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  Link sensed a hint of selfish interest on Bond’s part, and he may have been right. If Bond savored being the first to demonstrate a three-hundred-foot submarine escape, he might also want to be the first to show that the concept of saturation diving—his concept—could enable man to live in the sea. Bond even raised red flags about national security—not a characteristic concern of his, and one that neither Link, who was hardly cavalier about such things, nor even the cautious U.S. Navy brass, shared. In any event, Link said he wasn’t trying to steal Bond’s thunder. Were it not for Genesis and Bond’s animal experiments, Link knew he would not attempt such a long, deep dive. Bond deserved all due credit, Link would say. In fact, he would have preferred to have the U.S. Navy and Dr. Bond take charge of the experiment he was about to do. When he lobbied Vice Admiral Hayward in the hope of convincing the Navy to actively pursue saturation diving, he encountered many of the same fusty attitudes Bond had. So one of Link’s motivations for going ahead on his own was to prod the Navy into action, show them it could be done, should be done, and the sooner the better. And if the Navy took up the cause of saturation diving, Link would gladly drop his own experiments. But until then, the intrepid inventor was not going to sit on his capable hands and wait.

  Bond’s expressed desire to have Link drop his experiment, or at least postpone it, likely stemmed in part from a concern that any serious mishap or fatality could make it that much harder to sell the Navy on saturation diving. One tiny bubble on the brain of one diver could ruin everything. If Navy skeptics had their worst suspicions confirmed at this early stage, the quest to live in the sea could end almost before it began. Rockets could blow up and test pilots could die in spectacular fireballs, but the space race and the cosmic tug-of-war between Us and Them would go on, regardless. Not so with saturation diving, at least not yet, despite George Bond’s inspired sermonizing, and Ed Link’s determined prodding.

  As it turned out, Link didn’t receive Bond’s entreaty until after his experiment had ended. Link would later say that if he had gotten the letter sooner he probably would have heeded Bond’s warning. But that summer found Link decided that his split with Cousteau might have been for the best. Cousteau and his team were planning what seemed to Link an overly prudent venture. They were building an undersea habitat, a worthwhile effort, but they were going to place it at two atmospheres, a depth of just thirty-three feet. The week-long duration envisioned for the Cousteau team’s dive certainly had great publicity value, Link thought, but at that minimal depth the experiment would represent mere baby steps onto the continental shelf. Cousteau would prove only that man could live in a swimming pool. Link set his sights at two hundred feet, the same trial depth Bond had simulated with his Genesis menagerie in New London.

  From the port of Monaco, Link sailed ten miles or so west into a sheltered bay at the medieval citadel of Villefranche-sur-Mer, which offered a variety of possible depths. Villefranche was also the Mediterranean home port of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet. Link’s prodding of top military brass had not been entirely in vain: The Navy took charge of delivering Link’s cylinder to France and planned to provide him with the costly helium he would need. The Navy also granted Link’s request to have a submarine rescue ship, equipped with expert diving teams and decompression chambers, available in the bay during the planned two-hundred-foot saturation dive.

  Link had no medical specialist on Sea Diver but through his various Navy contacts specifically requested that Charlie Aquadro be assigned to his project. Aquadro had befriended Link while stationed at Key West and had been among the Navy divers assigned to two of Link’s recent high-profile underwater archaeological expeditions, in Jamaica and Israel. Aquadro would have been happy to join Link again for Man-in-Sea, but he was about to serve as medical officer aboard a Polaris submarine, so Link’s request for medical assistance went to Dr. Robert Bornmann, an able lieutenant commander with the kind of know-how Link needed.

  Bornmann had come to the Navy by way of Harvard and medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and had been through the Navy’s deep-sea diving school in Washington, the submarine school, and the training tank in New London. When the assignment with Link came along, Bornmann had been the medical officer and an instructor at the Navy diving school in Key West for the better part of a year. Prior to that he had spent a couple of months on Bond’s staff at the Medical Research Lab. Although not directly involved, Bornmann was certainly aware of Genesis, and he struck up a friendship with Dr. Bond. A cordial letter from Bornmann to Bond that included an update on Link’s progress is what had prompted Bond to write back, to Bornmann, with the warning that Link should hold off until Bond could run his tests on human subjects in chambers. Bond and Link surely followed each other’s underwater activities, but the two Americans rarely had direct exchanges and in that sense they were more rivals than friends.

