The Lost Cavern

by H. F. Heard

  “Well, granted these are things that they didn’t want us to see, what do they mean?”

  “I believe they do link up with the secret-service report. First of all, look at these.” Chase bent down and took from his portfolio some maps.

  “This is the district of Russia we were then flying over. These green crosses show where each photo was taken. You see a fairly straight red line—one that wavers but is going across country fairly well—links up those green crosses. See, too, that a couple of big rivers flow down and cut across the red line. The red line is the hundred-foot contour line. Where those two big rivers cross the red contour line, you see, are two of the large building projects that are shown in nearly all the photos. Do you get it?”

  Place scratched his head. “I thought they were some big power development.”

  “Mr. President, put all the facts I’ve told you, and the secret report together—you remember that all the code could say—because since Spy L 55, B 2 holds the chair of Neo-Communist Casuistry at Karakorum he naturally can’t report in person or send proper messages—was ‘coast-line, contour, change,’ and that had to be distributed through the messages so it took us some time to be sure. But that’s certain now, and, what’s more, I’m certain I know what it means, and I’ll bet I’m right by betting that in five minutes you’ll have guessed as I did.”

  There was silence for about a minute, broken only by the sound of the President’s thumbnail tapping his teeth. That sound then stopped, but his mouth remained open. From it came quietly but with the greatest conviction the word “Gosh!”

  “Yes,” said Chase nodding. “You’ve got it. It’s worthy of Yang, I think! A very neat use of giant power. I don’t know quite how he’s doing it, but there’s no doubt he’s nearly ready for his grand slam.”

  “But what are we to do about it?”

  “Well, it’ll take some time, whatever it is—I mean, whatever the motive power. Anyhow, beyond this I don’t know what actually he’s up to. The photos are too vague to tell us more than that he’s up to some plan rather bigger than anything so far, and that he’s getting ready for some big change in which he intends to be ready and leave us behind—indeed, sunk in some way. That’s as far as I can go. I expect we have time to take counter measures. But I’m sure we should be doing something. That’s for you to decide. Besides, I’m not sure that this won’t prove to be something quite outside the Army’s province.”

  Place had been watching his Chief of Staff while he spoke. When he’d finished, the huge Head got up, ambled over to the small door, and threw it open: “Dr. Skelton, I want you to meet General Chase.”

  While the two were shaking hands, the President unearthed the charts, arranged them neatly with the map sections, and put under them the photo strips.

  “Now, gentlemen, I have ready my exhibit. Dr. Skelton, these, I think, will click in your mind. When you have grasped their significance, please explain your charts to the General.”

  Skelton was as quick as the President, for here was the cause, the possible reason for his puzzling phenomenon. After all three of them had bent over the papers on the table, the scientist and the soldier straightened up and looked at the politician. The huge executive was already back in his chair.

  “I see,” remarked Chase. “You were right, Mr. President. We haven’t got time, as I had thought. My question is then all the more urgent, ‘What are you going to about it?’”

  “There’s only one thing to do. Or, leastways, till we’ve done that we can’t do anything else, and it might work. I believe, you know, in frontal attacks of frankness.”

  “What do you mean?” both men asked.

  “Send for the Secretary of State, Chase. No, get him now on the phone for me. No, Dr. Skelton, you can stay here. Frankness begins at home. I’m going to call this—this bluff—if it is. But we can at least know that and then—well, we’ll see.”

  As soon as the Secretary of State was on the line the President told him to come over, but added, “Before you do, leave instructions that a television long-distance conference set-up be sent along here at once, at once. It must get here as soon as you do.”

  The urgency in his voice told. The Secretary of State and the radio specialists who geared the plant for T. L-d. C. S. turned up almost together. The Secretary of State sent through his diplomatic code beam message requesting conference immediately with the Commissar of Foreign Affairs. In five minutes they were talking. “Would it be possible for the Supreme Commissar to speak with the President?” Another five minutes brought the answer Yes.

  The screens were then set; the President with the Secretary of State standing behind him were grouped in their little apse of beams. It was rather like the staging of an old family photograph a century earlier. On the screens opposite the two men, through their grayness, figures began to glimmer and waver, then were steady, plain, colored, stereoscopic. They were as though alive and moving in the room, and their voices as clear. Yes, it was Yang in his plain blue silk robe, and beside him his Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Place bowed. The Secretary of State made the formal introduction. Yang bowed and in perfect English, though with something of that archaic accent once called Oxford, remarked on the pleasure it gave him to see that the President was in such good health. Place countered by hoping that the Commissar of Commissars was in equal health and that the strain of the continued duties to which he had again been called would not tax his energy. Yang almost smiled and bowed again. Then, without a moment’s warning Place showed his hand.

