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 ... why ... 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 ... why ... practically any vibratory motion will detonate it. Even dissolved, it can detonate because it is not a chemical but an energy-release action.
"A good, drumming, heavy rain," said Sandringham very calmly indeed, "which falls on this end of the island, will undoubtedly set off some scores 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 Hardwick from the outer terrace, now yawned loudly. Hardwick reached over and absent-mindedly scratched his ears. Young Barnes swallowed.
"Beg pardon, sir," he said awkwardly. "But what's the weather forecast?"
"Continued fair," said Sandringham pleasantly. "That's why I had Hardwick and Werner come down. Three heads are better than one. I've gambled their lives on their brains."
Hardwick continued thoughtfully 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 awkwardly. "I ... I think the odds are pretty good. Mr. Hardwick, sir—He'll manage!"
Then he flushed hotly at his own presumption in saying something consoling to a Sector 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 Hardwick to hear what he had to say.
III
The leeward side of the island went very 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 there were 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 things came up from the ocean bottom and were dumped inside their hulls, and then baskets went back down into the water. At long intervals—quite long intervals—men emerged from underwater and sat on the sides of the boats and smoked with an effect of leisure.
There was sunshine, and the land was green, and a seeming of vast tranquillity 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 Hardwick dryly, "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, sir. I asked everything I could think of."
"Those boats yonder?"
Hardwick 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, sir, 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, sir."
Hardwick 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 dryly. "What's the depth here?"
"We're half a mile out, sir," said Barnes promptly. "It should be about sixty feet, sir. 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!"
Hardwick 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 island was infinitely finely-divided. In fresh water it floated practically like a 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, Hardwick 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 mud 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."
Hardwick 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."
Hardwick stared. He turned his eyes away.
"Er ... sir," said Barnes unhappily. "May I ask, sir—"
Hardwick said dryly:
"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. But solving the rest of the problem will do no good if this part remains unsolved. You see?"
"Yes, sir. But ... the others seem more ... urgent, sir."
Hardwick shrugged.
There was a shout from a nearby boat. Men were pointing ashore. Hardwick jerked his eyes to the shoreline.
A section of seemingly solid ground moved slowly toward the water. Its forefront seemed to disintegrate, and a singularly 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 downwind and very deliberately 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.
Hardwick 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 topsoil was suddenly undercut. The wetter material under it flowed away, leaving a ledge which bore carefully tended flowering shrubs—Hardwick 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. It fell. It 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 Hardwick 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," Hardwick said briefly. "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 Hardwick. "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, sir."
"If we had soil-coagulants enough," said Hardwick vexedly, "we could handle that upside-down swamp the civilians have so carefully made, here. But we haven't got it! But 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, sir ... wouldn't you have to put the minerals in irrigation-water to get them down to the ... the swamp?"
Hardwick grinned, very 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 Hardwick.
The recreation-boat obediently turned. It went out to sea until the water flowing past its hull was crystal-clear. And Hardwick 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 Hardwick, "makes for emotional thinking. These people know their danger. So they've packed their children and their wives into these little cockleshells 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 small 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 embarrassedly, "but ... if the fuel blows, it'll be pretty bad, sir."
"That's the understatement of the century," Hardwick commented. "Yes. It will. Why?"
"You've something in mind, sir, 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, sir, 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, sir—"
"Stop stammering," grunted Hardwick. "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, miserably.
"And," said Hardwick formidably. "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 Hardwick.
The boat came into the dock. Hardwick got out of the boat. He 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 a ... ah ... 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 Hardwick.
"That was the planetary president," he said dryly.
Hardwick 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 know."
"Yes," admitted Hardwick.
He did know. Even forty tons of ship-fuel going off would destroy this entire end of the island. It would be at least the equivalent of a megaton fusion bomb explosion. 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 extremely painstaking care—for fear of having them adopted on his past record rather than because they were sound. And then, too, his 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 Hardwick honestly did not know why. But as a matter of the training of junior ranks—
"About the work to be done," said Hardwick. "I imagine the sea-water freshening plants have closed down?"
"They have!" said Sandringham curtly. "They insisted on piling them up over my protests. Now if anybody proposed operating one, they'd scream to high heaven!"
Hardwick felt uncomfortable.
"What was done with the minerals taken out of the sea water?"
"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 another 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 Hardwick. "Could a freshener be started up again?"
