Undersea City

5 Quake Forecast!

Down deep there are no natural days.

Black night has been there since the rolling oceans first were filled. Life down deep doesn’t need the sun for a clock; it doesn’t have a clock; there is no time. Sub-Sea Time—set by the Fleet Observatory at Bermuda—is everywhere the same.

At 15:15 hours, Yeoman Harris appeared at our quarters to escort us down to Station K.

We dropped in an elevator down to the very base of the city—below dock level, even, but not anywhere near down as far as we were to go. Here we passed through gloomy storage spaces, with glimpses of dark tunnels choked with air conduits and the coiled piping that served the city above. We could hear the bass throbbing of the pumps that sucked the trickling waste water from all the myriad drains and catch basins of the city, collected it in sumps and forced it, under fantastic pressure, out into the hungrily thrusting sea outside. We walked out into an arched tunnel whose dripping roof was black basaltic rock, still marked with the ragged bite of the drills that had cut it out of the sea’s bottom when the Dome was built.

“We’re halfway,” said Yeoman Harris dourly. He wasn’t much of a talker..

An armed guard stepped briskly out of a little sheetmetal shelter. “Halt!”

Yeoman Harris stepped up and showed him a copy of our orders. This was no courtesy inspection, no military drill. This was real business. The guard scanned every word and line, and when he handed the orders back to Harris I had the feeling that he had memorized them.

This was serious business—that much was for sure.

“Come on,” growled the wheezing old yeoman. He led us past the guard, to yet another elevator.

But this one was something new in my experience.

It was a small round cage, and it hung in a circular shaft. But the shaft was hewn out of living rock, and it glowed with a shimmering inside film of edenite.

Here was pressure beyond anything I had experienced! Even the rigid basalt that cups the world’s oceans was not to be trusted down here; it might crumble, it might flow under the mighty weight of sea and rock above, and so it must be lined with edenite!

Harris herded us into the cage and pressed a button.

The cage dropped out from under us into the palely shining bore. The walls shimmered with a thousand shades of color as we fell, reflecting the play of pressure that they contained; it was a reassuring sight to me, since edenite was something I had grown up with, a familiar story in my family. But Harley Danthorpe was chalk white.

And Bob kept his face turned away.

We came out of the cage in a matter of minutes—ten thousand feet down. Above us was nearly two miles of solid rock. Above that, the massive bulk of Krakatoa Dome, the entire city of people and industry, the fleet base and the soaring pillars of the Exchange—far, far over our heads.

And above that—three tall miles of the Indian Ocean.

We came out of the cage, through an edenite lock, into an arched tunnel.

Here there was no edenite. Perhaps it was only the narrow shaft that was vulnerable, for here was only the rough facing of pressure-concrete, and it was dark with moisture. Ten thousand feet under the nearest free water, it yet was dappled with beads of water that stood out on it everywhere, forced through it by the enormous pressure behind. They grew slowly, even as we watched; they gathered into tiny silent rivulets, and trickled down into little gutters cut into the basalt floor around the walls.

“No edenite down here,” Yeoman Harris explained gruffly. “Can’t have it. Couldn’t get through to the rock when we go out in the Moles.”

We looked at each other wordlessly. There wasn’t anything to say.

White light poured down on us from isotopic Troyon tubes.

We stood in a narrow little tomb of an office, saluted, and reported to Lieutenant Tsuya, our new commanding officer.

“Danthorpe,” he said cheerfully. “Eskow. Eden.” He shook hands all around. He was lean and young and intense looking, and very much alive. “Glad to see you, Eden,” he said, pumping my hand. “I know a lot about your uncle. Good man. Don’t pay any attention to what some people say. They’re just jealous.”

“Thanks,” I said—but it wasn’t the kind of thing I liked to hear. So the gossip about Uncle Stewart had penetrated this far!

But he was going on to the others. “Good to have you aboard,” he said. “Sit down. We’ll get started right away.”

I sat, and so did the others. It was cold there, in that room. In spite of the light, it still seemed gloomy, from the wet blackness of the walls and from the smothering darkness of miles of rock and water that all of us knew were overhead.

Cold?

Lieutenant Tsuya grinned; he said accurately: “You’re wondering why it isn’t hot here.”

I nodded. It was odd; this far down, the Earth’s internal heat should have raised the temperature a degree or two, not cut it down. No doubt the air conditioning would make it bearable—but this was definitely chilly.

“Partly psychological,” said Lieutenant Tsuya, his pumpkin-shaped face smiling. “Partly because of the flow of water—we’ve pretty well honeycombed the rock around here. Don’t worry. It’ll get hot enough when you start using your geosondes.”

“Geosondes—” Danthorpe swallowed. “Lieutenant,” he said desperately, “I’d like to request a twenty-four hour pass at once, for the purpose of visiting my family.”

“Family?”

“My Dad,” said Harley Danthorpe proudly. “Mr. Benford Danthorpe. He’s a very important—”

“I know,” said the Lieutenant, the smile fading. “There won’t be any passes, however. Not for some time.

“For the next two weeks, all three of you mil be occupied sixteen hours a day. None of you is going to have any spare time at all. You will be on duty for all except eight hours in every twenty-four—and those eight will be used for sleep.

“You’ll need it.”

He sat down and twisted a dial on his desk. On the wall behind him there appeared a map—a strange map, such as I had never seen before. It seemed to show the contours of the sea bottom, but it was overlaid with lines and shaded areas that looked like nothing I could recognize.

“You have been assigned,” said Lieutenant Tsuya, “to one of the most difficult and exacting studies that you will undertake in all your sub-sea careers. As a small part of it, you will take part in investigation of the rock around us, five miles under the surface of the sea, two miles deep into solid rock.

“Gentlemen, I can hardly exaggerate the importance of what you are going to do here.”

He paused for a second.

Then he said:

“You are here for one reason only. You are going to learn the science of forecasting subsea quakes.”

What a two week period!

The first days in the Academy were rough and rugged, but nothing like this. Without a break—almost without time to catch our breaths—we were plunged into long, sweating hours in that dismal dungeon under the rock sea floor. Study and practice and more study, with the lash of Lieutenant Tsuya’s sardonic tongue stinging us on. He was a good man, that Lieutenant Tsuya; but his orders were to pump us full of the lore of sub-sea seismology in two short weeks.

He was determined to do it if it killed us. As a matter of fact, it felt as if he came pretty close!

First was theory:

Long hours of lecture, study, examination. What is the earth’s crust? Rock. Is rock solid?

No—not under pressure! For under pressure even rock flows. Does it flow evenly? No! It sticks and slips, and pressures build up.

“Quakes happen,” droned the lieutenant, “because the rock is not completely plastic. Stresses accumulate. They grow. They build up—and then, bang. They are released.

“Quakes are simply the vibrations that dissipate the energy of these suddenly released stresses.”

We had to learn all sorts of strange new words, the language of seaquakes. I remember Bob mumbling, “Epicenter, epicenter—if they mean the center of a quake, why don’t they say it?”

And Harley Danthorpe: “Lubber! The epicenter is the point on the surface of the earth just above the center! Why, the center may be twenty miles down.”

We had to learn the three chief types of seismic wave: The thrusting, hammering primary “P” wave—the first to reach instruments, because it is the fastest, racing through the substrata of the earth at five miles a second. The secondary “S” wave—three miles a second, vibrating at right angles to the direction of its travel, like the shaking of a clothesline or the cracking of a whip.

And then the big one—the slow, powerful long or “L” wave, the one that does the damage. We learned how by measuring the lapse betwen “P” and “S” waves, we could forecast when the destructive “L” wave would arrive.

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.”