Young Barnes said:
“Excuse me, sir. What are those boats doing?”
“They’re towing an oil-slick out to sea,” said Bordman absently, “by towing a floating line of some sort between them. There isn’t enough oil to maintain the slick, and it’s blown landward. So they tow it out to sea again. It holds down the seas. Every time, of course, they lose some of it.”
“But—”
“There are trade-winds,” said Bordman, not looking to seaward at all. “They always blow in the same direction, nearly. They blow three-quarters of the way around the planet, and they build up seas as they blow. Normally, the swells that pound against this cliff, here, will be a hundred feet and more from trough to crest. They’ll throw spray ten times that high, of course, and once when I was here before, spray came over the cliff-top. The impacts of the waves are—heavy. In a storm, if you put your ear to the ground on the leeward shore, you can hear the waves smash against these cliffs. It’s vibration.”
Barnes looked uneasily at the cliff’s edge and the line of boats pushing over an ocean whose waves seemed less than ripples from nearly a mile above them. But the line of boats was incredibly long. It was twenty miles in length at the least.
“The slick holds down the waves,” Barnes guessed. “It works best in deep water, I believe. The ancients knew it. Oil on the waters.” He considered. “Working hard to prevent vibrations! Are they really so dangerous, sir?”
Bordman nodded inland. A quarter mile from the edge of the cliff there was a peculiar, broken, riven rampart of soil. It might have been forty feet high, once. Now it was shattered and cracked. It had the look of having been pulled away from where it was withdrawn. There were vertical breaks in its edges and broken-off masses left behind. At one place, a clump of perhaps a quarter-acre had not followed the rest, and trees leaned drunkenly from its top, and at the edge had fallen outward. All along the top of the stone cliff for as far as the eye could see there was this singular retreat of soil and vegetation from the cliff’s edge.
Bordman stooped and picked up a bit of the mud underfoot. He rubbed it between his fingers. It yielded like modelling clay. He dipped a finger into a gray, greasy-seeming puddle. He looked at the thick liquid on his finger and then rubbed it against his other palm. Young Barnes duplicated this last action.
“It feels soapy, sir!” he said blankly. “Like wet soap!”
“Yes,” said Bordman. “That’s the first problem here.”
He turned to a ground-service Survey private, and jerked his head along the coast-line.
“How much have other places slipped?”
“Anywhere from this much, sir,” said the private, “to two miles and upward. There’s one place where it’s moving at a regular rate. Four inches an hour, sir. It was three-and-a-half yesterday.”
Bordman nodded.
“Hm. We’ll go back to Headquarters. Nasty business!”
He plodded over the messy footing toward the vehicle which had brought him here. It was not an ordinary ground-car. Instead of wires or caterwheels, it rolled upon flaccid, partly-inflated five-foot rollers. They would be completely unaffected by roughness or slipperiness of terrain and if the vehicle fell overboard it would float. It was thickly coated with the gray mud of this cliff-top.
As he moved along, Bordman was able to see the pattern of the rock underneath the mud. It was curiously contorted, like something that had curdled rather than cooled. And, as a matter of fact, it was believed to have solidified slowly under water at such monstrous pressure that even molten rock could not make it burst into steam. But it was above-water now.
Bordman climbed into the vehicle, and Barnes followed him. The bolster-truck turned and moved toward the broken barrier of earth. Its five-foot flabby rollers seemed rather to flow over than to surmount obstacles. Great lumps of drier dirt dented them and did not disintegrate. There were no stones.
Bordman frowned to himself. The bolster-truck more or less flowed up the crumbling, inexplicably drawing-back mass of soil. Atop it, things looked almost normal. Almost. There was a highway leading away from the cliff. At first glance it seemed perfect. But it was cracked down the middle for a hundred yards, and then the crack meandered off to the side and was gone. There was a great tree, which leaned drunkenly. A mile along the roadway its surface bucked as if something had pressed irresistibly upward from below. The truck rolled over the break.
