by Frederik
Bob said immediately: “Because the trail would have led directly to him! Don’t you see that, Jim. The best way for him to conceal his own activities was to involve me in them, and not you. When he came to me, just after we arrived here, he explained the whole thing to me. He told me that you would feel left out, and rightly so—but that he counted on you to understand at the end, when everything was explained. And you do, Jim!”
“I guess I do,” I said at last—but I wasn’t so very sure! In spite of everything, I wished that I had been able to take part of the work and worry on myself!
But Lt. Tsuya, climbing down the boarding ladder, interrupted:
“I have one more question too,” he said. “You made that successful quake forecast because you knew what was going to happen—knew that Stewart Eden would cause it. Right?”
Bob nodded. “I guess I should have faked it,” he admitted. “But—well, it looked like a good chance for me to show how smart I was! And that wasn’t very smart…”
“That’s not my question,” said the lieutenant, shaking his head. “It was after that. The thing I’m talking about is the geosonde that was stolen from the station.”
Bob peered at him blankly.
“That sonde cost the Fleet thousands of dollars,” said Lt. Tsuya. “And I want to know what happened to it! I’m responsible, you know.”
But Bob shook his head. “Sir,” he said honestly, “I can’t help you. That’s something I don’t know anything about.”
Harley Danthorpe popped his head out of the hatch of the MOLE.
“All stowed away!” he called. “You’re all ready to take off!”
And that’s when the fifth quake struck.
I suppose it wasn’t any bigger or worse than the others. The wave amplitude was no greater, on the seismographs we still had working. But the sound of it seemed louder, when it came moaning up through the rock to shatter the damp, icy stillness of the tunnels. The vibration seemed more painful.
And most of all—this one wasn’t part of Dr. Koyetsu’s plan!
My uncle turned white-faced to us and cried: “We’ve got to get those other bombs planted! We’ve started something and we have to finish it!”
Rock sprayed out of the cracks in the ceiling and caught him as he spoke. My uncle was thrown to the ground, bleeding from the head and shoulder. Rock rattled against the edenite hull of the MOLE like machinegun fire. I was hit; Dr. Koyetsu was hit; Gideon was knocked flat, but only a glancing blow that pounded the wind out of him but did no more damage than that.
But Koyetsu and my uncle, they were in no shape to withstand that sort of treatment! Neither of them was young—both had been under immense strain—and now, in a fraction of a second, both were smashed down by falling rock, in a quake that signaled enormous danger for all of us.
Lt. Tsuya gave swift orders, and Bob and I helped get the injured ones to a dry and level place on the chart tables. Bob glanced at me and said sharply: “Jim, you’re bleeding yourself!” It was true, but no more than a scratch. A sharp-edged flint had raked across my neck and shoulder; the skin was gouged, but not deeply.
We ministered to the injured ones, while Lt. Tsuya computed hastily. Soundings we had none; seismograph traces were scanty, most of the machines being out of commission from the repeated shocks; but the art of forecasting is more in the mind of the man who does it than in the data he has to work with. Lt. Tsuya threw his pencil across the station.
“Here!” he cried. “Look at this!” He scrabbled up another pencil and quickly charted the position of the focuspoints of the five quakes, the four that had been triggered and the fifth that nature itself had brought upon us. “Look!” Red crosses marked the position of each focus; a dotted red line lay between them. “That fifth quake isn’t all bad,” he said hurriedly. “It will help relieve the tension—provided the remaining triggerexplosions are set off on schedule. The MOLE must go out again at once! There’s less than an hour to get the next blast off—and it will take all of that to get in position!”
My uncle pushed himself off the table. “I’m ready,” he said hoarsely, clutching at a chair for support. “John—Gideon. Come on!”
But Lt. Tsuya was pushing him back into a chair. “You’re going nowhere, ” he said forcefully. “Well take over now!”
“You?” My uncle blinked at him dizzily. “But—but what do you know about it? John and I are experienced at this by now. It’s too dangerous for anyone else to go!”
