ver Navy is closest, and ask them to come deal with it." From the driving bridge, we strolled over to the positioning bridge - a separate control room that is used to hold the ship on station during cable operations. Naturally it faces toward the stern of the vessel so that Swaffield and his team can observe what is going on below. From the windows of the positioning bridge we looked down on the entire working area of the ship (see Figure 7-27). On the near right below us was the control room for the robotic cable layer; on the left was the robot itself, hanging from a giant crane. And far off in the distance was the stern of the ship, where cables were retrieved for repair or dropped. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Transport Technologies Transport Technologies Figure 7-27 The aft work From the bridge we went back down to deck level where we walked into the covered area of the deck - looking for all the world like a giant garage (see Figure 7-28). On the left was a structure that resembled a restaurant walk-in refrigerator, which Martin confirmed was in fact a freezer where the repeaters were kept. "They cost a million dollars apiece; we keep them cold so that the electronics won't be shocked when we dump them overboard after installing them on cables." Figure 7-28 Covered area of deck Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Transport Technologies Chapter 7 In the right was a small room where fiber splicing was done (see Fig- ure 7-29). A long, narrow window ran the length of the room and cables to be spliced could be dragged through the window for repair. This was also where I saw cross sections of submarine cable for the first time. The stuff 