by Hal Clement
I should have asked him right then, I know, why the lights were up in the water instead of down closer to the plants. It was just one of those things that I didn’t. If he’d answered, it would have saved me a good deal of later embarrassment, though I’m still not sure that he would have. I suppose he would, on the basis of what I understand now of his reasons for acting as he did.
When I mentioned the power plant, he started off immediately, with the same group trailing along. I wondered whether they were guards, secret agents, or curious idlers, but didn’t waste much time on the question. There was no way to tell, or even to make a decent guess. In any case, with the power plant next on the agenda, no other question was very interesting.
After a time we reached the first large closed door I had seen since emerging from my tank. It was much like the one which had admitted my container to the conversion room. Bert made a few gestures to our escort; they began a longer conversation among themselves, but he didn’t wait for them to finish. He began opening small lockers in the tunnel wall, and extracting coveralls which looked like the ones used outside in the ocean. They were complete with helmets.
“What’s the reason for these? Temperature?” I wrote when he gestured me to put one on.
“No. You probably haven’t found out yet, and I hope for your sake you don’t, but immersed as we are in liquid we’re very sensitive to intense sound waves.” I didn’t interrupt with my experience, but for once I was sure he was telling unvarnished truth. “The power plant is very efficient, but there’s still a trace of noise—quite enough to kill an unprotected person. Get the suit on and make sure it’s tight.”
I obeyed. I had a little trouble; the garment wasn’t as simple as it looked. One of the buckles proved to have a sharp corner which cut quite a deep gash on my hand and I wondered what sort of quality control would put up with that sort of design. The drops of blood looked a little strange, bright-red globules rising from the wound, but the injury was minor. By the time Bert had solved my problem with the buckle the bleeding had stopped.
He checked my coverall, especially the wrist and helmet junctions, very carefully. The others had also dressed and were doing the same for each other. Gestures which even I could interpret signified that the checks were complete, and Bert turned to the door.
He manipulated a dial at its side, and the great valve—large enough to accommodate a small work sub—swung easily open. He waved us through, waited until we had passed and closed the portal behind us. It struck me again that his air was not merely one of familiarity but of authority. How, in a single year, could a Board agent have made himself so completely trusted by these people? A Board agent, of all people on Earth the most likely to take action against them and their way of life? Gould he have been in contact with them even before his disappearance from the surface a year ago? Could Marie be right? And if she were, what was I getting into? I had trusted Bert Whelstrahl completely when I first saw him down here and had tossed off most of Marie’s claims as coming from a woman nearly hysterical with grief; it had seemed likely enough that her Joey—not that he’d ever been hers, in his own estimation—had actually never reached this place. Enough other things could happen to make a one-man sub disappear in the Pacific.
Now I was wondering, deeply. But there were other matters claiming attention.
XVI
For the first time, I found myself in a tunnel which was obviously slanted steeply—the pull of my ballast belt let me judge ‘up’ and ‘down’ easily enough when I paid attention to the matter. We were heading downward at fully sixty degrees. The tunnel lights, the only distinct features on the walls, were going by at a speed which showed we were being helped by pumps; there was certainly a downward current. I wondered if we’d have to swim against it on the way back and decided it wouldn’t be possible. Either they’d reverse the flow, or we’d use another tunnel.
I didn’t notice any temperature change, though I knew we were going to examine a heat engine. Maybe this bunch was moral enough about energy waste when it came to the sort of leakage which robbed a machine of efficiency, no matter how they behaved about it afterward.
I couldn’t guess how far down we went before reaching the control chamber. It was certainly hundreds of feet, probably thousands, possibly as much as a mile. I did see the charts of the layout later on, but the peculiar ideas of scale used by their makers still defeats me. It was certainly far enough down to present a hopeless obstacle to any brute-force defense against pressure as armor.
The room itself was big enough to make the far end hard to see. The liquid, as I guess I may have forgotten to mention, scattered light just a trifle and gave objects more than fifty yards or so away a foggy appearance.
The room, though, as a control chamber was almost shockingly conventional. It contained along one wall a pattern of lines which even I could recognize as a distribution net. Below this was another pattern, harder to recognize but of noticeably vertical orientation, and I suspected that it indicated the working-fluid circuits between the heat source far below and the converters and heat sink at the top. A heat engine of any sort works on pretty basic thermodynamics, and its diagrams are apt to resemble those of its relatives whether it’s a steam turbine or a thermocouple.
Along the lines of both diagrams were indicators, mostly of familiar dial-and-needle type, switches and rheostats. Nothing was mystifying; it was a power plant control at a glance. That is, it could be recognized at a glance. It could be learned, given luck and competence, in a month or two.
