Colonial Survey

by Murray Leinster

  Bordman spread out his hands.

  “I’m wondering,” he observed, “what the really serious problem is. There’s more than sliding soil the matter! Else you would—I’m sure Lieutenant Barnes has thought of this—else you would let the civilian population into Headquarters to sit on its rump and wait for better times.”

  Sandringham glanced at young Barnes, who flushed hotly at being noticed.

  “I’m sure you have good reasons, sir,” he said, embarrassed.

  “I have several,” said the Sector Chief drily. “For one thing, so long as we refuse to let them in, they’re reassured. They can’t imagine we’d let them drown. But if we invited them in they’d panic and fight to get in first. There’d be a full-scale slaughter right there! They’d be sure disaster was only minutes off. Which it would be!”

  He paused and glanced from one to the other of the senior officers.

  “When I sent for you,” he said, “I meant you, Bordman, to take care of the possible sliding. I meant for Werner, here, to do the public-relations job of scaring the civilians just enough to make them let it be done. It’s not so simple, now!”

  He drew a deep breath.

  “It’s pure chance that this is a Sector Headquarters. Or else it’s Providence. We’ll find that out later! But ten days ago it was discovered that an instrument had gone wrong over in the ship-fuel storage area. It didn’t register when a tank leaked. And a tank did leak. You know ship fuel is harmless when it’s refrigerated. You know what it’s like when it’s not. Dissolved in soil-moisture, it’s not only catalyzed to explosive condition, but it’s a hell of a corrosive, and it’s eaten holes in some other tanks—and can you imagine trying to do anything about that?”

  Bordman felt a sensation of incredulous shock. Werner wrung his hands.

  “If I could only find the man who made that faulty tank!” he said thickly. “He’s killed all of us! All! Unless we get to solid ground in the Arctic!”

  The Sector Chief said:

  “That’s why I won’t let them in, Bordman. Our storage tanks go down to bedrock. The leaked fuel—warmed up, now—is seeping along bedrock and eating at other tanks, besides being absorbed generally by the soil and dissolving in the groundwater. We’ve pulled all personnel out of all the area it could have seeped down to.”

  Bordman felt slightly cold at the back of his neck.

  “I suspect,” he said, “that they came out on tip-toe, holding their breaths, and they were careful not to drop anything or scrape their chairs when they got up to leave. I would have! Anything could set it off. But it is bound to go anyhow! Of course! Now I see why we couldn’t make a rocket-landing!”

  The chilly feeling seemed to spread as he realized more fully. When ship-fuel is refrigerated during its manufacture, it is about as safe a substance as can be imagined, so long as it is kept refrigerated. It is an energy-chemical compound, of atoms bound together with forced-violence linkages. But enormous amounts of energy are required to force valences upon reluctant atoms. When ship-fuel warms up, or is catalyzed, it goes on one step beyond the process of its manufacture. It goes on to the modification the refrigeration prevented. It changes its molecular configuration. What was stable because it was cold becomes something which is hysterically unstable because of its structure. The touch of a feather can detonate it. A shout can set it off. It is indeed, burned only molecule by molecule in a ship’s engines, being catalyzed to the unstable state while cold at the very spot where it is to detonate. And since the energy yielded by detonation is that of the forced bonds, the energy-content of ship-fuel is much greater than a merely chemical compound can contain. Ship-fuel contains a measurable fraction of the power of atomic explosive. But it is much more practical for use on board ship.

  The point now was, of course, that—leaked into the ground and warmed—practically any vibratory motion would detonate the fuel. Even dissolved, it can detonate because it is not a chemical but an energy-release action.

