Undersea City

19 Sea of Stone

Lt. Tsuya bellowed over the monstrous racket: “More speed, Park! We’ve got to get down to the fault level in fifty minutes if we’re going to do any good!”

“Aye-aye, sir!” cried Gideon, and winked at me out of the corner of his eye. He was enjoying himself, in spite of everything. I remembered the first day I met him, when he pulled me out of the drainage tubes in Marinia, and all our adventures since; danger was a tonic to Gideon Park.

And for that matter, it had done something to all of us. The knowledge of danger didn’t matter; what mattered was that we were in action—we were fighting.

Only Harley Danthorpe seemed silent and worried.

I remembered the strange, tragic expression that had been on his face as he came back to Station K, after seeing Father Tide to the sub-sea quays. The MOLE had erupted into the station at just that moment and there had been no chance to study Harley Danthorpe; but something had been wrong. And something was wrong now.

Bracing myself against the plunge and roll of the ship as it chewed its way through masses of steel-hard rock, I started over to him. But there was no time now either; Gideon Park, bellowing over his shoulder, ordered: “Get the nuclear fuses ready for planting! This old tub has taken a terrible beating. As soon as we get them laid, we want to get out of there!”

So for the next little while there was no time to talk. Each golden globe had to be carefully laid in a discharge port—a tube, edenite-lined, something like the pneumatic torpedo tubes of the old-fashioned submarines. But these ports were designed to spew their contents out into solid rock, not water; each port was designed with a special ortholytic cutting tool mounted at its outer hatch. Lining up and sealing those tools was a complicated job; it was a task that belonged to skilled sallymen of the Fleet, not to us—but we were there. By force of circumstance, we had to do it.

We did it.

But the job didn’t stop there. Once the nuclear fuses were in place and the port cutting tool properly readied, there came the task of arming the fuses. The stainless steel bands that girdled them were cocking gears. Painfully—for the years at the bottom of the sea had done nothing to make the old corroded gears work more easily—each set of bands had to be aligned to the precise notch that released the safety locks inside. As long as any one band was a fraction of an inch off dead center, the fuses were on safety; we could fling them as far into hot dead rock as we liked, but only sheer accident would make them explode. And that wasn’t good enough. It was necessary to unlock the safeties…and, of course, there was always the chance that once they were unlocked the weary old fuses would not wait for the impulse that thrust them out of the discharge ports and the timing mechanism that was supposed to set them off, but would on the instant explode in our faces.

That, of course, would be the end of the MOLE and all of us—permanently. There wasn’t a chance that a fragment the size of a pin would survive.

But that, at least, didn’t happen.

Two of the spheres were too far gone; try as we would, the bands couldn’t be manhandled into place. Gideon’s face grew long and worried-looking as, from the controls, he saw us discard them one after another. We had two cocked, two discarded—and only two left. If both of those were defective—

But they were not.

We got the three globes into position not more than two minutes before Gideon, bent over the inertial-guidance dead reckoner, reported that we were at the focus of the next quake.

There was a long pause, while the MOLE bucked and roared and screeched through the resisting rock—

Then—”Fuse away!” roared Gideon. Lt. Tsuya, white lines of strain showing around his mouth, came down hard on the port release valve. There was a sudden raucous whine of highspeed whirling ortholytic elements from inside the port, a clatter of metal against rock as the port thrust itself open—

And the first nuclear explosive was gone.

MOLE had laid her first egg with her new crew; two more remained.

We made tracks out of there.

Fourteen minutes later, exactly on schedule, there was a sudden shuddering moan that filled the little ship, almost drowning out for a second the noise of our frantic flight through the rock. The MOLE felt as if it were some burrowing animal indeed, caught in a ferret’s teeth, shaken and flung about as the rock shook in the throes of the quake we had triggered. The lights flickered, went out and came back on again—even dimmer than before. There was a heart-stopping falter in the noise of our drill—if it stopped, all stopped; without those whirling elements we were entombed beyond any chance of help. But it caught again; and the MOLE was strong enough to survive the shock.

“That was a close one!” yelled Gideon, grinning. “Next time, let’s leave a little more time on the fuse!”

“Impossible!” rapped Lt. Tsuya at once. “We can’t open those discharge ports again! The fuse settings will have to remain just as they are!”

And then he saw that Gideon was grinning at him. After a moment, the lieutenant returned his smile. “I thought you were serious for a moment,” he apologized.

The grin dried up on Gideon’s face. “It might get serious at that,” he said, suddenly cocking his ear to the sound of the drills. Bob Eskow, clutching the hand-brace beside me, said tautly:

“I hear it too! One of the drill elements must be working loose!”