  “I am appealing to you as the world’s most powerful man.…”

  Yang did not smile; he inclined his head a little to show he would listen.

  “I am not going to say anything about what I don’t know,” continued the President. “I’m not interested in theories, and surely I don’t want suspicions.…” Again Yang bowed, but as he bent his head he kept his eyes on the face of the fat man who, the other side of the earth, was trying to get at him.

  “But there are some big world facts, facts of climate, that concern us all, desperately if they go wrong. I’m asking for co-operation in fact-finding. We’re all on this globe together.…”

  Yang’s eyelids drooped for a minute. He looked then like those photos that used to show him seated receiving the congratulations of the endless Committees of Soviets on St. Joseph’s Day. Place saw he must cut to the center at once.

  “We fear, our tide experts fear, that something on a vast scale may have shifted, gone wrong, and the center of the disturbance may be in your districts.” He stopped.

  Yang raised his head: “Did you want to ask anything further?” The tone was as though the question were a real one.

  “Yes, we want to ask that we may get together on this thing and help. As I’ve said, we’re on one planet which is covered, more than three-fifths of it, by sea. It’s a common concern if we are going to lose much more land to the sea. We have this in common: we are all land-dwelling animals.”

  Place smiled. Yang’s Mongolian features palely reflected a shadow of humor or perhaps courtesy. Then he was grave, obviously grave. He paused and then remarked slowly, “It is kind of you to come so quickly to our assistance, on what must have been no more than a rumor. But I will repay generosity with frankness. Yes, we have met with—not a disaster, but a reverse—a miscalculation which will exact perhaps a greater cost for ultimate gain than we had estimated. One of our most hopeful experiments—undertaken for mankind at large, a global enterprise—has had consequences that some of the experts did not suspect. On us will fall the weight of the cost. This great discovery was to have been given to the world at the next Inaugural—at which I have once more the honor to preside—instead of which it will have to be another challenge to face crisis. But we are brave. We will face our losses and, as the old literature used to say, Casting our bread upon the waters and sowing in tears we shall yet reap in joy, for after many days we shall find a new harvest. We do not then ask you to help. Not for a dol
lar do we appeal. We ask only for your sympathy. And your ready inquiry at the first breath of rumor shows that we have that.”

  He rose, bowed, and gave a signal with his hand, and the image of himself and his Secretary wavered, became iridescent round the edges, and on the gray glass remained nothing.

  “Can you beat it!” It was the President’s voice. “Switch us off!” he called. “But can you beat it! Glad of our sympathy; touched by our rushing to his aid; won’t ask a dollar. Chase, we’re out of date. This is the new war. This makes war obsolete.”

  “Mr. President.” It was the Secretary of State speaking. “Please understand that I, at least, don’t understand. What has happened? The secret-service report and the return of the Chief of Staff! Surely there is no need of such precipitancy. If war is obsolete, diplomacy becomes even more essential.”

  “Did y’ever hear, ‘Time and Tide wait for no man’?” Place cut in. “That’s what we’re up against. Did y’ever hear another old wise-crack, ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Sea’? Well, that again describes just where we are, just where we’ve been put on the spot. Chase, show’m those maps and charts. I must think and think the fastest I’ve ever. Well, the frontal attack of frankness has failed, been jiu-jitsued by that mealy-mouthed Mongolian.”

  The silence was disturbed only by the shuffling sound of the charts and maps as Chase and the Secretary of State handled them. Staccato on this whisper came the tapping of the President’s thumbnail on his teeth.

  “But, Mr. President.” The Secretary of State had turned to the large man filling the chair. “If this preposterous evidence really agrees, and these three reports mean the same thing, the tidal records, the building preparations on the hundred-foot contour line, and the Supreme Commissar’s statement, even then we must be circumspect. Why rush to such wild conclusions? Granted there has been an unparalleled miscalculation by the U.S.S.R. experts—well, their plans have gone wrong before. But that may only mean a vast dislocation, perhaps a disaster for them. Don’t you see, they are the first to suffer. Diplomacy doesn’t surely make a man an idealist, but it does teach him that men act in the light of their own obvious interests! Why should this master of half the world choose to cut off his nose in the hopes that we shall have an attack of sneezing?”

  “Oh, stop it, old man! That’s stuff for the papers. Look at those maps again.”

  “Well, it’s clear he’ll lose first and lose, I guess, as heavily.”