Sandringham said with irony:
"Oh, the civilians would love that! No! 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 ground up here."
"My God! What for?" demanded Sandringham. Then he said shortly: "No! Don't tell me! Let me try to work it out."
There was silence. The brown dog blinked at Hardwick. He held out his hand. The dog came sedately to him and bent his head to be scratched. Hardwick scratched.
After a considerable time, the Sector Chief growled:
"I give up. Do you want to tell me?"
Hardwick said painstakingly:
"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 ... well ... 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 bedrock. 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 Hardwick. "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?"
Hardwick told him. He felt uncomfortable about it. The telling required eighteen words.
"Of course," he added, "we did pick a day when there was a strong wind from the right quarter."
Sandringham stared at him. Then he said vexedly:
"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 Hardwick, "is underground. But there's forty feet, on an average, of soil on top."
He explained painstakingly what difference that made. It took him three sentences to make the difference clear.
Sandringham leaned back in his chair. Hardwick scratched the dog, somewhat embarrassed. Sandringham thought concentratedly.
"I do not see any possible chance," said Sandringham distastefully, "of doing it any other way. I would never have thought of that! But at least ninety per cent of the people on this island, Civilian and Survey together, will die if we don't do something. So we will do this. But I'm taking it out of your hands, Hardwick."
Hardwick 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."
Hardwick winced a little. But Sandringham was right. He didn't know how to be impressive. He could not speak with pompous conviction, which is so much more convincing than reason, to most people. He wasn't the man to get the co-operation of the non-Service population, because he could only explain what he knew and believed, and was not practiced in persuasion. But Werner was. He had the knack of making people believe anything, not because it was reasonable but because it was oratory.
"I suppose you're right," acknowledged Hardwick. "We need civilian help and a lot of it. I'm not the man to get it. He is." He did not say anything about Werner being the man to get credit, whether he deserved it or not. He patted the dog's head and stood up. "I wish I had a good supply of soil-coagulant. I need to make a coffer-dam in the reserve area here. But I think I'll manage."
Sandringham regarded him soberly as he moved to the door. As he was about to pass out of it, Sandringham said:
"Hardwick—"
"What?"
"Take good care of yourself. Will you?"
IV
Therefore Senior Officer Werner, of the Colonial Survey, received his instructions from Sandringham. Hardwick never knew the details of the instructions Werner got. They were possibly persuasive, or they may have been menacing. But Werner ceased to argue for the movement of any fraction of the island's population to the arctic ice cap, and instead made frequent eloquent addresses to the planetary population on the scientific means by which their lives were to be saved. Between the addresses, perhaps, he sweated cold sweat when a tree sedately tilted in what had seemed solid soil, or a building settled perceptibly while he looked at it, or when ... say ... a section of the island's soil bulged upward.
Publicly, he headed citizens' committees, and grandly gave instructions, and spoke in unintelligible and, therefore, extremely scientific terms when desperately earnest men asked for explanations. But he was perfectly clear in what he wanted them to do.
He wanted drill-holes in the arable soil down to the depth at which the holes began to close up of themselves. He wanted those holes not more than a hundred feet apart, in lines which slanted at forty-five degrees to the gradient of the bedrock.
Sandringham checked his speeches, at the rate of four a day. Once he had Hardwick called away from where he supervised extremely improbable operations. Hardwick was smeared with the island's grayish mud when he looked into the phone-plate to take the call.
"Hardwick," said Sandringham curtly, "Werner's saying those holes you want are to be lines at forty-five degrees to the gradient."
"That ... I'd like a little more," said Hardwick. "A little less, rather. If they slanted three miles across the grade for every two downhill, it would be better. I'd like to put a lot more lines of holes. But there's the element of time."
"I'll have him explain that he was misquoted," said Sandringham, grimly. "Three across to two down. How close do you really want those lines?"
"It's not how close," said Hardwick. "I've got to have them quickly. How does the barometer look?"
"Down a tenth," said Sandringham.
Hardwick said:
"Damn! Has he got plenty of labor?"
"All the labor there is," said Sandringham. "And I'm having a road laid along the cliffs for speed with the trucks. If I dared ... and if I had the pipe ... I'd lay a pipe line."
