Undersea City

7 Life on the Lid

Harley said knowingly: “You haven’t got the inside drift. Take my word for it, Bob’s up in the dome right now, having himself a time.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said, but there seemed to be every chance that Harley was right.

The guards checked our passes, and we took the elevator up to the dome itself. We walked out into Krakatoa Dome, into the throbbing of the pump rooms and the air circulators, past the locks where a sleek cargo sub-sea liner was nuzzling into the edenite pressure chamber.

I said suddenly: “Let’s look for him.”

Harley gloated: “Ha! So you admit—”

Then he stopped.

He looked at my face, shrugged, changed expression. And then, after a moment, he squinted at his watch. “Well,” he said a little reluctantly, “I’ll tell you how it is. I don’t mind, but I’ve got a date for dinner with my folks in three hours. Are you coming along?”

I said: “Help me look for Bob.”

He shrugged. “Oh, all right,” he said at last. “Why not? But I’m not missing my father’s chef’s cooking! If we don’t find him by nineteen hundred hours—that’s it!”

We stepped onto a circular slidewalk, and then off it again at a radial way that was moving toward the center of the dome.

“Most men off duty head for the tipper southeast octant,” Harley said expertly. “That’s the White Way, as we call it—where the shops and theaters and restaurants are. Now, you lubbers want to be careful on a slidewalk, because it’ll pitch you off if you aren’t braced for it. Watch the way I do it, Jim.”

“I’m not exactly a lubber,” I protested.

He shrugged. “Depends on your point of view,” he said reasonably. “You’ve spent a couple weeks in a dome. I’ve spent my whole life here. I don’t know what you are—to a lubber; but I know what you are to me.”

He grinned. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll give you the inside drift as we go.”

He led me toward another bank of elevators.

“To begin with,” he lectured, “Krakatoa Dome’s a perfect hemisphere, except for the tube at the top, that goes to the qoating terminal on the surface. It’s two thousand feet in diameter, and a thousand feet high—not counting the drainage pumps, the warehouse districts and so on, that are actually quarried out of the sea floor. And not counting Station K.”

“I see,” I said, hardly listening. I was scanning every passing face, hoping to see Bob.

“Those pumps are what keep out the sea. No quake is likely really to hurt the dome itself—it would take Force Eight at the least, probably Nine or even Ten. But even a smaller quake, if it hit just wrong, might fissure the rock underneath us, where there’s no edenite film. Then—boom! The sea would come pounding in!”

I glanced at him. He actually seemed to enjoy the prospect!

“Don’t let it get you, Jim,” he said consolingly. “I mean, it’s true that we’re living on the lid of an active seismic zone. What of it? It’s true that if the pumps went, and the basic rock split, we couldn’t keep the sea out of the dome. But there’s still a chance that we might survive, you know. Oh, not down at Station K—that would go, sure. But the dome itself, up here, is divided into octants, and each one can be sealed off in a second!

“Of course,” he said meditatively, “we might not have a second.

“Especially,” he added, “if anything happened to the power supply, and the automatic octant barriers didn’t go on!”

I let him talk. Why not? He was trying to scare a lubber—but, no matter what he thought, I wasn’t a lubber. I love the deeps too well to feel that they are an enemy!

But then we were up a dozen decks, and I said:

“That’s enough, Harley. All right? I’d like to concentrate on looking for Bob.”

He grinned. “Got under your skin a little, eh?” he said amiably—and wrongly. “All right. Well, we’re a long way from Zero Deck. This is the shopping area; let’s take a look around.”

We came out onto a crowded street. It didn’t look much different from any business street in a surface city—at first; until you noticed the Troyon tubes that give it light, set into the metal ceiling that hung forty feet overhead.

We poked through the crowds around the tri-D theaters and the restaurants. There were plenty of people—civilians, crewmen from the sub-sea cargo and passenger vessels, uniformed men from the Fleet. I saw several cadets in sea-red dress uniforms, but none of them was Bob.

We rode on a slidewalk along a circular street to the next radial, then hopped on a slide that took us back to the elevators.

Harley gave his watch a calculating squint. “The dome has a hundred miles of streets,” he said. “With the slidewalks moving at four miles an hour, you’ll be about four working days searching the city—and then Eskow will probably be inside some building when you go by. Better give it up. Come on home with me.”

I said, “Let’s try one more deck.”

We went up to the next deck. The slidewalk took us past rows of shooting galleries and pin-ball machines and novelty shops that sold little plastic models of the dome in mailing cartons. We saw a lot of men in uniform. But none of them was Bob.

“That’s all for me,” Harley Danthorpe said.

I shrugged. He said persuasively: “Why not ride up to the next deck? That’s where my family lives. You might as well look there as anywhere else.”

It seemed reasonable.

We went up one deck more, and out a radial street that was crowded with expensive looking restaurants. We rode the slidewalk through the safety wall, into the residential octant where Danthorpe lived.

The streets were wider there; strips of carefully manicured lawn were growing under the Troyon lights, beside the slidewalks. The apartment buildings glittered sleekly with wealth. The doors were guarded by expensive robot butlers.

“Come in,” said Harley Danthorpe hospitably. “Stay for dinner. My father’s chef can—”

“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. Danthorpe shrugged and left me.

I rode on around through the next safety wall.