  “A good, drumming, heavy rain,” said Sandringham, “which falls on this end of the island, will undoubtedly set off some hundreds of tons of leaked ship-fuel. And that ought to scatter and catalyze and detonate the rest. The explosion should be equivalent to at least a megaton fusion bomb.” He paused, and added with irony. “Pretty situation, isn’t it? If the civilians hadn’t irrigated, we could evacuate Headquarters and let it blow, as it will anyhow. If the fuel hadn’t leaked, we could let in the civilians until the island’s soil decides what it’s going to do. Either would be a nasty situation, but the combination…”

  Werner said shrilly:

  “Evacuation to the Arctic is the only possible answer! Some people can be saved! Some! I’ll take a boat and equipment and go on ahead and get some sort of refuge ready—”

  There was dead silence. The brown dog who had followed Bordman from the outer terrace, now yawned loudly. Bordman reached over and absent-mindedly scratched his ears. Young Barnes swallowed.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” he said. “What’s the weather forecast?”

  “Continued fair,” said Sandringham pleasantly. “That’s why I had Bordman and Werner come down. Three heads are better than one. I’ve gambled their lives on their brains.”

  Bordman continued to scratch the brown dog’s ears. Werner licked his lips. Young Barnes looked from one to another of them. Then he looked back at the Sector Chief.

  “Sir,” he said. “I—I think the odds are pretty good. Mr. Bordman, sir—he’ll manage!”

  Then he flushed hotly at his own presumption in saying something consoling to a Sector Chief. It was comparable to telling him how to top off his vacuum-suit tanks.

  But the Sector Chief nodded in grave approval and turned to Bordman to hear what he had to say.

  The leeward side of the island sloped gently into the water. From a boat offshore—say, a couple of miles out—the shoreline looked low and flat and peaceful. There were houses in view, and boats afloat. But they were much smaller than those that had been towing a twenty-mile-long oil-slick out to sea. These boats did not ply back and forth. Most of them seemed anchored. On some of them there was activity. Men went overboard, without splashing, and brought things up from the ocean bottom and dumped them inside the hulls. At long intervals men emerged from underwater and sat on the sides of the boats and smoked with an effect of leisure.

  The sun shone, and the land was green, and a seeming of vast tranquility hung over the whole seascape. But the small Survey-personnel recreation-boat moved in toward the shore, and the look of things changed. At a mile, a mass of green that had seemed to be trees growing down to the water’s edge became a thicket of tumbled trunks and overset branches where a tree-thicket had collapsed. At half a mile the water was opaque. There were things floating in it: the roof of a house, the leaves of an ornamental shrub, with nearby its roots showing at the surface, washed clean. A child’s toy bobbed past the boat. It looked horribly pathetic. There were the exotic planes and angles of three wooden steps, floating in the ripples of the great ocean.

  “Ignoring the imminent explosion of the fuel-store,” said Bordman, “we need to find out something about what has to be done to the soil to stop its creeping. I hope you remembered, Lieutenant, to ask a great many useless questions.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Barnes. “I tried to. I asked everything I could think of.”

  “Those boats yonder?”

  Bordman indicated a boat from which something like a wire basket splashed into the water as he gestured.

  “A garden-boat, sir,” said Barnes. “On this side of the island the sea-bottom slopes so gradually that there are sea-gardens on the bottom. Shellfish from Earth do not thrive, sir, but there are edible sea-plants. The gardeners cultivate them as on land.”

  Bordman reached overside and carefully took his twentieth sample of the sea-water. He squinted, and estimated the distance to shore.

  “I shall try to imagine someone wearing a diving-mask and using a hoe,” he said drily. “Wha
t’s the depth here?”

  “We’re half a mile out, sir,” said Barnes. “It should be about sixty feet. The bottom seems to have about a three per cent grade, sir. That’s the angle of repose of the mud. There’s no sand to make a steeper slope possible.”

  “Three per cent’s not bad!”

  Bordman looked pleased. He picked up one of his earlier samples and tilted it, checking the angle at which the sediment came to rest. The bottom mud, here, was essentially the same as the soil of the land. But the soil of the land was definitely colloid. In sea-water, obviously, it sank because of the salinity which made suspension difficult.