"Later," said Hardwick tiredly. "If he's got labor to spare, set them to work turning the irrigation systems hind part before. Make them drainage systems. Use pumps. So if rain does come it won't be spread out on the land by all the pretty ditches. So it will be gathered instead and either flung back over the cliffs or else drained downhill without getting a chance to sink into the ground. For the time being, anyhow."
Sandringham said evenly:
"Has it occurred to you what a good, pounding rain would do to Headquarters, and consequently to public confidence on this island, and therefore to the attempt of anybody to do anything but wring his hands because he was doomed?"
Hardwick grimaced.
"I'm irrigating, here. I've got a small-sized lake made, and an ice coffer-dam, and the water-freshener is working around the clock. If there is labor, tell 'em to fix the irrigation systems into drainage layouts. That will cheer them, anyhow."
He was very weary, then. There is a certain exhausting quality in the need to tell other men to do work which may cause them to be killed spectacularly. The fact that one will certainly be killed with them does not lessen the tension.
He went back to his work. And it definitely seemed to be as purposeless as any man's work could possibly be. Down-grade from the now thoroughly deserted area in which ship-fuel tanks had leaked—quite far down-grade—he had commandeered all the refrigeration equipment in the warehouses. Since refrigeration was necessary for fuel-storage, there was a great deal. He had planted iron pipe in the soil, and circulated refrigerant in it, and presently there was a wall of solidly frozen earth which was shaped like a shallow U. It was a coffer-dam. In the curved part of that U he'd siphoned out a lake. A peristaltic pump ran sea water from the island's lee out upon the ground—where it instantly turned to mud—and another peristaltic pump sucked the mud up again and delivered it down-grade beyond the line of freezing-pipes. It was in fact a system of hydraulic dredging such as is normally performed in rivers and harbors. But when topsoil is merely former abyssal mud it is an excellent way to move dirt. Also, it does not require anybody to strike blows into soil which may be explosive when one has gotten down near bedrock, and in particular there are no clanking machines.
But it was hair-raising.
In one day, though, he had a sizable lake pumped out. And he pumped it out to emptiness, painstakingly smelling the water as it went down to a greater depth below the previous ground surface. At the end of the day he shivered and ordered pumping ended for the time.
But then he had the brine-pipe laid around a great circuit, to the Headquarters ground which was upgrade from the now-deserted square mile or so in which the fuel tanks lay deep in the soil. And here, also, he performed excavation without the sound of hammer, shovel, or pick. He thrust pipes into the ground, and they had nozzles at the end which threw part of the water backward. So that when sea water poured into them it thrust them deeper into the ground by the backward jet action. Again the fact that the soil was abyssal mud made it possible. The nozzles floated up much grayish mud, but they bored ahead down to bedrock, and there they lay flat and tunneled to one side and the other—the tunnels they made being full of water at all times.
From those tunnels, as they extended, an astonishing amount of sea water seeped out into the soil near bedrock. But it was sea water. It was heavily mineralized. And it is a peculiarity of sea water that it is an electrolyte, and it is a property of electrolytes that they coagulate colloids, and rather definitely discourage the suspension of small solid particles which are on the borderline of being colloids. In fact, the water of the ocean of Canna III turned the ground-soil into good, honest mud which did not feel at all soapy, and through which it percolated with a surprising readiness.
Young Barnes eagerly supervised this part of the operation, once it was begun. He shamed the Survey personnel assigned to him into perhaps excessive self-confidence.
"He knows what he's doing," he said firmly. "Look here! I'll take that canteen. It's fresh water. Here's some soap. Wet it in fresh water and it lathers. See? It dissolves. Now try to dissolve it in sea water! Try it! See? They put salt in the boiled stuff to separate soap out, when they make it!" He'd picked up that item from Hardwick. "Sea water won't soften the ground. It can't! Come on, now, let's get another pipe putting more salt water underground!"
His workmen did not understand what he was doing, but they labored zestfully because it was mysterious and for a purpose. But downhill, in the hydraulic-dredged-out lake, water came seeping in, in the form of mud. And then another pipe came up from the seashore and the mud settled solidly on the bottom, not dispersing. It was a rather small pipe, and the personnel who laid it were bewildered. Because there was a water-freshening plant down there on the shore, and all the fresh water was poured back overboard, while the brine—saturated with salts from the ocean: unable to dissolve a single grain of anything else—was being used to fill the small artificial lake.
