Manhattan Transfer

by John E. Stith

  Actually it could no longer be called a tunnel mouth. Where yesterday a short tunnel had been cut into the gray material, now the square opening in the black wall was filled with the gray stuff, and gray goo had flowed from beyond the barrier into the Battery Tunnel. Looking a little like gray toothpaste squeezed through a square hole, the gray goo formed a thick alluvial fan extending over a meter from the opening.

  Rudy knelt near the gray material and pressed a hammer into the stuff. It still possessed the modeling clay firmness, but reason told him it must really be a fluid, albeit an extremely viscous one. He found a small pebble on the pavement and placed it about a centimeter from the edge of the gray goo. He watched the gap. He couldn't detect the gap actually shrinking, but several seconds later he could tell that it was in fact smaller than before.

  He walked over to the dump truck and climbed up until he could see inside the back. What had been a pile of chunks of the gray stuff now looked more like gray cake batter poured into a pan. The high point was in the middle, but the stuff was obviously flowing slowly, gradually working its way into the corners. Another day and it would probably be level. Glass took years to fatten the bottom of windowpanes. On the viscosity scale, this stuff was much nearer cold molasses than glass.

  Rudy remembered the piece of the gray goo that someone had burned the day before, and thought about how it had seemed stiffer. He retrieved an oxyacetylene torch, turned on the gas jets, and lit it.

  At the edge of the gray goo that had now covered the pebble, he played the torch over the surface and watched it darken and shrink back. He found another pebble and placed it about a centimeter from the new edge.

  As he moved around the fan–shaped spread of goo, heating the edge with the torch, he heard sounds of surprise as the construction crew began to arrive.

  Nicholas showed up within an hour. By then the goo had spread no farther. Instead it looked like dough rising, confined by a darkened perimeter. Workers were just finishing the job of putting a panel in front of the opening and bracing it in place to minimize the flow.

  "I got your message," Nicholas said. "I left Emile in charge. Fortunately things are going smoothly."

  "Thanks for coming down," Rudy said. He gave Nicholas a quick summary. "So, you got any ideas on how to tunnel through this stuff safely?"

  Nicholas shook his head and moved closer to the gray goo. He performed some of the same tests that Rudy had done, but Nicholas's tests were conducted at pencil length or with the aid of gloves. Finally he came back to Rudy.

  "I may be thinking of some of the same things you are," Nicholas said.

  "That's fine. I just didn't want to precondition you."

  "Well, the obvious first. The tunnel walls have to be braced, just like we were working in dirt."

  "Right." Rudy wasn't sure if it was his imagination or if Nicholas had shuddered slightly when he said, "working in dirt."

  "Okay. This stuff seems about half as heavy as water, so that means the pressure at this point is about half of what it would be in water this deep. We're roughly, what, thirty meters below the surface. At one–half atmosphere for every ten meters—" Nicholas pushed up his sleeve and exposed a wrist calculator. After pushing a few buttons, he said, "Eventually you're going to have something near fifty tons pushing on that panel."

  Rudy nodded.

  "But the depth is the only real nuisance. If we were to go back up top and dig just underneath the bottom of the bubble. you'd have a lot less pressure. You should be able to tunnel pretty easily there."

  "True, but we've got a lot easier environmental control where we are. Plus, if we are being watched, this is a lot safer." Rudy thought a minute, then snapped his fingers. "I bet if we wanted, we could tunnel all the way to the next dome just below the surface without much trouble at all."

  "Except for the nuisance of having to get rid of the stuff you dig out. And getting fresh air all that way."

  "We might have ways around that. Near the surface, the pressure would be low enough that maybe we could just push our way through it. That way we wouldn't risk being seen on the surface."

  "And bracing the walls would be a lot easier near the surface."

  "Actually, we might not have to."

  "I think you'd better explain, boss."

  Rudy reached down and picked up a piece of the gray matter discolored from being heated. He rapped it against the wall, then handed it to Nicholas, who grabbed it with a handkerchief. "There's a chance that we already have the bracing material we need."

