Undersea City

3 Fire Under the Sea

Artificial seaquakes! And my uncle Stewart Eden charged with setting them off, by this strange priest who called himself Father Tide!

It was too much for me to grasp. I was no longer worried; I was angry.

He left me there in the Commandant’s office, almost without another word. I stopped him as he was going out, asked for my uncle’s belongings.

He hesitated, glanced at the Commandant, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jim. Later they will doubtless be yours. But they are evidence. If it is necessary for the officers of the Sub-Sea Fleet to take over the private investigation I have begun, they will doubtless wish to examine them.”

And he would say no more.

I suppose the Commandant dismissed me, but I don’t remember it.

The next thing I remember was standing in a payphone booth, trying to reach my uncle in Thetis Dome. It took forever for the long relay lines to clear…and then, no answer. No answer from his home. No answer from his office. In desperation, I had him paged in the hotels and sea-car terminals—both him and his loyal aide, Gideon Park. But there was no answer.

This much was true of what Father Tide had said: My uncle had disappeared from sight.

I stood staring into space. I had no idea where I was.

By and by the object I was looking at began to make sense to me. It was a huge map of the world on the Mercator Projection; the map that, as a first-year lubber at the Academy, I had tirelessly memorized for the glory and grandeur that it spelled out. It was a strange map, at least for dry-siders—for the continents themselves were featureless black, showing only the rivers and a few of the largest cities.

But the oceans!

They sparkled in brilliant luminous colors. Shades of blue and green to indicate the depths of the sea bottom. Wash overlays of crimson and orange to show the submarine mountain peaks and ranges. Brilliant gold for the cities; lines of webbed silver that showed the pipelines and vacuum tubeways that linked them; shaded tracing that showed the vast mineral deposits that lay on the ocean’s bottom. There was incalculable wealth there! Enough to make a million millionaires! But dishonest men were wrecking what had so laboriously been built by the pioneers of the deeps, such as my uncle and my father.

And yet, my uncle was one of those dishonest men, according to the man who called himself Father Tide.

I came to with a start, shook myself and turned away from the great map of the deeps.

I was in Dixon Hall, the Academy’s exciting museum, where all the history of the subsea service was on display. I had no recollection of how I got there.

And someone was calling my name.

I said: “Oh. Hello. I—I didn’t see you come in.”

It was Bob, with Harley Danthorpe.

“You didn’t see anything at all,” Danthorpe rasped. “Can’t you find a better place to daydream than a dump like this? We’ve been looking all over for you.”

I expected something from Bob at that point, for he was nearly as devoted to Dixon Hall and the living history it contained as I.

But he was paying no attention. “Look!” he said, pointing.

It was a tapered metal tube, four inches thick and about three feet long, mounted in a glass display case.

The polished walls of it were glowing like edenite—the fantastic armor that my uncle invented, the pressure film that turns the deadly pressure of the water back on itself, making it possible for men to plumb the deeps.

But it was not edenite, or not of any sort that I had ever seen. For the glow of this was not the even shimmering green of submarine edenite armor. It was filled with little sparking points of colored fire that came and went like Christmas lights seen through the waving branches of a tree.

It’s a model mole!” cried Bob. “Look at the sign!”

He pointed to the card in the case:

Working Model of

Mechanical Ortholytic Excavator

Experimental craft of this type, now under test by the Sub-Sea Fleet, offer the promise of new opportunities to Academy graduates. With it explorations may be made at first hand of the strata beneath the sea bottom.

“Beneath the sea bottom,” I read aloud, wonderingly, “Do they mean actually underground?”

Harley Danthorpe twanged: “If you want the inside drift on the mole, just ask me.” He came up behind us, squinting at the shining model. “My dad has money in the basic patents,” he bragged. “On the ortholytic drill. Get it? Mechanical—Ortho—Lytic—Excavator. M-O-L-E.” He patted the case reassuringly. “Dad says it will slice through basalt rock like a bullet through butter. He says a time is coming when self-contained drilling machines will cruise through the rocks under the floor of the sea like submarines under the surface of the water. And he says the mole is going to earn millions for the man with the inside drift.”

“Great,” said Bob, disgusted. “A thing like this, and all you can think of is how to make money out of it!”

“What’s wrong with money?” Danthorpe demanded hotly. “After all, if it wasn’t—”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “I remember hearing about this thing. They’re having trouble with it, right? The model is fine, but the big machines have bugs.”

Danthorpe confessed, “Well, all atomic drills generate a lot of heat—and the ortholytic drill cuts faster, but if makes more heat. And the earth’s crust is already plenty hot, when you get a few miles down. They’ve got a terrific refrigeration problem.”

“At the least,” Bob agreed. “But they’ll lick it! And—Wow!”

He stopped and pointed at the big clock on the wall, under the sign that read; The Tides Don’t Wait.

“Five minutes before seventeen hundred!” he cried. “Come on, we’ve got to get to the Commandant’s office!”

We stood at ramrod attention, while the Commandant came around his big desk and inspected us with critical eyes as cold as the polar seas.

He said nothing about the scene in his office a few hours before. He didn’t show by a look or a gesture that it had ever happened.

For that I was grateful.

He walked behind the desk again and sat down deliberately.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice as hard as his seascarred face, “you are nearing the end of a course of training. You have reached the stage when certain selected cadets are chosen for detached duty as a part of their training. On this occasion, I want to remind you of your enormous duties, and of your peculiar opportunities.”

Opportunities!

It was a strange way for him to put it. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even move. But I could hear Bob Eskow catch his breath beside me.

The Commandant was lecturing.

“The Sub-Sea Fleet,” he was saying, “was originally designed to protect American interests under the sea. That was back before all the world’s weapons were placed under the direct supervision of the U.N. We looked out for American cities, American mining claims, American shipping. That is still an important part of our duties. But the Sub-Sea Fleet has a broader mission now.

“Our enemies down deep are seldom men in these days. In fact, the old institution of war was drowned in the deeps. There’s room and wealth enough for everybody.

“But getting them takes co-operation. Edenite was an American invention—” Did I imagine it, or did he glance at me when he said that? “But the British devised the techniques of sub-sea farming. The ortholytic drill was originally a German idea. The Japanese have pioneered in sub-sea quake forecasting.

“Against the hazards of the sea, all men fight together.”

He paused and looked at us.

“‘The Tides Don’t Wait!’” His voice rang out with the old slogan of the Academy. “That means that the Sub-Sea Fleet doesn’t live in the past. We recognize the fact of change. We are quick to make the most of new technologies.

“Gentlemen,” he said in his cold voice of command, “on a basis of your unusual aptitudes, indicated by the scores you have earned on the psychological tests and confirmed by your actual achievements here at the Academy, you have been selected for a mission involving the application of such a new field of scientific development.

“You are placed on orders.

“You will be ready for departure by air at twenty-one hundred hours tonight. You will proceed via New York and Singapore to Krakatoa Dome. You will report to the commanding officer of the Fleet base there, for a special training assignment.

“Gentlemen, you are dismissed.”

And we saluted, about-faced and marched out.

“I told you so,” hissed Harley Danthorpe, the moment we were out of the Commandant’s private office. “I had the inside drift!”

But even Danthorpe couldn’t tell us what the “special training assignment” might be.