It was a different part of the city entirely. I was in the financial district now, and it was after business hours, the streets empty tunnels of plate glass and stainless steel and granite. It wasn’t a likely place to find Bob. I rode on, into the octant.

This was a livelier section by far. It was the crowded residential section where the bulk of the dome’s population lived—not the lavish luxury homes of the Danthorpe family, but the clerks and factory workers, and the families of the Fleet and commercial sub-sea liner crews. It had no glitter, none at all. There were a few little shops on the deck, but the floors above were all apartments. Men in undershirts were reading newspapers on the balconies. Kids were shouting and running, noisily chasing after balls in the street; women in housecoats were calling after them.

I couldn’t think of a single reason why Bob might be here, either.

I had just decided to stay on the circular slidewalk, continuing until it returned to the shopping district again, when—I saw Bob!

He was talking to a man, a wrinkled little Chinese—the man I had seen at our barracks!

I was on the point of rushing up to him, and then, queerly, I stopped myself. Though I hated to admit it, it seemed that there was something going on here—something that involved my good friend Bob Eskow, in a way that I didn’t like. I was no spy, no private detective to take pleasure in shadowing a man and catching him at some evil act. But here was something that I didn’t understand, and I could not make myself step forward until I had a clue as to what was going on.

And they were, in truth, behaving oddly.

It was almost as though they were suspicious of being followed. They spoke briefly, then drifted apart. Bob knelt on the in-walk, fussing with his boots, looking covertly around. The little Chinese ambled a dozen yards away and fed a coin into a sea-chicle vending machine—and he, too, glanced around.

I stayed out of sight.

When they were borne nearly past the barrier wall on the moving in-walk I jumped aboard.

I followed them as closely as I dared. We headed down—down and down; toward the elevators, and then down.

I felt like a sore thumb—my sea-red dress uniform was about the worst possible disguise for a Junior Sub-Sea Ranger on an undercover assignment; I felt foolish besides. But I couldn’t take time to worry about my feelings. I had to stay with them.

Already Bob was standing in line behind three noisy sub-seamen at the down chute. The little Chinese had paused on the landing to put a penny in a news machine. He was stooping over the hooded screen, standing so that he could see the whole landing simply by lifting his eyes.

The more cautiously they behaved, the more sure I was that they were up to something.

I copied their tactics. A couple of cadets from one of the training sub-sea vessels in port—the Simon Lake, by their insignia—were looking at a display window. The window was full of scuba gear, designed for civilian use in shallow water; they were amused by it; I joined them. If I kept my face averted, it was not likely that Bob or the Chinese would recognize me. The cadets paid no attention to me; they were too busy pointing out to one another how much flashy chrome and how little practical use the display of scuba gear had.

Using the side of a chrome electro-gill for a mirror, I saw Bob follow the noisy sub-seamen into the down chute.

The little Chinese left the news machine and sauntered into line for the next car.

I took a chance and got into the down car with him.

He was unwrapping his little packet of sea-chicle, as serious about it as a three-year-old. But just as the automatic door of the car slid shut behind me, he looked up at me for half a second.

And suddenly he was something more than a sea-worn Chinese derelict.

He was a human being.

He was no derelict, either; there was bright intelligence in the look he darted at me. I was sure he knew me, but he made no attempt to speak. And his expression—his expression was something that I shall never forget.

I had thought, in that crazy wondering time of doubt, that there might be danger here for me. And danger there was—it was in his eyes—but not for me! For the look in his eyes was that of an animal caught in a trap. He was afraid! His seamed face was haggard, haunted. He watched me with hollow eyes, then looked away—an animal, caught, waiting to be put out of its misery.

I couldn’t understand.

I turned away almost as quickly as he did, and didn’t meet those eyes again.

We came to the bottom of the down-chute; the car doors opened; we got out. I looked around quickly for Bob—

There was no sign of him at all.

There was only one thing to do, and that was to stay with the Chinese.

Doggedly I kept him in sight, for more than an hour.

We had a tour of the entire dome, and long before the hour was over I knew that the man was playing with me; he knew who I was, and knew that I was following him. I would learn nothing. But I kept on following, for there was nothing else to do.

It began to be close to twenty hundred hours—the time when Bob was supposed to be back on duty at the quake station, the time when Lt. Tsuya wanted to demonstrate to him that Ms-forecast quake would not occur. He had had plenty of time to get back since I had lost him; I could only hope that he had taken advantage of the time. But that did nothing to change the greater mystery, of why he had gone AWOL in the first place, and what his connection was with this man whom I was following.

And as the hour got closer to twenty hundred, then passed it, the man I followed began to act nervous, agitated. Several times he turned and looked back toward me; more than once he actually started in my direction. But each time he changed his mind. And it was not only me he was worried about, for he kept looking overhead, staring about him at the walls, the buildings, the people.

Something very great indeed was on his mind.

I could not imagine what it was—until a terrible moaning sound seemed to fill the dome. It came from somewhere beneath us, far down—so far that it was a distant cruel howling that made no sense.

Then the floor moved crazily under my feet, and it began to make a great deal of sense indeed.

Seaquake!

Bob’s forecast had been right indeed! I heard screams from the people around us, saw the old Chinese turn and begin to run toward me.

Then I caught a glimpse of something big and jagged sailing down from the deck-roof toward me; I tried to leap out of its way, but I was too late, too late; it reached me; I was thrown a couple of yards away; and the lights went out for me.