THE BICENTENNIAL MAN Read online

  Demerest said cautiously, “I’ve asked to come here, Mrs. Bergen, because I’m a safety engineer. Ocean-Deep has an enviable safety record--”

  “Not one fatality in almost twenty years,” said Bergen cheerfully. “Only one death by accident in the C-shelf settlements and none in transit by either sub or ‘scaphe. I wish I could say, though, that this was the result of wisdom and care on our part. We do our best, of course, but the breaks have been with us--”

  “John,” said Annette, “I really wish you’d let Mr. Demerest speak.”

  “As a safety engineer,” said Demerest, “I can’t afford to believe in luck and breaks. We cannot stop Moon-quakes or large meteroites out at Luna City, but we are designed to minimize the effects even of those. There are no excuses or there should be none for human failure. We have not avoided that on Luna City; our record recently has been”--his voice dropped--”bad. While humans are imperfect, as we all know, machinery should be designed to take that imperfection into account. We lost twenty men and women--”

  “I know. Still, Luna City has a population of nearly one thousand, doesn’t it? Your survival isn’t in danger.”

  “The people on Luna City number nine hundred and seventy-two, including myself, but our survival is in danger. We depend on Earth for essentials. That need not always be so; it wouldn’t be so right now if the Planetary Project Council could resist the temptation toward pygmy economies--”

  “There, at least, Mr. Demerest,” said Bergen, “we see eye to eye. We are not self-supporting either, and we could be. What’s more, we can’t grow much beyond our present level unless nuclear ‘scaphes are built. As long as we keep that buoyancy principle, we are limited. Transportation between Deep and Top is slow; slow for men; slower still for materiel and supplies. I’ve been pushing, Mr. Demerest, for--“

  “Yes, and you’ll be getting it now, Mr. Bergen, won’t you?”

  “I hope so, but what makes you so sure?”

  “Mr. Bergen, let’s not play around. You know very well that Earth is committed to spending a fixed amount of money on expansion projects-on programs designed to expand the human habitat-and that it is not a terribly large amount. Earth’s population is not going to lavish resources in an effort to expand either outer space or inner space if it thinks this will cut into the comfort and convenience of Earth’s prime habitat, the land surface of the planet.” Annette broke in. “You make it sound callous of Earthmen, Mr. Demerest, and that’s unfair.. It’s only human, isn’t it, to want to be secure? Earth is overpopulated and it is only slowly reversing the havoc inflicted on the planet by the Mad Twentieth. Surely man’s original home must come first, ahead of either Luna City or Ocean-Deep. Heavens, Ocean-Deep is almost home to me, but I can’t want to see it flourish at the expense of Earth’s land.”

  “It’s not an either-or, Mrs. Bergen,” said Demerest earnestly. “If the ocean and outer space are firmly, honestly, and intelligently exploited, it can only redound to Earth’s benefit. A small investment will be lost but a large one will redeem itself with profit.”

  Bergen held up his hand. “Yes, I know. You don’t have to argue with me on that point. You’d be trying to convert the converted. Come, let’s eat. I tell you what. We’ll eat here. If you’ll stay with us overnight, or several days for that matter-you’re quite welcome-there will be ample time to meet everybody. Perhaps you’d rather take it easy for a while, though.”

  “Much rather,” said Demerest. “Actually, I want to stay here…I would like to ask, by the way, why I met so few people when we went through the units.”

  “No mystery,” said Bergen genially. “At any given time, some fifteen of our men are asleep and perhaps fifteen more are watching films or playing chess or, if their wives are with them--”

  “Yes, John,” said Annette.

  “--And it’s customary not to disturb them. The quarters are constricted and what privacy a man can have is cherished. A few are out at sea; three right now, I think. That leaves a dozen or so at work in here and you met them.”

  “I’ll get lunch,” said Annette, rising.

  She smiled and stepped through the door, which closed automatically behind her.

