to be impressive. He could not speak with pompous conviction, which
is so much more convincing than reason to most people. He wasn't the
man to get the cooperation of the non-Service population, because he
could only explain what he knew and believed, and was not practiced in
persuasion. But Werner was. He had the knack of making people believe
anything, not because it was reasonable but because it was oratory.
"I suppose you're right," acknowledged Bordman. "We need civilian help
and a lot of it. I'm not the man to get it. He is." He did not say
anything about Werner being the man to get credit, whether he deserved
it or not. He patted the dog's head and stood up. "I wish I had a good
supply of soil-coagulant. I need to make a coffer-dam in the reserve
area here. But I think I'll manage."
Sandringham regarded him soberly as he moved to the door. As he was
about to pass out of it, Sandringham said:
"Bordman--"
"What?"
"Take good care of yourself. Will you?"
* * * * *
Therefore Senior Officer Werner, of the Colonial Survey, received his
instructions from Sandringham. Bordman never knew the details of the
instructions Werner got. They were possibly persuasive, or they may
have been menacing. But Werner ceased to argue for the movement of any
fraction of the island's population to the arctic ice-cap, and instead
made frequent eloquent addresses to the planetary population on the
scientific means by which their lives were to be saved. Between the
addresses, perhaps, he sweated cold sweat when a tree sedately tilted
in what had seemed solid soil, or a building settled perceptibly while
he looked at it, or when a section of the island's soil bulged upward.
Instead, he headed citizens' committees, and grandly gave instructions,
and spoke in unintelligible and therefore extremely scientific terms
when desperately earnest men asked for explanations. But he was
perfectly clear in what he wanted them to do.
He wanted drill-holes in the arable soil down to the depth at which the
holes began to close up of themselves. He wanted those holes not more
than a hundred feet apart in lines which slanted at a little less than
forty-five degrees to the gradient of the bed-rock.
Sandringham checked his speeches, at the rate of four a day. Once
he had Bordman called away from where he supervised some improbable
operations. Bordman was smeared with the island's grayish mud when he
looked into the phone-plate to take the call.
"Bordman," said Sandringham curtly, "Werner's saying those holes you
want are to be in lines exactly forty-five degrees to the gradient."
"That--I'd like a little less," said Bordman. "If they slanted three
miles across the grade for every two down-hill, it would be better. I'd
like to put a lot more lines of holes. But there's the element of time."
"I'll have him explain that he was misquoted," said Sandringham,
grimly. "Three across to two down. How close do you really want those
lines?"
"As close as possible," said Bordman. "But I've got to have them
quickly. How does the barometer look?"
"Down a tenth," said Sandringham.
Bordman said:
"Damn! Has he got plenty of labor?"
"All the labor there is," said Sandringham. "And I'm having a road laid
along the cliffs for speed with the trucks. If I dared--and if I had
the pipe--I'd lay a pipe-line."
"Later," said Bordman tiredly. "If he's got labor to spare, set them
to work turning the irrigation systems hind part before. Make them
drainage systems. Use pumps. So if rain does come it won't be spread
out on the land by all the pretty ditches. So it will be gathered
instead and either flung back over the cliffs or else drained down-hill
without getting a chance to sink into the ground. For the time being,
anyhow."
Sandringham said:
"Has it occurred to you what a good, pounding rain would do to
Headquarters, and consequently to public confidence on this island, and
therefore to the attempt of anybody to do anything but wring his hands
because he was doomed?"
Bordman grimaced.
"I'm irrigating, here. I've got a small-sized lake made, and an ice
coffer-dam, and the water-freshener is working around the clock. If
there is labor, tell 'em to fix the irrigation systems into drainage
layouts. That'd cheer them, anyhow."
He was very weary. There is a certain exhausting quality in the need to
tell other men to do work which may cause them to be killed. The fact
that one would certainly be killed with them did not lessen the tension.
