Undersea City (16 page)

But it was not enough, as I say.

Wearily, almost beyond hope, we went back to Station K to make more readings and more forecasts.

Canned dance music was on the Dome P.A. systemcanned dance music and reassuring statements from the City Council. In disgust, Lt. Tsuya finally turned it off.

We had completed another forecast, and what it showed was the same as always. The time varied slightly, the exact amplitude of the quake was off a few points—

But the big quake had yet to strike. All our forecasts agreed.

The shocks we had already suffered had damaged our instruments. There was no help for that; they had to be built to record the tiniest movements of the rock, and the severe jarring of even a Force Four shock was bound to knock them awry. Yeoman Harris, with a hastily gathered crew of instrument technicians, was busily checking and readjusting them while we made our forecasts.

When we were through, Lt. Tsuya demanded: “What about it, Harris? Is everything working right now?”

The yeoman scratched his head. “I’m not sure, Lieutenant,” he admitted. “Everything checks out, but—Well, see for yourself.”

Lt. Tsuya trotted over to the microseismograph. He took one look, then blazed:

“Ridiculous! You’ve got something wrong here. These readings—”

Then he paused.

He stared for a long time at the microseismograph trace, frowning. Then, in a different tone: “McKerrow. Eden. Come and see what you make of this.”

We hurried over to look.

The amplitude and distance trace was all wrong to begin with. It showed a small, steady, nearby vibration—too rapid and regular to be a rock movement, too strong and powerful to be any machine vibration. That was preposterous; no such vibration should exist. And then the direction shown—why, that was utterly out of the question! For the epicenter of this little disturbance was not down in the magma or at the plotted faults—it wasn’t down at all—it was, if anything, up
higher
than Station K itself!

McKerrow said bluntly: “The machine’s all wet. Get busy, Harris. You’ve messed it up.”

“No, wait,” said Lt. Tsuya. He scowled. “Watch the direction vector,” he commanded. “It isn’t constant. I’ve seen it change in the past few seconds.”

We watched.

And it was true! Whatever the cause of this small, steady disturbance was, it was not fixed in one place. It was moving, slowly but perceptibly; the readings changed under our eyes; while we watched the direction showed an azimuth change of three or four degrees, and an elevation change as well. The source of the disturbance dipped until it was level with the depth of Station K—then lower; and on the distance and amplitude trace it clearly showed that, whatever it was, it was coming closer.

“What in the world!” cried Lieutenant McKerrow. “Tsuya, have you got a pet earthquake coming to call on us?”

Tsuya shook his head.

He said solemnly: “Unless I’m crazy, I know what that is.

“It’s the MOLE! It has come back from the depths—and it’s cruising around right now, under Krakatoa Dome!”

For long minutes we stood there watching it—it was incredible! In spite of everything, I had hardly believed that any man-made machine could cruise through solid rock. I had seen our geosondes drop down into basalt, and hadn’t believed; I had seen the ship in the pit, and hadn’t believed; in spite of all reason and the evidence of my senses, the whole thing had just seemed too crazily ridiculous for belief.

But now—now I had to believe! For nothing else could explain what we were seeing. In the rock beneath us a machine, probably bearing my uncle and Bob Eskow, if not others, was swimming about as casually as a herring in the sea’s shallows!

The door to the outer shaft opened and Harley Danthorpe, looking pale and with a haunted misery in his eyes that I didn’t understand, came wearily in. “Cadet Danthorpe,” he said, with a tragic effort at briskness, “reporting for duty, sir!”

“At ease,” said Lieutenant Tsuya absently, glancing at him. Then he stiffened. “Danthorpe!” he barked. “What’s the matter with you!”

Harley’s eyes were bulging now, staring in horror at something beyond us. He pointed and tried to speak, strangling. “The—the rock!” he cried.

We turned and stared.

Under my hand the microseismograph pen was scratching wildly,
trying
to record vibrations far huger than it was ever meant to scribe.

In the wall a long crack split open, and water cascaded from it.

Earthquake?

No—there was no earthquake. It was something far stranger! For from that crack came a grinding, tearing, ripping, crunching sound, and the whine of high-speed engines.

A bright gleaming edenite nose poked out of that crack.

Spiral ortholytic drill elements, whirling and coruscating, flared into life behind it.

