by Hal Clement
The unexpected difficulty might have been foreseen if the station had been running for more than a very few years before the break; there would have been some eye-opening experience. As it was, the experience came later.
A technical culture has to be a literate one, at least until some adequate substitute for the reference book can be devised. Did you ever consider the problem of teaching a phonetic language like Russian or English to someone who had never heard a spoken word and can’t produce a sound himself?
All right, I know it can be done by a highly trained specialist. What do you do, though, for the specialists needed when no one in the entire population can speak a word and you want to teach the new generation to read Farrington Daniel’s Mathematical Preparation for Physical Chemistry or some similar basic work? You’re not qualified yourself. All your neighbors are in the same boat. The kids themselves are playing around together, presumably communicating by signs of some sort, but what are the chances of the signs they’ve invented for themselves being useful for explaining elementary vector analysis? Even elementary discipline questions are hard enough to get across; in this medium it’s impossible to administer a decent spanking.
Still, you’ve got to produce a certain number of competent engineers and technicians with each generation, or the whole group is going to die in the darkness—and chill of the ocean bottom.
What you’d do I don’t know, but this group leaned heavily on pictures. I don’t know the details. There were differing versions in the books I read, and I suspect that many of them were guesses on the part of the writers. There must have been a lot of determination, some panic, a high general intelligence level and a certain amount of plain luck involved. As it came out in the end, the grandchildren of the original group had the use of a highly workable written language which must have evolved, just as I’d suspected when I saw it, from electrical and engineering diagrams—the sort of things where the connection between symbol and experience could be most easily shown to the growing children. The gesture language was a derivative of the written one, with gesture patterns standing for drawn symbols in much the way that our phonetic written languages are derivatives of the spoken equivalents. Think over the details yourself; I’m still incompetent.
What I could see was that children who had never heard a spoken word and had grown up using a language which is basically pictorial, with a backup code of gesture symbols, are going to have quite a time learning a language which is basically oral, with a backup code of written phonetic symbols.
I don’t say it will be impossible for them. An intelligent and determined person can accomplish remarkable things. I do say that very, very few of them are going to consider it worth much effort. The majority, however intelligent, are unlikely to be determined.
Of the few that will make the effort, none will have much confidence in their own skill, because they will never have had a chance to check it except on each other. They’ll be like a social club which has decided to learn Sanskrit as a project and has only books to learn from. There’ll be some uncertainty even in matching an engineering text with the machinery it’s supposed to describe. Given the choice between using the original maintenance manual, printed in chicken tracks which really stand for sounds they’ve never heard, and using the notes made for their convenience by the maintenance workers who already know the machines—which are the kids going to do for homework?
Of course, the original books are still available as the years go on. They certainly aren’t getting worn out. Unfortunately, as the years go on the original books become less and less useful. They need modern texts, in one sense; but there are two strikes against the modern text.
First and obviously, they can’t read it. Second, it’s about as directly useful on machines designed and built a century or so ago as the manual on a power lathe would be to a flint-ax maker of thirty thousand B.C.
The machines designed and built so long ago have lasted well, but not perfectly. Routine maintenance must, more and more often, give way to major repair and even replacement; the original books don’t cover these problems even if they could be read. The notes of the maintenance engineers certainly don’t cover them.
So these people need helpers from the surface, either engineers who can do the necessary work without following a manual, or else harder-to-define experts who can take modern books and transfer their meaning to the local maintenance specialists. Maybe schoolteachers would be the best term.
In other words, they need Joey, and Bert, and Marie, and me. They need practically anyone they can recruit from the surface. Need us. Marie’s hypothesis was perfectly right. They’ve been getting people like us for decades past—the people whose writings enabled me to figure all this out—and their survival depends on keeping it up.
But that gave food for another thought.
It was easy enough to believe that a certain percentage of the people who had come to this place, either accidentally or as a result of surreptitious recruiting, had been persuaded to stay of their own free will. It was much harder to believe that all of them had been. What had happened to those who had not agreed?
I could see two possibilities. One was the fate which Marie seemed to expect if she tried to leave. The other was the explanation Bert had offered, that they had been allowed to return to the surface unharmed but that the Board had covered up their stories or reports.
But Bert was a proven and admitted liar. He might also be wrong.
There were references in the books I had read to visitors who had arrived, but of whom nothing more was mentioned. Of course if they hadn’t stayed it was unlikely that anything would be—either way. I didn’t like to believe that violence had been used—I preferred to believe that Bert was right. Still, Marie was far from stupid, and the morals of this isolated culture might well be those of a century or so back. In fact, in some ways they obviously were.
It was enough for me that there was even a possibility that Marie might be in danger.
