“The money shall be raised and the tunnel shall be built in the manner I have outlined.”
BOOK THE SECOND
UNDER THE SEA
I. AN UNUSUAL JOURNEY
The silence in the little cabin was almost absolute and were it not for the constructions and devices of man it would have been, for here at thirty fathoms of depth in the Atlantic there was no sound. On the ocean’s surface above the waves might crash and roar and ships’ foghorns moan as the vessels groped their way through the almost constant fogs of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and nearer the surface pelagic life made its own moans as it was consumed, the shrimp clicked, the dolphin beeped, the fish burbled. Not so at the level where the tiny submarine sped, here was the eternal quiet of the deep. Stillness outside and almost as still within. There was only the distant hum of the electric motors that drove them through the water, the sibilant whisper of the air vents and, surprisingly the loudest, the tack-tack-tack of the jackdaw clock fixed to the bulkhead above the pilot. There had been no conversation for some minutes and in that vacuum the clock sounded the louder. The pilot saw his passenger’s glance move to it and he smiled.
“You’ll be noticing the clock then, Captain,” said he, not without a certain amount of pride.
“I do indeed,” said Washington, failing to add that it was impossible not to notice the obtruding thing. “I assume it is an original?”
“Not only an original but it is close on being the original, one of the very first ones made, that’s what it is. My grandfather it was who built the first jackdaw clock after seeing one of them things from the Black Forest when he was in a hock shop on O’Connell Street. Cuckoo clock it was, he said, and it fascinated him, what with him being a clockmaker himself and all of that. When he came home to Cashel he tried to build one but not being overfond of cuckoos himself—great ugly thing laying eggs in others nests and such incivility—he put in a jackdaw and a bit of ruined tower that being where jackdaws are found in any case and there it was. He made first one and then another and they caught on with the English tourists out to look at the Castle and the Rock and before you could say Brian O’Lynn an entire new industry was founded and to this day you’ll see a statue of him in the square there in Cashel.”
As though to add emphasis to this panegyric the clock struck the hour and the jackdaw emerged through the portal of the ruined abbey and hoarsely shouted CAWR, CAWR before retreating.
“Is it two already?” asked Washington, looking at his watch which was in rough agreement with the jackdaw who had retired to his dark cell for another hour, “Are we going as fast as we can?”
“Full revs, Captain, Nautilus is doing her best.” The pilot pushed the speed lever harder against its stop as though to prove his point. “In any case there’s the site now.”
O’Toole turned off the outside lights so they could see farther through the darkness of the sea. Above them there was a filtered greenness that Vanished as the depth increased so that below there was only unrelieved blackness. Yet when the glow of the beams had died away something could be seen down there in abyss, light where only night had ruled since the world was born. One light was visible, then another and another until a cluster of submerged stars greeted them as they dropped lower, welcoming them to a hive of industry alien to the ancient peace of the ocean floor.
First of all the eye was captured by a hulking, squat, ugly, alien, angular, boomed, buttressed and barbizaned machine that clutched the ocean floor. It had the girder and rivet look of a sturdy bridge for well over ninety-five percent of its construction was open to the ocean, at a pressure equilibrium with the sea around it. The frame was open and the reaching arms were open, while the tractor treads were jointed plates that ran on sturdy cast-iron wheels. It took a keen eye to note the swollen bulges behind the treads that contained the electric motors to power them, though the rotund shape of the nuclear reactor, swung like a melon behind the great ma-chine, was certainly easy enough to see. Other motors in pods turned the gear wheels and cables while the most important pod of all made a rounded excrescence on the front of the entire structure. This was the control room and living quarters of the crew, pressurized, comfortable and habitable, and so self-contained that the men could live here for months on end without returning to the world above the waves that was their natural habitat. Yet so large was the great supporting device that even these stately quarters were no larger in proportion than an egg would be balanced on the handle-bars of a bicycle, which, in some ways, the structures did resemble.
This hulking machine, entitled the Challenger Mark IV Dredger by its manufacturers, was nonetheless called Creepy by all who came into contact with it, undoubtedly because of its maximum speed of about one mile an hour. Creepy was neither creeping nor operating at the present time which was all for the best since otherwise vision would have been completely impossible, for while at work it threw up an obscuring cloud in the water denser than the finest inky defense of the largest squid alive. Its booms would then swing out and the rotating cutters, each as large as an omnibus, would crash into the ocean floor, while about them compressed streams of water tore at the silt and sand deposits of this bed. Under the attack of the water and the cutting blades the eternal floor of the ocean would be stirred and lifted—into the mouths of suction dredgers that sucked at this slurry, raised and carried it far to the side where it was spewed forth in a growing mound.
All of this agitation raised a cloud of fine particles in the water that completely obscured vision and was penetrable only by the additional application of scientific knowledge. Sound waves will travel through water, opaque or no, and the returned echoes of the sonar scanner built up a picture on the screen of events ahead in the newly dug trench. But Creepy’s work was done for the moment, its motors silent, its digging apparatus raised when it had backed away from the new trench.
Other machines now took their place upon the ocean floor. There was an ugly device with a funnel-like proboscus that spat gravel into the ditch, but this had finished as well and also backed away and the silt raised by its disturbance quickly settled. Now the final work had begun, the reason for all this subaqueous excavation. Floating downwards towards the newly-dug trench and the bed of gravel on which it was to rest was the ponderous and massive form of a preformed tunnel section. Tons of concrete and steel reinforcing rods had gone into the construction of this hundred foot section, while coat after coat of resistant epoxies covered it on the outside. Preformed and prestressed it awaited only a safe arrival to continue the ever-lengthening tunnel.
Thick cables rose from the embedded rings to the even larger flotation tank that rode above it, for it had no buoyancy of its own. The tubes that would be the operating part of the tunnel were open to the sea at both ends. Massive and unyielding it hung there, now drifting forward slowly under the buzzing pressure of four small submarines, sister vessels to the one that Washington was riding in. They exchanged signals, stopping and starting, then drifting sideways, until they were over the correct spot in the trench. Then water was admitted to the ballast tanks of the float so it dropped down slowly, setting the structure to rest on its prepared bed. With massive precision the self-aligning joint between the sections performed its function so that when the new’section came to rest it was joined to and continuous with the last.