Ocean on Top

by Hal Clement

  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 pos
ition 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.

  Chapter Seventeen

  That sight made a change in me. Bert had been a good friend of mine for several years. I had trusted him; Marie, admittedly, had not and had tried to get me to share her feelings, but I’d felt sure she was just brooding.

  A few minutes ago I had been jolted when Bert confessed to a falsehood in his earlier talk to me, but I had still been ready to listen to his excuses. I would even have been willing to believe that I had misunderstood him the first time.

  But he had also told me — written it in plain words, with no possible doubt about their meaning — that he did not know about Joey’s whereabouts and that to the best of his knowledge and belief Joey had never gotten to this place.

  Clearly and unarguably Bert Whelstrahl had been lying like the proverbial rug. He had known that Joey was here. He had known just where he was and what he was doing. Why should he tell such a lie to me and apparently to Marie? And having told it, why was he now bringing me face to face with the proof that he was a liar? And had Marie formed her impression by spotting some evidence I had missed?

  One thing was certain in my own mind. Whatever explanation Bert gave was going to have to be supported by some pretty good independent evidence before I could accord it any weight. So was anything else he said from now on.

  These thoughts were interrupted by Joey’s pulling away from his viewer and catching sight of me. The expression on his face indicated that Bert hadn’t told him about me either. He was clearly astonished, and seemed delighted. He came over and shook hands violently, and seemed as frustrated as I was by the impossibility of talking. He looked around, probably for the writing pad, but Bert was already busy with the stylus. He held his words up for both of us to read.

  “Joey, we know you’re tied up for the next few hours at least, but will it be all right if I give you another assistant as soon as his first job is finished?” I appreciated his tactful skipping of my name and felt a little more willing to listen to his excuses when they came. I suspected from Joey’s quick grin that he appreciated it too; a few weeks away from our section hadn’t let him forget my chronic embarrassment at the handle my parents had inflicted on me or my self-consciousness about all nicknames offered as substitutes. “More than glad,” he wrote. “Check him out as quickly as you can, Bert. We need him badly.” He came as close to slapping me on the back as the medium permitted, grinned once more, and went back to his viewer.

  I would have liked to make more of a conversation out of it, but was coming to see how anyone who had been here long might start to lose the urge for idle chatter. I could even think of a few people who would be improved by such a change in residence. I waved a farewell which Joey didn’t see, and followed Bert back out into the control room.

  I was going to put some pretty harsh questions to him, but he had the writing pad and circumstances made it difficult to interrupt anyone else’s talk. He had stopped swimming and started writing by the time I got through the door.

  “I didn’t want you to know about Joey until after you’d had your talk with Marie,” were his words. “In fact, I only just decided to let you know even this soon. I don’t think she should know he’s here, and I’m quite sure he shouldn’t know that she is.” I grabbed the pad.

  “Why not? It sounds to me like a dirty trick on both of them.”

  “If she knows he’s here she’ll want to stay.”

  “What’s bad about that? You wanted me to stay, as you said, and I never denied she’s more decorative than I am.”

  “She shouldn’t stay because her only reason for doing it would be Joey, and you know as well as I do how much good that would do her. You know he doesn’t care two cents for the kid. He chose to stay down here, remember. If she learns about him and stays, she’ll be giving him a hard time, and we can’t afford to have that happen. The job’s much too important. If he gets distracted, or changes his mind about staying here, it’s trouble.”

  “And why shouldn’t he know about her?”

  “For the same set of reasons. He’d know why she was here, and it would be as bad as though she were hanging around him in person. He never admitted it, but I think she was one of the reasons he chose to stay here.”

  “You mean he disappeared on purpose? That he knew about this place earlier?”

  “Oh, no. He got here just as I did, and as Marie did. He spotted a work sub that didn’t belong to the Board and followed it.”