He went back to his work. And it definitely seemed to be as purposeless
as any man's work could possibly be. Down-grade from the now thoroughly
deserted area in which ship-fuel tanks had leaked--quite far
down-grade--he had commandeered all the refrigeration equipment in the
warehouses. Since refrigeration was necessary for fuel-storage, there
was a great deal. He had planted iron pipes in the soil, and circulated
refrigerant in it. Presently there was a wall of solidly frozen soil
which was shaped like a shallow U. In the curved part of that U he'd
siphoned out a lake. A peristaltic pump ran sea-water from the island's
lee out upon the ground--where it instantly turned to mud--and another
peristaltic pump sucked the mud up again and delivered it down-grade
beyond the line of freezing-pipes. It was in fact a system of hydraulic
dredging such as is normally performed in rivers and harbors. But when
top-soil is merely former abyssal mud it is an excellent way to move
dirt. Also, it does not require anybody to strike blows into soil
which may be explosive when one has gotten down near bed-rock, and in
particular there are no clanking machines.
But it was hair-raising.
In one day, though, he had a sizeable lake pumped out. And he pumped
it out to emptiness, smelling the water as it went down to a greater
depth below the previous ground surface. At the end of the day he
shivered and ordered pumping ended for the time.
Then he had a brine-pipe laid around a great circuit, to the
Headquarters ground which was up-grade from the now-deserted square
mile or so in which the fuel-tanks lay deep in the soil. And here,
also, he performed excavation without the sound of hammer, shovel, or
pick. He thrust pipes into the ground, and they had nozzles at the end
which threw part of the water backward. So that when sea-water poured
into them it thrust them deeper into the ground by the backward jet
action. Again the fact that the soil was abyssal mud made it possible.
The nozzles floated up much grayish mud, but they bored ahead down to
bed-rock, and there they lay flat and tunneled to one side and the
other, the tunnels they made being full of water at all times.
From those tunnels, as they extended, an astonishing amount of
sea-water seeped out into the soil near bed-rock. But it was sea-water.
It was heavily mineralized. It is a peculiarity of sea-water that it
is an electrolyte, and it is a property of electrolytes that they
coagulate colloids, and discourage the suspension of small solid
particles which are on the border-line of being colloids. In fact,
the water of the ocean of Canna III turned the ground-soil into good,
honest mud which did not feel at all soapy, and through which it
percolated with a surprising readiness.
Young Barnes supervised this part of the operation, once it was begun.
He shamed the Survey-personnel assigned to him into perhaps excessive
self-confidence.
"He knows what he's doing," he said firmly. "Look here! I'll take that
canteen. It's fresh water. Here's some soap. Wet it in fresh water and
it lathers. See? It dissolves. Now try to dissolve it in sea-water!
Try it! See? They put salt in the boiled stuff to separate soap out,
when they make it!" He'd picked up that item from Bordman. "Sea-water
won't soften the ground. It can't! Come on, now, let's get another pipe
putting more salt water underground!"
His workmen did not understand what he was doing, but they labored
willingly because it was for a purpose.... And down-hill, in the
hydraulic-dredged-out lake, water came seeping in, in the form of mud.
And another pipe came up from the sea-shore. It was a rather small
pipe, and the personnel who laid it were bewildered. Because there was
a water-freshening plant down there and all the fresh water was poured
back overboard, while the brine, saturated with salts from the ocean,
unable to dissolve a single grain of anything, was being used to fill
the small artificial lake.
The second day Sandringham called Bordman again, and again Bordman
peered wearily into the phone-screen.
"Yes," said Bordman. "The leaked fuel is turning up. In solution. I'm
trying to measure the concentration by matching specific gravities of
lake-water and brine, and then sticking electrodes in each. The fuel's
corrosive as the devil. It gives a different EMF. Higher than brine of
the same density. I think I've got it in hand."
"Do you want to start shipping it?" demanded Sandringham.
"You can begin pouring it down the holes," said Bordman. "How's the
barometer?"
"Down three-tenths this morning. Steady now."
"Damn!" said Bordman. "I'll set up moulds. Freeze it in plastic bags
the size of the bore-holes so it will go down. While it's frozen they
can even push it down deep."
Sandringham said grimly:
"There's been more damned technical work done with ship-fuel than any
other substance since time began. But remember that the stuff can still
be set off, even dissolved in water! Its sensitivity goes down, but
it's not gone!"
"If it were," said Bordman drearily, "you could invite in the civilian
population to sit on its rump. I've got something like forty tons of
ship-fuel in brine solution in this lake I pumped out! But it's in
five thousand tons of brine. We don't speak above a whisper when we're
around it. We walk in carpet-slippers and you never saw people so
polite! We'll start freezing it."
"How can you handle it?" demanded Sandringham apprehensively.
