Ocean on Top

by Hal Clement

  “But why didn’t you mention this before? I thought—well—”

  “Some things really shouldn’t need mentioning. Where in the world would you expect to find ready-made equipment for taking a man out of a high-pressure escape shell while it was still in a high-pressure environment? Think it over.” He put down the pad and was gone before I could think of a good answer to that one.

  In fact he had come back, nearly an hour later, before I could think of one. I still haven’t.

  Bert, on his return, had better news than I had been afraid he might. The Council, or such of them as he had found — I was getting an idea that it was a body of rather fluid composition, and that the usual way of getting things done officially was to find and deal with one’s own chosen quorum of members — had approved my application for citizenship, if it could be called that, with no argument. Several engineers in the group had been interested enough in the problem I represented to go to work on it at once. They were at the task now and might be expected to come up with something shortly.

  That was encouraging. I’m an engineer of sorts myself, though I work at it only in its incidental connection with my main job, and every idea I had thought of ran into a blank wall. This was usually a matter of basic procedure. I couldn’t see how welding, or high-speed drilling, or any of several other ordinary operations you take for granted in machining and handling work could be done in a liquid environment under a pressure of more than a ton to the square inch. Most tools, for example, have high-speed motors; high-speed motors are a little hard to conceive with their moving parts bathed in an even moderately viscous fluid; and under that sort of pressure, how do you keep the fluid out?

  Of course, if these people had been down here the eighty years or so that Bert had mentioned, they should have learned the basic tricks for the environment, just as men had learned space engineering the hard way. I wished I knew how they were going about my problem, though.

  I didn’t find out in detail, but it didn’t take them too long. About eighteen hours — a very boring eighteen hours — after Bert had brought the news, he came back with a team of helpers and began moving the tank. It was quite a trip. We went back outside and traveled half a mile or so to another, larger entrance. Inside it there were several large corridors, instead of just one, opening from the main chamber.

  They towed me down one of these for a distance and stopped by a pair of the first genuine locks I had seen since my arrival.

  One was quite ordinary, and I barely glanced at it; the other was circular and just about large enough for my tank. It was located in the same wall as the smaller lock, about twenty yards away from it. It was opened as we approached by a couple of the party who swam on ahead, and the tank was juggled through. The wall in which the door was hung turned out to be several feet thick, and the door itself but little thinner; I judged that the room beyond was the one to be depressurized.

  The chamber itself was fairly large. One side was crowded with apparatus, the most recognizable items being an operating table with broad restraining straps and a set of remote-control hands much finer than I was used to seeing on work subs.

  The larger part of the room, in which the tank had been placed, was almost bare, and it looked very much as though the operating room had originally been much smaller. There were signs that a wall as thick as the one I had come through had been removed from between the spot where I now was and the place where the table and its auxiliary gear stood. I would have liked to see the tools that had done the job.

  My guess, as it turned out, was correct; the smaller section had been the original conversion room; the smaller lock leading into it could be connected to the hatch of a visiting sub. The whole trouble had been that my tank had no hatch; it normally opened by bisection.

  Bert wrote instructions for me while the others were getting out of the place.

  “When we’re all gone and the door is sealed, the room will be pumped down to surface pressure. A green light will flash over the table when it’s down, but you’ll know anyway — you’ll be able to open your tank. When you can get out, go over to the table and get onto it. Fasten the straps around your body and legs. It doesn’t matter whether your arms are free or not. When you’re tight to the table, press the red signal button you can see from here.” He indicated the button to me. “It’s within reach of your right hand, you see. A container of sleeping medicine will be delivered by one of the hands. Drink it and relax. Nothing more can be done while you’re conscious.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll have to be plugged into a heart-lung machine during the change. Don’t worry. It’s been done many times before. Once you’re out of that tank and onto the table, the only unusual problem you offer will have been solved. All right?”

  “I see. All right.” He put down his pad and swam out through the ponderous lock, which swung slowly shut. I hadn’t seen any special dogs or clamps on it, but it opened out into the corridor and wouldn’t need any. With its area, once the pressure started down in the room nothing much short of an earthquake could open it.

  I could tell when the pumps started; the whole place quivered, and the vibration carried through to the tank very easily. I spent some time estimating the work that would have to be done to empty a room of this volume against a one-mile head of sea water and a little more in wondering how the mysterious fluid that was replacing water would behave when the pressure came down. If it had a high vapor pressure there would be a purging job on top of the pumping one — no, not necessarily, come to think of it; the stuff must be physiologically harmless, so probably the vapor could be left in the room. Of course if it were flammable it might make trouble when they put oxygen in for me to breathe. Well, they were used to that problem and had been for decades. I needn’t worry about it.

  In spite of all the free energy which seemed to be around, it took nearly half an hour to empty the place. The liquid level went down steadily. The surface, when it appeared, remained smooth. There was no boiling or other special behavior. It might as well have been water. They took no pains to get the last of it out; there were several puddles on the rather uneven floor when the light flashed.

