Undersea City

15 The Crime of Stewart Eden

Lieutenant Tsuya closed the door of the lead-lined safe.

He stepped gingerly back from it, with a silent respect for the atomic death it contained. He swung upon my uncle, his face a strange blend of emotions—worry, shock, sadness—and over it all, triumph.

He rasped: “All right, Eden! What have you got to say for yourself?”

“I–I—” My uncle’s voice faltered. He stumbled from the safe to the cot and sat down on the edge of it. He shook his head as if to clear it. Then he leaned back weakly against the sea-green wall.

“Those are thermonuclear devices!” cried Lt. Tsuya, “They don’t belong in civilian hands, Eden—you know that. They must have been stolen from the Fleet. Why, even the government of Krakatoa has agreed to support the international laws that give the Fleet exclusive jurisdiction over the manufacture and use of nucleonic devices. They’re contraband—and you can’t deny that they were found in your possession!”

My uncle blinked at him. “I don’t deny it,” he whispered, so faintly that I could hardly hear.

“And I believe that you have been using them to cause seaquakes!” cried the lieutenant.

He pointed a long accusing finger at my uncle. “Do you deny that?”

Painfully my uncle shook his head.

The lieutenant was startled. He glanced at me, then back at my uncle; plainly, he had expected more difficulty. He said, half incredulous and half triumphant: “You admit all this? You admit that you are guilty of a crime so great that there is no name for it—the crime of causing death and destruction by triggering seaquakes?”

“Death?” whispered my uncle. “But there has been no death—no—”

He stopped.

He caught a long, gasping breath.

His sea-worn, sagging face turned very pale and, as though he had been stricken down by a blow, he abruptly slid down on the cot.

He lay with his head hanging limply over the side, breathing hard.

I cried, “Uncle Stewart!” and ran toward him. Simultaneously Gideon leaped to help him too.

But Lt. Tsuya halted us both. “Stop!” he roared. “Stand back! Don’t touch him! The man’s a confessed criminal!”

“But he’s a sick man,” Gideon protested gently. “He needs medicine. You’ll kill him if you keep me from him now!”

“That,” rasped the lieutenant harshly, “is my responsibility. He’s my prisoner.” He turned to face my uncle, lying unconscious on the cot. Formally Lt. Tsuya droned: “Stewart Eden, by my authority as a commissioned officer of the Sub-Sea Fleet, in the lawful discharge of my duty to prevent illicit manufacture or use of nucleonic weapons in the sea, I hereby place you under arrest!”

My uncle lay gasping, and if he heard the long legal formula or not I could not tell; but while I stood silent Gideon would not be denied. He leaped past the lieutenant to attend to my uncle. Quickly—showing the practice he had had—he put a pillow under Uncle Stewart’s head, raising it gently; lifted his feet to the cot; spread a blanket over him. “There,” he crooned. “You’ll be all right, Stewart. I’ll fix your injection now.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind!” snapped Lt. Tsuya. “He’s my prisoner now!”

Gideon stood up and turned to face the lieutenant,

I do not recall that I have ever seen Gideon very angry; he isn’t a man to lose his temper. But just then, angry or not, I was glad that it was the lieutenant who had to face him and not me.

He stood like a giant warrior out of old Africa, and his dark eyes were black as the bottom of the Deeps themselves. He said in a low, deep voice that throbbed and roared: “Stewart Eden has a bad heart, Lieutenant. I intend to give him an injection. If you try to stop me, you’ll have to kill me!”

The lieutenant paused for a moment, listening to my uncle’s labored breathing, while Gideon brought a tiny hypodermic from the desk and began to roll up my uncle’s sleeve.

Then Lt. Tsuya said: “Very well. Give him the injection.” And he glared at me.

But by that time it was already done. With deft black fingers Gideon had stabbed the tiny needle into my uncle’s lean arm. He pushed the little piston gently home. He drew the needle out, and swabbed away one bright drop of blood.

It took time for it to have its effect.

We all stood there, ringed around my uncle, while he lay gasping under the blanket. Gideon knelt beside him, murmuring to him. My uncle’s face looked pinched and bloodless under a film of perspiration.

