Undersea City (5 page)

And then the big one—the slow, powerful long or “L” wave, the one that does the damage. We learned how by measuring the lapse betwen “P” and “S” waves, we could forecast when the destructive “L” wave would arrive.

And we learned a lot more than that.

For one thing, I learned something about our teacher, Lieutenant Tsuya.

We plotted our first maps—like the map Lieutenant Tsuya had projected on the wall for us, showing the stresses and faults in the earth’s crust for hundreds of miles around, with shading to indicate thermal energy and convection flows (for, remember, even the rock flows that far down!), with lines that showed microseisms, trigger forces, the whole lore of the moving rock.

Lieutenant Tsuya criticized them, and then he relaxed.

We sat there, all of us, taking a rare break, while the beads of salt dew formed on the pressure-concrete walls and drops of sweat plinked from the ceiling.

Bob Eskow said, “Lieutenant. The yeoman told us we couldn’t have edenite down here because the geosonde couldn’t get through. Was that right?”

Lieutenant Tsuya’s almond face smiled. “No. It is a matter of forecasting.”

He stood up and touched our maps. “All this information,” he said softly, “comes to us through instruments. Very delicate instruments. That is why the station was located so far beneath the city. Any vibration, from traffic or the pumps, would disturb them. You must learn to walk softly here. And you must avoid dropping heavy objects.”

“Yes, sir,” Harley Danthorpe spoke up promptly. He nodded alertly, watching the lieutenant with his calculating squint, as if he were looking for the inside drift. “I see, sir.”

“Do you?” The lieutenant looked at him thoughtfully “Well, good. That’s why we have to forego the protection of edenite, here in the station. Seismic vibrations reach us through the rock. They would be canceled out by the Eden Anomaly, do you see? If our instruments were shielded, they couldn’t register.”

“Yes, sir.” It was Harley Danthorpe again, but his voice was not quite so brash, not quite so prompt, and I saw him squinting uneasily at the dark glittering droplets of the sea that oozed silently out of the walls.

“Our work here is highly classified,” the Lieutenant said abruptly. “You must not discuss it outside of this station.”

“But why, sir?” I asked.

Tsuya’s pumpkin-shaped face looked suddenly worn. “Because,” he said, “there is a bad history, connected with seaquake forecasting.

“Some of the early forecasters were too confident. They made mistakes. Of course, they lacked some of our new instruments, they didn’t know many things we know now. But they made mistakes. They issued incorrect forecasts.

“The worst was at Nansei Shoto Dome.”

The lieutenant passed his hand nervously across his pale forehead, as though he were trying to wipe out an unpleasant memory.

“I know a lot about what happened at Nansei Shoto Dome” he said, “because I was one of the survivors.

“The Dome was totally destroyed.”

He sat down again, looking away from us. “I was just a boy then,” said Lieutenant Tsuya. “My folks had moved down-deep from Yokohama when the dome was new. We moved there in the spring of the year, and that summer there were a good many quakes. They caused panics.

“But not everybody panicked. Unfortunately.

“My father was one who did not panic. I remember how my mother begged him to leave, but he would not. It was partly a matter of money—they had spent every
yen
they owned, in making the move. But it was also—well, call it courage. My father was not afraid.

“There was a very wise scientist there, you see. “His name was Dr. John Koyetsu. He was a seismologist—the chief of the city’s experimental forecasting station. He made a talk on the city’s TV network. No, he said, do not be alarmed, there is nothing to be alarmed about. Be calm, he said, these are only minor seisms which have frightened you. There is no need to flee. There is no possibility of a dangerous quake. Look, he said, I show you my charts, and you can see that there can be no dangerous quake in Nansei Shoto Trench for at least a year!

“His charts were very convincing.

“But he was wrong.”

The lieutenant shook his dark head. A grimace of pain twisted his lean cheeks.

“That was Friday morning,” he said. “My mother and my father talked it over when I came home from school. They were very much reassured. But it so happened that they had made arrangements for me to go back to school on the mainland, and it was my mother’s thought that this was as good a time as any. Oh, they were not afraid. But my mother took no chances.

“That night they put me on a ship for Yokohama.

