Undersea City (4 page)

Fortunately, that was about the end of that little discussion, because we had come to the gate of the Fleet Base.

“Halt!” rapped out a Sub-Sea Fleet guard, bright in seascarlet tunic, presenting arms. “Advance and identify yourselves!”

Harley Danthorpe snapped to. He marched three paces forward as though it was the drill field at the Academy. “Cadet Danthorpe, Harley!” he snapped. “With a detachment of two cadets, reporting to the commanding officer!”

The guard passed us in without another word…but as we entered I caught the ghost of a wink from him. Evidently he’d seen cadets as raw and fresh as Harley Danthorpe before!

We reported to a smooth-faced executive officer, who looked as though he’d been out of the Academy about three hours himself. He read our orders, frowned and finally said:

“You will be quartered here on the base. Yeoman Harris will show you to your quarters. You will report for duty to Lieutenant Tsuya.” He glanced at some memo on his desk. “You will find him down at Station K, at sixteen hundred hours.”

“Station K?” Harley Danthorpe repeated it uneasily, and glanced at us. We shook our heads. “Uh, beg pardon, sir,” he said. “Where is Station K?”

“Ten thousand feet down,” barked the young ensign.

“Ten—?” Harley couldn’t finish. Evidently this was one thing that the insider drift didn’t cover, because he was as much at sea as we were. Ten thousand feet down? But that was bedrock!

We didn’t have a chance to ask questions. The exec said irritably: “Yeoman Harris will show you the way. Anything else you need to know, you’ll learn from Lieutenant Tsuya. Dis—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish the word “dismissed.” Harley Danthorpe gulped and took a fresh grip on the inside drift.

“Sir!” he cried anxiously. “Please, Ensign. My family lives here in the Dome. I guess you’ve heard of my father. Mr. Benford Danthorpe, that is—he’s on the board of the Stock Exchange. May I have a pass to visit my family?”

The officer stared at him for a long second.

Then Harley gulped. “Oh,” he said, and added the missing word: “
Sir.
”

“Very well,” said the exec. “Your request is refused.”

“Refused? But—”

“That’s enough!” barked the officer. “As I’ve told you, Lieutenant Tsuya will be your commanding officer. You may ask him about it. Still, I can inform you that the answer will be negative, Mr. Danthorpe. Cadets in training here at Krakatoa Base are not granted passes for the first two weeks.”

“Two
weeks!”
Harley flinched. “But, sir! My father is the most important man in Kra—”

“Quite possibly! You, however, are a cadet!”

“Yes, sir.” For the first time, Harley Danthorpe’s voice lost its brassy twang.

We saluted.

But Bob Eskow said suddenly: “Sir! One question, please.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, sir, we’ve never been informed of what our duties are. Can’t you tell us?”

The ensign pursed his lips. Then, abruptly, he shrugged, and at once seemed to become more human.

“I can tell you this,” he said, his voice a normal speaking voice now, without the assumed military rasp he had put into it. “I envy you.”

“Envy us?”

The exec nodded seriously. “Your duties,” he said, “are something brand new in the history of the Fleet.

“The three of you are assigned to training in maritime seismology—the science of seaquakes. You are going to investigate not only the sea itself—but the rock beneath it as well!”

We got out of there somehow—I don’t remember how. Under the sea bottom!

It was a startling, almost a terrifying thought.

Yeoman Harris took us over and began leading us

toward the section of the base where we would be quartered. I hardly noticed the wonderful sights and sounds we passed—the clangorous shops where repairs were under way, the briskly marching squadrons of Sub-Sea Fleet men, all the feel of an operational base of the Fleet.

I looked at Bob, beside me.

Ten thousand feet down into rock! Would Bob be able to take it? He had always had difficulty—it was only raw courage that had got him through the Academy so far—what would happen now? If the icy miles of the sea were deadly, with a black pressure that could crush the mind as easily as the body, the solid crust of the earth would be many times worse.

Ten thousand feet down!

It was worse than anything the sea itself might bring to bear against us, I decided. Long years of research had perfected ways to hold back the deadly thrust of the sea—my uncle Stewart’s edenite armor was absolutely reliable, given the current to power it and the skill to use it properly.

But the Mole was still an untried experiment!