For once, I was in complete agreement with Bert; she had to be persuaded to leave at once. Furthermore, she should be guarded until she was well away from here. Guarded by me. That meant two jobs, of which the first was likely to be the harder. Marie had listened to Bert’s arguments about her leaving for several weeks, with no result except a complete undermining of her trust in Bert. How could I possibly do any better?
I claim to be a reasonably good engineer, as I’ve said before, and I can run a competent investigation when the subject is an essentially technical one like tracking down where power is going. I’m not a plotter, though, in the real, old-style meaning of the term, and for a while I was completely stumped by this problem. I suppose what blocked me so long from a working idea was a natural reluctance to tell anything but the truth to Marie, backed up by an even greater dislike of causing her unhappiness.
I don’t know what finally broke through that block. Suddenly, though, it seemed as clear as day that if Marie were bound and determined to stay as long as she believed that Joey might be alive down here, she would presumably go if she were to be convinced that he had died down here.
I didn’t like the idea. I don’t like lying, especially to people who trust me and most especially to Marie. I went through the usual stage in childhood where lying seemed the easiest way out of all troubles, but some very good teachers and a pair of understanding parents, assisted by a close friend with a good right cross who outweighed me by fifteen pounds, had helped me outgrow it. In the present case, I had to tell myself repeatedly that it was for Marie’s own safety before I could decide it was proper to do.
How I convinced myself that it would also be worth the unhappiness it was certain to cause her is something I choose not to discuss. Once I was convinced, the plan was so simple that I wondered why Bert had never thought of it. After all, he seemed to lack my prejudice against falsehood.
XIX
I suggested it to him at the first opportunity, and he couldn’t see why he hadn’t thoug
ht of it either. He approved strongly, and complimented me as eloquently as developing writer’s cramp would permit. Then he set to work on arrangements.
The plan was simple enough. Joey’s sub was still here, of course. We would simply wreck it, tell Marie we had found the remains, and if necessary show them to her. A little care would make sure that the registry number and enough other identification features remained recognizable. With that much agreed, we set out for the dock where the boat lay. We’d have been able to get to work the moment we reached it, except for the fact that the half-hour swim without communication had enabled each of us to work out all the details. When we resumed conversation, the details didn’t jibe, and it took half an hour or so to reconcile them. With that, actual work and Bert’s search for people to help us with transportation, more than six hours passed before we were really ready to move the sub outside.
We didn’t attempt to run it out under its own power, though that would have been possible. It had been allowed to fill with the living-liquid at local pressure after Joey had been converted. We were able to work on its inner plumbing with no trouble. We thought of bringing it back to the ‘operating room’ and connecting it with the transfer lock so that we could pump room and sub back down to surface pressure, but an easier plan had occurred to me.
Like all deep-work machines, Joey’s vessel had very large lift and ballast tanks. The former still worked, not having leaked enough flotation liquid to matter, judging by the sub’s present buoyancy. The latter, of course, were now full of the liquid which formed our regular environment. They were in two major units extending nearly the full length of the hull parallel to the keel, with each unit divided into four cells by bulkheads containing valves and transfer pumps.
We opened all these valves. Then we cracked the seals on the maintenance ports without opening them completely, so that fluid could bleed between the main hull interior and the ballast tanks. The ballast scavenger pumps would now, given time, empty the hull as well as the tanks.
Finally, we arranged for the collapse of the hull. I had taken for granted that we could use ordinary explosive squibs, forgetting how sound affected a person living in liquid. The things simply weren’t to be had; they were never used here.
We finally settled the problem—we thought—by opening all the interhull inspection plates and removing as many of the bolted braces—the ones which had to be removable for maintenance purposes—as possible. It seemed pretty certain that pumping out the hull now could hardly help but cause it to collapse.
A good deal of time was wasted trying to improvise something that would start the ballast pumps either by time or from outside. It finally occurred to someone—not me—that there was nothing to prevent us from starting them from inside and then leaving, shutting the lock after us. Pressure would not start to drop until the hull was sealed off from the ocean.
That seemed to finish the job. The sub was already weighted in near-equilibrium with outside ballast, so we picked it up and began to swim toward the nearest entrance. There were ten of us altogether, and the load wasn’t too bad. We brought it to a halt under the roof opening, pushed it up until it met the interface and left it there while we donned outdoor coveralls.
I wasn’t yet accustomed to these. I hadn’t yet gotten around to asking what the little tank on the back was for—my theory didn’t account for it, as you may remember. There was no chance to ask now. Bert helped me to adjust everything properly, though I wasn’t sure what he was doing part of the time. In three or four minutes we were casting off the outside ballast, and the sub was entering water for the last time.
We left a little negative buoyancy on her, and some of us walked supporting the hull while the rest swam and pushed it. Bert and I hadn’t made any special plans about where the wreck should be staged; obviously it shouldn’t be too close to an entrance, or there’d be little excuse for not having found it sooner. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be possible to carry the thing too far away. We gave it an hour of travel and then let the hulk settle to the bottom.
