The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  I agreed with this, for it was my problem, too. As I left the office, Mikhail pointed to the wall calendar, said “Three weeks,” and ran his finger across his throat. And I knew he wasn’t thinking of his neck.

  Two hours later I was climbing over the Alps, saying goodbye to the family by radio and wondering why, like every other sensible Swiss, I hadn’t become a banker or gone into the watch business. It was all the fault of the Piccards and Hannes Keller, I told myself moodily; why did they have to start this deep-sea tradition, in Switzerland of all countries? Then I settled down to sleep, knowing that I would have little enough in the days to come.

  We landed at Trincomalee just after dawn, and the huge, complex harbor—whose geography I’ve never quite mastered—was a maze of capes, islands, interconnecting waterways and basins large enough to hold all the navies of the world. I could see the big white control building, in a somewhat flamboyant architectural style, on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean. The siting was pure propaganda—though of course if I’d been Russian I’d have called it “public relations.”

  Not that I really blamed my clients; they had good reason to be proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet made to harness the thermal energy of the sea. It was not the first attempt; there had been an unsuccessful one by the French scientist Georges Claude in the 1930’s and a much bigger one at Abidjan, on the west coast of Africa, in the 1950’s.

  All these projects depended on the same surprising fact —that even in the tropics the sea a mile down is almost at freezing point. Where billions of tons of water are concerned, this temperature difference represents a colossal amount of energy and a fine challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.

  Claude and his successors had tried to tap this energy with low-pressure steam engines; the Russians had used a much simpler and more direct method. For over a hundred years it had beep known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end is heated and the other cooled; and ever since the 1940’s Russian scientists had been working to put this “thermoelectric” effect to practical use. Their earliest devices had not been very efficient—though good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of kerosene lamps—but in 1974 they had made a big, and still secret, breakthrough. Though I fixed the power elements at the cold end of the system, I never really saw them; they were completely hidden in anticorrosive covering. All I know is that they formed a big grid like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.

  I recognized most of the faces in the little crowd waiting on the Trinco airstrip; friends or enemies, they all seemed glad to see me—especially Chief Engineer Shapiro.

  “Well, Lev,” I said, as we drove off in the station wagon, “what’s the trouble?”

  “We don’t know,” he said frankly. “It’s your job to find out—and to put it right.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “Everything worked perfectly up to the full-power tests,” Shapiro answered. “Output was within five percent of estimate until 01.34 Tuesday morning.” He grimaced; obviously that time was engraved on his heart. “Then the voltage started to fluctuate violently, so we cut the load and watched the meters. I thought that some idiot of a skipper had hooked the cables—you know the trouble we’ve taken to avoid that happening—so we switched on the searchlights and looked out to sea. There wasn’t a ship in sight; anyway, who would have tried to anchor just outside harbor on a clear, calm night?

  “There was nothing we could do except watch the instruments and keep testing. I’ll show you all the graphs when we get to the office. After four minutes everything went open circuit. We can locate the break exactly, of course —and it’s in the deepest part, right at the grid. It would be there, and not at this end of the system,” he added gloomily, pointing out of the window.

  We were just driving past the solar pond—the equivalent of the boiler in a conventional heat engine. This was an idea that the Russians had borrowed from the Israelis; it was simply a shallow lake, blackened at the bottom, holding a concentrated solution of brine. It acts as a very efficient heat trap, and the sun’s rays bring the liquid up to almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Submerged in it were the “hot” grids of the thermoelectric system, every inch of two fathoms down. Massive cables connected them to my department, 150 degrees colder and 3,000 feet lower, in the undersea canyon that comes to the very entrance of Trinco harbor.

  “I suppose you checked for earthquakes?” I asked, not very hopefully.

  “Of course. There was nothing on the seismograph.”

  “What about whales? I warned you that they might give trouble.”

  More than a year before, when the main conductors were being run out to sea, I’d told the engineers about the drowned sperm whale found entangled in a telegraph cable half a mile down off South America. About a dozen similar cases are known—but ours, it seemed, was not one of them.

  “That was the second thing we thought of,” answered Shapiro. “We got on to the fisheries department, the navy and the air force. No whales anywhere along the coast.”

  It was at that point that I stopped theorizing, because I overheard something that made me a little uncomfortable. Like all Swiss, I’m good at languages, and have picked up a fair amount of Russian. There was no need to be much of a linguist, however, to recognize the word “sabotash.”

  It was spoken by Dimitri Karpukhin, the political advisor on the project. I didn’t like him, nor did the engineers, who sometimes went out of their way to be rude to him. One of the old-style Communists who had never quite escaped from the shadow of Stalin, he was suspicious of everything outside the Soviet Union, and most of the things inside it. Sabotage was just the explanation that would appeal to him.

