Undersea City

12 Forecast: Trouble!

It was after 2400 hours when I got bade to the base. I wanted a hot bath and a dry uniform—and more than either of those, I wanted someone to tell me that my eyes were liars, that what I had just seen wasn’t true.

Instead, I called Station K.

Lieutenant Tsuya was already back on duty. He ordered me sharply to report to him at once.

When I came in he was sitting at his wide forecasting desk, scowling at a 200-kilometer seismic stress chart. He swung around on his tall stool to look at me. Framed in the Troyon tubes that lit the charts over his desk he looked pinched and grim with worry, even before I told him what I had seen.

And when I had finished, he sat silent for a long moment, staring at an isentropic analysis graph without seeing a line of it.

He said fretfully: “I wish the computer section would hurry up.”

“Sir?” I was startled; he seemed absent-minded—absent-minded, when I had been telling him about the deadly events I had seen in the drainage sump!

He shook his head and seemed to remember that I was there. “Oh, yes, he said. “Eden. You were telling me about—ah—”

I said urgently, “Sir, maybe I didn’t make myself clear. They’ve got a MOLE! And what’s more, it’s loaded awash with hydrogen fusion devices.”

“I see.” He nodded gravely. But there was something very strange about his behavior.

Either he didn’t believe me, or—well, what else could it be?

He said, his voice more irritable than I had ever known it: “Eden, you come in here with the most fantastic story I have ever heard, and you expect me to pay attention to it. Ridiculous, man! There aren’t six MOLEs in the world—and I guarantee you, nobody but a top-ranking seismographer is going to get his hands on one. Nobody! If you’d said Father Tide was involved—why, yes, there might be some chance of that. A very faint chance, Eden! But Bob Eskow? Nonsense!”

He shook his head, and then his tone changed. “Eden,” he said formally, “I want you to think carefully before you answer this next question. Have you any evidence to prove what you have just told me?”

It caught me flat-footed.

I had been prepared for anything but this. If he had called out the Security section—if he had demanded that Eskow be shot on sight—if he had, even, raced out of the station, taking me with him, to investigate that sump himself…why, any of these things might have made some sense.

But he was acting as though he both doubted what I had to say—and, in the second place, didn’t much care!

I said, clutching at the first words that came into mind: “Sir, surely there’s some evidence! I mean—well, look!” I pointed to my wrecked uniform. Icy sea water was still sloshing out of my shoes. He looked, and shook his head.

“You’re wet, Cadet Eden,” he rapped out. His sleepy eyes narrowed. “Can’t you think of some better proof?”

I said hopelessly: “No, sir. Except that I don’t think Bob Eskow will be back from his pass, until that machine gets back from under the sea-floor.”

“And even that,” he pointed out reasonably, “would be no real proof. He might be anywhere. Anywhere else would be more logical.”

He took a deep breath and faced me squarely.

“Eden,” he said grimly, “I have to tell you that I hardly believe what you have just said. I cannot help but wonder if it is entirely truthful—whether or not mistaken—or if it might be something you have cooked up to shield your uncle.”

The accusation took my breath away. “Sir—”

He cut in: “If I am wrong, you will ultimately receive my apologies,” he said. “But for the present—One moment!”

There was a flashing red light and the tinkle of a bell. Lt, Tsuya, forgetting me entirely, dove for the message hopper, where the alarm had signified the receipt of an incoming message.

I saw the capsule as, feverishly, Lt. Tsuya grabbed it and wrenched it open.

It bore the imprint: Computer Section.

And then I began to understand Lt. Tsuya’s behavior. First he sent me on an errand—then, when I had undertaken it and came back with important information to report, he ignored me, challenged my word, seemed, in short, to have lost his mind!

But he hadn’t lost his mind at all.

It was something else entirely. Something had happened—something so great that he simply could not spare the time to think about Bob Eskow or the missing geosonde, much less what must have seemed like a fantastic story of MOLEs in the drainage sumps and contraband nuclear explosives.

Computer Section.

Those two words told me a lot!

The science of quake forecasting, you see, involves so many factors, each of which has to be evaluated for importance before it can be used at all, that computers are nearly helpless in it.

A computer can do an enormously complex mathematical job in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a man, yes. But computers have no judgment, and they have no knowledge beyond what is put into them. They don’t have, in other words, “know-how.” A computer can solve every problem a man can, but the man has to think it out first. Preparing a seismic problem for a computer takes more work than solving it does. For that reason, computers are not used—except in one case.

That case is when the forecaster cannot believe his results.

Then he submits it to the computer—hoping to find a mathematical error.

But whatever it was that was on the lieutenant’s mind, I could see by the sudden bone-weary slump of his shoulders that he had found no mathematical error. He dropped the half-sheet of mathematical symbols from Computer Section that summarized the results and sat, for a moment, staring into space.

I said: “Is something wrong, sir?” He focused on me with difficulty.

