Undersea City (3 page)

I stood staring into space. I had no idea where I was.

By and by the object I was looking at began to make sense to me. It was a huge map of the world on the Mercator Projection; the map that, as a first-year lubber at the Academy, I had tirelessly memorized for the glory and grandeur that it spelled out. It was a strange map, at least for dry-siders—for the continents themselves were featureless black, showing only the rivers and a few of the largest cities.

But the oceans!

They sparkled in brilliant luminous colors. Shades of blue and green to indicate the depths of the sea bottom. Wash overlays of crimson and orange to show the submarine mountain peaks and ranges. Brilliant gold for the cities; lines of webbed silver that showed the pipelines and vacuum tubeways that linked them; shaded tracing that showed the vast mineral deposits that lay on the ocean’s bottom. There was incalculable wealth there! Enough to make a million millionaires! But dishonest men were wrecking what had so laboriously been built by the pioneers of the deeps, such as my uncle and my father.

And yet, my uncle was one of those dishonest men, according to the man who called himself Father Tide.

I came to with a start, shook myself and turned away from the great map of the deeps.

I was in Dixon Hall, the Academy’s exciting museum, where all the history of the subsea service was on display. I had no recollection of how I got there.

And someone was calling my name.

I said: “Oh. Hello. I—I didn’t see you come in.”

It was Bob, with Harley Danthorpe.

“You didn’t see anything at all,” Danthorpe rasped. “Can’t you find a better place to daydream than a dump like this? We’ve been looking all over for you.”

I expected something from Bob at that point, for he was nearly as devoted to Dixon Hall and the living history it contained as I.

But he was paying no attention. “Look!” he said, pointing.

It was a tapered metal tube, four inches thick and about three feet long, mounted in a glass display case.

The polished walls of it were glowing like edenite—the fantastic armor that my uncle invented, the pressure film that turns the deadly pressure of the water back on itself, making it possible for men to plumb the deeps.

But it was not edenite, or not of any sort that I had ever seen. For the glow of this was not the even shimmering green of submarine edenite armor. It was filled with little sparking points of colored fire that came and went like Christmas lights seen through the waving branches of a tree.

It’s a model mole!” cried Bob. “Look at the sign!”

He pointed to the card in the case:

Working Model of
Mechanical Ortholytic Excavator

Experimental craft of this type, now under test by the Sub-Sea Fleet, offer the promise of new opportunities to Academy graduates. With it explorations may be made at first hand of the strata beneath the sea bottom.

“Beneath the sea bottom,” I read aloud, wonderingly, “Do they mean actually underground?”

Harley Danthorpe twanged: “If you want the inside drift on the mole, just ask me.” He came up behind us, squinting at the shining model. “My dad has money in the basic patents,” he bragged. “On the ortholytic drill. Get it? Mechanical—Ortho—Lytic—Excavator. M-O-L-E.” He patted the case reassuringly. “Dad says it will slice through basalt rock like a bullet through butter. He says a time is coming when self-contained drilling machines will cruise through the rocks under the floor of the sea like submarines under the surface of the water. And he says the mole is going to earn millions for the man with the inside drift.”

“Great,” said Bob, disgusted. “A thing like this, and all you can think of is how to make money out of it!”

“What’s wrong with money?” Danthorpe demanded hotly. “After all, if it wasn’t—”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “I remember hearing about this thing. They’re having trouble with it, right? The model is fine, but the big machines have bugs.”

Danthorpe confessed, “Well, all atomic drills generate a lot of heat—and the ortholytic drill cuts faster, but if makes more heat. And the earth’s crust is already plenty hot, when you get a few miles down. They’ve got a terrific refrigeration problem.”

“At the least,” Bob agreed. “But they’ll lick it! And—Wow!”

He stopped and pointed at the big clock on the wall, under the sign that read;
The Tides
Don’t Wait.

“Five minutes before seventeen hundred!” he cried. “Come on, we’ve got to get to the Commandant’s office!”

We stood at ramrod attention, while the Commandant came around his big desk and inspected us with critical eyes as cold as the polar seas.

He said nothing about the scene in his office a few hours before. He didn’t show by a look or a gesture that it had ever happened.