A shuddering, rattling crash of rock opened a pathway—

And into the lowermost room of our Station K, like a ferret blundering into a rabbit’s warren, came crunching the long mechanical body of a Manned Ortholytic Excavator—a MOLE—the stolen MOLE that Bob Eskow had entered in the drainage sump, that had since caused the quakes that seemed to be shaking Krakatoa Dome down around our ears!

Lieutenant Tsuya moved fast for a lean little man. He was back in his private office, into his locker and back again with a gun in his hand before the rest of as had recovered from our first astonished shock.

“Stand back!” he cried. “All of you, out of the way!”

The MOLE crept, rattling and whining, a few yards into the room, demolishing the wall charts, shattering the forecast table, chewing a whole rack of blank maps and diagram sheets into confetti.

Then the whirling ortholytic drill elements slowed, dulled, stopped.

The hatch at the top of the little sea-car, now doubling as a MOLE, trembled and rasped. A hand pushed it part way open. It struck against the fragments of rock; the hand shoved hard, hesitated, then banged it three or four times against the loosened rock.

Shards fell. The hatch opened.

And out of it came Bob Eskow, looking like the end of a day of wrath.

“Halt!” rapped Lt. Tsuya, the gun in his hand. “Eskow, don’t make a move!”

Bob looked up dizzily, as though he couldn’t comprehend what the lieutenant was doing with a gun in his hand. He slid down the ribs of the sea-car’s boarding ladder, staggered, almost collapsed and managed to save himself by clutching at the edenite hull. And that was a mistake, because it was hot—blistering hot—smoke-hot, from the friction of the drill elements against the naked rock. Bob cried out and pulled his hand away.

But the pain seemed to bring him back to consciousness.

“Sorry,” he whispered, holding one hand in the other, staring at the lieutenant. “We’ve made an awful mess out of your station, sir.”

“You’ve made a bigger mess than that, Eskow!” rapped the lieutenant.

“I—I—” Bob seemed at a loss for words. At last he said: “Can the others come out of the MOLE, sir?”

“Others?” Lt. Tsuya frowned. “Well, very well,” he conceded at last.

With difficulty Bob climbed back up the boarding ladder and spoke into the hatch.

First my uncle, Stewart Eden, appeared—weary, his face beaded with sweat, filthy with grime, but looking in far better health than I had seen him the day before. “Jim!” he boomed, and then caught sight of Lt. Tsuya with the gun. He frowned quizzically, but said nothing.

After my uncle—then Gideon Park. He stood at the open hatch and grinned at us, then turned back and reached down into the depths of the ship to help out the last member of the MOLE’s crew.

It was the old Chinese I had seen with Bob!

I heard a gasp from beside me. It was Lt. Tsuya.

“Doctor Koyetsu!” he gasped. The muzzle of his gun wavered and dropped toward the floor. “Doctor, what are you doing here?”

Chinese? Not at all! The “old Chinese” was the Japanese seismologist who had written most of the books on our station shelves—John Koyetsu!

From the moment when Lt. Tsuya saw his own personal hero, Dr. Koyetsu, in the company of my uncle and the others, his certainty that my uncle was a criminal disappeared. It was like the changing of night into day. He turned, without a word, and put the gun away.

And then he said simply: “Doctor Koyetsu, will you tell me what this is all about.”

The doctor said wearily: “Of course.” He looked around, a lean, worn old man, pressed very far beyond the limits of his endurance, for a place to sit. Hastily Harley Danthorpe dragged a folding chair across the rock floor to him.

“Thank you,” said the doctor, and smiled. He sat.

“You remember what happened at Nansei Shoto Dome,” he said abruptly. Lt. Tsuya nodded—we all nodded, for it was at Nanei Shoto that the greatest underwater tragedy in history had occurred, when this very Dr. John Koyetsu had issued a wrong forecast and prevented the evacuation of the dome.

“I was wrong at Nanei Shoto,” he said harshly. “I have given the rest of my life to finding out why—and to doing something about it.

“The first thing I did,” he said, “was to work with Father Tide, for the Fordham Foundation—where we designed the geosonde, and later this MOLE.” He patted its cooling flanks. “As you know, with the help of the sondes, we have been able to forecast quakes much more accurately than ever before.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” I said bitterly—and then hurriedly apologized for interrupting. But Dr. Koyetsu smiled.