The second day Sandringham called Hardwick again, and again Hardwick peered wearily into the phone-screen.
"Yes," said Hardwick, "the leaked fuel is turning up. In solution, I'm trying to measure the concentration by matching specific gravities of lake water and brine, and then sticking electrodes in each. The fuel's corrosive as the devil. It gives a different EMF. Higher than brine of the same density. I think I've got it in hand."
"Do you want to start shipping it?" demanded Sandringham.
"You can begin pouring it down holes," said Hardwick. "How's the barometer?"
"Down three-tenths this morning. Steady now."
"Damn!" said Hardwick. "I'll set up molds. Freeze it in plastic bags the size of the bore-holes so it will go down. While it's frozen they can even push it down deep."
Sandringham said very grimly:
"There's been more damned technical work done with ship-fuel than any other substance since time began. But remember that the stuff can still be set off, even dissolved in water! Its sensitivity goes down, but it's not gone!"
"If it were," said Hardwick drearily, "you could invite in the civilian population to sit on its rump. I've got something like forty tons of ship-fuel in brine solution in this lake I pumped out! But it's in five thousand tons of brine. We don't speak above a whisper when we're around it. We walk in carpet slippers and you never saw people so polite! We will start freezing it."
"How can you handle it?" demanded Sandringham apprehensively.
"The brine freezes at minus thirty," said Hardwick. "In one per cent solution it's only five per cent sensitive at minus nineteen. We're handling it at minus nineteen. I think I'll step up the brine and chill it a little more."
He waved a mud-smeared hand and went away.
That day, bolster-trucks began to roll out of Survey Headquarters. They rolled very, very smoothly, and they trailed a fog of chilled air behind them. And presently there were men with heavy gloves on their hands taking long things like sausages out of the bolster-trucks and untying the ends and lowering them down into holes bored in the topsoil until they reached places where wetness made the holes close up again. Then the men from Survey pushed those frozen sausages underground still further by long poles with carefully padded—and refrigerated—ends. And then they went on to other holes.
The first day there were five hundred such sausages thrust down into holes in the ground, which holes to all intents and purposes closed up behind them. The second day there were four thousand. The third day there were eight. On the fourth the solution of ship-fuel in brine in the lake did not give adequate EMF in the little battery-cell designed to show how much corrosive substance there was in the brine. Hardwick took samples from the fluid draining into the lake. It was not mud any longer. Brine flowed at the top of bedrock, and it left the mud behind it, because salt water remarkably hindered the suspension of former globigerinous ooze particles. It was practically colloid. Salt water practically coagulated it.
The brine flowing from the salt-water tunnels upwind showed no more ship-fuel in it. Hardwick called Sandringham and told him.
"I can call in the civilians!" said Sandringham. "You've mopped up the leaked stuff! It couldn't have been done—"
"Not anywhere but here, with bedrock handy just underneath, and slanting," said Hardwick. "But I wouldn't advise it. Tell them they can come if they want to. They'll sort of drift in. I want to tap some more ship-fuel for the rest of those bore-holes. From the tanks that haven't leaked."
Sandringham hesitated.
"Twenty thousand holes," said Hardwick tiredly. "Each one had a six-hundred block of frozen saturated brine dumped in it, with roughly one pound of ship-fuel in solution. You have gone that far. Might as well go the rest of the way. How's the barometer?"
"Up a tenth," said Sandringham. "Still rising."
Hardwick blinked at him, because he had trouble keeping his eyes open now.
"Let's ride it, Sandringham!"
Sandringham hesitated. Then he said:
"Go ahead."
Hardwick waved his arms at his associates, whom he admired with great fervor in his then-foggy mind, because they were always ready to work when it was needed, and it had not stopped being needed for five days running. He explained very lucidly that there were only three more miles of holes to be filled up, and therefore they would just draw so much of ship-fuel and blend it carefully with an appropriate amount of suitable chilled brine and then freeze it in appropriate sausages—
Young Lieutenant Barnes said gravely:
"Yes, sir. I'll take care of it. You remember me, sir! I'll take care of it."
Hardwick said:
"Barometer's up a tenth." His eyes did not quite focus. "All right, lieutenant. Go ahead. Promising young officer. Excellent. I'll sit down here for just a moment."
