of those triple-decker banner headlines most often seen during wartime. The Times did finally produce more than a squib about Sealab I, but the story wasn’t front-page news and didn’t appear until a week after the press conference. The paper ran sixteen paragraphs by one of its more renowned reporters, Hanson Baldwin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning military affairs correspondent. Under the headline “Navy Men Set Up ‘House’ Under Atlantic and Find Biggest Problem Is Communication,” it reported that the dive set a record for depth and duration, albeit with considerable understatement.

  Ed Link was taken aback when he read the Times report. The article made no mention of his own record dives. Not the recent 432-footer in the Bahamas, or even the day-long two-hundred-footer at Villefranche—a true first. He didn’t begrudge Bond and the Navy for getting the paper’s attention, but the only other aquanaut the Times mentioned was Jacques Cousteau and his Conshelf exhibition. Link, who kept an apartment in Manhattan, fired off a letter the next day to a top Times editor: “As a reader of The New York Times, I am somewhat shaken at the lack of knowledge on the part of your editors and the apparent need for more data in your files on important scientific events which are totally ignored in the before mentioned article.”

  A few of Link’s friends, including a retired Navy captain who lived on Park Avenue, contacted Hanson Baldwin directly. One friend extended an offer to Baldwin to arrange a luncheon, “so that whatever Mr. Link can contribute to your knowledge of this growing field could be made available.” Baldwin responded with a cordial note and expressed interest in a meeting. But the Times editor who received Link’s missive was terse and unmoved: “Simply because everyone you have mentioned was not mentioned in Mr. Baldwin’s story is no reflection whatsoever on the knowledge of our editors, and our files are quite adequate on the subject.” The officer-in-charge of the Experimental Diving Unit lamented that coverage in the Washington newspapers was no better than in the Times. He told Link that the papers had failed completely to recognize the significance of the four-hundred-foot saturation dive.

  The single Times story and a smattering of magazine articles were not enough to make household names out of Sealab I, saturation diving, or Captain Bond and his aquanauts. The proof was in the invitation that Bob Barth soon received to appear on To Tell the Truth. Each week on the popular TV game show a virtually unknown man or woman who had achieved or created something remarkable sat alongside two impostors. All three answered questions from the celebrity panelists whose job was to guess which of the three was the notable person. For this installment of the game, they had to figure out which one of the anonymous contestants seated before them had actually lived in the sea.

  10

  THE TILTIN’ HILTON

  In January 1965, just a few months after the press conference in Bermuda, planning began in earnest for Sealab II, a structure similar to its cylindrical predecessor but with a number of improvements. It would be the centerpiece of a more ambitious experiment in which three teams of both Navy and civilian divers would live and work out of their base at 205 feet for forty-five days. The budget was close to $2 million, ten times that of Sealab I. Although the target depth was only slightly greater than before, this second foray would be more challenging by virtue of its location: the edge of an undersea canyon about a mile offshore from La Jolla, California. This was just south of the location of the abortive Keller dive, with undersea conditions that would make the Devil’s Triangle look like a paradise. The water was both murkier than at Argus Island and markedly colder—around fifty degrees Fahrenheit—and therefore more like most of the world’s ocean depths. If the aquanauts could survive in this “hostile environment,” they could succeed anywhere on the continental shelf.

  One of the Navy’s principal scientific partners for Sealab II was the famed Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. The renowned institute, part of the University of California at San Diego, was perched along rocky bluffs overlooking a serene, two-mile-long crescent of sandy beach bisected by the utilitarian Sc
ripps pier. It was to serve as the mainland support base and a half-dozen Scripps scientists were among the civilians picked to live on Sealab II. Twenty-eight volunteer aquanauts were divided into three teams, each team taking turns on the bottom for fifteen straight days. Scott Carpenter had recovered from his Bermudan motorbike injuries and was scheduled to spend a longer block of time on the ocean bottom than anyone else. As the designated leader of the first two teams, the former astronaut would live and work out of Sealab II for thirty consecutive days.

  The first of the three Sealab II teams would do most of the setting up of the undersea house, and all three teams would have their share of experiments in oceanography and marine biology that Scripps researchers devised, along with projects on the Navy agenda, including a performance test of a specially trained porpoise. The Navy was happy to foster scientific interests and possible civilian spin-offs, but its main concern was in developing promising methods for military operations, like submarine rescue and especially salvage. Among the Team 3 aquanauts were some highly experienced Navy divers whose useful work would include salvaging the fuselage of a downed jet plane, like those that had crashed at Bermuda. Medical monitoring of all the aquanauts would continue throughout the experiment.