  Bergen looked after her. “That’s a concession. She’s playing woman for your sake. Ordinarily, it would be just as likely for me to get the lunch. The choice is not defined by sex but by the striking of random lightning.”

  Demerest said, “The doors between units, it seems to me, are of dangerously limited strength.”

  “Are they?”

  “If an accident happened, and one unit was punctured--”

  “No meteorites down here,” said Bergen, smiling.

  “Oh yes, wrong word. If there were a leak of any sort, for any reason, then could a unit or a group of units be sealed off against the full pressure of the ocean?”

  “You mean, in the way that Luna City can have its component units automatically sealed off in case of meteorite puncture in order to limit damage to a single unit.”

  “Yes,” said Demerest with a faint bitterness. “As did not happen recently.”

  “In theory, we could do that, but the chances of accident are much less down here. As I said, there are no meteorites and, what’s more, there are no currents to speak of. Even an earthquake centered immediately below us would not be damaging since we make no fixed or solid contact with the ground beneath and are cushioned by the ocean itself against the shocks. So we can afford to gamble on no massive influx.”

  “Yet if one happened?”

  “Then we could be helpless. You see, it is not so easy to seal off component units here. On the Moon, there is a pressure differentia] of just one atmosphere; one atmosphere inside and the zero atmosphere of vacuum outside. A thin seal is enough. Here at Ocean-Deep the pressure differential is roughly a thousand atmospheres. To secure absolute safety against that differentia] would take a great deal of money and you know what you said about getting money out of PPC. So we gamble and so far we’ve been lucky.”

  “And we haven’t,” said Demerest.

  Bergen looked uncomfortable, but Annette distracted both by coming in with lunch at this moment.

  She said, “I hope, Mr. Demerest, that you’re prepared for Spartan fare. All our food in Ocean-Deep is prepackaged and requires only heating. We specialize in blandness and nonsurprise here, and the non-surprise of the day is a bland chicken a la king, with carrots, boiled potatoes, a piece of something that looks like a brownie for dessert, and, of course, all the coffee you can drink. “

  Demerest rose to take his tray and tried to smile. “It sounds very like Moon fare, Mrs. Bergen, and I was brought up on that. We grow our own micro-organismic food. It is patriotic to eat that but not particularly enjoyable. We hope to keep improving it, though.”

  “I’m sure you will improve it...

  Demerest said, as he ate with a slow and methodical chewing, “I hate to ride my specialty, but how secure are you against mishaps in your air-lock entry?”

  “It is the weakest point of Ocean-Deep,” said Bergen. He had finished eating, well ahead of the other two, and was half through with his first cup of coffee. “But there’s got to be an interface, right? The entry is as automatic as we can make it and as fail-safe. Number one: there has to be contact at every point about the outer lock before the fusion generator begins to heat the water within the lock. What’s more, the contact has to be metallic and of a metal with just the magnetic permeability we use on our ‘scaphes. Presumably a rock or some mythical deep-sea monster might drop down and make contact at just the right places; but if so, nothing happens.

  “Then, too, the outer door doesn’t open until the steam has pushed the water out and then condensed; in other words, not till both pressure and temperature have dropped below a certain point. At the moment the outer door begins to open, a relatively slight increase in internal pressure, as by water entry, will close it again.”

  Demerest said, “But then, once men have passed thro
ugh the lock, the inner door closes behind them and sea water must be allowed into the lock again. Can you do that gradually against the full pressure of the ocean outside?”

  “Not very.” Bergen smiled. “It doesn’t pay to fight the ocean too hard. You have to roll with the punch. We slow it down to about one-tenth free entry but even so it comes in like a rifle shot-louder, a thunderclap, or waterclap, if you prefer. The inner door can hold it, though, and it is not subjected to the strain very often. Well, wait, you heard the waterclap when we first met, when Javan’s ‘scaphe took off again. Remember?”

  “I remember,” said Demerest. “But here is something I don’t understand. You keep the lock filled with ocean at high pressure at all times to keep the outer door without strain. But that keeps the inner door at full strain. Somewhere there has to be strain.”