  There were, of course, a great many people who would not be exactly brokenhearted if the Trinco power project failed. Politically, the prestige of the U. S. S. R. was committed; economically, billions were involved, for if hydro-thermal plants proved a success, they might compete with oil, coal, water power and, especially, nuclear energy.

  Yet I could not really believe in sabotage; after all, the Cold War was over. It was just possible that someone had made a clumsy attempt to grab a sample of the grid, but even this seemed unlikely. I could count on my fingers the number of people in the world who could tackle such a job—and half of them were on my payroll.

  The underwater TV camera arrived that same evening, and, working all through the night, we had cameras, monitors and two kilometers of coaxial cable loaded aboard a launch by morning. As we pulled out of the harbor, I thought I saw a familiar figure standing on the jetty, but it was too far away to be certain and I had other things on my mind. If you must know, I am not a good sailor; I am only really happy underneath the sea.

  We took a careful fix on the Round Island lighthouse and stationed ourselves directly above the grid. The self-propelled camera, looking like a midget bathyscaphe, went over the side; as we watched the monitors, we went with it in spirit.

  The water was extremely clean and extremely empty, but as we neared the bottom, there were a few signs of life. A small shark came and stared at us, then a pulsating blob of jelly went drifting by, followed by a thing like a big spider with hundreds of hairy legs, tangling and twisting together. At last the sloping canyon wall swam into view; we were right on target, for there were the thick cables running down into the depths, just as I had seen them when I made the final check of the installation six months before.

  I turned on the low-powered jets and let the camera drift down the power cables. They seemed in perfect condition, still firmly anchored by the pitons we had driven into the rock. It was not until I came to the grid itself that there was any sign of trouble.

  Have you ever seen the radiator grille of a car after it’s run into a lamppost? Well, one section of the grid looked very much like that. Something had battered it in, as if a gargantuan madman had gone to work on it with a sledge hammer.

  There were gasps of astonishment and ange
r from the people looking over my shoulder. I heard “sabotash” muttered again, and for the first time began to take it seriously. The only other explanation that made sense was a falling boulder, but the slopes of the canyon had been carefully checked against this very possibility.

  Whatever the cause, the damaged grid had to be replaced. That could not be done until my lobster—all 20 tons of it—was flown out from the Spezia dockyard where it was kept between jobs.

  “Well,” said Shapiro, when I had finished my visual inspection and photographed the sorry spectacle on the screen, “how long will it take?”

  I refused to commit myself. The first thing I ever learned in the underwater business is that no job turns out as you expect. Cost and time estimates can never be firm, because it’s not until you’re at least halfway through a contract that you know exactly what you’re up against.

  My private guess was three days. So I said: “If everything goes well, it shouldn’t take more than a week.”

  Shapiro groaned. “Can’t you do it quicker?”

  “I won’t tempt fate by making rash promises. Anyway, that still gives you two weeks before your deadline.”

  He had to be content with that, though he kept nagging at me all the way back into harbor. When we got there, he had something else to think about.

  “Morning, Joe,” I said to the man who was still waiting patiently on the jetty. “I thought I recognized you on the way out. What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “You’d better speak to my boss. Chief Engineer Shapiro —meet Joe Watkins, science correspondent of Time magazine.”

  Lev’s response was not exactly cordial. Normally, there was nothing he liked better than talking to newsmen, who arrived at the rate of about one a week. Now, as the target date approached, they would be flying in from all directions. Including, of course, from Russia; and at the present moment Tass would be just as unwelcome as Time.

  It was amusing to see how Karpukhin took charge of the situation. From that moment, Joe had “permanently attached to him as guide, philosopher and drinking companion a smooth young public-relations type named Sergei Markov. Despite all Joe’s efforts, the two were inseparable. In the middle of the afternoon, weary after a long conference in Shapiro’s office, I caught up with them for a belated lunch at the government resthouse.

  “What’s going on here, Klaus?” Joe asked pathetically. “I smell trouble, but no one will admit anything.”

  I toyed with my curry, trying to separate the bits that were safe from those that would take off the top of my head.

  “You can’t expect me to discuss a client’s affairs,” I answered.

  “You were talkative enough,” Joe reminded me, “when you were doing the survey for the Gibraltar Dam.”

  “Well, yes,” I admitted. “And I appreciate the write-up you gave me. But this time there are trade secrets involved. I’m—ah—making some last-minute adjustments to improve the efficiency of the system.”

  And that, of course, was the truth; for I was indeed hoping to raise the efficiency of the system from its present value of exactly zero.

  “Hmm,” said Joe sarcastically. “Thank you very much.”

  “Anyway,” I said, trying to head him off, “what’s your latest crackbrained theory?”

  For a highly competent science writer, Joe has an odd liking for the bizarre and the improbable. Perhaps it’s a form of escapism; I happen to know that he also writes science fiction pseudonymously, though this is a secret well kept from his employers. He has a sneaking fondness for poltergeists and ESP and flying saucers, but lost continents are his real specialty.

