A life boat might have a name instead of a number but it could not look at him like that.
Then he saw that it was nearer to him, although he could not exactly see it move. On top of it were two persons, one of whom appeared to be looking at him through a long glass. Tom wished that he could see the rest of it—the part underneath—for then it would not seem so unnatural.
Then one of the men called to him through a megaphone and he was possessed by an odd feeling that it was the thing itself speaking and not the man upon it.
“Speak German?”
“No,” Tom called, “I’m American.”
He waited, thinking they would either shoot him or else go away and leave him. Then the man called, “Lift up your feet!”
This strange mandate made the whole thing seem more unreal, and he would not have been surprised to be told next to stand on his head. But he was not going to take any chances with a Teuton and he raised his feet as best he could, while the little tower came closer—closer, until it was almost upon him.
Suddenly his feet caught in something, throwing him completely over, and as he frantically tried to regain his position his feet encountered something hard but slippery.
“Vell, vot did I tell you, huh?” the man roared down at him.
Tom was almost directly beneath him now, walking, slipping, and scrambling to his feet again, while this grim personage looked down at him like Humpty Dumpty from his wall. The whole business was so utterly strange that he could hardly realize that he was standing, or trying to stand, waist deep, at the conning tower of a German submarine. By all the rules of the newspapers and the story books, his approach should have been dramatic, but it was simply a sprawling, silly progress.