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! 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
bed-rock. The leaked fuel--warmed up, now--is seeping along bed-rock
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 Senior 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. "What'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 down-wind
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 understatement 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.
When the man in the vision-screen panted to a stop, Sandringham said
calmly:
"I am assured that before the soil of the island is too far gone,
measures now in preparation will be applied to good effect. A Senior
Survey Officer is now preparing remedial measures. He is--ah--a
specialist in problems of exactly this nature."
"But we can't wait!" panted the civilian fiercely. "I'll proclaim a
planetary emergency! We'll take over the reserve-area by force! We have
to--"
"If you try," Sandringham told him grimly, "I'll mount paralysis-guns
to stop you!" He said with icy precision: "I urged the planetary
government to go easy on this irrigation! You yourself denounced me in
the Planetary Council for trying to interfere in civilian affairs. Now
you want to interfere in Survey affairs! I resent it as much as you
did, and with much better reason!"
"Murderer!" panted the civilian. "Murderer!"
Sandringham snapped off the phone-screen. He swung his chair and nodded
to Bordman.
"That was the planetary president," he said.
Bordman sat down. The brown dog blinked his eyes open and then got up
and shook himself.
"I'm holding off those idiots," said the Sector Chief in suppressed
fury. "I daren't tell him it's more dangerous here than outside! If
or when that fuel blows--do you realize that the falling of a single
tree-limb might set off an explosion in the Reserve-area here that
would--But you do know."
"Yes," admitted Bordman.
He did know. Some hundreds of tons of ship-fuel going off would destroy
this entire end of the island. And almost certainly the concussion
would produce violent movement of the rest of the island's surface.
But he was uncomfortable about putting forward his own ideas. He was
not a good salesman. He suspected his own opinions until he had proved
them with painstaking care, for fear of having them adopted on his
past record rather than because they were sound. And then, too this
plan involved junior ranks being informed about the proposal. If they
accepted a dubious plan on high authority, and the plan miscarried,
it made them share in the mistake. Which hurt their self-confidence.
Young Barnes, now, would undoubtedly obey any order and accept any hint
blindly, and Bordman honestly did not know why. But as a matter of the
training of junior ranks--
"About the work to be done," said Bordman, "I imagine the sea-water
freshening plants have closed down?"
"They have!" said Sandringham. "They insisted on piling them up over my
protests. Now if anybody proposed operating one, they'd scream to high
Heaven!"
"What was done with the minerals taken out of the sea-water?" Bordman
asked.
"You know how the fresheners work!" said Sandringham. "They pump
sea-water in at one end, and at the other one pipe yields fresh water,
and the other heavy brine. They dump the heavy brine back overboard
and the fresh water's pumped up and distributed through the irrigation
systems."
"It's too bad some of the salts weren't stored," said Bordman. "Could a
freshener be started up again?"
Sandringham stared. Then he said:
"Oh, the civilians would love that! Now if any man started up a
water-freshener, the civilians would kill him and smash it!"
"But I think we'll need one. We'll want to irrigate some of the Reserve
area."
"My God! What for?" demanded Sandringham. He paused. "No! Don't tell
me! Let me try to work it out."
There was silence. The brown dog blinked at Bordman. He held out his
hand. The dog came sedately to him and bent his head to be scratched.
After a considerable time, the Sector Chief growled:
"I give up. Do you want to tell me?"
Bordman nodded. He said:
"In a sense, the trouble here is that there's a swamp underground, made
by irrigation. It slides. It's really a swamp upside down. On Soris
II we had a very odd problem, only the swamp was right-side-up there.
We'd several hundred square miles of swamp that could be used if we
could drain it. We built a soil-dam around it. You know the trick.
You bore two rows of holes twenty feet apart and put soil-coagulant
in them. It's an old, old device. They used it a couple of hundred
years ago back on Earth. The coagulant seeps out in all directions and
coagulates the dirt. Makes it water-tight. It swells with water and
fills the space between the soil-particles. In a week or two there's a
water-tight barrier, made of soil, going down to bed-rock. You might
call it a coffer-dam. No water can seep through. On Soris II we knew
that if we could get the water out of the mud inside this coffer-dam,
we'd have cultivable ground."
Sandringham said skeptically:
"But it called for ten years' pumping, eh? When mud doesn't move,
pumping isn't easy!"
"We wanted the soil," said Bordman. "And we didn't have ten years. The
Soris II colony was supposed to relieve population-pressure on another
planet. The pressure was terrific. We had to be ready to receive some
colonists in eight months. We had to get the water out quicker than it
could be pumped. And there was another problem mixed up with it. The
swamp vegetation was pretty deadly. It had to be gotten rid of, too. So
we made the dam and--well--took certain measures, and then we irrigated
it. With water from a nearby river. It was very ticklish. But we had
dry ground in four months, with the swamp-vegetation killed and turning
back to humus."
"I ought to read your reports," said Sandringham dourly. "I'm too busy,
ordinarily. But I should read them. How'd you get rid of the water?"
Bordman told him. The telling required eighteen words.
"Of course," he added, "we picked a day when there was a strong wind
from the right quarter."
Sandringham stared at him. Then he said:
"But how does that apply here? It was sound enough, though I'd never
have thought of it. But what's it got to do with the situation here?"
"This swamp, you might say," said Bordman, "is underground. But there's
forty feet, on an average, of soil on top."
He explained what difference that made. It took him three sentences to
make the difference clear.
Sandringham leaned back in his chair. Bordman scratched the dog,
somewhat embarrassed. Sandringham thought.
"I do not see any possible chance," said Sandringham distastefully, "of
doing it any other way. I would never have thought of that! But I'm
taking part of the job out of your hands, Bordman."
Bordman said nothing. He waited.
"Because," said Sandringham, "you're not the man to put over to the
civilians what they must believe. You're not impressive. I know
you, and I know you're a good man in a pinch. But this pinch needs
a salesman. So I'm going to have Werner make the--er--pitch to the
planetary government. Results are more important than justice, so
Werner will front this affair."