“Your forecasts were wrong for a good reason, Jim,” he said. “We made them wrong.”

“For mere forecasting is not enough. I determined to find a way not only to
predict
quakes far enough ahead to minimize damage…but to
prevent
them. And the way to prevent them turned out to be—the creation of artificial quakes. Small ones. Timed just so, occurring in just such a place, that they would relieve the strain in the mother rock that was building up to a great devastation—and release it in small and harmless quakes. Such as the ones that you have seen here in Krakatoa.

“For we created them, the four of us.”

The news shook us more than any of the quakes had. Lt. Tsuya’s face was furrowed with perplexity; Harley Danthorpe stood stunned, his eyes open wide; Lt. McKerrow shook his head endlessly.

But I—I was exultant!

“I told you!” I burst out. “I told you my uncle couldn’t be involved in anything dishonest or wrong. You should have believed me!”

Lt. Tsuya said harshly: “One minute, Eden! I grant you that Doctor Koyetsu’s word goes a long way with me, but there are still a lot of questions that have to be answered for my satisfaction. You can’t talk black into white—and your uncle has already admitted, for example, that he made a million dollars out of the panic from the first quake. Not to mention his possession of nuclear explosives!”

“But I think I can explain it all,” I said excitedly. “If you will just listen! Because I think that million dollars was far less than he had already spent—that the money was used to pay for the big project on which he was engaged.”

“And what was that?” barked the lieutenant.

“The saving of Krakatoa Dome!”

My uncle grinned and spoke up. “Good boy, Jim,” he said in his warm, chuckling voice. “And how did you think I was going to do that?”

“Why—” I hesitated, trying to remember exactly what Dr. Koyetsu had said, and to fit it in with all the theory of seismic processes which I had been taught right here in this station—”why, I think it would go something like this. This city stands over a dangerous fault. We have been watching the seismic stresses increase along the fault. The only question was when the whole business would go off.

“But if it could be made to go off prematurely, then the buildup would not be complete. Particularly, if the stress could be released a little bit at a time, no one quake would be big enough to do much damage. And the aggregate effect would completely prevent the big, damaging one.

“It would be a matter of trigger forces,” I went on quickly—and I saw Gideon’s warm eye wink at me, and knew that I was on a level keel—“and in order to trigger the small, artificial quakes, you would use nuclear energy!

“You would use, in fact, the H-bomb fuses we found in your safe!”

Dr. Koyetsu, smiling and nodding, droned in professorial style: “Exactly right, Cadet Eden. Accumulated crustal tensions are relieved by a series of controlled minor quakes released by nucleonic explosives.”

And—“Go to the head of the class, Jim!” boomed my uncle.

But it wasn’t quite enough for Lt. Tsuya.

He was convinced, there was no doubt of it. It was impossible for him to doubt Dr.

Koyetsu, not to mention my uncle. But he was also an officer of the Sub-Sea Fleet, with a duty to do; and part of that duty was that he should enforce its regulations.

“That leaves three questions,” he barked. “Where did you get a MOLE? Where did you get your nucleonic explosives? And, most of all—why was it necessary for you to keep it all a secret?”

My uncle grinned and wheezed: “You should be able to answer that last question.” He sat down, color flooding back into his face, his hollowed blue eyes filled once again with their old unquenchable fire. “Secrecy? It was absolutely essential that this operation be carried out in secrecy. What could we do—go to the city council and say, ‘Please, gentlemen, we have an idea that we might be able to prevent earthquake damage to the dome. Of course, well have to
start
a couple of earthquakes to do it/ Should we have done that? Put it this way. Would
you
have done it, remembering what difficulties you yourself had in trying to deal with a council dominated by Barnacle Ben Danthorpe?”

Harley Danthorpe flushed but said nothing. Lt. Tsuya frowned thoughtfully, then nodded: “Very well,” he said. “What about the other questions?”

My uncle said forcefully: “We did what we had to do to save lives!

“This all began a year ago, when Doctor Koyetsu came to me at my home in Marinia. He had kept his eye on the Krakatoa faults. He knew that there was danger here—that sooner or later there would be a major quake, Force Ten or greater, and that that would be the end of Krakatoa Dome.