Then both of them climbed down the hatch.
Motors began to hum inside the little ship.
The hatchways slid shut.
The conning tower telescoped in, until the top of it was flush with the shining hull. The edenite armor film pulsed and shimmered and grew brighter—
And then abruptly I understood at least one of the queerly puzzling things.
Locks? No. There were no locks.
This ship didn’t need any locks!
It wasn’t a mere sub-sea ship that needed open ways to the deeps; it was something more than that, more powerful and more ominous.
It was a MOLE!
It was a sub-sea cruiser equipped with the ortholytic drills that would permit it to burrow through the solid rock itself. Now, with the conning tower out of the way, I could see the nested spiral elements of the ortholytic drill itself.
It could mean only one thing: Someone had betrayed one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Sub-Sea Fleet.
Already it was diving. The black water washed over it. The edenite film on the hull shimmered and brightened again, responding to the pressure change.
Still it slid down, while the water dimmed and shattered its image—and then it was gone.
It had entered the rock itself.
A smothering darkness filled the drainage pit.
Shivering from shock as much as from cold, I got stiffly to my feet and stumbled up the radial drain, on the long return trip through the dripping seepage and the suffocating dark. I could feel the rock shivering under my feet—the pumps? Or the whirling spiral ortholytic drills of the MOLE?
I hurried, exhausted and worn, up the chill wet tubes, while under my feet, in a sea of solid rock, the tiny ship that carried two of my best friends embarked on what could only be an errand of treachery.
12
Forecast: Trouble!
It was after 2400 hours when I got bade to the base. I wanted a hot bath and a dry uniform—and more than either of those, I wanted someone to tell me that my eyes were liars, that what I had just seen wasn’t true.
Instead, I called Station K.
Lieutenant Tsuya was already back on duty. He ordered me sharply to report to him at once.
When I came in he was sitting at his wide forecasting desk, scowling at a 200-kilometer seismic stress chart. He swung around on his tall stool to look at me. Framed in the Troyon tubes that lit the charts over his desk he looked pinched and grim with worry, even before I told him what I had seen.
And when I had finished, he sat silent for a long moment, staring at an isentropic analysis graph without seeing a line of it.
He said fretfully: “I wish the computer section would hurry up.”
“Sir?” I was startled; he seemed absent-minded—absent-minded, when I had been telling him about the deadly events I had seen in the drainage sump!
He shook his head and seemed to remember that I was there. “Oh, yes, he said. “Eden. You were telling me about—ah—”
I said urgently, “Sir, maybe I didn’t make myself clear. They’ve got a MOLE! And what’s more, it’s loaded awash with hydrogen fusion devices.”
“I see.” He nodded gravely. But there was something very strange about his behavior.
Either he didn’t believe me, or—well, what else could it be?
He said, his voice more irritable than I had ever known it: “Eden, you come in here with the most fantastic story I have ever heard, and you expect me to pay attention to it. Ridiculous, man! There aren’t six MOLEs in the world—and I guarantee you, nobody but a top-ranking seismographer is going to get his hands on one. Nobody! If you’d said Father Tide was involved—why, yes, there might be some chance of that. A very faint chance, Eden! But Bob Eskow? Nonsense!”
He shook his head, and then his tone changed. “Eden,” he said formally, “I want you to think carefully before you answer this next question. Have you any evidence to prove what you have just told me?”
It caught me flat-footed.
I had been prepared for anything but this. If he had called out the Security section—if he had demanded that Eskow be shot on sight—if he had, even, raced out of the station, taking me with him, to investigate that sump himself…why, any of these things might have made some sense.
But he was acting as though he both doubted what I had to say—and, in the second place, didn’t much care!
I said, clutching at the first words that came into mind: “Sir, surely there’s some evidence! I mean—well, look!” I pointed to my wrecked uniform. Icy sea water was still sloshing out of my shoes. He looked, and shook his head.
“You’re wet, Cadet Eden,” he rapped out. His sleepy eyes narrowed. “Can’t you think of some better proof?”
I said hopelessly: “No, sir. Except that I don’t think Bob Eskow will be back from his pass, until that machine gets back from under the sea-floor.”
“And even that,” he pointed out reasonably, “would be no real proof. He might be anywhere. Anywhere else would be more logical.”
He took a deep breath and faced me squarely.
“Eden,” he said grimly, “I have to tell you that I hardly believe what you have just said. I cannot help but wonder if it is entirely truthful—whether or not mistaken—or if it might be something you have cooked up to shield your uncle.”
The accusation took my breath away. “Sir—”
He cut in: “If I am wrong, you will ultimately receive my apologies,” he said. “But for the present—One moment!”
There was a flashing red light and the tinkle of a bell. Lt, Tsuya, forgetting me entirely, dove for the message hopper, where the alarm had signified the receipt of an incoming message.
I saw the capsule as, feverishly, Lt. Tsuya grabbed it and wrenched it open.
It bore the imprint: Computer Section.
And then I began to understand Lt. Tsuya’s behavior. First he sent me on an errand—then, when I had undertaken it and came back with important information to report, he ignored me, challenged my word, seemed, in short, to have lost his mind!
But he hadn’t lost his mind at all.
It was something else entirely. Something had happened—something so great that he simply could not spare the time to think about Bob Eskow or the missing geosonde, much less what must have seemed like a fantastic story of MOLEs in the drainage sumps and contraband nuclear explosives.
Computer Section.
Those two words told me a lot!
The science of quake forecasting, you see, involves so many factors, each of which has to be evaluated for importance before it can be used at all, that computers are nearly helpless in it.
A computer can do an enormously complex mathematical job in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a man, yes. But computers have no judgment, and they have no knowledge beyond what is put into them. They don’t have, in other words, “know-how.” A computer can solve every problem a man can, but the man has to think it out first. Preparing a seismic problem for a computer takes more work than solving it does. For that reason, computers are not used—except in one case.
That case is when the forecaster cannot believe his results.
Then he submits it to the computer—hoping to find a mathematical error.
But whatever it was that was on the lieutenant’s mind, I could see by the sudden bone-weary slump of his shoulders that he had found no mathematical error. He dropped the half-sheet of mathematical symbols from Computer Section that summarized the results and sat, for a moment, staring into space.
I said: “Is something wrong, sir?” He focused on me with difficulty.
“Wrong?” he mumbled. Then he smiled wryly. ”Yes,” he said, “you might say that. There are indications of a rapid intensification of deep-level stress.”