  “Yes, indeed. But if the outer door, with a thousand-atmosphere differential on its two sides, breaks down, the full ocean in all its millions of cubic miles tries to enter and that would be the end of all. If the inner door is the one under strain and it gives, then it will be messy indeed, but the only water that enters Ocean-Deep will be the very limited quantity in the lock and its pressure will drop at once. We will have plenty of time for repair, for the outer door will certainly hold a long time.”

  “But if both go simultaneously--”

  “Then we are through.” Bergen shrugged. “I need not tell you that neither absolute certainty nor absolute safety exists. You have to live with some risk and the chance of double and simultaneous failure is so microscopically small that it can be lived with easily.”

  “If all your mechanical contrivances fail--”

  “They fail safe,” said Bergen stubbornly.

  Demerest nodded. He finished the last of his chicken. Mrs. Bergen was already beginning to clean up. “You’ll pardon my questions, Mr. Bergen, I hope.”

  “You’re welcome to ask. I wasn’t informed, actually, as to the precise nature of your mission here. ‘Fact finding’ is a weasel phrase. However, I assume there is keen distress on the Moon over the recent disaster and as safety engineer you rightly feel the responsibility of correcting whatever shortcomings exist and would be interested in learning, if possible, from the system used in Ocean-Deep.”

  “Exactly. But, see here, if all your automatic contrivances fail safe for some reason, for any reason, you would be alive, but all your escape-hatch mechanisms would be sealed permanently shut. You would be trapped inside Ocean-Deep and would exchange a slow death for a fast one.”

  “It’s not likely to happen but we’d hope we could make repairs before our air supply gave out. Besides we do have a manual backup system.”

  “Oh?”

  “Certainly. When Ocean-Deep was first established and this was the only unit-the one we’re sitting in now-manual controls were all we had. That was unsafe, if you like. There they are, right behind you--covered with friable plastic.”

  “In emergency, break glass,” muttered Demerest, inspecting the covered setup.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Just a phrase commonly used in ancient fire-fighting systems ...Well, do the manuals still work, or has the system been covered with your friable plastic for twenty years to the point where it has all decayed into uselessness with no one noticing?”

  “Not at all. It’s periodically checked, as all our equipment is. That’s not my job personally, but I know it is done. If any electrical or electronic circuit is out of its normal working condition, lights flash, signals sound, everything happens but a nuclear blast. , ..You know, Mr. Demerest, we are as curious about Luna City as you are about Ocean-Deep. I presume you would be willing to invite one of our young men--”

  “How about a young woman?” interposed Annette at once.

  “I am sure you mean yourself, dear,” said Bergen, “to which

  I can only answer that you are determined to have a baby here and to keep it here for a period of time after birth, and that effectively eliminates you from consideration.”

  Demerest said stiffly, “We hope you will send men to Luna City. We are anxious to have you understand our problems.”

  “Yes, a mutual exchange of problems and of weeping on each other’s shoulders might be of great comfort to all. For instance, you have one advantage on Luna City that I wish we could have. With low gravity and a low pressure differential, you can make your caverns take on any irregular and angular fashion that appeals to your aesthetic sense or is required for convenience. Down here we’re restricted to the sphere, at least for the foreseeable future, and our designers develop a hatred for the spherical that surpasses belief. Actually it isn’t funny. It breaks them down. They eventually resign rather than continue to work spherically.”

  Bergen shook his head and leaned his chair back against a microfilm cabinet. “You know,” he continued, “when William Beebe built the first deep-set chamber in history in the 1930s--it was just a gondola suspended from a mother ship by a half-mile cable, with no buoyancy chambers and no engines, and if the cable broke, good night, only it never did. ...Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, when Beebe built his first deep-sea chamber, he was going to make it cylindrical; you know, so a man would fit in it comfortably. After all, a man is essentially a tall, skinny cylinder. However, a friend of his argued him out of that and into a sphere on the very sensible grounds that a sphere would resist pressure more efficiently than any other possible shape. You know who that friend was?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “The man who was President of the United States at the time of Beebe’s descents-Franklin D. Roosevelt. All these spheres you see down here are the great-grandchildren of Roosevelt’s suggestion.”