  #

  Bobby Joe Brewster leaned back and examined the close–up views of individual domes on the large display before him.

  One window on the screen showed the first dome in what Bobby Joe thought of as the grand tour—the bubble almost about ten kilometers away, directly south of Battery Park. Whatever these people looked like, they must like the outside even less than Bobby Joe did. He hadn't seen any sign of activity since he started scanning. The dome looked to be only a tenth the size of the one over Manhattan, but the building inside dwarfed every human structure. The dome held but one giant building, a cube that must be half as tall as the World Trade Center towers. Irregular rows of large round windows helped him learn nothing about the interior of the building, because he couldn't see in. He stared at the patterns made by the windows, and wondered vaguely if they spelled anything.

  Bobby Joe adjusted his controls, giving more power to the transmitters directed toward that dome. A scan of the receivers with antennas pointed at the dome said they still had detected no reply.

  Bobby Joe absently reached for the plastic plate beside the console and grabbed the last couple of food pellets. He popped them in his mouth and took a drink of water from the soft–drink container. It would have been easier to use a glass, but the gaudy decorations on the triangular container made him feel less cut off from his normal diet.

  He wiped his mouth and looked over at Abby where she sat at a computer terminal with the screen displaying the alien message. Before his conversation with Matt, he'd have been tempted to share his theory with Abby that the aliens took Manhattan, leaving behind a ransom demand, and that the Earth was refusing to pay.

  #

  When Matt reached the blocked end of the Battery Tunnel, he looked around for Rudy, but saw no sign of him. Even more workers than last time bustled about in controlled chaos. A faint rumbling shook the pavement, an indication that some of the subways were running again on a vastly reduced schedule, mainly carrying outpatients between hospitals and home.

  The smaller tunnel through the black wall and into the gray goo looked different, more like a large mine shaft except for the gradual curve upward. Four–by–eight plastic beams lined the walls, floor, and ceiling. Three people wearing hardhats with lights came out of the shaft. Rudy was the third. He talked to a woman who jotted down notes as she listened, and then he looked up and saw Matt.

  "I think we're getting the hang of it," Rudy said as he came closer. He took off his hardhat and scratched his scalp. "It's like tunneling through very slow–motion water. The cutting is easy, and as long as we're quick, the stuff doesn't rush back in. We're heating the sides as we go. Cooking the stuff makes it a little like very tough rubber. That alone might be enough to maintain the tunnel shape once we get high enough—–where the pressure is lower."

  "Great. I'm sure glad someone like you is in charge of it."

  Rudy shook his head. "I sure didn't feel that way when I came back down here and saw that gray stuff flowing out. I should have thought about that possibility. If we had been digging fast enough, we might have wound up trapping workers at the end of the shaft."

  Matt put a hand on Rudy's shoulder. "I'm confident you'll do everything right. I've always been more sure of you than you were."

  "And vice versa, now that I think about it. Want to take a look inside?"

  "Sure."

  Matt followed Rudy to the mouth of the shaft. A half–dozen tubes and cables converged from
various points and entered the tunnel along the floor. He didn't have to stoop inside the tunnel, despite his height and the hardhat.

  They squeezed to one side as a worker on the way out hurried past.

  Rudy pointed to the wall formed by adjacent vertical plastic beams. "Behind those beams is a fused layer of permaseal, and past that is the goo itself, heated enough to seal it. Some material–properties folks are conducting more tests right now, trying to see how the strength varies as a function of the temperature and duration of the heat. They're also trying to judge whether it's likely to change back. I think this section is safe no matter what, but closer to the surface we can probably get by with a lot less effort. We've gone to around–the–clock operation so the goo doesn't have time to make trouble."

  They walked up the moderate incline, and Rudy said, "We would have cut it steeper, to get to the easier path earlier, but this will make it safer to get stuff in and out of the tunnel."

