New Writings in SF 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  The visiphone caught him hurriedly from a quick survey of the mounting load demand. It was Sanchez, from Sea-lock Four.

  “Myself and four, ready to go out. We should be at the first inlet in ten minutes. Check?”

  “Right. Reverse flow in progress, should help. Have you contacted Kingsley?”

  “Yes. He is here and will stand-by the telephone.”

  “Fine. Luis, take care. Those inlets are thirty feet apart and the stoppage was simultaneous, so it could be something big.”

  Sanchez grinned as the connection went and Sentry sent a call to his opposite number. “Georgi! Keep the circulators running in reverse. There’s a scuba team just leaving, should be there by 0915.”

  “Good! Peter, I was thinking. It would help, perhaps, if I put on a helmet and went down into the pipe from inside ? Through the manhole?”

  “Not on your own, you don’t,” Sentry said, and Solkov chuckled.

  “That is all taken care of. Charlie Snow just happened to call in, and he will stand-by while I go down the pipe. All right?”

  “Fair enough. You know what to do.” Solkov chuckled again, went away and Snow’s grinning face appeared. Sentry had already reasoned out the chain. Moira Snow was in Biology along with Belle. She must have rung Charley and he had “just happened to call in” to see what was going on.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded. “Can’t you sleep?”

  Snow ignored the thrust. “What d’you reckon this is, Peter?” he asked. “There’s a back-pressure on those two circulators. I’ve never seen that before. Usually anything gets stuck on the outside screens, it washes away again as soon as the flow reverses.”

  “No idea,” Sentry shrugged. “We’ll know, soon. You’d better switch your visiphone link to the circulator chamber, so you can keep an eye on that manhole when Georgi goes down. Let’s not take any chances.”

  That was Sentry’s dominating urge, now. He could visualize the scuba-men paddling cautiously around the squat outside bulk of the dome and knew this was nothing to them. In small groups, they went out daily to study their fish farms, collect weed samples, take soundings of currents, mud-cores and plankton densities. It was a strange and weirdly wonderful world out there, but they were used to it and would take care. He was far more concerned with Solkov, in his pressure-helmet and with a four-foot chrome-steel lance, as he wriggled and squirmed along the inlet-pipe to the screens. That pipe was eight feet in diameter, but it could seem like a constricting trap to a man confronted with danger. He caught himself mentally checking the items of equipment, life-line, headlamp, lance, helmet—and shook his head in irritation. This could be the way Kingsley had begun to crack, by getting too involved with another man’s hazard. It was the devil to give orders and be compelled to stand-by and wait, unable to do anything effective.

  It must be the same with research, he mused. The biologist just had to assume that the biochemist knew what he was doing with his part. The physiologists had to assume that the psychologists and sociologists were on the ball. Diet and Culinary had to take for granted the chemical analyses supplied them. There was a chain there, he thought. The marine biologists, familiarly called “the farmers”, went out and caught it or found it, the chemists analysed it, the horticulture group tried to grow it in synthetic soil or breed it in tanks, the physiologists examined it for edibility or nutritive fractions, the dieticians tried to cook it or prepare it in some way—everybody dependent on everybody else. And all the data so laboriously garnered went in a steady stream into the greedy maw of the computer storage.

  The visiphone buzzer jerked him out of reverie. He made a reflex inspection of his control-board as he pressed the “accept” button. This time the face was an utterly unexpected one.

  “Emmy!” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  Emmeline Addy was Ghanaian, as black as polished jet, and easily the loveliest girl Sentry had ever seen. She gave him a shy but dazzling smile.

  “I just wanted to know how much longer the load restriction was going to last, Peter. We would like to use the big oven as soon as we can.”

  He glanced at the clock and saw 0933. “I’m sorry, Emmy. It’s one of those things. Trouble outside. No telling when we’ll be clear. Why ?”

  “It’s not urgent. We’ve a new flour substitute we want to try out as a cake-mix. It can wait.”

  “Not a minute longer than it has too,” he promised. “Save a sample for me, won’t you?” She smiled again and switched off. Her lovely image had barely left the screen when the buzzer sounded again. It was Kingsley, wide-eyed and shouting.

  “It’s a squid, a giant squid! It’s caught on the screens!”

  “That’s from Sanchez ? Are they all right out there ?”

  “It’s a hell of a mess! They can’t get near the thing, can’t see—the sea’s thick with ink. It’s enormous!”

  “Calm down,” Sentry snapped. “You won’t achieve anything by getting hysterical. You still in touch with them?”

  “Yes. Of course!”

  “All right. Call them back in, right away. Warn Luis to leave the thing alone and come back. Leave it there. We’ll have to deal with this from the inside!”

  “But how, man ? How ?”

  “Let me handle that end of it. You get the scuba-gang inside, out of danger.” He cut off the wild-eyed Director and put his hand on a button that had not been used in many weeks. He pressed three times, slow and strongly, then took a moment to clear his thoughts. That alarm would bring all the rest of the power engineers on the run, regardless of what they were doing. Snow was on picture from the East plant within seconds.