When Barnes came back, Hardwick was asleep. And a last one hundred and fifty frozen sausages of brine and ship-fuel went out of Headquarters within a matter of hours, and then a vast quietude settled down everywhere.
Young Barnes sat beside Hardwick, menacing anybody who even thought of disturbing him. When Sandringham called for him. Barnes went to the phone-plate.
"Sir," he said with vast formality. "Mr. Hardwick went five days without sleep. His job's done. I won't wake him, sir!"
Sandringham raised his eyebrows.
"You won't?"
"I won't, sir!" said young Barnes.
Sandringham nodded.
"Fortunately," he observed, "nobody's listening. You are quite right."
He snapped the connection. And then young Barnes realized that he had defied a Sector Chief, which is something distinctly more improper in a junior officer than merely trying to instruct him in topping off his vacuum-suit tanks.
Twelve hours later, however, Sandringham called for him.
"Barometer's dropping, lieutenant. I'm concerned. I'm issuing a notice of the impending storm. Not everybody will crowd in on us, but a great many will. I'm explaining that the chemicals put into the bottom soil may not quite have finished their work. If Hardwick wakens, tell him."
"Yes, sir," said Barnes.
But he did not intend to wake Hardwick. Hardwick, however, woke of himself at the end of twenty hours of sleep. He was stiff and sore and his mouth tasted as if something had kittened in it. Fatigue can produce a hangover, too.
"How's the barometer?" he asked when his eyes came open.
"Dropping, sir. Heavy winds, sir. The Sector Chief has opened the Reserve Area, sir, to the civilians if they wish to come."
Hardwick computed dizzily on his fingers. A more complex instrument was actually needed, of course. One does not calculate on one's fingers just how long a one per cent solution of ship-fuel in frozen brine has taken to melt, and how completely it has diffused through an upside-down swamp with the pressure of forty feet of soil on top of it, and therefore its effective concentration and dispersal underground.
"I think," said Hardwick, "it's all right. By the way, did they turn the irrigation systems hind end to?"
Young Barnes did not know what this was all about. He had to send for information. Meanwhile he solicitously plied Hardwick with coffee and food. Hardwick grew reflective.
"Queer," he said. "You think of the damage forty tons of ship-fuel can do. Setting off the rest of the store and all. But even by itself it rates some thousands of tons of TNT. I wonder what TNT was, before it became a ton-measure of energy? You think of it exploding in one place, and it's appalling! But think of all that same amount of energy applied to square miles of upside-down swamp. Hundreds or thousands of miles of upside-down swamp. D'you know, lieutenant, on Soris II we pumped a ship-fuel solution onto a swamp we wanted to drain? Flooded it, and let it soak until a day came with a nice, strong, steady wind."
"Yes, sir," said Barnes respectfully.
"Then we detonated it. We didn't have a one per cent solution. It was more like a thousandth of one per cent solution. Nobody's ever measured the speed of propagation of an explosion in ship-fuel, dry. But it's been measured in dilute solution. It isn't the speed of sound. It's lower. It's purely a temperature-phenomenon. In water, at any dilution, ship-fuel goes off just barely below the boiling-point of water. It doesn't detonate from shock when it's diluted enough to be all ionized—but that takes a hell of a lot of dilution. Have you got some more coffee?"
"Yes, sir," said Barnes. "Coming up, sir."
"We floated ship-fuel solution over that swamp, Barnes, and let it stand. It has a high diffusion-rate. It went down into the mud—And there came a day when the wind was right. I dumped a red-hot iron bar into the swamp water that had ship-fuel in solution. It was the weirdest sight you ever saw!"
Barnes served him more coffee. And Hardwick sipped it, and it burned his tongue.
"It went up in steam," he said. "The swamp water that had the ship-fuel dissolved in it. It didn't explode, as a mass. They told me later that it propagated at hundreds of feet per second only. They could see the wall of steam go marching across the swamp. Not even high-pressure steam. There was awhoosh!and a cloud of steam half a mile high that the wind carried away. And all the surface water in the swamp was gone, and all the swamp-vegetation parboiled and dead. So"—he yawned suddenly—"we had a ten-mile by fifty-mile stretch of arable ground ready for the coming colonists."
He tried the coffee again. He added reflectively:
"That trick—it didn't explode the ship-fuel, in a way. It burned it. In water. It applied the energy of the fuel to the boiling-away of water. Powerful stuff! We got rid of two feet of water on an average, counting what came out of the mud. It cost ... hm-m-m ... a fraction of a gram per square yard."
