Red-eyed after two days without sleep, stocky, sandy-haired Rear Admiral William Guest ordered crewmen on the sea-stained, 2,100-ton submarine rescue ship U.S.S. Petrel to start heaving in on the winch. Four cold, tense hours later, as dawn exploded over the Mediterranean horizon, the sunken 2,800-lb. H-bomb that had defied every attempt at retrieval for 80 days splashed out of the water onto the Petrel's fantail.

Thus ended a frantic, seriocomic science-fiction epic that had strained Washington's relations with Spain, given Soviet propagandists a rich fallout of anti-American gibes, indelibly affected the life and folklore of thousands of Spanish campesinos and, by week's end, allowed the world at large its first peek at an H-bomb.

To the Bottom. "¡La Bomba es recuperada!" shouted villagers in the fishing town of Palomares five miles away. "They have pulled it up!" In Madrid, one newspaper suggested that the recovery was a Holy Week "miracle." For Palomaresinos, the splash-out meant a return to workaday chores that will always be colored by the phantasmagoria that ensued after a bomb-laden SAC B-52 collided with a jet tanker in their skies last Jan. 17. Ever since, hundreds of airmen, many in Martian masks and protective clothing, had scoured the countryside collecting the remains of the three bombs (two burst open on impact) that fell on land. Air Force generals even helped gather more than 1,600 tons of slightly contaminated topsoil* for burial in the nuclear-waste plot of Aiken, S.C.

Stranger yet to Palomares fishermen were the Jules Verne trawling capsules imported by the Navy's 18-ship, 2,200-man recovery task force under "Wild Bill" Guest, 52. Among the most sophisticated hardware in his far-out fleet were the civilian-manned, deep-diving research subs Aluminaut and Alvin. It was Alvin's two crewmen who first found the wayward nuke last month, wrapped in its grey parachute 2,500 ft. down on a 70° slope. But Alvin proved a ham-handed retriever. On its first try at getting a line around the bomb, the sub booted the bomb 20 ft. down the slope toward a 3,000-ft. chasm from which it might never have been extracted; it was lost again for nine days.

To the Top. What finally boated the bomb was CURV (for Cable-Controlled Underwater Research Vehicle), weirdest of all of Guest's gadgets. On a 15-ft. pipe base not unlike the landing gear of a small helicopter, CURV mounts four long red ballast tubes for depth control, three electric propulsion motors, lights, sonar, film and TV cameras. Controlled from the surface, it can clamp a detachable claw onto objects up to 3 ft. wide, then back away leaving the claw and a buoyed line attached. Though it is normally used to retrieve spent torpedoes, Guest acted on a hunch and ordered CURV flown out from California.

Even CURV went round the bend. After attaching two claws to the bomb's parachute lines, it got hopelessly tangled trying to attach a third. Exasperated, Guest decided to try hauling up the whole conglomeration—bomb, parachute, CURV and all—while the weather still held fair. Luckily, CURV somehow disentangled itself on the way up, and the rest of the recovery went off without a hitch.