Bart stopped. He was already out of effective earshot and he did not want to make the mistake of going where he should not go inside the door until he had Michel to guide him. To cover his pause, he made a point of frowning extravagantly and turning around as if just discovering Michel was not with him.
To his relief, he saw his half-brother just turning away from a section of the workbench just inside the entrance. Michel came toward him, one hand stuck into a side pocket of his suit coat, and the pocket bulging more than even Michel’s bunched fist should make it do. Now, having an excuse to wait, Bart also had a quite reasonable excuse to look around him.
The room he had entered was too big to take in at one glance. In the center of it was a huge device, which must be the Tectonal that Michel had talked about. At first glance, it seemed to consist of a round shape—effectively, a doughnut shape—with its bottom edge some two or three feet off the floor. It was in motion, rotating about the central column, a massive round shaft that rose high from the center of the round shape. This was clearly the same shaft he had glimpsed from a distance on the first day as a Steed, when he had carried Pier through one end of an upper room opening on this one. The shaft mounted to and through the ceiling far overhead. Around the four walls of the room ran a continuous series of workbenches like the one he had seen Michel coming from. Benches at which white-coated men and women seemed to be busy with picture screens, other desk-mounted devices and various smaller bits of machinery or material. But these seemed almost unimportant.
Indeed, the room was truly enormous. It was several stories high and had several acres of open floor. Bart, thinking of the interior of factories and steamships as they had been described to him in the past, had expected the space to be crammed with machinery. Instead, it seemed almost empty, although there must be close to a hundred people in white coats busy at the benches.
The walls and the ceiling, and even the floor, were simply polished, faintly pink, rock. But it was the Tectonal, in the center of the open space, that denied the room any real claim to emptiness.
It was simple but gigantic. The turning doughnut-shape itself was perhaps eighty feet in diameter, raised from the floor by the vertical shaft to which it seemed to be attached, although there might have been more underneath than Bart could see from here.
This shaft shone like polished steel, and probably was, to carry such a weight. It was a good ten feet in diameter itself; and stretched upward until it either touched, or penetrated, the ceiling far overhead.
Now that he looked more closely at the doughnut shape, he saw that a milky, semi-transparent surface covered its visible portion, through which he could barely make out what seemed to be an endless number of fins, or sheets of shiny metal, separated from each other by a foot or so. And the whole thing was turning about the shaft at a speed that barely allowed the fins of metal to be seen as separate parts, rather than one blurred mass.
Michel led Bart up to the doughnut shape and put out his hand above the rotating milky shield enclosing the fins.
“Listen,” he said—but Bart was already aware of a low-pitched hum coming from the shield. “If it wasn’t for the fact that we’ve got this protecting us, you and I and everybody else in this room would have lost their hearing by now.”
He pointed to a rock wall nearly a hundred feet away across the room.
“That’ll be coming out in the next few days,” he said, “so as to make seating room for the ceremony. The whole Lordly class—you didn’t see all of them at Court—would have trouble fitting into this room, big as it is, unless we add the lounge beyond—you know it, the one with the big stained-glass window. So the wall comes out. Then we’ll have room for not only Lords and Ladies, but us Hybrids as well. The slaves, of course, are going to have to make do with standing in the corridors leading to here and watching the proceedings on electroscreens.”
“What ceremony?” asked Bart.
Michel looked at him with unusually intent eyes.
“You don’t know?” he answered. “The Commencement. The Breakout. The beginning of the world’s end. Don’t tell me even the slaves haven’t been talking about that?”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Bart. “But it doesn’t mean anything to me. This thing’s already running. What’s going to commence?”
“Right. It’s running, and it has been, for nearly eighteen years now,” said Michel. “But it’s taken that many years just to prime the pump, so to speak.”
“I suppose,” said Bart, “somewhere along the way now you’re going to explain all this you’re telling me about?”
“That’s what we’re here for,” said Michel. He gestured at the turning doughnut-shape. “That, Brother Bart, is the heart of the Tectonal, at least the visible part of it. It goes up, as you see, and down as well, but to get to what’s beyond the ceiling and under the floor below would require some dismantling upstairs and some rather incredible excavation. So you’ll have to make do with what you see here.”
“I see some sort of fan. Or is it a spinning top of some kind?” said Bart.
“Neither,” said Michel. “It’s a technological stirring rod for roiling up the electromagnetic currents in the magma of the central part of this world; and tangling them into an electric storm that’ll end up by breaking the magma out through the crust of the continents and sea floors—”
He was interrupted by one of the white-clad workers in the room, who had come up to them without either of them noticing. The newcomer was a thin, sharp-faced Hybrid in his mid-forties, with an air of authority about him.
“You’re not thinking of taking this person underneath?” the thin man said to Michel.
“Of course,” said Michel soothingly. “Cousin Merk, this is Cousin Bart Saberut, who grew up away from us all in the wilds of the upper world; and only now’s returned to take his rightful place among us. Bart, this is our cousin Merk Jocelyn, assistant Superintendent in the Main Machine Group and probably the ranking person on duty here this shift. Yes, Merk, I’ve been ordered to tutor Bart because he’s been up on the surface nearly all his life; and so we’re just about to crawl under so I can show him the machine’s underside.”