He gulped the coffee down. There were men looking at him solicitously. They seemed very glad to see him awake again. There was a monstrous bank of cloud-stuff piling up in the sky. He suddenly blinked at that.
"Hello! How long did I sleep, Barnes?"
Barnes told him. Hardwick shook his head to clear it.
"We'll go see Sandringham," said Hardwick, heavily. "I'd like to postpone firing as long as I can, short of having the stuff start draining into the sea to leeward."
There were mud-stained men around the place where Hardwick had slept. When he went—still groggy—out to the bolster-truck young Barnes had waiting, they regarded Hardwick in a very satisfying manner. Somebody grunted, "Good to've worked with you, sir,"—which is about as much of admiration as anybody would want to hear expressed. These associates of Hardwick in the mopping-up of leaked ship's fuel would be able to brag of the job at all times and in all places hereafter.
Then the truck went trundling away in search of Sandringham.
It found him on the cliffs to the windward side of the island. The sea was no longer a cerulean blue. It was slaty-color. There were occasional flecks of white foam on the water four thousand feet below. There were dark clouds, by then covering practically all the sky. Far out to sea, there were small craft heading grimly for the ends of the island, to go around it and ride out the coming storm in its lee.
Sandringham greeted Hardwick with relief. Werner stood close by, opening and closing his hands jerkily.
"Hardwick!" said the Sector Chief cordially. "We're having a disagreement, Werner and I. He's confident that the turning of the irrigation systems hind end to—making them surface-drainage systems, in effect—will take care of the whole situation. Adding the brine underground, he thinks, will have done a good deal more. He says it'll be bad, psychologically, for anything more to be done. He didn't speak of it, and it would injure public confidence in the Survey."
Hardwick said curtly:
"The only thing that will make a permanent difference on this island is for the water-fresheners to be a little less efficient. Barnes has the figures. He computed them from some measurements I had him make. If the water-freshener plants don't take all the sea-minerals out: if they don't make the irrigation-water so infernally soft and suitable for hair-washing and the like: if they turn out hard water for irrigation, this won't happen again! But there's too much water underground now. We have got to get it out, because a little more's going underground from this storm, surface-drainage systems or no surface-drainage systems."
Sandringham pointed to leeward, where a black, thick procession of human beings trooped toward the Survey area on foot and by every possible type of vehicle.
"I've ordered them turned into the ship-sheds and warehouses," said the Sector Chief. "But of course we haven't shelter for all of them. At a guess, when they feel safe they'll go back to their homes even through the storm."
The sky to windward grew blacker and blacker. There was no longer a steady flow of wind coming over the cliff's edge. It came in gusts, now, of extreme violence. They could make a man stagger on his feet. There were more flecks of white on the ocean's surface.
"The boats," added Sandringham, "were licked. There simply wasn't enough oil to maintain the slick. The radio reports were getting hysterical before I ordered them told that we had it beaten on shore. They're running for shelter now. I think they'd have stayed out there trying to hold the slick in place with their towline, if I hadn't said we had matters in hand."
Werner said, tight-lipped: "I hope we have!"
Hardwick shrugged.
"The wind's good and strong, now," he observed. "Let's find out. You've got the starting system all set?"
Sandringham waved his hand. There was a high-voltage battery set. It was of a type designed for blasting on airless planets, but that did not matter. Its cables led snakily for a couple of hundred feet to a very small pile of grayish soil which had been taken out of a bore-hole. They went over that untidy heap and down into the ground. Hardwick took hold of the firing-handle. He paused.
"How about highways?" he asked. "There might be some steam out of this hole."
"All allowed for," said Sandringham. "Go ahead."
There was a gust of wind strong enough to knock a man down. There was a humming sound in the air, as storm-wind beat upon the four-thousand-foot cliff and poured over its top. There were gradually rising waves, below. The sky was gray. The sea was slate-colored. Far, far to windward, the white line of pouring rain upon the water came marching toward the island.
Hardwick pumped the firing-handle.
There was a pause, while wind-gusts tore at his garments and staggered him where he stood. It was quite a long pause.
