City Under the Sea

Book 33: Gateway Essentials

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Jeremy Dodge knew the Earth would face starvation if it were not for the new science of "aquaculture". With the world's population numbering many billions, only the extra food being cultivated on the bottom of the sea could feed everyone. But, like the rest of the surface-dwellers, Jeremy did not know what a vicious monopoly underwater cultivation had become. That is, until the dreadful moment when he himself was kidnapped and dragged beneath the depths. And there he was to learn that just making his own escape would not be enough - he would have to save mankind from the tyranny of a new race of water-breathing human monsters!

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 154

Sample

THE water was deep and black and cold. Caught in the grip of crushing pressure, the water scarcely moved above the pelagic ooze, its profundity embalming reason, its bulk covering a vast gloom, drowning a mysterious world of eternal night.

The water thrust at the ooze of the ocean floor and thrust against the bleak wall of the escarpment, rising in barren, fissured, soaring columns of rock. Mudfalls draped rocky clefts like curtains and spilled out in undulating fans.

There was no colour here—only the everlasting blackness.

Fissured and indented, the slopes of the scarp rose upwards in an unbroken, uninterrupted ascent, the longest continuous slopes in the world. Raking upwards at an ever steepening incline from the ocean floor, twenty thousand feet of lightless, plantless, virgin rock and mud supported and buttressed the continental shelf. Blackness unrelieved—and yet, lights. Lights everywhere. Luminous motes of colour gliding and darting, poised, halting for a startled fragment of time, and then fleeing and disappearing, swooping and glowing in fierce, brainless hunger-satisfied triumph.

But now another source of light probed the depth. The bruised tag-end of the spectrum imperceptibly created an encompassing blueness, and as the mass of water above thinned, the blueness grew, lightening through the spectrum, pearling into a translucent twilight where the myriad lights from below flickered and faded with a spectral glimmer.

The bluffs of the continental shelf puffed out their bulging chests into the waters, shouldering from blackness into opaline radiance; but they themselves were drowned beneath a skin of water—a film of moisture negligible by comparison with the unplumbed depths below—but a film with merciless fingers of constricting pressure.

Under that pressure, strung along the very edge of the shelf, a chain of softly glowing pearls gleamed with a steady radiance. Each dome sent out its welcome beams of light, visible reminders, in that cruel undersea world, of comfort and warmth and rest. In the watery invisible atmosphere, the domes glowed like a diadem of stars.

There is movement around the domes. Shining forms, sparkling and glittering scales in the light, streamlined bodies, waving, glinting fins—fish. Fish by the billion. Schools of fish, colleges of fish, whole universities, twisting and turning—and yet—moving with a strangely ordered purpose. With all their swarming to and fro, their playful scurryings, their gobbling for food, their sudden inexplicable surges, they never stray beyond the limits of the shelf, never seek to explore the blue depths beneath. And above them as the water pales ever greener and mellower and begins subtly to move in answer to other forces than those slow agonized creepings of drowned currents, there are more fish, civilizations of fish both large and small, all responding in some mysterious way to an over-riding controlling force.

Set forward on a jutting cliff that stands out like some sentinel finger from the undersea shelf, there hovers over rock and ooze only darkness—where surely there should be another link of light ringing the edge of the scarp. Fragmentary shadows flicker in the water. Lonely lights curve sharply, veer away. Into the twilight dimension seeps a murky cloud. A rolling cloud that is out of keeping with the crystalline liquid atmosphere. Sound shatters the silence of the depths. Mutterings and flutings, the involuntary whistles of fish and the sharp, hard pinging of sonic waves. Shining bubbles rise and burst. The dome is silent and dead. Shapes clash and struggle around it. Giant jaws open wide.

Puny figures struggle—figures un-fishlike in this world of pitiless ferocity and unknowing cruelty—figures with four spindly inefficient appendages in place of powerful streamlined fins and tail.

Tiny figures that have no place in this undersea world of darkness and cold and death.

THE spaceport was crowded. The monorail was crowded. The streets bulged. Flyovers creaked under pressing humanity. It took him ten minutes before he could dial a taxi. The hotel lobby was crowded. The lift was crowded.

There were just too many damned people.

That was the trouble with Earth, of course. Nothing new in the thought. But coming back after ten years in space, it sort of hit him in the eye.

With just one person sitting waiting demurely by the window, the way he was feeling even his hotel room was crowded.

She wasn’t the type to be overlooked. She attracted a crowd, she crowded your attentions and she more than crowded the shocking-pink orlon tube sweater. She stood up gracefully, with the fluid motion that, under the full effects of one whole gravity, he was still finding difficult, and turned to face him, smiling.

‘Commander Jeremy Dodge?’ Her voice was pleasant and smooth, and yet, in his frame of mind, still linked embarrassingly with the strident hum of the city.

‘That’s right.’ He waited for her to go on.

She made a little gesture with her left hand, the square cut nails gleaming. ‘I’m Elise Tarrant. Mr. Grosvenor’s private secretary.’ She said it as though it explained everything.

