Undersea City

6 The Borer in the Earth

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.”

“But, sir!” Bob looked stunned. “I mean—sir, Fve been counting on a pass!”

“Disapproved, Eskow,” said the lieutenant coldly. “Passes are your reward for satisfactory performance of duty. This forecast is not satisfactory.” He nodded coldly. “Dismissed!”

Back at our quarters, Danthorpe and I showered and changed quickly into our sea-scarlet dress uniform, and headed for Yeoman Harris’s desk to pick up our passes.

Bob had disappeared while we were in the shower. I was as well pleased; I didn’t like to walk out on him. And Danthorpe—why, nothing was troubling Harley Danthorpe. He was bubbling with plans and hopes. “Come on, Eden,” he coaxed. “Come with me. Have dinner with my father. He’ll show you what sub-sea cooking can be like! He’s got a chef that—Come on, Eden!”

Yeoman Harris looked up at him sourly. But the phone rang before he could speak.

“Yes, sir!” he wheezed, and then waited. “Right, sir!” He hung up.

“You two,” he said, clearing his throat asthmatically. “Do you know where Cadet Eskow is?”

“In the barracks, I guess,” said Harley Danthorpe, “Come on, Harris. Let’s have our passes.”

“Wait a minute,” the yeoman grumbled. “That was Lieutenant Tsuya. He wants Eskow to report to Station K at twenty hundred hours for special duty. And he isn’t in the barracks.”

Harley and I looked at each other. Not in the barracks? But he had to be in the barracks. .

Harley said, “I wonder what the special duty is.”

I nodded. We both knew what the special duty was—it wasn’t hard to figure out. Twenty hundred hours. An hour before the little quake that Bob had forecast. Obviously, the lieutenant was planning to have Bob on duty at the time the quake was supposed to occur—to show him that the forecast was wrong, in a way that Bob couldn’t question.

But Bob wasn’t around.

Yeoman Harris wheezed softly, “His pass is missing.” He opened the drawer and showed us. “It was there. Then Lieutenant Tsuya canceled it, and I went to destroy it. But it was gone.”

I stared at the open drawer unbelievingly. Bob was behaving oddly—I remembered his behavior with the shriveled Chinese janitor, coming so close to the disappearance of the microseismometer. But he was my friend,

I couldn’t imagine anything in Krakatoa Dome that would make him go AWOL to get there.

“Better see if you can find him,” wheezed Yeoman Harris. “Lieutenant Tsuya’s a good officer, so long as you trim ship with him. But he won’t stand for lubberly lack of discipline!”

We took our passes and, without a word, hurried back to the barracks.

Bob wasn’t there.

And his dress uniform was gone.

“He’s gone AWOL!” cried Harley Danthorpe. “Well, what do you know about that!”

“Blow your tanks,” I said sharply. “He’s a good cadet. He wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“Then where is he?” Harley demanded.

That stopped me.

There wasn’t any answer to that.