Then a white vapor came seeping out of the bore-hole. It was perfectly white. Then it came out with a sudden burst which was not in any sense explosive, but was merely a vast rushing of vaporized water. Then, a hundred yards away, there was a mistiness on the grassy surface. Still farther, a crack in the surface-soil let out a curtain of white vapor.
Here and there, everywhere, little gouts of steam poured into the air and tumbled in the storm-wind. It was notable that the steam did not come out as an invisible vapor, and condense in midair. It poured out of the ground in clouds, already condensed but thrust out by more masses of vapor behind it. It was not super-heated steam that came out. It was simply steam. Harmless steam, like the steam out of the spouts of tea kettles. But it rose from individual places everywhere. It made a massy coating of vapor which the storm-wind blew away. In seconds a half-mile of soil was venting steam; in seconds more a mile. The thick, fleecy vapor swept across the landscape. The storm-wind could only tumble it and sweep it away.
In minutes there was no part of the island to be seen at all, save only the thin line of the cliffs reaching away between dark water on the one hand and snow-white clouds of vapor on the other.
"It can't scald anybody, can it?" asked Barnes uneasily.
"Not," said Hardwick, "when it's had to come up through forty feet of soil. It's been pretty well cooled off in taking up some extra moisture. It spread pretty well, didn't it?"
The Sector Chief's office had tall windows—doors, really—that looked out upon green lawn and many trees. Now a downpour of rain beat down outside. Wind whipped at the trees. There was tumult and roaring and the vibration of gusts of hurricane force. Even the building in which the Sector Chief's office was, vibrated slightly in the wind.
The Sector Chief beamed. The brown dog came in uneasily, looked around the room, and walked in leisurely fashion toward Hardwick. He settled with a sigh beside Hardwick's chair.
"What I want to know," said Werner tensely, "is, won't this rain put back all the water the ship-fuel boiled away?"
Hardwick said uncomfortably: "Two inches of rain would be a heavy fall, Sandringham tells me. It's the lack of heavy rains that made the civilians start irrigating. When you figure the energy-content of ship-fuel, Werner—an appreciable fraction of the energy in atomic explosive—it's sort of deceptive. Turn it into thermal units and it gets to be enlightening. We turned loose, underground, enough heat to boil away two feet of soil-water under the island's whole surface."
Werner said sharply:
"What'll happen when that heat passes up through the soil? It'll kill the vegetation, won't it?"
"No," said Hardwick mildly. "Because therewastwo feet of water to be turned to steam. The bottom layer of the soil was raised to the temperature of steam at a few pounds pressure. No more. The heat's already escaped. In the steam."
The phone-plate lighted. Sandringham snapped it on. A voice made a report in a highly official voice.
"Right!" said Sandringham. The highly official voice spoke again. "Right!" said Sandringham again. "You may tell the ships in orbit that they can come down now, if they don't mind getting wet." He turned. "Did you hear that, Hardwick? They have bored new cores. There are a few soggy spots, but the ground's as firm, all over the island, as it was when the Survey first came here. A very good job, Hardwick! A very good job!"
Hardwick flushed. He reached down and patted the head of the brown dog.
"Look!" said the Sector Chief. "My dog, there, has taken a liking to you. Will you accept him as a present, Hardwick?"
Hardwick grinned.
Young Barnes made ready to rejoin his ship. He was very strictly Service, very stiffly at attention. Hardwick shook hands with him.
"Nice to have had you around, lieutenant," he said warmly. "You're a very promising young officer. Sandringham knows it and has made a note of the fact. Which I suspect is going to put you to a lot of trouble. There's a devilish shortage of promising young officers. He'll give you hellish jobs to do, because he has an idea you'll do them."
"I'll try, sir," said young Barnes formally. Then he said awkwardly, "May I say something, sir? I'm very proud, sir, to have worked with you. But dammit, sir, it seems to me that something more than just saying thank you was due you! The Service, sir, ought to—"
Hardwick regarded the young man approvingly.
"When I was your age," he said, "I'd the very same attitude. But I had the only reward the Service or anything else could give me. The job got done. It's the only reward you can expect in the Service, Barnes. You'll never get any other."
Young Barnes looked rebellious. He shook hands again.
"Besides," said Hardwick, "there is no better."
Young Barnes marched back toward his ship in the great metal crisscross of girders which was the landing-grid.
Hardwick absently patted his dog. He headed back toward Sandringham's office for his orders to return to his own work.
THE END