It was notable that the motion of the truck was utterly smooth. It made no vibration at all. But even so it slowed before it moved through a place where buildings—houses and a shop or two—clustered closely together on each side of the road.
There were people in and about the house, but they were doing nothing at all. Some of them stared at the Survey truck with hostility. Some others deliberately turned their backs to it. There were vehicles out of shelter and ready to be used, but none was moving. All were pointed in the direction from which the bolster-truck had come.
The truck went on. Presently the extraordinary flatness of the landscape became apparent. It was possible to see a seemingly illimitable distance. The ocean forty miles away showed as a thread of blue beneath the horizon. The island was an almost perfectly plane tilted surface. There was no hill visible anywhere, nor any valleys save the extremely minor gullies worn by rain. Even they had been filled in, dammed, and tied in to irrigation systems.
There was a place where there was a row of trees along such a water-course. Half the row was fallen, and a part of the rest was tilted. The remainder stood upright and firm. All the vegetation was perfectly familiar. Most colonies have some vegetation, at least, directly descended from the mother planet Earth. But this island on Canna III had been above-water perhaps no more than three or four thousand years. There had been no time for local vegetation to develop. When the Survey took it over, there was nothing but tidal seaweed, only one variety of which had been able to extend itself in weblike fashion over the soil above water. Terrestrial plants had wiped it out, and everything was green and human-introduced.
But there was something wrong with the ground. At this place the top of the soil bulged, and tall corn-plants grew extravagantly in different directions. At another, there was a narrow, lipless gash in the ground’s surface. An irrigation-ditch poured water into it. It was not filled.
Barnes said:
“Excuse me, sir, but how the devil did this happen?”
“There’s been irrigation,” said Bordman patiently. “The soil here was all ocean-bottom, once—it used to be what is called globigerinous ooze. There’s no sand, and no stones. There’s only bed-rock and formerly abyssal mud. And some of it underneath is no longer former. It’s globigerinous ooze again.”
He waved his hand at the landscape. It had been remarkably tidy, once. Every square foot of ground had been cultivated. The highways were of limited width, and the houses were neat and trim. It was, perhaps, the most completely civilized landscape in the galaxy. Bordman added:
“You said the stuff felt like soap. In a way it’s acting like soap. It lies on slightly slanting, effectively smooth rock, like a soap-cake on a sheet of metal that’s tilted a bit. And that’s the trouble. So long as a cake of soap is dry on the bottom it doesn’t move. Even if you pour water on top, like rain, the top will wet, and the water will flow off, but the bottom won’t wet until all the soap is dissolved away. While that was the process here, everything was all right. But they’ve been irrigating.”
They passed a row of neat cottages facing the road. One had collapsed completely. The others looked absolutely normal. The bolster-truck went on.
Bordman said, frowning:
“They wanted the water to go into the soil, so they arranged it. A little of that did no harm. Plants growing dried it out again. One tree evaporates thousands of gallons a day in a good trade-wind. There were some landslides in the early days, especially when storm-swells pounded the cliffs, but on the whole the ground was more firmly anchored when first cultivated than it h
ad been before the colonists came.”
“But irrigation? The sea’s not fresh, is it?”
“Water-freshening plants,” said Bordman drily. “Ion-exchange systems. They installed them and had all the fresh water they could wish for. And they wished for a lot. They deep-ploughed, so the water would sink in. They dammed the water-courses. What they did amounted to something like boring holes in that cake of soap I used for an illustration just now. Water went right down to the bottom. What would happen then?”
Barnes said:
“Why the bottom would get wet—and the soap would slide! As if it were greased!”
“Not greased,” corrected Bordman. “Soaped. Soap is viscous. That’s different, and a lucky difference, too. But the least vibration would encourage movement. And it does. So the population is now walking on eggs. Worse, it’s walking on the equivalent of a cake of soap which is getting wetter and wetter on the bottom. It’s already sliding as a viscous substance does, reluctantly. But in spite of the oil-slick they’re trying to keep in place upwind there’s still some battering from the sea. There are still some vibrations in the bed-rock. And so there’s a slow, gentle, gradual sliding.”
