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  Like Bond, Workman was naturally curious about the concept of saturation diving. Bond needed a scientist of Workman’s caliber to help do the physical calculations necessary to determine whether saturation diving was a viable way to break depth barriers. At Bond’s behest, Workman wielded his slide rule and confirmed a critical point: If a diver stayed under pressure long enough to become fully saturated, his decompression requirement would become fixed. The decompression curve flattened out. On paper, it appeared that a saturated diver’s decompression penalty should be the same whether he stayed down a few additional minutes, a day, a month, or possibly even longer. This would mean that a diver could stay underwater indefinitely with only one decompression—a key to living in the sea and a stunning advance over the standard practice of making multiple short dives, each one requiring a time-consuming decompression. The animal experiments would be the first step in finding out whether the hypothesis held up. Bond called these experiments Genesis. They marked a beginning, as the name implied, but mostly the name was Bond’s way of paying tribute to the first book of the Bible, the spiritual origin of Dominion over the Seas.

  Down by the Thames River, in a dreary building adjacent to the bottom of the escape training tank, Bond had access to a pressure chamber, much like the one at the top of the tank, where trainees suffering from an embolism could be locked in for emergency recompression. Like other such steel chambers, including the one in which Bond treated Charlie Aquadro, this one was cylindrical and looked like a midget railway tank car. It was roughly twenty feet long, with a circular hatch on one end. That hatch led into a compartment that served as an airlock for entering and exiting an adjacent second compartment separated from the first by another hatch. Both chamber compartments were just large enough around for a man to stand up. The chamber wasn’t designed for experimental use and didn’t have much in the way of instrumentation—Bond’s lab still awaited the installation of a new, state-of-the-art test chamber—but this old chamber’s dual compartments at least allowed the researchers to maintain a desired test pressure in the second compartment while tending the animals inside by using the first compartment as an airlock.

  Bond, Mazzone, and Workman, the Genesis trinity, would take turns peering through little portholes to observe the animals they led into this pressurized Ark, which was about a ten-minute walk from the medical lab on the upper base. Two dozen rats would be the first of many critters to get locked in. The initial goal was to keep them for fourteen days under a pressure of seven atmospheres—more than one hundred pounds per square inch—the same as would be experienced at a depth of two hundred feet. Two hundred feet was considered a substantial depth, and fourteen days was far beyond the durations of a few hours outlined in the standard dive tables. This struck Bond as a good starting point for collecting some benchmark data. A good long saturation dive like this would give them ample opportunity to identify any signs of physiological trouble. It also gave them a chance to practice the art of prolonged atmospheric control. They would begin by filling the chamber with ordinary compressed air. They knew that if nitrogen narcosis didn’t kill the animals, oxygen poisoning probably would. Sure enough, by the thirty-fifth hour, all two dozen male rats were dead. Some amount of helium was going to be needed to create a healthy artificial atmosphere.

  Over the course of about two years, Bond, Mazzone, and Workman took turns watching over dozens of animals—some two hundred, by Bond’s unofficial count. The need for constant monitoring during a Genesis experiment could add long hours to the researchers’ days. Rats, then guinea pigs, and eventually little squirrel monkeys were locked in the chamber and put under pressure in a helium-infused artificial atmosphere for up to two weeks at a time. As the hours passed, the researchers would watch for any signs of animal sickness or discomfort, such as changes in appetite, lethargy, dragging a limb. In some guinea pigs they observed a heightened friskiness. Perhaps artificial atmospheres would join the long line of purported aphrodisiacs. No one could be sure. Later, in checkups and dissections at the medical lab, they examined the animals’ organs for any signs of trouble attributable to living under pressure.