For that I was grateful.

He walked behind the desk again and sat down deliberately.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice as hard as his seascarred face, “you are nearing the end of a course of training. You have reached the stage when certain selected cadets are chosen for detached duty as a part of their training. On this occasion, I want to remind you of your enormous duties, and of your peculiar opportunities.”

Opportunities!

It was a strange way for him to put it. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even move. But I could hear Bob Eskow catch his breath beside me.

The Commandant was lecturing.

“The Sub-Sea Fleet,” he was saying, “was originally designed to protect American interests under the sea. That was back before all the world’s weapons were placed under the direct supervision of the U.N. We looked out for American cities, American mining claims, American shipping. That is still an important part of our duties. But the Sub-Sea Fleet has a broader mission now.

“Our enemies down deep are seldom men in these days. In fact, the old institution of war was drowned in the deeps. There’s room and wealth enough for everybody.

“But getting them takes co-operation. Edenite was an American invention—” Did I imagine it, or did he glance at me when he said that? “But the British devised the techniques of sub-sea farming. The ortholytic drill was originally a German idea. The Japanese have pioneered in sub-sea quake forecasting.

“Against the hazards of the sea, all men fight together.”

He paused and looked at us.

“‘The Tides Don’t Wait!’” His voice rang out with the old slogan of the Academy. “That means that the Sub-Sea Fleet doesn’t live in the past. We recognize the fact of change. We are quick to make the most of new technologies.

“Gentlemen,” he said in his cold voice of command, “on a basis of your unusual aptitudes, indicated by the scores you have earned on the psychological tests and confirmed by your actual achievements here at the Academy, you have been selected for a mission involving the application of such a new field of scientific development.

“You are placed on orders.

“You will be ready for departure by air at twenty-one hundred hours tonight. You will proceed via New York and Singapore to Krakatoa Dome. You will report to the commanding officer of the Fleet base there, for a special training assignment.

“Gentlemen, you are dismissed.”

And we saluted, about-faced and marched out.

“I told you so,” hissed Harley Danthorpe, the moment we were out of the Commandant’s private office. “I had the inside drift!”

But even Danthorpe couldn’t tell us what the “special training assignment” might be.

We were gaining on the sun.

It was less than an hour above the horizon as the last plane of our journey slowed the thunder of its jets, dumped its flaps and came swooping in to the crossed buoyed “runways” of the sea over Krakatoa Dome.

The plane slapped hard against the waves, small though they were—electrostatic “pacifiers” had smoothed out the highest wavecrests between the buoys that marked our landing lane. But our pilot had placed the first contact just right. We skipped once and settled. In a moment we were moored to the bright X-shaped structure that floated over the Dome, the edenite-shielded city that lay three miles beneath us.

“All right, you men! Let’s get ready to debark!”

Eskow looked at me and scowled, but I shook my head. Because Danthorpe’s name came ahead of ours alphabetically, it had appeared first on the orders—and he had elected to assume that that put him in charge of the detail. It graveled Bob; but, after all, one of us might as well be in charge, and at least it made sure that Danthorpe was the one who had to worry about making connections, clearing customs and so on. We stood up, picked up our gear, and filed out of the overseas jet on to the X-shaped landing platform.

Colossal floating dock! It was nearly a thousand feet along each leg—big enough for aircraft to land in an emergency, when the sea was too rough for even the pacifiers. It towered two hundred feet above the waterline; the keel of its floats lay two hundred feet below; it was a small city in itself.

And yet, it was only a sort of combination front door and breathing tube for the sub-sea city itself. The platform was a snorkel, with special flexible conduits, edenitearmored, to inhale pure air and exhale what came out. Older cities had made do with air-regeneration apparatus; Krakatoa Dome pumped fresh air from the surface. We clambered past the vents that exhaled the air from fifteen thousand feet below and felt the cold damp reek of busy industry, oozing salt water and crowded humanity from far below. It was a familiar smell. All of us looked at each other.

“Hup, two!” cried Harley Danthorpe, and marched us out of the crowded terminal into the three-mile magnetic elevators. The door closed; there was a
whoosh;
and abruptly the bottom of the elevator car dropped out from Tinder our feet. Or so it felt.

