Undersea City

18 Gave Down Deep

There was a sudden thumping roar from the tunnels outside. For a moment I was startled—could it be a fresh quake, so soon on the heels of the last? But it was not. It was the drainage pumps, automatically springing into action to suck away the brine flooding into the station.

They were big enough to handle the job; the station would not drown, not yet, though the quake had cost us half our remaining seismographs and split a long crack down the wall of the main tunnel. Dark water trickled out of the splintered stone.

Lt. Tsuya demanded harshly: “Was that one of your artificial quakes?”

My uncle nodded. “Dr. Koyetsu’s program calls for eight triggered quakes, in a diagonal line downward against the fault plane. We set four of them. That was the fourth.”

“And the other four?”

My uncle said quietly: “Those still have to be set.”

There was a silence in the station, broken only by the thumping of the pumps outside and the trickle of water across the floor.

Dr. Koyetsu stood up. “The nucleonic explosives from the wreck,” he said, “were under water a long time. Some of them are damaged.

“We used all the active ones we had aboard the MOLE. Then we had to come back for more. We went to the sump—Gideon and Bob Eskow went up to your uncle’s office—but the store in his safe had been removed. We found out from the superintendent of the building what had happened. The Fleet had removed them.

“And so we had to come here, to get them. We need them!” he cried strongly. “Without them, all that we’ve done so far is wasted! The big quake will be delayed, yes—perhaps it will be one or two degrees less powerful—but it will come.

“And Krakatoa will be destroyed.”

Lt. Tsuya took no time at all to make his decision. He was trained as an officer of the Sub-Sea Fleet, and the training wouldn’t let him waste a second in trying to explain or justify his previous actions. He had been wrong; very well, now he was right; get on with the job!

He said: “That won’t happen, Dr. Koyetsu. The nuclear fuses are right here, in one of the storage rooms. We’ll help you load them!”

It didn’t take much time. Two of us at a time wrapped slings around the gleaming golden spheres, lugged them down the rocky tunnel to the station, handed them up to Gideon, atop the MOLE. “Keep them coming!” Gideon cried, grinning, and hefted the heavy balls into the hatch, where Lt. Tsuya and Harley Danthorpe, under my uncle’s directions, stowed them away. Dr. Koyetsu and Lt. McKerrow made one hauling team, Bob Eskow and I the other.

When all the fuses were stowed away Bob and I stood panting for a second, looking at each other. It was an embarrassing moment, in a way—the first time we had faced each other since the whole mysterious affair had started. And both of us were remembering the harsh and mistrustful thoughts I had had of Bob—remembering them, and wishing they could be put out of the way. But at last Bob grinned and stuck out his hand.

“You’re a great detective,” he complimented me. “Congratulations! I should have been more careful about being followed—but I honestly didn’t think you were that good!”

I said seriously: “I’m sorry, Bob.” He grinned. I said: “No, don’t laugh it off. I should have trusted you—and I should have trusted Gideon and my uncle too. But—”

I hesitated. “Well,” I confessed at last, “there was one thing I couldn’t understand. For that matter, I still can’t! I understand that this whole thing had to be kept secret. But why from me? If my uncle had to have help in the station here, why couldn’t I have been the one he came to instead of you?”

Bob said immediately: “Because the trail would have led directly to him! Don’t you see that, Jim. The best way for him to conceal his own activities was to involve me in them, and not you. When he came to me, just after we arrived here, he explained the whole thing to me. He told me that you would feel left out, and rightly so—but that he counted on you to understand at the end, when everything was explained. And you do, Jim!”

“I guess I do,” I said at last—but I wasn’t so very sure! In spite of everything, I wished that I had been able to take part of the work and worry on myself!

But Lt. Tsuya, climbing down the boarding ladder, interrupted:

“I have one more question too,” he said. “You made that successful quake forecast because you knew what was going to happen—knew that Stewart Eden would cause it. Right?”

Bob nodded. “I guess I should have faked it,” he admitted. “But—well, it looked like a good chance for me to show how smart I was! And that wasn’t very smart…”

“That’s not my question,” said the lieutenant, shaking his head. “It was after that. The thing I’m talking about is the geosonde that was stolen from the station.”

Bob peered at him blankly.

“That sonde cost the Fleet thousands of dollars,” said Lt. Tsuya. “And I want to know what happened to it! I’m responsible, you know.”

But Bob shook his head. “Sir,” he said honestly, “I can’t help you. That’s something I don’t know anything about.”

Harley Danthorpe popped his head out of the hatch of the MOLE.

“All stowed away!” he called. “You’re all ready to take off!”

And that’s when the fifth quake struck.

I suppose it wasn’t any bigger or worse than the others. The wave amplitude was no greater, on the seismographs we still had working. But the sound of it seemed louder, when it came moaning up through the rock to shatter the damp, icy stillness of the tunnels. The vibration seemed more painful.

And most of all—this one wasn’t part of Dr. Koyetsu’s plan!

My uncle turned white-faced to us and cried: “We’ve got to get those other bombs planted! We’ve started something and we have to finish it!”