I listened. Yes. There was something; but I wasn’t expert enough to know what. Above the banging and rasping there was an uneven note, something like an internal-combustion car with some of its cylinders misfiring; the MOLE seemed to stagger through the rock instead of cutting evenly.

I turned to Bob. He shrugged.

We let it go at that. There was nothing else to do…

The second egg went off on schedule. The second blast caught us and shook us just as hard as the first. But we survived—amazingly, when you stop to think that any one of those fuses contained atomic energy enough to trigger an H-blast big enough to slag a city. But even an H-bomb is tiny compared to the energies released in an earthquake; the bombs themselves, damped by miles of solid rock between us and them by the time they went off, were relatively weak; it was the quakes they triggered that endangered us.

But there was nothing to do about it.

Lt. Tsuya took a pencil and figured feverishly in the wan, flickering light; but he cast it away from him after a moment. “I hoped,” he muttered, “that that last quake might have been enough. But I’m not sure.”

Gideon called, calm and sure over the racket of the MOLE: “Trust John Koyetsu, Lieutenant! If he says we need eight quakes, then that’s what we need.”

The lieutenant nodded soberly. Then his pumpkin face twisted sharply. “To think,” he raged, “that all this could have been done on time—with extra crews and extra MOLEs to do it—if it hadn’t been for that city council! I’m a peaceful man—but I hope they get what they deserve!”

Above the infernal noise came the voice of Harley Danthorpe, and even in that moment we could all hear a note in it that explained all the tragedy and worry in his face:

“You get your wish, sir,” he said. “They did.”

Lt. Tsuya whirled to face him. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

Harley Danthorpe’s face was entirely relaxed, entirely without emotion. He said, as though he were telling us the time by the ship’s clock: “Why, just what I say, sir. They got what they deserved.”

For a second his calm deserted him, and his face worked wildly. But he regained control of himself. “My father,” he said grimly, “and the mayor. And three or four of the council, too. They’re gone, Lieutenant.

“Do you remember sending me to the quays with Father Tide? While I was there I saw it. My father’s special sub-sea yacht was there—cost him half a million dollars! It was the pride of his life. He’d just had it overhauled, and for a minute, when I saw it, I thought that he’d given it to the people of Krakatoa, to help in the evacuation!

“But that was wrong. It wasn’t that way at all.”

Harley’s face was pale and stiff. He said, almost too low to hear above the clamoring din: “There were eight men boarding that yacht. Eight, when there was room for fifty! And all the rest of the space was taken up with papers. Stock certificates. Property deeds. Bonds—cash—everything my father owned in the way of wealth that he could bring with him. He was evacuating himself and a few friends, not the people of Krakatoa! I saw the mayor with him. And I saw them close the hatch and go into the locks.

“And I saw what happened, when the outer lock door opened.”

Harley gulped and shook his head.

“The edenite didn’t hold. When the sea pressure came into the lock, she caved flat. They—they were all killed, sir.”

For a moment we were silent.

Then Lt. Tsuya said, his voice oddly gentle: “I’m sorry, Danthorpe. Your father—”

“You don’t have to say anything,” Harley interrupted grimly. “I understand. But there’s one more thing I want to tell you. Remember that missing geosonde?”

Lt. Tsuya looked startled. “Of course.”

“Well, sir—I took it.” Harley swallowed, but doggedly went on. “My dad asked me to. I realized I broke regulations—by stealing it, and even by talking about it. I—” He stopped himself. He said abruptly: “I have no excuse, sir. But I did it. You see, he was going to have more made, using it as a model, in order to set up his own quake-forecasting service, privately. It was the same proposition he offered Doctor Koyetsu. He—he wanted to make money out of speculation.”

For a moment Harley’s face seemed as though he would lose control; but he hung on and said grimly: “I have no excuse, and I’ll face a board of investigation, if we ever get out of this. But I hope I’ll get another chance, Lieutenant.

“The inside drift—I never want to hear of it again! If I live through this—and if I get the chance—I only want one thing out of life. I want to be a good cadet of the Sub-Sea Fleet!”

Lt. Tsuya stood up to his full height. He said harshly: “Cadet Danthorpe! You’re that already! And now the subject is closed.”

It was a dramatic moment.

But it was broken by Gideon’s bellow from the controls: “Look at the time! Hurry it up, you down there—we’re in position! Get that last egg out of here so we can head for the barn!”

We had barely time to get out of the way of the quake this time. We were heading up at a steep slant, and making slow going of it as the worn old MOLE fought to keep itself alive. When the shock came we lost most of our lights, and they didn’t come back.

But the hull stayed in one piece, though it began to creak warningly.