“And it’s plain murder for you!” cried the lieutenant. He stabbed at the chart before him. “Here—and here—and here! That’s where the next three shots have to go. What else do we need to know? We’ll take Bob with us, if he’ll go, and Gideon. And we’ll need one more person.”
“Me!” I cried immediately. But I was not alone; at the same instant, beside me, Harley Danthorpe stepped forward.
“Me!” he shouted. Then he turned to look at me. “I have to go, Jim!” he said tautly.
For a moment the station was almost silent, except for the pumps and the splash of water where the sea was running through widening fractures in the rock. All of us were thinking of the voyage that lay before the MOLE, boring through the earth’s crust, miles beneath us, under increasing heat and pressure. Five quakes had gone off, but three remained.
And those three must be placed deeper, where the MOLE would be in greater danger of being crushed by slipping rock, or drowned in molten magma. I remembered how many of our sondes had imploded at seventy thousand feet or less—and now we would have to go far deeper than that!
But it had to be done.
And Lt. Tsuya said at last: “Very well. We’ll take you both! Lieutenant McKerrow, I’m leaving you in charge of the station and these two gentlemen. See that they’re taken care of.”
“Thanks,” grumbled McKerrow. Then, eagerly: “Listen, why not take six? I’m sure Eden and Koyetsu can get along by themselves.”
“That’s an order,” rapped Lt. Tsuya. “There’ll be plenty of work here. Now—” he glanced behind him, at the gleaming armor of the MOLE and the spiral ortholytic elements that wound around it—”now, let’s get going!”
While we were completing the loading and getting aboard ourselves, the emergency speakers, long silent, began to rattle again with quake messages and warnings. It sounded bad, even with the limited knowledge the announcer had been given. He spoke of new cracks opened in the drainage tubes, sumps filling faster than the overloaded pumps could empty them. Plans were being made to evacuate all of the dome outside the edenite safety armor. But there was a grave, worried note in his voice as he said it, and I knew why. Edenite was mighty against the thrust of the ocean’s pressure, but without power it might as well have been tissue paper. And there was always the chance of a power failure. A mob in the upper northeast octant had tried to fight their way into the platform elevators and there had been trouble—and fighting meant guns; and with guns the power generators themselves might be endangered.
There was no time to waste! And then the hatch came down as Dr. Koyetsu and my uncle waved.
At once the sound was cut off.
In the tiny, cramped cabin of the MOLE Gideon took his place at the controls. We stared at each other in the dim, flickering lights—all the light we could have; for the armor and the ortholytic drill elements between them took enormous power, and there was just so much left over for other purposes.
“Let’s go!” ordered Lt. Tsuya.
Gideon nodded.
He poised his fingers above the starting buttons, hesitated—then pressed four of them in quick sequence.
The edenite armor began to pulse brightly.
The ortholytic elements began to spin.
The MOLE shuddered and rocked, and then began to move.
The noise was like a giant howling of mad dinosaurs crunching rock; there was never another noise like it; even inside the armor, it was almost deafening.
The MOLE lurched and staggered, and we felt it begin to ti
lt as, crawling backwards, it withdrew from the hole it had breached in the rock walls of Station K.
We were on our way to the bowels of the earth!
19
Sea of Stone
Lt. Tsuya bellowed over the monstrous racket: “More speed, Park! We’ve got to get down to the fault level in fifty minutes if we’re going to do any good!”
“Aye-aye, sir!” cried Gideon, and winked at me out of the corner of his eye. He was enjoying himself, in spite of everything. I remembered the first day I met him, when he pulled me out of the drainage tubes in Marinia, and all our adventures since; danger was a tonic to Gideon Park.
And for that matter, it had done something to all of us. The knowledge of danger didn’t matter; what mattered was that we were in action—we were fighting.
Only Harley Danthorpe seemed silent and worried.