Thirty or forty swimmers, suited and helmeted like ourselves, drifted a few feet from the control wall, all their attention focused on it. This was a little surprising. I would have expected fewer operators on a board of this size. If they were all necessary for manual control, it was another mark against the general level of technical competence here, like the sharp buckle. I hoped that—poor coordination on their part would merely result in nuisance rather than catastrophe. No doubt there were fail-safe breakers in the electric distribution net and some sort of emergency bleed-offs here and there in the fluid lines, but even so that crowd of operators gave a certain primitive air to the whole thing. I watched thoughtfully. The ones who had come in with us looked with as much interest as I felt; I got the impression that they hadn’t been here before either. Well, that was quite possible. The whole population could hardly be composed of power engineers.
It added to the mystery, though, because I knew that Bert wasn’t one either. He had a general engineering background like my own, which of course you need to be any good at tracking down power waste. Why should he have authority around here?
He turned and made a couple of gestures at our escort. Then he wrote me a message.
“Don’t get close enough to distract any of these people. More than half of them are trainees.” That put a slightly better light on the situation.
“You take your education here seriously,” I answered.
“You bet we do. You’ll see why, soon. Swim around as much as you want and look at what you want—you know enough so I don’t have to watch you like these others. Just don’t get in front of an operator.”
I nodded. For the next half hour I did just as he had written, examining the entire board in as much detail as I could. The arrangement made more and more sense as time went on. One very surprising reason for this was that the dials and control knobs were marked in perfectly ordinary numbers. I hadn’t expected that, after seeing what seemed to pass for writing down here.
The numbers were alone, unfortunately—no units such as volts or megabars were given. In spite of this, the position of each instrument on the diagram which formed the board usually gave a pretty good clue to its purpose. In less than an hour I felt I understood the system pretty well.
Ten shafts led down to the heat absorbers at the source—presumably a magma pocket. The details of the absorbers themselves weren’t obvious from the board, but I knew enough about volcanic installations to guess. I�
�d done a waste investigation in Java once. The working fluid was water; the still which took in sea water and desalted it, the electrolysis units which got alkali metals from the recovered salts, and the ion injection feeds were all obvious on the board.
The MHD converters were also ten in number, but all exhausted into a common condenser which appeared to be cooled by outside sea water. It did not serve as a preheater for the still, which seemed wasteful to me. Without units on the gauges I couldn’t be sure of the net power developed, but it seemed obvious that it had to be in megawatts at least.
I hadn’t noticed the sound of which Bert had warned, but perhaps that was because of the suit. I took a chance and loosened slightly one of the cuffs between sleeve and glove. There was sound, a heavy drone like a vast organ pipe and no doubt due to the same physical cause. It wasn’t painful, but I could tell that removing the protecting suit entirely might be unwise. I wondered how close we actually were to the steam tunnels which must be the source of the hum. Even more, I wondered about their maintenance, but I had to do without details for the time being.
The people who had come with Bert and me had stayed farther from the board, presumably because of his orders. They watched a while what was going on, but gradually began talking to each other, judging by their hand motions. They rather reminded me of school children who have lost interest in watching the film. Once again I was reminded of the oddness in Bert’s being able to give orders, or even act as a guide.
He himself, after the first few minutes, paid no attention to the people who had come with us. He had waved to me in a gesture which I had interpreted as meaning that he’d be back later and swam out of sight. I assumed he would be and kept on with my inspection of the board.
For a good deal of the rest of the hour, the girl and her companions followed me around, though without getting as close to board and operators as I did. They seemed to be more interested in me than in the engineering. I considered this understandable in the case of the girl and supposed the men were just staying with her.
I finally decided that I had made all I could of the board and began to wonder where Bert had gone. There seemed no way to ask; he had taken the writing pad with him, and anyway the futility of that method had been established. If there had been among my satellites someone not present at the earlier experiment, I might have been tempted to try again anyway, but as it was the absence of writing gear was more of a challenge than a nuisance. This seemed to be a good time to start learning the local gesture language.
I swam away from the control panel to the farther wall, the others following, and began what I hoped would be a language lesson by the method standard in fiction. I pointed to things, and tried to get the others to use their gesture-words for them.
To say that it went badly is understating. It went so badly that I wasn’t even sure whether they had grasped what I wanted by the time Bert came back. They had made lots of hand, arm, and ringer motions, both at me and at each other, but I saw no way of telling whether any of them were the names of things I pointed at, or symbols for the verbs I acted out. Probably I was missing a lot of the subtle motions and attitudes anyway, but I simply never detected a pattern repeated often enough to be learned. It was as frustrating an experience as I’d had since—well, for a few hours, anyway. Maybe a day or more.
When Bert did get back and saw what was going on he had another siege of near-laughter.
“I tried that, too,” he finally wrote, “when I first got here. I’m supposed to be a fair linguist, but I never made more than the slightest headway. I hate to seem conceited, but I really don’t think it can be done unless you start as a child.”
“You must have learned a little.”
“Yes, About fifty basic symbols—I think.”
“But you were talking to these people here. I got the impression you were telling them what to do.”
“I was, in a sloppy sort of way. My few dozen gestures include the most obvious verbs, but even those I can’t do very well. Three-quarters of the people can’t understand me at all—this girl here is one of the best. I can read them only when they make my few signs very slowly.”