  “I am working on a couple of ideas,” he admitted. “They cropped up when I was doing the research on this story.”

  “Go on,” I said, not daring to look up from the analysis of my curry.

  “The other day I came across a very old map—Ptolemy’s, if you’re interested—of Ceylon. It reminded me of another old map in my collection, and I turned it up. There was the same central mountain, the same arrangement of rivers flowing to the sea. But this was a map of Atlantis.”

  “Oh, no!” I groaned. “Last time we met, you convinced me that Atlantis was the western Mediterranean basin.”

  Joe gave his engaging grin.

  “I could’ve been wrong, couldn’t I? Anyway, I have a much more striking piece of evidence. What’s the old national name for Ceylon—and the modem Singhalese one, for that matter?”

  I thought for a second, then exclaimed: “Why, Lanka, of course. Lanka—Atlantis.” I rolled the names off my tongue.

  “Precisely,” said Joe. “But two clues, however striking, don’t make a full-fledged theory; and that’s as far as I’ve got at the moment.”

  “Too bad,” I said, genuinely disappointed. “And your other project?”

  “This will really make you sit up,” Joe answered smugly. He reached into the battered briefcase he always carried and pulled out a bundle of papers.

  “This happened only one hundred and eighty miles from here and just over a century ago. The source of my information, you’ll note, is about the best there is.”

  He handed me a photostat, and I saw that it was a page of the London Times for July 4, 1874. I started to read without much enthusiasm, for Joe was always producing bits of ancient newspapers, but my apathy did not last long.

  Briefly—I’d like to give the whole thing, but if you want more details your local library can dial you a facsimile in ten seconds—the clipping described how the 150-ton schooner Pearl left Ceylon in early May, 1874, and then fell becalmed in the Bay of Bengal. On May 10, just before nightfall, an incredibly enormous squid surfaced half a mile from the schooner, whose captain foolishly opened fire on it with his rifle.

  The squid swam straight for the Pearl, grabbed the masts with its gigantic arms and pulled the vessel over on her side. She sank within seconds, taking two of her crew with her; the others were rescued only because the steamer Strathowen was in sight and had witnessed the incident herself.

  “Well,” said Joe, when I’d read through it for the second time, “what do you think?”

  “I don’t believe in sea monsters.”

  “The London Times,” Joe answered, “is not prone to sensational journalism. And giant squids exist, though the biggest we know about are feeble, flabby beasts and don’t weigh more than a ton, even when they have arms forty feet long.”

  “So? An animal like that couldn’t capsize a one-hundred-and-fifty-ton schooner.”

  “True—but there’s a lot of evidence that the so-called giant squid is merely a large squid. There may be decapods in the sea that really are giants. Why, only a year after the Pearl incident, a sperm whale off the coast of Brazil was seen struggling inside gigantic coils which finally dragged it down into the sea; you’ll find the incident described in the Illustrated London News for November 20, 1875. And then, of course, there’s that chapter in Moby Dick . . .”

  “What chapter?”

  “Why, the one called ‘Squid.’ We know that Melville was a very careful observer, but here he really lets himself go. He describes a calm day when a great white mass rose out of the sea ‘like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills.’ And this happened here in the Indian Ocean, perhaps a thousand miles south of the Pearl incident. Weather conditions were identical, please note.

  “What the men of the Pequod saw floating on the water —I know this passage by heart, I’ve studied it so carefully —was ‘a vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream color . . . innumerable long arms radiating from its center, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.’”

  “Just a minute,” said Sergei, who had been listening to all this with rapt attention. “What’s a furlong?”

  Joe looked slightly embarrassed.

  “Actually, it’s an eighth of a mile—660 feet.” He raised his hand to stop our incredulous laughter. “Oh, I’m sure Melvi
lle didn’t mean that literally. But here was a man who met sperm whales every day, groping for a unit of length to describe something a lot bigger. So he automatically jumped from fathoms to furlongs. That’s my theory, anyway.”

  I pushed away the remaining untouchable portions of my curry.

  “If you think you’ve scared me out of my job,” I said, “you’ve failed miserably. But I promise you this—when I do meet a giant squid, I’ll snip off a tentacle and bring it back as a souvenir.”

  Twenty-four hours later I was out there in the lobster, sinking slowly down toward the damaged grid. There was no way in which the operation could be kept secret, and Joe was an interested spectator from a nearby launch. That was the Russians’ problem, not mine; I had suggested to Shapiro that they take him into their confidence, but this, of course, was vetoed by Karpukhin’s suspicious mind. One could almost see him thinking: “Just why should an American reporter turn up at this moment?”—and ignoring the obvious answer that Trincomalee was now big news.