Undersea City

17 The Quake Doctors

Lieutenant Tsuya moved fast for a lean little man. He was back in his private office, into his locker and back again with a gun in his hand before the rest of as had recovered from our first astonished shock.

“Stand back!” he cried. “All of you, out of the way!”

The MOLE crept, rattling and whining, a few yards into the room, demolishing the wall charts, shattering the forecast table, chewing a whole rack of blank maps and diagram sheets into confetti.

Then the whirling ortholytic drill elements slowed, dulled, stopped.

The hatch at the top of the little sea-car, now doubling as a MOLE, trembled and rasped. A hand pushed it part way open. It struck against the fragments of rock; the hand shoved hard, hesitated, then banged it three or four times against the loosened rock.

Shards fell. The hatch opened.

And out of it came Bob Eskow, looking like the end of a day of wrath.

“Halt!” rapped Lt. Tsuya, the gun in his hand. “Eskow, don’t make a move!”

Bob looked up dizzily, as though he couldn’t comprehend what the lieutenant was doing with a gun in his hand. He slid down the ribs of the sea-car’s boarding ladder, staggered, almost collapsed and managed to save himself by clutching at the edenite hull. And that was a mistake, because it was hot—blistering hot—smoke-hot, from the friction of the drill elements against the naked rock. Bob cried out and pulled his hand away.

But the pain seemed to bring him back to consciousness.

“Sorry,” he whispered, holding one hand in the other, staring at the lieutenant. “We’ve made an awful mess out of your station, sir.”

“You’ve made a bigger mess than that, Eskow!” rapped the lieutenant.

“I—I—” Bob seemed at a loss for words. At last he said: “Can the others come out of the MOLE, sir?”

“Others?” Lt. Tsuya frowned. “Well, very well,” he conceded at last.

With difficulty Bob climbed back up the boarding ladder and spoke into the hatch.

First my uncle, Stewart Eden, appeared—weary, his face beaded with sweat, filthy with grime, but looking in far better health than I had seen him the day before. “Jim!” he boomed, and then caught sight of Lt. Tsuya with the gun. He frowned quizzically, but said nothing.

After my uncle—then Gideon Park. He stood at the open hatch and grinned at us, then turned back and reached down into the depths of the ship to help out the last member of the MOLE’s crew.

It was the old Chinese I had seen with Bob!

I heard a gasp from beside me. It was Lt. Tsuya.

“Doctor Koyetsu!” he gasped. The muzzle of his gun wavered and dropped toward the floor. “Doctor, what are you doing here?”

Chinese? Not at all! The “old Chinese” was the Japanese seismologist who had written most of the books on our station shelves—John Koyetsu!

From the moment when Lt. Tsuya saw his own personal hero, Dr. Koyetsu, in the company of my uncle and the others, his certainty that my uncle was a criminal disappeared. It was like the changing of night into day. He turned, without a word, and put the gun away.

And then he said simply: “Doctor Koyetsu, will you tell me what this is all about.”

The doctor said wearily: “Of course.” He looked around, a lean, worn old man, pressed very far beyond the limits of his endurance, for a place to sit. Hastily Harley Danthorpe dragged a folding chair across the rock floor to him.

“Thank you,” said the doctor, and smiled. He sat.

“You remember what happened at Nansei Shoto Dome,” he said abruptly. Lt. Tsuya nodded—we all nodded, for it was at Nanei Shoto that the greatest underwater tragedy in history had occurred, when this very Dr. John Koyetsu had issued a wrong forecast and prevented the evacuation of the dome.

“I was wrong at Nanei Shoto,” he said harshly. “I have given the rest of my life to finding out why—and to doing something about it.

“The first thing I did,” he said, “was to work with Father Tide, for the Fordham Foundation—where we designed the geosonde, and later this MOLE.” He patted its cooling flanks. “As you know, with the help of the sondes, we have been able to forecast quakes much more accurately than ever before.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” I said bitterly—and then hurriedly apologized for interrupting. But Dr. Koyetsu smiled.

“Your forecasts were wrong for a good reason, Jim,” he said. “We made them wrong.”