“And they figure,” said Barnes, “that locking onto a ship with the landing-grid might be like an earth-quake.” He stopped. “An earth-quake, now—”
“Not much vulcanism on this planet,” Bordman told him. “But of course there are tectonic quakes occasionally. They made this island.”
Barnes said uneasily:
“I don’t think, sir, that I’d sleep well if I lived here.”
“You are living here for the moment. But at your age I think you’ll sleep.”
The bolster-truck turned, following the highway. The road was very even, and the motion of the truck along it was infinitely smooth. Its lack of vibration explained why it was permitted to move when all other vehicles were stopped. But Bordman reflected uneasily that this did not account for the orders of the Sector Chief forbidding the rocket-landing of a ship’s boat. It was true enough that the living-surface of the island rested upon slanting stone, and that if the bottom were wet enough that it could slide off into the sea. It already had moved. At least one place was moving at four inches per hour. But that was viscous flow. It would be enhanced by vibration, and assuredly the hammering of seas upon the windward cliff should be lessened by any possible means.
But it did not mean that the sound of a rocket-landing would be disastrous, nor the straining of a landing-grid as it stopped a space-ship in orbit and drew it to ground should produce a landslide. There was something else, though the situation for the island’s civilian population was already serious enough. If any really massive movement of the ground did begin, viscous or any other, if any considerable part of the island’s surface did begin to move, all of it would go. And the population would go with it. If there were survivors, they could be numbered in dozens.
The tall tamped-earth wall of the Headquarters reserve area loomed ahead. Sector Headquarters had been established here when there were no other inhabitants. Seeds had been broadcast and trees planted while the Survey buildings were under construction. Headquarters, in fact, had been built upon an uninhabited planet. But colonists followed in the wake of Survey personnel. Wives and children, and then storekeepers and agriculturists, and presently civilian technicians and ultimately even politicians arrived as the non-Service population grew. Now Sector Headquarters was resented because it occupied one-fourth of the island. It kept too much of the planet’s useful surface out of civilian use. And the island was desperately over-crowded.
But it seemed also to be doomed.
As the bolster-truck moved silently toward Headquarters, a hundred-yard section of the wall collapsed. There was an upsurging of dust, and a rumbling of falling, hardened dirt. The truck’s driver turned white. A civilian beside the road faced the wall and wrung his hands, and stood waiting to feel the ground under his feet begin to sweep smoothly toward the here-distant sea. A post held up a traffic signal some twenty yards from the gate. It leaned slowly. At a forty-five-degree tilt it checked and hung stationary. Fifty yards from the gate, a new crack appeared across the road.
But nothing more happened. Nothing. Yet one could not be sure that some critical point had not been passed, so that from now on there would be a gradual rise in the creeping of the soil toward the ocean.
Barnes caught his breath.
“That makes me feel—queer,” he said unsteadily. “A shock like that wall falling could start everything off!”
Bordman said nothing at all. It had occurred to him that there was no irrigation of the Survey area. He frowned thoughtfully, even worriedly, as the truck went inside the Headquarters gate and rolled on over a winding road through park-like surroundings.
It stopped before the building which was the Sector Chief’s own headquarters in Headquarters. A large brown dog dozed peacefully on the plastic-tiled landing at the top of half a dozen steps. When Bordman got out of the truck the dog got up with a leisurely air. And when Bordman ascended the steps, with Barnes following him, the dog came forward with a sort of stately courtesy to do the honors. Bordman said:
“Nice dog, that.”
He went inside. The dog followed. The interior of the building was empty, and there was a sort of resonant silence until somewhere a telewriter began to click.
“Come along,” said Bordman. “The Sector Chief’s office is over this way.”
Young Barnes followed.
“It seems odd there’s no one around,” he said. “No secretaries, no sentries, nobody at all.”
“Why should there be?” asked Bordman in surprise. “The guards at the gate keep civilians out. And nobody in the Service will bother the Chief without reason. At least, not more than once!”