I remembered the strange, tragic expression that had been on his face as he came back to Station K, after seeing Father Tide to the sub-sea quays. The MOLE had erupted into the station at just that moment and there had been no chance to study Harley Danthorpe; but something had been wrong. And something was wrong now.
Bracing myself against the plunge and roll of the ship as it chewed its way through masses of steel-hard rock, I started over to him. But there was no time now either; Gideon Park, bellowing over his shoulder, ordered: “Get the nuclear fuses ready for planting! This old tub has taken a terrible beating. As soon as we get them laid, we want to get out of there!”
So for the next little while there was no time to talk. Each golden globe had to be carefully laid in a discharge port—a tube, edenite-lined, something like the pneumatic torpedo tubes of the old-fashioned submarines. But these ports were designed to spew their contents out into solid rock, not water; each port was designed with a special ortholytic cutting tool mounted at its outer hatch. Lining up and sealing those tools was a complicated job; it was a task that belonged to skilled sallymen of the Fleet, not to us—but we were there. By force of circumstance, we had to do it.
We did it.
But the job didn’t stop there. Once the nuclear fuses were in place and the port cutting tool properly readied, there came the task of arming the fuses. The stainless steel bands that girdled them were cocking gears. Painfully—for the years at the bottom of the sea had done nothing to make the old corroded gears work more easily—each set of bands had to be aligned to the precise notch that released the safety locks inside. As long as any one band was a fraction of an inch off dead center, the fuses were on safety; we could fling them as far into hot dead rock as we liked, but only sheer accident would make them explode. And that wasn’t good enough. It was necessary to unlock the safeties…and, of course, there was always the chance that once they were unlocked the weary old fuses would not wait for the impulse that thrust them out of the discharge ports and the timing mechanism that was supposed to set them off, but would on the instant explode in our faces.
That, of course, would be the end of the MOLE and all of us—permanently. There wasn’t a chance that a fragment the size of a pin would survive.
But that, at least, didn’t happen.
Two of the spheres were too far gone; try as we would, the bands couldn’t be manhandled into place. Gideon’s face grew long and worried-looking as, from the controls, he saw us discard them one after another. We had two cocked, two discarded—and only two left. If both of those were defective—
But they were not.
We got the three globes into position not more than two minutes before Gideon, bent over the inertial-guidance dead reckoner, reported that we were at the focus of the next quake.
There was a long pause, while the MOLE bucked and roared and screeched through the resisting rock—
Then—”Fuse away!” roared Gideon. Lt. Tsuya, white lines of strain showing around his mouth, came down hard on the port release valve. There was a sudden raucous whine of highspeed whirling ortholytic elements from inside the port, a clatter of metal against rock as the port thrust itself open—
And the first nuclear explosive was gone.
MOLE had laid her first egg with her new crew; two more remained.
We made tracks out of there.
Fourteen minutes later, exactly on schedule, there was a sudden shuddering moan that filled the little ship, almost drowning out for a second the noise of our frantic flight througji the rock. The MOLE felt as if it were some burrowing animal indeed, caught in a ferret’s teeth, shaken and flung about as the rock shook in the throes of the quake we had triggered. The lights flickered, went out and came back on again—even dimmer than before. There was a heart-stopping falter in the noise of our drill—if it stopped, all stopped; without those whirling elements we were entombed beyond any chance of help. But it caught again; and the MOLE was strong enough to survive the shock.
“That was a close one!” yelled Gideon, grinning. “Next time, let’s leave a little more time on the fuse!”
“Impossible!” rapped Lt. Tsuya at once. “We can’t open those discharge ports again! The fuse settings will have to remain just as they are!”
And then he saw that Gideon was grinning at him. After a moment, the lieutenant returned his smile. “I thought you were serious for a moment,” he apologized.
The grin dried up on Gideon’s face. “It might get serious at that,” he said, suddenly cocking his ear to the sound of the drills. Bob Eskow, clutching the hand-brace beside me, said tautly:
“I hear it too! One of the drill elements must be working loose!”
