Ocean on Top

by Hal Clement

  Maybe the best thing to do would be to throw out the caution policy and turn on my lights. The extra power would be offset by more efficient travel when I could see where I was going and I should stand a better chance of reaching the entrance before my juice failed entirely and automatically let my ballast go. If I were seen, no doubt some of the swimmers would come close enough to give me a really good look, so I might get a better idea of their high-pressure technique before I left.

  I’m a cautious man by nature, and thought that one over for quite a while before I bought it. There was plenty against it, of course. Just because all I’d seen was swimmers rather than subs didn’t prove there weren’t any subs. If there were, there would be an excellent chance that I could never get back to the surface — but I’d accepted that risk before starting the trip. I ping-ponged the matter for several minutes. Then I took a good, deep breath on the theory that I might not get many more and turned on one of my spots.

  It made a difference, all right. The bottom was mostly rock, as I’d suspected, and was very rough — no wonder I’d had trouble using my legs effectively. Able to watch what I was doing, I resumed travel and, as I’d hoped, made much better speed with much less power drain. It wasn’t exactly easy yet; I was still rolling, and had to change lights as well as legs as I rolled, but the improvement was encouraging.

  I could see more motion around me. There was a lot of small life — shrimps and their relatives — that I hadn’t been able to spot before. They got out of my way without being too distracting. There were also plantlike growths, though considering how far they were from the nearest natural light it seemed likely that they were sponges or something of that sort. They neither helped nor hampered the rolling, as far as I could tell.

  However, I was paying for the much better short-range vision with a much worse view of distant objects. I might have been surprised quite easily by a group of swimmers, but what actually happened was less predictable. I lost orientation.

  Not in the compass-direction sense and not completely. I could still see the lighted area to my left, though not as well as before; my compass still worked, when it happened to be right side up; but my sense of up and down, depending more on my view of a few square yards of ocean bottom than on my semicircular canals, was fooled when some of the bottom ceased to be horizontal.

  The change must have been gradual, or I’d have spotted it within the small area I could see well. As it was, I overlooked it completely; suddenly I was on an area of rock sloping much more steeply than any I had traversed up to then. Before I knew it the tank had started a stately roll to the left; after I knew it, leg after leg poked out in that general direction proved useless.

  It wasn’t like rolling downhill in a barrel; it was a slow and graceful motion. I could easily have stayed upright inside the tank if I’d chosen to concentrate on that problem instead of on the controls. For all the use I got out of the latter, I might as well have concentrated on comfort. Some of the legs may have slowed me a little, but none of them came close to putting a stop to the journey. I rolled helplessly into the lighted region and out onto the tent fabric. For several long seconds my report-making attention was divided almost equally between up and down.

  Above me I could see the lights clearly for the first time. They were ordinary high-pressure, excited-vapor lamps, bigger than I’d ever seen used for general illumination, but otherwise nothing strange. I still couldn’t see what held them in position, since looking up at them was hard on the eyes.

  Looking down was harder on the imagination, though mine was getting a bit calloused. I already knew that the fabric was remarkably strong and elastic; I’d seen how it reacted to Pugnoses’s bow, which must have had some pretty sharp corners here and there. I also knew that it was opaque, or at best translucent, in its normal state. I realised that the part now under my tank would be-stretched. But it hadn’t occurred to me that stretching the stuff would make it transparent.

  Chapter Four

  When I stopped moving, however, I could see ordinary sea bottom — rock similar to the stuff I had been rolling across — under me. For a moment I thought something must have stopped me short of the tent roof after all, but glances through several of the ports killed that notion. I was nearly fifty yards out on the thing, sunk into it for just about half of the diameter of the tank. From ports above that level I could see the lights above and the smooth fabric below; from the lower windows I could make out rock and occasional patches of silt on the bottom and a greenish-white, evenly glowing ceiling above — evidently the fabric, lighted from the other side. It was translucent, then; but the part of it stretched around the lower half of the tank offered no interference at all to vision. Some of the legs were extended on this side, and the stuff seemed to have spread in an invisibly thin layer over these as well — they could hardly have punctured it or I wouldn’t have been hanging on the roof. Someone must have done some very fancy work in molecular architecture, I decided — which shows how a wildly wrong set of premises can at times give rise to a correct conclusion.

  But why the tent at all? The sea bottom under it looked no different from that above. There was no sign of any human being or artificial structure in the region below. There weren’t even any living beings that I could see, and I certainly looked hard — it occurred to me for a moment that someone might have gone so far with the energy-wasting business as to try growing natural foods with artificial light. The idea at least went along with indifference to ordinary morality about energy; people who’d shine all those kilowatts into the ocean probably wouldn’t boggle at overreaching their fair share of area in order to grow mustard or something like that. The sea bottom was about the only place on Earth where such a trick could be pulled without being caught right away by indignant neighbors, to say nothing of the Board. The only trouble with the theory, other than one’s natural reluctance to believe in such people, was that I couldn’t see anything growing. For that matter, I didn’t know what sort of food plant could be grown under sea water. There were some, no doubt; and if there weren’t natural ones, there is always gene tailoring.