Dodge said: ‘This Grosvenor. When do I meet him?’ He put his grip on the end of the bed. ‘He drags me off furlough—and believe me, Miss Tarrant, anyone who can persuade me to give up a mountaineering holiday on the Moon is a grade A persuader—and cajoles me down to Earth. I’m in rather a hurry. If you’d …’

‘That is why I am here, Commander.’

She was coolly amused. Dodge saw, and that made him feel uncomfortably small-boyish, which made him annoyed. It looked as though this self-possessed young lady had the power to shatter his composure. He drew his eyebrows down.

‘Mr. Grosvenor asked me particularly to apologize for your holiday, but he feels that what he has to tell you will more than compensate.’ She paused, and then, with an air of gravity that caught Dodge’s full attention, said: ‘It’s such a big thing, really big, I mean, that your whole life will be altered.’

Dodge grunted. ‘They told me that when we went on the first Jovian expedition.’

She made a little moue of disgust. ‘So many billions that even the U.N. Treasury hasn’t told the full story yet, and for half a dozen little balls of eternally frozen mud.’

‘You don’t think much of the Space Force?’

‘I think you’re all heroes, sure. But I think you get too much applause and too much money and too many medals.’

‘Well, it’s nice to know.’

She caught her upper lip between her teeth. Dodge noticed how red the lips, how white the teeth. That pleased him, in an obscure way. The vero-coloured makeup, flaunted by women he had seen on his brief journey from the space-port to the hotel, had sickened rather than attracted him. The pace of the modern world was so hectic, that even ten tiny years could witness changes of astounding magnitude. She released the lip with a gesture of decision.

‘I’m sorry, Commander. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that.’ She looked at him. ‘You’ll have a better idea of how I feel when you’ve talked to Mr. Grosvenor and seen around …’ She stopped speaking with such force that for a moment to Dodge it was like falling over a precipice of sound. Then she went on, but that quiet voice was uneven now, struggling to hold down some strong emotion. ‘If you are ready, Commander, we can start now.’

‘Start?’ Dodge said, really wondering about that strange change of subject, that sharp cutting off of what the girl had been saying. ‘Start—where to?’

‘To see Mr. Grosvenor. He is staying at the Blue Deep Hotel. It’ll take us about an hour.’

‘An hour!’ Dodge looked surprised. ‘Where is this hotel, then, on the other side of the planet?’

Then, thinking of the traffic and the crowds he said sourly: ‘Or is it in the next block?’

She smiled. It was a sunrise in the spartan hotel room, Dodge began to see different angles to this enigmatic girl. He picked up his bag philosophically, prepared to play out this wild-goose chase until he could hear the straight talk from the lips of persuasive Grosvenor himself.

The telephone rang.

Dodge answered. ‘Yes, this is Commander Dodge speaking. Who is …’

On the line there was a definite click as the receiver was replaced. Whoever had rung had merely confirmed that he was in his room, and had then rung off. Odd.

Elise Tarrant was staring at him uncertainly. He laughed shortly, and said: ‘Wrong number, I expect,’ and realized with a distinct sense of shock that he didn’t think anything of the sort. And, what was odder still, he knew with a curious certainty that the girl didn’t think so, either, and she knew that he knew she felt that. Elise crinkled up her nose, refusing to comment further, and Dodge picked up his bag and they left the room together. The electronic lock hummed cheerfully to itself as the door closed.

Dodge was happy to escape into the hissing maw of the Underground; at least there the atmosphere was air-conditioned and breathable. They hadn’t got round to air-conditioning the streets yet, between the web-work of flyovers and vertical window-pierced cliffs, and the air there just wasn’t breathable; not by the standards of a spaceman who lived off canned air and algae-produced oxygen all his life.

The idea of algae tanks for city-wide air-conditioning, suspended from every cross-over attracted him fleetingly; it was the sort of whacky idea the Dodges could be relied on to dream up in any idle moment. The coast-hugging network of undersea farms would do well out of it, producing algae on an even greater scale than they now did for food-processing and the Space Force’s uses. His Uncle Arthur had gone in for that aquaculture racket, the last he’d heard of him, and oddly, it was about Uncle Arthur that this Grosvenor fellow wanted to talk. Be just like the old villain to have made his pile ploughing up the sea-bottom and herding fish and milking—well, they hadn’t yet arranged to milk fishes; against nature or something. And, anyway, all these undersea ventures, the mile-deep oil wells and coal mines, the intense cultivation or sea-weeds and adapted marine plants, the solid shoals of fish herded about the sea like cattle, all of them seemed to have a cloak of semi-mystery flung about them which a returning spaceman like Dodge just wouldn’t bother his head about.

The train snaked almost silently beneath the city, carrying them out beyond the park-like suburbs and the ring of factory-areas. Dodge leaned forward on the cushioned seat.