"The brine freezes at minus thirty," said Bordman. "In one per cent
solution it's only five per cent sensitive at minus nineteen. We're
handling it at minus nineteen. I think I'll step up the brine and chill
it a little more."
He waved a mud-smeared hand and went away.
That day, bolster-trucks began to roll out of Survey Headquarters. They
rolled very smoothly, and they trailed a fog of chilled air behind
them. And presently there were men with heavy gloves on their hands
taking long things like sausages out of the bolster-trucks and untying
the ends and lowering them down into holes bored in the top-soil until
they reached places where wetness made the holes close up again. Then
the men from Survey pushed those frozen sausages underground still
further by long poles with carefully padded--and refrigerated--ends.
And then they went on to other holes.
The first day there were five hundred such sausages thrust down into
holes in the ground, which holes to all intents and purposes closed up
behind them. The second day there were four thousand. The third day
there were eight. On the fourth the solution of ship-fuel in brine in
the lake was so thin that it did not give enough EMF in the little
battery-cell to show how much corrosive substance there was in the
brine. It was not mud any longer. Brine flowed at the top of bed-rock,
and it left the mud behind it, because salt water hindered the
suspension of former globigerinous ooze particles. It was practically
colloid. Salt water almost coagulated it.
The brine flowing from the salt-water tunnels upwind showed no more
ship-fuel in it. Bordman called Sandringham and told him.
"I can call in the civilians," said Sandringham. "You've mopped up the
leaked stuff! It couldn't have been done--"
"Not anywhere but here with bed-rock handy just underneath and
slanting," admitted Bordman. "Tell them they can come if they want to.
They'll sort of drift in. I want to tap some more ship-fuel for the
rest of those bore-holes."
Sandringham hesitated.
"Twenty thousand holes," said Bordman tiredly. "Each one had a
six-hundred pound block of frozen saturated brine dumped in it with
roughly one pound of ship-fuel in solution. We've gone that far. Might
as well go the rest of the way. How's the barometer?"
"Up a tenth," said Sandringham. "Still rising."
Bordman blinked at him, because he had trouble keeping his eyes open.
"Let's ride it, Sandringham!"
Sandringham hesitated. Then he said:
"Go ahead."
Bordman waved his arms at his associates, whom he admired with great
fervor in his then-foggy mind, because they were always ready to work
when it was needed, and it had not stopped being needed for five days
running. He explained that there were only three more miles of holes to
be filled up, and therefore they would just draw so much of ship-fuel
and blend it carefully with an appropriate amount of chilled brine and
then freeze it in appropriate sausages....
Young Lieutenant Barnes said:
"Yes, sir. I'll take care of it."
Bordman said:
"Barometer's up a tenth." His eyes did not quite focus. "All right,
Lieutenant. Go ahead. Promising young officer. Excellent. I'll sit down
here for jusht a moment."
When Barnes came back, Bordman was asleep. And a last one hundred and
fifty frozen sausages of brine and ship-fuel went out of Headquarters
within a matter of hours. Then a vast quietude settled down everywhere.
Young Barnes sat beside Bordman, menacing anybody who even thought of
disturbing him. When Sandringham called for him Barnes went to the
phone-plate.
"Sir," he said with vast formality. "Mr. Bordman went five days without
sleep. His job's done. I won't wake him, sir!"
Sandringham raised his eyebrows.
"You won't?"
"I won't, sir!" said young Barnes.
Sandringham nodded.
"Fortunately," he observed, "nobody's listening. You are quite right."
He snapped the connection. And then young Barnes realized that he had
defied a Sector Chief, which is something distinctly more improper in
a junior officer than merely trying to instruct him in topping off his
vacuum-suit tanks.
Twelve hours later, however, Sandringham called for him.
"Barometer's dropping, Lieutenant. I'm concerned. I'm issuing a notice
of the impending storm. Not everybody will crowd in on us, but a great
many will. I'm explaining that the chemicals put into the bottom soil
may not quite have finished their work. If Bordman wakens, tell him."
"Yes, sir," said Barnes.
But he did not intend to wake Bordman. Bordman, however, woke of
himself at the end of twenty hours of sleep. He was stiff and sore
and his mouth tasted as if something had kittened in it. Fatigue can
produce a hangover, too.
"How's the barometer?" he asked when his eyes came open.