  I wasted no time opening the tank; I’d been in it for a long time and couldn’t get out too fast. My ears hurt for a moment as the hemispheres fell apart; pressures had not been perfectly matched, but the difference wasn’t enough to be serious. Once out I slowed down. My arms and legs were badly cramped, and I found it almost impossible for a few moments to walk even as far as the table. I spent several minutes working the kinks out of my limbs before I took the next step.

  The table was comfortable. Anything I could have stretched out on, including the stone floor, would have been comfortable just then. I fastened the broad, webbed strap about my waist and chest, then of course found I couldn’t reach down to the ones for my legs. I undid the first set, took care of my legs, refastened the upper strap and finally was ready to push the signal switch.

  As promised, one of the mechanical hands promptly extended toward me with a beaker of liquid and a flexible tube to let me drink it lying down. I followed orders, and that’s all I remember about the process.

  Chapter Twelve

  I woke up with a reasonably clear head. I was lying on a bunk in a small room that contained two other beds and nothing much else. No one else was around.

  Someone had removed my clothes, but they were folded in a sort of hybrid, offspring of a laundry basket and a letter rack near the head of the bunk. Another similar affair held a pair of trunks such as I had seen worn by many of the men around my tank. After a moment’s thought I put on the trunks; my other garments weren’t made for swimming. I got out of the bunk and stood on the floor, though my head felt a little funny.

  It occurred to me that I had no business feeling enough weight to let me stand, under the circumstances; I was presumably immersed in a liquid denser than water, and therefore denser than my body. A thought crossed my mind; I rummaged in the
pockets of my old clothes, found a jack-knife, and let go of it.

  Sure enough, it fell past my face. I was standing on the ceiling, as were the bunks.

  I tried swimming after the knife, which had come to rest a couple of feet out of reach on the floor/ceiling. It was quite an effort, though not by any means impossible. It: was obvious why the people I had seen wore the ballast belts. I didn’t see any of those around, though, for the moment at least, I’d have to walk if I wanted to go anywhere. This promised to be rather inconvenient too, since the liquid was fairly viscous, though less so than water. Also, the architecture wasn’t designed for walkers; one of the doors to the room was in a wall and fairly accessible, but the other was in the floor — that is, the floor toward which my head was now pointing and on which my jackknife had come to rest. Under the circumstances I decided to wait until Bert or someone showed up with ballast and swim fins.

  The decision was helped by the fact that I still didn’t feel quite myself, even aside from the difference of opinion between my eyes and my semicircular canals as to which way was up and which was down. As a matter of fact, the canals couldn’t seem to make up their minds at all on the matter, and it suddenly occurred to me that some surgery must have been done there as well. They could not possibly have been left full of air — or could they? How strong was bone, and how well surrounded by it were the canals, anyway?

  I felt around and found several places on my neck and around my ears where the smooth plastic of surgical dressing covered the skin, but that didn’t prove much. It had been obvious all along that some work around the ears would be necessary.

  I felt no desire to breathe; they must have slipped a supply of their oxygen-food into me sometime during the procedure. I wondered how long it would last.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I was very much in the power of anyone who chose to exercise it, since I hadn’t the faintest idea where to get more of the stuff. That was something I’d have to discuss with Bert very shortly.

  I tried forcing myself to breathe. I found I could squeeze liquid slowly out of my lungs and get it back equally slowly, but it hurt and made me feel even dizzier than being right side up and upside down simultaneously. The liquid went into my windpipe; I could feel it, but there was no tendency to cough. I still think that must have been one of the trickiest parts of the conversion procedure, considering the nerve and muscle activity which coughing involves.

  The presence of liquid in my windpipe, expected at it was, raised another question. I certainly couldn’t talk, and I didn’t know the sign language which appeared to be standard here — didn’t even know the spoken language on which it was presumably based. I had a long job ahead of me if I were to communicate with the local inhabitants. Maybe it would be better to bypass any such effort; if I could find out all I needed to know from Bert, language lessons would be a waste of time.

  I could hear, though. The sounds were almost strange, though some might have been the hum of high-speed motors or generators. There were whistles, thus, whines — nearly everything there is a word for, but none of it exactly similar to anything familiar, and one particular class of noise completely missing. The gabble of speech which drenches every other inhabited part of Earth was totally lacking.

  Nearly an hour passed according to my watch, before anyone appeared (the watch itself was a solid-state radioactive-powered affair which had not been designed with sea-bottom pressure in mind, but had come through the change perfectly). I spent most of the time cursing myself — not for making the change, but for failing to take advantage of the time between decision and action by getting more information from Bert.

  The new arrival was young and quite decorative — but I didn’t fall in love with her. The response was mutual. She waved me back to the cot and examined my dressings with an air of competence.

  When she finished, I tried to call her attention to my lack of swimming ballast. She may have understood, since she paid courteous attention to me and nodded agreeably after I’d finished my gestures, but she left without doing anything constructive about the matter. I hoped she was going to call Bert.

