POSEIDON PROJECT

By John Rackham

Working in a closed environment beneath the sea, a preselected group of human beings find that not all the perils facing them are outside their dome.

One

Almost to the day, it was six months after his wedding that Peter Sentry realized he was in love with his wife. The knowledge came out of the silent recesses of his mind as surprisingly delightful as finding a pearl in a plateful of dinner oysters. According to the gentle bleat of his alarm it was 0530, time to climb out and make ready for his day-watch in the power house. Other mornings he had tolerated this untimely summons from sleep, to grumble but submit, knowing it had to be done, but this special morning his irritation melted in the glow of his new find. He slid from bed carefully, adjusting the coverlet so that Belle would still be warm, shuffled to the meal-nook to switch on the preprogrammed breakfast, then moved into the bath cubby to endure the gasping semi-torture that would set him up for the rest of the day.

As he smeared depilating cream, manipulated the toothbrush, squirmed at the impact of ice-cold needles of water, and then stood to let the hot dry blast finish him off, he revolved his new discovery in his mind like a man who knows he has found something valuable but is not quite sure what. That he knew the date was the least wonderful aspect, as everyone here in Poseidon counted the days. Here on the ocean bed eight hundred and eighty yards below the surface, every day passing was a day won and to be marked off the calendar. But that it had taken him six months to discover that he did, after all, love Belle, was a discovery as moving and significant as the astonishing fact that it was true. His next wonder was whether she felt the same ?

Out of the shower and zipping up his thin cotton coveralls while he supervised the last moments of breakfast, he let his mind drift back to the start of it all. And even before the official start, which had been, symbolically, on the 1st of January, he had been a part of the preparations. The master design and all the planning had begun much farther back still, but he knew very little of that. Sentry had first come to the project by applying for and getting a job with the contractors who had undertaken to build and lay a floating island in mid-ocean half a mile across. All he knew at that time was that it was being done just for the hell of it, to see if it could be done. He had a degree in solid-state physics and was particularly interested in the currently exciting developments in fuel-cell power, but he was only twenty-five and vigorous minded enough to be attracted by the chance to take part in something new and challenging.

He’d had two years of it, two years of hard work and hazard, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. Looking back now he could pinpoint precisely the moment he had realized there was something more to “Island” than was being let out for public consumption. The tug-fleet had assembled an enormous concourse of steel cylinders, each twenty-five feet long, hexagonal in section and hollow. These, bolted and hinged together at their edges, had made a vast heaving carpet of buoyancy to support a floor of synthetic rubber a yard thick. And then, over the rubber, struggling men had contrived to lay one more surface, of laminated and rubberized concrete of a carefully calculated flexibility. They had then bonded the whole area with a perimeter wall. It had all made sense, except for one item. Every one of those buoyancy cylinders had a tap-outlet at the top, and it was curious that great care was taken to keep those tap-outlets clear and free when the carpet was laid. He had wondered why, and he had an engineer’s mind.

A tap-fitting could mean only one of two things. Either you wanted to pump something in, or out. And whichever it was, once you did that you lost your buoyancy. You had to. And, as “Island” had only six or seven feet of freeboard by the time the perimeter wall was up, and the intention was to put in place a complex of “dwelling units”, the whole thing would sink!

Sentry collected the breakfast on a tray, grinning at his own struggles to believe the incredible, so long ago. At that moment the notion of sixty selected people deliberately choosing to live for a year on the sea-bed, half a mile below the surface, never occurred to him, and if it had he would have hooted at it. Yet here he was, doing it. He went into the bedroom, swung a spidery table into place, laid the tray on it and shook Belle.

“Come on!” he said, without ceremony. “It’s just on six. You want any of this, or shall I put it in the oven ?”

The humped coverlet stirred, gave a long sigh and ten finger-tips appeared, pushing it back to reveal a tousled mass of blonde, almost silvery hair, and two enormous blue eyes. They were the biggest and bluest eyes he had ever seen, and on those alone, Belle was beautiful. The rest of her was non-spectacular, was comfortably homely.

“I never heard the alarm,” she mumbled, sitting all the way up and stretching luxuriously.

“Remember me?” he scorned. “I live here. You’ve been lying there just waiting for me to bring this in. You don’t fool me, Tinkle.”

“It’s not fair!” She finger-combed her hair from her face and grinned as she reached for her cup. “I’ve no secrets any more.”

The idea that anyone so transparently honest and candid could ever have secrets at all was ludicrous enough to make him chuckle, but as he perched on the bedside to take up his own cup his mirth died away.

“Perhaps you do still have one. I know I have. Something I discovered only a few minutes ago.”

“Conundrums at this hour? What have you discovered?”

“That I am in love with you, Tinkle.” He said it quite seriously. “The buzzer woke me, and there it was in my mind. Utterly obvious. And wonderful.”

She gazed at him over the rim of her cup, then moved it enough to say, “Now what am I supposed to do? You’ll be off to work in twenty minutes!”

“Just forget you’re a biologist for a moment. You might tell me whether some similar sort of conclusion had reached your mind or not ? That’s what really matters, isn’t it?”

“Right.” She nodded. “You always do know, exactly, what it is that matters. The important things. I noticed that about you a long time ago, and I’ve been in love with you for a long time. Doesn’t it sound odd ? But I didn’t tell you, because it wouldn’t have been right.”

“That’s true. You’d never try to influence me. That’s your way. But I had to tell you, because that’s my way.”

“I’m so glad you did. Can you remember just what it was that made it go click in your mind?”

Sentry harried a small heap of pressure-cooked sea-greens and pondered the point. “Something like this. Six months gone. Six months to go. And then all over bar the studies, the appraisal of data, the reports, the tedious abstracts. But this, this life down here—all over and finished. All of us free to go our separate ways and pick up normal life again. You know? And it hit me then. I didn’t want it. I just couldn’t imagine the future without you as part of it. And then I knew.”

“That’s a good way,” she murmured, spearing a last piece of white fishmeat with her fork. “With me it was a long time ago, and sudden. The first big blackout, remember?”

Sentry remembered very well. That had been the colony’s first major fright, and a combination of circumstances engineered by malicious coincidence. With a pressure of millions of tons per square foot to keep at bay, steady power and throbbing machinery were absolutely essential, and potential defects were chased and corrected rigorously. One ring-main was out of service for a periodical inspection, the other perfectly capable of carrying full load and a bit over. But—just as Sophia Menin, in Biochemistry, moved the switch to activate the big centrifuge, so, at that precise moment, the marine biology team under Luis Sanchez had rapped the button to start opening the armoured outside door to Sea-Lock Two, so that they could get back in from an expedition across the sea-bed. “B” ring-main could have accepted one surge, but not both. Protective trips went into action automatically. Instant blackout, a kind of silent death.

Sentry had just been leaving Power-West, was barely out of the entrance when the “night” fell. Running like a madman, he had managed to get back in and up to the control-room just in time to stop his relief, Charlie Snow, from throwing in the big breakers by hand.

“Charlie! For God’s sake—no!” He could recall Snow’s face now, and how it had gone sick-white in the feeble glow of emergency battery-power.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, “I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted the power back.”

“All right. But let’s do it right. Lighting circuits first. You get on the visiphone and warn all the labs and everybody else—operate their ‘off’ switches on anything using heavy power. Go on!”

Within half an hour everything was back to normal, lights, circulators, temperature-coils, atmosphere-plant and then the heavy stuff, section by section, and no harm done apart from frayed nerves. But Sentry had spent a further valuable hour hammering home the lesson to be learned and circulating it to all departments. “In the event of another major power failure, switch off all major current-consuming plant immediately.”

“That was a lulu!” he grinned. “If Charley had thrown that switch, and fed all that load straight on to the generators—well, we wouldn’t be here right now to talk about it. We were all pretty much on edge in those days. It couldn’t happen now.”

“That’s not the point, Peter. I was as scared as anyone, at first. But I knew you should have been on your way home. You didn’t come. The power came back, all normal, and still you didn’t come. Then I realized I was still afraid, but not for myself, for the dome, for anything else except you. You mattered more than anything else in the world. That’s when I knew.”

“But that was four months ago. You’ve known all that time? Belle, am I slow?”

“Not really,” she smiled. “You’re a man. It’s different for you.”

“Whatever that may mean,” he scoffed. “All the same though, it does make a difference.”

“What kind of difference?”

Sentry got to his feet hastily. “Oh no,” he said, “you’re not getting me involved in a philosophical discussion. I haven’t that kind of mind. Let’s just say I consider it a bonus, and myself the most fortunate of men.” He put out his wrist to see the time and gasped. “Fortunate or not, Charley will have blood in his eye if I don’t get going!” He stood a moment in awkwardness then stooped to kiss her, very gently. “ ‘Bye now. See you tonight.”

For a long while after he had gone, Belle Sentry sat quite still in her bed, dreaming and feeling supremely and foolishly happy. For six nerve-taut months she and Peter had lived together as man and wife, had grown to know and respect each other, with many shared surprises and delights, but that was the first time he had ever kissed her goodbye just like that. Then she too caught sight of the clock and made haste to rise and dress and attend to her household chores before leaving to carry on with her own work in Biology.

Two

It was 0630 as Sentry cleared the cluster of buildings that made up the dome centre and set away to walk to Power-West, out at the rim. He was in good time and didn’t hurry himself. At his back was the orderly array of dwelling units, conference and recreation rooms, stores and supplies, all set around the central column that was the emergency-escape tube and decompression-chambers. It was a pile that towered like a temple, reaching to the blue-grey “sky” up there, that layered bubble of acryllic resins and rubbers and foamed concrete that was the edge of this little world. It glowed now with the diffuse blue of “night”. He knew that in an hour and a half from now there would be a mass exodus from the centre as the colonists tackled the problems of yet one more day under pressure, and the light would change to brightness. He had little eye for it this morning, or for the disciplined flower-beds and vegetable plots that hugged the path, all grown on synthetic soils and humus won from the sea out there. Ahead of him and all round the rim were the workshops, the laboratories, the busy places where the colonists toiled with all the wit and resource they could bring to keep this isolated world a going proposition.