  “What’s up, Peter?”

  “Get Georgi up out of that pipe, fast. There’s a giant squid outside, stuck on the screens. Move!” Snow vanished, leaving the screen open. Two minutes later Alex McKay, Percy West and Mike Ryan all together came jostling to the instrument. Over his shoulder Sentry heard heavy steps, and turned to see Eben Addy and Hans Goring, both breathless. He put them all in the picture in brief words.

  “Those screens are thirty feet apart, so you can guess how big the creature must be. It’s out of the question for any bunch to tackle it on its own terms. It’s up to us. I’ve got as far as thinking we ought to give it a jolt, clamp a couple of earthing cables on those screens and shove a few thousand volts through it. Anybody want to take it from there?”

  “It’s a four-man job just fixing those cables,” McKay offered. “One man down the pipe and one standing by. Let’s get that bit done right away.”

  “Right! You’ve two men already on Number One inlet. You and Mike can handle Number Two.” The screen now showed Percy West’s thoughtful stare.

  “We can’t deliver much of a jolt, Peter,” he murmured. “Not without stepping it up somehow. I assume we want to kill it, not just make it mad?”

  “I was thinking about that,” Eben Addy rumbled, leaning over to get in the scope of the picture. “How about those heavy-duty condensers we used for that ionization job? You still have ‘em over there ?”

  “Stacked in the motor room. About a dozen. We could hook ‘em up in cascade, easily. Peter?”

  “That sounds all right, but those damn things are heavy. You’ll need help, Percy.”

  “Me!” Hans Goring grunted. “I will go, right away.”

  “Me too!” Addy grinned. “Betcha I can outrun you!” As they departed, Sentry turned back to Percy West.

  “You know what to do. Hook up your cables direct to the main bus-line. Then those condensers, one, two, four and eight, if you have enough. Run up the other two generators ready. I’ll pull out all the loading here except lights and essentials. Then when we’re ready we’ll throw all six generators into those lines——”

  “We might just burn out all our plant, Peter. You thought of that?”

  “It’s a chance we have to take. The overload trips ought to save us, though. And there’s this. Unless we cook that squid, once and for all, it is just big
enough to tear out those screens and come wandering inside looking for pickings. This is the only way.”

  West went away, Sentry broke the call, moved a switch that changed the red “caution” to “emergency” and then proceeded, swiftly but systematically, to withdraw all heavy power supplies from each section at a time, watching carefully to see that the automatic output controls took care of the generator settings. Power-East became gradually quieter and quieter. As he worked he wondered whether Percy West had guessed right, or would the surge trips act in time to save them.

  * * * *

  Four

  In less than half an hour not one watt more than was absolutely necessary was leaving the power-plant. The clock stood at 1017. Sentry took a moment to seize paper and pencil and work out how long it would take the cascade of heavy condensers to build up to overload and flash over. He made it eighteen seconds. He had a vivid image in his mind of the furious activity that would be going on in the other plant. He was poised and ready for the call when it came. Eben Addy’s sweat-gleaming face grinned at him,

  “We need a couple more minutes,” he said, “to clamp down those manhole covers extra good.”

  “Why?”

  “Man, have you thought what’s going to happen when we smash out all that power? We’re going to vaporize several tons of ambient water, crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It will be like a bomb!”

  ‘Two bombs!” Sentry snapped. “You’re quite right, Eb. Make sure you all keep well clear.”

  “That’s all done. Another thing, Peter. If this comes off, d’you reckon it might be a good notion to hook up juice lines to those screens for permanent? That way we could give them a jolt regular, say every night watch. Then we’d have no more trouble with weeds or anything.”

  “That’s a good idea. We’ll work it out later. Batteries, maybe.”

  He saw Addy tilt his head aside to some sound off screen then nod and grin. “That’s it, Peter. Ready when you are.”

  “Right. I’ll switch it from here. Starting now.” On the relay board he twisted controls, two at a time, that sent East’s two generators humming up to full output. He stepped smartly from there to his own panel and did it again, two at a time, then again. There was only the muted whine of the fuel pumps to indicate that anything was happening. The unit output gauges swung and climbed in smooth silence as a hundred and fifty megawatts of power hurled itself into a condenser, defeated its attempts to hold, overflowed into two more, flooded those and burst on into four more. Sentry watched the seconds sweep past. He could imagine the cracking pressures and the seething stresses on these condensers as they struggled frantically to contain the torrent of energy. Fifteen—sixteen—seventeen —he counted in his mind. Then it all went, lights, power rotors and motors, fans, indicators, everything died for one desolate second.

  In the dark he moved urgently to twist back the controls, and as he did so the sounds of life came back with shrill whines and flickering lights. He let out a long breath, set the last pair of controls to minimum and went back to the screen. If there had been any discernible shock, he had missed it in the cacophony of restarting machinery. As he waited for a face to show in the screen he checked and double-checked his panel, making sure that everything was back to normal. It was five minutes before Percy West appeared again, panting but jubilant.

