When such incidents happened, General Overton was called on for a stern lecture, and the appropriate corporate headquarters was notified. Companies like Du Pont or Honeywell or Martin-Marietta did not want to lose the privilege of experimenting in space and tended to take immediate corrective action with their employees.
Completing her inspection, she said good-bye to Dixon and passed back into Honeywell’s lab. It was mostly taken up by three large, reinforced, and interconnected boxes that contained the components of a computer memory. It had been explained to her that the difference was that the memory chips were in complete vacuum. They were playing with artificial intelligence, Dr. Monte Washington had willingly explained to her.
She made a quick trip around the lab, then headed back to the spoke, reaching the hatchway just as it opened. Washington and his assistant, a bespectacled and bald man named Kensing, floated through the opening.
“Hey, Colonel Pearson,” Washington said. “You’re early today.”
“That’s because I have a full day ahead, I’m afraid, Mr. Washington.”
“Ah, that’s too bad. I was hoping to buy you lunch or dinner. Take in a movie.”
“Maybe another time,” she said, for perhaps the tenth time. Washington was persistent, though not grabby. He poked with his eyes.
She felt his eyes on her backside as she darted down the spoke.
Monte Washington might be one step worse than McKenna, she thought. At least McKenna seemed honest.
And she wondered at the question she had asked him. She didn’t really think that McKenna disliked her.
Bahnsteig Eine appeared to be solid as a rock when Eisenach’s helicopter settled onto the landing pad at two o’clock. The appearance was something of a deception.
The platform bases actually floated. While the platform itself stood some fifteen meters above the surface of the sea, the three legs extended downward only as far as the subsurface unit. That massive, donut-shaped structure was twenty meters below the surface, providing flotation as well as stabilization with extended, winglike stabilizers and internal, motor-driven gyros. The seabed, a crevice in this location below Bahnsteig Eine, was some 520 meters deep, and the platform maintained its position by means of four anchor lines.
Heavy seas were running, the troughs a meter below the white-capping tips of the waves, but the platform was steady when Eisenach, his adjutant Oberlin, and Oberst Albert Weismann, exited the helicopter.
Four crewmen from the platform ran out to tie the helicopter down, and the pilot descended from his cockpit to light a cigarette.
The wind was strong, forcing the three officers to grip their service caps as they made their way across the flight deck to the dome entrance. The small door was set deeply into the wall of the dome. The walls were three meters thick, solid insulation sandwiched between aluminum skins in each of the five-meter triangular pieces that made up the dome. Next to the small door was a section of wall, four meters tall by six meters wide, which was removable so that heavy equipment could be transferred in and out of the dome.
When Oberlin closed the door behind them, they stood in a wide, high corridor leading to the back side of the structure. The deck was steel-plated in an antiskid diamond pattern. At the back of the corridor, an insulated fiberglass wall had been installed, to isolate the corridor from the drilling compartment that was located to the back of the dome.
Eisenach wrinkled his nose at the sulfur-tainted air that wafted through the corridor. A deep hum of machinery vibrated through the floor.
On his right were the living quarters, ten floors of dormitory rooms, kitchens, and recreation rooms to house the 140 men who worked on Bahnsteig Eine. The living spaces took up about a third of the dome.
To the left, taking up four floors, was the gigantic collection and distribution room. The heavy machinery was located in the drilling section.
Eisenach had no interest in seeing either area on this visit.
He led the way down the corridor and arrived at the elevator just as it opened.
Oberst Hans Diederman smiled widely as he emerged from the car. “Herr General Eisenach, how good it is to see you!”
Diederman was an army engineer with a widely respected mind. He was tremendously overweight, and the fat bulged his fatigue uniform. Eisenach had spoken to him repeatedly about his weight, but the engineer continued to enjoy the well-stocked pantry included in his command.
Eisenach treated the man with some deference because he was instrumental to the VORMUND PROJEKT. He was in charge of all twenty-four platforms, and the process had been developed by Diederman and his army subordinate engineers. Some navy and air force engineering officers, who happened to be partially knowledgeable of the project, were jealous.
Diederman did not bother with a salute, but held his callused hand out.
Eisenach shook it. The hand was hard and firm, contrary to his appearance. “Hans. How are you?”
“Wonderful! Come, come, gentlemen. Let us go up to my suite.”
Diederman stepped back into the elevator, and Eisenach, Oberlin, and Weismann followed him. The engineer’s bulk made the car very small.
Diederman pressed the button for Level Five, and the car rose silently. He had designed the elevator also.
When they exited on the fifth deck, the vibrations and humming of the platform were considerably reduced. The sound-deadening insulation imbedded in the walls of the control center was quite thick.
The center itself felt spacious. It was two stories tall, and the interior walls were about thirty meters long. The outside, third wall curved to the radius of the dome. In one wall was a door to the residential section. In the other straight wall were doors to several private offices.
An electronic grid map on the wall identified the immediate area, with the wells, the ice shelf, and ships in the area clearly marked. Alongside the circles signifying each well was a rectangular box displaying sets of numbers. To Diederman, and to others as well versed as he, the numbers provided pertinent and current information about each well. Temperatures, pressures, output. Eisenach had long before given up trying to interpret them.
The floor of the control center was lined with electronic consoles. There were forty consoles, with thirty-two of them currently manned.
Oberst Albert Weismann stopped by one console and peered over the shoulder of the operator. He appeared as puzzled by what was displayed on the computer screen as Eisenach had been, the first time it was explained to him.
“Now, this way, gentlemen.”
Diederman led them into his office, which was spacious, and closed the glass door. The office did not have a desk. It had a computer terminal, a bank of six television screens, two sofas angled into one corner, and a huge round table with eight chairs spaced around it. The table was littered with computer printouts, diagrams, and schematics. Near one chair was a slanted control panel similar to a switchboard.