The Planet Explorer Page 17

  The truck went on. Presently the extraordinary flatness of the landscape became apparent. It was possible to see a seemingly illimitable distance. The ocean forty miles away showed as a thread of blue beneath the horizon. The island was an almost perfectly plane tilted surface. There was no hill visible anywhere, nor any valleys save the extremely minor gullies worn by rain. Even they had been filled in, dammed, and tied in to irrigation systems.

  There was a place where there was a row of trees along such a water-course. Half the row had fallen, and a part of the rest was tilted. The remainder stood upright and firm. All the vegetation was perfectly familiar. Most colonies have some vegetation, at least, directly descended from the mother planet Earth. But this island on Canna III had been above-water perhaps no more than three or four thousand years. There had been no time for local vegetation to develop. When the Survey took it over, there was nothing but tidal seaweed, only one variety of which had been able to extend itself in a web-like fashion over the soil above water. Terrestrial plants had wiped it out, and everything was green and human-introduced.

  But there was something wrong with the ground. At this place the top of the soil bulged, and tall corn-plants grew extravagantly in different directions. At another, there was a narrow, lipless gash in the ground's surface. An irrigation-ditch poured water into it. It was not filled.

  Barnes said:

  “Excuse me, sir, but how the devil did this happen?"

  “There's been irrigation,” said Bordman patiently. “The soil here was all ocean-bottom, once—it used to be what is called globigerinous ooze. There's no sand, and no stones. There's only bedrock and formerly abyssal mud. And some of it underneath is no longer former. It's globigerinous ooze again."

  He waved his hand at the landscape. It had been remarkably tidy, once. Every square foot of ground had been cultivated. The highways were limited width, and the houses were neat and trim. It was, perhaps, the most completely civilized landscape in the galaxy. Bordman added:

  “You said the stuff felt like soap. In a way it's acting like soap. It lies on slightly slanting, effectively smooth rock, like a soap-cake on a sheet of metal that's tilted a bit. And that's the trouble. So long as a cake of soap is dry on the bottom it doesn't move. Even if you pour water on top, like rain, the top will wet, and the water will flow off, but the bottom won't wet until all the soap is dissolved away. While that was the process here, everything was all right. But they've been irrigating."

  They passed a row of neat cottages facing the road. One had collapsed completely. The other looked absolutely normal. The bolster-truck went on.

  Bordman said, frowning:

  “They wanted the water to go into the soil, so they arranged it. A little of that did no harm. Plants growing dried it out again. One tree evaporates thousands of gallons a day in a good trade-wind. There were some landslides in the early days, especially when storm-swells pounded the cliffs, but on the whole the ground was more firmly anchored when first cultivated than it had been before the colonists came."

  “But irrigation? The sea's not fresh, is it?"

  “Water-freshening plants,” said Bordman dryly. “Ion-exchange systems. They installed them and had all the fresh water they could wish for. And they wished for a lot. They deep-ploughed, so the water would sink in. They dammed the water-courses. What they did amounted to something like boring holes in that cake of soap I used for an illustration just now. Water went right down to the bottom. What would happen then?"

  Barnes said:

  “Why, the bottom would get wet—and the soap would slide! As if it were greased!"

  “Not greased,” corrected Bordman. “Soaped. Soap is viscous. That's different, and a lucky difference, too. But the least vibration would encourage movement. And it does. So the population is now walking on eggs. Worse, it's walking on the equivalent of a cake of soap which is getting wetter and wetter on the bottom. It's already sliding as a viscous substance does, reluctantly. But in spite of the oil-slick they're trying to keep in place upwind there's still some battering from the sea. There are still some vibrations in the bedrock. And so there's a slow, gentle, gradual sliding."

  “And they figure,” said Barnes, “that locking onto a ship with the landing-grid might be like an earthquake.” He stopped. “An earthquake, now—"

  “Not much vulcanism on this planet,” Bordman told him. “But of course there are tectonic quakes occasionally. They made this island."