“You’d better keep him alive!” Lt. Tsuya snapped at Gideon. “We’ve got a lot of questions to ask him. Stolen reactors—making seaquakes for private profit—I can’t imagine more shocking crimes! And this from a man who has been held up to the world as a sort of hero! I want him alive, Park!”

Gideon looked up at him and said softly: “So do I.”

He stood up. “It’ll take a few minutes, Lieutenant,” he said, “but I believe he’ll be all right now. When he wakes up, I want you to listen to what he has to say.”

“I will!” barked the lieutenant grimly. “You can count on that. But I warn you, I’m not going to believe whatever lies he might cook up!”

“Suppose they aren’t lies?” Gideon asked gently.

The lieutenant shrugged.

I cut in at that point. My voice had a dry catch in it, but I couldn't help speaking—I had waited too long, too long, everything I knew told me that I had waited too long. This was my uncle, Stewart Eden, the greatest man in the world! Or so I had thought as a boy—and so I still believed, in a manner of speaking, now!

I said: “Lieutenant, give him a chance! You don’t know my uncle. I do! He couldn’t be guilty of any of these crimes! It simply isn’t possible. There is some explanation, I guarantee. There has to be. Don’t make your mind up now! Wait and hear what he has to say when he wakes up!”

The lieutenant looked at me for a moment before he spoke. I could see how worn out he was. Why, I’d had little enough rest, the past few days, but Lt. Tsuya had had none at all, barring a cat-nap on the quake station cot. Worried, worn—and more concerned about my uncle than I realized.

He said in a low, toneless voice: “Cadet Eden, you carry family loyalty a little too far. I know enough about your uncle to know that he was a great and respected man—once. But what does that have to do with the present situation?

“After all, Eden—you heard him admit his guilt!”

It was a crushing blow; I had no answer.

Perhaps Gideon did. At any rate, he started to speak—

But he never had a chance to finish what he was going to say. There as an interruption. I felt myself suddenly unsteady on my feet, flung out an arm in surprise to catch hold of a chair to steady myself, glanced around at the others…

And found identical expressions of surprise on every face. Each one was staggering slightly.

Then surprise became certainty. There was a great rumbling sound out of the deep rock that underlay the city—a giant, complaining basso-profundo groan. The big safe shook itself gently and rolled out to meet me, slowly, carefully, as if unsure of its welcome. The vibration grew, tingling the soles of my feet. A bottle of ink on my uncle’s shabby old desk danced tremblingly across the desktop and flung itself shatteringly on the floor. Blue-black ink spattered the cuffs of my dress-scarlet uniform. Harley Danthorpe took a quick step, missed his footing and fell to the floor.

“Quake!” I cried. “It’s a seaquake, ahead of schedule!”

The vibrations must have stirred my uncle even out of his coma—Uncle Stewart was the kind of mariner who would have come back from the gates of Death itself at a challenge like that. He pushed himself groggily up on one elbow. “Quake,” he whispered. “Gideon…”

Gideon looked at him and nodded. “That’s right, Stewart,” he said gently. “Right on schedule. Now we’d better get out of here!”

“Wait!” cried Lt. Tsuya, clutching at the desk. “What are you talking about?”

“This building,” Gideon said grimly. “It isn’t going to take much of this! If you hope to bring your prisoner in alive, Lieutenant, you better get us all out into Radial Seven!”

The floor was dancing crazily under us now. It wasn’t a major quake—not yet; Force Three or Four, I estimated, in the split-second of time I had for such things. But it wasn’t by any means over yet. It could well build up to the Force Ten or Twelve that we ourselves had predicted…and in that case, it would all be over!

A gargling sound came out of the emergency PA. speaker on the wall:

“Attention all citizens! Attention all citizens!” it rasped. “This is a Quake Alert! All routine precautions will be put into effect immediately. All safety walls will be energized. All slidewalks will be stopped to conserve power. All public ways will be restricted to official use only.”

It coughed and was silent as the power was turned off.

“You hear that?” Gideon demanded. “Come on, Lieutenant! Let’s get out of here.”

But it wasn’t that easy.

