The door to the outer shaft opened and Harley Danthorpe, looking pale and with a haunted misery in his eyes that I didn’t understand, came wearily in. “Cadet Danthorpe,” he said, with a tragic effort at briskness, “reporting for duty, sir!”
“At ease,” said Lieutenant Tsuya absently, glancing at him. Then he stiffened. “Danthorpe!” he barked. “What’s the matter with you!”
Harley’s eyes were bulging now, staring in horror at something beyond us. He pointed and tried to speak, strangling. “The—the rock!” he cried.
We turned and stared.
Under my hand the microseismograph pen was scratching wildly, trying to record vibrations far huger than it was ever meant to scribe.
In the wall a long crack split open, and water cascaded from it.
Earthquake?
No—there was no earthquake. It was something far stranger! For from that crack came a grinding, tearing, ripping, crunching sound, and the whine of high-speed engines.
A bright gleaming edenite nose poked out of that crack.
Spiral ortholytic drill elements, whirling and coruscating, flared into life behind it.
A shuddering, rattling crash of rock opened a pathway—
And into the lowermost room of our Station K, like a ferret blundering into a rabbit’s warren, came crunching the long mechanical body of a Manned Ortholytic Excavator—a MOLE—the stolen MOLE that Bob Eskow had entered in the drainage sump, that had since caused the quakes that seemed to be shaking Krakatoa Dome down around our ears!
17
The Quake Doctors
Lieutenant Tsuya moved fast for a lean little man. He was back in his private office, into his locker and back again with a gun in his hand before the rest of as had recovered from our first astonished shock.
“Stand back!” he cried. “All of you, out of the way!”
The MOLE crept, rattling and whining, a few yards into the room, demolishing the wall charts, shattering the forecast table, chewing a whole rack of blank maps and diagram sheets into confetti.
Then the whirling ortholytic drill elements slowed, dulled, stopped.
The hatch at the top of the little sea-car, now doubling as a MOLE, trembled and rasped. A hand pushed it part way open. It struck against the fragments of rock; the hand shoved hard, hesitated, then banged it three or four times against the loosened rock.
Shards fell. The hatch opened.
And out of it came Bob Eskow, looking like the end of a day of wrath.
“Halt!” rapped Lt. Tsuya, the gun in his hand. “Eskow, don’t make a move!”
Bob looked up dizzily, as though he couldn’t comprehend what the lieutenant was doing with a gun in his hand. He slid down the ribs of the sea-car’s boarding ladder, staggered, almost collapsed and managed to save himself by clutching at the edenite hull. And that was a mistake, because it was hot—blistering hot—smoke-hot, from the friction of the drill elements against the naked rock. Bob cried out and pulled his hand away.
But the pain seemed to bring him back to consciousness.
“Sorry,” he whispered, holding one hand in the other, staring at the lieutenant. “We’ve made an awful mess out of your station, sir.”
“You’ve made a bigger mess than that, Eskow!” rapped the lieutenant.
“I—I—” Bob seemed at a loss for words. At last he said: “Can the others come out of the MOLE, sir?”
“Others?” Lt. Tsuya frowned. “Well, very well,” he conceded at last.
With difficulty Bob climbed back up the boarding ladder and spoke into the hatch.
First my uncle, Stewart Eden, appeared—weary, his face beaded with sweat, filthy with grime, but looking in far better health than I had seen him the day before. “Jim!” he boomed, and then caught sight of Lt. Tsuya with the gun. He frowned quizzically, but said nothing.
After my uncle—then Gideon Park. He stood at the open hatch and grinned at us, then turned back and reached down into the depths of the ship to help out the last member of the MOLE’s crew.
It was the old Chinese I had seen with Bob!
I heard a gasp from beside me. It was Lt. Tsuya.
“Doctor Koyetsu!” he gasped. The muzzle of his gun wavered and dropped toward the floor. “Doctor, what are you doing here?”
Chinese? Not at all! The “old Chinese” was the Japanese seismologist who had written most of the books on our station shelves—John Koyetsu!
From the moment when Lt. Tsuya saw his own personal hero, Dr. Koyetsu, in the company of my uncle and the others, his certainty that my uncle was a criminal disappeared. It was like the changing of night into day. He turned, without a word, and put the gun away.
And then he said simply: “Doctor Koyetsu, will you tell me what this is all about.”
The doctor said wearily: “Of course.” He looked around, a lean, worn old man, pressed very far beyond the limits of his endurance, for a place to sit. Hastily Harley Danthorpe dragged a folding chair across the rock floor to him.
“Thank you,” said the doctor, and smiled. He sat.
“You remember what happened at Nansei Shoto Dome,” he said abruptly. Lt. Tsuya nodded—we all nodded, for it was at Nanei Shoto that the greatest underwater tragedy in history had occurred, when this very Dr. John Koyetsu had issued a wrong forecast and prevented the evacuation of the dome.
“I was wrong at Nanei Shoto,” he said harshly. “I have given the rest of my life to finding out why—and to doing something about it.
“The first thing I did,” he said, “was to work with Father Tide, for the Fordham Foundation—where we designed the geosonde, and later this MOLE.” He patted its cooling flanks. “As you know, with the help of the sondes, we have been able to forecast quakes much more accurately than ever before.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” I said bitterly—and then hurriedly apologized for interrupting. But Dr. Koyetsu smiled.
“Your forecasts were wrong for a good reason, Jim,” he said. “We made them wrong.”
“For mere forecasting is not enough. I determined to find a way not only to predict quakes far enough ahead to minimize damage…but to prevent them. And the way to prevent them turned out to be—the creation of artificial quakes. Small ones. Timed just so, occurring in just such a place, that they would relieve the strain in the mother rock that was building up to a great devastation—and release it in small and harmless quakes. Such as the ones that you have seen here in Krakatoa.
“For we created them, the four of us.”
The news shook us more than any of the quakes had. Lt. Tsuya’s face was furrowed with perplexity; Harley Danthorpe stood stunned, his eyes open wide; Lt. McKerrow shook his head endlessly.
But I—I was exultant!
“I told you!” I burst out. “I told you my uncle couldn’t be involved in anything dishonest or wrong. You should have believed me!”
Lt. Tsuya said harshly: “One minute, Eden! I grant you that Doctor Koyetsu’s word goes a long way with me, but there are still a lot of questions that have to be answered for my satisfaction. You can’t talk black into white—and your uncle has already admitted, for example, that he made a million dollars out of the panic from the first quake. Not to mention his possession of nuclear explosives!”
“But I think I can explain it all,” I said excitedly. “If you will just listen! Because I think that million dollars was far less than he had already spent—that the money was used to pay for the big project on which he was engaged.”