“For mere forecasting is not enough. I determined to find a way not only to predict quakes far enough ahead to minimize damage…but to prevent them. And the way to prevent them turned out to be—the creation of artificial quakes. Small ones. Timed just so, occurring in just such a place, that they would relieve the strain in the mother rock that was building up to a great devastation—and release it in small and harmless quakes. Such as the ones that you have seen here in Krakatoa.

“For we created them, the four of us.”

The news shook us more than any of the quakes had. Lt. Tsuya’s face was furrowed with perplexity; Harley Danthorpe stood stunned, his eyes open wide; Lt. McKerrow shook his head endlessly.

But I—I was exultant!

“I told you!” I burst out. “I told you my uncle couldn’t be involved in anything dishonest or wrong. You should have believed me!”

Lt. Tsuya said harshly: “One minute, Eden! I grant you that Doctor Koyetsu’s word goes a long way with me, but there are still a lot of questions that have to be answered for my satisfaction. You can’t talk black into white—and your uncle has already admitted, for example, that he made a million dollars out of the panic from the first quake. Not to mention his possession of nuclear explosives!”

“But I think I can explain it all,” I said excitedly. “If you will just listen! Because I think that million dollars was far less than he had already spent—that the money was used to pay for the big project on which he was engaged.”

“And what was that?” barked the lieutenant.

“The saving of Krakatoa Dome!”

My uncle grinned and spoke up. “Good boy, Jim,” he said in his warm, chuckling voice. “And how did you think I was going to do that?”

“Why—” I hesitated, trying to remember exactly what Dr. Koyetsu had said, and to fit it in with all the theory of seismic processes which I had been taught right here in this station—”why, I think it would go something like this. This city stands over a dangerous fault. We have been watching the seismic stresses increase along the fault. The only question was when the whole business would go off.

“But if it could be made to go off prematurely, then the buildup would not be complete. Particularly, if the stress could be released a little bit at a time, no one quake would be big enough to do much damage. And the aggregate effect would completely prevent the big, damaging one.

“It would be a matter of trigger forces,” I went on quickly—and I saw Gideon’s warm eye wink at me, and knew that I was on a level keel—“and in order to trigger the small, artificial quakes, you would use nuclear energy!

“You would use, in fact, the H-bomb fuses we found in your safe!”

Dr. Koyetsu, smiling and nodding, droned in professorial style: “Exactly right, Cadet Eden. Accumulated crustal tensions are relieved by a series of controlled minor quakes released by nucleonic explosives.”

And—“Go to the head of the class, Jim!” boomed my uncle.

But it wasn’t quite enough for Lt. Tsuya.

He was convinced, there was no doubt of it. It was impossible for him to doubt Dr.

Koyetsu, not to mention my uncle. But he was also an officer of the Sub-Sea Fleet, with a duty to do; and part of that duty was that he should enforce its regulations.

“That leaves three questions,” he barked. “Where did you get a MOLE? Where did you get your nucleonic explosives? And, most of all—why was it necessary for you to keep it all a secret?”

My uncle grinned and wheezed: “You should be able to answer that last question.” He sat down, color flooding back into his face, his hollowed blue eyes filled once again with their old unquenchable fire. “Secrecy? It was absolutely essential that this operation be carried out in secrecy. What could we do—go to the city council and say, ‘Please, gentlemen, we have an idea that we might be able to prevent earthquake damage to the dome. Of course, well have to start a couple of earthquakes to do it/ Should we have done that? Put it this way. Would you have done it, remembering what difficulties you yourself had in trying to deal with a council dominated by Barnacle Ben Danthorpe?”

Harley Danthorpe flushed but said nothing. Lt. Tsuya frowned thoughtfully, then nodded: “Very well,” he said. “What about the other questions?”

My uncle said forcefully: “We did what we had to do to save lives!

“This all began a year ago, when Doctor Koyetsu came to me at my home in Marinia. He had kept his eye on the Krakatoa faults. He knew that there was danger here—that sooner or later there would be a major quake, Force Ten or greater, and that that would be the end of Krakatoa Dome.

