“In the barracks, I guess,” said Harley Danthorpe, “Come on, Harris. Let’s have our passes.”
“Wait a minute,” the yeoman grumbled. “That was Lieutenant Tsuya. He wants Eskow to report to Station K at twenty hundred hours for special duty. And he isn’t in the barracks.”
Harley and I looked at each other. Not in the barracks? But he had to be in the barracks. .
Harley said, “I wonder what the special duty is.”
I nodded. We both knew what the special duty was—it wasn’t hard to figure out. Twenty hundred hours. An hour before the little quake that Bob had forecast. Obviously, the lieutenant was planning to have Bob on duty at the time the quake was supposed to occur—to show him that the forecast was wrong, in a way that Bob couldn’t question.
But Bob wasn’t around.
Yeoman Harris wheezed softly, “His pass is missing.” He opened the drawer and showed us. “It was there. Then Lieutenant Tsuya canceled it, and I went to destroy it. But it was gone.”
I stared at the open drawer unbelievingly. Bob was behaving oddly—I remembered his behavior with the shriveled Chinese janitor, coming so close to the disappearance of the microseismometer. But he was my friend,
I couldn’t imagine anything in Krakatoa Dome that would make him go AWOL to get there.
“Better see if you can find him,” wheezed Yeoman Harris. “Lieutenant Tsuya’s a good officer, so long as you trim ship with him. But he won’t stand for lubberly lack of discipline!”
We took our passes and, without a word, hurried back to the barracks.
Bob wasn’t there.
And his dress uniform was gone.
“He’s gone AWOL!” cried Harley Danthorpe. “Well, what do you know about that!”
“Blow your tanks,” I said sharply. “He’s a good cadet. He wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“Then where is he?” Harley demanded.
That stopped me.
There wasn’t any answer to that.
7
Life on the Lid
Harley said knowingly: “You haven’t got the inside drift. Take my word for it, Bob’s up in the dome right now, having himself a time.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said, but there seemed to be every chance that Harley was right.
The guards checked our passes, and we took the elevator up to the dome itself. We walked out into Krakatoa Dome, into the throbbing of the pump rooms and the air circulators, past the locks where a sleek cargo sub-sea liner was nuzzling into the edenite pressure chamber.
I said suddenly: “Let’s look for him.”
Harley gloated: “Ha! So you admit—”
Then he stopped.
He looked at my face, shrugged, changed expression. And then, after a moment, he squinted at his watch. “Well,” he said a little reluctantly, “I’ll tell you how it is. I don’t mind, but I’ve got a date for dinner with my folks in three hours. Are you coming along?”
I said: “Help me look for Bob.”
He shrugged. “Oh, all right,” he said at last. “Why not? But I’m not missing my father’s chef’s cooking! If we don’t find him by nineteen hundred hours—that’s it!”
We stepped onto a circular slidewalk, and then off it again at a radial way that was moving toward the center of the dome.
“Most men off duty head for the tipper southeast octant,” Harley said expertly. “That’s the White Way, as we call it—where the shops and theaters and restaurants are. Now, you lubbers want to be careful on a slidewalk, because it’ll pitch you off if you aren’t braced for it. Watch the way I do it, Jim.”
“I’m not exactly a lubber,” I protested.
He shrugged. “Depends on your point of view,” he said reasonably. “You’ve spent a couple weeks in a dome. I’ve spent my whole life here. I don’t know what you are—to a lubber; but I know what you are to me.”
He grinned. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll give you the inside drift as we go.”
He led me toward another bank of elevators.
“To begin with,” he lectured, “Krakatoa Dome’s a perfect hemisphere, except for the tube at the top, that goes to the qoating terminal on the surface. It’s two thousand feet in diameter, and a thousand feet high—not counting the drainage pumps, the warehouse districts and so on, that are actually quarried out of the sea floor. And not counting Station K.”
“I see,” I said, hardly listening. I was scanning every passing face, hoping to see Bob.
“Those pumps are what keep out the sea. No quake is likely really to hurt the dome itself—it would take Force Eight at the least, probably Nine or even Ten. But even a smaller quake, if it hit just wrong, might fissure the rock underneath us, where there’s no edenite film. Then—boom! The sea would come pounding in!”
I glanced at him. He actually seemed to enjoy the prospect!
“Don’t let it get you, Jim,” he said consolingly. “I mean, it’s true that we’re living on the lid of an active seismic zone. What of it? It’s true that if the pumps went, and the basic rock split, we couldn’t keep the sea out of the dome. But there’s still a chance that we might survive, you know. Oh, not down at Station K—that would go, sure. But the dome itself, up here, is divided into octants, and each one can be sealed off in a second!
“Of course,” he said meditatively, “we might not have a second.
“Especially,” he added, “if anything happened to the power supply, and the automatic octant barriers didn’t go on!”
I let him talk. Why not? He was trying to scare a lubber—but, no matter what he thought, I wasn’t a lubber. I love the deeps too well to feel that they are an enemy!
But then we were up a dozen decks, and I said:
“That’s enough, Harley. All right? I’d like to concentrate on looking for Bob.”
He grinned. “Got under your skin a little, eh?” he said amiably—and wrongly. “All right. Well, we’re a long way from Zero Deck. This is the shopping area; let’s take a look around.”
We came out onto a crowded street. It didn’t look much different from any business street in a surface city—at first; until you noticed the Troyon tubes that give it light, set into the metal ceiling that hung forty feet overhead.
We poked through the crowds around the tri-D theaters and the restaurants. There were plenty of people—civilians, crewmen from the sub-sea cargo and passenger vessels, uniformed men from the Fleet. I saw several cadets in sea-red dress uniforms, but none of them was Bob.
We rode on a slidewalk along a circular street to the next radial, then hopped on a slide that took us back to the elevators.
Harley gave his watch a calculating squint. “The dome has a hundred miles of streets,” he said. “With the slidewalks moving at four miles an hour, you’ll be about four working days searching the city—and then Eskow will probably be inside some building when you go by. Better give it up. Come on home with me.”
I said, “Let’s try one more deck.”
We went up to the next deck. The slidewalk took us past rows of shooting galleries and pin-ball machines and novelty shops that sold little plastic models of the dome in mailing cartons. We saw a lot of men in uniform. But none of them was Bob.
“That’s all for me,” Harley Danthorpe said.
I shrugged. He said persuasively: “Why not ride up to the next deck? That’s where my family lives. You might as well look there as anywhere else.”
It seemed reasonable.
We went up one deck more, and out a radial street that was crowded with expensive looking restaurants. We rode the slidewalk through the safety wall, into the residential octant where Danthorpe lived.
The streets were wider there; strips of carefully manicured lawn were growing under the Troyon lights, beside the slidewalks. The apartment buildings glittered sleekly with wealth. The doors were guarded by expensive robot butlers.