The floor shuddered lazily under us again, and the safe, that had minced daintily out into the middle of the floor, now wheeled itself with careful decorum back to the wall once more. Back—and a little more; that safe was heavy; the faint, imperceptible tilt of the floor that moved it gave it enough impetus to crash thunderingly against no the wall. Plaster splintered. There was a rattling, rolling bowling-ball clatter from inside it of toppling lead brick and colliding primary reactors—not a pleasant sound! In theory these devices were safe unless specially set off by their own fuses, but it was not a theory any of us cared to count on. If one of them had exploded, caught by some freakish accident in just such a way that it went off—

Why, then, our forecasts would not matter; a Force Twelve quake could strike the city, and no one would care—for we would all be dead, as one sphere triggered the next and all of them went up in one giant burst of nuclear energy, huge enough to demolish the dome entirely!

Gideon commanded: “Grab hold, there. You, Jim! Brace that thing!”

We all sprang to the safe—even my uncle tottered to his feet. Whatever it was that had been in the little needle Gideon gave him, it was doing the trick; his face showed color, his eyes were coming alive. He put his shoulder next to mine and the two of us steadied one side of the safe, Harley Danthorpe and the lieutenant the other while Gideon hastily chocked the plunging wheels with telephone books, the mattress from the cot, whatever was handy.

“Now let’s get out of here!” cried Gideon.

The lieutenant cast one glance at the weaving walls of the rickety old structure and surrendered. The building was steel. The foundations were strong enough, the building itself was in no danger of collapsing. But the inside walls—that was another story. Old, untended, under the sea-green paint Gideon had applied, peeling with neglect, it wouldn’t take much to crack off the plaster or drop pieces of the ceiling on us. Gideon was right. The only thing to do was to get out into Radial Seven, where we would be safe as long as the Dome itself was safe.

The P.A. speaker hiccoughed and crackled into life again as we were hustling out the door:

“Attention all citizens! Attention all citizens! Here is a message from the mayor! There is no reason for alarm. Repeat, there is no reason for alarm. Our safety devices are holding up well. The mayor expects no casualties or serious damage. The Quake Alert will be lifted as soon as possible. Repeat—there is no reason for alarm!”

“But I’ll bet he’s alarmed, just the same,” panted Gideon over his shoulder, and turned his head to wink at me. It was like old times! I felt a sudden thrill of warmth, remembering the dangers Gideon and I had faced, remembering all the tight spots we had been in, and how we had met them. Artificial quakes—contraband nuclear explosives—why, these things didn’t matter! In that moment I was absolutely sure that nothing mattered, except that I was with my uncle and Gideon Park; they would explain everything, they would clear themselves, it was only a matter of waiting and having faith…

In that moment.

But then—something happened.

We came to the street exit, looking out on Radial Seven—now filled with scurrying, hurrying figures, seeking shelter, racing to protect their homes and goods. But there seemed to be no damage. Lt Tsuya whispered fervently: “If only there isn’t another quake—”

And my uncle said clearly: “There will be seven more.”

“Seven.” The lieutenant whirled to face him, his expression grim and contorted. “Then you admit that—”

But he never finished his sentence.

The old building had been vibrating in the residual stresses of the quake; and it was not only the inside walls that had been neglected. An ornate old cornice, set high over the doorway, crackled, sighed, trembled on the verge —and came down.

“Jump, Jim!” snapped Gideon’s voice like a whip. I jumped—not quite in time. The cornice came down as I plowed into Harley Danthorpe and the lieutenant. It was false, ugly—a miserable old-fashioned thing; but fortunately so for us, for it was only plaster, not the granite it pretended to be. Even so it caught me on the shoulder. I went head over heels with Harley and Lt. Tsuya. There was a sudden shouting commotion.

And then I blacked out.

And when I woke up, there was Lt. Tsuya, pinned by the legs, screeching like a banshee. “They got away, they got away!” he howled. “Murderers! Traitors! Stewart Eden, I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do on earth!”

And Gideon and my uncle, in the confusion, had got clean away.

By the time we got the lieutenant free and tried to get in touch with the Dome police, many precious minutes had passed; the police had enough to do, coping with the Quake Alert; they weren’t interested in crazy stories from Fleet officers about contraband atomic fuses and man-made seaquakes.

Lt. Tsuya turned to me bitterly. “All right, Cadet Eden!” he barked. “What do you have to say in defense of your uncle now? He’s run away. As far as I’m concerned that proves his guilt!”

I had no answer at all.