Undersea City by Frederik & Williamson Pohl Read Free Book Online Page B

up in the dome right now, having himself a time.”
    “I don’t believe it,” I said, but there seemed to be every chance that Harley was right.
    The guards checked our passes, and we took the elevator up to the dome itself. We walked out into Krakatoa Dome, into the throbbing of the pump rooms and the air circulators, past the locks where a sleek cargo sub-sea liner was nuzzling into the edenite pressure chamber.
    I said suddenly: “Let’s look for him.”
    Harley gloated: “Ha! So you admit—”
    Then he stopped.
    He looked at my face, shrugged, changed expression. And then, after a moment, he squinted at his watch. “Well,” he said a little reluctantly, “I’ll tell you how it is. I don’t mind, but I’ve got a date for dinner with my folks in three hours. Are you coming along?”
    I said: “Help me look for Bob.”
    He shrugged. “Oh, all right,” he said at last. “Why not? But I’m not missing my father’s chef’s cooking! If we don’t find him by nineteen hundred hours—that’s it!”
    We stepped onto a circular slidewalk, and then off it again at a radial way that was moving toward the center of the dome.
    “Most men off duty head for the tipper southeast octant,” Harley said expertly. “That’s the White Way, as we call it—where the shops and theaters and restaurants are. Now, you lubbers want to be careful on a slidewalk, because it’ll pitch you off if you aren’t braced for it. Watch the way I do it, Jim.”
    “I’m not exactly a lubber,” I protested.
    He shrugged. “Depends on your point of view,” he said reasonably. “You’ve spent a couple weeks in a dome. I’ve spent my whole life here. I don’t know what you are—to a lubber; but I know what you are to me.”
    He grinned. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll give you the inside drift as we go.”
    He led me toward another bank of elevators.
    “To begin with,” he lectured, “Krakatoa Dome’s a perfect hemisphere, except for the tube at the top, that goes to the qoating terminal on the surface. It’s two thousand feet in diameter, and a thousand feet high—not counting the drainage pumps, the warehouse districts and so on, that are actually quarried out of the sea floor. And not counting Station K.”
    “I see,” I said, hardly listening. I was scanning every passing face, hoping to see Bob.
    “Those pumps are what keep out the sea. No quake is likely really to hurt the dome itself—it would take Force Eight at the least, probably Nine or even Ten. But even a smaller quake, if it hit just wrong, might fissure the rock underneath us, where there’s no edenite film. Then—boom! The sea would come pounding in!”
    I glanced at him. He actually seemed to enjoy the prospect!
    “Don’t let it get you, Jim,” he said consolingly. “I mean, it’s true that we’re living on the lid of an active seismic zone. What of it? It’s true that if the pumps went, and the basic rock split, we couldn’t keep the sea out of the dome. But there’s still a chance that we might survive, you know. Oh, not down at Station K—that would go, sure. But the dome itself, up here, is divided into octants, and each one can be sealed off in a second!
    “Of course,” he said meditatively, “we might not have a second.
    “Especially,” he added, “if anything happened to the power supply, and the automatic octant barriers didn’t go on!”
    I let him talk. Why not? He was trying to scare a lubber—but, no matter what he thought, I wasn’t a lubber. I love the deeps too well to feel that they are an enemy!
    But then we were up a dozen decks, and I said:
    “That’s enough, Harley. All right? I’d like to concentrate on looking for Bob.”
    He grinned. “Got under your skin a little, eh?” he said amiably—and wrongly. “All right. Well, we’re a long way from Zero Deck. This is the shopping area; let’s take a look around.”
    We came out onto a crowded street. It didn’t look much different from any business street