第18章 The Hole

Nobody slept, and by seven in the morning there were four people on the peak who had the look of somebody waiting for a number, and Omar Hadid was the one who was going to have to produce it. He had the drum on the plank with the notebook open and the pencil out, and he had done the arithmetic four times, and four times he had come out of it with a different answer, and the difference between the answers had narrowed from a factor of three to a factor of one and a half, which in his trade meant something bad. The *Vera K* answered at nine-twenty with the sounder. Pike had gone about it the way a man does a job he has been given, which is at the first light of the day he has, at the speed his boat will take, along the line he was given. He sounded the creek first, because it was the question with people attached to it. Then he sounded the ring. "The creek mouth is open to me," he said. "Bar's eleven feet at low water and it scoured out sometime Tuesday, so there's no beach left in it, it's a hard sand edge and then depth. Two hundred yards up the creek it goes to twenty. The whole thing is navigable by anything with a keel and I can turn in it without touching anything." "And the creek bar itself." "There's more to that creek than there was." Pike took a breath. "I sounded the north bar at first light Tuesday and I sounded it again just now, and here's what I have. Tuesday the bar came up in a ridge four hundred yards offshore and the basin inside it was shallow and flat, eight, ten, twelve feet, the way it always was. Right now the bar's still there but it's sitting at the back of a hole. There's a basin between the bar and the channel that runs from a hundred and ten feet in the north end to nothing at the south, and it's been scoured. If it wasn't put there by Tuesday I don't know what put it there." Omar asked him to describe it again, and then asked him to describe it a third time with one instruction: keep the numbers. At the end of it there was a long pause on the frequency, and then Pike said a number that made Omar Hadid put his palm flat on the plank and leave it there. "Hundred and thirty feet across," Pike said. "Tuesday night, at eleven o'clock when I was standing off the bar. Hundred and fifty-eight feet across, at seven this morning, in the middle of the white ring." Juna looked at Omar. Omar was not looking at her. "Twenty-eight feet of hole in twenty hours," he said. "Twenty-eight feet of diameter. The throat of it. A month ago that was a rock with a crack in it. It is eating itself." Omar picked up the pencil and wrote two numbers on the board beside Perrin's and turned it around so that the whole gravel pad could see it. Two hundred and forty thousand. He tapped the first number. "That is the 1946 blast floor over the void. Eleven thousand cubic yards of granite and quarry spoil laid over a chamber the county cut and never filled, holding it up over the hole they have opened under it. That is the rock that is standing between the harbor and a hole five hundred feet deep." He tapped the second number. "And that is what has gone out of the roof of the chimney in twenty hours, on a conservative reading of the sounder, at the rate the throat is widening. There is no more of the ceiling coming down than the water carries with it, because the water is taking the ceiling with it. Every cubic yard that goes down that hole is a yard of floor gone." He put the pencil down. "A bathtub does not empty through a crack and stay a bathtub. It empties through a hole in the floor of the world, and the floor of the world is what is holding the water up." Nobody on the gravel pad said anything for a while. A child somewhere behind the windbreak asked whether the sky was going to fall. "A hundred and thirty feet across," Juna said. "Pike had a number on Tuesday night. So somebody somewhere can put a beam on this thing." "The shelf was blasted flat in 1946 to a table four feet below datum, because the fishing fleet scraped their hulls on it, and then the county put two hundred thousand tons of the stuff on the seaward shoulder of it because there was nowhere else to put it." Omar's voice had gone very quiet. "That shelf is the only solid ground in Tidefall Harbor. Everything in this valley is soil off the side of a hill, and it has been standing in moving water for four days. When that floor goes, there is no shelf under the harbor mouth and no rock under the north bar, and both of those things are made out of the same limestone as the creek head. It is all one piece. It goes together or it stands." "Where does the creek head sit?" "On the north bar. Eight miles from the chimney, on the same bed, at the far lip of the same basin that Pike just sounded." He looked down the hill at the school. "If I put a landing there and the boats come into that creek, I am putting twenty-two people onto a piece of the same floor that I have just told you is going to be gone inside a day." Juna looked at the number on the board for a long time. "Then what do we do with it?" "Do it anyway." He almost sounded surprised that she had asked the question in that order. "Juna, we have eight children, a four-year-old with no shoes until yesterday, and eight people over sixty, sitting on the least certain piece of ground in this county, under a wave that put forty-six feet on a tower in one morning. And across eight miles of country there is a creek with eleven feet of water in it and a rock knuckle at twenty-two feet with a generator and eight hundred gallons of diesel on it. That is the best place anybody in this county has to stand tomorrow morning. I am not going to hold thirty-one people on a rock and refuse them a boat." "Then we go tonight." "We go tonight, and we go in two parties, and we are off this rock before the tide is high." He closed the notebook. "And before we go, I want to look down the hole myself, because a man who has sent eight children toward a creek should at least have been in the chimney." Low water was at ten to nine, and Juna went down the goat trail at seven in the morning with Halleck, and the valley under them had changed character in the two days since she had last been down in it. The water was still leaving. There was a full five-foot fall in the draw over a mile of it, and the whole of it was going downhill toward the harbor with a surface that looked like poured iron, and it made almost no sound at all, which frightened her more than noise would have. At the granite they rigged the same way they had rigged twice before. Halleck put sixty feet of the old salvage cord around a boulder's waist, ran the bight through the ring, and gave her the free end, and she went off the shelf with the ring in one hand and the light in the other. Eleven feet over the shelf. The chain. The ring. The blast face, and the seam in it, which was four fingers wide now instead of two. She went down into the chamber, and the chamber was different too. The water in it was moving fast enough to lay a hitch in her suit, and the case on the floor was bolted down and had been bolted down well, and the drum was gone from its bracket, and the empty memory socket was still capped. The throat was where she had left it. She went in head first, and this time the light went down a long way before it gave up, because the shaft was a quarter as wide as it had been and a great deal straighter, and she could see the arcs of the county's own blast work going down for sixty feet, and below that the round hole that the sea had made, and below that nothing at all. Forty-two feet down, on the cord, with her knees against the wall. And then the light found something, and she stopped breathing, and let herself sink another inch to see it better. It was a floor. A flat pale floor twenty feet across, made of angular blocks the size of a car, and the water was going through it. The blast floor had not fallen all at once. It had come down in pieces and the pieces were still there, packed and shoved into the throat by the water going through them, and the sea was eating them as she watched, one block at a time, turning them over and grinding them down the shaft, and where they went the water closed over and made a small white mark and took the mark away. A man on the shore of the world was watching the ground under his feet go down a drain a piece at a time, in real time, and there was not one thing in the world he could have done about any of it. She was up the shaft in ninety seconds, up the chain in two minutes flat, and on the granite at five minutes past nine, and Halleck had her and had the cord and was already pulling, and she lay on the rock for a while with her arm over her face. "Twenty," she said, when she could. "There were twenty feet of floor left down there when I looked, and it was going piece by piece, and I could see the blocks turning over in the light." "How long has that floor been there?" "Sixty-eight years. It was put there in a hurry by men who were told to put the rock somewhere." Halleck took that in and nodded and did not ask the question, because he could do arithmetic. At noon they told all thirty-one of them, on the gravel, in the sun, standing, in under ten minutes, because there was no other way to do it and Aughrim had made that rule on Wednesday and nobody was going to break it on Thursday. At four in the afternoon Aughrim worked out who carried what. ---