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methods.
    “For the time being, then, you must not talk to anybody about our work here. That is an order.”

6
The Borer in the Earth
    Time passed.
    We learned.
    And Lieutenant Tsuya came in on us one day, where all three of us were working up our convection diagrams, and said:
    “You’re beginning to understand.” His lean pumpkin face was smiling. He went over our charts, line by line, nodding. “Very well,” he said. “Now—I have something new for you.”
    He took a sealed tube of yellow plastic out of his briefcase.
    “Observations are the key to forecasting!” he said. “And as you have seen, it is the deep-focus quakes, hundreds of miles beneath the surface, that determine what happens to our dome cities. And there it is difficult to make observations. But now—”
    He opened the tube.
    Inside was a heavy little machine, less than two feet long, not quite two inches in diameter. It looked very much like the model Mole we had seen at the Sub-Sea Academy, except that it was thinner and smaller.
    “The geosonde!” he said proudly. “A telemeter, designed to plumb the depths of the earth, much as the radiosonde reaches into the atmosphere!”
    He held it up for us to see.
    “In the nose,” he lectured, “an atomic ortholytic drill. The body, a tube filmed with high-tension edenite. And inside it, the sensing elements and a sonic transmitter.
    “The edenite film presented us with a difficult engineering problem, for, as you know, our instruments cannot read through edenite. We solved it—by turning off the film once a minute, for a tiny fraction of a second. Not very long, but long enough for the elements to register, without the device being crushed.
    “It is with this geosonde that we can, at last, reach the deepest quake centers.
    “With it—we may make sure that there will never be another catastrophe like the Nansei Shoto Dome.”
    He grinned at us amiably. “Oh,” he said, “and one thing more. Your two-week training period is over. Tomorrow you can all get a pass.”
    Harley Danthorpe came to life. “Great, Lieutenant!” he cried. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Now my father will—”
    “I know,” said Lieutenant Tsuya dryly. “We’ve all heard about your father. I’ll prepare the passes for twelve hundred hours tomorrow. In the morning, I want each of you to complete one forecast, based on current readings—the real thing. When that is done, you can take off.”
    He nodded approvingly at our convection diagrams. “You’ve come a long way,” he observed. “Dismissed!”
    We went back to the base, far above the deep observatory, and headed for the mess hall. Bob disappeared for a moment, and when he rejoined Danthorpe and me, he seemed a little concerned. But I didn’t think much about it—then.
    Harley Danthorpe spent the whole meal bragging about his father. The thought of seeing him—of coming back into his rightful environment, as he saw it, as Crown Prince of the kingdom of the sea that his father ruled—seemed to excite him.
    Bob was very subdued.
    After chow, Harley and I marched back to the barracks—I to make some practice readings for tomorrow’s forecast, Harley to phone his father. I didn’t see Bob for a while.
    Then I noticed that the microseismometer I was using seemed out of true. These are precision instruments, and even for practice readings I wanted to use one that was working properly.
    I started out of our quarters—and nearly tripped over Bob. He was talking heatedly, in a low voice, to a man I had never seen before—a small, withered, almond-skinned man, perhaps a Chinese or a Malay. He was dressed like a civilian janitor.
    Bob had his hand out to the man—almost as though he were handing him something.
    And then he looked up and saw me.
    Abruptly his manner changed. “You,” he cried. “What do you think you’re up to? Where’s my book?”
    The little janitor glanced at me, and then shrank away, “No, mister!” he squeaked.