“Wrong?” he mumbled. Then he smiled wryly. ”Yes,” he said, “you might say that. There are indications of a rapid intensification of deep-level stress.”

I frowned. “But today’s observations—

“Tonight’s observations,” he cut me off, “show a considerable build-up, and proceeding at a rapidly increasing pace. Yes.” He nodded. “Something’s brewing, down below.”

For the first time since I had come into the room, I took a quick look at the charts and soundings.

If his analysis was correct, something was brewing indeed. It showed on every chart. The intensification of forces in the twelve hours between the 0900 and 2100 hours observations was remarkable.

Over my shoulder Lt. Tsuya said heavily: “I’m going to order a special geosonde run. If we could get it down to the two-hundred-kilometer level—” he thrust at the chart before him with a drafting stylus—“we might have a basis for a quake forecast. But—”

He didn’t have to finish. I knew our chances of getting a sounding that far down; they were very small. The pressure was simply too great. Nine sondes out of ten imploded—that is, were crushed by the pressure—at far less depths than that.

“As it is,” he droned, talking more to himself than to me, “with our best deep-level data derived from the reflection and refraction of shots at the twenty-kilometer level…”

His voice trailed off.

He swung around to face me. “But you see, Eden,” he said, “that I’ve got enough on my mind without listening to fairy tales about pirate MOLEs, without evidence to back them up.”

I said urgently: “Sir, if it’s a matter of evidence, surely there must be some sign in the sump itself. If we could drain it and examine the rock—”

“We’ll drain no sumps tonight,” he said sharply. “Now I’ve got to get the sonar-sonde crew on deck. You’re dismissed, Eden. Get some sleep.”

His tired, troubled eyes had already gone back to his charts before I left the room.

But I got very little sleep that night, in spite of his orders.

I stood under a hot shower until my numb feet ached and tingled and came back to life. Then I went to bed—and lay there for a long time in a kind of tragic, eyesopen nightmare.

Actually, I couldn’t really blame Lt. Tsuya for suspecting me of inventing the story to shield my uncle in some way. It was hard enough for me to believe what I had seen myself. It was hard to understand how Bob Eskow and the old Chinese and my uncle’s good friend Gideon Park had got hold of a MOLE. It was almost impossible to understand where they had obtained thermonuclear weapons. And I couldn’t even guess what they would want these things for in the first place, unless—unless—

I sat bolt upright in bed.

Unless they were in some way connected with the threat of seismic disturbances that was troubling Lt. Tsuya!

For I remembered what Father Tide had said: Someone, he thought, was actually creating artificial quakes! Making them, in order to manipulate the stock market!

And then the reaction set in.

It didn’t fit at all; the pattern was all wrong. It had to be a coincidence.

For there were two separate things operating here. Lt. Tsuya’s charts and soundings had seemed to indicate a build-up of stress…the rock stretching and twisting against itself, so to speak, getting ready to slip and yield—which would be a quake—but as yet doing nothing of the sort.

Even if it were true that hydrogen weapons could cause a quake, it was flatly impossible that they could cause the sort of pattern that was worrying Lt. Tsuya. Far from it! They were much more likely to relieve such stresses than to cause them; the pattern was all wrong, as I say.

I put the idea out of my mind.

Eventually I fell asleep…

And dreamed that I had discovered a crack in the city dome. I stood watching, while the seeping drops of icy water became a stream, then a roaring river, then a thundering pressure-jet a hundred yards across. I was trying to call my uncle, to repair the failing edenite armor, but the first icy spray had trapped and frozen me. I was-helpless. There was nothing that I could do about it. The water was up to my chin—

Somebody grabbed me and hauled me free.

I woke up.

It was Harley Danthorpe, shaking me out of bed.

He said: “You sounded pretty desperate, Jim. You must have had squid for dinner.” But his face wasn’t smiling, even as he made the old, bad joke. (It’s an old sub-seaman’s tale that eating squid causes nightmares—everybody knows it isn’t true.) He said: “We’re ordered to report to Station K in thirty minutes.”

I fumbled groggily for my watch. “Wha—what time—

“It’s five hundred hours, Jim,” said Harley Danthorpe.

I woke up fast. That meant they wanted us on duty nearly three hours early. And that, in turn, meant that something was up.

Or, as the lieutenant had said the night before, something was brewing down below.

When we got to the station Lt. McKerrow was on duty. He was moody and jittery. Lt. Tsuya had always begun each shift with a little talk on the forces that were always folding and remolding the plastic rock beneath the station; Lt. McKerrow didn’t bother. The weary geosonde crew was making a fresh run. He set us to helping them.

Bob Eskow was not in the station. He hadn’t been in our quarters either; that much, at least, of what I had told Lt. Tsuya had been verified. But the lieutenant wasn’t, apparently, very interested. He was in the little chart room attached to the station, sprawled out on a cot, sleeping, while we finished the sonar-sonde run.

It wasn’t a very successful run. The terminal point, where the sonde imploded, was only seventy thousand feet below Station K.