He could remember how the true extent of the project had unfolded itself to him stage by stage. Because he had felt certain “they” were going to sink the “Island” and couldn’t imagine why, and was tantalized by that, he had Volunteered to stay on for the “building programme”. Among various unspecified prefabricated sections coming in by freight he had seen the unmistakable contours of what had to be a power-generating plant. And then another. And of advanced design, too. He had applied at once to the site-superintendent.

“Those power-plants,” he said, “are they for show, or use?”

McTaggart had told him, “Just as soon as ever we can get them operating, we will. Make our own juice. Why? You looking for a better job, mister ?”

“If there’s one going, yes. I’ve a degree in that stuff. Want to try me out?” He hadn’t cared whether McTaggart was getting a power-engineer cheaper that way than by hiring one from shore. That didn’t matter. What did matter was that he now had a job he could get his teeth into, plus the assurance that he would stay with the project until the end, whatever that was. And so he had been on hand at the unfolding of the next stage. Looking about him now, at the warm dry quiet, it was hard to recall what it had been like when open to the winds, the lash and whip of sea-spray and the continuously unsteady rippling motion of the great waves. He would never have called it a place to live, not by choice.

“To live? Here?”

“Yes, Mr. Sentry. People will live here.” It was his first meeting with Dr. Andrew Kingsley, who headed the little group of serious-faced men who had come to inspect progress on the vast heaving disk. Kingsley, leonine and quietly assured, had gone on. “Imagine this entirely enclosed. Assume sixty people, their needs and an extensive provision of workshops and equipment for research, all within this circle. Assume, as we are doing, a load of about fifty megawatts overall. Now, in your opinion, if you were asked to depend on this power-plant as installed, would you? If it was your life at stake?”

It was put in a way to make Sentry think hard and he did. But he knew the plant by that time, had nursed it through teething troubles. “You’ve two stations,” he said. “Either one can carry a hundred megawatts alone, comfortably. I’d say there was a generous safety factor. I’d trust it, personally.” But he had added the caution. “The finest plant in the world is no better than the people who run it, mind. You want the right people.”

“You may leave that point to us,” Kingsley had smiled, and the implications had provoked Sentry into asking further questions. The answers had stunned him only slightly more than the utter conviction in Kingsley’s manner, a degree of conviction that made doubt seem an impertinence.

“I can go along,” Sentry declared, “with the idea of inflating a dome over this thing. And even with the idea of multi-layering it to withstand pressure. And of course it will sink, and it can be steered down and secured by anchor cables. All that is possible. But how in the name of sanity do you intend to persuade sixty sane people to try to live inside the thing in those conditions?”

“Persuade is hardly the word, Mr. Sentry. The colonists will be taking part in a tremendous experiment, under strenuous conditions. The research results will be invaluable and the prestige enormous. I anticipate ten—no, a hundred times the numbers we will be able to use. Only those who can pass the most rigorous testing will be acceptable even for consideration in the first instance. I have already spent some considerable time and thought, with the best expert advice, on the screening process. There’ll be no shortage of applicants, I assure you. Our difficulty will be in deciding who to leave out! Give a genuine scientist just the hint that something special is afoot in his own particular line, and you try and keep him out!”

“They’ll be all scientists, then?”

“Of course. I want keen and inquisitive young people, trained to be objective, versatile and ingenious, with a sense of adventure. And it will be quite an added inducement for them to know they will have a whole year’s handsome salary waiting for them, untouched, on completion. I’ll get my sixty. Fifty-eight, rather, for myself and my wife will make two for a start.”

Kingsley had been absolutely right. Long before the pressurizing details of the Island cover-dome had been finalized the applicants began to flood in. Sentry was able to guess the extent of the flood by what happened to his own application. After a lot of hard thought and deciding he had as good a set of qualifications as anyone, perhaps better than most, and impelled also by sheer curiosity, he had completed a form, attended a strenuous interview—only to discover that he was a long, long way down the waiting list in his own field. It was a shock, and a spur. When the second-stage qualifying literature reached him he tackled it much more intently, dredging his mind for all the additional qualifications he could think of. He ran into one question that shook him.

“Are you prepared to be formally married and to accept as a living-partner for the duration of the project period, a person of the opposite sex who will be chosen by sociological tests as being maximally compatible with yourself, this in order that the project may simulate as far as possible a normal Earth colony? Answer yes or no. If already married, mark X.”

He hesitated a long time and then the thought of the dozens, possibly hundreds, who lay ahead of him decided the issue. After all, what was a year of sharing research with some stranger ? She would be a rational, sane person, and a scientist. Was it so terrible? He marked “yes” and went on to complete the paper. Just like that!

He shook his head in wonder at the thought as he reached the entrance to Power-West and passed inside. At once the unusually vigorous song of power from the banked thyristors caught his ear. Overload ? He ran up the corkscrew stair to the control-room, to where Charley Snow sat, reading.

“Hi!” he said. “We’re shoving it out a bit, aren’t we? What’s new?”

“Hi, Peter!” Snow got to his feet and stretched. “Nothing much. Bit of trouble over East. About an hour ago Alex reported severe blockage and drop in water-flow on first and second inlets, so we switched the load over to us, so as to give him a free hand to deal with his troubles.”

Sentry nodded thoughtfully. “Two inlets at a time, eh? That’s new. Any word on results?”

“Not so far. Doesn’t sound like weed.”

“No. All right, Charley, away you go. See you at seven.”

Snow went away whistling. Sentry spent a routine ten minutes checking over the arrays of instruments and telltales, just to satisfy himself. Over the months much of the plant-operation business had been given over to the central computer for automation, bit by bit. In an emergency the computer could have taken over entirely, but all eight of the power-engineers had agreed, early on, that it was better that they kept some routine duties under their own hands, if only to give a man something responsible to do. Satisfied that all was in order he moved to the visiphone and buttoned for Power-East. As the square, hard-planed face of Georgi Solkov stabilized on the screen it creased into a friendly grin.

“Good morning, Peter. We have fishes, I think.”

“Georgi! You’re satisfied it’s not weed, then ?”

“I think not. On the chart it shows sudden and severe drop on inflow at 0510, on two inlets, for a moment. And then again at 0604, but remaining this time. I think it is fishes. A shoal.”

“Could be. You’ve tried reverse flow?”

“Alex was on that when I took over. I have just checked. No better. I shall now try reverse flow with injected repellents and toxins.”

“Right. Give it about an hour and I’ll check you again about 0800, to see if there’s any luck. If it’s no better I’ll contact Luis Sanchez and ask him to take a squad of scuba-boys and investigate it from the outside. Meantime I’ll carry the load here.” Solkov nodded, cut the picture and Sentry sat back, automatically reviewing the control board. Two generator sets were more than adequate to bear the present load, and he had two more that would take care of the peak demand, from 0830 onwards. No worry there. The next decision could wait until 0800 hours. Out of the blue it occurred to him to wonder if Georgi had made a comparable discovery in his domestic circumstances? In the same instant he knew the futility of such a question. Here in the dome, the word “domestic” had grown to be almost magical in portent. With sixty people practically living in each other’s pockets, that one tiny area of privacy was jealously guarded. Everything else was rigorously researched, investigated and recorded, but no one asked questions about inter-pair relationships. Even the twelve-strong psycho-social team approached it delicately and with oblique and impersonal symbolism. Once every two weeks, each and every colonist had to submit to a thorough mental-stability test, for the record, but those interviews had all the safeguards and respect of a confessional.

Letting his trained reflexes take care of the job. Sentry ranged his mind back, following the train of thought that had started with his pleasant awakening. Kingsley had planned well and with great care. Because this was much more than just an experiment at living under pressure, under the sea. That kind of thing had been done before, by Cousteau and others. Kingsley had broken it to them at the last important interview.

“We are the chosen ones,” he said, and then smiled at once to apologize for his dramatics. “From thousands of applicants, we sixty people are about to live for a whole year beneath the sea, autonomously. All the tedium of examinations, interviews-in-depth, embarrassing incursions into privacy, that is all over. All that mass of information has been codified and digested by the best available logical machines and we are the result. You may feel that I am over-stressing this, that you are all sufficiently dedicated, prepared to be your own guinea-pigs, eager to make the experiment a success. But this is not, of itself, enough.” Kingsley had made a dramatic pause before resuming.

“There is something much more important at stake, nothing less than the future of Mankind. Like it or not we must face the fact that the pollutions of civilization are reaching the point at which they affect our lives. Soon the result will be to curtail them. Yet we go on spawning in ever greater numbers and sprawling our noxious cultures ever more widely across the face of the Earth. Apparently we are unable to arrest, let alone reverse the trend. By the time the situation becomes a matter for panic action it will be too late. Some think it is already too late. Whatever your opinion on that, let me assure you that in the foreseeable future this—life at the bottom of the sea—is absolutely essential if civilized man is to continue. So this brave project of ours has got to work. It is up to us to meet the hazards, the hard problems and the snags, and overcome them. And we must do it without looking for outside help.”

That was the shattering bit, Sentry mused. The vital importance of this research was bad enough, but that they had to do it, if it was humanly possible, without recourse to the rest of mankind, up there, was enough to screw up the tension to fever point. They did have a link with “upstairs”, just one. From the central computer there ran a thigh-thick cable that carried all the data they were gaining. Duplicate records of everything, because they were precious. But it was tacitly agreed that if they ever decided to use that link to call for help, it would be an open admission of failure and it was just as readily agreed that things would have to be pretty desperate before they came to that pass. Sixty people, paired and matched for multiple abilities, character stability and compatibility, by computer-logic, determined to make a go of it, if it was humanly possible. Three pairs had been already married before application. The Kingsleys, of course, Andrew and Helen, both highly skilled sociologists. Robert Vance, marine biologist and one of Luis Sanchez’s team of “scuba-men”, and his wife Alice, in Biochemistry. And Luis Sanchez himself, and his wife Maria, who was in the Diet and Culinary section.

