Undersea City by Frederik & Williamson Pohl Read Free Book Online

“No take book, mister!”
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    Bob glowered. “This lubber’s swiped my Koyetsu! Don’t ask me why, but I want it back!”
    “Koyetsu?” He meant Koyetsu’s book, Principles of Seismology; it was one of our texts. “But, Bob, didn’t you loan it to Harley? I’m nearly sure I saw him with it?”
    “Harley?” Bob hesitated. Then he shrugged and growled: “All right, you. Get out of here!”
    The little janitor lifted his hands over his head, as if afraid that Bob meant to hit him, and ran down the passage and out of sight.
    I went back into the barracks—and there it was. Bob’s book, in plain sight, on the shelf over Harley’s bunk.
    I showed it to him.
    “Oh,” he said. And then: “Oh, yes. I remember now.” But he didn’t look at me.
    “Guess I’ll take a little rest,” he said, and his voice was still disturbed. And he flung himself on his bunk without looking at me.
    It was very puzzling.
    I brooded about it all the way to the spare-parts department, where the microseismometer I wanted was kept. I found it, and then it occurred to me that I would need to check over the geosonde, since Lt. Tsuya wanted us to make a schematic diagram of it. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.
    The geosonde was stored in a moisture-proof box. I found it and began to strip it, thinking about Bob and his odd behavior.
    And then I had no time to think of Bob.
    I opened the box; it was full, all right, but not with a geosonde. It contained a stack of lead weights from a gravity-reading instrument, packed with crumpled paper to keep them from rattling.
    The geosonde was gone!
    Lieutenant Tsuya hit the ceiling.
    “Very bad business, Eden!” he stormed, when I reported the loss the next morning. “Why didn’t you come to me at once?”
    “Well, sir. I—” I hesitated. Why? Because I had been too concerned with Bob Eskow, in truth—but that wasn’t a reason I was anxious to give, since I didn’t want to discuss Bob’s queer actions with the lieutenant.
    “No excuse, eh?” said Lieutenant Tsuya irritably. “Of course not! Well, the three of you stay right here and work on your forecasts. I’m going to initiate an investigation right now. We can’t have Fleet property stolen!”
    Especially—he could have added, but didn’t need to—when it relates to a classified project like quake forecasting. He left us and went to interview the station personnel.
    When he came back his face was like a sunset thundercloud.
    “I want to know what happened to that instrument,” he told us. “I know that it was there two weeks ago, because I put it there myself.”
    He looked around at us. “If any of you know who took it, speak up!”
    His eyes roved over our faces. “Have you seen anybody carrying anything away from the station?”
    I shook my head.
    And then I remembered. Bob, and the bent little janitor. Had Bob handed him something? It had looked like it.
    But I wasn’t sure. I said nothing.
    “All right,” grumbled Lieutenant Tsuya. “I’ll have to report it to the Base Commandant; he’ll take it from there. Now, let’s see those forecasts.”
    Silently we filed before him and handed over our charts and synoptic diagrams, along with the detailed quake forecast we had each of us made, from our own readings and our own observations.
    Lieutenant Tsuya looked at them carefully, a frown on his bland face. He had his own forecast, of course, made as a part of the station’s regular program; he was matching his—the official forecast of what Krakatoa Dome could expect in the way of earth movements, large and small, in the next twenty-four hours—against ours.
    And it was plain that he didn’t like something he saw.
    He looked up at us over his dark-rimmed glasses.
    “Accurate forecasts,” he reminded us, “depend on accurate observations.”
    He dismissed Harley Danthorpe’s work and mine with a curt: “Satisfactory.”
    Then he turned to Bob.
    “Eskow,” he said,