And we learned a lot more than that.
For one thing, I learned something about our teacher, Lieutenant Tsuya.
We plotted our first maps—like the map Lieutenant Tsuya had projected on the wall for us, showing the stresses and faults in the earth’s crust for hundreds of miles around, with shading to indicate thermal energy and convection flows (for, remember, even the rock flows that far down!), with lines that showed microseisms, trigger forces, the whole lore of the moving rock.
Lieutenant Tsuya criticized them, and then he relaxed.
We sat there, all of us, taking a rare break, while the beads of salt dew formed on the pressure-concrete walls and drops of sweat plinked from the ceiling.
Bob Eskow said, “Lieutenant. The yeoman told us we couldn’t have edenite down here because the geosonde couldn’t get through. Was that right?”
Lieutenant Tsuya’s almond face smiled. “No. It is a matter of forecasting.”
He stood up and touched our maps. “All this information,” he said softly, “comes to us through instruments. Very delicate instruments. That is why the station was located so far beneath the city. Any vibration, from traffic or the pumps, would disturb them. You must learn to walk softly here. And you must avoid dropping heavy objects.”
“Yes, sir,” Harley Danthorpe spoke up promptly. He nodded alertly, watching the lieutenant with his calculating squint, as if he were looking for the inside drift. “I see, sir.”
“Do you?” The lieutenant looked at him thoughtfully “Well, good. That’s why we have to forego the protection of edenite, here in the station. Seismic vibrations reach us through the rock. They would be canceled out by the Eden Anomaly, do you see? If our instruments were shielded, they couldn’t register.”
“Yes, sir.” It was Harley Danthorpe again, but his voice was not quite so brash, not quite so prompt, and I saw him squinting uneasily at the dark glittering droplets of the sea that oozed silently out of the walls.
“Our work here is highly classified,” the Lieutenant said abruptly. “You must not discuss it outside of this station.”
“But why, sir?” I asked.
Tsuya’s pumpkin-shaped face looked suddenly worn. “Because,” he said, “there is a bad history, connected with seaquake forecasting.
“Some of the early forecasters were too confident. They made mistakes. Of course, they lacked some of our new instruments, they didn’t know many things we know now. But they made mistakes. They issued incorrect forecasts.
“The worst was at Nansei Shoto Dome.”
The lieutenant passed his hand nervously across his pale forehead, as though he were trying to wipe out an unpleasant memory.
“I know a lot about what happened at Nansei Shoto Dome” he said, “because I was one of the survivors.
“The Dome was totally destroyed.”
He sat down again, looking away from us. “I was just a boy then,” said Lieutenant Tsuya. “My folks had moved down-deep from Yokohama when the dome was new. We moved there in the spring of the year, and that summer there were a good many quakes. They caused panics.
“But not everybody panicked. Unfortunately.
“My father was one who did not panic. I remember how my mother begged him to leave, but he would not. It was partly a matter of money—they had spent every yen they owned, in making the move. But it was also—well, call it courage. My father was not afraid.
“There was a very wise scientist there, you see. “His name was Dr. John Koyetsu. He was a seismologist—the chief of the city’s experimental forecasting station. He made a talk on the city’s TV network. No, he said, do not be alarmed, there is nothing to be alarmed about. Be calm, he said, these are only minor seisms which have frightened you. There is no need to flee. There is no possibility of a dangerous quake. Look, he said, I show you my charts, and you can see that there can be no dangerous quake in Nansei Shoto Trench for at least a year!
“His charts were very convincing.
“But he was wrong.”
The lieutenant shook his dark head. A grimace of pain twisted his lean cheeks.
“That was Friday morning,” he said. “My mother and my father talked it over when I came home from school. They were very much reassured. But it so happened that they had made arrangements for me to go back to school on the mainland, and it was my mother’s thought that this was as good a time as any. Oh, they were not afraid. But my mother took no chances.
“That night they put me on a ship for Yokohama.
“The quake struck the next afternoon. It destroyed Nansei Shoto Dome. No one survived.”
Lieutenant Tsuya stood silent for a moment, his dark eyes following the thin little river of black water that silently ran down the narrow gutter under the oozing concrete wall.
Danthorpe stood squinting at him sharply, as though looking for the inside drift. Bob was watching the dark wet concrete with a blank expression.
“That’s why our work is classified,” the lieutenant said suddenly.
“Quake forecasting has a bad name. It prevented the evacuation of Nansei Shoto Dome, and caused many deaths—my parents among them.
“The Sub-Sea Fleet is authorized to operate this station, but not to release any forecasts to the public. I hope that ultimately we can save more people than Koyetsu’s error killed. But first we must establish the accuracy of our forecasting methods.
“For the time being, then, you must not talk to anybody about our work here. That is an order.”
6
The Borer in the Earth
Time passed.
We learned.
And Lieutenant Tsuya came in on us one day, where all three of us were working up our convection diagrams, and said:
“You’re beginning to understand.” His lean pumpkin face was smiling. He went over our charts, line by line, nodding. “Very well,” he said. “Now—I have something new for you.”
He took a sealed tube of yellow plastic out of his briefcase.
“Observations are the key to forecasting!” he said. “And as you have seen, it is the deep-focus quakes, hundreds of miles beneath the surface, that determine what happens to our dome cities. And there it is difficult to make observations. But now—”
He opened the tube.
Inside was a heavy little machine, less than two feet long, not quite two inches in diameter. It looked very much like the model Mole we had seen at the Sub-Sea Academy, except that it was thinner and smaller.
“The geosonde!” he said proudly. “A telemeter, designed to plumb the depths of the earth, much as the radiosonde reaches into the atmosphere!”
He held it up for us to see.
“In the nose,” he lectured, “an atomic ortholytic drill. The body, a tube filmed with high-tension edenite. And inside it, the sensing elements and a sonic transmitter.
“The edenite film presented us with a difficult engineering problem, for, as you know, our instruments cannot read through edenite. We solved it—by turning off the film once a minute, for a tiny fraction of a second. Not very long, but long enough for the elements to register, without the device being crushed.
“It is with this geosonde that we can, at last, reach the deepest quake centers.
“With it—we may make sure that there will never be another catastrophe like the Nansei Shoto Dome.”
He grinned at us amiably. “Oh,” he said, “and one thing more. Your two-week training period is over. Tomorrow you can all get a pass.”
Harley Danthorpe came to life. “Great, Lieutenant!” he cried. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Now my father will—”