  I pondered. The story had some convincing aspects; Joey’s attitude toward Marie was almost as well known as mine, though no one had ever convinced Marie of it. Few people had risked trying. Joey himself wasn’t the sort of man who could tell a girl to run along, even if it were obviously the best thing for the girl as well as for himself. He’d feel it was somehow his fault for not falling for her.

  “But why should you have had to lie to me about it?” I asked finally.

  “Because you were going to see Marie, and I had some hopes you’d talk her into leaving. You’ll forgive my saying that if you’d known Joey was here you wouldn’t have been able to tell her that as far as you knew he wasn’t. I’m not belittling your acting ability, but you wouldn’t have believed it was necessary then.”

  “I’m not sure I do yet. I’m still in the dark about this very important job Joey has to do and I’m supposed to help with.”

  “True enough. We’d better get on with your education. Library next.”

  “Will these guards, or whatever they are, be with us to the end?”

  “It’s hard to say. They aren’t guards, just people who are interested. You ought to be flattered.”

  “Oh, I am. I’ve never been a celebrity before.” It’s curious how hard it is to convey irony by the written word alone. Bert missed it completely, as far as I could tell. He swam back in the general direction of the tunnel we had come down, and the rest of us followed him.

  As I had guessed, the way up was along a different route — maybe I should say a different pipe — with the current, as I’d also expected, carrying us up.

  As usual the trip was not enlivened by conversation, though I found it wasn’t too boring; the girl swam beside me instead of trailing behind with the others. As before, I didn’t know how long the journey took.

  I’m not clear how they controlled the current. It had carried us down one passage, it carried us back to the same room through another, but in the room itself there was no trouble in stopping. Bert opened the big door, and we shed our coveralls on the other side. Then he led the way once more.

  I was a little surprised, and a little more disappointed, to lose our escort at this point. They turned off into another tunnel a few yards from where we left the coveralls. No doubt they, too, had to work at times. I put them out of my mind, more or less, and followed Bert.

  This is one of the points where it’s hard to be detailed without being boring. A library is a library, even when it’s upside down. The books were ordinary in shape and style, if not in content. The films and cards were in no way remarkable. Like unballasted human bodies, most of them tended to float. The chairs, tables, and carrels were on the ceiling, with racks under — no, I mean over — the chairs for parking ballast belts. Not everyone parked them, though; many readers had their belts still on as they drifted in front of a reading screen or floated with a book in their hands.

  The images on the screens were all of the general sort the girl had drawn on the writing pad, second cousins to electrical diagrams or grad-school topology exercises. I watched several of the readers for some minutes each and got the opinion that while they were read
ing in the same sense that the word usually implies, there was an important difference in technique. They did go page by page or frame by frame, as the case might be, spending half a minute or a minute on each before going on to the next. But their eyes didn’t follow the regular back-and-forth routine of a book reader. They wandered irregularly over each page, like the eyes of a man examining a picture.

  Still, I reflected, that wasn’t too surprising. The same thing would happen to me if I were examining a wiring diagram. I was gradually coming to understand the situation, perhaps rather slowly by some people’s standards. I hadn’t thought of engineering drawings as a language before.

  Bert floated quietly around for several minutes, evidently willing for me to study the place by myself. At last, though, he beckoned me over to one end of the room. There was an unoccupied film reader here, and a fairly large case of books. It took about two seconds for me to notice that these were written in ordinary languages. Chinese… Urdu… Latin… English… Russian… I could recognize them all, even though I couldn’t read many of them.

  Bert started writing again.

  “This stuff will tell you the story much more quickly than I can. It’s no shock to you by now that a lot of people, not only Board workers, have found this place in the past. It’s been here since before there was a Board. A lot of those people have stayed. Some of these books were brought here by them, some were written here by them. The information here is what convinced me of the things I told you — the business about attempts to get in touch with the Board about this place, and so on.

  “Spend as much time as you need absorbing it. It’s important that you get the whole story. I’ll be back when it’s time to eat.”