A Meeting With Medusa (11 page)

Not that I really blamed my clients; they had good reason to be proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet made to harness the thermal energy of the sea. It was not the first attempt. There had been an unsuccessful one by the French scientist Georges Claude in the 1930s, and a much bigger one at Abidjan, on the west coast of Africa, in the 1950s.

All these projects depended on the same surprising fact: even in the tropics the sea a mile down is almost at freezing point. Where billions of tons of water are concerned, this temperature difference represents a colossal amount of energy—and a fine challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.

Claude and his successors had tried to tap this energy with low-pressure steam engines; the Russians had used a much simpler and more direct method. For over a hundred years it had been known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end is heated and the other cooled, and ever since the 1940s Russian scientists had been working to put this ‘thermoelectric’ effect to practical use. Their earliest devices had not been very efficient—though good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of kerosene lamps. But in 1974 they had made a big, and still-secret, breakthrough. Though I fixed the power elements at the cold end of the system, I never really saw them; they were completely hidden in anticorrosive paint. All I know is that they formed a big grid, like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.

I recognised most of the faces in the little crowd waiting on the Trinco airstrip; friends or enemies, they all seemed glad to see me—especially Chief Engineer Shapiro.

‘Well, Lev,’ I said, as we drove out in the station wagon, ‘what’s the trouble?’

‘We don’t know,’ he said frankly. ‘It’s your job to find out—and to put it right.’

‘Well, what
happened
?’

‘Everything worked perfectly up to the full-power tests,’ he answered. ‘Output was within five per cent of estimate until 0134 Tuesday morning.’ He grimaced; obviously that time was engraved on his heart. ‘Then the voltage started to fluctuate violently, so we cut the load and watched the meters. I thought that some idiot of a skipper had hooked the cables—you know the trouble we’ve taken to avoid
that
happening—so we switched on the searchlights and looked out to sea. There wasn’t a ship in sight. Anyway, who would have tried to anchor just
outside
the harbour on a clear, calm night?

‘There was nothing we could do except watch the instruments and keep testing; I’ll show you all the graphs when we get to the office. After four minutes everything went open circuit. We can locate the break exactly, of course—and it’s in the deepest part, right at the grid. It
would
be there, and not at
this
end of the system,’ he added gloomily, pointing out the window.

We were just driving past the Solar Pond—the equivalent of the boiler in a conventional heat engine. This was an idea that the Russians had borrowed from the Israelis. It was simply a shallow lake, blackened at the bottom, holding a concentrated solution of brine. It acts as a very efficient heat trap, and the sun’s rays bring the liquid up to almost two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Submerged in it were the ‘hot’ grids of the thermoelectric system, every inch of two fathoms down. Massive cables connected them to my department, a hundred and fifty degrees colder and three thousand feet lower, in the undersea canyon that comes to the very entrance of Trinco harbour.

‘I suppose you checked for earthquakes?’ I asked, not very hopefully.

‘Of course. There was nothing on the seismograph.’

‘What about whales? I warned you that they might give trouble.’

More than a year ago, when the main conductors were being run out to sea, I’d told the engineers about the drowned sperm whale found entangled in a telegraph cable half a mile down off South America. About a dozen similar cases are known—but ours, it seemed, was not one of them.

‘That was the second thing we thought of,’ answered Shapiro. ‘We got on to the Fisheries Department, the Navy, and the Air Force. No whales anywhere along the coast.’

It was at that point that I stopped theorising, because I overheard something that made me a little uncomfortable. Like all Swiss, I’m good at languages, and have picked up a fair amount of Russian. There was no need to be much of a linguist, however, to recognise the word
sabotash
.

It was spoken by Dimitri Karpukhin, the political adviser on the project. I didn’t like him; nor did the engineers, who sometimes went out of their way to be rude to him. One of the old-style Communists who had never quite escaped from the shadow of Stalin, he was suspicious of everything outside the Soviet Union, and most of the things inside it. Sabotage was just the explanation that would appeal to him.