“You can’t do that. We can’t be responsible for what might happen—to the machine, or him. I’m sorry, I’ll have to forbid it.”
“I’ll write your forbiddance into the records, dear cousin,” said Michel. “But as you can see, Yna Sicorro has already issued him a badge—” Bart had forgotten about the badge he wore, and now turned himself slightly to make it harder for Jocelyn to read the name on it.
“Him—badged!” exploded Merk. “When he’s hardly more than a surface savage? Are you going to keep him out from under, or do I have to call Yna and insist that she order you personally to do that?”
“Best of cousins,” said Michel, draping an arm over the thin man’s shoulders, which the other angrily shrugged off, “now, you and I both know you’re running a bluff on us, aren’t you? So, why don’t you trot back to your work and let us get on about ours?”
“You think so?” snapped Merk. “You’ll see! I’m calling Yna.” He turned and stalked off, white coat flapping around his rapidly moving legs. Michel shook his head sadly.
“Sounds like our time here may be shorter than I thought,” he said to Bart.
“Then you’d better give me a quick look under that thing, right now, hadn’t you?” said Bart. He was not sure just why he wanted to look under the rotating apparatus, but since he had come this far . . . he looked at the machine shape. The whirling metal flanges were completely enclosed in the milkily transparent cover, and in spite of what he had just said, there was a strong, instinctive, exciting feeling of danger that spread along to his nerve-ends at the idea of crawling in underneath it. He pushed the feeling aside. “There’s time enough for that, still, isn’t there?”
Michel nodded.
“I think so,” he answered soberly. “Come on, then.” He took his fist out of his pocket, producing wh
at looked to Bart like two pairs of oversized earmuffs with a slim, carved piece coming around from one of the ear-parts of each pair. The earmuffs seemed to be made of some hard material, rather than soft; and they bulged out like the bottoms of teacups. Each of these pairs was connected to the other pair by some eight feet of flexible cord that felt—when Bart picked it up between his fingers—like something smoother than ordinary cord or leather, but with some kind of hard core within, though that was also flexible.
“Put them on,” said Michel, demonstrating. “Cover your ears.”
He put on one pair of the devices. The slim piece attached, curved around until its end almost touched his lips. Bart followed his example and was surprised to find that, although they were in no way sticky, the earmufflike parts clung over his ears like iron to a magnet.
“Have you got them on all right? Can you hear me?” Michel spoke to him, thinly but clearly, directly in his covered ears.
“Yes,” he said, and his voice, too, sounded thin and strange in his ears as Michel’s had done.
“All right, then,” said Michel’s voice. “Follow me. Keep well down and whatever you do, don’t reach up to touch the shield overhead. It ought to be perfectly safe to touch it, but let’s not take any chances. And you’ve got to stay close enough to me for the wire to reach. Ready? Go!”
He got down on his back and began to pull himself with his arms, sliding across the smooth floor, in under the edge of the machine. Bart imitated him and followed. He had expected darkness and had fleetingly wondered how they were to see anything in any detail underneath here in only the light that was reflected from the room outside. But he found the space into which they crawled had its own, if very strange, form of lighting.
There was a good foot and a little of clearance between his upturned face and the same milky, semi-transparent shielding that he had seen covering the spinning, vertical sheets of metal on the sides and above. But down here, above the shielding and below the turning fan blades, once they were more than a few feet in from the rim, was a network—something like a grille—of interconnected, heavy bars that looked like copper but seemed to give off a pale, almost moonlightlike glow.
“What’s that light?” he asked Michel.
It was strange to speak into the small end of the curved part touching his lips; even stranger to hear Michel’s voice in answer, thin and distant-sounding, but clear and understandable in his ears.
“It’s a lot of things,” Michel’s voice answered him now, “but it’s toward the blue end of the spectrum and there’s a lot of ultraviolet—that’s invisible light which is beyond the color of blue, at the blue end of the spectrum, if Vincent taught you anything about the spectrum of visible light—”
“He did,” broke in Bart shortly.
“Ah, well, I’d have thought he might. At any rate, the ultraviolet is so far beyond the visible end you can’t see it. It’s there, though, as in natural sunlight, too, our researchers tell us. It’s what gives you a sunburn and it helps plants grow. It’s in our corridor and other lights too, because we try to make our light down here as much like natural light as possible. But there’s so much of it right here that you’d get a bad bum on your hands and face if we stayed here half an hour or so.”
“I see,” said Bart, mentally filing the fact that whatever Michel had to show him must be something that could be shown in something less than half an hour. Not that they probably had anything like that much time before they were rousted out from under here.
It was only after that thought that the implications of these people being able to produce light beyond the visible spectrum began to impact on Bart. He had taken almost for granted their machines for seeing and talking at a distance over wires, their lighting and ventilating systems and everything else, so far. He had told himself that these things were merely devices he, himself, had not known existed. But the sudden connection between invisible light and what his father had taught him gave him unexpectedly a sort of yardstick by which he could measure the distance of their accomplishments; and he was suddenly shocked to feel how much perhaps these strange cavern people might indeed have learned, that humanity in the upper world did not know.
