Greavy glanced at Ryan for approval before continuing. Ryan nodded, and Greavy went on: “It’s heat- driven electrical energy drawn from volcanic sources under the sea floor—hot springs and fumaroles, sulfur chimneys, and the like. ‘Geothermal’ some call it. A virtually endless source of power. Wonderful, isn’t it? No coal needed, no oil!” Greavy said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Once the supply line is set up, the energy flow goes on as long as the earth retains its heat!”
“We have twelve domes like this one arrayed around the site,” Ryan added proudly. “We sank them, pumped them out. Pipe in clean air. The domes are all connected by tunnels we’ve built right on top of the seabed.”
“Not sure I believe it, guv,” Bill said, staring at the big gripper, “and here I am looking at it!”
Ryan chuckled. “Then you shall see it up close! Greavy—ask Wallace to take us in for a closer look!”
Roland Wallace was a bearded, dour man of about forty with deep-set eyes and a furrowed brow. Ryan introduced him. “This is a man you can count on to get things done in tough conditions.”
Wallace led them to a large steel door, one of three placed symmetrically around the dome. He checked a couple of dials on a panel beside the door, nodded to himself, and spun the wheel. He grunted as it swung open into a tunnel made of some amalgam pocked by vents and ribbed in metal. “Now if you gentlemen will wait to the side here…”
They pressed against the wall to the right, Ryan with an expression of proprietary pride. After a minute, the battery-powered gripper drove slowly through the doorway, whirring to itself. Affixed to its rear was a small cockpit, where Wallace drove, the gripper’s jointed, black-metal arms retracted; behind him came a little radio- slaved tram, reminding Bill of a small funicular without the cable. It seemed to be driving itself—and it stopped in front of Ryan and Bill when the gripper stopped.
“Step in,” Ryan said, and they climbed into the leather-mesh seats of the shuttle, side by side. The gripper moved off, and the little shuttle followed.
They passed under the electric lights of the tunnel for what seemed a quarter mile when suddenly a killer whale flashed overhead, its toothy mouth agape. Bill recoiled. “Oi!”
Ryan laughed dryly. “Look closer!”
Bill leaned out of the tram and saw that the walls here were transparent—they were a heavy, polished glass of some kind banded with metal. Light shone upward from electric lamps on the seabed outside the transparent section. He could see the tunnel, mostly cement, occasionally glass, wending out across the seabed toward the framework of Rapture. The foundations of Rapture stood out in shades of dark green and indigo.
“It’s hard to reckon where the water stops and the glass starts—it’s like we’re in the water with ’em!” Bill muttered. A diffuse shimmer from the surface far above answered the glow from the seabed lamps. Schools of fish emerged from billowing forests of green kelp and purple sea fans: tuna, cod, and fish he couldn’t identify, gleaming with iridescence, threading in and out of light and shadow. A squid pulsed by and then another great black-and-white orca swept by. Bill was awestruck. “Look at that bloody thing! Fast as a swallow but big enough to swallow a man! It’s flyin’ right over us!”
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Ryan mused, gazing through the curving, transparent pane as they rolled along. “Fairly obvious, looking out at a glorious prospect like this one, why I’m calling the city
“Nothing but glass, holding out all that water?” Bill marveled. “We’re down fair deep! All that bloody great pressure…!”
“I’m not ready to share all my secrets with you yet, Bill, but that is in fact a perfect merging of glass—and metal. Something new called submolecular bonding. Astonishingly pressure resistant. Expensive, but worth every cent.”
The two vehicles paused under the curving transparent pane of the tunnel, and Bill gazed into the shaded blue distances of the sea. He glimpsed great shadowy shapes swimming along out there, murk-veiled outlines not quite definable—appearing and vanishing. An object on the seabed about five hundred yards away gave off a faint red glow.
“What’s that—glowing, over there?”
“That’s our geothermal energy valve,” said Ryan. “We lost three men setting it up,” he added casually. “But now it seems quite secure…”
“Three men lost?” Bill looked at him, suddenly feeling what a deep, cold place this was. “How many have died working out here?”
“Oh, not so many. Why, when they built the Panama Canal, Bill—how many do you think died there?”
Bill thought back to his reading as he watched the silhouette of a bathysphere drifting by overhead. “If I recall, the French lost about fifteen thousand men. When the Americans finished the job, another five thousand died.”
Ryan nodded briskly. “Risk, Bill—nothing is built without risk. Build an ordinary house and lay the foundations a few inches wrong, the whole thing might collapse on you. Men died for the canal. Men died in the building of great bridges, died attempting to scale the highest mountains. Pioneers died crossing deserts. But we don’t take
Bill saw something like a giant lobster flying over, fifty feet long. Then it passed from a patch of dimness into the glow around the edges of Rapture, and he saw it was one of the smaller, specialized submarines he’d glimpsed earlier. Beams of light projected from headlights like shining eyes; its jointed, pincered mechanical arms were extended to grasp a big ornate segment of metal wall lowering on a cable.
Bill watched a gripper move up opposite it, mechanical arms poised to help ease the big metal section into place on a wall. The wall sections appeared to be sculpted, prefabricated metal pieces. Bill thought of the way the Statue of Liberty had been constructed, with the separate pieces made in Europe, then shipped to America and fitted precisely together to form the gargantuan figure.
He noticed there was no one in the small cockpit at the rear of the gripper—he could just make out the connective control cable trailing behind it.
“How does anyone see enough to control it?” he asked. “The controller watches through a window?”
Ryan smiled. “He’s watching on a screen. We use a television camera on that one.”
“Television! Me second cousin in the Bronx had one. Got a headache, me, when I tried to watch one of those boxes, not a week ago. Fellas caperin’ about in dresses, dancing packs of cigarettes…”
“The technology can be used for more than entertainment,” Ryan said. He pointed across the site. “One of our supply submarines…”
Bill saw it gliding along on the far side of Rapture’s foundations: a larger submarine, without mechanical arms, that could almost have belonged to the British Navy—except that it was pulling a massive oblong shape behind it on a doubled chain. “It’s towing freight in some kind of container,” he remarked.
“There is a little air in the cargo bag, for buoyancy,” Wallace said. “Mostly it contains some dry goods and medical supplies. All netted together.”
“Costly process,” Ryan said. “Off we go, Wallace…”
Wallace returned to the gripper, and they drove on, through tunnel after tunnel, passing through domes crowded with tool racks, machinery, tables. Here and there a lighted window looked out into the deep. Just outside a dome window a crowd of translucent pink jellyfish billowed, trailing long, delicate-looking stingers. A strong smell of sweat and old laundry was a physical presence in the domes; some were partly screened off, and Bill glimpsed men sleeping in cots back there.
“The construction goes on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” Ryan said. “The men work in shifts, ten hours on, fourteen off. We have a recreation dome where beer is sold, music is played, movies are shown. They showed the latest Cagney film there last week…”
“Fan of ’opalong Cassidy meself,” Bill murmured, as they passed into another covered tunnel. A transparent panel gave a glimpse of workers in deep-sea diving suits wrestling a culvert-sized copper pipe into place.
