Ocean on Top

by Hal Clement

  I cleared the sheet and tried some more languages, this time ones I don’t know at all well. All I was hoping for was evidence of recognition. I didn’t get it. Not a trace. This was very odd, since the dozen or so languages I had covered represent native tongues for something like three-quarters of the Earth’s population and included at least a few known slightly by educated people everywhere.

  The girl reciprocated my second effort with another of her own. I could see that it differed in detail from the first, but it bore a strong family resemblance to its predecessor, and I couldn’t make any more sense out of it. If I’d had a camera able to work under the circumstances I’d have photographed it on the chance that it had something to do with the power plants, though even at my most optimistic I’d have admitted it was a very slim chance.

  The thought of plans in general gave me an idea, though. I cleared the pad again and drew in its center a small sketch meant to represent the room we were in, the various passages leading from it and the chamber where Marie’s sub was berthed. The girl didn’t get the idea at first, so I swam over to one of the passages whose entrance I had indicated, looked down it to see whether it were straight or not and extended the appropriate lines on the drawing.

  That seemed to get across. She nodded her head after some more hand-talk with her friends; then she gave me a ‘so what’ look. I handed her the pad and stylus and gestured around, hoping she’d see I wanted a map of the place.

  They understood this, too, I felt sure, but the hand-talk went on for a good deal longer. I hoped they were merely arguing about the best way to give me the information, rather than whether to give me it at all. What I would have liked best was a regular chart of the place, not someone’s freehand sketches.

  The argument, if that’s what it was, was interrupted by Bert’s return. It was a relief to be able to converse understandably, however slowly, once more, but Bert had his own ideas about the subject of conversation. He took the writing materials from the girl and cleared the pad without a glance at what was on it.

  “Did you get any co-operation out of Marie, or has she lumped you with the rest of the outcasts?” he asked.

  “I think I’m on probation,” I replied. “Nothing will really satisfy her but a definite report on Joey.”

  “Well, we can’t give one. To the best of my knowledge he never got here.”

  “You didn’t spot his sub in the vicinity, even?”

  “No one reported it.”

  “But how about your sonar?”

  “We don’t use it except under very special circumstances. It would be too likely to be picked up. We’re quite willing to have the world know about us, but only if they find out all about us. Don’t you have that picture yet? We simply don’t want to be lumped in with the power-wasters the Board is always after, and you know perfectly well that’s the picture people will have if we don’t get a chance to explain.”

  “I suppose that’s true. It’s the picture Marie has now, and she seems quite fond of it. I wonder if just explaining is really going to be enough.”

  “It would be if people would believe the explanation.” I said nothing about the profundity of that remark.

  “You’ve been explaining to Marie for six weeks, and she doesn’t.”

  “No, we haven’t. We’ve been talking for six weeks and she doesn’t listen. There’s a difference. She refuses to discuss anything except Joey. I think your greatest service, both to us and to the Board, would be to get her to pay attention to a genuine description of the whole situation.”

  I digested that for half a minute or so. Several of the people who had been there when Bert arrived had now swum away, but the girl and two or three others were still watching with interest. They were deeply absorbed in seeing what we were writing on the pad, crowding in to look at each message in turn over the writer’s or intended recipient’s shoulder. The girl always seemed to get the best place. Standards of courtesy seemed a bit old-fashioned compared with most regions at the surface.

  “You may be right,” I wrote at last, after trying to fit what he had said into the program I had outlined for myself. “That would seem to mean that I’ll have to see this whole installation with my own eyes, so as to be able to claim first-hand knowledge.”

  “Precisely. Come along. With this job, you may be spared farming after all, but at least you’ll have to see the farms.

  As a matter of fact, I’m getting hungry, and it must be even longer for you than for me since the last decent meal.”

  I had no objection to this thought, and followed him as he swam off through still another of the passages. The girl and three others, after a couple of gestures, followed us.

  As before, it just wasn’t practical to write and swim at the same time, so I had plenty of opportunity for thought as we traveled. I wasn’t able to use it very constructively, and there’s nothing much I can say about the trip except that it took around fifteen or twenty-minutes. Absolutely nothing of interest, and as far as I know nothing of importance, happened until we reached a doorway much less regular in shape than the circular and rectangular ones I had seen so far.

  The light on the other side was fainter than in the tunnels, but brighter than in the ocean beyond the regular entrances. I followed Bert with quickened interest, guessing what I’d see.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I wasn’t surprised to find myself suddenly a few yards above the sea bottom; I was ‘outdoors’.

  The passage we had just left was cut into a sloping rock face — as a matter of fact, the passage itself was a long way from horizontal, as I could now see. I had not been aware of swimming uphill during any of the trip. There was, I reflected, little reason why I should have been.