  They edged past a worker maneuvering a wheelbarrow loaded with chunks of the goo. At intervals, small lights hung from a cord fastened to the ceiling beams. By the time they had passed ten of the lights and climbed what Matt guessed to be ten meters, they reached the working end of the tunnel.

  The final ten meters of tunnel were even wider than the section they had gone through. All the surfaces showed rough hewn gray material. At the very end of the tunnel, a worker played a torch back and forth over the surface of the wall in a regular pattern. Just back from that point, a small team wallpapered the floor, ceiling, and walls with shiny sheets of material. Between the wallpaperers and the finished tunnel, another small team set plastic beams in place. The last couple of finished beams didn't look as even as the rest to Matt, and he assumed they would be pressed into final alignment by the goo itself as it pushed harder and harder from the outside.

  As Matt and Rudy watched the goings on, they had to make way for an empty wheelbarrow and then a pair of workers with a large drill.

  One of the workers said to Rudy, "We're ready for the test hole."

  Rudy said, "Good. Go ahead," then turned to Matt as the men moved past and began to set up their equipment. "They're going to drill to the surface so we can get an air sample from out there. You can stay if you like, but this is new, so we could be in for some surprises."

  Matt said, "I'll stay. That's part of the reason I came."

  A couple of minutes later one of the drillers gave Rudy a high sign. Rudy took a small box from his shirt pocket and pressed a switch on it. The lights in the tunnel winked off and then rapidly back on several times, then came back on steady. Rudy raised his voice. "We're about to drill a test hole to the surface, so anyone who's not involved should take a rest break."

  As soon as a few workers had left the area, the drillers put on nose masks, aimed the long drill bit vertically at the roof of the tunnel, and turned on the drill. The drill moved fairly easily up toward the ceiling as gray grit fell slowly to the tunnel floor. When the drill got near the ceiling, they stopped it, freed the bit, and attached an extension, which they then tightened into the drill, and continued.

  By the time they had gone through a stack of extensions, the drill finally began to turn faster. "I think we're there!" one of the workers shouted.

  Running the drill in the opposite direction, and removing and stacking extensions for several minutes, left them with their original pile. As the bit itself finally came out of the hole and they shut off the drill, Matt could hear the whistling of air escaping just before a worker slapped a small silver square of permaseal over the hole. The sound stopped, and an indentation formed in the permaseal. Moving quickly, the other worker retrieved the rounded end of a hose. The permaseal cover came off the hole, and the pair of men ran the hose up the hole until a white ring around the hose met the ceiling, leaving about two meters of hose, capped with a threaded stem.

  Matt could still hear a soft hiss of escaping air, but a worker stuffed what looked like real modeling clay into the small gap around the hose, and the sound died.

  "Okay," Rudy said as another worker brought in a pump connected to a long extension cord. "Now for the interesting stuff." As soon as the pump and hose were connected, he moved closer and motioned for Matt to follow.

  Rudy switched on the pump, and a light next to a gas canister lit. Over the throbbing sound, he said, "Right now, the hose is mostly full of our own atmosphere. I'm pumping gas from the hose into this canister, and I'll give it a safety margin."

  The pump throbbed for a couple of minutes before Rudy flipped a switch. The light near the first canister went out, and a light next to a second, much smaller canister lit. After a few more seconds, he turned off the pump. "Okay. We've got a sample of the atmosphere up there. The only other thing we need now is the pressure. He flipped another couple of switches, and a lamp illuminated an attached pressure gauge. The black digits rose quickly to 0.60 and then climbed more slowly, settling on 0.642 atmospheres.

  "Good," Matt said. The first report he'd gotten had said the pressure was probably in the sixty to seventy percent of Earth normal range, and it was comforting to get agreement. "And how soon does the lab say they can analyze this?"

  Rudy detached the canister containing the outside gas sample. "A few hours. Part of that is just transit time."

  Rudy gave directions to one of the workers who had brought in the pump. The woman disconnected the hose and sealed it, then wheeled the pump back down the tunnel.

  "I don't know that there's much more to see right now," Rudy said.