“And he was determined, for reasons we all know, to prevent any more loss of life through the destruction of an underwater city.” My uncle glanced sympathetically at Dr. Koyetsu. “Can you blame him?”

“But why did he come to you?” demanded Lt. Tsuya. “Why not go to someone here in the Dome?”

“Ah, but he did,” said my uncle softly. “He went first to see Mr. Danthorpe. I imagine you can guess what Mr. Danthorpe said. We don’t want to wreck the prosperity of the dome with crack-brained nonsense, he said, and how did Koyetsu know the thing would work—and lots more.

“And he didn’t forget to remind Doctor Koyetsu about what had happened at Nansei Shoto. So he turned him down cold. Refused to let him try out his scheme, and in fact threatened him with arrest if he ever appeared in Krakatoa Dome again.”

“He did offer to let me stay on one consideration, Stewart,” reminded Dr. Koyetsu.

My uncle nodded. “Oh, yes. He offered Doctor Koyetsu a job—forecasting quakes, to give him the inside drift on quakes that might affect the stock market. Koyetsu took it as an insult at the time. But I don’t mind telling you that the idea turned out to be useful to us later.

“Because then John Koyetsu came to see me. He told me his fears about Krakatoa, and his hopes that the quake might be averted—not only here, but everywhere—by the application of his technique.

“At first I was skeptical. Don’t blame me too much for that; remember that even Father Tide had been skeptical at first. But Doctor Koyetsu convinced me, and I took a chance. After all, that’s been my life—taking chances, for the sake of developing the riches of the deep water.

“The question was, How could I help?

“My health was not too good. It still isn’t, I admit, though I think the worst is over! I didn’t have much money at the time—and money was needed, great quantities of money; the MOLE cost nearly ten million dollars. And I didn’t have the nuclear explosives we needed.

“But I got them!” he cried.

“I got the money, as you know—by speculating on the stock exchange, on the basis of John’s forecasts.

“And for the nuclear explosives—why, I remembered the wreck of the Hamilcar Barca.”

“Hamilcar Barca?” Lt. Tsuya looked puzzled. Then he said, doubtfully: “Oh, was that the one—It was a long time ago, when I was only a baby. But wasn’t that the ship that sank in the early days, before you invented edenite armor? And it carried a cargo of—”

“Nuclear fuses!” said my uncle triumphantly. “You’ve got a good memory, Lieutenant! Hamilcar Barca went down near Mount Calcutta thirty-one years ago. And after twenty-eight years, the cargo of any foundered vessel belongs to the man who salvages it. That’s the law!

“So I decided that that man was me. What was more, there was work to be done around Mount Calcutta. John had predicted a severe quake there, and he was anxious to test his theories. Well, I got the cargo—and John’s theories tested out beautifully—but we ran into trouble.” He grinned. “But we escaped, though my old sea-car was a total wreck.”

My uncle sobered. “Then Doctor Koyetsu rescued us in the MOLE, with the cargo. And we came here to Krakatoa Dome. We hid the reactors in the drainage sump, along with the MOLE itself, until the time was right to put John’s theories into practice.

“That time came four days ago. And the rest of the story you know.”

John Koyetsu called urgently: “Stewart! The time—”

My uncle hesitated and looked at the station clock. He nodded gravely.

“Brace yourselves, gentlemen,” he said.

There was a silence. Seconds passed—a minute. Lt. Tsuya started to speak: “What are we waiting for? Is it—”

“Wait!” commanded my uncle. And then, almost on cue, we felt it.

The rock shuddered beneath us. A distant awful howl of quaking seismic masses sang in the air. Even in the station we felt it, and clutched, every one of us, for whatever would help us stand.

“The third quake!” cried my uncle over the din. “And there are five more to go!”

Beneath us, the tormented rock was still moaning.

The floor of the station pitched and shuddered. The ortholytic elements on the nose of the MOLE quivered and spun slowly, twisted by the racking movements of the earth, looking queerly as though the MOLE itself were protesting against the effects of the quake it had itself caused. Rock exploded out of the roof.

And from widening fissures a cold salt flood poured into the station.