Robert Silverberg: By the Seawall

It was Michas-IV’s bad luck to be on duty by the seawall the day the first of the suicides occurred. He was not really to blame for what happened, but he was reprimanded none the less. How could he have known? How could he begin to comprehend human motives?

His post along the seawall was exactly a thousand meters long. It was Zone KF-6 on the master chart, shown as a neat, elongated blue block. Since the total length of the seawall was six thousand kilometers, Micah-IV knew that he was responsible for precisely one six-thousandth of the entire length of the seawall. It was a somber burden, for did not the safety of humanity depend on the wall? Yes. But Micah-IV was watchful. He patrolled his kilometer twelve hours a day, ever vigilant. He did his best; but he was not omniscient.

The seawall stood sixty meters high throughout most of its length and was twenty meters thick at its base, tapering to a width of six meters at the top. It was constructed of blocks of gray-green stone, dressed and trued to the last millimeter and laid one atop another without need of mortar. The stone came from the Wyoming nuclear kilns, beetle-trucked across the continent to its place at the shore. Building the wall had taken the better part of two generations, even with mechanical help. It had been the great communal effort of mankind. Its vastness made a mockery of all earlier accomplishments of its sort. The Great Pyramid was a heap of pebbles beside it, and China’s Great Wall, a rivulet of sand.

Beyond the seawall lay the gray bulk of the ocean, beast infested, sinister.

As he marched parade from one end of Zone KF-6 to the other, Micah-IV could sometimes see the beasts turning and twisting in the water. Now and then one would swim curiously up toward the land, searching for a chink in the armor of humanity. There were no chinks, of course. The beasts were deflected, a kilometer from shore, by a zone of poison, spewed day and night by vents sprouting from the seawall itself. If the beasts passed the yellow-stained poison zone, they next encountered a belt of electrification, fifty meters wide, ready to unleash thousands of kilowatts upon any lifeform large enough to trigger it. Within the electrified belt lay the seawall. Its outer face gleamed like annealed bronze and was as smooth as the finest glass.

No beast could climb that wall.

No beast ever had, in the eighty years since the wall’s completion.

Several had tried, though Micah-IV had not seen it happen. In Zone CI-9, some forty years ago, a scaly thing with fiery red eyes and a ferocious tail had propelled its way through the poison zone, had endured the electricity, and had launched itself against the wall in blind fury. Thirty tons of angry flesh struck the seawall without causing it to quiver. Bracing itself on mighty hind flippers, the monster rose erect, its snout twenty meters above the ground, its rough tongue lapping at the glassy stone, and it attempted to climb.

There was no way for it to gain purchase. It slipped back again and again. At last it dropped to the rocky shore just without the seawall and lay there exhausted. Its ponderous gasps could be heard far away. Levering itself up once more, it butted its head mindlessly against the base of the wall for days, until in the end the gray-green stone was liberally stained with red, and the decaying, bloated corpse of the monster lay by the shore as prey for the scavenger birds.

Twenty years later Zone BX-11 had had a much closer call. A sinuous ebony thing longer than any tree was tall had made its journey safely past poison and electricity and, extending tendrils thirty meters long tipped with great sucker-pads, had begun to climb. Up, up, up, until the stinking salty mass clung to the seawall’s middle, and then one of the sucker-pads slapped itself to the stone a scant five meters from the top. That activated the resonating circuits. Booming waves of sound raced along the spectrum from the bottom to a scope of several million hz. The sea boiled and churned. The sucker-pads relented; the creature fell back and was dashed against the boulders at the base of the seawall.

Micah-IV had known no such excitements. For half the hours of each day he moved from southern border of KF-7 to the northern border of KF-5, watching the sea. Now a lemon-colored torpedo of an animal, scales bright in the sunlight, would flash by, well outside the poison zone. Now Micah-IV would see by night the uplifted luminous trawler-organ of a giant sweeper of the seas and by its light would glimpse the terrible, gaping mouth behind that dangling orb. Now he would see tentacles lash the water; now, the sudden spike of a ghastly fin.

The beasts kept their distance. Once they had raided the shore settlements at will, for most of them could tolerate an hour or two in the air. Since the construction of the seawall they had been denied that pleasure. The dwellers of the land were safe from the nightmares in the sea. Walled off, thwarted, the great things circled and wheeled in their own salty element, now and again attacking each other in battles that made the continents tremble.

Twelve hours Micah-IV walked the battlements. Twelve hours he rested in the barracks of the guardians. Even synthetic flesh must have a chance to rid itself of the poisons of fatigue.

His job was simple. He patrolled the upper walkway, keeping watch on the sea against an unwanted intruder from below. In the event one of the beasts attempted an attack, he was required to notify the central authorities. His sphere of responsibility also embraced maintenance of the wall; he was charged with discovering potential defects or strains before they became serious, and with reporting them to the proper departments.

Lastly, Micah-IV’s tasks included dealing with the humans who occasionally mounted the wall to look at the sea.

They came, generally, in family groups of five or six. Micah-IV greeted them courteously, spoke of the techniques by which the seawall had been constructed, and when possible pointed out to them the sporting monsters off shore. If a child became fearful, Micah-IV comforted it. If a woman developed nausea, Micah-IV gave her medicine. If a man in his boldness went to close to the low retaining barrier that topped the wall, Micah-IV tactfully suggested that he stand back a bit. One never knew when a sucker-tipped tentacle would probe from below.

It was a dreary, mechanical job, which was why human beings did not care for it. Micah-IV, as a synthetic, was better able to cope with boredom. He had patrolled the seawall for more than a decade now, and the uneventful round of his days did not have serious effects on his mind. Every third year he needed a retuning to cancel the cumulative impact of the boredom, that was all.

Up the path. Down the path. Eyes right. Eyes left. Check the sea. Check the shore. Key in the resonating circuits every second hour. Report to Central every third hour. Monitor the visitor center.

Snow, Wind, Rain. Heat. Sun.

Tang of salt air in the cunningly crafted nostrils.

Whitecaps on the surface of the sea. Vast things heaving in its depths.

Privately Micah-IV yearned for an incident. Let a beast try to scale the wall, he prayed. Let a woman tourist enter childbirth atop the wall. Let a stone block be struck by lightning and crumble. Something novel, something unexpected, something to give Zone KF-6 its place in seawall history.

He was within a year of needing another tuning. That was why he felt the wish for novelty.

He stared hopefully at the things lashing the water, waiting for them to attack. But they did not attack. It would be futile, and the animals out there knew it. The wall was impenetrable. The days when marauders out of the sea devoured hundreds of humans for lunch were over forever.