But across the glistening, empty floor there ran an ominous crack.
They went down a corridor. Voices sounded, and Bordman tracked them, with the paws of the dog clicking on the floor behind him. He led the way into a spacious, comfortably nondescript room with high windows—doors, really—that opened on green lawns outside. The Sector Chief, Sandringham, leaned back in a chair, smoking. Werner, the other summoned Senior Officer, sat bolt upright in a chair facing him. Sandringham waved a hand to Bordman.
“Back so soon? You’re ahead of schedule on all counts! Here’s Werner, back from looking at the fuel-store situation.”
Bordman suddenly looked as if he’d been jolted. But he nodded, and Werner tried to smile and failed. He was completely white.
“My pilot from the ship, who’s kept aground,” said Bordman. “Lieutenant Barnes. Very promising young officer. Cut my landing-time by hours. Lieutenant, this is Sector Chief Sandringham and Mr. Werner.”
“Have a seat, Bordman,” grunted the Chief. “You too, Lieutenant. How does it look up on the cliff, Bordman?”
“I suspect you know as well as I do,” said Bordman. “I think I saw a vision-camera planted up there.”
“True enough. But there’s nothing like on-the-spot inspection. Now you’re back, how does it look to you?”
“Inadequate,” said Bordman. “Inadequate to explain some things I’ve noticed. But it’s a very bad situation. Its degree of badness depends on the viscosity of the mud at bedrock all over the island. The left-behind mud’s like pea soup. It looks really bad! But what’s the viscosity at bedrock with soil pressing down, and I hope drier soil than at the bottom?”
Sandringham grunted.
“Good question. I sent for you, Bordman, when it began to look bad, before the ground really started sliding. When I thought it might begin any time. The viscosity averages pretty closely at three times ten to the sixth. Which still gives us some leeway. But not enough.”
“Not nearly enough!” said Bordman impatiently. “Irrigation should have been stopped a long while back!”
The Sector Chief grimaced.
“I’ve no authority over civilians. They’ve their own planetary government.
And do you remember?” He quoted: “‘Civilian establishments and governments may be advised by Colonial Survey officials, and may make requests of them, but in each case such advice or request is to be considered on its own merits only, and in no case may it be the subject of a quid-pro-quo agreement.’” He added grimly: “That means you can’t threaten. It’s been thrown at my head every time I’ve asked them to cut down their irrigation in the past fifteen years! I advised them not to irrigate at all, and they couldn’t see it. It would increase the food-supply, and they needed more food. So they went ahead. They built two new sea-water freshening plants only last year!”
Werner licked his lips. He said in a voice that was higher-pitched than Bordman remembered:
“What’s happening serves them right! It serves them right!”
Bordman waited.
“Now,” said Sandringham, “they’re demanding to be let into Sector Headquarters for safety. They say we haven’t irrigated, so the ground we occupy isn’t going to slide. They demand that we take them all in here to sit on their rumps until the rest of the island slides into the sea or doesn’t. If it doesn’t, they want to wait here until the soil becomes stable again because they’ve quit irrigating.”
“It’d serve them right if we let them in!” cried Werner in shrill anger. “It’s their fault that they’re in this fix!”
Sandringham waved his hand.
“Administering abstract justice isn’t my job. I imagine it’s handled in more competent quarters. I have only to meet the objective situation. Which is plenty! Bordman, you’ve handled swamp-planet situations. What can be done to stop the sliding of the island’s soil before it all goes overboard?”
“Not much, offhand,” said Bordman. “Give me time and I’ll manage something. But a really bad storm, with high seas and plenty of rain, might wipe out the whole civilian colony. That viscosity figure is close to hopeless, if not quite.”
The Sector Chief looked impassive.
“How much time does he have, Werner?”
“None!” said Werner shrilly. “The only possible thing is to try to move as many people as possible to the solid ground in the Arctic! The boats can be crowded—the situation demands it! And if the two space-craft in orbit are sent to collect a fleet, and as many people as possible are moved at once, there may be some survivors!”
Colonial Survey Page 17