  “You see the point, eh?” he asked. When Barnes shook his head, Bordman explained, “Probably for my sins I’ve had a good deal to do with swamp-planets. The mud of a salt-swamp is quite different from a fresh-water swamp. The essential trouble with the people ashore is that by their irrigation they’ve contrived an island-wide swamp which happens to be upside down, the swamp at the bottom. So the question is, can it acquire the properties of a salt-swamp instead of a fresh-water swamp without killing all the vegetation on the surface? That’s why I’m after these samples. As we go inshore the water should be fresher, on a shallowing shore like this with drainage in this direction.”

  He gestured to the Survey private at the stern of the boat.

  “Closer in, please.”

  Barnes said:

  “Sir, motorboats are forbidden inshore. The vibrations.”

  Bordman shrugged.

  “We will obey the rule. I’ve probably samples enough. How far out do the mudflats run, at the surface?”

  “About two hundred yards at the surface, sir. The mud’s about the consistency of thick cream. You can see where the ripples stop, sir.”

  Bordman stared. He turned his eyes away.

  “Er—sir,” said Barnes unhappily. “May I ask—?”

  Bordman said drily:

  “You may. But the answer’s pure theory. This information will do no good at all unless all the rest of the problem we face is solved. However, solving the rest of the problem will do no good if this part remains unsolved. You see?”

  “Yes, sir. But the other parts seem more urgent.”

  Bordman shrugged.

  There was a shout from a nearby boat. Men were pointing ashore. Bordman jerked his eyes to the shoreline.

  A section of seemingly solid ground moved slowly toward the water. Its forefront seemed to disintegrate, and a slow-moving swell moved out over the rippleless border of the sea, where mudbanks like thick cream reached the surface.

  The moving mass was a good half-mile in width. Its outer edge dissolved in the sea, and the top tilted, and green vegetation leaned downwind and subsided into the water. It was remarkably like the way an ingot of non-ferrous metal slides into the pool made by its own melting.

  But the aftermath was somehow horrifying. When the tumbled soil was all dissolved and the grass undulated like a floating meadow on the water, there remained a jagged shallow gap in the land-bank. There were irregularities: vertical striations and unevennesses in the exposed, broken soil.

  Bordman snatched up glasses and put them to his eyes. The shore seemed to leap toward him. He saw the harsh outlines of the temporary cliff go soft. The bottom ceased to look like soil. It glistened. It moved outward in masses which grew rounder as they swelled. They flowed after the now-vanished fallen stuff, into the water. The top-soil was suddenly undercut. The wetter material under it flowed away, leaving a ledge which bore carefully tended flowering shrubs—Bordman could see specks of color which were their blossoms—and a brightly-colored, small, trim house in which some family had lived.

  The flow-away of the deeper soil made a greater, more cavernous hollow beneath the surface. It began to collapse. The house teetered, fell, smashed. More soil dropped down, and more, and more.

  Presently there was a depression, a sort of valley leading inland away from the sea, in what had been a rampart of green at the water’s edge. It was still green, but through the glasses Bordman could see that trees had fallen, and a white-painted fence was splintered. And there was still movement.

  The movement slowed and slowed, but it was not possible to say when it stopped. In reality, it did not stop. The island’s soil was still flowing into the ocean.

  Barnes drew a deep breath.

  “I thought that was it, sir,” he said shakily. “I mean—that the whole island would start sliding.”

  “The ground’s a bit more water-soaked down here,” Bordman said. “Inland the bottom-soil’s not nearly as fluid as here. But I’d hate to have a really heavy rainfall right now!”

  Barnes’ mind jerked back to the Sector Chief’s office.

  “The drumming would set off the ship-fuel?”

  “Among other things,” said Bordman. “Yes.” Then he said abruptly: “How good are you at precision measurements? I’ve messed around on swamp-planets. I know a bit too much about what I ought to find, which is not good for accuracy. Can you take these bottles and measure the rate of sedimentation and plot it against salinity?”

  “Y-yes, sir. I’ll try.”