"Dropping, sir. Heavy winds. The Sector Chief has opened the Reserve
Area to the civilians if they wish to come."
Bordman computed dizzily on his fingers. A more complex instrument was
actually needed, of course. One does not calculate on one's fingers
just how long a one per cent dilute solution of ship-fuel in frozen
brine has taken to melt, and how completely it has diffused through an
upside-down swamp with the pressure of forty feet of soil on top of it,
and therefore its effective concentration and dispersal underground.
"I think," said Bordman, "it's all right. By the way, did they turn the
irrigation systems hind end to?"
Young Barnes did not know what this was all about. He had to send for
information. Meanwhile he solicitously plied Bordman with coffee and
food. Bordman grew reflective.
"Queer," he said. "You think of the damage leaked ship-fuel can do.
Setting off the rest of the store and all. Even by itself it rates
some thousands of tons of TNT. I wonder what TNT was, before it became
a ton-measure of energy? You think of it exploding in one place, and
it's appalling! But think of all that same amount of energy applied
to square miles of upside-down swamp. Hundreds or thousands of miles
of upside-down swamp. D'you know, Lieutenant, on Soris II we pumped a
ship-fuel solution onto a swamp we wanted to drain? Flooded it, and let
it soak until a day came with a nice, strong, steady wind."
"Yes, sir," said Barnes respectfully.
"Then we detonated it. We didn't have a one per cent solution. It was
more like a thousandth of one per cent solution. Nobody's ever measured
the speed of propagation of an explosion in ship-fuel, dry. But it's
been measured in dilute solution. It isn't the speed of sound. It's
lower. It's purely a temperature-phenomenon. In water, at any dilution,
ship-fuel goes off just barely below the boiling-point of water. It
doesn't detonate from shock when it's diluted enough to be ionized, but
that takes a hell of a lot of dilution. Have you got some more coffee?"
"Yes, sir," said Barnes. "Coming up."
"We floated ship-fuel solution over that swamp, Barnes, and let it
stand. It has a high diffusion-rate. It went down into the mud....
And there came a day when the wind was right. I dumped a red-hot iron
bar into the swamp-water that had ship-fuel in solution. It was the
damndest sight you ever saw!"
Barnes served him more coffee, Bordman sipped it, and it burned his
tongue.
"It went up in steam," he said. "The swamp-water that had the ship-fuel
dissolved in it. It didn't explode, as a mass. They told me later that
it propagated at hundreds of feet per second only. They could see the
wall of steam go marching across the swamp. Not even high-pressure
steam. There was a woosh! and a cloud of steam half a mile high that
the wind carried away. And all the surface-water in the swamp was gone,
and all the poisonous swamp-vegetation parboiled and dead. So--" He
yawned suddenly--"we had a ten-mile by fifty-mile stretch of arable
ground ready for the coming colonists."
He tried the coffee again. He added reflectively:
"That trick, it didn't explode the ship-fuel, in a way. It burned it.
In water. It applied the energy of the fuel to the boiling-away of
water. Powerful stuff! We got rid of two feet of water on an average,
counting what came out of the mud. It cost--hm--a fraction of a gram
per square yard."
He gulped the coffee down. There were men looking at him solicitously.
They seemed very glad to see him awake again. Outside a monstrous bank
of cloud-stuff was visible piling up in the sky. He suddenly blinked at
that.
"Hello! How long did I sleep, Barnes?"
Barnes told him. Bordman shook his head to clear it.
"We'll go see Sandringham," said Bordman. "I'd like to postpone firing
as long as I can, short of having the stuff start draining into the sea
to leeward."
Several mud-stained men were standing around the place where Bordman
had slept. When he went, still groggy, out to the bolster-truck young
Barnes had waiting, they regarded Bordman in a very respectful manner.
Somebody grunted, "Good to have worked with you, sir," which is about
as much of admiration as anybody would want to hear expressed. These
associates of Bordman in the mopping-up of leaked ship's fuel would be
able to brag of the job at all times and in all places hereafter.
Then the truck went trundling away in search of Sandringham.
It found him on the cliffs to the windward side of the island. The
sea was no longer a cerulean blue. It was slaty-color. There were
occasional flecks of white foam on the water four thousand feet below.
There were dark clouds, by then covering practically all the sky. Far
out to sea, there were small craft heading for the ends of the island,
to go around it and ride out the coming storm in its lee.