  A more immediate question was what to do next. Thirty seconds of trying proved that I could extend and retract my legs until the power cells ran down without moving the tank at all. They just didn’t have anything to push against; the bottom was a little too far down. I tried rolling the thing by shifting my weight. This worked as far as turning the tank over was concerned, but didn’t get me noticeably closer to ‘shore’. It seemed that the only freedom of motion I had left was upward.

  This was a little annoying. I had planned to plant a small sonar transponder near the entrance when I found it, as a guide for the police boats. If I dropped it here, it would mean very little and furthermore would be seen lying on the tent fabric by the first person who happened to pass, either above or below. If I’d had the reaction time and foresight of a fictional hero I might have let one go when I realized I was out of control; but I hadn’t, and there was no use moaning about it.

  I might wait until they found the tank and just hope for a chance to drop the instrument without anyone’s noticing while they were carting me off, but that seemed to involve a historical record for optimism.

  I couldn’t accept the idea of going back to the surface without leaving it, though, even though that and all the other things it would be so nice to get done seemed to be impossible. Even a snake on a tray of oiled ball bearings keeps wriggling.

  And so I remained. There was really no point in an early departure anyway. I still had plenty of oxygen, and there was always the hope that I’d get a useful idea before they — whoever ‘they’ were — found me. The hope lasted for nearly six hours.

  It wasn’t a girl this time, though it might possibly have been one of the same men. He wore the same sort of swimming outfit to the last detail, as far as I could see. He was swimming straight toward me when I first saw him, above the tent roof as the others had been, slanting out of the darkness fro
m the direction I supposed the entrance must lie. Certainly he had seen me, or rather the tank. I wished I had spotted him earlier — it would be interesting, and might even be useful, to know whether I had been found accidentally by a passing swimmer or by someone deliberately checking the region where the wrecked boat had been found. However, I could be philosophical about not knowing. I watched as he swam overhead.

  He should be able to recognize the tank without much trouble. It had a lot of nonstandard equipment fastened outside, but it was basically a regular emergency high-pressure escape tank of the sort you’d find in any large submarine — a sphere of silica fiber and high-stress polymer able to stand the pressure of two miles of sea water. It was light enough to float, ordinarily, but the jury-rigged thing I was in was well ballasted. Besides the legs and their accessory gear there were the lights, the transponders, sundry pieces of sensing equipment, and several slabs of lead so distributed as to keep the center of buoyancy and the geometrical center as close together as practical. The lead made the real difference; I would still float with all the rest.

  The swimmer stopped stroking as he glided overhead and drifted, settling slowly toward me. I could see his face now through the helmet — in fact, the helmet itself was barely noticeable; he might almost have been swimming bareheaded. He was no one I could remember ever having seen before in five years, of Board work, but I took good note of the line of his black hair, the set of his eyes, and the squarish outline of the rest of his face so as to be sure of knowing him again if the chance ever came up. Presumably he couldn’t see me; the view ports were small, my inside lights were out, and he showed no sign of the surprise I would have expected him to feel if he knew or guessed that the tank contained a living man.

  He came close enough to touch the equipment — so close that I could no longer see everything he was doing. I told myself that it couldn’t be anything very drastic, considering what the tank was built to take, but I’d still have been much happier if I could have seen his hands all the time. He was certainly fooling with things; I could feel the casing quiver occasionally as he pushed something particularly hard.

  He drew away again and swam twice more all around the tank, never taking his eyes from it. Then he settled down to the tent roof and pushed his head against it, as though he were trying to swim through.

  I didn’t dare shift my weight quickly enough to look through one of the lower ports while he was still in that position, so I couldn’t tell whether his helmet stretched the fabric enough to let him see through — it was, after all, a lot smaller than my tank. I did let myself down very gingerly, so as not to move my container noticeably, but by the time my eyes had reached one of the lower ports he had risen again — at least, I could see nothing against the fabric except his shadow. He seemed to have started swimming away, and I took a chance and straightened up quickly. The shadow had told the truth. He was heading back in the direction from which he had come.

  This time I was much more careful with the clock. He was back with another man in just under eight minutes. His companion was carrying either the cylinder that had been used in moving the wreck, or one just like it; the first man was also carrying something, but I couldn’t make out what it was right away. It looked like a rather untidy bundle of rope.

  When he stopped above the tank and shook it out, however, it turned out to be a cargo net, which he began to work around the tank. Apparently he had decided on his first inspection that the natural irregularities of his find didn’t offer much hold to a rope. I couldn’t exactly blame him for that conclusion, but I very much wished he hadn’t reached it. I wasn’t sure how strong the net might be, but unless it were grossly defective in manufacture it would hold my ballast slugs. If it were fastened around tank and slugs both, releasing the latter would become a pointless gesture. It was definitely time to go, and I reached for the master ballast release.