  “If we had soil-coagulants enough,” said Bordman, “we could handle that damned upside-down swamp the civilians have so carefully made here. But we haven’t got it! The freshened sea-water they’ve been irrigating with is practically mineral-free! I want to know how much mineral content in the water would keep the swamp-mud from acting like wet soap. It’s entirely possible that we’d have to make the soil too salty to grow anything, in order to anchor it. But I want to know!”

  Barnes said uncomfortably:

  “Wouldn’t you—wouldn’t you have to put the minerals in irrigation-water to get them down to the swamp?”

  Bordman grinned, surprisingly.

  “You’ve got promise, Barnes! Yes. I would. And it would increase the rate of slide before it stopped it. Which could be another problem. But it was good work to think of it! When we get back to Headquarters, you commandeer a laboratory and make those measurements for me.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Barnes.

  “We’ll start back now,” said Bordman.

  The recreation-boat obediently turned. It went out to sea until the water flowing past its hull was crystal-clear. And Bordman seemed to relax. On the way they passed more small boats. Many of them were gardeners’ boats, from which men dived with diving-masks to tend or harvest the cultivated garden-patches not too far down. But many were pleasure-boats, from double-hulled sailing craft intended purely for sport, to sturdy, though small, cabin cruisers which could venture far out to sea, or even around to the windward of the island for sport-fishing. All the pleasure-craft were crowded—there were usually some children—and it was noticeable that on each one there were always some faces turned toward the shore.

  “That,” said Bordman, “makes for emotional thinking. These people know their danger. So they’ve packed their children and their wives into these little cockle-shells to try to save them. They’re waiting offshore here to find out if they’re doomed regardless. I wouldn’t say—” he nodded toward a delicately designed twin-hull sailer with more children than adults aboard—“I wouldn’t call that a good substitute for an Ark!”

  Young Barnes fidgeted. The boat turned again and went parallel to the shore toward where Headquarters land came down to the sea. The ground was firmer there. There had been no irrigation. Lateral seepage had done some damage at the edge of the reserve, but the major part of the shoreline was unbroken, unchanged solid ground, looming above the beach. There was, of course, no sand at the edge of the water. There had been no weathering of rock to produce it. When this island was upraised, its coating of hardened ooze protected the stone, the lee-side waves merely lapped upon bare, curdled rock. The wharf for pleasure-boats went out on metal pilings into deep water.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said young Barnes, “but—if the fuel blows, it’ll be pretty bad, won’t it?”

  “That’s the unders
tatement of the century,” Bordman commented. “Yes. It will. Why?”

  “You’ve something in mind to try to save the rest of the island. Nobody else seems to know what to do. If—if I may say so, sir, your safety is pretty important. And you could do your work on the cliffs, and—if I could stay at Headquarters and—”

  He stopped, appalled at his own presumption in suggesting that he could substitute for a Senior Officer even as a message-boy, and even for his convenience or safety. He began to stammer:

  “I m-mean, sir, n-not that I’m capable of it—”

  “Stop stammering,” grunted Bordman. “There aren’t two separate problems. There’s one which is the compound of the two. I’m staying at Headquarters to try something on the ship-fuel side, and Werner will specialize on the rest of the island since he hasn’t come up with anything but shifting people to the ice-pack. And the situation isn’t hopeless! If there’s an earthquake or a storm, of course, we’ll be wiped out. But short of one of those calamities, we can save part of the island. I don’t know how much, but some. You make those measurements. If you’re doubtful, get a Headquarters man to duplicate them. Then give me both sets.”

  “Y-yes, sir,” said young Barnes.

  “And,” said Bordman, “never try to push your ranking officer into a safe place, even if you’re willing to take his risk! Would you like it if a man under you tried to put you in a safe place while he took the chance that was yours?”

  “N-no, sir!” admitted the very junior lieutenant. “But—”

  “Make those measurements!” snapped Bordman.

  The boat came into the dock. Bordman got out and went to Sandringham’s office.

  Sandringham was in the act of listening to somebody in the phone-screen, who apparently was on the thin edge of hysteria. The brown dog was sprawled asleep on the rug.