Rock sprayed out of the cracks in the ceiling and caught him as he spoke. My uncle was thrown to the ground, bleeding from the head and shoulder. Rock rattled against the edenite hull of the MOLE like machinegun fire. I was hit; Dr. Koyetsu was hit; Gideon was knocked flat, but only a glancing blow that pounded the wind out of him but did no more damage than that.

But Koyetsu and my uncle, they were in no shape to withstand that sort of treatment! Neither of them was young—both had been under immense strain—and now, in a fraction of a second, both were smashed down by falling rock, in a quake that signaled enormous danger for all of us.

Lt. Tsuya gave swift orders, and Bob and I helped get the injured ones to a dry and level place on the chart tables. Bob glanced at me and said sharply: “Jim, you’re bleeding yourself!” It was true, but no more than a scratch. A sharp-edged flint had raked across my neck and shoulder; the skin was gouged, but not deeply.

We ministered to the injured ones, while Lt. Tsuya computed hastily. Soundings we had none; seismograph traces were scanty, most of the machines being out of commission from the repeated shocks; but the art of forecasting is more in the mind of the man who does it than in the data he has to work with. Lt. Tsuya threw his pencil across the station.

“Here!” he cried. “Look at this!” He scrabbled up another pencil and quickly charted the position of the focuspoints of the five quakes, the four that had been triggered and the fifth that nature itself had brought upon us. “Look!” Red crosses marked the position of each focus; a dotted red line lay between them. “That fifth quake isn’t all bad,” he said hurriedly. “It will help relieve the tension—provided the remaining triggerexplosions are set off on schedule. The MOLE must go out again at once! There’s less than an hour to get the next blast off—and it will take all of that to get in position!”

My uncle pushed himself off the table. “I’m ready,” he said hoarsely, clutching at a chair for support. “John—Gideon. Come on!”

But Lt. Tsuya was pushing him back into a chair. “You’re going nowhere, ” he said forcefully. “Well take over now!”

“You?” My uncle blinked at him dizzily. “But—but what do you know about it? John and I are experienced at this by now. It’s too dangerous for anyone else to go!”

“And it’s plain murder for you!” cried the lieutenant. He stabbed at the chart before him. “Here—and here—and here! That’s where the next three shots have to go. What else do we need to know? We’ll take Bob with us, if he’ll go, and Gideon. And we’ll need one more person.”

“Me!” I cried immediately. But I was not alone; at the same instant, beside me, Harley Danthorpe stepped forward.

“Me!” he shouted. Then he turned to look at me. “I have to go, Jim!” he said tautly.

For a moment the station was almost silent, except for the pumps and the splash of water where the sea was running through widening fractures in the rock. All of us were thinking of the voyage that lay before the MOLE, boring through the earth’s crust, miles beneath us, under increasing heat and pressure. Five quakes had gone off, but three remained.

And those three must be placed deeper, where the MOLE would be in greater danger of being crushed by slipping rock, or drowned in molten magma. I remembered how many of our sondes had imploded at seventy thousand feet or less—and now we would have to go far deeper than that!

But it had to be done.

And Lt. Tsuya said at last: “Very well. We’ll take you both! Lieutenant McKerrow, I’m leaving you in charge of the station and these two gentlemen. See that they’re taken care of.”

“Thanks,” grumbled McKerrow. Then, eagerly: “Listen, why not take six? I’m sure Eden and Koyetsu can get along by themselves.”

“That’s an order,” rapped Lt. Tsuya. “There’ll be plenty of work here. Now—” he glanced behind him, at the gleaming armor of the MOLE and the spiral ortholytic elements that wound around it—”now, let’s get going!”

While we were completing the loading and getting aboard ourselves, the emergency speakers, long silent, began to rattle again with quake messages and warnings. It sounded bad, even with the limited knowledge the announcer had been given. He spoke of new cracks opened in the drainage tubes, sumps filling faster than the overloaded pumps could empty them. Plans were being made to evacuate all of the dome outside the edenite safety armor. But there was a grave, worried note in his voice as he said it, and I knew why. Edenite was mighty against the thrust of the ocean’s pressure, but without power it might as well have been tissue paper. And there was always the chance of a power failure. A mob in the upper northeast octant had tried to fight their way into the platform elevators and there had been trouble—and fighting meant guns; and with guns the power generators themselves might be endangered.

There was no time to waste! And then the hatch came down as Dr. Koyetsu and my uncle waved.

At once the sound was cut off.

In the tiny, cramped cabin of the MOLE Gideon took his place at the controls. We stared at each other in the dim, flickering lights—all the light we could have; for the armor and the ortholytic drill elements between them took enormous power, and there was just so much left over for other purposes.

“Let’s go!” ordered Lt. Tsuya.

Gideon nodded.

He poised his fingers above the starting buttons, hesitated—then pressed four of them in quick sequence.

The edenite armor began to pulse brightly.

The ortholytic elements began to spin.

The MOLE shuddered and rocked, and then began to move.

The noise was like a giant howling of mad dinosaurs crunching rock; there was never another noise like it; even inside the armor, it was almost deafening.

The MOLE lurched and staggered, and we felt it begin to tilt as, crawling backwards, it withdrew from the hole it had breached in the rock walls of Station K.

We were on our way to the bowels of the earth!