Gordon paced across the shed and back. “Christ. If this doesn’t get ’em off their ass, nothing will.”
Will looked at Jeanne. He touched her shoulder. “Gordie, I think you may be right.”
Gordon’s arguments, for all the weight they gained from the snake-eye, were blown away by a blizzard that swept over the Shelf that night and lasted for days. The Otter was readied; Al was prepared; the wind never dropped below a hundred k.p.h., and often gusted to three hundred.
On the third day of the blizzard Herm Northrop walked down Tunnel E from the reactor. Usually he was grateful for the CANDU’s compactness and automated systems, which enabled it to run with only minimal supervision; but today he almost wished it would malfunction and give him something to do. He thought about the Ridge, and about what would happen to the core rods when the island broke up. He would have plenty of time to shut down and pull the core, anyway. The container might, with great luck, be buried in sediment before it could rupture. (Jeanne, however, had given him no comfort on that point: there was very little sediment anywhere under the Shelf, and the Ridge, being steadily scoured by the ice, was likely to have none at all.) If it did rupture it would, as Gordon had said the other night, warm the Ross Sea.
Herm’s eyes widened behind their rimless glasses. He stopped, turned and went back down the tunnel a little way. Along one wall, several big reels of heavy-duty power cable were stacked amid boxes and crates. The cable had been there, useless surplus, since the station had been built. There must be six or seven thousand metres of it, a sop to environmentalists’ anxieties about having a reactor too close to the station. Herm ran his gloved hand over the cable while he did some sums in his head. Then he trotted down the tunnel and went looking for Gordon Ellerslee.
That night’s seminar was the first attended by the Vostochni, who sat in a corner with Katerina translating for Yevgeni and Kyril. They had recovered with astounding speed, and if they were depressed by their amputations they gave no sign of it.
The Shacktowners, however, looked grim as they heard from Colin that the blizzard showed no signs of ending, and from Will that Laputa had moved almost five kilometres in the past twenty-four hours — an indication that Blefuscu’s destruction was complete and that Laputa’s turn was next. A depressed silence fell over the lounge. Gordon stood up.
“I’ve got a suggestion. Actually, it was Herm’s idea, but he checked it out with me and it sounded pretty good.
“We got about three million miles of old HV-12 cable piled up in Tunnel E. If we stripped the insulation off of it and shoved it down the drill hole in a big loop, or maybe even two or three loops, and ran a hell of a lot of juice through it, we might be able to loosen up some of the ice under the island.”
“Sort of like an immersion coil?” Terry Dolan asked.
“Yeah,” laughed Gordon. “The world’s biggest goddamn immersion coil. If we switched station power over to the diesel generator, the CANDU could give everything it’s got to melting the ice.”
“And that’s a great deal indeed,” Herm put in. “As you all know, the whole station — with everything running — only draws about a tenth of the reactor’s maximum output.”
Somebody whistled. Will said, “It’s an interesting idea, but you can’t just shove the cable down there; you’d have to deploy it right up against the ice. But it’ll just sink.”
“I think the snake-eye could probably deploy the cable,” Herm said, “and if we rig floats along the cable — perhaps Styrofoam, or even wood — it’ll stay pretty close to the ice. I don’t think we’d need to melt very much ice, just enough to weaken the ice between the crevasses so that they’ll break off as we hit the Ridge.”
Jeanne said, “It might work over a very limited area, Herm. At the most, a couple of square kilometres around the hole. But there’s no guarantee that Laputa won’t crack to bits anyway. We could split from stem to stern long before this part of the island reached the Ridge.”
“Maybe. But I think it’s worth trying.”
“So do I,” said Steve. “And I suggest we put everybody on it, right away. Just stripping the insulation off the cable is going to be a huge job.”
“All in favour?” Hugh asked.
Everyone’s hands went up. After Katerina and Ivan explained the matter to Yevgeni and Kyril, they cheerfully raised their bandaged hands as well.
The seminar was held on the evening of April 27. That same night Carter, Herm and the technicians met to plan the details of the project. The next morning almost everyone but the Dolans, the Vostochni, and one or two others started stripping cable. It was cold work in the tunnel, but no one complained; there was a lot of good-natured kidding and even some singing. Some stripped, others gathered up the insulation for disposal and others rewound the cable in hundred-metre lengths. The blizzard went on.
After two solid days of work over two kilometres of cable had been prepared. Rather than run it through the tunnels and hangar and then out to the drilling rig, the technicians decided to lay insulated cable directly from the reactor building to the hole. This would save several hundred metres, but it meant teams had to work outside in hundred-kilometre winds and near-zero visibility. Ray Crandall and George Hills were frostbitten; after that, no one could work outside for more than twenty minutes every two hours.
At 0235 hours on the morning of April 30 the Grid South end of Laputa struck the Ridge. The shock was not great enough to wake anyone, but those who were awake could feel it. A geranium in the greenhouse was knocked off a table, and Shackleton’s portrait fell off the wall in the mess hall. In the tunnels frost fell beautifully from the ceilings.
Later that day the diesel generator went on, filling the whole station with a monotonous hammering roar that gave everyone headaches. Tremors continued. Will theorised that the end of the island was disintegrating a little at a time.
Around 1000 hours on May 1 the snake-eye went back down the hole with the first length of cable attached to it; the cable, in turn, carried chunks of Styrofoam attached by wire every ten metres. Given the length of the snake-eye’s own control cable, it had been decided to deploy several relatively short loops, like the petals of a flower. After the first one, Jeanne had relatively little difficulty.
“Our only real problem is the bloody current,” she remarked late that afternoon in the drilling shed. “It’s almost impossible to put anything Grid North of us and keep it there. You’ve got to find a crevasse and wedge the cable in without losing the snake-eye at the same time.”
Nevertheless, she managed. Current went on at 2030 hours that evening. The snake-eye showed no dramatic change, though the water temperature did begin to show a very slight rise right at the bottom of the hole; the warmed water was rising into the crevasse. As soon as this was announced at the seminar, Katerina ordered Jeanne to stay out of the drilling shed and to take at least a solid day’s rest. She was glad to obey.
The tremors continued to strike the station every few hours, but no one seemed alarmed. The only problem was the fact that the CANDU now required more snow than ever to keep its boilers going at full capacity to produce enough electricity for the cables. Snow mining now went on around the clock, and the conveyor that fed snow to the melter added its clatter to the noise of the generator.
On May 3 Penny went along with Steve, Tim and Sean McNally on a traverse to the Grid North end of Laputa. The blizzard had finally exhausted itself, and the moon was bright through broken clouds. The Sno-Cat was cold, but it was worth it to be outside breathing clean air.