There would be a thousand problems to solve. Problems of survival. Refrigeration—as Bob had mentioned, back in Dixon Hall, when it was only a matter of casual discussion for us. Pressure! Edenite was powerful indeed…but could it hold up the crust of the earth? There would be a shielding problem—I remembered that the first atomic ortholytic drill had contaminated a whole Nevada mountain, so that it had to be fenced and abandoned for a hundred years, they said.

I took my mind off those worries as best I could.

Bob—I knew Bob. He could learn to take whatever might come up. I had the feeling that I was diving a little too deep, worrying about problems that might never come up.

But I didn’t know…

And, at that, Bob’s taut, pale face was not the most disturbed of the three of us; for behind Bob and me Harley Danthorpe limped along, as though his gear had suddenly become too heavy for him. He was muttering under his breath, about the importance of his father and the indignity of being ordered ten thousand feet down.

The inside drift had failed him, and I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him.

Down deep there are no natural days.

Black night has been there since the rolling oceans first were filled. Life down deep doesn’t need the sun for a clock; it doesn’t have a clock; there is no time. Sub-Sea Time—set by the Fleet Observatory at Bermuda—is everywhere the same.

At 15:15 hours, Yeoman Harris appeared at our quarters to escort us down to Station K.

We dropped in an elevator down to the very base of the city—below dock level, even, but not anywhere near down as far as we were to go. Here we passed through gloomy storage spaces, with glimpses of dark tunnels choked with air conduits and the coiled piping that served the city above. We could hear the bass throbbing of the pumps that sucked the trickling waste water from all the myriad drains and catch basins of the city, collected it in sumps and forced it, under fantastic pressure, out into the hungrily thrusting sea outside. We walked out into an arched tunnel whose dripping roof was black basaltic rock, still marked with the ragged bite of the drills that had cut it out of the sea’s bottom when the Dome was built.

“We’re halfway,” said Yeoman Harris dourly. He wasn’t much of a talker..

An armed guard stepped briskly out of a little sheetmetal shelter. “Halt!”

Yeoman Harris stepped up and showed him a copy of our orders. This was no courtesy inspection, no military drill. This was real business. The guard scanned every word and line, and when he handed the orders back to Harris I had the feeling that he had memorized them.

This was serious business—that much was for sure.

“Come on,” growled the wheezing old yeoman. He led us past the guard, to yet another elevator.

But this one was something new in my experience.

It was a small round cage, and it hung in a circular shaft. But the shaft was hewn out of living rock, and it glowed with a shimmering inside film of edenite.

Here was pressure beyond anything I had experienced! Even the rigid basalt that cups the world’s oceans was not to be trusted down here; it might crumble, it might flow under the mighty weight of sea and rock above, and so it must be lined with edenite!

Harris herded us into the cage and pressed a button.

The cage dropped out from under us into the palely shining bore. The walls shimmered with a thousand shades of color as we fell, reflecting the play of pressure that they contained; it was a reassuring sight to me, since edenite was something I had grown up with, a familiar story in my family. But Harley Danthorpe was chalk white.

And Bob kept his face turned away.

We came out of the cage in a matter of minutes—ten thousand feet down. Above us was nearly two miles of solid rock. Above that, the massive bulk of Krakatoa Dome, the entire city of people and industry, the fleet base and the soaring pillars of the Exchange—far, far over our heads.

And above that—three tall miles of the Indian Ocean.

We came out of the cage, through an edenite lock, into an arched tunnel.

Here there was no edenite. Perhaps it was only the narrow shaft that was vulnerable, for here was only the rough facing of pressure-concrete, and it was dark with moisture. Ten thousand feet under the nearest free water, it yet was dappled with beads of water that stood out on it everywhere, forced through it by the enormous pressure behind. They grew slowly, even as we watched; they gathered into tiny silent rivulets, and trickled down into little gutters cut into the basalt floor around the walls.

“No edenite down here,” Yeoman Harris explained gruffly. “Can’t have it. Couldn’t get through to the rock when we go out in the Moles.”

We looked at each other wordlessly. There wasn’t anything to say.

White light poured down on us from isotopic Troyon tubes.

