But Lt. Tsuya was pushing him back into a chair. “You’re going nowhere, ” he said forcefully. “Well take over now!”
“You?” My uncle blinked at him dizzily. “But—but what do you know about it? John and I are experienced at this by now. It’s too dangerous for anyone else to go!”
“And it’s plain murder for you!” cried the lieutenant. He stabbed at the chart before him. “Here—and here—and here! That’s where the next three shots have to go. What else do we need to know? We’ll take Bob with us, if he’ll go, and Gideon. And we’ll need one more person.”
“Me!” I cried immediately. But I was not alone; at the same instant, beside me, Harley Danthorpe stepped forward.
“Me!” he shouted. Then he turned to look at me. “I have to go, Jim!” he said tautly.
For a moment the station was almost silent, except for the pumps and the splash of water where the sea was running through widening fractures in the rock. All of us were thinking of the voyage that lay before the MOLE, boring through the earth’s crust, miles beneath us, under increasing heat and pressure. Five quakes had gone off, but three remained.
And those three must be placed deeper, where the MOLE would be in greater danger of being crushed by slipping rock, or drowned in molten magma. I remembered how many of our sondes had imploded at seventy thousand feet or less—and now we would have to go far deeper than that!
But it had to be done.
And Lt. Tsuya said at last: “Very well. We’ll take you both! Lieutenant McKerrow, I’m leaving you in charge of the station and these two gentlemen. See that they’re taken care of.”
“Thanks,” grumbled McKerrow. Then, eagerly: “Listen, why not take six? I’m sure Eden and Koyetsu can get along by themselves.”
“That’s an order,” rapped Lt. Tsuya. “There’ll be plenty of work here. Now—” he glanced behind him, at the gleaming armor of the MOLE and the spiral ortholytic elements that wound around it—”now, let’s get going!”
While we were completing the loading and getting aboard ourselves, the emergency speakers, long silent, began to rattle again with quake messages and warnings. It sounded bad, even with the limited knowledge the announcer had been given. He spoke of new cracks opened in the drainage tubes, sumps filling faster than the overloaded pumps could empty them. Plans were being made to evacuate all of the dome outside the edenite safety armor. But there was a grave, worried note in his voice as he said it, and I knew why. Edenite was mighty against the thrust of the ocean’s pressure, but without power it might as well have been tissue paper. And there was always the chance of a power failure. A mob in the upper northeast octant had tried to fight their way into the platform elevators and there had been trouble—and fighting meant guns; and with guns the power generators themselves might be endangered.
There was no time to waste! And then the hatch came down as Dr. Koyetsu and my uncle waved.
At once the sound was cut off.
In the tiny, cramped cabin of the MOLE Gideon took his place at the controls. We stared at each other in the dim, flickering lights—all the light we could have; for the armor and the ortholytic drill elements between them took enormous power, and there was just so much left over for other purposes.
“Let’s go!” ordered Lt. Tsuya.
Gideon nodded.
He poised his fingers above the starting buttons, hesitated—then pressed four of them in quick sequence.
The edenite armor began to pulse brightly.
The ortholytic elements began to spin.
The MOLE shuddered and rocked, and then began to move.
The noise was like a giant howling of mad dinosaurs crunching rock; there was never another noise like it; even inside the armor, it was almost deafening.
The MOLE lurched and staggered, and we felt it begin to tilt as, crawling backwards, it withdrew from the hole it had breached in the rock walls of Station K.
We were on our way to the bowels of the earth!
19
Sea of Stone
Lt. Tsuya bellowed over the monstrous racket: “More speed, Park! We’ve got to get down to the fault level in fifty minutes if we’re going to do any good!”
“Aye-aye, sir!” cried Gideon, and winked at me out of the corner of his eye. He was enjoying himself, in spite of everything. I remembered the first day I met him, when he pulled me out of the drainage tubes in Marinia, and all our adventures since; danger was a tonic to Gideon Park.
And for that matter, it had done something to all of us. The knowledge of danger didn’t matter; what mattered was that we were in action—we were fighting.
Only Harley Danthorpe seemed silent and worried.
I remembered the strange, tragic expression that had been on his face as he came back to Station K, after seeing Father Tide to the sub-sea quays. The MOLE had erupted into the station at just that moment and there had been no chance to study Harley Danthorpe; but something had been wrong. And something was wrong now.
Bracing myself against the plunge and roll of the ship as it chewed its way through masses of steel-hard rock, I started over to him. But there was no time now either; Gideon Park, bellowing over his shoulder, ordered: “Get the nuclear fuses ready for planting! This old tub has taken a terrible beating. As soon as we get them laid, we want to get out of there!”
So for the next little while there was no time to talk. Each golden globe had to be carefully laid in a discharge port—a tube, edenite-lined, something like the pneumatic torpedo tubes of the old-fashioned submarines. But these ports were designed to spew their contents out into solid rock, not water; each port was designed with a special ortholytic cutting tool mounted at its outer hatch. Lining up and sealing those tools was a complicated job; it was a task that belonged to skilled sallymen of the Fleet, not to us—but we were there. By force of circumstance, we had to do it.
We did it.
But the job didn’t stop there. Once the nuclear fuses were in place and the port cutting tool properly readied, there came the task of arming the fuses. The stainless steel bands that girdled them were cocking gears. Painfully—for the years at the bottom of the sea had done nothing to make the old corroded gears work more easily—each set of bands had to be aligned to the precise notch that released the safety locks inside. As long as any one band was a fraction of an inch off dead center, the fuses were on safety; we could fling them as far into hot dead rock as we liked, but only sheer accident would make them explode. And that wasn’t good enough. It was necessary to unlock the safeties…and, of course, there was always the chance that once they were unlocked the weary old fuses would not wait for the impulse that thrust them out of the discharge ports and the timing mechanism that was supposed to set them off, but would on the instant explode in our faces.
That, of course, would be the end of the MOLE and all of us—permanently. There wasn’t a chance that a fragment the size of a pin would survive.
But that, at least, didn’t happen.
Two of the spheres were too far gone; try as we would, the bands couldn’t be manhandled into place. Gideon’s face grew long and worried-looking as, from the controls, he saw us discard them one after another. We had two cocked, two discarded—and only two left. If both of those were defective—
But they were not.
We got the three globes into position not more than two minutes before Gideon, bent over the inertial-guidance dead reckoner, reported that we were at the focus of the next quake.
There was a long pause, while the MOLE bucked and roared and screeched through the resisting rock—