Undersea City

13 The Billion-Dollar Panic

We carried our forecasts to Lt. McKerrow.

“Wake up, Lieutenant Tsuya!” he ordered sharply, and, without a word, began to go over our figures. In a moment Lt. Tsuya came groggily in, and the two of them studied and checked the figures interminably.

Then Lt. Tsuya sighed and put down the forecast. He watched Lt. McKerrow, waiting.

At last Lt. McKerrow said, “It’s what we figured, Tsuya.”

Lt. Tsuya nodded. “I’ll see what I can do upstairs,” he said, and hurried out.

Lt. McKerrow turned to face us. He said sourly: “Congratulations. We’ve all made the same observations, and your conclusions confirm Lieutenant Tsuya’s and mine. We can expect a major quake at some time within the next sixty hours.”

For a few seconds nobody said anything else. The station was very still. A drop of falling water went plink. The silent microseismographs quivered faintly, recording the vibrations created by its impact.

Then I heard Harley Danthorpe catch his breath.

“A major quake!” he gasped. “What are we going to do about it?”

Lt. McKerrow shrugged. “Let it happen, I suppose. Do you have any other suggestions?”

Then his thin face stiffened sternly. “But one thing we won’t do,” he said, “is talk about it. Do you understand that? Our work is strictly classified. You will not issue any private quake forecasts. Not to anybody.”

I couldn’t help breaking in. “But, Lieutenant! If the city is in danger, surely the city has a right to know!”

“The city has always been in danger,” Lt. McKerrow reminded me acidly.

“But not like this! Why, suppose it is a Force Twelve quake—can you imagine the loss of life? Surely there should be at least some attempt at evacuation…”

“That,” said the lieutenant grimly, “is not up to us. That’s what Lieutenant Tsuya’s gone up to see about now.”

He looked worriedly at our forecast sheets. “The city government co-operated with the Fleet in setting up this station,” he said. “One of the conditions they made is that we cannot release forecasts without their approval. Lieutenant Tsuya phoned the mayor last night to alert him. Now he’s gone up to see him, to try to get the city council called into emergency session, to approve releasing the forecast.

“But we can’t just sit on the forecast!” I cried. Lt. McKerrow scowled.

“We can’t do anything else,” he said.

For the next two hours we checked and rechecked every figure. They all came out the same.

Then Lt. Tsuya returned to the station.

He had shaved and put on a fresh uniform, but his lean pumpkin face looked pinched and haggard, like a pumpkin winter-killed by being left out too long in the frosts. He hurried without a word to check the instruments himself, stared for a long time at the readings on the microseismograph trace, and then came slowly back to the desk.

Lt. McKerrow was plotting a new cross-section of the forecast fault. He looked up.

“Any change?” Lt. Tsuya demanded.

“No change.” McKerrow shook his head. “How are you doing with the city fathers?”

Lt. Tsuya said bitterly: “They’re too busy to meet! Most of them are also business men. I suppose they feel that they can’t risk the panic. There’s enough panic up there now.”

“Panic?” Lt. McKerrow turned to scowl at Danthorpe and me. Still looking at us, he demanded: “Has somebody talked?”

“Oh, I think not,” said Lt. Tsuya thoughtfully. “No, more likely it’s just a delayed result of that first quake. There was a wave of selling yesterday morning, you know. And today—well, the exchange opened just as I got up to the mayor’s office. It was a madhouse. I can’t even get Mr. Danthorpe on the telephone.” He eyed Harley meditatively. But he shook his head. “I thought for a moment—But no. We’ll have to do this thing in the proper way, through channels. And the mayor says that it will be impossible to get a quorum of the council together until after the stock exchange closes. That will be—” he squinted at his watch—“in just under three hours.”

I said desperately: “Sir, can’t we do something?”

“Something?”

Lt. Tsuya looked at me for a moment. His gaze had that curious questioning quality that I had observed before. There was more on his mind, I knew, than the mere danger of the quake that lay before us all, great though that danger was. And, in a way, I could see his position. For here he was, conducting an experimental, untried station, and with a staff composed of two officers—and three cadets, each one of whom, in his own way, must have presented a huge problem to the Station Commander. There was Bob Eskow—behaving very queerly, by any standards! Myself—and, from Lt. Tsuya’s point of view, perhaps I was the biggest question mark of all; for it was on my testimony that all he knew of Bob’s behavior rested, and certainly he had to consider the possibility that I was somehow linked with my uncle in some evil and dangerous scheme. And finally there was Harley Danthorpe, the son of one of the men on whose good will the whole existence of the station depended.