“The quake struck the next afternoon. It destroyed Nansei Shoto Dome. No one survived.”

Lieutenant Tsuya stood silent for a moment, his dark eyes following the thin little river of black water that silently ran down the narrow gutter under the oozing concrete wall.

Danthorpe stood squinting at him sharply, as though looking for the inside drift. Bob was watching the dark wet concrete with a blank expression.

“That’s why our work is classified,” the lieutenant said suddenly.

“Quake forecasting has a bad name. It prevented the evacuation of Nansei Shoto Dome, and caused many deaths—my parents among them.

“The Sub-Sea Fleet is authorized to operate this station, but not to release any forecasts to the public. I hope that ultimately we can save more people than Koyetsu’s error killed. But first we must establish the accuracy of our forecasting methods.

“For the time being, then, you must not talk to anybody about our work here. That is an order.”

Time passed.

We learned.

And Lieutenant Tsuya came in on us one day, where all three of us were working up our convection diagrams, and said:

“You’re beginning to understand.” His lean pumpkin face was smiling. He went over our charts, line by line, nodding. “Very well,” he said. “Now—I have something new for you.”

He took a sealed tube of yellow plastic out of his briefcase.

“Observations are the key to forecasting!” he said. “And as you have seen, it is the deep-focus quakes, hundreds of miles beneath the surface, that determine what happens to our dome cities. And there it is difficult to make observations. But now—”

He opened the tube.

Inside was a heavy little machine, less than two feet long, not quite two inches in diameter. It looked very much like the model Mole we had seen at the Sub-Sea Academy, except that it was thinner and smaller.

“The geosonde!” he said proudly. “A telemeter, designed to plumb the depths of the earth, much as the radiosonde reaches into the atmosphere!”

He held it up for us to see.

“In the nose,” he lectured, “an atomic ortholytic drill. The body, a tube filmed with high-tension edenite. And inside it, the sensing elements and a sonic transmitter.

“The edenite film presented us with a difficult engineering problem, for, as you know, our instruments cannot read through edenite. We solved it—by turning off the film once a minute, for a tiny fraction of a second. Not very long, but long enough for the elements to register, without the device being crushed.

“It is with this geosonde that we can, at last, reach the deepest quake centers.

“With it—we may make sure that there will never be another catastrophe like the Nansei Shoto Dome.”

He grinned at us amiably. “Oh,” he said, “and one thing more. Your two-week training period is over. Tomorrow you can all get a pass.”

Harley Danthorpe came to life. “Great, Lieutenant!” he cried. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Now my father will—”

“I know,” said Lieutenant Tsuya dryly. “We’ve all heard about your father. I’ll prepare the passes for twelve hundred hours tomorrow. In the morning, I want each of you to complete one forecast, based on current readings—the real thing. When that is done, you can take off.”

He nodded approvingly at our convection diagrams. “You’ve come a long way,” he observed. “Dismissed!”

We went back to the base, far above the deep observatory, and headed for the mess hall. Bob disappeared for a moment, and when he rejoined Danthorpe and me, he seemed a little concerned. But I didn’t think much about it—then.

Harley Danthorpe spent the whole meal bragging about his father. The thought of seeing him—of coming back into his rightful environment, as he saw it, as Crown Prince of the kingdom of the sea that his father ruled—seemed to excite him.

Bob was very subdued.

After chow, Harley and I marched back to the barracks—I to make some practice readings for tomorrow’s forecast, Harley to phone his father. I didn’t see Bob for a while.

Then I noticed that the microseismometer I was using seemed out of true. These are precision instruments, and even for practice readings I wanted to use one that was working properly.

I started out of our quarters—and nearly tripped over Bob. He was talking heatedly, in a low voice, to a man I had never seen before—a small, withered, almond-skinned man, perhaps a Chinese or a Malay. He was dressed like a civilian janitor.

Bob had his hand out to the man—almost as though he were handing him something.

And then he looked up and saw me.

Abruptly his manner changed. “You,” he cried. “What do you think you’re up to? Where’s my book?”

The little janitor glanced at me, and then shrank away, “No, mister!” he squeaked. “No take book, mister!”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Bob glowered. “This lubber’s swiped my Koyetsu! Don’t ask me why, but I want it back!”