The rest of the group had congratulated these happy pairs on their successful application, but no one among the rest had complained at the computer’s selections. Good scientists and sane people all, they had buckled down to the formidable task ahead in good spirits. Sentry grinned now as he recalled that someone had quoted Mark Twain to the effect that everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. And now it was almost too late to do anything about the “weather” up there. Poseidon had to work, and there were a dozen or more anxious-faced groups up there constantly in touch with the day-by-day results as they were relayed through that single cable.

Three

Sentry got to his feet, went for a little walk-tour around his domain, to inspect everything. Although it was carefully pushed back in his mind, the momentary difficulty over in the East plant made him restless. Tension was never very far away from any of them, at any time. He remembered how it had been in the first few wire-taut weeks, with people calling in every few minutes or so to assure themselves that everything was going well. One man could keep adequate watch on this plant. Eight men kept watch on both power-plants on an eight-week cycle of twelve-hour watches, an arrangement that gave them plenty of time off and was quite satisfactory. But in those first anxious days there had been no lack of extra people, all eager to help “keep an eye on things”. Sentry had to laugh to himself as he came back to his solitary vigil by the master control board.

There had been some anxious moments, right enough. He himself had said that he considered these fuel-cell generators reliable enough to depend on for his life, but he had not envisaged operating them under a constant pressure of two-and-half atmospheres of He-O-N. Joints and glands, operating levers and seals that were perfect at atmospheric pressure tended to develop bugs at two-and-a-half times that, and helium was the very devil to keep under control, but they had to have it, or go into delirium from nitrogen-narcosis. And no matter how you tried, you could never forget the thousands of tons per square inch of crushing death that lay constantly in wait beyond the frail walls of the dome. Crises had been met headlong and defeated one by one; little by little, some measure of confidence had grown, but you could never forget––

He started, now, as the visiphone buzzed for him. Solkov’s expression was calm but grim.

“It does not work, Peter. The toxins and repellents have achieved nothing at all. First and second inlets are still blocked.”

“Right! Keep that reverse flow going. Keep a sharp eye on the other two inlets, just in case. And put up a red caution. All load demands switched through to me here. I’ll warm up my other two ready to take the peak and then I’ll see if I can catch Luis Sanchez and get his gang on it.”

Solkov cut the picture again and Sentry moved the controls to liven up his remaining pair of generators. Then, when the pyrometers showed stable, he put them on interlock and returned to the visiphone, glancing at the clock. 0814 hours. Sanchez should be still at home, with luck. He was. The picture showed him with a scowl on his dark face, and irritation thickened his voice.

“Sentry! I am late with breakfast this morning. Is it urgent?”

“I’m afraid it is, Luis. I’m on watch at the moment. Trouble on the East plant. First and second inlets blocked solid and nothing we can do will clear them. Doubt very much if it’s weeds or small fry.”

“I see!” The irritation melted away as Sanchez grasped the situation. “You want me to go for a swim and take a look, eh?”

“If you would. Better make it a squad. This sounds like something a bit bigger than usual.”

“Very well. It will take perhaps three-quarters of an hour to be ready. I will let you know.”

“That’s fine. Thanks, Luis. I’ll chase up Kingsley and put him in the picture while you’re rounding up the boys.”

Sentry swept the screen clear and buttoned this time for Director Kingsley’s home. A few minutes delay set his teeth on edge, then Helen Kingsley showed in the screen. In her late thirties, Helen had the kind of gaunt, high-cheeked beauty that would still be there long after her blonde hair had turned to grey. A queenly women, but she offered Sentry a warm smile.

“Peter. Something I can do for you?”

“I was after Andrew. We’ve a small crisis in Power-East, and he ought to be kept in touch. Any idea where I’ll find him?”

“Not the slightest,” she made a face. “You know how he is, a law unto himself. Could be anywhere.”

“All right. If you locate him before I do, have him call me back here, would you?” He broke the connection, wasted a moment in a scowl. No matter how you tried, you couldn’t kill gossip altogether, and gossip had it that all was not as well as it might be in the Kingsley ménage. He shrugged the thought away, reminding himself that those two had more problems on their minds than anyone else in the colony. As co-directors they were responsible for everything collectively. Who would blame them for buckling a bit under the strain ? As his fingers poised to button for the Sociology Centre, Kingsley’s special domain, the visiphone call-signal buzzed and he accepted it abruptly, frowned again as Belle’s face appeared.

“Not a personal call, Tinkle, please. I’m busy!”

“Me too. Look, we want to start up another fermentation-plant, and you have a red caution showing. Is it serious ?”

“Bad enough. I’m afraid you can’t have any extra power for a while.” He had hardly done saying it when her image was shouldered aside, and Kingsley appeared, leonine and imperious.

“See here, Sentry, we must have that fermentation process started at once. A delay now will set us back hours! What’s all this nonsense about a power restriction?”

“No nonsense. I just rang your home to advise you, but you weren’t there. Severe blockage on water inlets, Power-East. I have just asked Luis Sanchez to take out a scuba party to investigate “

“The devil you have?”

“Yes, the devil I have!” Sentry retorted, hardening his voice. “I’m not asking you to explain what the hell you mean by leaving home without a tracer, or what you’re doing in Biology. That’s your affair. This is mine. With East out of service, we are pushing close to our safety margin. Or do you want me to draw you a diagram?” Kingsley flushed, then mastered himself. The expression on his strong face presaged a growl, but his voice was soft as he spoke.

“Yes. You’re quite right, Sentry. Sorry. It was a rather important experiment, but it can wait, and you were quite right in seeking to inform me at once. Now, is there anything else to arrange?”

“Sanchez might need help assembling his team. You should find him by Sea-lock Four. I forgot to warn him to make a telephone link before going outside. You should catch him.”

“Yes. I’ll do that right away.”

The screen darkened, leaving Sentry to his thoughts, which were not as pleasant as they had been earlier. Rumours and gossip had no appeal for him, but he couldn’t dodge them altogether. In the beginning the two Kingsleys had been a driving force, an inspiration to all. Now there were signs, small straws in the wind, that the position was reversing itself. As the rest of the group gained in confidence and cooperation, so those two seemed to have lost theirs. There were stories of rows and ugly scenes, raised voices and temperamental displays. Sentry had paid little attention, because his work seldom brought him in direct confrontation with the research side. But now he had seen some of the signs for himself. And he had reacted. He did not feel happy about it.

The visiphone caught him hurriedly from a quick survey of the mounting load demand. It was Sanchez, from Sea-lock Four.

“Myself and four, ready to go out. We should be at the first inlet in ten minutes. Check?”

“Right. Reverse flow in progress, should help. Have you contacted Kingsley?”

“Yes. He is here and will stand-by the telephone.”

“Fine. Luis, take care. Those inlets are thirty feet apart and the stoppage was simultaneous, so it could be something big.”

Sanchez grinned as the connection went and Sentry sent a call to his opposite number. “Georgi! Keep the circulators running in reverse. There’s a scuba team just leaving, should be there by 0915.”

“Good! Peter, I was thinking. It would help, perhaps, if I put on a helmet and went down into the pipe from inside ? Through the manhole?”

“Not on your own, you don’t,” Sentry said, and Solkov chuckled.

“That is all taken care of. Charlie Snow just happened to call in, and he will stand-by while I go down the pipe. All right?”

“Fair enough. You know what to do.” Solkov chuckled again, went away and Snow’s grinning face appeared. Sentry had already reasoned out the chain. Moira Snow was in Biology along with Belle. She must have rung Charley and he had “just happened to call in” to see what was going on.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded. “Can’t you sleep?”

Snow ignored the thrust. “What d’you reckon this is, Peter?” he asked. “There’s a back-pressure on those two circulators. I’ve never seen that before. Usually anything gets stuck on the outside screens, it washes away again as soon as the flow reverses.”

“No idea,” Sentry shrugged. “We’ll know, soon. You’d better switch your visiphone link to the circulator chamber, so you can keep an eye on that manhole when Georgi goes down. Let’s not take any chances.”

That was Sentry’s dominating urge, now. He could visualize the scuba-men paddling cautiously around the squat outside bulk of the dome and knew this was nothing to them. In small groups, they went out daily to study their fish farms, collect weed samples, take soundings of currents, mud-cores and plankton densities. It was a strange and weirdly wonderful world out there, but they were used to it and would take care. He was far more concerned with Solkov, in his pressure-helmet and with a four-foot chrome-steel lance, as he wriggled and squirmed along the inlet-pipe to the screens. That pipe was eight feet in diameter, but it could seem like a constricting trap to a man confronted with danger. He caught himself mentally checking the items of equipment, life-line, headlamp, lance, helmet—and shook his head in irritation. This could be the way Kingsley had begun to crack, by getting too involved with another man’s hazard. It was the devil to give orders and be compelled to stand-by and wait, unable to do anything effective.

It must be the same with research, he mused. The biologist just had to assume that the biochemist knew what he was doing with his part. The physiologists had to assume that the psychologists and sociologists were on the ball. Diet and Culinary had to take for granted the chemical analyses supplied them. There was a chain there, he thought. The marine biologists, familiarly called “the farmers”, went out and caught it or found it, the chemists analysed it, the horticulture group tried to grow it in synthetic soil or breed it in tanks, the physiologists examined it for edibility or nutritive fractions, the dieticians tried to cook it or prepare it in some way—everybody dependent on everybody else. And all the data so laboriously garnered went in a steady stream into the greedy maw of the computer storage.

The visiphone buzzer jerked him out of reverie. He made a reflex inspection of his control-board as he pressed the “accept” button. This time the face was an utterly unexpected one.

“Emmy!” he said. “What can I do for you?”

Emmeline Addy was Ghanaian, as black as polished jet, and easily the loveliest girl Sentry had ever seen. She gave him a shy but dazzling smile.

“I just wanted to know how much longer the load restriction was going to last, Peter. We would like to use the big oven as soon as we can.”

