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this place in the past. It's been here since before there was a Board. A lot
of those people have stayed. Some of these books were brought here by them,
some were written here by them. The information here is what convinced me of
the things I told you the business about attempts to get in touch with the
Board about this place, and so on.
'Spend as much time as you need absorbing it. It's important that you get the
whole story. I'll be back
when it's time to eat.'
He laid the pad under a chair that's not quite the right way to say it; the
pad was denser than the liquid, so figure it out for yourself - and swam off.
There seemed to be nothing to do but start reading.
Now, I don't have copies of those books and tapes. And I know Bert was a liar.
But take my word for it, there were far too many of them for him to have
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produced himself in the time he was down here. Most of them were handwritten,
though some had been typed. I spent something like eighteen solid hours just
skimming the ones that were in languages I knew. (I shouldn't say solid hours.
Bert did come back to take me to meals, and I also slept. There's no point in
describing all the details of life, even if the environment did make some of
them rather unusual). I'll boil down the picture I got of the situation to the
smallest volume I can manage.
Chapter Eighteen
The place had indeed been in existence before the Board. During the final few
decades before rationing, the separate political institutions which existed
then were one by one coming to realize that man's energy reserves were indeed
vanishing. A number of frantic attempts were made to avoid, or at least
postpone, the consequences without offending public opinion - or rather,
without disturbing public complacency.
My own historical knowledge is shaky, but I seem to remember that this was the
period of the 'crash program', which cynical engineers of the time used to
define as an administrative attempt to produce a baby in one month by making
nine women pregnant. You must know some of the results, like the
Mediterranean-Dead Sea hydroelectric tunnel, the Messina, Key, Ore and Arafura
dams, the Valparaiso thermocouple, the Bandung and Akureyr volcanic taps. Some
worthwhile, and even valuable, some monuments to inept politics.
You know the further consequences of some of them - the disputes over output
use which led to a dozen minor wars, which in turn wasted more energy in a
year than all the crash units together could produce in a human lifetime. And
you know that the final result was the formation of the Board and general
acceptance of power rationing.
During the period of friction several nations attempted to set up secret power
plants, in the hope either of avoiding the covetousness of their neighbors or
of providing themselves with energy reserves in case violent conflict did
occur. Most of these 'secrets' were secret only to the general public of the
nation concerned long before they were producing such of them as got that
far. A few lasted for several years after Board rationing began. It had been
assumed that the last of these had been found and tied into the general power
net many decades ago.
But here was another.
It was as simple as that almost.
I didn't find in the records just what country was responsible. I didn't try
very hard. The name would have been almost as meaningless to me, born more
than half a century after country names had become merely geographical labels,
as it would have been to Abraham Lincoln, who died probably twice as long
before the nation in question existed.
It was probably a small enough country to be worried about its neighbors, and
certainly a large enough one to be highly industrialized. The technique of
deep-sea living which was being so effectively demonstrated to me at this
moment was not a product of casual, or even of crash-program, research. It
must have involved a very long development period. Knowing something of the
customs of the time, I'm still amazed that the secret was kept though I can
guess at the steps which in those days would have seemed normal and proper to
achieve this end.
Anyway, they set up the station and had it running nicely before the Board and
rationing became a reality.
Remember, it was a secret.
It had to be. Only a handful of people would have known about it at any one
time, other than the thousands of permanent residents. That handful, when
rationing began and all power sources became public property, simply and
quietly withdrew from the world and severed connections with it. A little
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ruthlessness may have been necessary, but I prefer to believe that the worst
to happen was a little forced change of address.
At any rate, there was suddenly a new nation with a population of about
fifteen thousand at the bottom of the Pacific. It was well supplied with
manufacturing and synthesizing plants, and oversupplied with energy. Fifteen
thousand people. As Marie put it later, fifteen thousand aristocrats -and more
than fifteen billion Jacquerie.
More realistically, fifteen thousand cut flowers.
Most of the accounts I read expressed, or at least hinted, the belief that the
severance of relations with the surface hadn't been meant to be so complete.
It must have been obvious to all concerned that a population of that size was
far too small to maintain a highly technical culture and equally obvious that
only a highly technical culture could live under those conditions. They
presumably meant to maintain intellectual contact with the rest of mankind
-probably they even meant to maintain physical connection, since it's hard to
believe that they expected to be able to manufacture every piece of equipment
they needed to keep themselves going.
But they didn't maintain those contacts. They couldn't. They might possibly
have managed, even in the face of the unexpected difficulty, if what contact
there was didn't have to be surreptitious; but the two factors together broke
the link.
The unexpected difficulty might have been foreseen if the station had been
running for more than a very few years before the break; there would have been
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