  Whether she did or not, he was the next to enter. He had no extra ballast with him, but he did have the writing pad. This was even better. I reached for it and buckled down to work.

  I’d been restricted to communicating only by written note before, but not since leaving grammar school. In those days it had had a certain thrill, being an illicit activity in study hall; now it proved to be purest nuisance.

  In something over two hours, we settled:

  That I was a fully naturalized citizen of this place, and entitled to go where I pleased and do what I wanted short of obvious conflict with the interests of others;

  That I was not only permitted to examine the power-generating units, but was expected to familiarize myself with them as soon as possible;

  That I could visit Marie at her submarine whenever I felt like it, and I had the blessing of the Council and the rest of the population in arguing with her; and

  That I would be expected to support myself by farming until I demonstrated some different and at least equally useful way of contributing to the general welfare.

  That was all. Often in the past I’d held a lengthy conversation with someone, and after he was out of sight had remembered other things I’d wanted to say; but down here this sort of thing wasn’t an incident, it was a habit.

  It wasn’t so much that one forgot to bring up some point or other. As a rule there wasn’t time to cover even the ones remembered. I’ve never appreciated the gift of speech so much in my life. Those of you who feel, after finishing this report, that I should have learned certain key facts sooner than I did will please remember this difficulty. I don’t say I shouldn’t have been quicker, but I do claim some excuse for failure.

  The whole thing was not merely annoying; it did wind up making me look more like a plain fool than I ever have before or hope to again. What is really embarrassing is that so many people who have heard only this much of the story can see already where I went wrong.

  I had no real enthusiasm for farming, though I was curious about how it would be conducted on the sea bottom. I did want to learn about the power plant, but even that item I postponed. I asked Bert first of all to guide me to Marie’s sub. He nodded and started swimming.

  The trip was made without conversation. Maybe Bert was used enough to swimming by this time so that he could have written and read while doing it, like a city secretary doing a crossword puzzle as she strolls out to lunch, but I certainly was not. I simply looked around as I followed him, noting everything I possibly could.

  The tunnels were long and for the most part straight, but they formed a hopeless maze as far as I was concerned. I would be a long, long time learning to find my way around unaided. If there was anything corresponding to an ordinary street sign, I failed to spot it. There were all sorts of color patterns on the walls, but I couldn’t tell whether they meant something or were merely decoration. Everything was brightly lighted.

  The place wasn’t just tunnels, either. There were large rooms of all shapes, some of which might have been business plazas or shopping centers or theaters or almost anything else one can think of where a lot of people congregate. I seldom saw any real crowds, but there were enough swimmers around to support the claim that the population was quite large — not surprising if it had been going for several generations. I was gradually coming to think of the place as a country, as Bert had claimed, rather than an outlaw organization; a country which had never lost its identity by subscribing to the Power Code. This might indeed be the case — it might have been here longer than the Code had. I didn’t know how much more than the eighty years Bert had mentioned might be in its history. That was something else to find out.

  I never got good at judging distances in swimming, and some of the corridors had their traffic assisted by a pump-driven current, so I don’t know how far we went before reaching the submarine. As a matter
of fact, I still have only the vaguest notion of the size of the whole place. At any rate, we finally emerged from a narrow corridor into one of the big chambers under an ocean entrance, crossed beneath the circle of blackness which gave on a mile of salt water, went on down a much larger passageway for perhaps two hundred yards, and found ourselves at the entrance to a fair-sized room in which one ordinary Board work sub, loaded with external ballast slugs as my tank had been, lay cradled on the floor.

  Bert stopped just outside the entrance and began to write. I read over his shoulder as he produced “I’d better stay outside. She’s firmly convinced that I’m Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Vidkun Quisling all rolled into one. You’ll have enough trouble appearing as you are without me beside you. Have you decided what excuse to offer for making the change?”

  I nodded, seeing no need to waste time writing out details more than once, and took the pad and stylus. Bert looked a little expectant, but I waved farewell to him and headed for the sub. When I looked back, just before reaching it, he was gone. I then remembered that sometime fairly soon I was going to need ordinary food and presumably, even more seriously, the oxygen food. I still didn’t know where to get them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I couldn’t see anyone through the ports of the sub as I approached, though I circled all the way around it. Apparently Marie was asleep. I wasn’t sure it would be sound policy to wake her up, but I finally decided to take a chance. I tapped on the hull.

  “If that’s Bert, clear out. I’m busy thinking!” The words were clear and understandable, but they didn’t sound at all like Marie’s voice. I can’t describe just what they did sound like. There are overtones produced by the human vocal cords which don’t usually get through the impedance-matching equipment of the listener’s middle ear — one of the reasons one’s own voice sounds so unfamiliar in a recording. Being immersed in a fluid which carries sound at about the same speed as water does, and having that fluid on both sides of the eardrum, makes an even greater difference. As I say, I personally lack the words to describe the exact result.