  “Surely, though, you know your Chang now? Do I have to remind you that our dear Mongol brother doesn’t like Russians any more than he likes Americans? Don’t you see that he’s going to kill a whole covey of birds, drown a whole flock of geese with one flush? Of course he’ll inundate a great deal of Russia, and holy Leningrad will go under the sea where he’s long wanted it, and the Moscow River will swallow up the corpses of the two Founding Fathers he’s anxious to have forgotten. And the U.S.S.R. will be turned permanently East, by literally sinking the West, his own as well as ours; for, of course, he’ll sink every seaport west of him—all maritime Germany, France, England, and half the capitals, for they are on the sea. Cortes burnt his ships and so conquered Mexico. Yang drowns his bridge to the West and so Orientalizes Communism. He’ll lose, of course, not a few of his own people also. But another score of millions more or less never has mattered to Yang. He thinks in the grand manner when playing the old game of ‘Beggar-My-Neighbor.’”

  “You mean—”

  “Have I to cross the t and dot the i in ‘Inundation’? Sure, it’s got a large but neat inevitability about it! Armies, Chase? Pharaoh found himself up against this when he followed Moses into the Red Sea. Armies! Why, they’re now no more use than Lewis Carroll’s ‘Seven Maids with Seven Mops’ trying to sweep out the tide. That’s exactly it. Can’t you get the hang of it? Why, even I’ve heard of the possibility. Sure, a President doesn’t hear much—his mouth’s making too much noise all the time. But that possibility everyone heard about thirty years and more ago. Don’t you see, he’s succeeded in using atom-energy to melt all the frozen tundra, and he’s well across the Arctic Ocean by now, isn’t he?” Place turned to Skelton, who nodded.

  “And, as gently as a mother rocking her child to sleep, he’ll drown Leningrad—good for him—London, better—New York, best—yes, and swamp this little city. Maybe the Capitol dome will stick out like the Ark on Ararat, but more likely than not fishes will be breeding in the cornices of this very room. Oh, it won’t be a sudden rush of a monster tidal wave”—again he looked across to Skelton, who nodded again—“it will be quiet as a summer dawn. We’ll have time, time to do nothing. For nothing can be done to stop it. All we can do is to get ready to bear Yang’s brotherly, ‘Be brave,’ ‘How I sympathize,’ ‘I’ve been through it myself!’ Where’s Diplomacy now! Sunk, sunk with Chivalry. What’s the use of sending an army and bombing the U.S.S.R. cities? Will that stop the tide from coming in and going on rising? Now that it’s started it goes on of itself, this giant melt, just as a house, once it’s well lit, burns when the fire-bug has cleared off.”

  To Chase’s and the Secretary of State’s self-protective protest, Skelton added, “President’s right. Everyone interested in geophysics has known that. If you once did start the melt—and of course once you had the atom open you could—then you’d upset the cold-balance at the Poles. It’s simply a hangover of the last Ice Age. Once those packs of ice and the snow that throws back the heat into the sky are both melted they won’t re-form. Yes, we are headed for a warmer place than ever we thought we’d see this side the grave.”

  “And we’ve just got to wait.” It was the President again. “That’s what gets me! Oh, yes, we can spend our time becoming the most unpopular President that ever was, by telling people that nothing can be done. Nowadays that damns an Executive. He’s got to say he could do something about a total eclipse if the People say they wish it put off. I’m in a tighter jam than even the last Depression President. We can spend our remaining spell of office moving population to higher land. ‘Go West, young man; go and sit above the 100-foot contour line, and then the 150, perhaps. I can’t guarantee when you’ll ever be able to sit down again and have dry pants.’ We’ll end like one of those pictures of the Deluge, in the old illustrated Bibles—all that remains of us huddled out along the foothills of mountains looking across the new ocean that once was the plains of the United States. And the U.S.S.R. will be sitting comfortably on the bracing heights of the tablelands of Tibet and China. That’s right, isn’t it, Skelton?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s no way out?”

  “Well … there is, if not a way out, a way on. I mean there’s something that can be done, if you feel that just doing nothing is the worst thing of all. I didn’t have time to show you Chart Four. It’s my Prognosis.”

  Skelton took a map from the portfolio under his arm and placed it on the table. The other three gathered over it. It was as clear in its meaning as the other three. The silence showed the degree of attention that it aroused. Only that thumbnail tapping could be heard in the room. Then the President spoke, but from the tone of his voice it was clear that he was only asking for a final confirmation.

  “The green lines show, don’t they, the coast line as it will be when the present melt has all flowed out into the oceans, and the red lines show—well, the other possibility?”

  “That’s it, Mr. President, and the one is as certain as the other.”

  But the other two men had turned to the big man in the chair: “But you can’t! It’s absolutely out of the question!”

  “Can’t! That from a soldier! Mustn’t! From a master of diplomats!” The President was in full bellow. “I tell you, there’s just one thing I can’t and won’t do—that’s to tell the people I can’t do anything. I’m Irreplaceable because in every jam I have done something. Don’t any of you yet know the A.B.C. of politics? I’ve now got a chance to do something—to put the initiative back into the hands of the U.S., and,
by Hell and High Water, I’m going to do it!”