"I don't need looking after," I said mildly. "I'm all grown up now and I hardly ever feel lonely."

"I shall be as quick as I can, Dr. Carpenter," Swanson said. He hurried off down the gangway, and I gazed thoughtfully after him. I put out of my mind any idea I might have had about the Commander U. S. Atlantic Submarines picking his captains from the benches in Central Park. I had tried to effect an entrance aboard Swanson's ship, and if such an entrace was unauthorized he didn't want me taking off tifi he'd found out why. Hansen and his two men, I guessed, would be the three biggest sailors on the ship.

The ship. I stared down at the great black shape lying almost at my feet. This was my first sight of a nuclearengined submarine, and the «Dolphin» was like no submarine I had ever seen. She was about the same length as a World War II long-range ocean-going submarine, but there all resemblance ceased. Her diameter was at least twice that of any conventional submarine. Instead of having the vaguely boat-shaped lines of her predecessors, the «Dolphin» was almost perfectly cylindrical in design; instead of the usual V-shaped bows, her fore end was completely hemispherical. There was no deck, as such: the rounded sheer of sides and bows rose smoothly to the top of the hull then fell as smoothly away again, leaving only a very narrow fore and aft working space so treacherous in its slippery convexity that it was permanently railed off in harbor. About a hundred feet back from the bows the slender yet massive conning tower reared over twenty feet above the deck, for all the world like the great dorsal fin of some monstrous shark; halfway up the sides of the conning tower and thrust out stubbily at right angles were the swept-back auxiliary diving planes of the submarine. I tried to see what lay further aft but the fog and the thickening snow swirling down from the north of Loch Long defeated me. Anyway, I was losing interest. I'd only a thin raincoat over my clothes and I could feel my skin start to gooseflesh under the chili fingers of that winter wind.