  At times the lab evoked a high school science experiment. Inside the chamber the experimenters laid out trays of lithium hydroxide, a carbon-dioxide-absorbing chemical that looks like coarse sand. They positioned fans to help circulate the chamber atmosphere and added some boric acid powder to the trays to eliminate the growing stench of excreta. Because they were working with an old pressure chamber, sub rosa, in their spare time, without any formal budget or backing, this kind of jury-rigging was a must. To try to improve their setup at one point, Mazzone and Workman—who were both much handier than Bond—retrofitted the chamber with a homemade version of the kind of gas-filtering device used on submarines, known as “scrubbers,” to better “scrub” carbon dioxide out of the enclosed atmosphere. Bond and Mazzone were spending money out of their own pockets to buy animals, animal feed, or whatever else couldn’t be “borrowed” from the Medical Research Lab or some other department around the submarine base, such as costly helium.

  The Genesis troika eventually settled on a breathing mix that was about 97 percent helium and 3 percent oxygen at the trial pressure of seven atmospheres. Nitrogen was virtually absent, and Bond knew that some scientists had expressed doubt that the human body could function indefinitely without any nitrogen to breathe. Yet that did not seem to be an issue, the troika was finding. The tests on smaller animals were a good start, but if they were going to make the case that human beings should be allowed to try prolonged saturation dives, they needed to test some larger animals. Goats would be among the last animals into the pressurized Ark. Goats had been a top choice in experimental diving work for years because their anatomy more closely resembled that of humans. If the goats could survive the saturation plunge and subsequent decompression, chances were good that men would, too.

  Bond got some of his bleating test subjects from neighbors around the old farmhouse where he lived in nearby Ledyard with Margit and their four children. There were also goats enlisted from the submarine base, where they were left to graze to keep the grass trimmed. The scientists saturated a number of goat pairs, paying special attention to the decompression schedules. At certain predetermined depths, the decompression stops ranged from thirty-six hours to a few minutes. With each stop the gas recipe also had to be altered to keep the concentration of oxygen from becoming poisonous. This was the same sort of trial-and-error decompression testing that had been done with human subjects to refine the schedules for conventional dives. When those divers felt the telltale aches of the bends coming on, they would say so and adjustments could be made to the gases and pressure. But with the goats, and all the other animals, the three researchers had to watch for nonverbal warning signs. In the case of bends, the goats might gnaw at themselves as if they had a bad itch, or take the weight off a leg and let it hang limp.

  The Genesis experiments were already under way in early 1960 when Bob Barth began a stint as a training tank instructor. Barth was a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday and had a dry, wisecracking personality. He had a proclivity toward pranks and often spoke with an inscrutable smirk. He was of medium height and build, with thinning dark hair and a full, rounded face prone to ambiguous expressions. He had enlisted in the Navy at seventeen and had worked his way up to quartermaster first class. For the past few years Barth had ridden submarines and trained as a diver. When it came time for shore duty, the prospect of spending hours a day in a fat column of balmy water as a training tank instructor looked paradisiacal. Bob Barth could not have guessed that his days at the New London submarine base would include goat herding and the beginning of a long association with a medical officer named George Bond.

  Bond would come down to the tank to put in shifts as the doctor on duty and didn’t just watch or pace around in a lab coat. He liked to get in the water. Bond would join Barth and other instructors in making breath-holding dives from the top of t
he tank, or “bottom drops.” On a single breath, they would drop all the way to the bottom, nearly 120 feet, and then return to the surface, much like free diving sponge and pearl divers. When visitors came to the tank, Barth and Bond took part in demonstrations that featured bottom drops and a carnival atmosphere. One favorite stunt was to toss a pair of tennis shoes into the tank. Then a breath-holding diver would follow, “flying” to the bottom, as Barth would say. Once on the bottom he would put on the white sneakers, with studied nonchalance, taking time to lace them up, letting the clock tick, before finally resurfacing.

