Ocean on Top

Chapter Eighteen

The place had indeed been in existence before the Board. During the final few decades before rationing, the separate political institutions which existed then were one by one coming to realize that man’s energy reserves were indeed vanishing. A number of frantic attempts were made to avoid, or at least postpone, the consequences without offending public opinion — or rather, without disturbing public complacency.

My own historical knowledge is shaky, but I seem to remember that this was the period of the ‘crash program’, which cynical engineers of the time used to define as an administrative attempt to produce a baby in one month by making nine women pregnant. You must know some of the results, like the Mediterranean-Dead Sea hydroelectric tunnel, the Messina, Key, Ore and Arafura dams, the Valparaiso thermocouple, the Bandung and Akureyr volcanic taps. Some worthwhile, and even valuable, some monuments to inept politics.

You know the further consequences of some of them — the disputes over output use which led to a dozen minor wars, which in turn wasted more energy in a year than all the crash units together could produce in a human lifetime. And you know that the final result was the formation of the Board and general acceptance of power rationing.

During the period of friction several nations attempted to set up secret power plants, in the hope either of avoiding the covetousness of their neighbors or of providing themselves with energy reserves in case violent conflict did occur. Most of these ‘secrets’ were secret only to the general public of the nation concerned long before they were producing — such of them as got that far. A few lasted for several years after Board rationing began. It had been assumed that the last of these had been found and tied into the general power net many decades ago.

But here was another.

It was as simple as that — almost.

I didn’t find in the records just what country was responsible. I didn’t try very hard. The name would have been almost as meaningless to me, born more than half a century after country names had become merely geographical labels, as it would have been to Abraham Lincoln, who died probably twice as long before the nation in question existed.

It was probably a small enough country to be worried about its neighbors, and certainly a large enough one to be highly industrialized. The technique of deep-sea living which was being so effectively demonstrated to me at this moment was not a product of casual, or even of crash-program, research. It must have involved a very long development period. Knowing something of the customs of the time, I’m still amazed that the secret was kept — though I can guess at the steps which in those days would have seemed normal and proper to achieve this end.

Anyway, they set up the station and had it running nicely before the Board and rationing became a reality.

Remember, it was a secret. It had to be. Only a handful of people would have known about it at any one time, other than the thousands of permanent residents. That handful, when rationing began and all power sources became public property, simply and quietly withdrew from the world and severed connections with it. A little ruthlessness may have been necessary, but I prefer to believe that the worst to happen was a little forced change of address.

At any rate, there was suddenly a new nation with a population of about fifteen thousand at the bottom of the Pacific. It was well supplied with manufacturing and synthesizing plants, and oversupplied with energy. Fifteen thousand people. As Marie put it later, fifteen thousand aristocrats — and more than fifteen billion Jacquerie.

More realistically, fifteen thousand cut flowers.

Most of the accounts I read expressed, or at least hinted, the belief that the severance of relations with the surface hadn’t been meant to be so complete. It must have been obvious to all concerned that a population of that size was far too small to maintain a highly technical culture and equally obvious that only a highly technical culture could live under those conditions. They presumably meant to maintain intellectual contact with the rest of mankind — probably they even meant to maintain physical connection, since it’s hard to believe that they expected to be able to manufacture every piece of equipment they needed to keep themselves going.

But they didn’t maintain those contacts. They couldn’t. They might possibly have managed, even in the face of the unexpected difficulty, if what contact there was didn’t have to be surreptitious; but the two factors together broke the link.

The unexpected difficulty might have been foreseen if the station had been running for more than a very few years before the break; there would have been some eye-opening experience. As it was, the experience came later.

A technical culture has to be a literate one, at least until some adequate substitute for the reference book can be devised. Did you ever consider the problem of teaching a phonetic language like Russian or English to someone who had never heard a spoken word and can’t produce a sound himself?

All right, I know it can be done by a highly trained specialist. What do you do, though, for the specialists needed when no one in the entire population can speak a word and you want to teach the new generation to read Farrington Daniel’s Mathematical Preparation for Physical Chemistry or some similar basic work? You’re not qualified yourself. All your neighbors are in the same boat. The kids themselves are playing around together, presumably communicating by signs of some sort, but what are the chances of the signs they’ve invented for themselves being useful for explaining elementary vector analysis? Even elementary discipline questions are hard enough to get across; in this medium it’s impossible to administer a decent spanking.

Still, you’ve got to produce a certain number of competent engineers and technicians with each generation, or the whole group is going to die in the darkness— and chill of the ocean bottom.

