Undersea City (19 page)

“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.

A small-sized Santa Claus in clerical black was saying urgently: “Jim! Jim, boy. Here, take a bit of this for me.”

And something acrid and burning was being forced into my mouth.

I sat up, gasping and choking, and looked into the dear, sea-blue eyes of Father Tide.

“Wha—What—”

“Don’t try to talk, boy,” Father Tide said comfortably, in his clear, warm voice. His face was smiling, the seacoral cheeks creased with lines of good humor. “You’re all right, Jim. You’re in my sea-car. We’re on our way back to Krakatoa!”

“Krakatoa?” And then it all came flooding back to me. “But Krakatoa is flooded out, Father Tide! We’ve been there. Water in the quake station, no sign of life!”

He frowned worriedly. But at last he said: “We’ll go back, Jim. Perhaps there may be survivors…” But he could not meet my eye.

I stood up. I was in the forward compartment of a sea-car, Father Tide’s own sea-car, there was no doubt of that. For every inch of hull wall was lined with his seismological equipment; microseismographs, core samplers, sound-ranging apparatus, everything. This was the little ship in which Father Tide had roamed the world, studying the secret habits of the quake faults, gathering knowledge without which Dr. Koyetsu’s principles could never have been developed. I had heard much of this sea-car, and now I was in it.

And I was not alone!

Gideon Park bent over me, his broad black face gleaming with a smile like a sunburst. “Jim, you’re all right! We were worried. The rest of us came to an hour ago, but you’re a stubborn case, boy!”

“Rest of us?” I demanded.

Gideon nodded. “All of us,” he said solemnly. “Father Tide was cruising the area—we were just over the epicenter, you see—and he detected the vibrations of the MOLE. The steering mechanism had failed once and for all, but the ortholytic drills were still going—pointed straight up, churning the sea-bottom sludge, with all of us laid out flat inside it. But Father Tide got us out.” He nodded grimly. “He’s quite a man. This little sea-car was loaded gunnels-awash with equipment and refugees already. You should see the aft compartments! But that didn’t stop him. He took us aboard…”

Gideon turned away.

“So we’re safe, Jim,” he said. “But as for the others back in Krakatoa Dome—your uncle and Doctor Koyetsu, for two…”

He didn’t finish.

There wasn’t any need to finish.

But everything else was triumph! In our hearts we grieved for my uncle and the fine people of Krakatoa Dome; but if they had perished, at least we had the consolation of knowing that they would be the last, the secrets of the seismic forces that threatened destruction had been mastered, with Dr. Koyetsu’s technique the danger was gone. We worked like demons, all of us, in that little instrument-lined cabin—analyzing the readings Father Tide had made, converting his soundings into plotting measurements, drawing our graphs and charts. And—

“It worked!” whooped Harley Danthorpe, brandishing his forecast sheet. “Look what I get! Probable force, zero. Probable time, infinity. And probable error—so small that I didn’t work it out!”

“It checks!” cried Lt. Tsuya, his lean face beaming for the first time in days. “I get the same results. How about you, Eden? Eskow?”

We both nodded.

The negative gravity anomaly had begun to fall; the strain had been relieved.

Whatever had happened to Krakatoa, the process worked.

We had proved that seaquakes could be forecast; now we had proved that they could be controlled. Now there was no reason for another Nansei Shoto Dome. Even the dry-side cities were safer now. The great tragedies of Lisbon and San Francisco need never happen again.

(But that didn’t help those left in Krakatoa!)

We wrung each others’ hands solemnly.

All that next hour, while the little sea-car bustled busily back to Krakatoa, we hung over our seismographs and geosonde gear, alert for any vibration in the earth that might change the bright picture we had built up. But there was none. The crustal strain had been relieved, and the earth beneath the city was again at rest. In the aft compartments the refugees sat patiently, their faces grim but determined. They had been told how we had discovered the lower levels, at least, of Krakatoa to be flooded by the hammering sea; they knew how slim were the chances of finding life anywhere in the Dome. And hardly one of them but had left family or friends back there; it was no wonder that their faces were grim. But they were sub-sea pioneers. If the dome was gone, they would build a new dome!

And so, after long, tense minutes, we drew close to Krakatoa.…

Father Tide, his voice queerly muffled, cried: “I—I see indications of the edenite effect!

That flow! Those electronic pulses in the scanner screens. I—I think the dome is still intact!”

And in a moment we all saw.

Bulking enormous in the abyss, surrounded by a swarm of sea-cars returning to its sheltering ports, the round, palely gleaming shield of Krakatoa Dome stood strong and safe.

The armor had not failed!

Not only had Dr. Koyetsu’s triggering technique proved itself for the future—but it had saved Krakatoa itself with its teeming hundreds of thousands and all its great structures!

Hardly able to speak, we took our place in the long lines of vessels scrambling for position in front of the lock to each unloading quay. Time stopped. It must have been more than an hour, but it seemed hardly seconds until we were in the lock, and moored, and the hatches open…

And once again we stepped out into the warm, busy bustle of Krakatoa Dome.

We found my uncle and Dr. Koyetsu in the hospital. “Nothing serious, boy,”

whispered my uncle in his warm, chuckling voice. “Just worn out! After you left in the MOLE, the sea began to hammer in to Station K. We had to get out of there!

“But we made it. The whole Fleet Base was evacuated to higher levels, beyond the edenite shield. And the edenite held, in spite of all John’s quakes!” He turned and grinned across the space between the beds at Dr. Koyetsu, beside him.

Beside me, Gideon Park tightened his arm around my shoulder. “Why, Stewart,” he said, “we weren’t worried at all. Were we, Jim?”

“Of course not,” I assured my uncle solemnly. “We knew you’d pull through.”

I said it plausibly…but Bob and Harley Danthorpe, laughing their heads off, spoiled the effect.

My uncle grinned.

“It’s all over,” he said. “Now—we can all get back to work. The sea’s still got plenty of fight left in her, and we can’t conquer her by lying around in a hospital bed. Nurse!” he bawled, kicking the sheets off and standing up, barelegged in his short hospital gown. “Nurse, bring me my clothes so I can get out of here. The tides don’t wait!”