Free Cold is the Sea by Edward L. Beach Page A

carefully breathed through his nose only and through the gauze with which his mask had been stuffed. Nevertheless, he nearly lost consciousness when the wild, searing heat first went down into his lungs.
    The piercing, high-pitched shriek of the main pumps, no longer shielded by the heavy deck through which he had descended, tore at his eardrums. He could feel the delicatemembranes of his ears reacting, toughening, screeching their protests into his senses, bruising themselves, swiftly dulling their ability to respond. Too late to do anything about this now. It should have been foreseen. The hood and mask were not enough. He must specify earplugs for all those who followed him.
    The hot air shriveled the tender mucous linings of his nose and throat with every breath as he drew it in. Instantaneously he could feel the droplets popping out of his sweat glands, collecting, trickling down under his armpits, down his chest and backbone until absorbed by his clothing. Quickly his undershirt, and the civilian sport shirt, were sodden, as were his trousers along the front of his thighs and at the top of his buttocks. His feet felt tight in his suddenly moist shoes. He was grateful for the warm sweat. It would help keep his body temperature down.
    There was no time to lose. His part was vital. So were all the other parts, so carefully rehearsed, to follow. He must do precisely what had been scheduled; exactly that, no more, and certainly no less. The pain in his ears was less. Thank heaven for that! To reach the faulty demineralizer bypass he must crawl over a portion of the main coolant piping. An insulating mat had been dropped down the hatch before him. He gripped it, struggled upright, draped it over the nearly incandescently hot, foot-diameter pipe. Sliding over it, he crouched on hands and knees to crawl under a heavy cable channel, squeezed upright between the reactor pressure vessel and a smaller duplicate, the pressurizer. The heat from both, reflecting from the curved steel plates forming the bottom of the cylindrical hull, radiated through the thin asbestos lining of the work clothing protecting him. Down on hands and knees one more time to crawl under the thin bypass line itself (very carefully, so as to avoid passing before the crack with its still-issuing steam), he finally was able to sit upright facing the defective pipe, on the hot curved bottom of the reactor compartment. (This, at least, was at a more normal temperature, thanks to the tank of salt water onthe other side of the simulated submarine hull.) Working rapidly, he removed two sections of colored tape from a coverall pocket and fumblingly, but very carefully, wrapped them around the pipe, two feet apart. This would mark one of the freeze points. He crawled under the bypass line once more, around to the other side of the pressurizer, again positioned himself before the pipe, this time on the other side of the leak, marked the other freeze point with two more pieces of tape.
    By this time, Richardson was totally bathed in perspiration, his body as wet as if he had jumped, fully clothed, into the cooling pond. He had heard old Navy tales of men crawling into the firebox of a steaming coal-fired boiler to make emergency repairs. What he and the others were undergoing—or would soon be—was at least as severe a physical test, he thought, as he tortuously retraced his path through the packed compartment. It was only Admiral Brighting’s insistence that all components be accessible which had made it possible to reach the bypass pipe. Otherwise, left to the standard designers and contractors, it would not have been. But, even so, there could have been more than the barest minimum of space. . . .
    The upper reactor compartment was a cool heaven, and so was the engineroom, where Rich ripped off his mask and hood and then, more slowly, removed his wet coveralls. A lab technician seized his dosimeter and film badge, hurried them away for immediate inspection.