Ocean on Top

Chapter Seventeen

That sight made a change in me. Bert had been a good friend of mine for several years. I had trusted him; Marie, admittedly, had not and had tried to get me to share her feelings, but I’d felt sure she was just brooding.

A few minutes ago I had been jolted when Bert confessed to a falsehood in his earlier talk to me, but I had still been ready to listen to his excuses. I would even have been willing to believe that I had misunderstood him the first time.

But he had also told me — written it in plain words, with no possible doubt about their meaning — that he did not know about Joey’s whereabouts and that to the best of his knowledge and belief Joey had never gotten to this place.

Clearly and unarguably Bert Whelstrahl had been lying like the proverbial rug. He had known that Joey was here. He had known just where he was and what he was doing. Why should he tell such a lie to me and apparently to Marie? And having told it, why was he now bringing me face to face with the proof that he was a liar? And had Marie formed her impression by spotting some evidence I had missed?

One thing was certain in my own mind. Whatever explanation Bert gave was going to have to be supported by some pretty good independent evidence before I could accord it any weight. So was anything else he said from now on.

These thoughts were interrupted by Joey’s pulling away from his viewer and catching sight of me. The expression on his face indicated that Bert hadn’t told him about me either. He was clearly astonished, and seemed delighted. He came over and shook hands violently, and seemed as frustrated as I was by the impossibility of talking. He looked around, probably for the writing pad, but Bert was already busy with the stylus. He held his words up for both of us to read.

“Joey, we know you’re tied up for the next few hours at least, but will it be all right if I give you another assistant as soon as his first job is finished?” I appreciated his tactful skipping of my name and felt a little more willing to listen to his excuses when they came. I suspected from Joey’s quick grin that he appreciated it too; a few weeks away from our section hadn’t let him forget my chronic embarrassment at the handle my parents had inflicted on me or my self-consciousness about all nicknames offered as substitutes. “More than glad,” he wrote. “Check him out as quickly as you can, Bert. We need him badly.” He came as close to slapping me on the back as the medium permitted, grinned once more, and went back to his viewer.

I would have liked to make more of a conversation out of it, but was coming to see how anyone who had been here long might start to lose the urge for idle chatter. I could even think of a few people who would be improved by such a change in residence. I waved a farewell which Joey didn’t see, and followed Bert back out into the control room.

I was going to put some pretty harsh questions to him, but he had the writing pad and circumstances made it difficult to interrupt anyone else’s talk. He had stopped swimming and started writing by the time I got through the door.

“I didn’t want you to know about Joey until after you’d had your talk with Marie,” were his words. “In fact, I only just decided to let you know even this soon. I don’t think she should know he’s here, and I’m quite sure he shouldn’t know that she is.” I grabbed the pad.

“Why not? It sounds to me like a dirty trick on both of them.”

“If she knows he’s here she’ll want to stay.”

“What’s bad about that? You wanted me to stay, as you said, and I never denied she’s more decorative than I am.”

“She shouldn’t stay because her only reason for doing it would be Joey, and you know as well as I do how much good that would do her. You know he doesn’t care two cents for the kid. He chose to stay down here, remember. If she learns about him and stays, she’ll be giving him a hard time, and we can’t afford to have that happen. The job’s much too important. If he gets distracted, or changes his mind about staying here, it’s trouble.”

“And why shouldn’t he know about her?”

“For the same set of reasons. He’d know why she was here, and it would be as bad as though she were hanging around him in person. He never admitted it, but I think she was one of the reasons he chose to stay here.”

“You mean he disappeared on purpose? That he knew about this place earlier?”

“Oh, no. He got here just as I did, and as Marie did. He spotted a work sub that didn’t belong to the Board and followed it.”

I pondered. The story had some convincing aspects; Joey’s attitude toward Marie was almost as well known as mine, though no one had ever convinced Marie of it. Few people had risked trying. Joey himself wasn’t the sort of man who could tell a girl to run along, even if it were obviously the best thing for the girl as well as for himself. He’d feel it was somehow his fault for not falling for her.

“But why should you have had to lie to me about it?” I asked finally.