But the brief records, when we had converted and plotted them, were disturbing enough. They showed a sharp rise in the negative gravitational anomaly. Assuming that the sensing element in the sonde had remained in proper calibration, that could mean a sudden flow of hotter and therefore less dense rock into an area under the station.

Hotter and less dense rock. For example—liquid magma.

McKerrow, looking tired and worn, studied the plotted charts.

He nodded, his eyes half closed. “About what Tsuya expected,” he muttered. “That’s some rise. Eden, Danthorpe. You two go ahead and analyze them. Do it separately—I want to see if you both come up with the same answers. If you’ve got what it takes to be quake forecasters, now’s your chance to prove it.”

So Harley and I got to work, side by side at our plotting desks.

I sketched in the isobars of pressure, the isogeotherms of temperature, the milligals of gravitational anomaly.

I plotted the vectors of force, computed the changes from the previous analysis and projected them into the future.

Using the geodynamic equations that had been worked out by Father Tide, I computed the stresses. I located the probable planes of fault. I measured the tidal strains, and estimated the other trigger forces.

Finally, I substituted my figures into the equations of probable time and probable force.

I didn’t like the answers I got.

I looked at my answers, and then turned to look at Harley Danthorpe. Evidently his computations had led him to some similar conclusion. His face was pale; his worried squint was bitten deeper than ever; he was erasing frantically and rewriting his figures.

Forecasting quakes is not an exact science—any more than forecasting the weather is.

You understand the cause and effect of the great processes involved, all right, but a human being simply isn’t equipped to see enough—to observe enough data—to have all the facts.

Complete data for a really accurate quake forecast would, I believe, require complete information about every crystal—perhaps even every molecule!—in the curst of the earth. You would need to know the temperature and the melting point, the chemical constituents and im purities, the pressure and the shearing strain, the magnetic moment and the electrostatic potential, the radioactivity, the anomaly of gravitation, the natural period of vibration…all of those things. And then, having learned them all, you would know only a tiny fraction; for you would have to learn how all of those millions of tiny measurements were changing; whether they were going up or going down—how fast—regularly or unevenly…

It is as if you were in some huge theater, with an audience of millions of people, and someone shouted, “Fire!” What is the mob going to do? There is no way to know—not for sure—unless you go to each single individual and learn everything there is to know about how he will react—for one panicked individual can throw all your computations off.

Of course, that’s not possible.

And it’s not possible to know everything that should be known about the elements involved in quake forecasting. You would need a computing machine the size of the earth, to store and analyze the data—even if you had the data in the first place.

So you work with what you have.The incomplete data available consists of samplings. You can’t measure every bit of rock, so you take a few bits at random, hoping to get a pretty fair average picture. (Sometimes you do.) You have a few instrument readings—of only approximate accuracy, because the instruments themselves are subject to error, working as they do under enormous pressure and temperature—and then you interpret these doubtful read ings, knowing that your interpretation is as important as the figures.

For it is a matter of distance; it’s hard to get down where the quakes start. Hard? Say impossible, and you’ll be very nearly right. Deep-focus quakes originate hundreds of miles beneath the surface. Blindly, with our sonar-sondes, we were able to probe the Earth as far as twenty miles—with luck. The rest was half-proven theory, indirect evidence and sometimes plain guesswork.

Aware of all those sources of error, I went back and did the entire computation over again.

I checked everything that could be checked. I threw out the gravity anomaly figures we had just recorded, because they seemed unreasonably high—and put them back again when a recheck of the records of the last three geosonde runs showed the same rapid increase in negative anomaly.

I substituted my revised figures into the equations of probable time and probable force, and got the same answer.

The way our equations were set up, you never got an answer that said flatly: There will not be a quake. There’s a reason for that—and that reason is, simply, that a quake is always possible anywhere. The equations were based on that fact.

The best you could hope for would be a solution that would show no measurable quake occurring in any foreseeable time. Under those conditions, the solution for probable force will give the answer: Zero. And a solution for probable time will give the answer: Infinity.

But those were not the answers I got.

I looked at Harley Danthorpe, and found him squinting anxiously at me.

“Jim?” His voice was hoarse and dry. “Jim, have you finished?”

I nodded.

“What—what’s your forecast?”

I took a deep breath and gave it to him straight: “Probable force: Ten, with a probable error of plus or minus two. Probable time: Thirty-six hours, with a probable error of plus or minus twenty-four.”

He put his eraser down. He looked almost relieved. “I thought maybe I had lost my ballast,” he whispered. “But that’s the same answer I got.”

For a moment we just sat there. The dead stillness of the quake station was all around us. The walls were sweating water. Water was trickling silently along the little gutters at the edge of the floor. Over our heads were two miles of rock and three more miles of sea.

“That means it could happen in just twelve hours,” Harley said. His voice had a queer, breathless hush. “And it could be as strong as Force Twelve.”

He twisted around on his stool to squint at the station clock. He said, hardly audible: “Nothing can live through a Force Twelve quake.”