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carries experts for working on those things. However, they were no sooner taken off yesterday morning than this Drift Station operation came our way and Commander Swanson insisted on having at least six of them put back on straight away.’ Benson grinned. ‘If there’s one thing a submarine skipper hates it’s putting to sea without his torpedoes. He feels he might just as well stay at home.’
    ‘Those torpedoes are still not operational?’
    ‘I don’t know whether they are or not. Our sleeping warriors here will do their best to find out when they come to.’
    ‘Why aren’t they working on them now?’
    ‘Because before our return to the Clyde they were working on them for nearly sixty hours nonstop trying to find out the cause of the malfunction — and if it existed in the other torpedoes. I told the skipper that if he wanted to blow up the
Dolphin
as good a way as any was to let those torpedomen keep on working — they were starting to stagger around like zombies and a zombie is the last person you want to have working on the highly-complicated innards of a torpedo. So he pulled them off.’
    He walked the length of the gleaming torpedoes and halted before another steel door in a cross bulkhead. He opened this, and beyond, four feet away, was another such heavy door set in another such bulkhead. The sills were about eighteen inches above deck level.
    ‘You don’t take many chances in building these boats, do you?’ I asked. ‘It’s like breaking into the Bank of England.’
    ‘Being a nuclear sub doesn’t mean that we’re not as vulnerable to underwater hazards as the older ships,’ Benson said. ‘We are. Ships have been lost before because the collision bulkhead gave way. The hull of the
Dolphin
can withstand terrific pressures, but a relatively minor tap from a sharp-edged object can rip us wide like an electric can-opener. The biggest danger is surface collision which nearly always happens at the bows. So, to make doubly sure in the event of a bows collision,we have those double collision bulkheads — the first submarine ever to have them. Makes fore and aft movement here a bit difficult but you’ve no idea how much more soundly we all sleep at night.’
    He closed the after door behind him and opened the for’ard one: we found ourselves in the for’ard torpedo room, a narrow cramped compartment barely long enough to permit torpedoes to be loaded or withdrawn from their tubes. Those tubes, with their heavy-hinged rear doors, were arranged close together in two vertical banks of three. Overhead were the loading rails with heavy chain tackles attached. And that was all. No bunks in here and I didn’t wonder: I wouldn’t have liked to be the one to sleep for’ard of those collision bulkheads.
    We began to work our way aft and had reached the mess hall when a sailor came up and said that the captain wanted to see me. I followed him up the wide central stairway into the control room, Dr Benson a few paces behind to show that he wasn’t being too inquisitive. Commander Swanson was waiting for me by the door of the radio room.
    ‘Morning, Doctor. Slept well?’
    ‘Fifteen hours. What do you think? And breakfasted even better. What’s up, Commander?’ Something was up, that was for sure: for once, Commander Swanson wasn’t smiling.
    ‘Message coming through about Drift Station Zebra. Has to be decoded first but that should takeminutes only.’ Decoding or not, it seemed to me that Swanson already had a fair idea of the content of that message.
    ‘When did we surface?’ I asked. A submarine loses radio contact as soon as it submerges.
    ‘Not since we left the Clyde. We are close on three hundred feet down right now.’
    ‘This is a
radio
message that’s coming through?’
    ‘What else? Times have changed. We still have to surface to transmit but we can receive down to our maximum depth. Somewhere in Connecticut is the world’s largest radio transmitter using an extremely low frequency