He glanced at the clock and saw 0933. “I’m sorry, Emmy. It’s one of those things. Trouble outside. No telling when we’ll be clear. Why ?”

“It’s not urgent. We’ve a new flour substitute we want to try out as a cake-mix. It can wait.”

“Not a minute longer than it has too,” he promised. “Save a sample for me, won’t you?” She smiled again and switched off. Her lovely image had barely left the screen when the buzzer sounded again. It was Kingsley, wide-eyed and shouting.

“It’s a squid, a giant squid! It’s caught on the screens!”

“That’s from Sanchez ? Are they all right out there ?”

“It’s a hell of a mess! They can’t get near the thing, can’t see—the sea’s thick with ink. It’s enormous!”

“Calm down,” Sentry snapped. “You won’t achieve anything by getting hysterical. You still in touch with them?”

“Yes. Of course!”

“All right. Call them back in, right away. Warn Luis to leave the thing alone and come back. Leave it there. We’ll have to deal with this from the inside!”

“But how, man ? How ?”

“Let me handle that end of it. You get the scuba-gang inside, out of danger.” He cut off the wild-eyed Director and put his hand on a button that had not been used in many weeks. He pressed three times, slow and strongly, then took a moment to clear his thoughts. That alarm would bring all the rest of the power engineers on the run, regardless of what they were doing. Snow was on picture from the East plant within seconds.

“What’s up, Peter?”

“Get Georgi up out of that pipe, fast. There’s a giant squid outside, stuck on the screens. Move!” Snow vanished, leaving the screen open. Two minutes later Alex McKay, Percy West and Mike Ryan all together came jostling to the instrument. Over his shoulder Sentry heard heavy steps, and turned to see Eben Addy and Hans Goring, both breathless. He put them all in the picture in brief words.

“Those screens are thirty feet apart, so you can guess how big the creature must be. It’s out of the question for any bunch to tackle it on its own terms. It’s up to us. I’ve got as far as thinking we ought to give it a jolt, clamp a couple of earthing cables on those screens and shove a few thousand volts through it. Anybody want to take it from there?”

“It’s a four-man job just fixing those cables,” McKay offered. “One man down the pipe and one standing by. Let’s get that bit done right away.”

“Right! You’ve two men already on Number One inlet. You and Mike can handle Number Two.” The screen now showed Percy West’s thoughtful stare.

“We can’t deliver much of a jolt, Peter,” he murmured. “Not without stepping it up somehow. I assume we want to kill it, not just make it mad?”

“I was thinking about that,” Eben Addy rumbled, leaning over to get in the scope of the picture. “How about those heavy-duty condensers we used for that ionization job? You still have ‘em over there ?”

“Stacked in the motor room. About a dozen. We could hook ‘em up in cascade, easily. Peter?”

“That sounds all right, but those damn things are heavy. You’ll need help, Percy.”

“Me!” Hans Goring grunted. “I will go, right away.”

“Me too!” Addy grinned. “Betcha I can outrun you!” As they departed, Sentry turned back to Percy West.

“You know what to do. Hook up your cables direct to the main bus-line. Then those condensers, one, two, four and eight, if you have enough. Run up the other two generators ready. I’ll pull out all the loading here except lights and essentials. Then when we’re ready we’ll throw all six generators into those lines——”

“We might just burn out all our plant, Peter. You thought of that?”

“It’s a chance we have to take. The overload trips ought to save us, though. And there’s this. Unless we cook that squid, once and for all, it is just big enough to tear out those screens and come wandering inside looking for pickings. This is the only way.”

West went away, Sentry broke the call, moved a switch that changed the red “caution” to “emergency” and then proceeded, swiftly but systematically, to withdraw all heavy power supplies from each section at a time, watching carefully to see that the automatic output controls took care of the generator settings. Power-East became gradually quieter and quieter. As he worked he wondered whether Percy West had guessed right, or would the surge trips act in time to save them.

Four

In less than half an hour not one watt more than was absolutely necessary was leaving the power-plant. The clock stood at 1017. Sentry took a moment to seize paper and pencil and work out how long it would take the cascade of heavy condensers to build up to overload and flash over. He made it eighteen seconds. He had a vivid image in his mind of the furious activity that would be going on in the other plant. He was poised and ready for the call when it came. Eben Addy’s sweat-gleaming face grinned at him,

“We need a couple more minutes,” he said, “to clamp down those manhole covers extra good.”

“Why?”

“Man, have you thought what’s going to happen when we smash out all that power? We’re going to vaporize several tons of ambient water, crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It will be like a bomb!”

‘Two bombs!” Sentry snapped. “You’re quite right, Eb. Make sure you all keep well clear.”

“That’s all done. Another thing, Peter. If this comes off, d’you reckon it might be a good notion to hook up juice lines to those screens for permanent? That way we could give them a jolt regular, say every night watch. Then we’d have no more trouble with weeds or anything.”

“That’s a good idea. We’ll work it out later. Batteries, maybe.”

He saw Addy tilt his head aside to some sound off screen then nod and grin. “That’s it, Peter. Ready when you are.”

“Right. I’ll switch it from here. Starting now.” On the relay board he twisted controls, two at a time, that sent East’s two generators humming up to full output. He stepped smartly from there to his own panel and did it again, two at a time, then again. There was only the muted whine of the fuel pumps to indicate that anything was happening. The unit output gauges swung and climbed in smooth silence as a hundred and fifty megawatts of power hurled itself into a condenser, defeated its attempts to hold, overflowed into two more, flooded those and burst on into four more. Sentry watched the seconds sweep past. He could imagine the cracking pressures and the seething stresses on these condensers as they struggled frantically to contain the torrent of energy. Fifteen—sixteen—seventeen —he counted in his mind. Then it all went, lights, power rotors and motors, fans, indicators, everything died for one desolate second.

In the dark he moved urgently to twist back the controls, and as he did so the sounds of life came back with shrill whines and flickering lights. He let out a long breath, set the last pair of controls to minimum and went back to the screen. If there had been any discernible shock, he had missed it in the cacophony of restarting machinery. As he waited for a face to show in the screen he checked and double-checked his panel, making sure that everything was back to normal. It was five minutes before Percy West appeared again, panting but jubilant.

“That was a hell of a thing, Peter! The shock-wave rattled us here like beans in a can, and we have eight, maybe nine, heavy-duty condensers that will never be any good any more. But those inlets are free and clear, we’ve just tried them. Inflow normal.”

“Thank the Lord for that. Next thing is, did we kill it, or did we just send it away mad? But that’s not our problem. Sanchez and his boys can take care of it.”

“Better him than me,” West grinned. “We’re all back to normal here. I’m off, with the rest, and Georgi can take care of it. All right your end?”

“Everything’s fine. Thanks for the help. Pass it on to the others, would you ?”

The time was 1042. By 1100 hours all power supplies were back to the standard normal. By noon the incident was a cautionary memory, just more data for the computer. Sentry went up and out on to the narrow balcony that overhung the entrance to take a short breather. From here he could look up and see the blue-grey wall of the dome close to, could let his eye follow the slow upward and outward sweep of the curve as it went away to form the “sky”. Radiant panels studded it at regular intervals, giving off the bright shadowless glare of “noon”. Before him the whole colony lay arranged in neat order, a world in microcosm, almost. The emergency of the morning had been a bad one, and only an inscrutable fate knew how many more lay ahead, but he thought it was safe to say that the little colony was well on the way to establishing itself as a practical possibility.

Not quite a copy of the outer world, he thought, as he idled. They had no traffic problems, no economic tangles, no politics. And no dirt, either. That had been a completely unforeseen bonus. This atmosphere was precisely controlled at an equable temperature and balanced humidity, and it was clean. Like everyone else, he wore thin cotton coveralls at work to protect him from hard edges and uncomfortable machinery. But the material was treated to keep its shape and repel soiling, so the most he or anyone else ever had to do was rinse and hang out to dry. And when they were not actually at work they wore as much, or as little, as fancy dictated. In this ideal climate it didn’t matter much.

Over to his right he could see the Biology laboratories, and beyond them Biochemistry, the buildings tucked in alongside the dome wall. To his left was a general-purpose machine-shop, then Diet and Culinary and then Sea-lock Two. Hardly in keeping with the world outside, he had to admit. But virtually self-contained and independent, and growing more so every day. They synthesized their own fuel. They were able to extract enough metal from the sea water to meet any reasonable future demand. They had the food and drink question well in hand. He thought of Emmy Addy’s new cake-mix, and grinned. She was a whiz at her job. They all were, in “Cook and Eat”, as they had come to call it, and had done wonders with unpromising materials. He would have taken bets that some of them were, even now, contemplating some way of making edibles out of the corpse of the squid, if it was in fact killed.

Not just survival research, he mused. They were actually making useful discoveries. Belle had told him that in her department, in Biology, they were hot on the trail of an entirely new type of drug-chemicals that they were tentatively calling “super-proteins”, because they seemed to act in a way that reinforced natural functions. Thinking of Belle, it seemed utterly appropriate that he should cast his eye to the right and see her come striding along the outer ring-path to call on him. She had a plasti-bag tucked under one arm, and he knew what it was. She was bringing lunch. He had protested about it several times, insisting that he could quite easily carry a packed meal, or even whip something up for himself on the hot-ring they used for coffee-making. But she had insisted.

“You’re on a twelve-hour shift, and liable to get caught up in all sorts of duties. I can just imagine you forgetting all about your meal. As I’m only ten minutes’ walk away, why shouldn’t I bring my lunch over and eat it with you?”

He watched her now, greedily savouring the precious moment, wondering anew at his own good fortune. Belle Wrigley, brilliant biologist, sailing through all the gruelling tests to qualify for this project, only to be picked out by a mindless computer as the person best qualified to be compatible with Peter Sentry. He had thought it a necessary evil at the time, something to be endured because there was no cure. They’d been candid and resigned, right from the start, willing to be good friends and rub along. But now—she glanced up and saw him, waved, and he waved back and ran in and down the corkscrew staircase to meet her in the motor-room.

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” she said, as they went arm in arm up to control, “to be the wife of a hero.”

“Who, me ? What did I do ?”

“If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs––” she quoted, and he snorted amusedly.

“Ridiculous. I helped build this place. I know a bit more about it than most, that’s all. Any of the others would have done the same in my place. Perhaps not quite so quickly, that’s all.”

“I was thinking of Dr. Kingsley. I’ve just left him. He’s a mass of nerves.”

“That’s understandable, Tinkle. After all, he has to carry the entire load for everybody. Incidentally, what’s he doing in Biology? Something big coming up?”

Belle got that look on her face that he had learned to read as something she would rather not discuss. Before he could think of something to change the topic there came a cheery hail from below.

“Peter ? You up there ? Is it all right if I come up ?”

“That’s Emmy Addy,” Belle said, her voice unusually sharp. “What does she want here?”

“Easy way to find out.” Sentry raised his voice. “Hello, Emmy. It’s all right, come on up!” In the seconds of waiting he shot a cautious side-glance at Belle, puzzled by a look on her face that he had never seen there before and couldn’t interpret. Then a glossy black corona of hair appeared, followed by a gleaming smile as Emmeline Addy came into the control room. The smile winked out as she turned her head and saw Belle.

“Gosh, I might have known you’d be here too. Did I interrupt something ? I can leave it––”

“It’s all right. Have a seat. What’s that, cake?”

“You did say you wanted to try a piece. Well, here it is.” Emmy unwrapped a small bundle and Sentry nodded.

“It looks good, all right. Enough there for two. You try a piece, Tinkle. Got time to stay for a cup of coffee, Em ?”

Belle stood up, still with that curious expression on her face. “I feel a fool,” she said, “and that’s what I needed to open my eyes to something. Emmy, I think it’s only right that we should tell Peter what’s going on. I know the taboo on gossip, but this thing could grow by default until it’s too big to handle. You know what I mean, about Andrew Kingsley.”

Emmy’s lovely face became apprehensive. “I know what you mean, but I don’t want to be the one to start anything.”

“Then I will, if you’ll back me up. Somebody has to do it.”

“What are you two talking about?” Sentry demanded, and his wife fixed her big blue eyes on him resolutely.

“Do you want to know what was the first thing I felt when I heard Emmy’s voice, just now? Jealousy and suspicion. Oh, I know it’s ridiculous, and it went as soon as it came. I won’t even bother to apologize. Emmy will understand. You see, when you drop a little poison into a biological system it spreads and infects the whole. And that is what’s happening here. I’m talking about Andrew Kingsley. Over the past few weeks he has been developing into a goat. A nasty, sneaking, perverted satyr!”

“That’s the truth.” Emmy sighed as Sentry stared aghast. “Only last month I had a big row with him over it. Kept snooping round C. & D., pretending it was official and getting a bit too familiar with me. Then calling on me at home when Eben was on power-watch.”

Sentry forced a smile. “In your case who could blame him for being interested. Me too, only Twinkle watches me too closely.”

“You can say that in fun and I don’t mind. We all make that kind of joke at times. But Kingsley wasn’t fooling around, not with me he wasn’t. I had to tell him flat, in the end, that if he didn’t mind himself, Eben would find out, and he would wind up dead, fast. You know that’s right, Peter.”

Sentry sighed. Ebenezer Addy was a big man in every way, big in body, in enthusiasm, in his appetite for work. He would be enormous in anger.

“You too?” He turned to Belle, and she nodded gravely.

“Just like all the rest, I didn’t want to tell anybody, least of all you, and you know why. In the early days it didn’t matter so much. We were all keyed up, tensed up, sharing a common danger—and strong emotional involvements were something to avoid. We were all pretty free and easy and no harm done. But it’s different now. We’ve settled down. We have private lives. We’ve all made the adjustment. All except Kingsley, it seems. And he has been walking this path for some time now. It’s got to be stopped.”

“That’s easy to say,” Sentry muttered. “But not so easy to do. Why does it have to be Kingsley, of all people? As the Director, he’s virtually our inspiration and guide. If that image breaks it could smash the whole project, ruin everything !”

“Maybe it isn’t all that bad,” Belle hazarded: “After all, a man can’t be a successful satyr without some measure of cooperation, and so far as I know, he’s not getting it.”

“Not from me, he isn’t, anyway,” Emmy declared. “I like a bit of fun as much as anybody, but Eben’s my man and that suits me fine.”

Her words stirred a response in Sentry. He put out his hand to her.

“You too?”

She looked from him to Belle, and back, and her smile was a beautiful thing. “We’ve known for a long while. That computer certainly decided right for us two. And you ?”

Belle nodded, happy now. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Five

Wonderful or not, the seeds of unease had been sown in Sentry’s mind, and it was a problem that, while it concerned him acutely, involved him in matters outside his competence. He was a physicist. This was a problem that belonged properly to the sociology section. But the head of the sociology section was Andrew Kingsley. So where did you go from there? The colony had established its own routine for dealing with wild problems. It took the form of a regular quiz, once every two weeks. Everyone attended except the two men on power-watch, and even they kept in touch by visiphone. Questions were put up, debated, considered by whoever was expert in that field, decisions were taken, future action planned, reports made—it was a very important piece of administrative machinery. But the chairman, again, was Andrew Kingsley, and Sentry could just imagine the uproar there would be if he threw this little bomb into the works. Gossip! Where was the substantial evidence ? Would any of the others back him up ? And how could he ask around beforehand without lighting the very fuse he was afraid of?

The more he thought about it the more he saw how impossible it was. His own immediate contacts were, naturally, with the seven other men who made up the power team. They were all good friends, but they never mentioned personal or private matters. Their talk was always “shop”, or social activities. The choir, the games tournaments, the art-class, chess problems—or some repair-job, the cosmic-ray count, radiation factors in the latest water sample, the plankton drift—but never one’s private affairs. A sensible rule had grown to be a habit, a stranglehold that Kingsley was using to his own advantage. The frustration nagged him, was still nagging him as he ended his watch, turned the job over to Charlie Snow and made his way home by the playing fields to pick up Belle.

She was in the concluding stages of a foursome of tennis with the other three biologists, partnering Karen Wilby against Moira Snow and Sylvia Kiggel. In the next court four of the marine men were engaged in a ding-dong tussle, and Sentry joined the little group who were watching them. Giuseppi Vitelli gave him a rueful smile.

“This is much safer than the job you handed us this morning, Sentry. Never have I seen such a beast!”

“I can imagine. It never occurred to me it was all one animal. Still, that kind of thing won’t happen again, now we know how to discourage them.”

“Just as well somebody was on the ball.” The comment came from a great blond oak of a man by Sentry’s left. “Kingsley was practically gibbering in hysterics. A bloody poor show, in my opinion.” Sentry eyed the speaker, Robert Vance, and wondered if the comment carried any deeper significance. Vitelli chuckled, tried to dismiss the matter.

“You are too hard on him, Robert. It was a bad moment, and we were enough to frighten the devil himself, all smeared with that filthy ink. You were scared, go on, admit it!”

“Of course I was, but I was one of those who had to go back out and tackle the damned thing. Kingsley wasn’t in any danger.”

“We were all in danger,” Sentry interposed mildly. “If that stunt of mine had backfired we’d be in a hell of a mess now.” He turned away as the women’s foursome ended and Belle came trotting over to him, arm in arm with her partner. Both were breathless. Karen Wilby, a good three inches taller than Belle, pantomimed exhaustion and clutched Sentry’s shoulder.

“Am I glad that’s over. She runs me into the ground!”

“You’re overweight,” Belle remarked, flatly and without malice.

“Only in the best places, I hope,” Karen retorted, panting hugely and making the most of her magnificent endowments. Sentry joined in the laugh, knowing that Karen was irrepressibly extrovert, and quite harmless, but his mirth shrivelled as Vance inserted himself into the conversation, speaking to Belle.

“I’m hoping to be lucky enough to draw you for the mixed doubles,” he said. “You’re the kind of partner I need.”

“We’ll see how it goes,” she smiled offhandedly. “Come on, Peter. See you tomorrow, Karen.” She took Sentry’s arm and marched him away. As soon as they were clear he murmured,

“Is this thing beginning to get me, or is he another of those?”

“He’s another,” she said, very quietly. “The poison spreads.”

“But”-—he hesitated on the words—”how do you know? Isn’t there a chance that this is all just imagination?”

“Don’t be daft,” she said, and there was complete conviction in her voice. “A woman always knows.”

He had to be content with that. He tried to banish the problem and the simmering rage that came to him whenever he thought of it, with the thought that it was not his field. He would have been justly indignant had one of the sociologists tried to tell him how to operate the power-plant. Every man to his own job, he decided. But the problem reared up and struck at him, three days later, in a way he just could not ignore. He had just begun the night watch for the second time in his cycle. Prior to subsidence a lot of hard thought had gone into planning various routines so that everyone was used to the utmost of his abilities, yet each had ample free time for leisure. In the special case of the eight power-men, who had to be available twenty-four hours a day, a twelve-hour watch cycle had been chosen as ideal. It meant that each man did two day watches, from 0700 to 1900, then two night watches, from 1900 to 0700, and then had four days completely free to study, rest, play or catch up on whatever activities he fancied.

For this final night watch, while the rest of the community slept and only Solkov, on the East side, shared his vigil, Sentry had saved a delicate little job. On a work-table before him, so arranged that he could see the control board merely by looking up, stood the complex parts of a tiny TV camera, one of the hundreds that were to be found almost everywhere in Poseidon. Most of them were sizeable and linked directly in to the computer, to be put in action whenever anything was done that needed to be recorded, but this particular one was a tiny portable, one of the dozen or so that the outside party were in the habit of carrying whenever they went exploring the sea-bed. Camera maintenance was Sentry’s “other” job, and he enjoyed the work, but these tiny portables were teasing things to handle. This one had been bashed in the recent fracas with the squid and the interior was sticky with sepia-and-water.