We stood in a narrow little tomb of an office, saluted, and reported to Lieutenant Tsuya, our new commanding officer.

“Danthorpe,” he said cheerfully. “Eskow. Eden.” He shook hands all around. He was lean and young and intense looking, and very much alive. “Glad to see you, Eden,” he said, pumping my hand. “I know a lot about your uncle. Good man. Don’t pay any attention to what some people say. They’re just jealous.”

“Thanks,” I said—but it wasn’t the kind of thing I liked to hear. So the gossip about Uncle Stewart had penetrated this far!

But he was going on to the others. “Good to have you aboard,” he said. “Sit down. We’ll get started right away.”

I sat, and so did the others. It was cold there, in that room. In spite of the light, it still seemed gloomy, from the wet blackness of the walls and from the smothering darkness of miles of rock and water that all of us knew were overhead.

Cold?

Lieutenant Tsuya grinned; he said accurately: “You’re wondering why it isn’t hot here.”

I nodded. It was odd; this far down, the Earth’s internal heat should have raised the temperature a degree or two, not cut it down. No doubt the air conditioning would make it bearable—but this was definitely chilly.

“Partly psychological,” said Lieutenant Tsuya, his pumpkin-shaped face smiling. “Partly because of the flow of water—we’ve pretty well honeycombed the rock around here. Don’t worry. It’ll get hot enough when you start using your geosondes.”

“Geosondes—” Danthorpe swallowed. “Lieutenant,” he said desperately, “I’d like to request a twenty-four hour pass at once, for the purpose of visiting my family.”

“Family?”

“My Dad,” said Harley Danthorpe proudly. “Mr. Benford Danthorpe. He’s a very important—”

“I know,” said the Lieutenant, the smile fading. “There won’t be any passes, however. Not for some time.

“For the next two weeks, all three of you mil be occupied sixteen hours a day. None of you is going to have any spare time at all. You will be on duty for all except eight hours in every twenty-four—and those eight will be used for sleep.

“You’ll need it.”

He sat down and twisted a dial on his desk. On the wall behind him there appeared a map—a strange map, such as I had never seen before. It seemed to show the contours of the sea bottom, but it was overlaid with lines and shaded areas that looked like nothing I could recognize.

“You have been assigned,” said Lieutenant Tsuya, “to one of the most difficult and exacting studies that you will undertake in all your sub-sea careers. As a small part of it, you will take part in investigation of the rock around us, five miles under the surface of the sea, two miles deep into solid rock.

“Gentlemen, I can hardly exaggerate the importance of what you are going to do here.”

He paused for a second.

Then he said:

“You are here for one reason only. You are going to learn the science of forecasting subsea quakes.”

What a two week period!

The first days in the Academy were rough and rugged, but nothing like this. Without a break—almost without time to catch our breaths—we were plunged into long, sweating hours in that dismal dungeon under the rock sea floor. Study and practice and more study, with the lash of Lieutenant Tsuya’s sardonic tongue stinging us on. He was a good man, that Lieutenant Tsuya; but his orders were to pump us full of the lore of sub-sea seismology in two short weeks.

He was determined to do it if it killed us. As a matter of fact, it felt as if he came pretty close!

First was theory:

Long hours of lecture, study, examination. What is the earth’s crust? Rock. Is rock solid?

No—not under pressure! For under pressure even rock flows. Does it flow evenly? No! It sticks and slips, and pressures build up.

“Quakes happen,” droned the lieutenant, “because the rock is not completely plastic. Stresses accumulate. They grow. They build up—and then,
bang.
They are released.

“Quakes are simply the vibrations that dissipate the energy of these suddenly released stresses.”

We had to learn all sorts of strange new words, the language of seaquakes. I remember Bob mumbling, “Epicenter, epicenter—if they mean the center of a quake, why don’t they say it?”

And Harley Danthorpe: “Lubber! The epicenter is the point on the surface of the earth just
above
the center! Why, the center may be twenty miles down.”

We had to learn the three chief types of seismic wave: The thrusting, hammering primary “P” wave—the first to reach instruments, because it is the fastest, racing through the substrata of the earth at five miles a second. The secondary “S” wave—three miles a second, vibrating at right angles to the direction of its travel, like the shaking of a clothesline or the cracking of a whip.