The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

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 anger 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.