“Our enemies down deep are seldom men in these days. In fact, the old institution of war was drowned in the deeps. There’s room and wealth enough for everybody.
“But getting them takes co-operation. Edenite was an American invention—” Did I imagine it, or did he glance at me when he said that? “But the British devised the techniques of sub-sea farming. The ortholytic drill was originally a German idea. The Japanese have pioneered in sub-sea quake forecasting.
“Against the hazards of the sea, all men fight together.”
He paused and looked at us.
“‘The Tides Don’t Wait!’” His voice rang out with the old slogan of the Academy. “That means that the Sub-Sea Fleet doesn’t live in the past. We recognize the fact of change. We are quick to make the most of new technologies.
“Gentlemen,” he said in his cold voice of command, “on a basis of your unusual aptitudes, indicated by the scores you have earned on the psychological tests and confirmed by your actual achievements here at the Academy, you have been selected for a mission involving the application of such a new field of scientific development.
“You are placed on orders.
“You will be ready for departure by air at twenty-one hundred hours tonight. You will proceed via New York and Singapore to Krakatoa Dome. You will report to the commanding officer of the Fleet base there, for a special training assignment.
“Gentlemen, you are dismissed.”
And we saluted, about-faced and marched out.
“I told you so,” hissed Harley Danthorpe, the moment we were out of the Commandant’s private office. “I had the inside drift!”
But even Danthorpe couldn’t tell us what the “special training assignment” might be.
4
Seaquake City
We were gaining on the sun.
It was less than an hour above the horizon as the last plane of our journey slowed the thunder of its jets, dumped its flaps and came swooping in to the crossed buoyed “runways” of the sea over Krakatoa Dome.
The plane slapped hard against the waves, small though they were—electrostatic “pacifiers” had smoothed out the highest wavecrests between the buoys that marked our landing lane. But our pilot had placed the first contact just right. We skipped once and settled. In a moment we were moored to the bright X-shaped structure that floated over the Dome, the edenite-shielded city that lay three miles beneath us.
“All right, you men! Let’s get ready to debark!”
Eskow looked at me and scowled, but I shook my head. Because Danthorpe’s name came ahead of ours alphabetically, it had appeared first on the orders—and he had elected to assume that that put him in charge of the detail. It graveled Bob; but, after all, one of us might as well be in charge, and at least it made sure that Danthorpe was the one who had to worry about making connections, clearing customs and so on. We stood up, picked up our gear, and filed out of the overseas jet on to the X-shaped landing platform.
Colossal floating dock! It was nearly a thousand feet along each leg—big enough for aircraft to land in an emergency, when the sea was too rough for even the pacifiers. It towered two hundred feet above the waterline; the keel of its floats lay two hundred feet below; it was a small city in itself.
And yet, it was only a sort of combination front door and breathing tube for the sub-sea city itself. The platform was a snorkel, with special flexible conduits, edenitearmored, to inhale pure air and exhale what came out. Older cities had made do with air-regeneration apparatus; Krakatoa Dome pumped fresh air from the surface. We clambered past the vents that exhaled the air from fifteen thousand feet below and felt the cold damp reek of busy industry, oozing salt water and crowded humanity from far below. It was a familiar smell. All of us looked at each other.
“Hup, two!” cried Harley Danthorpe, and marched us out of the crowded terminal into the three-mile magnetic elevators. The door closed; there was a whoosh; and abruptly the bottom of the elevator car dropped out from Tinder our feet. Or so it felt.
Eskow and I instinctively grabbed out for something to support ourselves. Harley Danthorpe roared with laughter. “Lubbers!” he sneered. Don’t you think you ought to keep on your toes? If an elevator scares you that much, what’s going to happen when there’s a seaquake?”
Eskow, pale but game, snapped: “We’ll see what happens. I guarantee one thing, Danthorpe. If you can stand it, Jim Eden and I can.”
We stepped out of the elevator, wobbly-kneed, and at once we were in another world.
We lay three miles under the surface of the ocean! The blue sky and the sea breeze were gone; fifteen thousand feet of the Indian Ocean rolled over our heads; and the position of the sun no longer mattered.
“Hup, two!” chanted Danthorpe, and marched us from the elevator station at the crown of the dome to the exits. By slidewalk. elevator and passage he escorted us through the teeming, busy heart of Krakatoa Dome. Fleet Base lay down on dock level, at the dome’s lower rim; to reach it, we had the whole depth of the dome to pass through. Harley led us through what must have been the longest way.
We saw the great terraced levels where actual trees and grass grew—spindly and pale in the Troyon lights of the sub-sea cities, but a symbol of wealth and luxury for the rich Krakatoans who made their homes there. We peered through dense portholes out at the brightly lit sea-bottom surrounding the dome, where the pale waving stems of the sub-sea vegetation rippled in the stirrings of the current. We passed through the financial level, where frantic trading was going on in the ores and products of the sea bottom, and in stocks and securities that financed the corporations that made their business there. “See that?” barked Harley Danthorpe. “My dad’s ideal”
We looked. It was the entrance to the Krakatoa Exchange—columned with massive pillars shaped like upended sub-sea ships, the tall hulls aglow with a fire that looked like edenite.
“My dad was one of the founding members,” Harley informed us proudly. “He designed the Exchange.”
“That’s nice,” said Bob, but I doubt that he meant it.
Harley paused and looked at him narrowly. “Eskow,” he said, “you’re looking pretty solemn. Don’t you like Krakatoa?”
Bob said: “I was thinking about the landing platform up at surface level. I’d never seen anything like that in the other sub-sea cities.”
Harley laughed. “Other cities!” he sneered. “What have they got? Krakatoa’s the place, and don’t you forget it! That platform—it cost half a billion dollars! It took three years to build. But it’s a solid investment.” He winked and lowered his voice. “My dad bought a piece of it. He had the inside drift, all right. He says the franchise alone is worth the whole investment, because,.you see, those air conduits are the city’s windpipe, and—”
“That’s what I was thinking about,” Bob interrupted. “Suppose they get broken?”
“What could break them?”
“A storm, perhaps.”
Harley grinned like a man who’d just found a million dollars. “I can show you a section of the cables. No storm could break them. Besides, the waves can roll right through the piers between the platform and the floats without doing any damage. No. Try again.”
“This is seaquake territory,” Bob reminded him. “There could be a tidal wave.”
“You mean a tsunami” Harley Danthorpe corrected him smugly. “That’s the right name for a seismic sea wave. Man, you’re really a lubber! Tsunamis are .dangerous along a coast, all right, where they have a chance to build up speed and power. But not out in the open ocean! We wouldn’t even notice one going by, except for the readings on the instruments.”