  In the end, the most important mission of all, as with Sealab I, was survival. The serious injury or, God forbid, death of an aquanaut could derail the program. But from the looks of things at the christening ceremony for Sealab II, the Navy was showing a heady confidence, even pride, in this latest quest. The ceremony, held on Friday, July 23, 1965, was itself a telling contrast to the first Sealab’s sideshow status at the Mine Defense Lab’s open house the previous year. A number of Navy dignitaries were at the christening, including Dr. Robert W. Morse, who had replaced Bond’s friend and supporter Jim Wakelin as assistant secretary for research and development. Morse and a dozen others were seated onstage for the outdoor ceremony at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, just south of Los Angeles. Sealab II, painted a gleaming white instead of international orange, was festooned with billowing red, white, and blue ribbons.

  With the habitat as an imposing backdrop, Secretary Morse gave a keynote address that often sounded as though George Bond had been his speechwriter. Morse hailed the Navy’s emerging efforts at exploration and exploitation of the continental shelf—not since the days of the Louisiana Purchase, he proclaimed, had the United States stood at the frontier of a territory so rich with promise and yet so completely unknown. The secretary paid rare public homage to Bond, Walter Mazzone, and Robert Workman, who were seated nearby, and called Sealab I “successful beyond expectation,” particularly in view of its “very limited budget.” Morse got on quite a rhetorical roll, foretelling a day when excursions to deep-sea habitations, six hundred to a thousand feet below the surface, could be “as commonplace as jet air travel is today at thirty-five thousand feet.” The secretary of the navy, Paul Nitze, did not attend the christening but dispatched his daughter, Heidi, to do the traditional honors of smashing a champagne bottle on Sealab II’s hull. An ocean breeze blew softly and a Navy band launched into “Anchors Aweigh.” A chaplain read a benediction, blessed the Sealab crew, and prayed to Almighty God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords. Little wonder that as the ceremony came to a close, George Bond wept, unashamedly.

  All the aquanauts at the ceremony had heard their names read aloud in triumphant fashion. Scott Carpenter, Bob Barth, Cyril Tuckfield—Navy divers made up most of the crew for Sealab II, and Bond had favored divers he knew personally. Many more had applied to be aquanauts than could be accepted. Some, like Tuck, had served as support divers for Sealab I. Bond’s pal Charlie Aquadro might have made the team but he was still in Monaco with the Cousteau group, which was busy preparing for a third Conshelf, this one scheduled to overlap with Sealab II. The nearly dozen civilians who filled out the Sealab roster had been picked for their familiarity with diving and their scientific specialties.

  The only aquanaut missing at the ceremony was Lester Anderson, who had disappeared the day before, following a spat with Scott Carpenter. Commander Carpenter was in charge of physical training—PT—which included regular exercises like calisthenics and running. Soon after the aquanauts arrived in Long Beach from their training in Panama City, Anderson flatly refused to do PT. He could be stubborn sometimes, as everyone knew, but he was blatantly disobeying an order. Carpenter didn’t know what to make of it. He and Andy had seemed to get along fine during the preparations for Sealab I. Andy had even asked the world-famous astronaut to autograph some pictures for his five daughters. Billie Coffman, one of the new aquanauts, had sensed a souring of his Navy buddy’s attitude since earlier that year, when he and Anderson had witnessed a horrific accident at the Experimental Diving Unit.

  Anderson and Coffman were on watch at the Unit on February 16, 1965, when their friends Fred Jackson and John Youmans were locked inside the chamber to test a decompression schedule for a two-hour dive to 250 feet. Anderson and Coffman had switched with Jackson and Youmans that morning so they would be available to meet with Captain Bond about their upcoming roles for Sealab II. That simple schedule change had fateful consequences. As the divers in the chamber approached the end of the prescribed decompression, additional oxygen was pumped into the atmospheric mix, a routine procedure.

