Yan Dong looked around. Her demonstration hadn’t produced the reaction she’d expected. The engineers took a look, then returned to their computer screens, paying her no mind. It wasn’t until a stream of dark smoke rose from the point of light on the antistatic floor that the nearest person came over and said, “What did you do? I doubt it’s hot.”
At the same time, the person nudged back the waveguide, moving the light coming through the window away from the focal length of the parabolic reflector. Although the point was still on the floor, it immediately darkened and lost heat. Yan Dong was surprised at how adept the person was at adjusting the thing.
The lead engineer pointed at the waveguide. “Pack up your gear and drink some water. I heard you took the train. The one to here from Changchun is still running? You must be extremely thirsty.”
Yan Dong desperately wanted to explain her invention, but she truly was thirsty. Her throat burned and it was painful to speak.
“Very good. This is a really practical plan.” The lead engineer handed Yan Dong a glass of water.
Yan Dong drained the glass of water in one gulp. She looked blankly at the lead engineer. “Are you saying that someone has already thought of this?”
The lead engineer laughed. “Spending time with aliens has made you underestimate human intellect. In fact, from the moment the low-temperature artist sent the first block of ice into space, many people have come up with this plan. Afterward, there were lots of variants. For example, some used solar panels instead of reflectors. Some used wires and electric heating elements instead of waveguides. The advantage is that the equipment is easy to manufacture and transport. The disadvantage is the efficiency is not as high as waveguides. We’ve been researching this for five years now. The technology is already mature. The equipment we need has mostly been manufactured.”
“Then why haven’t you carried the plan out?”
An engineer next to them said, “With this plan, the Earth will lose twenty-one percent of its water. Either during propulsion as vaporized steam or during reentry from high-temperature dissociation.”
The lead engineer turned to that engineer. “We don’t know that yet. The latest American simulations show, below the ionosphere, the hydrogen produced by high-temperature dissociation during reentry will immediately recombine with the surrounding oxygen into water. We overestimated the high-temperature-dissociation loss. The total loss estimate is around eighteen percent.” She turned back to Yan Dong. “But this percentage is high enough.”
“Then do you have a plan to bring back all of the water from space?”
The lead engineer shook her head. “The only possibility is to use a nuclear fusion engine. But, right now, on Earth, controlled nuclear fusion isn’t within our capabilities.”
“Then why aren’t you acting more quickly? You know, if you dither around, the Earth will lose one hundred percent of its water.”
The lead engineer nodded. “So, after a long time of hesitation, we’ve decided to act. Soon, the Earth will be in for the fight of its life.”
Reclaiming the Oceans
Yan Dong joined the Ocean Recovery Division, in charge of receiving and checking the waveguides that had been produced. Although this wasn’t a core posting, she found it fulfilling.
One month after Yan Dong arrived at the capital, humanity’s project to reclaim the oceans started.
Within one short week, eight hundred large-scale carrier rockets shot into the sky from every launch site in the world, sending fifty thousand tons of freight into Earth orbit. Then, from the North American launch site, twenty space shuttles ferried three hundred astronauts into space. Because launches generally followed the same route, the skies above the launch sites all had a single rocket contrail that never dispersed. Viewed from orbit, it seemed like threads of spider silk stretching up from every continent into space.
These launches increased human space activity by an order of magnitude, but the technology used was still twentieth-century technology. People realized, under existing conditions, if the entire world worked together and risked everything on one attempt, it could do anything.
On live television, Yan Dong and everyone else witnessed the first time a deceleration propulsion system was installed on a block of ice.
To make things less difficult, the first blocks of ice they forced back weren’t the ones that rotated about their own axes. Three astronauts landed on a block of ice. They brought with them the following equipment: an artillery-shell-shaped vehicle that could drill a hole into the block of ice, three waveguides, one expeller tube, and three folded-up parabolic reflectors. It was only now that anyone could get the sense of the immense size of a block of ice. The three people seemed to land on a tiny crystalline world. Under intense sunlight in space, the giant field of ice under their feet seemed unfathomable.
Near and far, innumerable similar crystalline worlds hung in the black sky. Some of them still rotated about their own axes. The surrounding rotating and nonrotating blocks of ice reflected and refracted the sunlight. On the ice the three astronauts stood on, they cast a dazzling pattern of ever-changing light and shadow. In the distance, the blocks of ice in the ring looked smaller and smaller, but gathered closer and closer together, gradually shrinking into a delicate, silver belt twisting toward the other side of the Earth. The closest block of ice was only three thousand meters away from this one. Because it rotated about its minor axis, in their eyes, such a rotation had a breathtaking momentum, as though they were three tiny ants watching a crystalline skyscraper collapsing over and over again. Due to gravity, these two ice blocks would eventually crash into each other. The light-filtering membranes would rupture and the blocks of ice would disintegrate. The smashed blocks of ice would quickly evaporate in the sunlight and disappear. Such collisions had already happened twice in the ring of ice. This was also why this block was the first block of ice to be forced back.
First, an astronaut started the driller vehicle. As the drill head spun, crumbs of ice flew out in a cone-shaped spray, twinkling in the sunlight. The driller vehicle broke through the invisible light-filtering membrane. Like a twisting screw, it dug into the ice, leaving a round hole in its wake. Along with the hole that stretched into the depths of the ice, a faint white line could be seen in the ice itself. Once the hole reached the prescribed depth, the vehicle headed out toward another part of the ice. It then bored another hole. At last, it drilled four holes in total. They all intersected at one point deep in the ice.
The astronauts inserted the three waveguides into three of the holes, then inserted the expeller into the wider fourth hole. The expeller tube’s mouth was pointed in the direction of the motion of the block of ice. After that, the astronauts used a thin tube to caulk the gap the three waveguides and the expeller tube left against their holes’ walls with a fast-sealing liquid to create a good seal. Finally, they opened the parabolic reflectors. If the initial phase of ocean reclamation employed the latest technology, it was these parabolic reflectors. They were a miracle created by nanotechnology. Folded up, each was only a cubic meter. Unfolded, each formed a giant reflector five hundred meters in diameter. These three reflectors were like three silver lotus leaves that grew on the block of ice. The astronauts adjusted each waveguide so that its receiver coincided with the focal point of its reflector.
A bright point of light appeared where the three holes intersected deep in the ice. It seemed like a tiny sun, illuminating within the block of ice spectacular sights of mythic proportions: a school of silver fish, dancing seaweed drifting with the waves… Everything retained its lifelike appearance at the instant it was frozen. Even the strings of bubbles spat from fishes’ mouths were clear and distinct. Over one hundred kilometers away, inside another ice block being reclaimed, the sunlight that the waveguides led into the ice revealed a giant black shadow. It was a blue whale over twenty meters long! This had to be the Earth’s seas of old.