“All right,” Michel’s voice in his ears interrupted his thoughts, “we stop here. Look closely at what you see above you.”
Bart turned his attention to what hung a foot and a bit above his nose.
The milky shield was the same, but what he stared at now was an intricate interlacing of the light-shedding bars, while connecting them and running between them were small flexible cables each of which seemed to be sheathed in a woven network of silver wire. Above all these, in the few empty spaces he could see, there was only gloom, since the moonlight illumination of the glowing bars seemed to block out further vision. No sign of the moving blades of metal he had seen from the outside was now visible.
Tilting his head back, Bart’s eyes focused on the shiny metal surface of a round pillar of shaft—which, he suddenly realized, was turning as the metal blades had turned and which must be the continuation of the metal shaft he had seen reaching up to and through the ceiling. It was about eight or ten feet beyond him, occupying the center of the area under the doughnut shape, and in the luminous light under the doughnut the shaft seemed to be dark in color. The featurelessness of the metal had fooled his eye, he realized, into not seeing the swift rotation of the shaft at first.
“I won’t try to explain in any detail how the Tectonal works,” Michel’s voice said in his ears. “For one thing, I’m not an engineer in this area and for another thing it’d take far too long. Briefly— and you’ll simply have to take my word for it—the part we’re lying under is the motivational part for the shaft farther in—what I saw you looking at just now.”
“It goes down, from here?” Bart asked.
“That’s right,” answered Michel, “a great distance down, but only about a third of the way to the magma that underlies the continental plates—those are the rafts of solid, usable land that the surface world lives on. The plates float on the magma; and every so often one of them jostles up against the one next to it. Then its edge rides over or under the edge of the other plate, and a crack’s created that lets magma boil up from the interior of the earth. The results are volcanoes or rising or falling of the plates—so what was under the sea a million years ago is now dry land and what was dry land a like time ago may now be the floor of the seabed.”
He paused, looking at Bart.
“You follow me so far?” he said.
“I think so,” said Bart.
“Good. Well, then. Thanks to the theory of Morton Cadiz, an eighteenth century Lord who was an early paleologist—that being an elaborate term for a person who goes around dating the age of rock layers by the kinds of fossils he finds in them—and the fact we’ve later proved he was right, we know there are electromagnetic currents in the magma. These don’t exactly move it the way ocean currents move the ocean waters, but they have a somewhat similar effect. To the point that a disturbance in the pattern of these electromagnetic flows can disturb the balance of forces in the magma and lead to one plate trying to climb over another. You’re still following me?”
“Again, I think so,” said Bart. He looked up at the turning machinery overhead and it seemed to him he could feel the massive forces Michel talked about, stirring, deep beneath him.
“All right,” went on Michel. “We consequently theorized, tested, and finally built this device called the Tectonal, which you see around you.”
“And it does what to the magma?” asked Bart.
“Well,” answered Michel, “the answer to that’s a bit complicated. In layman’s language, it began by sending pulses of electromagnetic force from the lowest end of the drill, to tap it to one of the currents of like force already down there, suck it up, build it up, and feed it back down again—and continue this. As it continued, it took up and returned larger and larger elements of the force, until now, after a number of ye
ars, it’s pumping enough force into the flow it touches to change it from a small current to one much larger than it was originally, large enough to disrupt the pattern of force flows. It is just now at about the point where that pattern is going to give.”
He paused.
“Then what?” demanded Bart.
“Well,” said Michel’s voice, “when it does, there’ll be a widespread readjustment of the pattern of forces in the magma, and consequent widespread readjustment of the plates above it. In short, the surface world will go through hell—some land subsiding below sea level, other land rising abruptly; and volcanic activity all over the place. Except here, of course, which was carefully chosen because it was in one of the safe places.”
Bart tilted his head back and fastened his eyes on the turning, polished shaft.
“How far down does this go below us?” he asked.
“Several miles,” answered Michel. “It’s not the diameter you see for more than the first few hundred feet down. After that, it begins to narrow every few thousand feet. About half a mile short of the end of its shaft, it’s the diameter of the original drillhole— some six inches in diameter. After that last half-mile, it comes to an end. From there on down, the penetration through rock the rest of the way to the magma is immaterial. I don’t know enough to explain that part of it to you, if I wanted to; but essentially, we’ve energized a channel down through the rest of the plate rock into the magma itself.”
“And so this electric-whatever force of yours—,” began Bart.
“Electromagnetic.”
“—Electromagnetic force of yours,” Bart went on, “pours down this channel into the magma. What is magma, exactly?”
“It’s rock that’d be melted to a liquid if it weren’t under so much pressure,” Michel said. “When the pressure’s taken off; as when it breaks through to the surface—in a volcano, say—it does become liquid. But even under pressure down there, it acts a lot like a liquid. As I say, don’t ask me for details. That’s not my specialty. The point is, the force does go into the magma, it does act like a current of water flowing into the ocean and mixing with the currents already there, and altering them by the force of its thrust.”
The Earth Lords Page 29