Scoot Bailey read March’s letter and grinned.

“So flying’s easy, he says?” he muttered to himself. “He should have been here going through what I’ve been through! Aerodynamics, engines, controls, meteorology, gunnery, navigation, bombing, figure-eights, barrel-rolls, spot landings!”

He shook his head and looked at the row of textbooks on the desk before him.

“He’s right, though,” he said. “I do begin to feel like a flier. At first, before I’d ever been up in a plane, I thought I was one—one of those so-called natural fliers, only there isn’t any such thing. Then when I first flew I realized I didn’t know much of anything. Next, when I got so I could handle the trainer pretty well, with the instructor right there, I decided flying was pretty simple after all.”

He sat back and recalled the day that had changed his mind about that.

“But when he finally told me to take it up alone—boy, oh boy! There I sat in that flying machine with no teacher there to hold my hand. That’s when I thought I didn’t even know what direction the stick moved, I didn’t know which way to push the throttle. What ever gave me the nerve to give her the gun and take off I can never figure out. But when that was over and I was still alive and in one piece, I’d got over the worst of it.”

He realized that a submariner had no equivalent of soloing in a plane to go through. He’d have to remember to write that to March.

“After that I straightened myself out,” Scoot’s thoughts went on. “I wasn’t too cocky and I wasn’t too scared. I just knew that I had learned to fly a little bit, that there was still a tremendous amount to learn, and that if I worked hard enough I could learn it and turn out to be a pretty good pilot.”

Scoot was on the advanced Navy trainer now, a fast ship that came closer in speed and maneuverability to the fighters he would eventually fly.

“In another week I’ll be heading for the training carrier,” he said with a glow of satisfaction. “I’ll get my wings and I’ll be a real Navy pilot, but I’ve still got a lot to learn. Taking off from those heaving decks—and landing on ’em again—is going to be quite different from the same moves on these nice flat Texas plains.”

As Scoot thought about it, about the work March had been doing, he realized that there was a great deal in common in their fields. Flying a plane wasn’t much like handling a submarine, but both of them got away from the normal positions of most people. The flier got away from the earth’s surface in one direction. The submariner got away from it by going under. They both handled craft that could travel in a three-dimensional sphere, not just over the surface like a tank or a battleship.

“March practices coming up with a Momsen Lung,” Scoot told himself, “while I practice coming down with a parachute. That Lung’s just a sort of underwater parachute.”

A plane was just a vehicle to get explosives into position for firing at the enemy and so was a submarine, Scoot concluded. And sometimes they even handled the same explosives—torpedoes!

“Now if someone would just invent a flying submarine,” Scoot thought, “March and I could get together again. But I guess that’s not very likely outside the comic strips. When you think of the terrific water pressure a sub has to stand, you can’t very well imagine hooking wings on to something that heavily plated with steel. And think of the batteries! No—I’m afraid March and I will be separated for some time. It seems a shame, though, sub and plane ought to make a mighty fine team.”

The next week, as Scoot started off from Corpus Christi for the training carrier off the shores of Florida, March was setting off on one of the most important underwater trips of his training. It was a trip of two days on which March was to act throughout as navigation officer, still his specialty despite his training in every other job on the ship. March knew his navigation thoroughly while he was still on surface ships, but with the intensive extra study he had gone through at New London, especially on dead reckoning and “blind” navigation for underwater travel, he was a master.

During the trip, on which Stan Bigelow also acted as engineering officer in charge of the Diesels and motors, they got the real feeling of being on patrol. They simulated traveling through enemy waters and so ran submerged most of the daylight hours, the Skipper taking a look around occasionally with the periscope.

Numerous drills were also rehearsed during the voyage—fire drills, man-overboard drills, crash dives. They simulated a chlorine gas danger, acting as if the sea water had got into the batteries to give off the deadly fumes. Gas masks were out in a hurry and the battery room was sealed off with only two “casualties.”

“The only thing we haven’t tried on this trip,” March said at mess the first evening, “is some of the first aid we’ve learned.”

“Well, if someone will volunteer to simulate appendicitis,” the Skipper laughed, “I’m sure Pills will try an operation. But you forgot something else we haven’t tried—a depth-charge attack.”

“I’d just as soon skip that, sir,” Stan said, “at least until the real thing hits me.”

“No way of simulating it, anyway,” the Captain commented. “But it’s about the only thing we leave out in this training.”

“There’s one big difference,” March said. “In training, if you make a mistake, why you just get a bad mark from the teacher. In real submarining in war time, you’re likely to get—dead. And carry a lot of others along with you.”

“What do you mean?” the Skipper asked. “That’s true at the beginning, of course, but not now. You’re really navigating this boat, Mr. Anson. Nobody else is doing it, and nobody’s checking up on you. If you do it wrong, we’ll pile up on Montauk Point!”

March gulped. And Stan looked a little worried.

“What’s the matter, Stan?” March asked. “Are you scared? Think I’m not a good enough navigator?”

“No, I was just wondering,” Stan said, “if the same thing applied to me—if I’m really totally responsible for all these engines on this trip.”

“Of course you are, Mr. Bigelow,” the Skipper smiled. “And I’m sure you’ll handle them very nicely, just as I’m confident Mr. Anson will take us just where we’re supposed to go. You are not allowed to take over these duties until you have proved conclusively, in your previous work, that you could do so.”