No, it was no easy position!

Lt. Tsuya said reasonably: “Suppose we took matters into our own hands, Eden, and issued a forecast. Without the full co-operation of the Krakatoa Council and its police department, can you imagine what would happen? The panic would be incredible! There would be mob scenes such as you have never imagined!

“I doubt that that would save any lives, Eden.

“On the other hand—” and suddenly his quiet voice took on a new and harsher quality—“if it’s your own skin you’re worried about, then you can stop worrying. The Fleet has its own evacuation plan. And it has shipping enough to carry it out. I have communicated my forecast to the Base Commandant. The station here, of course, will be kept in operation until the last possible moment—but if you wish to ask a transfer from your present assignment so that you can be evacuated…”

“Sir!” I broke in sharply. “No, sir!”

He smiled faintly.

“Then,” he said, “I beg your pardon, Eden. Break out another geosonde. We’ll make a new forecast.”

The sonde blew up again at seventy thousand feet.

But there was no doubt of what it had to tell. Its transmissions showed that the negative gravity anomaly was still increasing under the city. Nothing had changed, not enough to matter.

When I had converted all the readings, and recomputed the equations of force and time, my answer was a force of eleven—probable error plus or minus one—and time thirty hours, probable error plus or minus twelve.

Lt. Tsuya compared my figures with his own and nodded.

“We agree again, Cadet Eden,” he said formally. “The only change is that the quake will probably be a little more severe, and will probably happen a little sooner.”

His voice was calm enough, but I could see white lines around his mouth. “I’m going to phone the mayor again,” he said.

Harley Danthorpe came into the station as Lt. Tsuya disappeared into his private office to phone. Harley was carrying thick white mugs of coffee from the mess hall.

“Here,” he said, handing me one. “Want a sandwich?” I looked at the plate he offered and shook my head. I didn’t have much of an appetite just then, though the station clock told me it was a long way past lunch. “Me too,” said Harley gloomily. “What’s the lieutenant doing?”

“Calling the mayor.”

“I wish,” said Harley Danthorpe irritably, “that he’d let me talk to my father! If I gave him the inside drift he’d have that council in session in ten minutes!”

Then he looked up. Tsuya’s office door was open, and the lieutenant was stepping calmly out.

“That,” he said, “won’t be necessary, Cadet Danthorpe. The council is in session now.”

“Hurray!” whooped Harley. “I tell you, now you’ll see some action! When my father gets—Excuse me, Lieutenant,” he finished, abashed.

The lieutenant nodded. “Lt. McKerrow,” he called, “I’m going topside to present the forecast to the council. I’ll leave you in charge of the statiorf.” McKerrow nodded wryly. “I expect a rough session with them,” Lt. Tsuya went on thoughtfully. “Some of the members are opposed to quake forecasting in any case. Now, of course, it will be worse.”

Harley said eagerly: “Sir, can I come along? I mean, if I’m there, my father will know that everything’s all right with the forecast—”

He stopped again, in confusion.

Lt. Tsuya said dryly: “Thank you, Cadet Danthorpe. I had already planned to take you with me—and Cadet Eden as well. However, your duties will be merely to help me display the charts.”

He nodded.

“I,” he said, “will do the talking. Remember that!”

The city hall of Krakatoa Dome was high in the northwest upper octant, between the financial district and the platform terminal deck.

The mayor and the council members were waiting for us in a big room walled with murals depicting scenes of undersea life—a kelp farm, a sub-sea uranium mine, undersea freighters loading cargo and so on. The murals were restful and lovely.

The gathering contained in the room, on the other hand, was nothing of the kind.

It was a noisy meeting, full of conflicting voices expressing their views in loud and quarrelsome terms; judged by Fleet standards, it was conducted in a most markedly sloppy fashion. The mayor called for order a dozen times before he got any order at all, and when he called on Lt. Tsuya to speak his piece there was still a quarrelsome undertone of voices nearly drowning him out.

But the lieutenant got their full attention in his very first words—when he told them dryly, without mincing words, that the chances were all in favor of a Force Eleven quake.

“Force Eleven?” demanded the mayor, startled.

“Possibly Force Twelve,” said Lt. Tsuya grimly.

Barnacle Ben Danthorpe broke in. “Possibly,” he sneered, “possibly Force Twelve. And possibly Force Eleven, right?”

“That’s what I said in the first place, Mr. Danthorpe,” said Lt. Tsuya.

