Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (163 page)

Well, they were not satisfied with it now, as I discovered quickly enough. Mikhail Goncharov, the Commercial Attaché, was an old friend of mine; he told me all he knew, but it was not much.

‘We’ve just had an urgent cable from Ceylon,’ he said. ‘They want you out there immediately. There’s serious trouble at the hydrothermal project.’

‘What sort of trouble?’ I asked. I knew at once, of course, that it would be the deep end, for that was the only part of the installation that had concerned us. The Russians themselves had done all the work on land, but they had had to call on us to fix those grids three thousand feet down in the Indian Ocean. There is no other firm in the world that can live up to our motto: ANY JOB, ANY DEPTH.

‘All I know,’ said Mikhail, ‘is that the site engineers report a complete breakdown, that the Prime Minister of Ceylon is opening the plant three weeks from now, and that Moscow will be very, very unhappy if it’s not working then.’

My mind went rapidly through the penalty clauses in our contract. The firm seemed to be covered, because the client had signed the take-over certificate, thereby admitting that the job was up to specification. However, it was not as simple as that; if negligence on our part was proved, we might be safe from legal action – but it would be very bad for business. And it would be even worse for me, personally; for I had been project supervisor in Trinco Deep.

Don’t call me a diver, please; I hate the name. I’m a deep-sea engineer, and I use diving gear about as often as an airman uses a parachute. Most of my work is done with TV and remote-controlled robots. When I do have to go down myself, I’m inside a minisub with external manipulators. We call it a lobster, because of its claws; the standard model works down to five thousand feet, but there are special versions that will operate at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I’ve never been there myself, but will be glad to quote terms if you’re interested. At a rough estimate, it will cost you a dollar a foot plus a thousand an hour on the job itself.

I realised that the Russians meant business when Mikhail said that a jet was waiting at Zurich, and could I be at the airport within two hours?

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I can’t do a thing without equipment – and the gear needed even for an inspection weighs tons. Besides, it’s all at Spezia.’

‘I know,’ Mikhail answered implacably. ‘We’ll have another jet transport there. Cable from Ceylon as soon as you know what you want: it will be on the site within twelve hours. But please don’t talk to anyone about this; we prefer to keep our problems to ourselves.’

I agreed with this, for it was my problem, too. As I left the office, Mikhail pointed to the wall calendar, said ‘Three weeks’, and ran his finger around his throat. And I knew he wasn’t thinking of
his
neck.

Two hours later I was climbing over the Alps, saying goodbye to the family by radio, and wondering why, like every other sensible Swiss, I hadn’t become a banker or gone into the watch business. It was all the fault of the Picards and Hannes Keller, I told myself moodily: why did they have to start this deep-sea tradition, in Switzerland of all countries? Then I settled down to sleep, knowing that I would have little enough in the days to come.

We landed at Trincomalee just after dawn, and the huge, complex harbour – whose geography I’ve never quite mastered – was a maze of capes, islands, interconnecting waterways, and basins large enough to hold all the navies of the world. I could see the big white control building, in a somewhat flamboyant architectural style, on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean. The site was pure propaganda – though of course if I’d been Russian I’d have called it ‘public relations’.

Not that I really blamed my clients; they had good reason to be proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet made to harness the thermal energy of the sea. It was not the first attempt. There had been an unsuccessful one by the French scientist Georges Claude in the 1930s, and a much bigger one at Abidjan, on the west coast of Africa, in the 1950s.

All these projects depended on the same surprising fact: even in the tropics the sea a mile down is almost at freezing point. Where billions of tons of water are concerned, this temperature difference represents a colossal amount of energy – and a fine challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.

Claude and his successors had tried to tap this energy with low-pressure steam engines; the Russians had used a much simpler and more direct method. For over a hundred years it had been known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end is heated and the other cooled, and ever since the 1940s Russian scientists had been working to put this ‘thermoelectric’ effect to practical use. Their earliest devices had not been very efficient – though good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of kerosene lamps. But in 1974 they had made a big, and still-secret, breakthrough. Though I fixed the power elements at the cold end of the system, I never really saw them; they were completely hidden in anticorrosive paint. All I know is that they formed a big grid, like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.

I recognised most of the faces in the little crowd waiting on the Trinco airstrip; friends or enemies, they all seemed glad to see me – especially Chief Engineer Shapiro.

‘Well, Lev,’ I said, as we drove out in the station wagon, ‘what’s the trouble?’

‘We don’t know,’ he said frankly. ‘It’s your job to find out – and to put it right.’

‘Well, what
happened
?’

‘Everything worked perfectly up to the full-power tests,’ he answered. ‘Output was within five per cent of estimate until 0134 Tuesday morning.’ He grimaced; obviously that time was engraved on his heart. ‘Then the voltage started to fluctuate violently, so we cut the load and watched the meters. I thought that some idiot of a skipper had hooked the cables – you know the trouble we’ve taken to avoid
that
happening – so we switched on the searchlights and looked out to sea. There wasn’t a ship in sight. Anyway, who would have tried to anchor just
outside
the harbour on a clear, calm night?

‘There was nothing we could do except watch the instruments and keep testing; I’ll show you all the graphs when we get to the office. After four minutes everything went open circuit. We can locate the break exactly, of course – and it’s in the deepest part, right at the grid. It
would
be there, and not at
this
end of the system,’ he added gloomily, pointing out the window.