He had fully expected an all-night session with the thing, but this time good fortune was on his side. With the sticky ink washed out and the battery replaced, his test-gauges showed that it ought to work perfectly. The blow had cracked the seals and let in water to short-circuit everything, but that seemed to be all. Hopefully, he smeared epoxy-resin on the matching edges of the casing, marked the time exactly, and shuffled everything into place so that he could press it all together when the time was right. On the five-minute mark precisely he held his breath, slid the sections together, pressed and waited, and then let go.

“That ought to do it,” he muttered, “until some ham-handed clown goes mad with it again.” Which was unfair, but there was no one to hear. He set it to stand on top of a multipoint recorder, where the warmth would help the resin to spread and ensure the seal, switched the control to action-on and let it run. It had capacity for an hour of sound and vision, but five or ten minutes ought to be enough for a trial. That done he turned to go and warm up some coffee before making a routine, on-the-hour check— and jumped with surprise as he saw someone watching him from the doorway.

“Did I startle you?” she asked, smiling. It was Helen Kingsley, her heavy blonde hair unbound and brushing her shoulders. One glance showed him that all she wore was a cobwebby pale-blue robe, a nightdress of some kind, he assumed, and that her feet were bare. No wonder he hadn’t heard her come.

“I certainly wasn’t expecting to see you, or anybody else,” he managed a smile and comparative ease. “Something I can do for you?”

“Not professionally, perhaps, no. I’m not intruding on anything?”

“Hardly. No secrets here. Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“Then you won’t mind if I stay and talk to you for a while.” She came all the way in, selected a low stool that was used mostly for the kind of job where a man would have had to crouch otherwise, and settled on it with apparent indifference for the inadequacies of her semi-transparent attire. Sentry felt a sudden chill, and the need for caution.

“I was just about to warm up some coffee. Want a cup?”

“You’re very kind.” She watched him, accepted the cup, smiled her thanks and murmured, “You have the best of it, here. Always something meaningful to be getting on with.”

“You’re joking, of course! Ninety per cent of what I do is routine that the computer could handle far more efficiently. I’m practically redundant, right now.”

“Aren’t we all?” she countered, sighing. “Here we are, all of us, just going through the same silly motions, day in and day out. So boring.”

“Boring? Do you think so?”

“Oh come, Peter, you must feel it. That little fuss we had, three days ago, was exciting, yes. But how often do we get anything like that now? It was different in the beginning. So new, so demanding, so different, with a fresh hazard and thrill every day. We lived then.” She sipped at her cup, staring at him. “Remember? There was a tingle in the atmosphere, a zest! Remember when Sea-lock Two jammed up, with a half-a-dozen scuba-boys trapped outside? And when Duggie Haig brought that odd weed in and we all caught a rash from it? And the time the nitrogen percentage got too high and we were all sozzled for a while until we found out what it was and fixed it?”

“It wasn’t funny at the time.”

“No, perhaps not. But it was exciting. And we were all so close then, like good friends facing a common threat. We lived life right up, because we could never be sure there was going to be a tomorrow. You know what I mean ?”

Sentry knew. He saw the colour coming to her cheeks, and her growing animation at her own memories. “Adrenalin,” he said, matter-of-factly, “is all right in small doses, but I’d hate to live like that, at full-throttle, all the time. I’d be just as pleased if the next six months were dull.”

“Oh no!” she protested. “You don’t mean it. Not that I want to see dreadful things, I don’t. But I couldn’t bear it if we settled down like some dreary little humdrum village on the surface. We’re not that kind of folk.”

“Oh, I don’t know. We’re just people!”

“Silly!” She got up and moved a step towards him. “We are not just people. We’re different. We aren’t bound by conventions. We don’t need little-people rules to tell us ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Why shouldn’t we make our own excitement? We’re not sheep!”

“We aren’t goats, either. At least I’m not.” He stood up to face her, trying to keep calm. “I almost said Why don’t you try your seduction bit on somebody else?’, but on second thought I suggest you forget it altogether.”

“You’re afraid of me?” she challenged, hands on hips, her body thrust arrogantly forward. “I wonder why? I won’t bite!”

“Once again,” he said, “I think you’re joking. I’m not afraid of you, but I am scared of what you might do. You may think this life boring, and that’s your opinion. You may think we’re immune from rights and wrongs, and that’s your opinion again. But if you try upsetting any more domestic peace just for the sake of a few cheap thrills, you are going to get a lot more than you bargain for, and that’s no opinion, but a fact.”

She came closer, not in the least abashed. “You’re strong minded, Peter. I like that. I’ve had a fancy for you for a long time. Does that shock you, that I can be so candid? But why not ? What can you do ? You daren’t talk to anyone about it because it would be your word against mine. And I’m the psychologist, remember? My story would be that you invited me here, tried to seduce me—and failed. That makes your story the result of rage and frustration and the urge to get revenge.”

“My story? Who said I was going to talk?”

“Of course you won’t. I’m just showing you the whip and assuring you that I’ll use it unless you play with me. I mean to have you, Peter.”

“You’re crazy!”

“In that way, yes! It’s a glorious feeling. I’m going to have you, steal some of you away from that pug-nosed dump of a housewife of yours and that makes it all the sweeter. That self-satisfied grin of hers sets my teeth on edge at times. You’re wasted on her.”

“And you’re wasting your time on me!”

“Oh no I’m not, dear man. You’ll play with me—or I’ll ruin you, your name, your domestic bliss and your professional integrity. Had you thought of that? You, in a position of trust and responsibility, a watcher-by-night, neglecting your duties for amorous dalliance—think how that would sound! Passion in the power-plant!”

“Here ?” Sentry glanced round at the severe lines of the control room.

“Why not? It will add spice. But not now!” She went back two tigerish steps. “There’s an art even to this and anticipation is nine-tenths of the delight. You will be on this watch again”—she narrowed her eyes in thought—”in seven days’ time. So there it is, darling. A date. Something to look forward to.”

“Just a minute,” he growled, as she turned to go. “Apart from anything else, why me?”

“Hah!” her eyes sparkled as she laughed at him. “Several reasons. In the early days when we were all so busy comforting each other, you didn’t indulge. I noticed that. You’re proud. And strong. The dominant type. And Belle obviously adores the very ground you walk on. That must mean something. I intend to find out what.”

As he slumped before his control board there was a faint trace of her perfume, enough to assure him this thing had really happened and was no nightmare. But he felt anything but dominant, at that moment. He glanced automatically at his gauges without seeing them. He was caught, trapped as surely as a man in chains. What hurt more than anything was the obviousness of it. Belle had said it took two to make a man a satyr. So, with a relationship shattered, there had to be two bits, both Kingsleys. And, if Belle was also right about Bob Vance, there went two more. Where would it end ? And what was he going to do ? He glanced up at his board again, purely by reflex, and an odd eye caught him. He looked again, and sat up straight, staring at it. There, completely forgotten, was the round unwinking eye of the little portable TV camera. For a moment, Sentry was too stunned to grasp that he had been saved. Helen Kingsley had known, as everyone else did, that the power-plants were virtually the only places where cameras were not fitted, where all the precious readings were taken direct from pressure gauges and flow-meters and pyrometer points. And, this time, she had been wrong.

He reached out and took down the little camera, handling it reverently. For the rest of that long watch he sat and thought, hard and carefully, to work out exactly what he had to do.

Six

The mid-month quiz came three days later. Timed for 1300 hours, it took place as usual in the main assembly room and again, as usual, the two Kingsleys held the chair between them, flanked on either side, on the rostrum, by the remaining ten of the sociology section, women one side, men the other. There was never any need to count heads or be formal. Kingsley went straight to the main matter.

“I think we’re all agreed that the giant squid has given us our hardest shock since last session, so let’s deal with that first. Prime consideration must be present danger. Sentry?”

“Solkov can tell you better. He’s East side.”

“So far as we can tell,” Solkov stood to report, “nothing serious. A slight increase in seepage water. A slight loss in pressure in the inlet chambers. These we will seek out and deal with on the next routine overhaul.”

“What about recurrence?” This from Yvette Briand, of Horticulture and Botany. Sentry stood for that one.

“We are in process of fitting cables to each of the screens, permanently connected to battery power. Routine electrification should prevent any further incidents. It’s for the outside party to say how likely it is that we’ll get more squids.”

Douglas Haig climbed to his feet. “I’d say another squid was unlikely. Cephalopods are my field. This is not their kind of locale, at all. That one, so far as I could tell from the remains, was injured before it reached us, I’d say in conflict with a predator, probably shark. Its behaviour was uncharacteristic, in that it should have lifted off when we approached. For the record, this is the biggest I’ve ever seen, although there are bigger specimens in the literature.”

The biochemists had their turn, Alice Vance reporting that squid was considered a delicacy in some cultures but that this one was too old and tough to offer much scope. “However,” she said, “we found no toxins or contra-indications, so we passed it along to Diet and Culinary.”

Emmeline Addy stood to report that they had tried all of a dozen ways to tenderize the flesh but without success. It was left to Elsie Haig, for Horticulture and Botany, to assure the gathering that the carcase would be rotted down and processed for humus and fertilizer. Kingsley took the floor again, an odd expression on his face.

“I hope the meeting will permit me to make an apology, almost a confession. I’m afraid I rather lost my head in that crisis. I regret it. I can offer no excuse other than the feeble one that we seem to have progressed to the point where crises are no longer common. I imagine I had allowed myself to relax into over-confidence——”

“This is quite unnecessary,” Alan Asquith interrupted from his right. “No one is criticizing you, Andrew. Forget it.”

Sentry, keenly watching the faces on the platform, saw general agreement, with two exceptions. Paul Briand and Josip Isvolsky did not join in the chorus. They seemed aloof and watchful. He rose to his feet abruptly.

“I wish to challenge the chair,” he said. All noises faded away until the room was thickly silent. Kingsley brought his head round very steadily.

“Challenge the chair? What may that mean?” He tried a laugh that came more like a bark. “Were you suggesting there should have been a few words of commendation extended to you, Sentry ?”

“Save it. I challenge the chair because I have a question or two to ask on matters you’re not competent to judge on.”

“Questions?” Kingsley lost his superior manner at once. “What questions?”

“Oh no,” Sentry retorted. “Not for you.”

“Do you expect me to vacate the chair?”

“And the room. And Mrs. Kingsley as well, please.” Sentry put down his hand to push away Belle’s anxious clutch on his sleeve, but kept his eyes hard on the platform crew. Aileen and Alan Asquith spoke almost in concert.

“This is ridiculous!” they said, and then hushed. The rest remained quiet until Helen Kingsley rose, pale and furious.

“Come, Andrew,” she snapped. “You’ll recall us, of course, when Mr. Sentry has done making a fool of himself !” Her husband’s snarl was audible in the hush as he leaped up and marched from the platform. Asquith stood watching them go, then turned a blistering eye on Sentry. With his neatly clipped moustache and aristocratic air, he could appear commanding. He did now.

“I suppose you’d want to appoint a new chairman? Yourself, perhaps ?”

“Not you, anyway. I haven’t cancelled one bias just to make room for another. I’ll be happy to accept either Paul Briand or Josip Isvolsky.”

After fifteen silent seconds for thought, Briand sighed. “Very well, Mr. Sentry. What is this momentous matter?”

“A general question, first. You people up there are responsible for keeping an eye on our mental health. We all have to take a personal stability test once every two weeks. We do. Who tests you ?” Asquith snorted, but Briand was calm.

“We test each other, of course. Very discreetly. Was that your big question?”

“Just a preliminary. Tell me now, who last ran a test on Kingsley?”

“Hah!” Asquith grunted. “And then you’ll demand to know the results of that test, eh ? No no, Sentry. That data is confidential, as you know.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep on screaming before you’re hurt,” Sentry snapped. “I only asked—which one of you last ran a test on Kingsley ?” Asquith sat, shrugged a sneering glance at Briand, then at Isvolsky. Then David Repington frowned at Larry Kiggel. They frowned at each other. The tension grew as the enquiring looks crossed the platform to the distaff side. Aileen Asquith shrugged, glanced to Olivia Cadorna. Hilda Ryan and Ruth Nivelle exchanged glances. Irene Ibbot put a hand to her mouth. Sentry was guessing ahead of them all now. “While you’re at it,” he suggested, “who last ran a test on Helen Kingsley?”

From the floor someone called out. “They’ve tested each other, perhaps ?”

“No!” Isvolsky scowled. “That is not good practice.”

Sentry sagged. His hopeful scheme had come unstuck. “That’s it,” he shook his head. “I withdraw the question. You’d better call back those two.”

“A moment,” Briand put up a stern finger. “It is not so easily dismissed. There are implications––”

Before he could complete the sentence the lights winked out. A fraction of a second later the floor shook just a thought ahead of a distant booming explosion. Sentry didn’t remember beginning to run. He was out of the room and into the open before his slower reasoning processes had worked out how he knew, instantly, that it was Power-East. The sound, the direction of impact, the pattern of light failure and flickering recovery, he analysed it as he ran, reaching the plant entrance well ahead of anybody else. Inside, the motor-room was silent. Up the corkscrew ladder he went, to find the control-room vacant, all instruments zeroed except the cross-over monitors, which were up to attention. The visiphone bleated. He slapped it alive. Eben Addy’s face looked out, tensely alert.

“What the hell was that, Pete?”

“Dunno. Just got here. Who’s on?”

“Percy West. Ain’t he there?”

“Not in sight. Leave this link open, I’ll go look and call you back.” The stink of fried insulation caught Sentry’s nostrils. He tracked it, let it lead him up and around another ladder, up to the switch-house. With the scorched insulation came the sweet reek of hot oil. Percy West lay sprawled on the tile floor, feebly trying to wriggle to the door. The walls were dripping with oil. Of the several rows of heavy-duty switches, one line was a wreck, their box-casings burst open like so many bombs. Sentry went down on his knees.

“Take it easy, Percy. What happened?” His touch told him that West was badly burned, at least.

“I’m all right, Pete. Just flash!” Tiny flakes of scorched skin broke and fell from West’s face as he tried to grin. “Switch-house temperatures began dropping about an hour ago.”

“Dropping? Getting cooler?”

“Right. Figured it out afterwards, too late. Came up to see why. Must have made a spark of some kind.”

“Free hydrogen! From the fuel-store lines.”

“Right. We must have loosened the seals when we blew the squid. But we don’t have hydrogen monitors. Silly, isn’t it?”

There came a clatter from below and Sentry raised his voice. Twenty delicate minutes later West was out and on the cool grass outside where the medical team could make hasty and temporary attempts to ease him. As a rule. Men’s Medical handled male accidents, but Sally West was head of the women’s section, and no power on earth or under the sea would have kept her from Percy’s side at that moment. Sentry noted that even while he was busy making arrangements for repair and replacement of the damaged switch-gear. There was a lot to be done, most of it hard and heavy labour, and he was thoroughly weary by the time he was able to leave it and get home. He was angry, too. As he said to Belle,

“It’s high time we turned this whole business over to automation. The computer would have diagnosed free hydrogen in a flash, as soon as those falling temperatures snowed. The heat-exchange factor is well known. Percy, of course, still had his head full of the giant squid business and I don’t blame him. It is the human factor that is going to wreck us unless we do something about it.”

Another “human factor” awaited him the next morning. At 0830 hours he had a visiphone call from Paul Briand, informing him that he was to attend a special committee meeting of the entire sociology section, in camera. Belle made no secret of her distress.

“Andrew is after your blood, Peter. He’s going to build a cross and nail you to it. He’s the type.”

“Don’t worry, Tinkle. I don’t break all that easily. This might be the way to achieve what I was after, anyway.”

The twelve were gathered in their own interview room, where the long table made a “U”-shaped area for Sentry to stand. He felt as if on trial. Kingsley put on the look of a headmaster about to admonish a brilliant but difficult pupil, an air of amused tolerance thinly layered over severity.

“Well now,” he began, “this is an extraordinary situation, isn’t it? Are we to have an explosion?”

“Perhaps. Tell me, do you know what was said, yesterday, after you left the quiz?”

“I can guess the general drift. The purpose of this meeting is that you will now make your accusations against me in my presence. Fair?”

“That’s fine. Only I didn’t make any accusations. I’m surprised your colleagues didn’t tell you that!”

“We don’t gossip,” Asquith growled. “You have the floor. Get on!”

“All right. Here’s that question again. When did you last take a personal stability test, Kingsley ?”

“Stick to your last, cobbler,” Kingsley smiled. “You’re making a fool of yourself. I have a test every other week, just like anyone else.”

“No no,” Briand murmured, and there was instant hush. “That is not true, Andrew. Not true.”

“Are you calling me a liar, Paul?” Kingsley’s indignation was well done. “You should check the records before making a statement like that, you know.”

“But I did. I checked very carefully, for ten times. Twenty weeks. And always the same—exactly the same— results. Similar, perhaps I could say possible. But exactly the same ? Never.”

“I agree,” Isvolsky murmured. “It seems Paul had the same idea as myself, and found the same results. Ten duplicate records, and all signed by Helen Kingsley. Furthermore––”

“Damn it, those records are confidential!”

“Rubbish!” Isvolsky brushed the objection aside with a precise gesture. “I am as professional as yourself. I disclose no secrets. I say, furthermore, that Helen Kingsley’s records show precisely the same pattern. It is now mid-July. Since twenty weeks back, neither one of you has taken a test, simply handed in copies. Comment, please.”

Kingsley went red in the face, tried to laugh. “Good God!” he burst out. “Anyone would think it was a crime! I am, after all, the Director. I have a thousand things to attend to. Does it matter that I chose to code in ‘same as last time’ results, instead of going through the rigmarole and wasting someone else’s time ? Surely no one questions my stability?”

“I do,” Sentry stated flatly. “You can call that an accusation, if you like. We can start with the fact that you and Mrs. Kingsley have been conspiring between you to dodge the tests for the past twenty weeks.”

“Just a minute,” Asquith protested. “That’s a bit too strong. Conspiring? Come now, Sentry!”

“Husbands and wives aren’t supposed to check each other anyway, you’ve said so yourselves. So what else is it?”

Helen Kingsley came to her feet, shivering with rage. Sentry watched her the way he would watch a strain-gauge climbing to danger point.

“Be careful,” she warned. “I wouldn’t push this thing too far, in your circumstances.” She let it hang there and he kept his bleak gaze on her until he thought the moment was ripe.

“A threat?” he murmured. “Is that how you propose to demonstrate how sane and stable you are, before these witnesses?”

She went white. Her laugh came shrill and unsteady. “You fool, to try psychological tricks on me. As Andrew said, stick to your last. Try your filthy accusations on me and I’ll see that you regret it, you conceited clown!”

“Now look here,” Kingsley slapped the table, “first you accuse me of psychosis. Then you snap at Asquith. Now you’re picking on Helen. Can’t you see you are demonstrating the very imbalance you’re accusing others of? Persecution tendency. Possibly slight megalomania. Wouldn’t you say, Briand?”

Helen Ryan broke in before Briand could speak. “My husband works in Mr. Sentry’s area of operations. And I was the last one to run a test on him. I submit that he shows every sign of stability and control. I reject Dr. Kingsley’s implications. Peter, I would like to hear the substance of your evidence as it relates to––”

“Let me tell it first,” Helen came up to her feet again, eyes blazing, “and then let him lie, if he dares!”

“Then there is substance to it?”

“Only this. That man is riddled with erotic fantasies, hatched in the long solitude of the night watches. Heaven only knows how many other women he has made the target of his urges, that remains to be seen. I do know that when he approached me and suggested—no, insisted—that I should visit him in the night, told me of his perverted imaginings and assumed that I would enjoy taking part in their fulfilment, I was shocked and disgusted. However, as part of my professional obligation, I was prepared to humour him up to a point. Frankly, I had not arrived at any hard decision. I think I would have sought advice from one of you, given the chance.”