  Bornmann had no specific experience with the peculiarities of saturation dives—outside of Bond’s immediate circle no one really did. Nonetheless, calculating decompression schedules and treating cases of bends were part of his training. Among the items Bornmann packed for the trip was the published report on Genesis. In a sense the report was as much a talisman as anything because its gas mixtures and decompression schedules, while perhaps safe for a goat, probably wouldn’t be exactly right for a man, as Bond had stressed in his letter.

  Not everyone found Ed Link easy to work with, but Bornmann, a bright and affable medical officer, got along well with the inventor, who had a stubborn streak and a bit of a temper, as Bornmann discovered. Link was an intense worker and devoted little time to diversions. Apart from daily newspapers, and perhaps Reader’s Digest, he typically read only what pertained to his projects. The only television he watched was the news. At fifty-eight, Link was tanned and as active as someone years younger, despite a graying wreath of hair around his head. His confident grin would deepen his facial crags.

  Toward the end of August, Link moored Sea Diver in a shallow section of Villefranche Bay and began a series of test dives, starting with one in which Link would lock himself into the cylinder. Link, like Bond, would never ask anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. Link’s aim was to test his prototype in an airtight mode, as if it were a mini-submarine or a bathysphere like William Beebe’s. With a hatch in its lower end sealed shut, the cylinder maintained a pressure of one atmosphere, the same as at the surface. Link sat in his cramped contraption like a man in a phone booth, tinkering and running through some checks. He was about sixty feet down. Suddenly he told his topside crew to bring him up. The hatch beneath his feet had apparently given way. The sea surged in, equalizing the pressure. Link was soon up to his neck in chilly saltwater. The boom and lifting line on Sea Diver were designed to handle the cylinder’s weight of more than two tons, but when the cylinder was filled with water, it became too heavy to handle. If the boom or the cable snapped, Link’s cylinder would sink to the bottom of the Mediterranean and become his casket.

  The crew cranked up the supply of compressed air, delivered by umbilical to the top of the cylinder, and forced the seawater out. But as the cylinder began to rise, Boyle’s law kicked in, the air inside expanded, and the over-buoyant cylinder shot out of the water like a great silver torpedo, clearing the surface by a good few feet before dropping back into the sea. Fortunately, Bornmann and the quick-thinking crew cranked up the air again before the cylinder could take on more water, and got it buoyant enough to reel in.

  Once safely back on deck, Link said they had done enough for the day. The supreme fix-it man then disappeared below deck, making his way through the wood-paneled lounge, past the fireplace of coral encrusted bricks and the mermaid figurine near the galley door, and downstairs into his private cabin. His biggest test was soon to follow.

  On August 28, Link attempted his longest, deepest dive: sixty feet for eight hours. Similar depths and durations had been achieved, but mostly by caisson workers or in dry test chambers. The standard U.S. Navy di
ving tables maxed out at a bottom time of between three and four hours, depending on whether air or a more complex helium-oxygen mixture was used, so there was no information about whether Link might suffer the bends. Even at this modest depth of less than three atmospheres, Ed Link was taking his chances, in a prototype that had just threatened to drown him. The pressure inside the cylinder was raised to equal the surrounding water pressure so Link could open the hatches in the bottom-facing end of the cylinder and swim freely in and out, as if using a diving bell. He donned scuba gear and spent much of the afternoon working in the water.

  A lunch of macaroni and cheese was delivered in a sealed container by the younger of Link’s two sons, twenty-one-year-old Edwin Clayton Link, known as Clayton, an experienced diver who was becoming a regular participant in his father’s expeditions. Clayton also brought his father a few letters. The prompt and pragmatic businessman in the cylinder dictated responses by telephone from his seat inside the silver cocoon. Link was relaxed enough to find time for a nap, which he took while hunched over a small tray table, like a dozing schoolboy. He later received a hot roast chicken dinner as the cylinder was gradually raised through the water and the pressure inside decreased. With two of the planned six hours of decompression still to go, Link’s crew hauled the sealed-up cylinder onto the deck of Sea Diver and laid it on its side, on a base that Link built to hold it in place. Once horizontal, Link was able to lie down for the first time in about twelve hours. He fell asleep almost immediately. Dr. Bornmann crunched some decompression figures and extrapolated from the Navy decompression schedules for “exceptional exposures.” These schedules were considered somewhat risky, but they were better than nothing if a diver ever got stuck on the bottom for much longer than the standard tables allowed.

