Ocean on Top Read online

  The other reason against haste I didn’t know about yet, and didn’t learn for a number of hours.

  I’m not a clock-watcher. I knew I had plenty of survival time in the tank and wasn’t keeping very close track of how much of it had passed. When the second reason did show up it never occurred to me to check the time, and for several hours after that I was very thoroughly distracted from such things as clocks. I can’t say, therefore, just how long I spent sitting in the tank waiting for something to happen. I can guarantee that it was a number of hours; long enough to get me bored, cramped, irritated, and more than half convinced that there was no one under that tent roof anywhere nearby. The idea that it might be someone who didn’t care a hoot about fragments of ship in his ceiling seemed too far out to be worth considering, if anyone had seen it, he’d have done something about it.

  No one had done anything about it. Therefore, no one was within sight. And if no one was within sight under the fabric, I might as well take a closer look at it myself. Maybe I could even get a look under it.

  Dangerous thinking, boy. Don’t let all those wasted kilowatts go to your head. You’re just a detached eyeball; if you don’t get back with information, anything you do manage to do is pure waste — and waste, of course, is the profane word around the Board.

  It was a temptation, though. No motion — no sign of human life except the lights and the tent roof itself, and mighty little sign of any other kind of life. No sound. Nothing from the sonar frequency monitor. Why shouldn’t I roll gently down to the edge of the fabric and study it more closely?

  The best answer to that question, of course, was that it would be the act of a dithering idiot. As time went on, though, it occurred to me once or twice that merely being here at all wasn’t the highest possible display of human intelligence. If I must act like a fool, I might as well be a real one. I don’t know where that sort of thinking comes from; maybe I should see that psychiatrist.

  I’m not sure just how close I came to giving in. I know I almost pulled in the legs three times and each time thought better of it.

  The first time I was stopped by something moving, which turned out to be a fair-sized shark. It was the first large living thing I’d seen since reaching bottom, and it set my thoughts off on another tangent for a while. The next couple of times I started to move the tank I was stopped by the memory of the shark; it had disappeared — had it heard something I couldn’t, that had frightened it off? I had no instruments outside for low or audible frequency detection, just the sonar receptors.

  I know all this isn’t making me sound much like a genius, or even a reasonably competent operator. I wish I’d had more time to edit my memories a bit before having to tell this story. If I’m to justify the decision I’m trying to sell, I should have some chance to look like a sensible adult first. All I can put in for my own defense at the moment is one of those let’s-see-you-do-better remarks. Are you sure just how your own thoughts would have gone if you were practically helpless in a six-foot plastic bubble a mile under the ocean? If you’re not, please suspend your criticism until I’m done.

  The second reason for not dumping ballast too hastily finally did show up. My attention was still pretty well focused on the wreckage, so I didn’t see it coming. My first glimpse was from the corner of my eye, and I thought for an instant it was another shark; then I realized it was human, and I had my evidence. Fine. Once it’s out of sight I can head for the surface.

  Not a chance. What I needed was convincing evidence, and if my own eyes weren’t convincing me it was unlikely that my words would convince anyone else. What I saw was a person, which was all right in itself; a suit of four-inch polyphase armor, adequately powered in the limbs, will hold back the ton and a quarter or so per square inch that sea water exerts a mile down. Such armor will even let the wearer look rather like a human being and move about in a very clumsy walk.

  It will not, however, unless he is immersed in an ocean of mercury, let him swim; and this clearly human figure was swimming.

  It came into view some distance to my left, appearing in the light rather suddenly as though it had come down from the darkness above. It was swimming toward me and the wreck, not in any obvious hurry. As it approached, details became plainer; and the plainest of-all — plainer even than the fact that it was female — was that she wasn’t wearing armor. She was wearing a cold-water coverall type scuba suit, absolutely ordinary except that it had a spherical, transparent helmet instead of a breathing mask, and the ballast seemed to be in rings here and there around body and limbs instead of being fastened to the belt. I repeat — in fact, I had to repeat it to myself several times — that the garment was not pressure armor. Its wearer’s swimming motions showed plainly that it was nearly as flexible as ordinary skin, just as a scuba suit should be.

  She didn’t seem to see my tank, which was some relief. She didn’t even seem to see the wreck until she was within twenty yards of it. She had been swimming very slowly along the edge of the tent roof with no more apparent purpose than someone out for an afternoon stroll, up to that point. Then she changed course and headed straight for the bow of Pugnose.

  That didn’t fit. Anyone down here should have been looking for that wreck, not running across it by accident. I’d been expecting a working party sent out by the people under that cover.

  Well, there’s more than one thing I haven’t been expecting about this business. Stop with the working hypotheses, brother, you haven’t enough data even for that yet. Just watch (I don’t even address myself by name).