  Between the showy demonstrations and the sober job of watching over potentially deadly practice escapes, a good deal of camaraderie developed around the training tank. Cyril Tuckfield returned to submarine duty when Bob Barth arrived, and soon Dr. Charlie Aquadro, who had lately been chief medical officer of a submarine squadron in Key West, joined Bond’s staff at the Medical Research Lab. The boyish Southern gentleman gave the training tank’s carnival side a boost when he started bringing his recently acquired pet Kampuchean monkey to work. Aquadro named the monkey Scuba and doted on him. Scuba liked to watch from the deck around the top of the tank as instructors and trainees came rocketing from the depths of the water column in a hail of bubbles. Before long, Aquadro had a machinist create a Mark V–style dive helmet for the monkey. Scuba would don the gear and Aquadro taught the little primate with the prehensile tail to dive. Scuba eventually made it all the way to the bottom of the tank in his little hardhat. Bob Barth and the other instructors grew fond of their unofficial mascot, and Barth even took Scuba home one weekend to monkey-sit while Aquadro was out of town.

  Once the goats were locked in the test chamber they required more work than the smaller rodents and primates. Bond also wanted the goats taken for a brisk trot as part of their post-decompression checkup, to see that they were running on all fours and not limping or displaying any other signs of ill health, like a slow-acting case of the bends. Cleaning up after goats and other animals in the chamber was one thing. It might be unpleasant but it could at least be done in relative seclusion. Running goats around the base required a certain nonchalance. Had anyone other than Dr. Bond asked Barth to volunteer as goat herder, Barth might have responded with a prickly answer and a dismissive smirk. But for Bond, and for the cause of Genesis and saturation diving, Barth did it willingly.

  Barth put the goats on leashes, two or sometimes four at a time, and herded them from out of the bowels of the escape training tank. The goats did not always want to go in the same direction, but Barth would do his best as he ran them along the nearby wharf, in full view of docked submarines, ships, and their crews. One can only imagine the merciless epithets hurled at the hapless sailor trying to keep his bleating ungulates in line. If anyone could weather the verbal assaults, it was Barth. But even he could get tongue-tied when trying to explain why he was running goats along the wharf, as happened one day when he was stopped by a base patrolman. Barth might have just said that his goats were like Able and Baker. Everyone knew Able and Baker, the monkeys famously launched into space on an American rocket. Unlike their simian counterparts, however, the Genesis goats would not get banner headlines or make the cover of Life magazine. Yet those goats were doing for diving what Able and Baker did for space travel.

  During the final phase of Genesis, Bond, Mazzone, and Workman focused on refining decompression schedules. Several pairs of anonymous goats were locked into the chamber and allowed to become saturated at the equivalent of two hundred feet. At this point, having gotten the hang of controlling the artificial atmosphere, the team of researchers began with a fairly conservative approach that gradually brought the goats back to the surface over seventy-two hours, an ascent rate of about three feet per hour. For half that time the goats were held at a pressure equivalent to a depth of eighty-four feet, for the other half at twenty-six feet, with the concentration of oxygen being increased along the way. A decompression lasting several days, as this one did, was long by traditional standards, but if paying this kind of decompression penalty meant a diver could live and work in the sea indefinitely, it would be time—and money—well spent. So far the signs were looking good.

  On another try, a larger goat weighing 120 pounds, closer in size to an adult human, exhibited symptoms of the bends. They raised the chamber pressure back to seven atmospheres, following the traditional method of using recompression to stop the fizzing soda pop effect of the bends. It worked. After three hours the goat’s symptoms subsided. This was good news for humans who might someday get bent while surfacing after a long saturation dive. Recompression still seemed to be effective medicine. They then successfully brought the goat back to the surface with a more conservative decompression schedule, pausing for full-day stops at one hundred feet, forty-three feet, and ten feet before returning the goat to the surface. The moonlighting hours could really add up during Genesis. Following the goats’ ritual run along the wharf with Bob Barth and a day of observation, none exhibited any symptoms of the bends.

  The goat tests marked the culmination of the groundbreaking animal experimentation and in early 1962, Bond, Mazzone, and Workman published an official report for the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery outlining the methods and results of Genesis: “Prolonged Exposure of Animals to Pressurized Normal and Synthetic Atmospheres.” The forty-page report, made publicly available, reflected the sober influence of Workman and Mazzone in that it was straight scientific fare. Gone were the grand flights of fancy found in Bond’s “Proposal for Underwater Research.” But the report did point out the potential for “operational exercises” that might include underwater construction, deep salvage, and marine research.