“Then how in blazes are you in a position to tell any of them what to do? And how does that fact jibe with what you told me about no one here being able to tell people what to do?”
“I may have expressed myself badly. This isn’t a very authoritative government, but the Council’s advice is usualy taken, at least on matters even slightly connected with physical maintenance of the installation.”
“And this Council has given you some sort of authority? Why? And does that mean that Marie was right in believing you’d deserted the Board and mankind and gone over to these wasters for good?”
“One question at a time, please,” he scribbled hastily. “The Council didn’t exactly give me authority. I’m making my suggestions as a member.”
I took the pad and cleared it, trying to catch his eye the whole time. I finally wrote, “Let’s have that again? My eyes must be fooling me, too.”
He grinned and repeated the sentence. I looked at him with an expression which sobered him at once, and he went on writing.
“I’m not—heavily underlined—here to stay, whatever Marie may think, and in spite of what I told you before. I’m sorry about having to lie to you. I’m here to do a job; what will happen after it’s done I don’t know. You’re in the same position, as you know perfectly well.” I had to nod agreement at that point. “I’m on the Council because of my linguistic skills and general background.” I was so hard put to it to make sense out of that remark that I almost failed to read the next one in time; I had to stop him as I was about to clear the board to make room for more words. “There’s a little more information about the place down here which I wasn’t going to bother you with, but I’ve changed my mind. I’ll let you see it, and you can decide for yourself how and whether to include it or allow for it in your job of getting Marie to make her mind up. I have my opinion on how it should be used, but you’re entitled to yours. Come on. I want you to meet the engineer in charge of maintenance development work here.”
He swam off, and I went after him with the others trailing behind. I had no urge to talk, even if it had been possible. I was still trying to figure out how someone whose mastery of the local speech represented a slow two-year-old’s vocabulary could have earned an official position on the strength of his linguistic talents.
No doubt you’ve seen it by now, since I’ve tried to tell this fairly, but it was too much for me. I was so far behind the facts that I was even startled by something else you’ve probably been expecting. We swam into a sort of office opening from the far end of the control room, and I saw floating in front of a microfilm viewer, oblivious to the people around him, my good friend Joey Elfven.
TO BE CONCLUDED
OCEAN ON TOP
The energy masters were criminals against my world. The trouble was in every important way—so was I!
SYNOPSIS
Three of my friends had disappeared in a single small area of the Pacific, just north of Easter Island. Like me, all worked for the Power Board, the group which was responsible for rationing man’s severely limited supply of energy and which was, because of that fact, practically the world government.
Bert Wehlstrahl had vanished a year before, and Joey Elfven ten months later. Marie Wladetsky had gone two weeks after Joe, presumably in search of him, and I was principally interested in finding Marie. (Don’t ask for my name; it’s bad enough to have to listen to it occasionally, and I’m certainly not going to put it in print.) Since the two men were police workers of a sort, it was likely that their disappearance was not accidental, so my first step was to search the ocean bottom in the key area from a camouflaged vantage point—actually one of the spherical escape tanks used in ordinary cargo submarines, somewhat modified for my purpose.
I found evidence of rationing violation the moment I reached the bottom—I almost landed on it. A m
ile down there was an area actually lighted artificially, and apparently concealed under a flat, translucent surface which I interpreted as some sort of fabric. Seeing energy wasted to light the outside of a tent roof was bad enough; the sight of a swimmer in what looked like ordinary scuba gear under five thousand feet of sea water was far worse. The technological capacity so demonstrated suggested something much more serious than an ordinary black-market energy gang.
My tank was not very maneuverable, but I managed to get myself “captured” and towed to an entrance to the undersea base. Here I dropped a sonar transponder which should guide Board enforcement forces to the spot, released my ballast and headed for the surface with the comfortable certainty that the swimmers could not follow far because of the pressure gradient.
This belief proved wrong. One of them hung on to my tank and by pounding on it was able to guide a sub to the scene. After doing my best to get the nearly helpless tank away, I was really captured and dragged back to the bottom.
The tank was brought to a lighted pit in the ocean floor. There were no doors or air locks. The swimmers, who had loaded my tank with enough ballast to keep it down even if they lost hold again, towed me into a tunnel which led from the entrance pit, along it for a short distance, and into a flooded room. Then they removed their helmets.
After recovering, more or less, from the shock of seeing people breathing water, I got another one by discovering that Bert Wehlstrahl was among them. Communicating with him wasn’t easy; he could hear my voice through the walls of the tank, but couldn’t talk himself—reasonable enough if his vocal cords were trying to wriggle in water. He had to write his messages. He told me very little; I assumed that this was partly because of the communication difficulty and partly because of the audience. He said that Marie was somewhere nearby, still in her sub, but that he knew nothing of Joe’s whereabouts. He also dropped a remark which forced me to revise my belief that he and the others were breathing water. They weren’t breathing at all, as more careful observation showed.