  So I watched. I watched her swim around the shattered bow, and into it and out again, and over it. Then I watched her unlimber an object which turned out to be a light, which had been clipped to her suit belt, and swim inside once more. That worried me a little; the camouflage for the tank had not been designed for that sort of inspection. Its clamps, its launching springs -

  She came out again, with no more visible signs of excitement than before, and at that point something else dawned on me. It was a very minor point compared with what I had already seen — at least, it seemed minor when I first noticed it; as I thought, it became more and more a major puzzle.

  Her scuba suit was, as I said, quite ordinary except for helmet and ballast. Its ordinariness included a small tank between the shoulders, whose upper end just touched the helmet and was presumably connected with it, though I could see no piping. All this was reasonable. The jarring note was that there were no bubbles.

  Now, I’m familiar with rebreather systems, and I know about chemical supplies — mixtures of alkali metal peroxides and superoxides which react with water to give free oxygen and pick up carbon dioxide. I know them well enough to know that they must have, besides the chemical container and mixer systems, a sort of ‘lung’ — a variable-volume, ambient-pressure gas bag or tank — with the supply chemicals between it and the user’s own lungs. The exhaled gas has to go somewhere until it’s ready to be inhaled again. That ‘lung’ must have a volume great enough to take all the air a swimmer can exhale at one breath — in other words it must have as much volume, or nearly as much, as his own inflated lungs. There was no such bag visible on this swimming outfit, and the back tank was not nearly large enough to have contained one. It seemed, therefore, that the unit did not involve a chemical oxygen supply; and unless some sort of microscopic pump was taking the gas as fast as she exhaled and squeezing it back into another part of that little tank at fantastically high pressure, there should be exhalant bubbles. I couldn’t see any reason for such a recovery system, but I couldn’t see any bubbles either. I had already been bothered about what gas mixture she could be breathing — at this pressure, half of one percent oxygen would have burned her lungs out, and there was nothing I knew of which could be used to dilute it. Even helium was soluble enough down here to make decompression a job of many hours.

  It crossed my mind for a moment that people might be living permanently under this pressure, breathing a nearly pure helium a
tmosphere with a fraction of a percent oxygen in it; but if that were the story, I still couldn’t see why that girl’s suit didn’t give out bubbles. Granted there might be every economic reason to recover helium, there are engineering problems which I still don’t think could be completely solved.

  No. All hypotheses inadequate. Keep on observing. Facts so far are only that she seems to be living and moving normally in a closed system at outside pressure, and that the pressure in question — skipping the old superstition about flattening a human body — is quite high enough to mess up any biophysical or biochemical processes involving gas dynamics.

  There wasn’t much more to observe, though. The girl clipped the light back on her belt, took a last glance at the wreckage and began swimming away from it. She didn’t go back the way she had come, but continued on to my right, slanting away from the lighted region. In a few seconds she had disappeared, though I knew she couldn’t be very far away yet.

  It seemed likely that she was off to get help in moving the wreck off the tent roof. How long before she would be back with it was anyone’s guess. There might be a tent entrance a few hundred yards away, or there might not be one for several miles. The former seemed a trifle more likely, but I wasn’t going to risk money on the question.

  Just my future.

  She might have noticed the gear that had held and launched my tank; she wouldn’t have had to be much of an actress to hide an expression of suspicion under the circumstances. If she had noticed and reported it, those who came with her were going to be very curious about the whole area. The outside of the tank was deliberately a little irregular in outline so that it wouldn’t be too obviously artificial, but it was not going to fool anyone who took a really good look at it. Maybe it would be better if I moved a little farther away. I wasn’t concerned with personal safety; I could always get away, but I wanted to see as much as possible before that became necessary.

  So I told myself.

  Moving would be a slow process; traveling ability was not really a design feature of the tank. There were two dozen of the legs, and I had enough stored power to retract them against their springs several thousand times (that had taken argument), but I had not been born a sea urchin. I had had a little practice rolling the thing around under water, but the purpose of the rig was to let me juggle into a better observing position, not to keep out of the way of searchers. If I were found, my only real recourse would be to drop ballast and start for the surface. That was a once-only operation, and I didn’t want to resort to it before I really had to. There was still some hope, I figured, of deciding what was going on down here in some detail.

  Maybe it’s courage, or maybe just natural optimism.

  Chapter Three

  I began working the legs, hoping that no instruments in the neighborhood were recording the D.C. pulses as I turned the retraction solenoids on and off. I had found during practice that I could climb a slope of five or six degrees if the bottom were hard enough to give the ‘feet’ any resistance, but that near the limit of steepness the going tended to be tricky. If I overbalanced and started downhill again it took very fast work with just the right legs to stop the roll. The sphere had a respectable moment of inertia. Because of its outer irregularity, some positions were naturally more stable than others, and some were much less. Just now I was wishing that I had spent more time in practice, though I consoled myself with the thought that the boss wouldn’t have authorized the energy expenditure anyway.

  I had worked my way between thirty and forty yards farther up the slope, with only one mistake that cost me any real distance, when the party I expected showed up.

