“You can’t pick— My God! Dead in her course, too!” The flush of excitement on the commandant’s stern face had paled. “Call again, man! Keep on calling, and don’t stop!”
The tenseness was broken by the flashing crackle which streamed again from the sender. The commandant waited, tapping his foot in his agitation. Into his ferment Rankin with all his inexperience of official propriety intruded.
“Pardon me, sir. May I ask what is the trouble?”
“Eh, what!” The commandant looked at him blankly for a moment. Then indignation added to his nervous irritation. “What the— Your curiosity is out of place, Ensign Rankin.”
“Pardon me. My ship, sir.” Rankin said it with a feeling of pride, as though it conferred a right upon him.
“Your—ah, yes. And you missed her! Well, sir, your ship is steaming into a whole fleet of submarines! That’s the trouble. Five of them; or maybe ten, or a hundred, as far as we can make out from these confounded code flashes.”
“Whe-e-ew!” The wireless operator whistled his startled amazement before he remembered that he was merely a machine who heard nothing and knew nothing of what passed in that little electric-charged room, a highly sensitized automaton, bound by many oaths to eternal dumbness; then he hid his confusion under the crisp hissing of his key.
Rankin echoed his whistle. But his was a personal interest. There was a danger; and he thought somehow that he ought to be there to share it. “His ship” had taken a definite meaning in his mind. In the strained silence which followed, broken only by the intermittent crackling calls into the void, he pictured her rushing into the peril, all unwarned and unsuspecting. Vaguely the commandant’s voice came to him, talking to the operator seemingly out of the distance.
“It is imperative to communicate. We must get in touch.”
It woke him out of his abstraction with a start. A wild idea had begun to take shape in his brain. Thoughtless of all pros and cons, he grasped at it with enthusiasm. Eagerly he burst out: