"Escape From The Crater"

Escape From The Crater

by Carl L. Biemiller

Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

A low, rumbling boom snuffed out all other night noises. The earth beneath their sleeping gear hiccoughed and snatched away their mattresses, leaving them clutching at grasses, which slid from them as though the turf had a life of its own.

Kim fought to his feet, teetered for balance, as the earth swayed again and the boom became a far-distant echo. He sprinted to the lake and took off in a low flat dive for its surface, and churned in a racing crawl for the Adam, which he made a shade ahead of a dripping Tuktu. Together they peeled the hatch, plummeted into the hull, and lunged for the console. Tiny lights were blinking over the seismic readouts as the instruments recorded the death of rocks, distorted beyond their strength into breaking, by incredible energy somewhere within the earth’s crust.

“Shallow focus, epicenter maybe a hundred miles away back in the mountains, magnitude 4.5 on the variant Richter, 4.0 on our more precise stuff, so not a major quake,” said Kim.

“No echoes showing from the west and what we can pick up from the seabed side. Nothing much in after-quake shock either,” added Tuktu. “What do you think? Volcanic?”

“That’s my notion.”

“It’s a right on,” said Major Bell, poking a wet head between them. “And from pretty far down into the mountain too. Signal-wave velocity per kilometer per second is pretty fast, yet too slow for basaltic rocks and ultra basaltics.”

“Forgot you were an expert,” said Kim. “See you brought Warden Lee with you.”

“Other way ‘round.”

“Nobody even yelled,” said Toby. “Wait a minute, Genright yelled.”

“What did he yell?” asked Tuktu.

“That he was going to sleep in for a bit,” said Toby. “I changed his mind. I’ve got him outside waiting.”

“Waiting? Waiting for what?” asked Major Bell.

“Moses,” said Kim grinning at Toby. “And a good thing. Personally, I’m tired of waiting, and after this little token, I don’t think more waiting is indicated. Tomorrow, sir, you and Toby Lee and I, and perhaps one or two of The Kirl’s brighter fellas, are going to take a long walk.”

“What are Gen and I going to do?” asked Tuktu.

“Play with your slide after you do a small chore for me, which I’ll tell you about before we take off.”

“Could be an interesting walk,” said Major Bell thoughtfully.

“Up to you,” smiled Kim. “You’re in command. You’re the land expert. And you might start thinking about little special things we might need.”

“Shoes,” said the cryo. “Mine are fine, but from what I’ve seen of yours, you wouldn’t get a mile or two.”

“I’d never thought of shoes,” muttered Toby.

“That’s why Major Bruce is commanding.”

“All quiet on the lake and with my people,” announced Moses from the hatch.

“And as long as we’re all awake, I feel sort of nibbly and munchy and snacky like hungry,” said Genright following him.

“What do you know about shoes?” demanded Tuktu.

“Without them, your toes would hang out all the time and get stubbed on rocks or walked on and maybe get tangled in stipes when you’re messing around the kelp forests.”

“Yes, but with them, it’s harder to play ‘this little piggy went to market, and this little piggy stayed home’…”

Major Bruce Bell’s face shattered in what one could only call unbelievable disbelief. He stared at Genright and Tuktu slack-jawed. For one tiny moment his eyes filled, unseen by all except Toby Lee, then he swiftly rearranged his features and grinned.

“My, my,” he said softly. “Time does have its passwords.”

“Like shoes,” said Toby in her no-nonsense voice.

“Moses, we need advice, and some help,” said Kim.

The day was past midmorning when they slipped into the brushy woodlands fringing the northwest side of the lake, and set a compass course due west as the shortest route to the sea. Kim, aware of the distance of tunnel length, which was only three quarters of a mile from bal to lake, anticipated a short trip. The cryo thought not. “I’ve traveled a whole day to make one mile in this territory, or terrain like it,” he said. “Nobody moves laterally from point to point. We’ll curve and climb and descend, and anyhow, plan to get back here when we get back.”

Two of the Kirl who had previous overland experience from time to time were assigned by Moses to make the trip with them. Reuben and Caleb were young Kirl, heavily muscled with thick shoulders and forequarters. They looked tough, competent, and confident. They also looked pleased and expectant at the unusual break in their routines in the lake.

Moses had talked with them at length, and whatever he told them gave them a pleasing pride, an extra glow in their dark, questing eyes. They moved like fighters. There were old scar slashes in their dark, gleaming coats to prove it.

Kim and Toby checked out the communications equipment carefully. “We’ll leave recording pickups going in Adam, which you can check when you complete your own chores,” he told Genright and Tuktu. “If we get high enough out of this static pocket or whatever signal block we’re in, I’m contacting outside, probably Olympia Base, unless we’ve got company closer, which I suspect.”

Major Bell checked out stores, capsule meals. “We may supplement these with game, if any,” he said. He checked weapons with Kim, fascinated with their range of use, as he was fascinated with everything in the Adam. He checked out radiation and seismic instruments with Toby, hand-packet sizes for each of them. He checked Kim about liners for the zip suits they intended to wear. “Gets cold up there with the winds.” He checked out two hundred feet of abrasion-proof plastic rope. And he double-checked shoes.

Tuktu had solved that problem. He took their most comfortable old work boots and sprayed the same treated algin gel used for bone splints to build up their soles. He ridged them with his fingers, as the cryo explained, “for rock climbing.” The result was a hard, yet “giving,” and practically impervious, protective walking surface for their feet.

“I can tell you will become a great doctor by the way you use medical stores,” said Genright. “You might throw in a tube or two of that muck, in case somebody breaks a leg and needs shoes.”

“Go load the sleds and crack out gear and shield suits. We’ve got to move pretty soon about our own business,” snapped Tuktu.

It was nearly noon when they reached the first crest of the surrounding hills, mere swells compared to the hump-backed rises ahead of them. They had covered a distance of three quarters of a mile, all of it through brush, over loose rock, at nearly a 60-degree angle. The effort put a twinge in their thighs. “It’ll work out,” said Major Bell enthusiastically. “Just exercising muscles you’re not used to working very hard.”

The Kirl, Reuben, and Caleb, had ranged a wide arc ahead of them. They had gone up the slope at a flowing, deceptively awkward gait, unhampered by stub trees and brush, to explore much of the ridge line, reading the country with their noses as they went. They were not strangers to the land. “There are a group of us who spend a lot of time away from water when we’re using the lake base. And there are a lot of animals who call these lands home that you might not want to meet, which is one reason we’re along,” they explained.

“Comfort to know that the ground is sweet,” said Kim.

“Well, let’s see,” said Major Bruce Bell. “Back in my time”—he grinned—“whenever that was, most people were exposed to about a thousand millirems a year in radiation which came from natural radioactivity in the ground, building-construction materials, cosmic radiation and natural radioactivity, mostly potassium 40, in your body.

“Cosmic radiation ran about thirty-five millirems a year, which disappeared if you were under water and doubled if you were a mile high above sea level, say, in a city like old Denver, Colorado. We’re climbing, so we’ll pick up more cosmic bombardment. But so far, all normal.”

“No sick country supports this much vegetation,” said Toby Lee. “And I’m going to sit a minute while Warden Rockwell kneads the back of my legs.”

“Just the same, there could be hot pockets,” said Kim.

“What? Oh, rub.”

They followed the ridge, still west. It broke off, and a deep valley crossed it like the bar of a T. They worked their way into it, crossed a clear, swiftly running stream, where the Kirl helped themselves to a fish snack, and plowed steadily up another, higher slope to another, still higher ridge than the one they had left. They topped it, and as a vast expanse of view spilled before them, Major Bell gasped. “There, I think, is the first major sign of the nuclear war and the last holocaust.”

At the bottom of a broad valley, a frozen river of shining black glass, its flow locked forever on some route to the sea, glinted in the sunlight. The steep walls which confined it, once rock, were a glaze of the same material. “Obsidian,” murmured Major Bell. “Incredible heat, but not volcanic origin, I think.”

“It’s black,” said Kim. “But from the way the light hits those walls, I seem to see shapes within the cliffs, big ones. Would they be buildings?”

“Buildings would have been battered flat,” said Toby quietly. “Melted like the rock. But the spacing of shapes? Streets?”

“Geologically impossible. Simply not in nature.” The Major seemed to be talking to himself. “But what do I know about possible? Yes, I think there’s a town under glass. There once was an ancient town named Pompeii, buried, yet preserved, by a volcano. Bombs? Lots of bombs? Plus a naturally unstable area?”

“The instruments aren’t showing anything,” said Toby.

“Well, if that valley is cool, the whole region must be,” said Kim. “How much of a region am I talking about anyhow?”

“If you’re talking about what I know as the state of Alaska, part of the United States of America, you’re talking about a land twenty-four hundred miles from its east to west boundaries, thirteen hundred miles from its south edge to its north, and five hundred and ninety thousand plus square miles in area.”

Kim was thoughtful, all that land, clean land, break-out land for the cities…certainly the Council must know about it? Or was it unknown, assumed perilous, as all land was assumed dangerous and uninhabitable to man? The wind flowing over the ridge top, a wind smelling of growing things and sunlight heat so unlike the sea, seemed to expand his brain. Major Bell seemed changed too, more alert, bigger somehow, eager, yet very much in command of himself, and, Kim thought, all of them. The cryo sniffed into that wind, apparently querying it as much as the Kirl. The man picked up rocks and peered at them, stared long into the valley, and lifted equally long gazes to the arc of higher hills and to the mountains, which ringed them.

“What are you looking for?” asked Toby Lee.

“Signs,” said Major Bell. “We built roads. Roads and highways endure for centuries, or did. Atomic destruction wouldn’t remove all traces of them. But geologic forces? That’s something else. This land has been turned over like a pancake, with much of its original ‘bottom’ now on ‘top.’ Volcanic action? Earthquakes? Who knows? But you see this rock?

“It’s red and loaded with iron oxides. It goes back to the Devonian era of what our scientists knew as the Paleozoic period of earth’s history, a period that lasted about three hundred forty-five million years. I know you don’t know what I’m talking about, although I’m never sure with you two. But anyhow, this rock ought to be buried miles in the earth’s crust, not goofing off up here on the top of a high plateau ridge.”

“We know about iron and steel,” said Toby

“Because the cities don’t have much in the line of stable metals, which is why we comb the seas looking for usable remains of metals that our ancestors used, and why we take sea water apart, drop by drop, to mine its contents,” added Kim. “Sometimes I think we don’t have much of lots of things…yet, that is.”

“Why don’t you call in and complain? That’s why we took this little walk, you know.” Toby looked at Kim steadily. As always, he felt the touch of oneness in his mind, their reaching and sharing.

“I’m afraid somebody’ll answer,” he said.

“Well, we’re out of the lake pocket and high enough to be out of any interference belt, I’d say. So let’s get at it.”

“I don’t feel all that high,” said Kim.

“If it’s any encouragement, there seems to be smoke coming from two peaks out there that weren’t smoking when I looked about a minute ago,” said Major Bell. “And this little instrument packet of mine seems to have a small message.”

Toby Lee laughed. “I’d just as soon not be knocked off this hilltop perch with another 4.0 quake while you’re being afraid of the com system.”

“Open band?”

“Well, old Job forty-one and thirty-one hundred kilocycles, our once-private band, was just as wide open the last time we used it,” said Toby.

“That was a code Toby set up from the Bible. Used to read it a lot. First thing I saw when I woke up in the Adam. And I know Job forty-one, thirty-one too… ‘He maketh the deep to boil…’ I get it. You’re afraid you’re about to be boiled, eh?”

“Okay,” muttered Kim. “Everybody listen in and turn red.”

“If nobody minds, we’ll take another swing down the ridge,” said Caleb. He trotted off in that seemingly otter-like gait, followed by Reuben, without waiting for an answer.

“Do they know something we don’t?” asked Toby.

“Everybody does,” said Kim glumly.

They raised a Service voice with Kim’s first broadcast, and his identification. It was a typical one, half syrup, half ice.

“Well,” it said, “Warden Rockwell, the little stranger about whom we all have special instructions. This is Olympia Base, home of the uttermost brass, dreamers all and resident kings of the seas. The next voice you hear will not be mine.”

“Good,” muttered Toby.

“Smart-fanny tech type,” said Kim.

“Hardly, Rockwell. This is Commander Tod Torrance.”

“Sir,” said Kim automatically.

“Report Rockwell.”

“And at once, Rockwell.” The new voice belonged to Commander Jiggs Jensen.

“Sir,” said Kim.

“You were last heard of entering a tunnel in flight from an erupting seabed either in custody of a bunch of ocean robbers named the Kirl, which you had orders to destroy, or as guests of deviant human beings disguised as large sea otters, with orders to survive and report pending future decisions. Anyhow, you’re in trouble around here. So start from the tunnel…”

“Are you at sea?” asked Commander Jensen.

“We’re on the top of a little mountain,” snapped Toby.

“Ah, another member of the mission. Odd place fort the Adam to be, isn’t it? Although, I must say it’s not on the bottom like Adam II. Who else is with you? Selsor and Barnes?”

“Major Bruce Bell, United States Army…”

“Year 1999,” added Toby Lee.

“We picked up some of your people, Major. They are well.”

“From the beginning, Rockwell,” said Commander Torrance. “And now. We can fill in details as we go along.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kim.

Chapter One	Chapter Two	Chapter Three	Chapter Four	Chapter Five
Chapter Six	Chapter Seven	Chapter Eight	Chapter Ten	Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve	Chapter Thirteen	Chapter Fourteen	Chapter Fifteen

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