“Why, all Navy men know how to navigate,” Stan protested. “I know my navigation pretty well.” “Maybe so,” March agreed, “but do you know it well enough to take a ship a few hundred miles under water without ever a chance to look at the horizon or shoot the sun or get a fix on some landmark? I know I couldn’t do it, and navigation’s been my main job so far.” “Navigating a sub’s no bed of roses, of course,” Stan said, “but nursing my pretty Diesels is no easy task, either. When you’re workin’ on those babies, you pay attention and be good to them.” “I’ll be good to your Diesels, all right,” March laughed. “But what I’m most anxious to learn about are all the new sound-detection devices. Pretty secret stuff, some of it, though we’ve had some of it on our surface ships.” “I know,” Stan said. “You don’t feel so blind and lost in a sub any more, I guess. You can tell from the sound devices just how many ships are near by and even from the sound of their engines what kind they are, where they’re goin’ and how fast. But you know what I’m anxious to do—really get inside a pigboat and look around. Those cross-section charts are fine, but there’s nothing like seeing the real thing for yourself.” “I think they’ll be taking us down for a dive within a couple of days,” March said. “Just for the ride, you know, and to see how we react. And it had better be pretty soon. That Scoot Bailey has probably been up in a plane half a dozen times at least and I haven’t seen the inside of a sub!” The next morning they looked for an announcement that they would go down in one of the subs but there was nothing of the sort. They spent their time in the classrooms, and they began the really intensive work that March had been expecting. “One day of preliminary stuff was enough, I guess,” he said to Stan at lunch. “They really put us to work this morning.” The classrooms and laboratories of the officer-students were in the same building as those of the enlisted men. Officers and men alike had gone through the same preliminary tests, but now their paths separated. March saw the men regularly, of course, in the halls and around the grounds. He stopped and chatted once in a while with Scott, the radioman, who struck him more and more as a pleasant and serious young man ideally suited to submarine work. He saw the pharmacist, Sallini, and also Marty Cobden, the fellow who had gone to pieces at the fifty-foot level in the escape tower. He was going at his studies like a demon, as if to make up in some way for his one failure to date. March and Stan saw them that very afternoon again, when they reported, according to instructions, to one of the Chief Petty Officers at the sub base below the school buildings. “Wonder what’s up?” Stan said. “Something for officers and men alike, whatever it is.” “There’s only one thing left of that sort,” exclaimed March happily. “That’s our first pigboat ride! Come on, Stan!”