  Barnes said uneasily:

  “I don't think, sir, that I'd sleep well if I lived here."

  “You are living here for the moment. But at your age I think you'll sleep."

  The bolster-truck turned, following he highway. The road was very even, and the motion of the truck along it was infinitely smooth. Its lack of vibration explained why it was permitted to move when all other vehicles were stopped. But Bordman reflected uneasily that this did not account for the orders of the Sector Chief forbidding the rocket-landing of a ship's boat. It was true enough that the living-surface of the island rested upon slanting stone, and that if the bottom were wet enough it could slide off into the sea. It already had moved. At least one place was moving at four inches per hour. But that was viscous flow. It would be enhanced by vibration, and assuredly the hammering of seas upon the windward cliff should be lessened by any possible means.

  But it did not mean that the sound of a rocket-landing would be disastrous, nor the straining of a landing-grid as it stopped a spaceship in orbit and drew it to ground should produce a landslide. There was something else, though the situation for the island's civilian population was already serious enough. If any really massive movement of the ground did begin, viscous or any other, if any considerable part of the island's surface did begin to move, all of it would go. And the population would go with it. If there were survivors, they would be numbered in dozens.

  The tall tamped-earth wall of the Headquarters reserve area loomed ahead. Sector Headquarters had been established here when there were no other inhabitants. Seeds had been broadcast and trees planted while the Survey buildings were under construction. Headquarters, in fact, had been built upon an uninhabited planet. But colonists followed in the wake of Survey personnel. Wives and children, and then storekeepers and agriculturists, and presently civilian technicians and ultimately even politicians arrived as the non-Service population grew. Now Sector Headquarters was resented because it occupied one-fourth of the island. It kept too much of the planet's useful surface out of civilian use. And the island was desperately overcrowded.

  But it seemed also to be doomed.

  As the bolster-truck moved silently toward Headquarters, a hundred-yard section of the wall collapsed. There was an upsurging of dust, and a rumbling of falling, hardened dirt. The truck's driver turned white. A civilian beside the road faced the wall and wrung his hands, and stood waiting to feel the ground under his feet begin to sweep smoothly toward the here-distant sea. A post held up a traffic signal some twenty yards from the gate. It leaned slowly. At a forty-five-degree tilt it checked and hung stationary. Fifty yards from the gate, a new crack appeared across the road.

  But nothing more happened. Nothing. Yet one could not be sure that some critical point had not been passed, so that from now on there wold be a gradual rise in the creeping of the soil toward the ocean.

  Barnes caught his breath.

  “That makes me feel—queer,” he said unsteadily. “A shock like that wall falling could start everything off!"

  Bordman said nothing at all. It had occurred to him that there was no irrigation of the Survey area. He frowned thoughtfully, even worriedly, as the truck went inside the Headquarters gate and rolled on over a winding road through park-like surroundings.

  It stopped before the building which was the Sector Chief's own headquarters in Headquarters. A large brown dog dozed peacefully on the plastic-tiled landing at the top of half a dozen steps. When Bordman got out of the truck the dog got up with a leisurely air. And when
Bordman ascended the steps, with Barnes following him, the dog came forward with a sort of stately courtesy to do the honors. Bordman said:

  “Nice dog, that."

  He went inside. The dog followed. The interior of the building was empty, and there was a sort of resonant silence until somewhere a telewriter began to click.

  “Come along,” said Bordman. “The Sector Chief's office is over this way."

  Young Barnes followed.

  “It seems odd there's no one around,” he said. “No secretaries, no sentries, nobody at all."

  “Why should there be?” asked Bordman in surprise. “The guards at the gate keep civilians out. And nobody in the Service will bother the Chief without reason. At least, no more than once!"

  But across the glistening, empty floor there ran an ominous crack.