Personally, I couldn’t have found my way back to the entrance we had used, and it would have been sheer luck if I ran into one. Bert and the others didn’t seem worried, however. I assumed that they either knew the ground or had some navigation scheme I hadn’t yet learned about. The only light came from our own lamps, whose radiance formed a tiny glowing dome in the immense blackness of the Pacific. We were far out of sight of the tent area, as I still called the farm region in my own mind. I didn’t even know the direction in which that lay, and knowing would have done no good since I had no compass.
Bert gestured me toward the sub’s lock. I opened it and went in. In a way, I hated to do this, but the idea still seemed good.
What I had to do inside was done quickly; it amounted only to closing two switches. I closed the locks behind me and joined the others.
We had recharged the boat’s batteries, and there was no worry about there being energy enough to empty her. I was quite proud of remembering that point—large as the tanks were, adding the hull volume to them meant a tremendous additional job for the pumps. However, I had barely reached the rest of the group when we were reminded of something neither Bert nor I had thought of, and for which there was not the slightest excuse for either of us.
Emptying the ballast tanks with the flotation tanks still full put positive lift on the boat. Naturally, she started up.
Fortunately the initial rise wasn’t too quick. I was able to catch her, open the lock under power—I couldn’t have done it manually with pressure difference already set up—and unseal and open the lift-jettison valves. By the time I got outside again the ship was a couple of hundred feet from the bottom. The swimmers were flocked around covering the scene with their lights: I looked at the top of the hull and saw the oily stream of lift fluid pouring out. The rate of climb was already slowing, and in a minute or two it ceased and reversed. We followed the ship back to a place on the bottom not too far from the one we had picked. And there we waited. And waited. And waited.
The helpers talked finger-language among themselves. Bert and I couldn’t talk at all, since the pad had been left back at the entrance when we had donned the coveralls. We each knew just about what the other was thinking, though, and as time went by and the hull just lay there we began to exchange inquiring glances.
The pumps had had time to handle the total volume by now, certainly. The inside of that ship should be practically a vacuum.
We had paid no attention to what was left in her air tanks. There couldn’t have been enough to matter at this pressure. No bubbles had appeared from the ballast vents, but any air released by the tanks inside might well have gone into solution at this pressure before being ejected.
The problem was not whether the inside pressure was zero or some small number of atmospheres, though; it was what we could possibly do about the hull’s failure to collapse. The pressure would stay down until long after the pumps ran out of fuel, and even that would be a long time since they must now be running free. Considering the general reliability of Board equipment, it could be months before some tiny leak let the internal pressure build up again to the point where even power could open the locks. I didn’t know how long we could sit around without more oxygen-food, but it certainly wasn’t months. As a matter of fact, it was going to be fairly hard to explain the three days or so which had already passed since I had seen Marie. Any more would be much harder, but I couldn’t afford to see her again without a convincing story about Joey all ready.
A depth charge would have been helpful. Even a squib would probably have been enough; the hull, after what we had done to it, must be very, very close to its limit. Unfortunately, there were still no explosives available.
All I could think of was to take the sub back, have Bert or me go into the conversion room, attach the sub to the lock which was supposed to connect the room with just such visitors, go through whatever had to be done to get the man back to surface pressure
and pump the room back down so he could get into the sub to start everything over. I didn’t like the idea. I was pretty sure Bert wouldn’t either, but I couldn’t find out under the circumstances. It wasn’t the sort of idea which could be transmitted by any gestures I knew. It was going to take quite long enough with the writing pad.
I did manage to make Bert understand that we would have to go back for the pad and a conference. When I tried to indicate that the sub should be brought with us, though, he vetoed the suggestion flatly. After a minute or two I stopped trying to push the idea. As I said, I wasn’t too fond of the basic plan anyway.
He made some gestures to the others, and all but four came with us; the four settled down on a level patch of mud twenty yards from the ship and started a game of some sort. At any other time I’d have been curious about the details.
The swim back was, of course, much quicker than the one out—or rather, would have been if we had made it.
I don’t know how far we got in the eight or ten minutes we were swimming. I suppose a quarter of a mile is a reasonable guess. I’m not the world’s most efficient swimmer, and even I wasn’t overworking.
The interruption, like so much else which had gone wrong with our plans, should have been foreseen, but none of us had foreseen it. If we had, we wouldn’t have been waiting anywhere around the sub after her ballast pumps had started.
It was obvious enough in nature, and the only reason I didn’t realize what had happened in the first second after the event was, of course, that I wasn’t really conscious.
XX
If you submerge yourself in water and have a friend knock a couple of large rocks together repeatedly, starting twenty or thirty yards away and coming closer until you can’t stand it anymore, you may have some idea of what happened.