“Then you never actually kept an assignation with Sentry?” David Repington asked. Kingsley looked murderous. Helen lifted her chin sharply.

“I am prepared to carry out professional obligations, but I don’t think anyone would expect me to go that far.”

“Well!” Kingsley growled, deep in his throat. “And this is the man who dares to accuse me—me! My God!”

“May we now hear Mr. Sentry?” Hilda Ryan’s voice was coldly calm, and Paul Briand nodded.

“Exactly. We must have it out.”

“I’d rather not listen to his lurid imaginings,” Kingsley shouted. “There are limits, you know!”

“You’d better stay,” Sentry told him. “You won’t hear anything lurid, not from me.” He turned to face Ruth Nivelle. “Three days ago your husband Georges brought me a job to do. The following day I gave it back to him and asked him to hang on to it for a while. Did he say anything to you about it?”

She thought a moment, then nodded. “Yes, I remember. Georges gave the—it to me to put away for him. In my desk file. It is still there.”

“That’s fine. Just to prove there’s been no chance to fake or tamper.” Sentry swung back to the co-chairman again. “The thing we were talking about was a camera. Georges had busted, it. I had just repaired it. And it was on my control panel, watching and listening to you, Mrs. Kingsley, three nights ago when you came to call on me. It saw everything, heard everything––”

He halted as he saw her stagger and then go down in a dead faint. Her husband stared down, frozen for the moment, the veins standing out on his neck, then he spun, snarling, and threw himself bodily across the table. Sentry was caught completely flat-footed by surprise and the sheer animal ferocity of the attack. He had one hideous close-up of a grinning maniacal face, then the hard floor met the back of his head and he saw stars, felt a cracking pain and then darkness.

Seven

Consciousness crept back to him through the sound of groans and a fog of pain. He realized that it was he himself who was groaning, stopped it and opened his eyes very cautiously, wincing at the bright lights of the sanatorium. A face came to look down at him. Luigi Cadorna smiled.

“Be still, now. It is only a bump on the head and some bruises, not severe. My Olivia told me all about it.”

“What happened?”

“As you might expect. Kingsley is unsafe. Also his wife. Both are under sedation right now. In a little while, three or four days perhaps, we begin to shut down the project and return to the surface. A pity.”

“What for? Why are we quitting?” Sentry tried to sit up, and another face came to frown at him. Stephen Wilby.

“Lie still, man. You’ve had a hell of a crack. Looks as if Kingsley tried to shove your skull right through the floor.”

“Never mind that. Steve, why are we deciding to quit. Who made that decision, anyway?”

“I dunno. The sociology boys I guess. They’re in charge. Now you take it easy. Belle’s outside, waiting to see you.”

Her approach was characteristically calm and casual. “I always said you had a hard head. Now everybody knows.”

“It doesn’t feel all that hard right now,” he admitted, and she put a sympathetic hand on his arm.

“Peter, whatever did you do? Half the sociology section are nursing cuts and bruises, Kingsley’s in a strait-jacket and there’s talk about us closing the place down. You look as if you’d been trampled. What’s been going on?”

“All I did was challenge an axiom,” he sighed. “Tinkle, would you ask Paul Briand to come and see me as soon as he can, before anybody takes any big decisions, please ?”

Briand came late that evening, just as Sentry had heard good news about Percy West, that his colleague was suffering only from lesser burns and shock and would be fit in a day or two. But Briand looked grim.

“You showed us our weakness, Sentry,” he admitted. “In time, I hope.”

“What’s this talk about shutting the project down ?”

“But what else?” the Frenchman shrugged. “We are in a new kind of danger, now that we know the testing machinery is not reliable. Anything else we could cope with, but the human factor was always the big riddle. And we have been wrong somewhere, that much is now obvious.”

“I have a theory about that, Paul. No, wait, I haven’t done so badly up to now, have I ? This time you can check me out beforehand. A prediction. But I want a little data first. Tell me, what actually happens to our test records, afterwards?”

“They are stored, filed, in the computer. What else would you?”

“All right. Now, let’s say you have just put me through the battery and you have all the results down there. What, exactly, do you do next?”

Briand frowned. “Do you expect me to give you a lesson in test evaluation in six short words? I look, I think, I judge. There are thirty-eight variables. I look for abnormalities, from my experience!”

“I’m an engineer-type,” Sentry said. “In my job one looks for anything out of line, anything that changes without some good reason. You?”

“But, of course. Sentry, this is elementary.”

“It certainly is. Look, I want you to do something for me. Get hold of Hans Goring. Or Sophia Menin, from Biochemistry. Either of those, or anyone else who knows how to set up a computer programme and set up a routine on the machine that will retrieve and inspect all the personality test-data for each and every one of us, compare them over elapsed time, and isolate any significant changes. Know what I mean?”

“A machine!” Briand made a face. “No machine can do the work of the human mind, my friend.”

“That’s the axiom I wanted to challenge. Will you do it? There’ll be no danger of revealing confidential material. You’re the only one who will see the final figures. And one thing more. Let me have a piece of paper and a stylus.” Briand got out a notebook, tore out a page. Sentry scribbled on it, folded it and gave it back. “There, you keep that until after you get the machine results and then look. Here’s my prediction. Most—almost all—the records will show no significant change. Some will, however. Those I’ve written down there. If I am right––”

“You have the Kingsleys here, of course.”

“No. You’re not thinking. Their records are fake, remember? No. If I’ve picked them right, then I’ve proved my point. And the project need not be thrown out as a loss. It will take only an hour or so to prove it.”

Briand got up. “Very well,” he sighed, “if it will preserve this wonderful experiment, I will try anything.”

Sentry slept well that night, but it was more sedation than satisfaction. His gamble seemed to be on more and more tenuous grounds the more he looked at it. He was awake and anxious long before there was any need, next morning. His answer came in the shape of all ten of the sociology section presenting themselves at the medical centre to talk to him. Stephen Wilby, under protest, allowed them the use of the Medical conference room. Briand took the floor.

“It is obvious,” he said, “that Mr. Sentry knows something we do not.” He described the suggested computer analysis and its results. “My friends, all night I have puzzled over this, but without the ‘aha!’ of understanding. The machine results show that all of us have remained reasonably stable and adjusted, over the period, except four. The four which Mr. Sentry wrote down here. I will name them, within this confidence of professionals. They are Robert and Alice Vance, and Luis and Maria Sanchez!” There was immediate if controlled uproar and incredulous voices. Briand waited for quiet.

“Now, Mr. Sentry, you will please tell us how you knew?”

“Gladly,” Sentry nodded, “but you’ll have to let me do it my way and lead up to it by stages, because you’re not going to like this. We’re all scientists together. You’ll agree, I think, that in the past half-century whenever we’ve applied the scientific method to our problems we’ve succeeded pretty well and whenever we haven’t, we’ve pretty well failed. Now this was and is a scientific problem, this project. And one of the main props of the scientific method has always been to minimize the possibility of human error. In my field it is fairly simple. I rely on instruments all the time. I take decisions, yes, but on the best possible evidence, provided for me by a non-involved machine of some kind.”

“We deal with people,” Asquith interrupted. “Not machines!”

“Agreed. There’s a difference. Emotions, feelings, inspiration and intuition and so on, all come into it. Precious abilities that no machine has. But deadly, if and when they fly directly in the face of fact. You have to have hard facts first. People make mistakes when they think they are better than the facts. That’s how I was able to predict those four. Paul, may I ask you a personal question? Are you in love with your wife, Yvette?”

Briand grunted. “Another trick ? If so, it fails. I am sorry to disappoint you, Sentry, but the answer is yes, I am in love with Yvette.”

“No disappointment, Paul. I was gambling on that. Look, when this project was being put together, the really hard part was selecting sixty people who would be fit for it, have the necessary combinations of skills and abilities, and be compatible with each other at the same time. We, all of us, were analysed right down to the last toenail and idiosyncracy. And the computer shuffled us and selected those who would stand the best chance of rubbing along together, both as a community, and as life-partners. For the sake of a very important and exciting project, we cooperated, made a go of it. But we were selected for compatibility only. Nobody said anything about love, or emotional involvement, or even affection, because we have no objective measurements for such things.”

“On the whole,” Hilda Ryan murmured, “we have done very well. What are you getting at, Peter ?”

“Let me be poetic a moment. I suggest to you that love is not the seed that is planted, but the flower that blooms afterwards—if, and only if, that seed was well planted and allowed to grow in good soil. In other words, given compatibility and willingness to begin with, love follows. As it has done with us. All of us, except the four people mentioned and the Kingsleys. Because, don’t you see, they were already married before they applied for the project, before the computer could analyse them for pair-compatibility. Their names were entered in as ‘married’, which, to the machine, means ‘compatible’. So the machine accepted that as a datum given and went on from there. And they were the only ones to fail. The rest of us are all right!”

Six months later, when the Second Poseidon Group had gone down, and the pioneering First Group reached the surface after a tedious week of careful depressurization, there was a swarm of avid newspapermen there to welcome them to the light of day and the unfamiliar feelings and sounds of the retrieval vessel. Sentry became the focal point for one little group. With his arm around Belle, he smilingly disclaimed any claim to genius or brilliance.

“Just a hunch, at first,” he declared, “based on a thing I once read by Bernard Shaw. Two people under the powerful influence of biological urges and sentimental emotions are in the worst possible condition to make sensible decisions which may affect the rest of their lives. Or something like that. It’s true, anyway. We were lucky. We made the rational decisions first and fell in love afterwards. We made it work.”

One newsman turned to Belle, and asked her amid a lightning-storm of flash-bulbs. “Do you feel that it will go on working, Mrs. Sentry?”

Belle smiled. “I’m ready to spend the rest of my life working at it,” she declared, with confidence.