“Or possibly Force Ten?” said Danthorpe.

“That’s possible too.”

“Or Force Nine, eh? Or maybe even Force Eight or Seven?”

“The chances of that, Mr. Danthorpe, are so small—”

“Small? Oh, maybe so, Lieutenant. Maybe so. But not impossible, eh?”

“Not quite impossible,” admitted Lt. Tsuya. “It’s all a matter of relative probabilities.”

“I see.” Ben Danthorpe grinned. “And on the basis of probabilities,” he said, “you want us to evacuate the city. Any idea of what that would cost, Lieutenant?”

Lt. Tsuya’s brown eyes glowed angrily. “Money is not the only consideration, Mr. Danthorpe!”

“But it is a consideration. Oh, yes. It is to us, Lieutenant, because we have to make it. We don’t live off the taxpayers, you see.”

Tsuya fumed silently; I could see the strain lines showing on his lean pumpkin face. Danthorpe went on easily: “I don’t deny that you scientists can give us a lot of useful information. After all, don’t you have my own son working with you? And he’s a smart boy, Lieutenant. A very smart boy!” I could feel Harley Danthorpe stiffen with pride beside me. “But Jie’s only a boy!” barked his father suddenly, “and we can’t let boys tell us how to run Krakatoa Dome! You tell us we’re sitting on a seaquake fault. All right. We know that. What do you expect us to do about it?”

“We can expect a catastrophic quake within forty-eight hours,” Lt. Tsuya said stubbornly. “Possibly within twelve. The city must be evacuated.”

“Not ‘must,’ Lieutenant!” Danthorpe blazed. “You make the forecasts, that’s all! We’ll decide what ‘must’ be done. And take this as a starter—the city cannot be evacuated.”

There was a moment of silence.

Then Lt. Tsuya took a deep, even breath. He pulled a sheaf of notes out of his portfolio and consulted them.

“I have spoken to the city engineers,” he said. “Here is their report.

“According to them, the city was designed to survive a Force Nine Quake with an adequate margin of safety. They believe that, with the edenite safety walls in full operation, most of the inhabitants would survive—at least, if it were not overly prolonged in duration. But the dome will collapse under Force Ten.

“Our forecast, as you know, is for Force Eleven, possibly Force Twelve.”

Ben Danthorpe listened silently.

Then, without changing expression, he nodded. “I have exactly those figures in my own briefcase, Lieutenant,” he said. “Nevertheless, I repeat my statement. Krakatoa Dome cannot be evacuated. “Your Honor.” He turned to the Mayor. “Your Honor, tell him why.”

The mayor started slightly. He was a big, pink, perspiring man who seemed inclined to take his orders from Ben Danthorpe; he almost looked surprised at being asked to speak in this kind of a discussion.

But when he spoke, what he had to say changed things.

“My office staff has been working on the evacuation problem for many years, on a stand-by basis,” he said. “This morning I asked them to bring their findings up to date.

“It is a problem, Lieutenant! And I don’t think that a solution exists.

“Our total population is three-quarters of a million.

“The available sub-sea shipping could carry away no more than fifty thousand.

“We can set up an air-shuttle that would take another hundred thousand dry-side in two days—if we had two days.

“We can find emergency space for fifty thousand more up on the platform—maybe even a hundred thousand, if we stop the air-lift and stand them on the flight decks.

“But that leaves us with, at best, more than half a million. More than five hundred thousand men, women and children, Lieutenant, waiting down here to shake hands with old Father Neptune.”

Lieutenant Tsuya snapped angrily: “Why don’t you have a better plan? Didn’t you know that this might happen some day?”

“Lieutenant!” roared the mayor, his pink face rapidly turning red. “Don’t forget yourself!”

But Barnacle Ben Danthorpe cut in before the mayor’s explosion could get out of hand. “That’s only the physical problem, Lieutenant,” he said. “There’s also a psychological problem. Most of our people wouldn’t leave the city even if they could. This is our home. And most of them feel, as I do, that we don’t need any quake forecasters to tell us what to do.”

He turned back to the mayor. “Your Honor,” he said, “I move that we thank the lieutenant for his trouble, and send him back to his playthings.”

There was a roar of discussion at that; and an angry fight that lasted for more than an hour—getting into questions, at the last, of what had become of funds that had been appropriated for various quake control measures.

But ultimately the motion was passed.

We were sent back to our playthings—and to the knowledge that the life expectancy of every man in Krakatoa Dome was well under two days.