“What’s that mean—storm of interference?” Remo asked.
“All communications black out in here, no matter what the transmission method,” Mark explained. “Radio, infrared, microwaves, even laser-based line-of-sight, nothing gets very far inside the storm. It’s even interfering with our spy satellites in the metasphere, 350 miles up.”
“Why so many ships?” Remo asked. “Why didn’t people get out?”
“They tried.” Mark shrugged.
“There was a current. A flow of water converging on the eye of the storm,” Smith explained.
“From all directions,” Mark added. “Flowing into a central point.”
“Like a bathtub drain,” Remo said. “He will drink the seas dry, Little Father?”
Chiun said nothing.
“And then destroy the world,” Remo added thoughtfully.
“I think we’re jumping the gun,” Smith said. “There’s no way that can happen.”
“The seas do shrink, Emperor,” Chiun pointed out.
“How much shrink are we talking?” Remo asked.
“The Pacific has fallen 1.8 millimeters in the last day and a half, and the pace seems to be picking up.”
“That doesn’t sound like much,” Remo said. “On the other hand, that’s a hell of a lot of water, isn’t it?”
“The displacement is almost incalculable,” Smith said. “Regardless, the water must go somewhere. The most extreme estimations of empty space that could exist below the Pacific will be reached in less than a day. The drainage can’t go on much longer.”
“It will,” Chiun replied.
“There’s simply no place for the water to go, Master Chiun.”
Chiun didn’t reply.
“The limits must be reached within twenty-four hours, at which point the oceans will stabilize,” Smith declared. “Then we will see what, if anything, CURE should do.”
“Remo must not be drawn into the twilight realm of the Dream Thing, Emperor,” Chiun intoned. “Nor I. We own an obligation to that one. He would take control of the Masters of Sinanju if he can.”
There were no more major problems requiring Remo’s attention—only a thousand minor ones, in every nation. Smith asked Remo and Chiun to come back to New York until they could come up with a better course of action.
After the call was done, Smith was unsettled, still trying to make sense of it all.
Chiun frustrated Smith. The old Master could be inscrutable, and his adherence to his knowledge was admirable, but right now Smith needed that knowledge.
Smith didn’t know if he should accept that these bizarre events were related, as Chiun believed, or simply appeared to be. The bird, the global disturbances, Chiun’s recent vision in New Zealand—each was a unique, improbable planet circling the binary stars of two cataclysmic events: the massive disturbances of the oceans and the seething discontent in every nation.
If they were related, then what Chiun knew could be invaluable—and yet Chiun refused to dispel the fanciful notions of the legend to find the truth at the core. Smith felt like a scientist trying to understand the nature of a comet, but his only eyewitness was a medieval peasant who was convinced he had seen Satan streaking through the heavens.
He summoned the two Masters back from Europe because there was little more they could do beside extinguish minor fires—and because he hoped to be able to have a meaningful exchange of ideas with Master Chiun.
“Chiun’s Moovian legends have no basis in reality, and still I find myself buying into them because I can’t accept doing nothing,” Smith said aloud.
Mark asked, “Do you believe the water level will stop going down within twenty-four hours?”
Smith frowned at the desktop, his hands idly bringing up a window on the screen below the glass desktop. The screen contained various estimates of the possible volume of contiguous sub-Pacific caverns. “Every rational scientific estimation says it should have stopped already,” Smith stated. “Unless you give credence to Dr. Belknap.”
Mark Howard’s wristwatch vibrated, reminding him to get to his feet. Sitting for more than fifteen minutes still made his leg ache. He circled the desk and looked at Dr. Smith’s display window.
It was a deceptively simple table. The top box contained the bulleted names of scientists, universities or think tanks that had developed estimates of the possible course of the ocean drain. Next to each name was their estimate in total time. The box on the bottom showed the names of the more improbable theorists. The hollow-earth believers, for example, who claimed the earth was actually an air-filled sphere. Neither Smith nor Mark Howard gave them much credence, but their theory allowed for the seas to indeed drain indefinitely.
In the middle of the window was a single name inside its own box. Dr. Stephen Belknap, a seismologist from Oregon State University. Nobody had ever heard of him until yesterday, when he went public with Tectonic Hollow theory. He postulated that, as the tectonic plates drifted during the past few hundred million years, ripping apart Earth’s single super continent to form the continents man knows today, it formed an air-filled chamber under Earth’s crust.
“Even the experts that are working with the benefit of data about the most recently discovered cavern systems haven’t been able to accommodate the volume of water the oceans appear to have lost,” Smith said. “Belknap’s looking more credible by the minute.”
Mark wouldn’t have agreed yesterday.
His leg didn’t hurt but he was weary, body and soul. The bad dreams hadn’t allowed him to sleep soundly in days. He needed just a few minutes … He rested his head in his hands.
Chapter 21
Mark Howard sank through the oceans slowly at first, watching the water grow darker until it was black. Then he moved faster. The fish that existed here provided their own glowing lights, and they made trails going past Mark.
He was aware he was in one of the Pacific Ocean’s deep trenches. Somehow, he knew he was twenty-one thousand feet below the surface when he finally touched bottom-—and slipped into the earth.
The blackness was the same, but it felt different. It was the mealy coarseness of soil, and Mark felt miles and miles of it pass. He sensed what his destination would be: the talk of the evening news, the infamous Tectonic Hollow.
Mark, who had not been afraid at first, was afraid now. He pictured himself standing inside a rock chamber hundreds of miles across, nothing but emptiness, emptiness, emptiness until it finally reached the rock hardness of the wall. The fear was claustrophobia and agoraphobia combined, but Mark was too terrified to appreciate how unique it was. He tried to stop. He reached out to the earth, clawed at the dirt, but he was only a shadow, a helpless phantom without substance.
He shouted at himself to wake up and for an instant he felt the dream fade—then he was dragged back into it by a thick tentacle that constricted his bad leg and pulled him down.
Mark Howard tried to kick it off, and the pain in his leg was severe—as if the old wound were freshly inflicted. He couldn’t see whatever it was—and whatever it was, it wasn’t as horrifying as where it was taking him.
Mark lunged at his leg and dug his fingers into the tentacle. It loosened, then squeezed harder.
Then Mark arrived at his destination.
It wasn’t what he expected.
It was worse.
Smith noticed his assistant was dozing at his desk, head in his arms. Smith went back to his screen. The young man deserved any sleep he could steal.
Mark gasped.
“Mark?”
Mark was trying to dig into the onyx desktop with his fingers, then he curled up in his chair, a low groaning sound coming from deep inside him. Smith went to the young man and touched his shoulder.