  To anyone who wanted to hear it, the report’s message was clear: What worked for the animals could work for human beings. A formidable barrier had been cracked, and an undersea future that had existed only in science fiction was seeping into reality. Just how long a man could stay down and how deep he could go still remained a mystery. Also off in the Buck Rogers realm was the engineering of a sea dwelling—an undersea laboratory or shelter something like the boxy structure depicted in The American Weekly. But it was beginning to look like man could actually live and work in the sea, if only someone dared to try.

  4

  FRIENDLY RIVALS

  In the years leading up to Bond’s Genesis experiments, there were sporadic and often sensational efforts to dive deeper, if not to stay down for very long. Several record-breaking dives were attempted in the 1940s, including one by a Swedish engineer, twenty-eight-year-old Arne Zetterström. Breathing a special gas mixture through traditional hardhat gear, the lanky Swede was lowered into the Baltic Sea on August 7, 1945, the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Zetterström successfully reached a depth of 528 feet, but his diving platform was raised too quickly. By the time he reached the surface, he was dead. In September 1947, a month before the first supersonic jet flight, one of Jacques Cousteau’s most experienced divers, Maurice Fargues, made a dive to 385 feet in the Mediterranean. Fargues was breathing ordinary compressed air, testing the depth limits of the Aqualung. Upon reaching his target depth—a record for an air-breathing diver—he apparently passed out. His safety line went slack, alerting his buddies at the surface that something was wrong. They hastily hauled him up and tried to revive him, but Fargues was dead.

  A year after Fargues’s accident the Royal Navy staged a series of deep dives in Loch Fyne in western Scotland and passed the official U.S. Navy helium diving record of 450 feet. On the final dive Wilfred Bollard, a petty officer diver first class, spent five minutes at 540 feet. He suffered a minor case of bends while undergoing nearly nine hours of decompression—but lived to celebrate his record. That record stood until the mid-1950s when another Royal Navy diver, Lieutenant George Wookey, was lowered in hardhat gear to six hundred feet in a Norwegian fjord, in October 1956. With the water temperature near freezing, he did a brief task with his numbed hands, simulating a procedure f
or submarine rescue, but then ate up precious minutes struggling to free his badly fouled umbilical. He was lifted back to the surface, dizzy and shaken, but alive.

  Deep-water marks like these were fine achievements when they didn’t turn tragic, but Bond wasn’t interested in depth alone, as he would make clear to anyone who would listen. He wanted divers to remain at depth long enough to perform useful work. While some in the Navy either doubted his abilities or disliked his unorthodox ideas, Bond found receptive audiences elsewhere. In the spring of 1959 he presented the keynote speech to the Boston Sea Rovers, a dive club formed in the early 1950s when the Aqualung was gaining popularity. Bond found himself in good company. The Rovers’ featured speaker the year before was Cousteau, who in 1957 had won an Academy Award for The Silent World, his film based on his popular book of the same name. That was also the year he took over the prestigious directorship of the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. By then Cousteau had retired from the French navy and transformed an American-made, 140-foot minesweeper into the Calypso, the research ship that would become synonymous with Cousteau, diving, and undersea exploration.

  The Rovers, unlike some Navy traditionalists, were captivated by Bond’s ideas, as were members of similar groups that formed around the growing interest in scuba. A man who heard Bond speak before the Illinois Council of Skin Divers around this time wrote to him to say that his presentation was the best he had ever heard by a doctor or by a naval officer. “Your message was important, and your sense of humor delightful. Thank you for coming. I know 600 others feel the way I do about your wonderful talk.” By 1960, the year after the daring three-hundred-foot submarine escape, the Boston Sea Rovers named Commander George Bond their Diver of the Year.