  “That was a hell of a thing, Peter! The shock-wave rattled us here like beans in a can, and we have eight, maybe nine, heavy-duty condensers that will never be any good any more. But those inlets are free and clear, we’ve just tried them. Inflow normal.”

  “Thank the Lord for that. Next thing is, did we kill it, or did we just send it away mad? But that’s not our problem. Sanchez and his boys can take care of it.”

  “Better him than me,” West grinned. “We’re all back to normal here. I’m off, with the rest, and Georgi can take care of it. All right your end?”

  “Everything’s fine. Thanks for the help. Pass it on to the others, would you ?”

  The time was 1042. By 1100 hours all power supplies were back to the standard normal. By noon the incident was a cautionary memory, just more data for the computer. Sentry went up and out on to the narrow balcony that overhung the entrance to take a short breather. From here he could look up and see the blue-grey wall of the dome close to, could let his eye follow the slow upward and outward sweep of the curve as it went away to form the “sky”. Radiant panels studded it at regular intervals, giving off the bright shadowless glare of “noon”. Before him the whole colony lay arranged in neat order, a world in microcosm, almost. The emergency of the morning had been a bad one, and only an inscrutable fate knew how many more lay ahead, but he thought it was safe to say that the little colony was well on the way to establishing itself as a practical possibility.

  Not quite a copy of the outer world, he thought, as he idled. They had no traffic problems, no economic tangles, no politics. And no dirt, either. That had been a completely unforeseen bonus. This atmosphere was precisely controlled at an equable temperature and balanced humidity, and it was clean. Like everyone else, he wore thin cotton coveralls at work to protect him from hard edges and uncomfortable machinery. But the material was treated to keep its shape and repel soiling, so the most he or anyone else ever had to do was rinse and hang out to dry. And when they were not actually at work they wore as much, or as little, as fancy dictated. In this ideal climate it didn’t matter much.

  Over to his right he could see the Biology laboratories, and beyond them Biochemistry, the buildings tucked in alongside the dome wall. To his left was a general-purpose machine-shop, then Diet and Culinary and then Sea-lock Two. Hardly in keeping with the world outside, he had to admit. But virtually self-contained and independent, and growing more so every day. They synthesized their own fuel. They were able to extract enough metal from the sea water to meet any reasonable future demand. They had the food and drink question well in hand. He thought of Emmy Addy’s new cake-mix, and grinned. She was a whiz at her job. They all were, in “Cook and Eat”, as they had come to call it, and had done wonders with unpromising materials. He would have taken bets that some of them were, even now, contemplating some way of making edibles out of the corpse of the squid, if it was in fact killed.

  Not just survival research, he mused. They were actually making useful discoveries. Belle had told him that in her department, in Biology, they were hot on the trail of an entirely new type of drug-chemicals that they were tentatively calling “super-proteins”, because they seemed to act in a way that reinforced natural functions. Thinking of Belle, it seemed utterly appropriate that he should cast his eye to the right and see her come striding along the outer ring-path to call on him. She had a plasti-bag tucked under one arm, and he knew what it was. She was bringing lunch. He had protested about it several times, insisting that he could quite easily carry a packed meal, or even whip something up for himself on the hot-ring they used for coffee-making. But she had insisted.

  “You’re on a twelve-hour shift, and liable to get caught up in all sorts of duties. I can just imagine you forgetting all about your meal. As I’m only ten minutes’ walk away, why shouldn’t I bring my lunch over and eat it with you?”

  He watched her now, greedily savouring the precious moment, wondering anew at his own good fortune. Belle Wrigley, brilliant biologist, sailing through all the gruelling tests to qualify for this project, only to be picked out by a mindless computer as the person best qualified to be compatible with Peter Sentry. He had thought it a necessary evil at the time, something to be endured because there was no cure. They’d been candid and resigned, right from the start, willing to be good friends and rub along. But now—she glanced up and saw him, waved, and he waved back and ran in and down the corkscrew staircase to meet her in the motor-room.

  “I’m a little overwhelmed,” she said, as they went arm in arm up to control, “to be the wife of a hero.”

  “Who, me ? What did I do ?”

  “If you can keep y
our head while all around are losing theirs------” she quoted, and he snorted amusedly.

  “Ridiculous. I helped build this place. I know a bit more about it than most, that’s all. Any of the others would have done the same in my place. Perhaps not quite so quickly, that’s all.”

  “I was thinking of Dr. Kingsley. I’ve just left him. He’s a mass of nerves.”

  “That’s understandable, Tinkle. After all, he has to carry the entire load for everybody. Incidentally, what’s he doing in Biology? Something big coming up?”

  Belle got that look on her face that he had learned to read as something she would rather not discuss. Before he could think of something to change the topic there came a cheery hail from below.