  A few yards below me a stretch of sea bottom extended into the distance. Once out of the tunnel I could see that it was quite well lighted. Looking up, I could see perhaps fifty feet above me the glowing surface of the ‘tent’ roof. The bottom itself might as well have been under five feet of water instead of five thousand. It was covered with vegetation.

  I didn’t recognize any of the plant life, but that was natural. I might have learned some descriptive biology, or natural history, or whatever it should be called if I’d been born before genetic manipulation became a practical art, but I wasn’t and didn’t. Presumably this plant life had been tailored to provide food for the local population, and the light was there to permit the plants to grow.

  It was almost as good an excuse for the wasted kilowatts as the one Bert had given me. Just once, several years before, I had tasted natural food confiscated from a waster, and I had sympathized with the fellow even then. I’d had to rehearse the moral precepts very firmly, several times a day, for weeks afterward. I’d finally recovered my normally healthy resentment of people who corner resources to give themselves pleasures denied to the rest of us, but it had come hard.

  Bert and the others were slanting down toward the bottom, which was laid but in roughly rectangular patches with a different variety of plant in each. Other swimmers were around in fairly large numbers. Some appeared to be eating, others working. The precise nature of the labor was obscure, partly because of their distance and partly because I knew no more of farming than anyone else had for the last century or so.

  My companions were now pulling round, greenish excrescences from the plants and taking bites from them. The girl handed one to me, and watched with evident amusement while I looked it over and finally took an experimental nibble.

  I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether I liked it or not. It was very different from any ordinary tank alga and was not in a class with that forbidden taste of years before, but it was interesting. I tried another bite, decided it was good and finished it off. The girl showed me how to get others from the plant without a major struggle — they had to be twisted in a special way before the tough stems would yield — and then left me to my own devices while she ate several of the things herself.

  Then she beckoned me to fo
llow, led the way to another patch, and showed me a different fruit. I made a very satisfactory meal in the next quarter of an hour.

  I wondered which, if any, of these growths was the oxygen source. Perhaps they all were; they were all green and presumably photosynthetic, but none were giving off visible bubbles as food-alga tanks are always doing. I decided not to worry about oxygen; there was no reason for Bert’s friends to kill me off in such an indirect and inconvenient way as by depriving me of that. They’d already had too many chances.

  It suddenly dawned on me that I was lumping Bert in more and more closely with the local dwellers, in my own mind. I don’t believe most of what I read about the subconscious — it seems to me to be too much like astrology, alcohol, and other excuses for sloppy thinking and incompetence — but as I review consciously the events of the last few hours it looked more and more as though my changing attitudes were justified. He seemed to regard himself more as a local citizen than as a Board worker with a job to do, and maybe I’d been picking up his attitude without really noticing the evidence.

  There was his choice of words, for example. I’d been devoting more attention to what he said than to the exact way he said it, but now that I thought of it there were a lot of ‘We’s’ and ‘Us’s’ which didn’t really belong in the thoughts of a good Board official under the circumstances — especially if he were really sure that no one but I could read what he was writing.

  Maybe Marie wasn’t being so unreasonable after all.

  I glanced over at him. He was eating, like the others, but he seemed to be taking very little part in the conversation which the unoccupied hands of the eaters were carrying on.

  I don’t really blame myself for not seeing anything very significant in that at the time. If anything, it reassured me; it was consistent with his claim that he hadn’t learned much of the local talk.

  But after the meal I began to feel bothered again. He took me everywhere I showed the slightest desire to go. He explained, convincingly, everything I asked about. There was the tent roof, for example. When I wrote a question about that, his face turned an odd purple color; when that had faded, he wrote. “Careful. With liquid in your lungs, laughing can kill you. They cut a key nerve in your coughing reflex when they changed you, but you can still laugh if you’re not careful.”

  “What’s funny about that question?”

  “Well, I can see where you’d get the idea of a fabric over this place, but I assure you no one has gone to any such trouble. What you see is simply the interface between the liquids.”

  “Why doesn’t it look the same here — translucent instead of transparent — as it does at the entrances? Why do you have special entrances, for that matter?”

  “We keep the entrances cleared off. There’s too much area for that — several square miles — over the farms. Stuff in the ocean is settling to the bottom all the time, and stuff formed on the farms is floating upward. Some of each — a very small percentage, luckily — has density between that of our liquid and water, so it collects at the interface. As a matter of fact, a good deal of living matter grows there, though fortunately it’s a monocellular stuff. If there were more of it, we’d have to clear anyway to let light through to the plants, which would be quite a project.”

  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.

  Chapter Sixteen

  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 a
ppearance.

  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.