  They went down a corridor. Voices sounded, and Bordman tracked them, with the paws of the dog clicking on the floor behind him. He led the way into a spacious, comfortable nondescript room with high windows—doors, really—that opened on green lawns outside. The Sector Chief, Sandringham, leaned back in a chair, smoking. Werner, the other summoned Senior Officer, sat bolt upright in a chair facing him. Sandringham waved a hand to Bordman.

  “Back so soon? You're ahead of schedule on all counts! Here's Werner, back from looking at the fuel-store situation."

  Bordman suddenly looked as if he'd been jolted. But he nodded, and Werner tried to smile and failed. He was completely white.

  “My pilot from the ship, who's kept aground,” said Bordman. “Lieutenant Barnes. Very promising young officer. Cut my landing-time by hours. Lieutenant, this is Sector Chief Sandringham and Mr. Werner."

  “Have a seat, Bordman,” grunted the Chief. “You too, Lieutenant. How does it look up on the cliff, Bordman?"

  “I suspect you know as well as I do,” said Bordman. “I think I saw a vision-camera planted up there."

  “True enough. But there's nothing like on-the-spot inspection. Now you're back, how does it look to you?"

  “Inadequate,” said Bordman. “Inadequate to explain some things I've noticed. But it's a very bad situation. Its degree of badness depends on the viscosity of the mud at bedrock all over the island. The left-behind mud's like pea soup. It looks really bad! But what's the viscosity at bedrock with soil pressing down, and I hope more dried soil at the top than at the bottom?"

  Sandringham grunted.

  “Good question. I sent for you, Bordman, when it began to look bad, before the ground really started sliding. When I thought it might begin any time. The viscosity averages pretty closely at three times ten to the sixth. Which still gives us some leeway. But not enough."

  “Not nearly enough!” said Bordman impatiently. “Irrigation should have been stopped a long while back!"

  The Sector Chief grunted.

  “I've no authority over civilians. They're their own planetary government. And do you remember?” He quoted: “'Civilian establishments and governments may be advised by Colonial Survey officials, and may make requests of them, but in each case such advice or request is to be considered on its own merits only, and in no case may be the subject of a quid-pro-quo agreement.'” He added grimly: “That means you can't threaten. It's been thrown at my head every time I've asked them to cut down their irrigation in the past fifteen years! I advised them not to irrigate at all, and they couldn't see it. It would increase the food-supply, and they needed more food. So they went ahead. They built two new seawater freshening plants only last year!"

  Werner licked his lips. He said in a voice that was higher-pitched than Bordman remembered:

  “What's happening serves them right! It serves them right!"

  Bordman waited.

  “Now,” said Sandringham, “they're demanding to be let into Sector Headquarters for safety. They say we haven't irrigated, so the ground we occupy isn't going to slide. They demand that we take them all in here to sit on their rumps until the rest of the island slides into the sea or doesn't. If it doesn't, they want to wait here until the soil becomes stable again because they've quit irrigating."

  “It'd serve them right if we let them in!” cried Werner in shrill anger. “It's their fault that they're in this fix!"

  Sandringham waved his hand.

  “Administering abstract justice isn't my job. I imagine it's handled in more competent quarters. I have only to meet the objective situation. Which is plenty! Bordman, you've handled swamp-planet situations. What can be done to stop the sliding of the island's soil before it all goes overboard?"

  “Not much, offhand,” said Bordman. “Give me time and I'll manage something. But a really bad storm, with high seas and plenty of rain, might wipe out the whole civilian colony. That viscosity figure is close to hopeless, if not quite."

  The Sector Chief looked impassive.

  “How much time does he have, Werner?"

  “None!” said Werner shrilly. “The only possible thing is to try to move as many people as possible to the solid ground in the Arctic! The boats can be crowded—the situation demands it! And if the two space-craft in orbit are sent to collect a fleet, and as many people as possible are moved at once, there may be some survivors!"

  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 dryly. “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 here! 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! 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 ground-water. 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 tiptoe, 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 the ship-fuel is refrigerated during its manufacture, it is about as safe as 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-valence 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 they 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 make 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.