“Koyetsu?” He meant Koyetsu’s book,
Principles of Seismology;
it was one of our texts. “But, Bob, didn’t you loan it to Harley? I’m nearly sure I saw him with it?”

“Harley?” Bob hesitated. Then he shrugged and growled: “All right, you. Get out of here!”

The little janitor lifted his hands over his head, as if afraid that Bob meant to hit him, and ran down the passage and out of sight.

I went back into the barracks—and there it was. Bob’s book, in plain sight, on the shelf over Harley’s bunk.

I showed it to him.

“Oh,” he said. And then: “Oh, yes. I remember now.” But he didn’t look at me.

“Guess I’ll take a little rest,” he said, and his voice was still disturbed. And he flung himself on his bunk without looking at me.

It was very puzzling.

I brooded about it all the way to the spare-parts department, where the microseismometer I wanted was kept. I found it, and then it occurred to me that I would need to check over the geosonde, since Lt. Tsuya wanted us to make a schematic diagram of it. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.

The geosonde was stored in a moisture-proof box. I found it and began to strip it, thinking about Bob and his odd behavior.

And then I had no time to think of Bob.

I opened the box; it was full, all right, but not with a geosonde. It contained a stack of lead weights from a gravity-reading instrument, packed with crumpled paper to keep them from rattling.

The geosonde was gone!

Lieutenant Tsuya hit the ceiling.

“Very bad business, Eden!” he stormed, when I reported the loss the next morning. “Why didn’t you come to me at once?”

“Well, sir. I—” I hesitated. Why? Because I had been too concerned with Bob Eskow, in truth—but that wasn’t a reason I was anxious to give, since I didn’t want to discuss Bob’s queer actions with the lieutenant.

“No excuse, eh?” said Lieutenant Tsuya irritably. “Of course not! Well, the three of you stay right here and work on your forecasts. I’m going to initiate an investigation right now. We can’t have Fleet property stolen!”

Especially—he could have added, but didn’t need to—when it relates to a classified project like quake forecasting. He left us and went to interview the station personnel.

When he came back his face was like a sunset thundercloud.

“I want to know what happened to that instrument,” he told us. “I know that it was there two weeks ago, because I put it there myself.”

He looked around at us. “If any of you know who took it, speak up!”

His eyes roved over our faces. “Have you seen anybody carrying anything away from the station?”

I shook my head.

And then I remembered. Bob, and the bent little janitor. Had Bob handed him something? It had looked like it.

But I wasn’t sure. I said nothing.

“All right,” grumbled Lieutenant Tsuya. “I’ll have to report it to the Base Commandant; he’ll take it from there. Now, let’s see those forecasts.”

Silently we filed before him and handed over our charts and synoptic diagrams, along with the detailed quake forecast we had each of us made, from our own readings and our own observations.

Lieutenant Tsuya looked at them carefully, a frown on his bland face. He had his own forecast, of course, made as a part of the station’s regular program; he was matching his—the official forecast of what Krakatoa Dome could expect in the way of earth movements, large and small, in the next twenty-four hours—against ours.

And it was plain that he didn’t like something he saw.

He looked up at us over his dark-rimmed glasses.

“Accurate forecasts,” he reminded us, “depend on accurate observations.”

He dismissed Harley Danthorpe’s work and mine with a curt: “Satisfactory.”

Then he turned to Bob.

“Eskow,” he said, “I do not follow your computations. You have predicted a Force Two quake at twenty-one hundred hours today. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” said Bob stonily.

“I see. There is no such prediction in the station’s official forecast, Eskow. Neither is there one in Danthorpe’s or in Eden’s. How do you account for that.”

Bob said, without expression: “That’s how I read it, sir. Focus twenty miles north-northwest of Krakatoa Dome. The thermal flow—”

“I see,” rapped Lieutenant Tsuya. “Your value for the thermal flow is taken nearly fifty per cent lower than any of the others. So that the strains will not be relieved, is that it?”

“Yes, sir!”

“But I cannot agree with your reading,” the lieutenant went on thoughtfully. “Therefore, I’m afraid I cannot give you a passing grade on this forecast. Sorry, Eskow. Til have to cancel your pass.”