  About eleven-thirty that night, Dr. Bornmann opened the hatches at the end of the cylinder and peered inside. The inventor was asleep. Wasn’t he? Other than hearing his voice over the intercom, there was no way to be sure he was all right, nothing monitoring his heartbeat or other vital signs. For a moment, like a nervous parent who tiptoes into a room to check on a sleeping child, Bornmann experienced a fillip of adrenaline as Link lay motionless in the aluminum cradle. Then Link suddenly stirred, crawled out, and kissed his wife and expeditionary partner, Marion Clayton Link. He had survived in the sea for eight hours at sixty feet!

  The cylinder had proven to be a viable shelter, at least down to three atmospheres. It enabled Link to do a few tasks in the water and had maintained the desired gas mixture and pressure for a total of nearly fifteen hours, including decompression. Link seemed uninterested in his having broken a diving record that was more than two centuries old. In the 1690s, Edmund Halley, the English astronomer known primarily for tracking the comet that would be named for him, built a barrel-shaped diving bell out of wood and lined it with lead. It had greater girth than Link’s cylinder but about the same interior volume. Halley devised a system of barrels and leather tubes that channeled fresh air from the surface to give the bell’s occupants more breathing time.

  During one trial, Halley wrote that he and four others stayed in the bell for an hour and a half at a depth of about sixty feet. The men couldn’t do much while submerged, although Halley had ideas for supplying air so that divers could work outside the bell. No one suffered any ill effects, but Halley and his crew had no way of knowing that with the depth and duration of their dive they narrowly averted getting bent, or worse. Nonetheless, his innovative bell and record stay in the sea made diving history, even if Halley’s Comet would become better known than Halley’s bell.

  So it was that Link, whom many considered a Renaissance man, broke a Renaissance record. But his day at ten fathoms was only meant as the final test before dropping the cylinder down to two hundred feet for a few days. Because Link felt he should oversee the experiment—and because the earlier trials were a reminder that at fifty-eight he was getting a little old for this sort of thing—he decided not to make the next saturation dive himself. Instead he gave the starring role to a volunteer half his age, an experienced Belgian diver named Robert Sténuit. Link had met Sténuit at Vigo Bay, on the northwest coast of Spain, where Sténuit was with an expedition searching for a fleet of galleons and cargoes of gold sunk during Halley’s day. The Belgian treasure hunter impressed Link as a skillful, even-keeled diver, and Sténuit further proved himself on Link’s expedition to Sicily that spring. After returning home to Brussels, Sténuit received Link’s invitation to make the two-hundred-foot dive in the cylinder. He readily accepted. It was as if he’d been invited to be the first man on the moon. Sténuit, twenty-nine, dark-haired, svelte, and mustachioed, rejoined Sea Diver in Villefranche for a few days ahead of the experiment to get acquainted with Link’s underwater shelter. This would be his first experience breathing a mix of helium and oxygen. If all went well, he might also be the first man to live in the sea.

  5

  DEPTH AND DURATION

  On September 5, 1962, Sea Diver anchored within view of the shoreline near Cap Ferrat, which juts like a thumb into the Mediterranean to form the eastern rim of Villefranche Bay. Like other parts of the Côte d’Azur, this scenic little bay was ringed by rocky hillsides spread with a mosaic of pastel residences with tile roofs. The sea depth just beyond the bay dropped to more than two hundred feet, perfect for Robert Sténuit’s trial dive in the cylinder.