  Coffman was looking through one of the little portholes and talking over the intercom with the divers inside when Youmans said, “We have a fire in here.” Coffman saw a flame shoot out of the carbon dioxide scrubber, the same cauldron-sized filtering device used in the chamber during Genesis. In the next instant it was as though Coffman were staring into a blast furnace. His friends vanished in a superheated flash of a thousand degrees—a “thermal explosion.” Within a hellish minute, during which Coffman and Anderson joined a dozen others in a futile rescue attempt, the chamber was blackened like the inside of an old barbecue pit.

  By their nature experimental dives carried an added risk, which is why not everyone clamored for billets at the Unit. While the risks were known, everyone was stunned and distraught that day, including Dr. Workman, who always took a cautious approach to the many chamber dives he supervised. Anderson seemed to take the accident especially hard. Some of the guys took him over to the Green Derby, a favorite neighborhood bar across the Anacostia River from the Unit. The Derby’s owner, Al Vogel, was well known to divers from the Navy Yard for his generous spirit. Depending on what a diver needed at any given moment, Vogel could be banker, teacher, tailor. At a time as bleak as that Tuesday morning it would have been just like Al to announce that drinks were on the house. Anderson wasn’t alone in needing a stiff one, and for some time the normally upbeat prankster was down in the dumps.

  In the weeks that followed, Captain Bond noticed a rebelliousness in Anderson but figured that Andy would come around, out of loyalty to the program if nothing else. But then Bond heard that Andy was refusing to do PT and had goaded Carpenter by saying that he couldn’t kick him off the team, that Captain Bond would overrule him if he did. Bond went looking for Anderson but couldn’t find him that night, and then Anderson didn’t show up for the christening. Bob Barth, like other friends, hoped that Andy would be allowed to stay, despite his recent transgression. They would miss him as a diver and they would miss his inimitable lighter side and nonpareil pranks.

  The day after the christening Bond caught up with Anderson and tried to find the reasoning behind his insubordination but heard nothing that made any sense. Perhaps the EDU tragedy was to blame. Or maybe he couldn’t accept Carpenter, a less experienced diver, as a leader—spaceman status be damned. Or perhaps it was some combination. Without giving specifics, Andy frequently complained to his wife about Carpenter, saying, “He’s going to kill somebody, Ma. He’s going to kill somebody on this trip!”

  Bond, Mazzone, and Carpenter agreed that Anderson would have to go. Bond still believed Anderson to be a valuable diver—it was his quick thinking, after all, that had saved Tiger Manning, and possibly the entire pr
ogram—but Andy would have to learn to cope without staging revolts against authority. Bond met privately with Anderson to let him know he was being taken off the Sealab roster. He humbly accepted his fate.

  Now that Sealab was less of a shoestring operation it was becoming more regimented. Captain Melson and the Office of Naval Research again took the lead in running Sealab, now formalized as the Man-in-the-Sea program and set up under the auspices of a new Deep Submergence Systems Project, an outgrowth of the group that had reviewed the Navy’s shortcomings in the wake of the Thresher loss. A busy agenda was designed to keep the aquanauts fully occupied, as Captain Melson thought the foursome on Sealab I should have been. Bond would reprise the Sealab I role of principal investigator, and they would still fondly call him Papa Topside, though his formal title was “deputy for medical affairs” in the organizational chart.

  After the christening festivities in Long Beach, Sealab II was towed eighty miles south to its ultimate destination, within sight of the shoreline at La Jolla. The lab had been built from scratch over the past six months at the Hunters Point Division of the San Francisco Bay Naval Shipyard. The shipyard’s builders had a handful of mentors from the Navy’s Mine Defense Lab and the lessons learned from the engineering of Sealab I, but they had been given none of the usual clear-cut, detailed specifications for a Navy vessel.

  They followed Sealab I’s basic layout, only the new habitat would be nearly twenty feet longer and have greater girth—a diameter of twelve feet and an overall length of fifty-seven feet. Instead of resembling a cigar with tapered ends, Sealab II looked like an extra-large tank car plucked from a freight train. It had nearly a dozen portholes along its sides and in the center on top was a stout conning tower painted with the new Sealab insignia. It looked like the Navy’s version of the NASA “meatball” logo—that familiar blue orb with a red swoosh and speckling of stars. The Sealab insignia was an upright rectangle with blue and white horizontal stripes symbolizing the ocean depths. Overlaying the stripes was a broad red arrow in which a fine white line etched the silhouette of a manly profile. The red arrow pointed down, the direction in which the program hoped to go, atmosphere by menacing atmosphere.