  Demerest considered that briefly but made no comment. He returned to the earlier topic. “We would particularly like someone from Ocean-Deep,” he said, “to visit Luna City because it might lead to a great enough understanding of the need, on Ocean-Deep’s part, for a course of action that might involve considerable self-sacrifice.”

  “Oh?” Bergen’s chair came down flat-leggedly on all fours. “How’s that?”

  “Ocean-Deep is a marvelous achievement; I wish to detract nothing from that. I can see where it will become greater still, a wonder of the world. Still--”

  “Still?”

  “Still, the oceans are only a part of the Earth; a major part, but only a part. The deep sea is only part of the ocean. It is inner space indeed; it works inward, narrowing constantly to a point.”

  “I think,” broke in Annette, looking rather grim, “that you’re about to make a comparison with Luna City.”

  “Indeed I am,” said Demerest. “Luna City represents outer space, widening to infinity. There is nowhere to go down here in the long run; everywhere to go out there.”

  “We don’t judge by size and volume alone, Mr. Demerest,” said Bergen. “The ocean is only a small part of Earth, true, but for that very reason it is intimately connected with over five billion human beings. Ocean-Deep is experimental but the settlements on the continental shelf already deserve the name of cities. Ocean-Deep offers mankind the chance of exploiting the whole planet--”

  “Of polluting the whole planet,” broke in Demerest excitedly. “Of raping it, of ending it. The concentration of human effort to Earth itself is unhealthy and even fatal if it isn’t balanced by a turning outward to the frontier.”

  “There is nothing at the frontier,” said Annette, snapping out the words. “The Moon is dead, all the other worlds out there are dead. If there are live worlds among the stars, light-years away, they can’t be reached. This ocean is living.”

  “The Moon is living, too, Mrs. Bergen, and if Ocean-Deep allows it, the Moon will become an independent world. We Moon-men will then see to it that other worlds are reached and made alive and, if mankind but has patience, we will reach the stars. We! We! It is only we Moon-men, used to space, used to a world in a cavern, used to an engineered environment, who could endure life in a spa
ceship that may have to travel centuries to reach the stars.”

  “Wait, wait, Demerest,” said Bergen, holding up his hand. “Back up! What do you mean, if Ocean-Deep allows it? What have we to do with it?”

  “You’re competing with us, Mr. Bergen. The Planetary Project Commission will swing your way, give you more, give us less, because in the short term, as your wife says, the ocean is alive and the Moon, except for a thousand men, is not; because you are a half-dozen miles away and we a quarter of a million; because you can be reached in an hour and we only in three days. And because you have an ideal safety record and we have had-misfortunes.”

  “The last, surely, is trivial. Accidents can happen any time, anywhere.”

  “But the trivial can be used,” said Demerest angrily. “It can be made to manipulate emotions. To people who don’t see the purpose and the importance of space exploration, the death of Moon-men in ,accidents is proof enough that the Moon is dangerous, that its colonization is a useless fantasy. Why not? It’s their excuse for saving money and they can then salve their consciences by investing part of it in Ocean-Deep instead. That’s why I said the accident on the Moon had threatened the survival of Luna City even though it killed only twenty people out of nearly a thousand.”

  “I don’t accept your argument. There has been enough money for both for a score of years.”

  “Not enough money. That’s exactly it. Not enough investment to make the Moon self-supporting in all these years, and then they use that lack of self-support against us. Not enough investment to make Ocean-Deep self-supporting either. ... But now they can give you enough if they cut us out altogether.”

  “Do you think that will happen?”

  “I’m almost sure it will, unless Ocean-Deep shows a statesmanlike concern for man’s future.”

  “How?”

  “By refusing to accept additional funds. By not competing with Luna City. By putting the good of the whole race ahead of self-interest.”