  As Link had just learned from his experience at sixty feet, the cold was going to bother Sténuit as much as anything, That was one drawback to substituting helium for nitrogen in order to avoid narcosis. Helium is a fantastic conductor of heat, whisking it away about six times faster than air. And not only would Sténuit be bathing in an atmosphere that was almost pure helium, he would be breathing the gas. Helium would sap his body heat. While Sténuit got a good night’s rest before the dive, Link was busy installing an additional heater inside the cylinder.

  Winds whipped up big swells and threatened to delay the dive, but calm returned the next day. The USS Sunbird, the submarine rescue ship Link had requested, arrived at dawn as promised. Sténuit was locked into the cylinder for the ride down to two hundred feet, which would put him about forty feet above the muddy bottom. He was to stay down for two, maybe even three days. Cousteau’s undersea house might have made the Belgian’s accommodations more comfortable, but Link’s cylinder would have to suffice.

  Keeping warm inside the cylinder was one challenge, but Sténuit also had to stay warm in the cool water outside. Even with a protective wet suit, itself a recent innovation, Sténuit quickly learned that the numbing cold of the deep Mediterranean made it difficult to spend more than a few minutes in the water. He was able to dive long enough to pose for photographers from Life and National Geographic who made brief bounce dives from the surface. Sténuit simulated some simple tasks and fetched a dinner that was sealed in a container and lowered like fish bait to the cylinder. The well-intentioned heaters built into the top of the cylinder fairly broiled Sténuit’s head, but the rest of him nearly froze. No prototype is perfect, but these added risks due to excessive cold, or equipment failures, were part of the reason Bond had tried to discourage Link from running his test at sea. In addition, Link didn’t have the equipment to monitor and collect detailed physiological data. Without it, little could be learned about the actual effects on a diver of a prolonged exposure to pressure, cold, helium, and the rest.

  Sténuit went to sleep by nine that night, seated and hunched over the little tray table with his head on his arms. Largely because of the cold, he spent most of his time inside the undersea turret, rather than out, reading books he brought along like Céline’s D’un château l’autre—Castle to Castle. The goal had been to demonstrate that a saturation diver could do a day’s work in the water, but in the end Sténuit made just two ten-minute dives, including the one to pose for the photographers. Still, Sténuit had put in twenty-four hours under pressure and at sea, which was believed to be longer than any diver before him. A barrier had
been broken, even if it didn’t seem to be as striking a human achievement as the miracle of flight, or even the first ascent to the summit of Mount Everest a decade earlier.

  Sténuit was supposed to stay down for another day or two to extend this new duration mark, and to make a more convincing case for living in the sea. But as the first day came to an end, Link called off the experiment. Sténuit protested over the intercom, but a leak in the homemade ventilation system was sapping their limited helium supply and they couldn’t risk running out before Sténuit had completed his decompression. There was also a predicted return of rough weather that could make the raising of the two-ton cylinder hazardous. Despite the curtailment of the experiment, Link considered it a real breakthrough. He believed they had proved that man can safely live at significant depths for long periods of time. Back in New London, however, Bond and Walt Mazzone were much less impressed. Perhaps Link had just been lucky, like Edmund Halley a few centuries before. And the experiment was not over yet: They still had to bring Sténuit back to the surface, safe and bubble-free.

  The Sunbird came to the rescue with enough additional helium to last through a long, steady decompression. Dr. Bornmann factored in both the standard Navy diving tables for helium and the Genesis results. After twelve hours at one hundred feet, the pressure inside the cylinder was dropped to the equivalent of fifty-five feet. It was about then that Sténuit felt a groaning ache around his right wrist that soon crept up his forearm—a telltale sign he was bent. As the pressure was reduced by another few pounds per square inch, the pain got worse, leaving little doubt that bubbles were affecting his wrist and arm, and there was always a fear the bubbles could spread. Bornmann promptly cranked up the pressure to take his Belgian subject back to a depth equivalent of seventy feet. As Bond’s group had found with the saturated goats, recompression still seemed to be the best remedy for the bends, even when coming out of a full saturation. The added pressure relieved Sténuit’s pain. Bornmann cautiously held the diver for another twelve hours at seventy feet before resuming the schedule that would have him back on the surface in a couple of days. Sténuit had no choice but to remain sealed inside the oversized aluminum can, passing time and peering out the portholes, assuming all the while that he would be able to rejoin those on the outside.