There were, of course, a great many people who would not exactly be brokenhearted if the Trinco Power Project failed. Politically, the prestige of the USSR was committed; economically, billions were involved, for if hydrothermal plants proved a success, they might compete with oil, coal, water power, and, especially, nuclear energy.

Yet I could not really believe in sabotage; after all, the Cold War was over. It was just possible that someone had made a clumsy attempt to grab a sample of the grid, but even this seemed unlikely. I could count on my fingers the number of people in the world who could tackle such a job—and half of them were on my payroll.

The underwater TV camera arrived that same evening, and by working all through the night we had cameras, monitors, and over a mile of coaxial cable loaded aboard a launch. As we pulled out of the harbour, I thought I saw a familiar figure standing on the jetty, but it was too far to be certain and I had other things on my mind. If you must know, I am not a good sailor; I am only really happy
underneath
the sea.

We took a careful fix on the Round Island lighthouse and stationed ourselves directly above the grid. The self-propelled camera, looking like a midget bathyscape, went over the side; as we watched the monitors, we went with it in spirit.

The water was extremely clear, and extremely empty, but as we neared the bottom there were a few signs of life. A small shark came and stared at us. Then a pulsating blob of jelly went drifting by, followed by a thing like a big spider, with hundreds of hairy legs tangling and twisting together. At last the sloping canyon wall swam into view. We were right on target, for there were the thick cables running down into the depths, just as I had seen them when I made the final check of the installation six months ago.

I turned on the low-powered jets and let the camera drift down the power cables. They seemed in perfect condition, still firmly anchored by the pitons we had driven into the rock. It was not until I came to the grid itself that there was any sign of trouble.

Have you ever seen the radiator grille of a car after it’s run into a lamppost? Well, one section of the grid looked very much like that. Something had battered it in, as if a madman had gone to work on it with a sledgehammer.

There were gasps of astonishment and anger from the people looking over my shoulder. I heard
sabotash
muttered again, and for the first time began to take it seriously. The only other explanation that made sense was a falling boulder, but the slopes of the canyon had been carefully checked against this very possibility.

Whatever the cause, the damaged grid had to be replaced. That could not be done until my lobster—all twenty tons of it—had been flown out from the Spezia dockyard where it was kept between jobs.

‘Well,’ said Shapiro, when I had finished my visual inspection and photographed the sorry spectacle on the screen, ‘how long will it take?’

I refused to commit myself. The first thing I ever learned in the underwater business is that no job turns out as you expect. Cost and time estimates can never be firm because it’s not until you’re halfway through a contract that you know exactly what you’re up against.

My private guess was three days. So I said: ‘If everything goes well, it shouldn’t take more than a week.’

Shapiro groaned. ‘Can’t you do it quicker?’

‘I won’t tempt fate by making rash promises. Anyway, that still gives you two weeks before your deadline.’

He had to be content with that, though he kept nagging at me all the way back into the harbour. When we got there, he had something else to think about.

‘Morning, Joe,’ I said to the man who was still waiting patiently on the jetty. ‘I thought I recognised you on the way out. What are
you
doing here?’

‘I was going to ask you the same question.’

‘You’d better speak to my boss. Chief Engineer Shapiro, meet Joe Watkins, science correspondent of
Time
.’

Lev’s response was not exactly cordial. Normally, there was nothing he liked better than talking to newsmen, who arrived at the rate of about one a week. Now, as the target date approached, they would be flying in from all directions. Including, of course, Russia. And at the present moment Tass would be just as unwelcome as
Time
.

It was amusing to see how Karpukhin took charge of the situation. From that moment, Joe had permanently attached to him as guide, philosopher, and drinking companion a smooth young public-relations type named Sergei Markov. Despite all Joe’s efforts, the two were inseparable. In the middle of the afternoon, weary after a long conference in Shapiro’s office, I caught up with them for a belated lunch at the government resthouse.

‘What’s going on here, Klaus?’ Joe asked pathetically. ‘I smell trouble, but no one will admit anything.’

I toyed with my curry, trying to separate the bits that were safe from those that would take off the top of my head.