“Because you were going to see Marie, and I had some hopes you’d talk her into leaving. You’ll forgive my saying that if you’d known Joey was here you wouldn’t have been able to tell her that as far as you knew he wasn’t. I’m not belittling your acting ability, but you wouldn’t have believed it was necessary then.”

“I’m not sure I do yet. I’m still in the dark about this very important job Joey has to do and I’m supposed to help with.”

“True enough. We’d better get on with your education. Library next.”

“Will these guards, or whatever they are, be with us to the end?”

“It’s hard to say. They aren’t guards, just people who are interested. You ought to be flattered.”

“Oh, I am. I’ve never been a celebrity before.” It’s curious how hard it is to convey irony by the written word alone. Bert missed it completely, as far as I could tell. He swam back in the general direction of the tunnel we had come down, and the rest of us followed him.

As I had guessed, the way up was along a different route — maybe I should say a different pipe — with the current, as I’d also expected, carrying us up.

As usual the trip was not enlivened by conversation, though I found it wasn’t too boring; the girl swam beside me instead of trailing behind with the others. As before, I didn’t know how long the journey took.

I’m not clear how they controlled the current. It had carried us down one passage, it carried us back to the same room through another, but in the room itself there was no trouble in stopping. Bert opened the big door, and we shed our coveralls on the other side. Then he led the way once more.

I was a little surprised, and a little more disappointed, to lose our escort at this point. They turned off into another tunnel a few yards from where we left the coveralls. No doubt they, too, had to work at times. I put them out of my mind, more or less, and followed Bert.

This is one of the points where it’s hard to be detailed without being boring. A library is a library, even when it’s upside down. The books were ordinary in shape and style, if not in content. The films and cards were in no way remarkable. Like unballasted human bodies, most of them tended to float. The chairs, tables, and carrels were on the ceiling, with racks under — no, I mean over — the chairs for parking ballast belts. Not everyone parked them, though; many readers had their belts still on as they drifted in front of a reading screen or floated with a book in their hands.

The images on the screens were all of the general sort the girl had drawn on the writing pad, second cousins to electrical diagrams or grad-school topology exercises. I watched several of the readers for some minutes each and got the opinion that while they were reading in the same sense that the word usually implies, there was an important difference in technique. They did go page by page or frame by frame, as the case might be, spending half a minute or a minute on each before going on to the next. But their eyes didn’t follow the regular back-and-forth routine of a book reader. They wandered irregularly over each page, like the eyes of a man examining a picture.

Still, I reflected, that wasn’t too surprising. The same thing would happen to me if I were examining a wiring diagram. I was gradually coming to understand the situation, perhaps rather slowly by some people’s standards. I hadn’t thought of engineering drawings as a language before.

Bert floated quietly around for several minutes, evidently willing for me to study the place by myself. At last, though, he beckoned me over to one end of the room. There was an unoccupied film reader here, and a fairly large case of books. It took about two seconds for me to notice that these were written in ordinary languages. Chinese… Urdu… Latin… English… Russian… I could recognize them all, even though I couldn’t read many of them.

Bert started writing again.

“This stuff will tell you the story much more quickly than I can. It’s no shock to you by now that a lot of people, not only Board workers, have found this place in the past. It’s been here since before there was a Board. A lot of those people have stayed. Some of these books were brought here by them, some were written here by them. The information here is what convinced me of the things I told you — the business about attempts to get in touch with the Board about this place, and so on.

“Spend as much time as you need absorbing it. It’s important that you get the whole story. I’ll be back when it’s time to eat.”

He laid the pad under a chair — that’s not quite the right way to say it; the pad was denser than the liquid, so figure it out for yourself — and swam off. There seemed to be nothing to do but start reading.

Now, I don’t have copies of those books and tapes. And I know Bert was a liar. But take my word for it, there were far too many of them for him to have produced himself in the time he was down here. Most of them were handwritten, though some had been typed. I spent something like eighteen solid hours just skimming the ones that were in languages I knew. (I shouldn’t say solid hours. Bert did come back to take me to meals, and I also slept. There’s no point in describing all the details of life, even if the environment did make some of them rather unusual). I’ll boil down the picture I got of the situation to the smallest volume I can manage.