  Matt nodded and they started walking down the slope, out of the tunnel. They passed several workers returning to their jobs.

  Back in the open Matt said, "You're doing great. Everyone seems to know exactly what to do, and everyone's efficient. But that's no surprise."

  "Thanks. By the way, I should have a real surprise for you in a day or two."

  #

  Matt pulled the city car into the artificial sunshine and left the Battery Tunnel behind. He probably should have gone directly back to the World Trade Center, but people there knew their jobs, and they were doing all they could. He needed a few minutes alone.

  He stepped on the accelerator, and the electric motor whine rose smoothly. Minutes later the car climbed the ramp onto the nearly deserted West Side Expressway. Matt pulled over to the right and stopped. He wondered how loud the honking would have been if he'd done that just a few days before. All the streets had at least one lane cleared for emergency vehicles. In places that meant abandoned cars had been forced onto the sidewalks.

  He looked back at the mass of buildings. He was still pleasantly surprised at how well the residents had adapted. To be sure, the number of shouters was up a little, but street musicians and mimes and magicians and poetry readers were out in force, doing their part in giving the public something to take their minds off the situation. And they were probably getting far more attention than normal, which had to be rewarding. The political and religious cranks were out in force, and they all seemed to like the current situation even less than Matt did.

  In the distance he could see some kids playing basketball. They'd had to fashion an extension from a pipe, so the hoop and backboard were two or three times their normal height. The kids bounced around the court as though it were a huge trampoline and they were in slow motion. The scene prompted a vague recollection of some kid's movie from long ago about basketball players able to jump three to five meters in the air.

  For many people, the reason to continue their day–to–day routine was now gone. Crime had risen slightly to take up some of the slack, but the volunteer lists were overflowing for virtually every city function that needed more help than normal. A black market flourished, but since money meant nothing, the trading was limited to exchanging services or an ever–diminishing supply of luxury goods and consumables that were used up, worn out, ingested, or burned.

  Matt looked through the dome at the bubbles beyond, and he thought of Nadine.

 
Sure, they'd had their share of arguments, but who didn't? He realized now that having her abruptly say she wanted out when he had thought things were okay cut several ways. It made him question his judgment about everything. If he was that close to her and still couldn't see the inevitable, what did that make him? And why couldn't he drive her from his mind when he had a much larger problem to face?

  Angry at himself, Matt looked back at Manhattan and tried to force Nadine from his mind. Several blocks away, a crowd had gathered at an intersection. He wondered vaguely what the attraction was.

  #

  Stuart Lund raised both arms to the crowd. He had found that although people looked away if they saw him in an everyday context, here the stump on his right arm was a virtual magnet for attention. With a deep, resonant voice, he said, "God is talking to us. Are you listening?

  "He talked to me in the moments while he was taking us away. He took my hand, and he told me to repent." Stuart liked that line. God had taken his hand, in two senses. But he wasn't too proud of it. God wouldn't approve of that.

  "Surely everybody here knows about Noah's Ark. Well, here we are on Noah's Ark Two. God will put us back on the Earth as soon as He's scrubbed it clean once again." Already Stuart saw comprehension flicker across a new face or two, and he knew he was gaining. God had, obviously, been all–knowing when he realized that Stuart could convey His message well. The streets held hardly any traffic now, so the crowd was free to spill into the intersection.

  Quite a few of the people in the crowd watched Stuart intently, a couple of them unconsciously rocking back and forth as they stood. No doubt the crowd was every bit as agitated about recent events as Stuart was, and people just needed a direction for their energy to be focused.

  Stuart didn't stop to count the faces, but as he maintained frequent eye contact with everyone who had stopped to listen, he was sure there were more than fifty people listening. People looked scruffier than New Yorkers normally had before, partly because of the fact that it was harder to do laundry now, partly because some of the people seemed to think this was some kind of vacation, that they had been relieved of their daily responsibilities. Most of these people listened attentively, possibly aware, as Stuart was, that this cataclysmic event had given them new responsibilities. Stuart drew a breath and continued.