Eskow and I instinctively grabbed out for something to support ourselves. Harley Danthorpe roared with laughter. “Lubbers!” he sneered. Don’t you think you ought to keep on your toes? If an elevator scares you that much, what’s going to happen when there’s a seaquake?”

Eskow, pale but game, snapped: “We’ll see what happens. I guarantee one thing, Danthorpe. If you can stand it, Jim Eden and I can.”

We stepped out of the elevator, wobbly-kneed, and at once we were in another world.

We lay three miles under the surface of the ocean! The blue sky and the sea breeze were gone; fifteen thousand feet of the Indian Ocean rolled over our heads; and the position of the sun no longer mattered.

“Hup, two!” chanted Danthorpe, and marched us from the elevator station at the crown of the dome to the exits. By slidewalk. elevator and passage he escorted us through the teeming, busy heart of Krakatoa Dome. Fleet Base lay down on dock level, at the dome’s lower rim; to reach it, we had the whole depth of the dome to pass through. Harley led us through what must have been the longest way.

We saw the great terraced levels where actual trees and grass grew—spindly and pale in the Troyon lights of the sub-sea cities, but a symbol of wealth and luxury for the rich Krakatoans who made their homes there. We peered through dense portholes out at the brightly lit sea-bottom surrounding the dome, where the pale waving stems of the sub-sea vegetation rippled in the stirrings of the current. We passed through the financial level, where frantic trading was going on in the ores and products of the sea bottom, and in stocks and securities that financed the corporations that made their business there. “See that?” barked Harley Danthorpe. “My dad’s ideal”

We looked. It was the entrance to the Krakatoa Exchange—columned with massive pillars shaped like upended sub-sea ships, the tall hulls aglow with a fire that looked like edenite.

“My dad was one of the founding members,” Harley informed us proudly. “He designed the Exchange.”

“That’s nice,” said Bob, but I doubt that he meant it.

Harley paused and looked at him narrowly. “Eskow,” he said, “you’re looking pretty solemn. Don’t you like Krakatoa?”

Bob said: “I was thinking about the landing platform up at surface level. I’d never seen anything like that in the other sub-sea cities.”

Harley laughed. “
Other
cities!” he sneered. “What have
they
got? Krakatoa’s the place, and don’t you forget it! That platform—it cost half a billion dollars! It took three years to build. But it’s a solid investment.” He winked and lowered his voice. “My dad bought a piece of it. He had the inside drift, all right. He says the franchise alone is worth the whole investment, because,.you see, those air conduits are the city’s windpipe, and—”

“That’s what I was thinking about,” Bob interrupted. “Suppose they get broken?”

“What could break them?”

“A storm, perhaps.”

Harley grinned like a man who’d just found a million dollars. “I can show you a section of the cables. No storm could break them. Besides, the waves can roll right through the piers between the platform and the floats without doing any damage. No. Try again.”

“This is seaquake territory,” Bob reminded him. “There could be a tidal wave.”

“You mean a
tsunami
” Harley Danthorpe corrected him smugly. “That’s the right name for a seismic sea wave. Man, you’re
really
a lubber! Tsunamis are .dangerous along a coast, all right, where they have a chance to build up speed and power. But not out in the open ocean! We wouldn’t even notice one going by, except for the readings on the instruments.”

Bob shrugged. But he didn’t look convinced.

“I hope you aren’t scared of quakes,” Harley said politely—
too
politely; it was like a sneer. “After all, even a lubber ought to get over being afraid of things like that. Just stick around, Bob. We aren’t afraid of quakes in Krakatoa Dome. Why, we call it ‘Seaquake City’! We built it to stand through a Force Nine quake—and they don’t come that strong very often. We’re riding the inside drift, and my dad has got rich on all the tin and uranium and oil that everybody else was afraid to touch.”

Well, that was about all the “inside drift” I could take. It bothered Bob even more than it did me. This Harley Danthorpe, he might be a real expert on seaquakes and life in Krakatoa Dome, but he didn’t know a thing about how to get along with his fellow man. I could see Bob’s face tightening in resentment.