I listened. Yes. There was something; but I wasn’t expert enough to know what. Above the banging and rasping there was an uneven note, something like an internal-combustion car with some of its cylinders misfiring; the MOLE seemed to stagger through the rock instead of cutting evenly.
I turned to Bob. He shrugged.
We let it go at that. There was nothing else to do…
The second egg went off on schedule. The second blast caught us and shook us just as hard as the first. But we survived—amazingly, when you stop to think that any one of those fuses contained atomic energy enough to trigger an H-blast big enough to slag a city. But even an H-bomb is tiny compared to the energies released in an earthquake; the bombs themselves, damped by miles of solid rock between us and them by the time they went off, were relatively weak; it was the quakes they triggered that endangered us.
But there was nothing to do about it.
Lt. Tsuya took a pencil and figured feverishly in the wan, flickering light; but he cast it away from him after a moment. “I hoped,” he muttered, “that that last quake might have been enough. But I’m not sure.”
Gideon called, calm and sure over the racket of the MOLE: “Trust John Koyetsu, Lieutenant! If he says we need eight quakes, then that’s what we need.”
The lieutenant nodded soberly. Then his pumpkin face twisted sharply. “To think,” he raged, “that all this could have been done on time—with extra crews and extra MOLEs to do it—if it hadn’t been for that city council! I’m a peaceful man—but I hope they get what they deserve!”
Above the infernal noise came the voice of Harley Danthorpe, and even in that moment we could all hear a note in it that explained all the tragedy and worry in his face:
“You get your wish, sir,” he said. “They did.”
Lt. Tsuya whirled to face him. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.
Harley Danthorpe’s face was entirely relaxed, entirely without emotion. He said, as though he were telling us the time by the ship’s clock: “Why, just what I say, sir. They got what they deserved.”
For a second his calm deserted him, and his face worked wildly. But he regained control of himself. “My father,” he said grimly, “and the mayor. And three or four of the council, too. They’re gone, Lieutenant.
“Do you remember sending me to the quays with Father Tide? While I was there I saw it. My father’s special sub-sea yacht was there—cost him half a million dollars! I
t was the pride of his life. He’d just had it overhauled, and for a minute, when I saw it, I thought that he’d given it to the people of Krakatoa, to help in the evacuation!
“But that was wrong. It wasn’t that way at all.”
Harley’s face was pale and stiff. He said, almost tod low to hear above the clamoring din: “There were eight men boarding that yacht. Eight, when there was room for fifty! And all the rest of the space was taken up with papers. Stock certificates. Property deeds. Bonds—cash—everything my father owned in the way of wealth that he could bring with him. He was evacuating himself and a few friends, not the people of Krakatoa! I saw the mayor with him. And I saw them close the hatch and go into the locks.
“And I saw what happened, when the outer lock door opened.”
Harley gulped and shook his head.
“The edenite didn’t hold. When the sea pressure came into the lock, she caved flat. They—they were all killed, sir.”
For a moment we were silent.
Then Lt. Tsuya said, his voice oddly gentle: “I’m sorry, Danthorpe. Your father—”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Harley interrupted grimly. “I understand. But there’s one more thing I want to tell you. Remember that missing geosonde?”
Lt. Tsuya looked startled. “Of course.”
“Well, sir—I took it.” Harley swallowed, but doggedly went on. “My dad asked me to. I realized I broke regulations—by stealing it, and even by talking about it. I—” He stopped himself. He said abruptly: “I have no excuse, sir. But I did it. You see, he was going to have more made, using it as a model, in order to set up his own quake-forecasting service, privately. It was the same proposition he offered Doctor Koyetsu. He—he wanted to make money out of speculation.”
For a moment Harley’s face seemed as though he would lose control; but he hung on and said grimly: “I have no excuse, and I’ll face a board of investigation, if we ever get out of this. But I hope I’ll get another chance, Lieutenant.