‘You can’t expect me to discuss a client’s affairs,’ I answered.

‘You were talkative enough,’ Joe reminded me, ‘when you were doing the survey for the Gibraltar Dam.’

‘Well, yes,’ I admitted. ‘And I appreciate the write-up you gave me. But this time there are trade secrets involved. I’m—ah—making some last-minute adjustments to improve the efficiency of the system.’

And that, of course, was the truth; for I was indeed hoping to raise the efficiency of the system from its present value of exactly zero.

‘Hmm,’ said Joe sarcastically. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Anyway,’ I said, trying to head him off, ‘what’s
your
latest crackbrained theory?’

For a highly competent science writer, Joe has an odd liking for the bizarre and the improbable. Perhaps it’s a form of escapism; I happen to know that he also writes science fiction, though this is a well-kept secret from his employers. He has a sneaking fondness for poltergeists and ESP and flying saucers, but lost continents are his real specialty.

‘I
am
working on a couple of ideas,’ he admitted. ‘They cropped up when I was doing the research on this story.’

‘Go on,’ I said, not daring to look up from the analysis of my curry.

‘The other day I came across a very old map—Ptolemy’s, if you’re interested—of Ceylon. It reminded me of another old map in my collection, and I turned it up. There was the same central mountain, the same arrangement of rivers flowing to the sea. But
this
was a map of Atlantis.’

‘Oh, no!’ I groaned. ‘Last time we met, you convinced me that Atlantis was the western Mediterranean basin.’

Joe gave his engaging grin.

‘I could be wrong, couldn’t I? Anyway, I’ve a much more striking piece of evidence. What’s the old national name for Ceylon—and the modern Sinhalese one, for that matter?’

I thought for a second, then exclaimed: ‘Good Lord! Why Lanka, of course. Lanka—Atlantis.’ I rolled the names off my tongue.

‘Precisely,’ said Joe. ‘But two clues, however striking, don’t make a full-fledged theory; and that’s as far as I’ve got at the moment.’

‘Too bad,’ I said, genuinely disappointed. ‘And your other project?’

‘This will really make you sit up,’ Joe answered smugly. He reached into the battered briefcase he always carried and pulled out a bundle of papers.

‘This happened only one hundred and eighty miles from here, and just over a century ago. The source of my information, you’ll note, is about the best there is.’

He handed me a photostat, and I saw that it was a page of the London
Times
for July 4, 1874. I started to read without much enthusiasm, for Joe was always producing bits of ancient newspapers, but my apathy did not last for long.

Briefly—I’d like to give the whole thing, but if you want more details your local library can dial you a facsimile in ten seconds—the clipping described how the one-hundred-and-fifty-ton schooner
Pearl
left Ceylon in early May 1874 and then fell becalmed in the Bay of Bengal. On May 10, just before nightfall, an enormous squid surfaced half a mile from the schooner, whose captain foolishly opened fire on it with his rifle.

The squid swam straight for the
Pearl
, grabbed the masts with its arms, and pulled the vessel over on her side. She sank within seconds, taking two of her crew with her. The others were rescued only by the lucky chance that the P. and O. steamer
Strathowen
was in sight and had witnessed the incident herself.

‘Well,’ said Joe, when I’d read through it for the second time, ‘what do you think?’

‘I don’t believe in sea monsters.’

‘The London
Times
,’ Joe answered, ‘is not prone to sensational journalism. And giant squids exist, though the biggest
we
know about are feeble, flabby beasts and don’t weigh more than a ton, even when they have arms forty feet long.’

‘So? An animal like that couldn’t capsise a hundred-and-fifty-ton schooner.’

‘True—but there’s a lot of evidence that the so-called
giant
squid is merely a large squid. There may be decapods in the sea that really are giants. Why, only a year after the
Pearl
incident, a sperm whale off the coast of Brazil was seen struggling inside gigantic coils which finally
dragged it down into the sea
. You’ll find the incident described in the
Illustrated London News
for November 20, 1875. And then, of course, there’s that chapter in
Moby Dick
….’