Ocean on Top

Chapter Fifteen

I wasn’t surprised to find myself suddenly a few yards above the sea bottom; I was ‘outdoors’.

The passage we had just left was cut into a sloping rock face — as a matter of fact, the passage itself was a long way from horizontal, as I could now see. I had not been aware of swimming uphill during any of the trip. There was, I reflected, little reason why I should have been.

A few yards below me a stretch of sea bottom extended into the distance. Once out of the tunnel I could see that it was quite well lighted. Looking up, I could see perhaps fifty feet above me the glowing surface of the ‘tent’ roof. The bottom itself might as well have been under five feet of water instead of five thousand. It was covered with vegetation.

I didn’t recognize any of the plant life, but that was natural. I might have learned some descriptive biology, or natural history, or whatever it should be called if I’d been born before genetic manipulation became a practical art, but I wasn’t and didn’t. Presumably this plant life had been tailored to provide food for the local population, and the light was there to permit the plants to grow.

It was almost as good an excuse for the wasted kilowatts as the one Bert had given me. Just once, several years before, I had tasted natural food confiscated from a waster, and I had sympathized with the fellow even then. I’d had to rehearse the moral precepts very firmly, several times a day, for weeks afterward. I’d finally recovered my normally healthy resentment of people who corner resources to give themselves pleasures denied to the rest of us, but it had come hard.

Bert and the others were slanting down toward the bottom, which was laid but in roughly rectangular patches with a different variety of plant in each. Other swimmers were around in fairly large numbers. Some appeared to be eating, others working. The precise nature of the labor was obscure, partly because of their distance and partly because I knew no more of farming than anyone else had for the last century or so.

My companions were now pulling round, greenish excrescences from the plants and taking bites from them. The girl handed one to me, and watched with evident amusement while I looked it over and finally took an experimental nibble.

I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether I liked it or not. It was very different from any ordinary tank alga and was not in a class with that forbidden taste of years before, but it was interesting. I tried another bite, decided it was good and finished it off. The girl showed me how to get others from the plant without a major struggle — they had to be twisted in a special way before the tough stems would yield — and then left me to my own devices while she ate several of the things herself.

Then she beckoned me to follow, led the way to another patch, and showed me a different fruit. I made a very satisfactory meal in the next quarter of an hour.

I wondered which, if any, of these growths was the oxygen source. Perhaps they all were; they were all green and presumably photosynthetic, but none were giving off visible bubbles as food-alga tanks are always doing. I decided not to worry about oxygen; there was no reason for Bert’s friends to kill me off in such an indirect and inconvenient way as by depriving me of that. They’d already had too many chances.

It suddenly dawned on me that I was lumping Bert in more and more closely with the local dwellers, in my own mind. I don’t believe most of what I read about the subconscious — it seems to me to be too much like astrology, alcohol, and other excuses for sloppy thinking and incompetence — but as I review consciously the events of the last few hours it looked more and more as though my changing attitudes were justified. He seemed to regard himself more as a local citizen than as a Board worker with a job to do, and maybe I’d been picking up his attitude without really noticing the evidence.

There was his choice of words, for example. I’d been devoting more attention to what he said than to the exact way he said it, but now that I thought of it there were a lot of ‘We’s’ and ‘Us’s’ which didn’t really belong in the thoughts of a good Board official under the circumstances — especially if he were really sure that no one but I could read what he was writing.

Maybe Marie wasn’t being so unreasonable after all.

I glanced over at him. He was eating, like the others, but he seemed to be taking very little part in the conversation which the unoccupied hands of the eaters were carrying on.

I don’t really blame myself for not seeing anything very significant in that at the time. If anything, it reassured me; it was consistent with his claim that he hadn’t learned much of the local talk.

But after the meal I began to feel bothered again. He took me everywhere I showed the slightest desire to go. He explained, convincingly, everything I asked about. There was the tent roof, for example. When I wrote a question about that, his face turned an odd purple color; when that had faded, he wrote. “Careful. With liquid in your lungs, laughing can kill you. They cut a key nerve in your coughing reflex when they changed you, but you can still laugh if you’re not careful.”

“What’s funny about that question?”

“Well, I can see where you’d get the idea of a fabric over this place, but I assure you no one has gone to any such trouble. What you see is simply the interface between the liquids.”

“Why doesn’t it look the same here — translucent instead of transparent — as it does at the entrances? Why do you have special entrances, for that matter?”

“We keep the entrances cleared off. There’s too much area for that — several square miles — over the farms. Stuff in the ocean is settling to the bottom all the time, and stuff formed on the farms is floating upward. Some of each — a very small percentage, luckily — has density between that of our liquid and water, so it collects at the interface. As a matter of fact, a good deal of living matter grows there, though fortunately it’s a monocellular stuff. If there were more of it, we’d have to clear anyway to let light through to the plants, which would be quite a project.”

I should have asked him right then, I know, why the lights were up in the water instead of down closer to the plants. It was just one of those things that I didn’t. If he’d answered, it would have saved me a good deal of later embarrassment, though I’m still not sure that he would have. I suppose he would, on the basis of what I understand now of his reasons for acting as he did.

When I mentioned the power plant, he started off immediately, with the same group trailing along. I wondered whether they were guards, secret agents, or curious idlers, but didn’t waste much time on the question. There was no way to tell, or even to make a decent guess. In any case, with the power plant next on the agenda, no other question was very interesting.

After a time we reached the first large closed door I had seen since emerging from my tank. It was much like the one which had admitted my container to the conversion room. Bert made a few gestures to our escort; they began a longer conversation among themselves, but he didn’t wait for them to finish. He began opening small lockers in the tunnel wall, and extracting coveralls which looked like the ones used outside in the ocean. They were complete with helmets.

“What’s the reason for these? Temperature?” I wrote when he gestured me to put one on.

“No. You probably haven’t found out yet, and I hope for your sake you don’t, but immersed as we are in liquid we’re very sensitive to intense sound waves.” I didn’t interrupt with my experience, but for once I was sure he was telling unvarnished truth. “The power plant is very efficient, but there’s still a trace of noise — quite enough to kill an unprotected person. Get the suit on and make sure it’s tight.”

I obeyed. I had a little trouble; the garment wasn’t as simple as it looked. One of the buckles proved to have a sharp corner which cut quite a deep gash on my hand and I wondered what sort of quality control would put up with that sort of design. The drops of blood looked a little strange, bright-red globules rising from the wound, but the injury was minor. By the time Bert had solved my problem with the buckle the bleeding had stopped.

He checked my coverall, especially the wrist and helmet junctions, very carefully. The others had also dressed and were doing the same for each other. Gestures which even I could interpret signified that the checks were complete, and Bert turned to the door.

He manipulated a dial at its side, and the great valve — large enough to accommodate a small work sub — swung easily open. He waved us through, waited until we had passed and closed the portal behind us. It struck me again that his air was not merely one of familiarity but of authority. How, in a single year, could a Board agent have made himself so completely trusted by these people? A Board agent, of all people on Earth the most likely to take action against them and their way of life? Gould he have been in contact with them even before his disappearance from the surface a year ago? Could Marie be right? And if she were, what was I getting into? I had trusted Bert Whelstrahl completely when I first saw him down here and had tossed off most of Marie’s claims as coming from a woman nearly hysterical with grief; it had seemed likely enough that her Joey — not that he’d ever been hers, in his own estimation — had actually never reached this place. Enough other things could happen to make a one-man sub disappear in the Pacific.

Now I was wondering, deeply. But there were other matters claiming attention.