“That’s a good sign,” he told himself. “Of course, they’ll like the extra pay—no doubt of that—but it’s not the reason they volunteered for sub duty. They really go into it for its own sake.”
The bus turned and entered the driveway of the sub base grounds and all the men looked eagerly out the windows. Their first look was for the river, where they hoped to see submarines.
“Look!” cried Scott, the radioman. “There’s one in dry dock!”
“And over there by the pier,” called another, “there’s a bunch of ’em lined up.”
March looked at the long slim lines of the pigboats and felt warm inside. He wondered just how soon he would take his first ride beneath the waters of Long Island Sound in one of them.
The bus passed a few buildings, but the sailors had no eyes for such ordinary things. Another structure had caught them—a tall round tower looming up above the trees on the gently sloping hillside.
“What’s that?” one of the men asked. “A water tower?”
“Water tower’s right!” exclaimed Scott. “But a special kind. That’s the escape tower!”
“Oh-oh, that’s the baby I’m wondering about,” said the pharmacist. “I don’t know how I’ll like going up through a hundred feet of water with just a funny gadget clamped over my nose and mouth.”
“Well—you better not let it get you,” one of the others put in. “It’s one of the first tests, I hear. If you can’t handle the escape-tower tests, you’re tossed out of submarines pronto!”