Sandringham greeted Bordman with relief. Werner stood close by, opening
and closing his hands jerkily.
"Bordman!" said the Sector Chief cordially. "We're having a
disagreement, Werner and I. He's confident that the turning of the
irrigation systems hind end to--making them surface-draining systems,
in effect--will take care of the whole situation. Adding the brine
underground, he thinks, will have done a good deal more. He says it'll
be bad, psychologically, for anything more to be done. He didn't speak
of it, and it would injure public confidence in the Survey."
Bordman said curtly:
"The only thing that will make a permanent difference on this island
is for the water-fresheners to be a little less efficient. Barnes has
the figures. He computed them from some measurements I had him make. If
the water-freshener plants don't take all the sea-minerals out; if they
don't make the irrigation-water so infernally soft and suitable for
hair-washing and the like; if they turn out hard water for irrigation,
this won't happen again. But there's too much water underground now.
We've got to get it out, because a little more's going underground from
this storm, surface-drainage systems or no surface-drainage systems."
Sandringham pointed to leeward, where a black, thick procession of
human beings trooped toward the Survey area on foot and by every
possible type of vehicle.
"I've ordered them turned into the ship-sheds and warehouses," said the
Sector Chief. "But of course we haven't shelter for all of them. At a
guess, when they feel safe they'll go back to their homes even through
the storm."
The sky to windward grew blacker and blacker. There was no longer a
steady flow of wind coming over the cliff's edge. It came in gusts,
now, of extreme violence. They could make a man stagger on his feet.
There were more flecks of white on the ocean's surface.
"The boats," added Sandringham, "were licked. There simply wasn't
enough oil to maintain the slick. The radio reports were getting
hysterical before I ordered them told that we had it beaten on shore.
They're running for shelter now. I think they'd have stayed out there
trying to hold the slick in place with their tow-line, if I hadn't said
we had matters in hand."
Werner said, tight-lipped:
"I hope we have!"
Bordman shrugged.
"The wind's good and strong, now," he observed. "Let's find out. You've
got the starting system all set?"
Sandringham waved his hand toward a high-voltage battery. It was of a
type designed for blasting on airless planets, but that did not matter.
Its cables led snakily for a couple of hundred feet to a very small
pile of grayish soil which had been taken out of a bore-hole, and went
over that untidy heap and down into the ground. Bordman took hold of
the firing-handle. He paused.
"How about the highways?" he asked. "There might be some steam out of
this hole."
"All allowed for," said Sandringham. "Go ahead."
There was a gust of wind strong enough to knock a man down, and a
humming sound in the air, as wind beat upon the four-thousand-foot
cliff and poured over its top. There were gradually rising waves,
below. The sky was gray, the sea slate-colored. Far, far to windward,
the white line of pouring rain upon the water came marching toward the
island.
Bordman pumped the firing-handle.
There was a pause, while wind-gusts tore at his garments and staggered
him where he stood. It was quite a long pause.
Then a vapor came jetting out of the bore-hole. It was perfectly white.
It came out with a sudden burst which was not in any sense explosive,
but was merely a vast rushing of vaporized water. Then, a hundred yards
away, there was a mistiness on the grassy surface. Still farther, a
crack in the surface-soil let out a curtain of white vapor.
Here and there, everywhere, gouts of steam poured into the air and
tumbled into the storm-wind. It was noticeable that the steam did not
come out as an invisible vapor and condense in mid-air. It poured
out of the ground in clouds, already condensed but thrust out by more
masses of vapor behind it. It was not super-heated steam that came out.
It was simply steam. Harmless steam, like the steam out of the spouts
of tea-kettles. It rose from individual places everywhere. It made a
massive coating of vapor which the storm-wind blew away. In seconds a
half-mile of soil was venting steam. In seconds more a mile. The thick
fleecy vapor swept across the landscape. The storm-wind could only
tumble it and sweep it away.
In minutes there was no part of the island to be seen at all, save only
the thin line of the cliffs reaching away between dark water on the one
hand and snow-white clouds of vapor on the other.
"It can't scald anybody, can it?" asked Barnes uneasily.
"Not," said Bordman, "when it's had to come up through forty feet
of soil. It's been pretty well cooled off in taking up some extra
moisture. It spreads pretty well, doesn't it?"