  Then I had another thought. Dropping the lead would presumably give my presence away, assuming they hadn’t already guessed there was someone inside. That cat was out of the bag, and nothing else I could do would tell them any more. I might as well, therefore, try something else which might keep that net from enfolding me until I was over bare rock again and stood a chance of dropping the transponder effectively. There seemed nothing to lose by it, so I extended all the legs at once.

  Neither of the swimmers was actually hit, but they were very startled. The one with the net had been touching the tank at the time, and may have thought that something he had done was responsible for releasing the springs. At any rate, neither of them seemed to feel that any more haste than before was needed, as they should have done if they’d suspected a man was inside. They simply went about the job of attaching the lifting device as they had to the other wreck; there were plenty of things to fasten lines to now that the legs were out, and it would have been hard or impossible to get the net around the new configuration. That was all to the good.

  The technique was the same as before. I assumed the cylinder contained a chemical gas generator, considering the pressure the balloon was expanding against. That was just a fleeting thought, though. It was much more interesting to watch the two swimmers pushing me toward the edge of the roof even before my container had lifted entirely clear of the fabric. Things were certainly looking up; only two people, bare rock coming up — no, don’t be too hasty; maybe they’ll push you right to that entrance you want to find. Wait it out, boy. I pulled my fingers away from the panel, and locked them together for extra safety.

  Just as had been done with Pugnose, the tank was moved away from the tent and then along parallel with its edge. The motion was slow — even with a weightless load there was plenty of water to push out of the way — and we were more than fifteen minutes on the trip. I kept watching for some sign of the entrance, expecting a break of some sort in the fabric itself, but that wasn’t the arrangement I finally saw.

  After a quarter of an hour my porters aimed away from the lights again and headed up the slope which I assumed was still to our right. About two hundred yards in this new direction brought us to the lip of another bowl or gully, apparently much like the one I had almost been trapped in a few hours before, but larger. The center of this depression was even more brightly lighted than the roof of the tent, and the entrance was in the very middle of the bright region.

  I didn’t take a very good look at it; I acted too fast. I glimpsed what seemed to be a smooth-walled pit about forty feet across with ladders going down at a couple of dozen points around its rim. Most of the light came from some point in the pit below my line of vision. Between me and the opening were a dozen or more swimming figures, and it was the sight of these that made me act. If I were to be surrounded by a whole school of swimmers, my chances of dropping a transponder unnoticed would be negligible; and without spending any more time in thought, I dropped the ballast and one of the sounders simultaneously. I instantly realized that might be a mistake, since each of the lead slabs was heavy enough even under water to smash the instrument, and as I felt the tank lurch upward I dropped another of the little machines. There was a good chance that my company had been distracted by the ballast — a much better one than I realized, as I found later.

  I heard the lead hit the rock. So, evidently, did the swimmers around the hole. It took them a few seconds to spot the source of the racket. A man judges sound direction partly from the difference in arrival time of the wave at his two ears; and with the high speed of sound in water, the fact that the disturbance was also being carried by the rock, and the helmets they were all wearing it was impossible for them to get more than a vague notion of where the sound had originated. When they did start coming my way it was in response to a flashlight which one of my carriers was shining toward them.

  The two original swimmers were hanging onto my legs — the tank’s I should say. They couldn’t hold me down, of course. It takes more than a couple of almost-floating human bodies to replace several tons of lead. They were staying with me
, though, and guiding the others.

  That didn’t worry me at first, since there weren’t enough people in sight to hold me down, and if there had been they couldn’t all have found room to get hold. The only real cause for anxiety was the possibility that there might be work subs with outside handling equipment somewhere around. Even from these, though, I’d be fairly safe if they’d just put off their appearance for a few more minutes. They’d have to hunt me with sonar once I was out of sight, and I was beginning to feel pretty certain that the last thing this bunch would do was send out sonar waves. The darned things travel too far and can be recognized too easily. I still didn’t know what these folks were up to, but there was enough obviously illegal about it to suggest that secrecy would be high on their policy list.

  The ones who were holding on to me would have to drop off soon. There isn’t an underwater breathing rig made that will let a man rise at three feet a second or so for more than a few hundred feet without running into decompression trouble. I didn’t care what gas mixture these characters were breathing; there are laws of physics and human bodies have to obey them.

  The more distant swimmers were turning back as this thought crossed my mind; I could see them against the fading background of the lighted pit. I could also see, poorly, the light which one of my hitchhikers was shining toward them. He seemed to have some hope still; maybe there was a sub in the neighborhood, and he was trying to stick with me long enough to guide it. Unless it showed up very soon, though, he was going to lose that gamble and kill himself in the bargain.

  I saw another swimmer, quite close, dwindling between me and the light; my second passenger must have dropped off. When would the first go? His light was still shining, but it could hardly do any good now. I could barely see the pit, and surely no one down there could see his little flash.