Chapter 15 Four Feet in the Gym

Omar read the drum for three hours with the lantern on his knee and a magnifying glass off the fire hall's first-aid tin, and then he came out and got everybody onto the gravel pad, because what he had on it changed the shape of the morning. Three traces, running in bands around a smoked paper cylinder a foot and a half wide, each one a hand's breadth across. "The top one is strain on the shelf," he said. "Node nine has a pair of extensometers welded to that rock in the last good year anybody had money for it. Background in this district is three tenths of a millimeter a day. You could draw that line with a ruler and a bad temper." He held the drum up so the light came through the paper. "It is a flat line. Four days of it, dead flat. That rock has not moved one measurable thing." "So the shelf is fine." "The shelf is perfect. It would be excellent news if the shelf were the part that mattered." He turned the drum a quarter turn and stopped it. "The middle trace is node nine itself. That is the fault, the trench, the moving front, the whole reason we are all sitting on this rock. Its full-scale is plus or minus twelve millimeters and the pen has a stop at the top of the travel. At four-twelve this morning the pen went past the stop and has been lying against it ever since." "In the range." "Off the range, Juna. Not to the top of the range. Past it, where it jammed and stopped moving." He set the drum down on the gravel. "So whatever happened under that bay at four-twelve this morning was larger than the instrument that Ibarra put down there to watch for it. It did not fail. It was too big for it." "What about the third one?" Omar did not answer for a moment. He turned the drum so the third band was uppermost, and the third band was not a wave. It climbed, in a smooth even ramp, from a level near the bottom of the paper all the way to near the top, and it had been climbing since four-twelve, without a kink, without a step, without a single hesitation in it, and the pen was two-tenths of an inch from the stop. "Nobody has ever put a pin in that chamber," he said. "It is a machine room cut into a rock. There is nothing in that room that should change by a single millimeter in a day, except the water standing on top of it. I have the calibration scratched into the frame by the man who sold him the instrument. One millimeter of pen is eight-tenths of a meter of head." "So the water over the shelf has been falling." "The water over the shelf has been falling at a steady, constant, machine-smooth rate for eleven hours and forty minutes, and it is not going to stop falling because the tide came back, because I have watched it." He looked up. "The hole is open. It is open into the chamber. And that chamber is under a rock the county blasted flat in 1946, and there is two thousand tons of that rock sitting on the seaward shoulder of it because there was nowhere else to put it. Everything the bay takes is going down a chimney, and the chimney is under the one piece of ground in Tidefall Harbor that four feet of water does not cover." Nobody said anything for a while. Perrin wrote eleven-twenty on the board in his careful hand and underlined it. "Okay," Juna said. "So the booster." The booster was a gray steel box the size of a lunch pail, bolted to a bracket above the suspended ceiling of the gym, with a coax pigtail and a pair of brass terminals and a label that said the school district's name and a lightning arrestor and the kind of part number that carries a date in it. It was a two-way box: a low-power transmitter for the weather instruments and a receiver with a squelch, built to sit at the top of a school mast and talk to a district room forty miles away on a good day. Forty feet of coax came down into it out of the ceiling tiles in a staple every eighteen inches, and every one of those staples was underwater, because the gym floor stands under two foot nine of water now instead of four, and the ceiling grid hangs eighteen feet above the gym floor. "Dive to eighteen feet, take forty feet of staple," Halleck said. "That is nine minutes of somebody's air." "Nine minutes of my air if I go straight up, take the corners off, and do not look at anything." She was already doing the sum with her hands. "I want a second trip for the tie wire in the maintenance cage, because Omar is going to need wire and there is no wire on this mountain worth the name. And I want somebody on the roof the whole time with the rope on me and a hand on the bell, and I want somebody at the door with the second reel." "I am at the roof," Halleck said. "Delgado, at the door." She looked at the man who had not said anything. "You are the only person in this county who knows how a school boiler room connects to the outside of a school. If I go in wrong I am going to come up the wrong corridor, and you will be the one who has to work that out from a rope." Delgado put his chin up. "I will be at the door." Slack low came at ten past one, and it came like a gift. Juna went in through the second-floor window at the back of the school, where the corridor ran the length of the building, and she swam forty feet of hallway in a hallway that had somebody's idea of a mosaic in it, a whale with a football, done in tile, swimming along upside down under her light. The gym doors were standing open. They were standing open because the water had come through the west wall that morning and gone out again through the west wall and taken the doors off their hinges in the first hour and set them down neatly against the far wall on the way. She went down the line of the windows until the tile grid came up out of the dark in front of her, and then she went up into it. Ninety seconds in, the booster. She got the bracket off with the pry bar, broke the pigtail, and had it in her hand with forty feet of coax still stapled to the joists above her. She could have gone. She went for the wire instead, because the wire was twenty feet past the far wall and because she had told Omar she would not look at anything, which is the sentence that makes every rescue swimmer dive twice. Four staples, then eight, then the coil. The wire cage had a padlock on it and she took the pry bar to the hasp, which took longer than it should have, and her air went from comfortable to arithmetic. At seven minutes she came down out of the grid with the coil under one arm and the booster under the other and the forty feet of coax dragging behind her like a rope off a running anchor, and she made the corridor, and she made the window. Her mask came off halfway across the second-floor landing, in the dark, with no hand on it, and the last four feet of that swim she did by memory with her eyes shut. The ceiling came down behind her. It came down the length of the gym in one piece, a hundred and fifty suspended tiles and two banks of lights and the school's emblem panel, which hit the water four seconds after the rest of it and made a noise she felt in the wall. The whole floor went the color of coffee, and every loose thing in that room came off its moorings at once and went to the west wall. Halleck had forty feet of rope and the bell in his fist. He took her up the back wall of the building one-handed, and Omar's voice came out of the hand light's speaker, which was clipped to his belt and which Omar had wired for exactly this and about which he would later claim to have said nothing. "Eleven hundred," he said. "You are over eleven hundred and she is coming up." At one thousand two hundred she came out of the west door of the school on her hands and knees with the booster rolling in front of her, and lay in the two foot nine of water in the corridor and bled from a cut along her forearm that she had not felt at all, and Halleck got the door open and got her out onto the rubble of the car park and sat on the curb and pressed his own shirt against her arm. The roof came off after that. The school's mast had been bolted through the membrane and the purlins and into a truss, and it stayed exactly where it was through all of it. But the roof deck around it went, in a long tearing strip from the west parapet to the stair bulkhead, and the storm drain that took it was a four-inch pipe, so where the water went after that was into the building's guts and out through the ground floor, which is how the school emptied in eleven minutes and filled again in twenty. They sat on the roof in the sun with their feet hanging over the west edge and looked at forty feet of lattice standing over nothing. "Nine minutes," Juna said. "It took me eleven. Tell Omar exactly eleven." They took the mast down in sections. Five bolted lengths of eight feet, three-inch aluminum lattice, the whole thing weighing two hundred and ten pounds, and Omar came out on the roof and put his hand on it and gave them the one fact that decided the rest of the day. "It wants to be bolted to a roof," he said. "It is instrumented for wind load and it is guyed for a guy plate, and if you stand it on a tower frame that was built to hold four men and a water tank, you will get twenty minutes of antenna before the whole thing folds in the middle." Halleck looked at the mast, and then at the eleven switchbacks and the four hundred yards of slope above them. "Two hundred and ten pounds," he said. "Thirty-one people. One switchback at a time." ---