What you’d do I don’t know, but this group leaned heavily on pictures. I don’t know the details. There were differing versions in the books I read, and I suspect that many of them were guesses on the part of the writers. There must have been a lot of determination, some panic, a high general intelligence level and a certain amount of plain luck involved. As it came out in the end, the grandchildren of the original group had the use of a highly workable written language which must have evolved, just as I’d suspected when I saw it, from electrical and engineering diagrams — the sort of things where the connection between symbol and experience could be most easily shown to the growing children. The gesture language was a derivative of the written one, with gesture patterns standing for drawn symbols in much the way that our phonetic written languages are derivatives of the spoken equivalents. Think over the details yourself; I’m still incompetent.

What I could see was that children who had never heard a spoken word and had grown up using a language which is basically pictorial, with a backup code of gesture symbols, are going to have quite a time learning a language which is basically oral, with a backup code of written phonetic symbols.

I don’t say it will be impossible for them. An intelligent and determined person can accomplish remarkable things. I do say that very, very few of them are going to consider it worth much effort. The majority, however intelligent, are unlikely to be determined.

Of the few that will make the effort, none will have much confidence in their own skill, because they will never have had a chance to check it except on each other. They’ll be like a social club which has decided to learn Sanskrit as a project and has only books to learn from. There’ll be some uncertainty even in matching an engineering text with the machinery it’s supposed to describe. Given the choice between using the original maintenance manual, printed in chicken tracks which really stand for sounds they’ve never heard, and using the notes made for their convenience by the maintenance workers who already know the machines — which are the kids going to do for homework?

Of course, the original books are still available as the years go on. They certainly aren’t getting worn out. Unfortunately, as the years go on the original books become less and less useful. They need modern texts, in one sense; but there are two strikes against the modern text.

First and obviously, they can’t read it. Second, it’s about as directly useful on machines designed and built a century or so ago as the manual on a power lathe would be to a flint-ax maker of thirty thousand B.C.

The machines designed and built so long ago have lasted well, but not perfectly. Routine maintenance must, more and more often, give way to major repair and even replacement; the original books don’t cover these problems even if they could be read. The notes of the maintenance engineers certainly don’t cover them.

So these people need helpers from the surface, either engineers who can do the necessary work without following a manual, or else harder-to-define experts who can take modern books and transfer their meaning to the local maintenance specialists. Maybe schoolteachers would be the best term.

In other words, they need Joey, and Bert, and Marie, and me. They need practically anyone they can recruit from the surface. Need us. Marie’s hypothesis was perfectly right. They’ve been getting people like us for decades past — the people whose writings enabled me to figure all this out — and their survival depends on keeping it up.

But that gave food for another thought.

It was easy enough to believe that a certain percentage of the people who had come to this place, either accidentally or as a result of surreptitious recruiting, had been persuaded to stay of their own free will. It was much harder to believe that all of them had been. What had happened to those who had not agreed?

I could see two possibilities. One was the fate which Marie seemed to expect if she tried to leave. The other was the explanation Bert had offered, that they had been allowed to return to the surface unharmed but that the Board had covered up their stories or reports.

But Bert was a proven and admitted liar. He might also be wrong.

There were references in the books I had read to visitors who had arrived, but of whom nothing more was mentioned. Of course if they hadn’t stayed it was unlikely that anything would be — either way. I didn’t like to believe that violence had been used — I preferred to believe that Bert was right. Still, Marie was far from stupid, and the morals of this isolated culture might well be those of a century or so back. In fact, in some ways they obviously were.

It was enough for me that there was even a possibility that Marie might be in danger.

For once, I was in complete agreement with Bert; she had to be persuaded to leave at once. Furthermore, she should be guarded until she was well away from here. Guarded by me. That meant two jobs, of which the first was likely to be the harder. Marie had listened to Bert’s arguments about her leaving for several weeks, with no result except a complete undermining of her trust in Bert. How could I possibly do any better?

I claim to be a reasonably good engineer, as I’ve said before, and I can run a competent investigation when the subject is an essentially technical one like tracking down where power is going. I’m not a plotter, though, in the real, old-style meaning of the term, and for a while I was completely stumped by this problem. I suppose what blocked me so long from a working idea was a natural reluctance to tell anything but the truth to Marie, backed up by an even greater dislike of causing her unhappiness.

I don’t know what finally broke through that block. Suddenly, though, it seemed as clear as day that if Marie were bound and determined to stay as long as she believed that Joey might be alive down here, she would presumably go if she were to be convinced that he had died down here.

I didn’t like the idea. I don’t like lying, especially to people who trust me and most especially to Marie. I went through the usual stage in childhood where lying seemed the easiest way out of all troubles, but some very good teachers and a pair of understanding parents, assisted by a close friend with a good right cross who outweighed me by fifteen pounds, had helped me outgrow it. In the present case, I had to tell myself repeatedly that it was for Marie’s own safety before I could decide it was proper to do.

How I convinced myself that it would also be worth the unhappiness it was certain to cause her is something I choose not to discuss. Once I was convinced, the plan was so simple that I wondered why Bert had never thought of it. After all, he seemed to lack my prejudice against falsehood.