"We could," smiled Lieutenant Jack Benson, "if our compressed air apparatus were working. We can't do the trick without compressed air. If we had any of that which we could use, we wouldn't need to leave the boat and swim to the top. We could take the boat to the surface instead." "Then it's impossible, sir, to leave the boat?" questioned Jetson, his color again fading. "Yes; if we opened the outer end of the torpedo tube, without being able to throw compressed air in there first, then the water would rush in and drown us." "I'm filled with wonder," Dan Dalzell muttered to himself. "Staring certain death in the face, I can't understand how it happens that I'm not going around blubbering and making a frantic jackanapes of myself. There's not a chance of living more than an hour or two longer, and yet I'm calm. I wonder how it happens? It isn't because I don't know what is coming to me. I wonder if the other fellows feel just as I do?" Dan glanced curiously around him at the other midshipmen faces. "Do you know," said Darrin quietly, "I've often wondered how other men have felt in just such a fix as we're in now." "Well, how do you feel, Darry?" Farley invited. "I'm blessed if I really know. Probably in an instant when I fail briefly to realize all that this means my feeling is that I wouldn't have missed such an experience for anything." "You could have all my share of it, if I could make an effective transfer," laughed Wolgast. "If we ever do get out of this alive," mused Page aloud, "I don't doubt we'll look back to this hour with a great throb of interest and feel glad that we've had one throb that most men don't get in a lifetime." "But we won't get out," advanced Jetson. "We're up hard against it. It's all over but the slow strangling to death as the air becomes more rare." "I wonder if it will be a strangling and choking," spoke Darrin again in a strange voice; "or whether it will be more like an asphyxiation? In the latter case we may drop over, one at a time, without pain, and all of us be finished within two or three minutes from the time the first one starts." "Pleasant!" uttered Wolgast grimly. "Let's start something---a jolly song, for instance." "Want to die more quickly?" asked Dalzell. "Singing eats up the air faster." Lieutenant Jack Benson came out of the engine room for a moment. He took down the wrench and went back to the engine room. But first he paused, for a brief instant, shooting at the midshipmen a look that was full of pity for them. For himself, Jack Benson appeared to have no especial feeling. Then the young commanding officer went back into the engine room, closing the door after him. "What did he shut the door for?" asked Jetson. "Probably they're going to do something, in there, that will call for a good deal of physical exertion." "Well, what of that?" demanded Jetson, not seeing the point.