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the floor of the mammoth enclosure—“room” was hardly the proper word—in which Mark One rested. “As I guess you know, we call this Mark One because Mark Two is the Nautilus herself. They were building her in Groton at the very same time they were buildingMark One here out in the desert. Only, Mark One was kept a few months ahead. Everything was tested and proved out before its duplicate was allowed to be installed in the ship. All changes that were found to be needed here were automatically done there, too.”
    It was obviously a speech that Dusty Rhodes made to every new group of trainees, but there was also a note of pride in his voice. It had been one of the extraordinary engineering feats of the time. Mark One was a monument to the genius of its designers and constructors, particularly that most demanding and irascible construction engineer of them all, Admiral Brighting. And now he, Lieutenant Commander Dusty Rhodes, had been entrusted with its total and exclusive charge.
    â€œI don’t see any propeller, Dusty. How do you simulate the resistance of the water? Just turning a big thing sticking out of the end of a fake submarine hull isn’t the same. To get horsepower you have to do work.” Keith’s question was one he knew Rhodes would have the answer for.
    â€œWe thought of that, all right,” said Rhodes, picking up the cue. “When you get into your schedule, one of the things you’ll be learning about is the water brake. It duplicates propeller resistance. Makes the turbine think there really is a propeller out there—even puts thrust on the thrust bearing. There is some trouble with it, though. Since we’re not really driving a ship, what we really do—the work we do—is make heat. You’ll be calculating the BTUs before you’re through here. We make a lot of heat, and this damn things heats up too easy. We have to have a garden hose spraying water on the outside casing of the water brake whenever we stay at full speed for long.”
    The others nodded their comprehension. One of the fine points, obviously, was that since the water brake was not an integral part of any submarine, a permanent and “engineered” solution for its overheating was not a matter of urgency or even concern, so long as the jury rig, the garden hose, solved the problem. After a moment, Rhodes went on. “What we do here is operate Mark One just like a submarine underway for a long cruise, and the trainees stand all the watches, along with the instructors. There’s usually several classes going on at the same time, in various stages of the program, so there’s trainees on nearly all the billets. The instructors fill in the rest of them. Theonly exception we make to shipboard routine is that the watches are eight hours long instead of four. Everything else is exactly like on board ship. We go through all the evolutions of starting, running, maneuvering and stopping, cope with simulated or real casualties to the machinery, do everything the Nautilus could do.
    â€œWe’ll put you fellows right into the system. The only thing different about you is that the normal trainee is here for a year, sometimes longer. So he drives in from Idaho Falls, or maybe Arco, wherever he lives, stands his eight-hours’ watch every day and goes home. Some of them have to be on night watches, but we keep most of the activity for the eight to four shift and leave things pretty quiet during weekends. You three are going to have to cram the whole year’s training program into the fourteen weeks you’ll be out here. So my orders are to fix you up with a place to sleep right here on the site, and you’re to spend all your time in Mark One, as if you actually were at sea.” He paused. “That doesn’t leave you much time free. You didn’t have any other plans, did you?”
    â€œNope.” Rich answered for the three of