  It wasn’t a large one — four in all. One could have been, and probably was, the girl I had seen before; the other three seemed to be men, though it was hard to tell at this greater distance. One of the new ones was towing a piece of equipment about three feet long, cylindrical in shape, and a little more than a foot in diameter. It had a slight negative buoyancy, which was understandable — they’d make sure that nothing which got loose would find its way to the surface.

  They swam over to the wreck, and two of them began pulling lengths of line from the cylinder. They attached these to convenient parts of Pugnose, while the third man pulled from the other end of the cylinder something that looked like a heavy bundle of netting with a collapsed balloon inside it. When the other lines were made fast he manipulated something on the cylinder, and the balloon began to inflate slowly. The wreckage didn’t have much submerged weight, and it wasn’t long before the balloon had it hoisted clear of the roof. Then all four of them got on the far side and began pushing it, swim fins fluttering violently.

  It took them several minutes to get it away from the smooth area and out of the light. I supposed this was all they’d bother to do, but I was wrong. With the tent roof out of danger they moved around and began pushing the load in the direction the girl went after finding it.

  This might be a nuisance. Maybe they just wanted it for a souvenir, but maybe they wanted to make a really close examination under better conditions — better light, or maybe even out of water. Whichever of these might be true, as long as they were interested someone was likely to notice the tank attachments. I’d have been much happier if they’d simply pushed the bow section off their roof and forgotten it. Now I had no excuse for not following them. Come to think of it, I should try to locate the entrance, or one of the entrances, to the place anyway.

  They weren’t swimming fast, but they went a lot faster than I could roll the tank. Once again I wished that some real provision for moving the thing had been made, but the argument had been that the closer the whole rig got to being a submarine, the harder it was going to be to camouflage. I hadn’t bought the argument completely at the time, and I would have been even more delighted at a chance to reopen it now. All I could do, though, was hope the chance would come later on, and in the meantime wait until the swimmers got their burden a reasonable distance away and then start rolling in the same direction.

  Perhaps I haven’t made clear quite all the nuisances involved in rolling the tank. The principle ought to be plain enough; it was simply a matter of letting the appropriate spring push out a leg against the bottom, on the side I wanted to go away from. It may not have crossed your mind that this general method of getting around meant that living equipment, control panels, and other fixed gear were some-

  times to one side of me, sometimes to another, and sometimes above or below. There were times when it was very hard to keep from sitting on all the leg-control buttons at once, for example. As I’ve said, the legs were meant more for position and altitude fine control, and to keep the tank from rolling on a slope, than for genuine travel. The need for the latter had not been foreseen, or at least hadn’t been considered very great, by the authorities.

  At least, concentrating on working the machine along the bottom kept my mind from the worries I’d felt on the way down. It was actually more likely now that I’d come under unfriendly observation, but at least I wasn’t brooding over it. The swimmers had vanished in the distance, nothing else could be seen moving in the lighted area to my left, and nothing at all could be seen the other way. The bottom under the tank couldn’t be made out in detail, and in a way I was groping along — though the verb isn’t exactly right, since it implies that you can feel what’s ahead of you. I couldn’t feel anything; I could only note whether my vehicle rolled a little way, a longer way, or not at all whenever another leg was extended. When it didn’t roll at all I had to guess which other legs to try. It would have been a lot easier if I had dared to use enough light of my own to get a decent sight of the bottom, but I wasn’t that silly. If the local population included swimmers, I didn’t have a prayer of knowing when any of them were around; when this mess had started we were thinking of subs and sonar. These I was ready to spot.

  The slope was not very regular, as I quickly found. Twice I rolled forward out of control for several yards when I reached a small dip. Once
I thought I was stuck for good — I couldn’t go forward, back, or what was presumably downhill toward the light. As a last resort I tried uphill and found that it wasn’t uphill at all; I rolled out of control again into a hollow where I couldn’t see the lighted area except as a vague, diffused glow over the ridge I’d just crossed. Getting out of that hollow used a lot of time and an irritating amount of stored power.

  I couldn’t even relieve my feelings with language. The coupling from air through plastic to water, and from water through helmets to gas and human ears, may be pretty bad, but it isn’t zero; and the sound-transmitting properties of cold water make up for a lot of matching deficiencies. I didn’t dare say a word.

  Once out of that devil-invented gully I stopped, once more in full sight of the tent roof and tried to take stock.

  My power was rather low. There was no way of telling whether I might reach the entrance in three hundred yards or three thousand; the former seemed more likely, since the girl hadn’t taken too long to come back with her help, but then she might have met the men already outside. Nothing was certain enough to give any possible line of action even the dignity of a calculated risk. It wasn’t possible to calculate.

  I had to find out more, though. I’d cooled down a little from my original reaction — I could believe what I’d seen, and I realized that others would, too — but the news I had wasn’t as helpful as it was supposed to be to the Board. If a police unit were to do anything but grope around, it should know where to start. A regular entrance would make a logical place. Of course it wasn’t likely that the tent roof would really keep a sub out; but judging by the area the tent enclosed, the chances of breaking through at a strategically useful point would be rather slim.