As darkness descended over the waters of Long Island Sound, the training sub surfaced and found herself just where she was supposed to be at that time, much to March’s relief. Hiding behind a point of land near the end of Long Island, they charged their batteries, while a skeleton crew stayed on watch. Most of the others went to bed for a few hours’ sleep in the bunks which lined the walls of most of the rooms. March and Stan shared a tiny cabin, but were not in it at the same time, as their watches followed one another.

Before dawn the next morning the sub set off from its cove, submerged, and followed the next course under water. Sending up the periscope at about ten o’clock, the Skipper saw the target boats at the designated spot and the sub went through a series of simulated attacks on enemy shipping, crash diving to get away from “destroyers” attacking them, lying on the bottom with all motors shut off for a spell, then sneaking away at a depth of two hundred feet in a circuitous course to outwit the enemy waiting for them.

During all the trip the Skipper and Lieutenant Commander Sutherland were closely observing, without seeming to do so, the actions of March and Stan, and of the student diving section which had shipped with them for this special trip. They were interested in seeing not just whether the men could handle their jobs, but how they did it—if calmly or with too much tension. On occasion one or the other of the two senior officers would give a conflicting order or misunderstand something reported by Stan or March, just to see what happened. Not once did Stan or March become upset, and the two older men smiled at each other meaningly.

“Two good officers,” the Skipper said. “I wish I could get out on patrol again and take along a couple of new young men like that.”

“I’d go anywhere with them myself,” said Sutherland. “Why do we have to be so old, Skipper?”

“Didn’t you have enough action in the last war?” the Captain asked.

“No, sir, and neither did you!”

“Well, men like Anson and Bigelow will have to do it for us this time, I guess,” the Captain said. “And I suppose we’re doing an important job if we help at all to make them such good pigboat officers.”

“They’re ready to be assigned now, don’t you think?” Sutherland asked.

“Yes, without a doubt. They can’t learn any more except through actual experience. They might as well start getting it right away.”

March and Stan felt sure that their training was coming to an end. So far as classes were concerned, they knew that they had covered just about all the work that the school had to give them. They had studied so hard that they felt mentally exhausted.

“I don’t think I could cram one more fact into my head,” Stan said. “It’s going to take some time for the facts I’ve been putting in there to assemble themselves and settle down in some orderly fashion.”

“We’ll be leaving before long,” March said. “But there’s one thing I want to do before I leave. I want to see Winnie and Minnie.”

“Oh—in the escape tower?” Stan exclaimed. “Of course—we’ve never made the hundred-foot escape.”

“We don’t have to, but just about everybody does,” March said. “Want to do it with me tomorrow?”

“Sure, if there’s a group going through,” Stan agreed. “By the way, what happened to that fellow Cobden who flubbed the fifty-foot escape?”

“He made it,” March said. “And he’s already done the hundred-footer, too. The psychiatrist found out what was bothering him. When he was just a kid he was swimming with a gang and one of ’em ducked him and held his head under water a bit too long. He got some water in his lungs, passed out, but they revived him. He’d forgotten all about it, really—except underneath, of course. He said that later when he made up his mind to learn how to swim well, it took a lot of grit to make himself do it. He didn’t know why it bothered him, but he had the guts to fight it out and really learn how to swim. Never did any diving, though—didn’t like being completely under water.”

“And after all these years that old experience pops up!” Stan exclaimed.

“It just goes to prove that all these tests are so sensible!” March said. “What if he hadn’t found that out until he got in a sub on duty somewhere? His going to pieces then might have wrecked it, or caused plenty of trouble.”

“He’s all over it now?” Stan asked.

“Sure,” March said. “As soon as the doc got the story out of him and explained it, Cobden just laughed and said he felt foolish. Went right over to the fifty-foot level and did the escape. He even joked with the Chief and said that he shouldn’t hold his head under water—it might make a neurotic out of him.”

“That’s swell!” Stan commented.

“Yes, and he insisted on taking the hundred-foot escape right away, too,” March went on. “But they were smart. They wouldn’t let him. They thought he might be acting under a temporary fit of courage and bravado and the old fear might come back on him later. So they made him wait a couple of weeks. It went fine, though.”

Before going to the escape tower the next day, March looked up Scott, the radioman, and reminded him of their date to look at Winnie and Minnie together. So Scott and March and Stan went to the hundred-foot tower together that afternoon, donned their swimming trunks, their Momsen Lungs, and stepped under the metal skirt in the water at the bottom. As March started up the long cable leading to the surface, he realized that the hatch and platform there were made exactly like the top of a real sub. And there on the walls were the two beautiful mermaids, Winnie and Minnie, smiling at him. He could not smile back, because of the Momsen Lung mouthpiece, but he waved at the girls and went slowly up past them.

At the fifty-foot platform an instructor swam out and around him, waving his arms to indicate that March was moving up at the correct speed. As he broke the surface he felt fine, as if one of the last acts at New London had been accomplished. Stan and Scott followed him quickly, and then the three of them were presented with the special diplomas, decorated with pictures of Winnie and Minnie, stating that they had made the hundred-foot escape.

As March and Stan walked back to their quarters, March said, “Now I feel ready for anything!”

And waiting for him were his orders—to report in two weeks to Baltimore, Maryland, for duty aboard the new submarine, Kamongo.