It was a moment of high triumph. “We’ve done it!” whooped Bob, pounding me violently on the back. “I never thought we’d make it!”

“We haven’t made it yet!” bellowed Gideon. “Bob, come here on the double! Give me a hand with these controls!”

The pushbutton system was gone completely, shocked out of circuit by the last quake. Gideon was fighting to handle the stubby manual levers that were supposed to give emergency control of the ortholytic elements. But it was more than a one-man job; the whirling elements that could bite through solid rock were not to be deflected by a finger’s pressure; the best Bob and Gideon together could do was to inch it slowly over, and even then it could not be held.

It was touch and go. The noise grew from merely deafening to utterly overpowering as the tortured drill elements began to lose some of their cutting power and beat raggedly against the naked rock. What lights we had were so few and faint that each of us was only a shadow; I turned to speak to Bob, and found that it was Lt. Tsuya beside me; Gideon’s face and Harley Danthorpe’s were indistinguishable in the gloom. The heat grew and beat on us as Gideon, desperate at last, cut the air-conditioning units out of circulation to conserve power for the drills and the armor.

Minutes passed.

Our instruments showed that we should by now be at the very brink of Station K, almost where the MOLE had erupted hours before. But the instruments were liars; one set contradicted another. Only the inertial-guidance deadreckoner could be trusted at all, and the power to drive it was growing weaker and weaker, and thus its accuracy dwindled—

And then the drill elements screeched and spun freely in the nose.

“We’re out of rock!” shouted Gideon joyfully, and each one of us yelled in plain relief. Out of the rock! Then our mission was accomplished! We were—

We were far too quick! For abruptly there was a sudden shattering clink of metal. Gideon’s face tightened; his eyes turned dark and worried.

“Our armor,” he said briefly. “It’s cracked.” He glanced at the instruments.

Then he turned and faced us.

“We’ve come out into water,” he said tonelessly. “The thermal shock has cracked the armor. The water is cold, and the armor was plenty hot.” He hesitated. “But that’s not the worst,” he said.

“The instruments are right. We’re exactly where we aimed.

“We’re in Station K—and Station K is flooded.”

We stared at each other for a second—but there wasn’t time to think about what that meant. Station K flooded!

My uncle—Dr. Koyetsu—what had become of them? If the station was gone—why, then, perhaps the whole dome was gone! Perhaps all of our efforts were in vain; the dome shaken open and crushed flat…

But there wasn’t time. No, not a single second.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” rasped Lt. Tsuya urgently. “If our armor’s gone—”

He didn’t have to finish.

If our armor was gone, we were naked to the might of the sea. For a time the edenite force-film would hold; but it depended on a carefully designed metal hull beneath it; without that smooth and precision-engineered metal capsule on which to cling, the film of force could not be maintained forever—might go at any second!

And the instant it went—

Three miles of water would stamp us out like insects under a maul.

“Give me a hand!” demanded Gideon urgently. “We’ve got to find an airbubble somewhere in the rock—heaven knows where! But if the dome is gone—”

And there too, he didn’t have to finish. For MOLE was too heavy, too worn, Jo become a sea-car again; it would never float, not with what feeble thrust remained in its engines. We could only bore blindly through whatever solid mass we could still penetrate, hoping to find air somewhere. It was the tiniest of hopes. But it was all we had.

And, in a matter of minutes, even that was denied us.

For the old MOLE had suffered one shock too many.

The heat made us dizzy and weak; the screaming, pounding thunder of the drills, unbalanced and wild, was plain torture to our ears. We couldn’t manage the stubby emergency levers, not with what strength we had left.

Lt. Tsuya was the first to go. I saw him slip, stagger and fall spread-armed to the floor; and for a moment I wondered dizzily what he was doing.

And then I realized—the heat; the air that was now choked with our own exhaled breath, heavy with the chemical reeks of the damaged machinery. He had passed out. It was simply beyond human strength to take more.

Harley Danthorpe fell away from his post at the emergency levers. I staggered dizzily toward them, tripped over something, paused foolishly to look—and wondered what Bob Eskow was doing, sound asleep on the deck. “Get up, Bob!” I cried impatiently. “What’s the matter with you?”

And then I heard Gideon’s voice. “Jim!” he called, agonized. “Come help me—I can’t hold it…

His voice trailed off.

I lurched toward him, each step harder than the one before. The MOLE did a looping turn, and abruptly I was on the deck myself. Was it the MOLE that had turned, or I? I didn’t know…

But it didn’t matter.

I was outstretched on the hot, hard metal deck. I knew it was important for me to get up—to do something—to control the ship in its wild, undirected flight…

But strength was not there. The last of the lights went out. I was unconscious.