‘Can you tell me anything of what this is all about?’ he said pleasantly. ‘Grosvenor mentioned my Uncle Arthur and intimated that he was connected some way. Are you familiar with this—well …’ he paused helplessly, and then said, with a half humorous chuckle: ‘with this case?’

She nodded. ‘I am. Fully. But Mr. Grosvenor expressly wishes to talk to you personally.’

‘Uh—it wouldn’t be any good if I—no, I thought not.’ Dodge sat back. He crossed one knee over the other, and flicked his immaculate Space Navy Blacks into a leading-edge crease. From almost a lifetime in the Space Force, since his parents had died and he had replaced them with his ideals of a man’s place out between the stars, his memory of Uncle Arthur, based on the half-dozen awkward meetings, was vivid. ‘Grosvenor said that Uncle Arthur had left me something, and I told him that all I expected was a bill for the drinks at the funeral. I told him that I wasn’t coming back to Earth just to collect a few thousand “or a decaying house”.’ He looked puzzled. ‘Grosvenor said it was not a few thousand, and that the house was already decayed. What did he mean, Miss Tarrant?’

‘I’m sorry. I am not at liberty to tell you.’ She sounded genuinely sorry too, Dodge realized. The train ran out of the tunnel, nosing upwards to the terminus. People were rising, gathering their belongings, moving for the doors.

Just as Elise rose to her feet, she leaned forward, swaying slightly with the roll of the train, and Dodge, braced against his seat, felt the soft warmth of her body press for a heady moment against him. Then he heard her saying something, something that came in vagrant wafts of sound through the thunder of the blood in his temples.

‘There is a great deal of injustice in the world. I mean real, brutal, callous, criminal injustice. You’ll see. You might be able to do something about it, too.’ Then the train had stopped and the doors had opened and people were streaming for the escalators, and all Dodge could think about was the way Elise had crushed into him. Space makes a man sensitive to these things.

He stumbled along after her, pulling the black space bag free from the crowds jamming the escalator, and began to mull over her words. Injustice? Well, he supposed there was, although he’d not experienced any, except, perhaps, when they’d passed him over the first time for Lieutenant-Commander. But he had the idea that this strong-willed personality, thrusting ahead now, the shocking-pink sweater the target for many wolfish eyes, wouldn’t consider for a micro-fraction of a second that as an example of injustice.

The terminus was a wide white sweep of concrete, flat roofed and with serpentine supporting pillars. Through the frame thus formed Dodge saw such a brilliance of sunshine that he blinked his eyes automatically. The air was crisp and biting, with a tang of ozone and bracing nippiness. They went with the crowd out and down the shallow steps, and there before him was the sea.

It was the first time in his life that he had seen the sea like this, standing on a low cliff-top, looking out across the white-flecked green and blue, and hearing the gentle susurration of shingled shores and feeling the good clean breeze blowing through the dusty pores of his body. Sea birds wheeled and screamed, their cries drifting down the air to him, their bodies minuetting through intricate, formal dances, suspended on curved brave wings against the sky.

‘Surprised?’ Elise said gravely.

‘Yes.’ He decided to be honest. ‘Yes, I am. I’d no idea—it’s beautiful.’

‘It hold its secrets well,’ she said cryptically.

Above them the sky was the faintest, translucent shade of bluer so brilliant that the mere air-glow hurt their eyes. The shining bowl seemed to surge away from them and, recurving, swoop in towards their feet so that the heavy green grass and rich earth of the cliff seemed suspended in an exquisite, precious and infinite globe of diluted light.

With a feeling almost of trespass, he began to follow Elise down the curved pathway to the foot of the cliffs. He’d seen the seas of Earth as few had seen them, gleaming mottled on the vast bulk of the planet, rushing up as his frail rocket fell headlong towards them. That had been a grand and wonderful experience, giving him, for a magic moment, a sense of superiority, of dispassionate calm removed from the troubles, of the world. But this—this was on a different plane altogether. This sense of wonder that pervaded him now was his birthright, something that his ancestors had taken in joy for thousands of years; taken for granted, taken and moulded as their temperaments directed. And he, a child of Earth, was seeing it for the first time.

He began to appreciate an inkling of Elise’s reaction to the Space Force. And then he shrugged off the whole mood and looked about him as he might have done stepping down from the landing ramp of his ship on any strange and alien planet.

The beach was an almost perfect arc of white sand. The sea laved it caressingly, without rancour, as though the titanic power of Neptune had been bridled and harnessed. Staring out to sea, he could just make out the long low dam which made that a fact, and no longer a fancy. This whole area of water before him was fenced off from the turbulence of the ocean. Across its bosom scudded yachts, trim shapes with pouter-pigeon spinnakers and stiff scraps of coloured bunting at their trucks. Catamarans ploughed railway lines of foam and laughing people swallow-tailed in the wake of speedboats, miraculously supported on fragile skis that threw back the light of the sun in golden slivers of speed. Swimmers were everywhere. Their tanned arms flashed above the waves. Dodge saw with dumfounded amazement a tot of no more tha. . .