We were just driving past the Solar Pond – the equivalent of the boiler in a conventional heat engine. This was an idea that the Russians had borrowed from the Israelis. It was simply a shallow lake, blackened at the bottom, holding a concentrated solution of brine. It acts as a very efficient heat trap, and the sun’s rays bring the liquid up to almost two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Submerged in it were the ‘hot’ grids of the thermoelectric system, every inch of two fathoms down. Massive cables connected them to my department, a hundred and fifty degrees colder and three thousand feet lower, in the undersea canyon that comes to the very entrance of Trinco harbour.

‘I suppose you checked for earthquakes?’ I asked, not very hopefully.

‘Of course. There was nothing on the seismograph.’

‘What about whales? I warned you that they might give trouble.’

More than a year ago, when the main conductors were being run out to sea, I’d told the engineers about the drowned sperm whale found entangled in a telegraph cable half a mile down off South America. About a dozen similar cases are known – but ours, it seemed, was not one of them.

‘That was the second thing we thought of,’ answered Shapiro. ‘We got on to the Fisheries Department, the Navy, and the Air Force. No whales anywhere along the coast.’

It was at that point that I stopped theorising, because I overheard something that made me a little uncomfortable. Like all Swiss, I’m good at languages, and have picked up a fair amount of Russian. There was no need to be much of a linguist, however, to recognise the word
sabotash
.

It was spoken by Dimitri Karpukhin, the political adviser on the project. I didn’t like him; nor did the engineers, who sometimes went out of their way to be rude to him. One of the old-style Communists who had never quite escaped from the shadow of Stalin, he was suspicious of everything outside the Soviet Union, and most of the things inside it. Sabotage was just the explanation that would appeal to him.

There were, of course, a great many people who would not exactly be brokenhearted if the Trinco Power Project failed. Politically, the prestige of the USSR was committed; economically, billions were involved, for if hydrothermal plants proved a success, they might compete with oil, coal, water power, and, especially, nuclear energy.

Yet I could not really believe in sabotage; after all, the Cold War was over. It was just possible that someone had made a clumsy attempt to grab a sample of the grid, but even this seemed unlikely. I could count on my fingers the number of people in the world who could tackle such a job – and half of them were on my payroll.

The underwater TV camera arrived that same evening, and by working all through the night we had cameras, monitors, and over a mile of coaxial cable loaded aboard a launch. As we pulled out of the harbour, I thought I saw a familiar figure standing on the jetty, but it was too far to be certain and I had other things on my mind. If you must know, I am not a good sailor; I am only really happy
underneath
the sea.

We took a careful fix on the Round Island lighthouse and stationed ourselves directly above the grid. The self-propelled camera, looking like a midget bathyscape, went over the side; as we watched the monitors, we went with it in spirit.

The water was extremely clear, and extremely empty, but as we neared the bottom there were a few signs of life. A small shark came and stared at us. Then a pulsating blob of jelly went drifting by, followed by a thing like a big spider, with hundreds of hairy legs tangling and twisting together. At last the sloping canyon wall swam into view. We were right on target, for there were the thick cables running down into the depths, just as I had seen them when I made the final check of the installation six months ago.

I turned on the low-powered jets and let the camera drift down the power cables. They seemed in perfect condition, still firmly anchored by the pitons we had driven into the rock. It was not until I came to the grid itself that there was any sign of trouble.

Have you ever seen the radiator grille of a car after it’s run into a lamppost? Well, one section of the grid looked very much like that. Something had battered it in, as if a madman had gone to work on it with a sledgehammer.

There were gasps of astonishment and anger from the people looking over my shoulder. I heard
sabotash
muttered again, and for the first time began to take it seriously. The only other explanation that made sense was a falling boulder, but the slopes of the canyon had been carefully checked against this very possibility.

Whatever the cause, the damaged grid had to be replaced. That could not be done until my lobster – all twenty tons of it – had been flown out from the Spezia dockyard where it was kept between jobs.

‘Well,’ said Shapiro, when I had finished my visual inspection and photographed the sorry spectacle on the screen, ‘how long will it take?’

I refused to commit myself. The first thing I ever learned in the underwater business is that no job turns out as you expect. Cost and time estimates can never be firm because it’s not until you’re halfway through a contract that you know exactly what you’re up against.

My private guess was three days. So I said: ‘If everything goes well, it shouldn’t take more than a week.’

Shapiro groaned. ‘Can’t you do it quicker?’

‘I won’t tempt fate by making rash promises. Anyway, that still gives you two weeks before your deadline.’

He had to be content with that, though he kept nagging at me all the way back into the harbour. When we got there, he had something else to think about.

‘Morning, Joe,’ I said to the man who was still waiting patiently on the jetty. ‘I thought I recognised you on the way out. What are
you
doing here?’

‘I was going to ask you the same question.’

‘You’d better speak to my boss. Chief Engineer Shapiro, meet Joe Watkins, science correspondent of
Time
.’

Lev’s response was not exactly cordial. Normally, there was nothing he liked better than talking to newsmen, who arrived at the rate of about one a week. Now, as the target date approached, they would be flying in from all directions. Including, of course, Russia. And at the present moment Tass would be just as unwelcome as
Time
.

It was amusing to see how Karpukhin took charge of the situation. From that moment, Joe had permanently attached to him as guide, philosopher, and drinking companion a smooth young public-relations type named Sergei Markov. Despite all Joe’s efforts, the two were inseparable. In the middle of the afternoon, weary after a long conference in Shapiro’s office, I caught up with them for a belated lunch at the government resthouse.