We drove inside to find a fairly standard looking loading dock with two roll-up delivery doors and a small man door to the right. I noticed a Lotus Elise, going 120 sitting still, parked incongruously in front of the loading dock. I shook my head. “Doesn’t that fool know this is Long Beach? It’s a wonder that thing isn’t stripped down to the frame already.” I shrugged again and parked the truck.
I sent Rudy up to the man-door on recon, and unloaded our gear from the back of the truck.
Rudy came back a minute later with a pink Post-it note in his hand. It read:
Dear AC People,
Gone to Radio Shack for some diodes. Gave minions the day off. Back in an hour. Please let yourself in through the crater (outside, trail to left).
Dr. Longbeach
I glanced at the work order. Sure enough, Dr. M. D. Longbeach was the customer name.
It looked like a long hike from the truck, so we went loaded for bear: toolbox, filter masks, a tank of R134a refrigerant (ozone friendly, if used as directed), a roll of trim-to-fit filter material, and two rolls of duct tape.
We quickly found the path, which was really more of a series of switchback ramps, disguised from view below by Styrofoam rocks and plastic plants. I work out three times a week, but I was still out of breath by the time we lugged all our gear to the top.
When we reached the lip of the crater we dropped our stuff and took a breather. There was a breeze off the harbor to the west. It had a taint of refinery stink, but it was at least cool. I took the time to size up what was waiting for us below, while Rudy admired the view.
“You can see the Queen Mary from here,” he said. Then he squinted and frowned. “Dude! Is that a giant octopus climbing the smokestacks?”
“Ignore the giant octopus, kid. That’s somebody else’s problem. We’ve got a volcano with a broken AC to fix.”
From this angle, looking past the ring of burners and smoke generators, it was obvious that the volcano was both fake and hollow. A translucent fiberglass roof covered the opening, and a large panel in the center of the roof was rolled back to reveal a huge silo in the middle.
Rudy tore himself away from the view and turned to look down into the open hatchway, which was probably big enough to fly a small helicopter through. Or launch a missile, which, judging from the rounded nose cone visible just below, was more likely its purpose.
Rudy’s eyes widened. “Dude, is that a-”
I nodded. “Yeah, kid, it is.”
“A water heater!”
I cringed. “No, doofus, it is not a water heater. Don’t you know a missile when you see one?”
“Not really.”
“Nor a water heater either, I guess. You’ve got a lot to learn, apprentice.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He stared at the missile with growing concern. “Dude, I was happier when it was a water heater. Should we be worried about this?”
“About what?”
“It’s a missile, dude!”
I looked up. “Is it aimed at you? Looks like it’s aimed at the sky to me. Probably another evil plot to destroy the moon. We had three last year in L.A. County that I know of.”
“The moon? Seriously? What happened?”
I shrugged. “Moon’s still there, isn’t it? Somebody stopped them, I guess.”
“Who?”
I shrugged. “You’re not an apprentice to NASA, Rudy, you’re an apprentice to BOSSE.” I was careful to pronounce it “boss,” the e is silent. Rudy kept calling the union “Bossy,” and the shop stewards didn’t take kindly to that.
I spotted a roof stair and a line of heavy-duty compressor units twenty yards around the crater to our right. “Come on, we’ve got a noisy blower to fix.” We reached the stairs and I tried the knob. I’d been secretly hoping it was locked, as we’d then have to wait, with the meter running, for the customer to return. But it turned freely, and as I opened the door, I noticed that, strangely enough, the lock had been neatly melted out of the middle. “Something’s not quite right here, kid. Keep an eye open.”
He looked at me. “Dude, we’re going into a fake volcano with a missile in the middle, and you say it’s not quite right? Are you like having a Homer moment or something?”
“Homer moment?”
“You know: D’oh!”
I frowned at him as I headed down the stairwell. “Do not ever say ‘D’oh’ to your designated union journeyperson. There’s almost certainly a regulation against it, and if not, I just made one up.”
I turned my attention to a series of heavily insulated coolant pipes running down the wall from the compressors above. Following them would lead us to the evaporator coils and the blower. We went down three floors to find a giant octopus of another kind, a huge central air-conditioning unit from which large metal ducts snaked off in all directions. As we stepped closer, we could hear the fan rumbling with an unhealthy, scraping noise just audible under the rumble.
I located the access hatch on the side, but found it padlocked. I held the lock in my hand and sighed. Unlike a locked roof door, this was no real excuse on this kind of system. “We’ll go in through the ducts,” I said.
Rudy looked surprised. “Dude?”
I nodded up toward the metal tentacles spreading out in all directions. “The ducts. Look at the size of them. We’ll find a grate, climb in, and walk back to the central unit. Look at the size of those things! We’ll hardly have to duck.”
By now, it was becoming clear to me that we were in some kind of lair. Though I hadn’t done much myself, mechanicals guys-HVAC, plumbing, electricians-they love lair work. Lots of mechanicals on a big scale, and price is usually no object. Where these guys get their money, I’ll never know, but they aren’t afraid to spend it. And for HVAC guys, a special treat: big ducts. Really big ducts. With great big registers over every secret filing cabinet, master strategy table, supercomputer, and self-destruct console.
Or so I’m told. Me, mostly I do industrial parks, big-box retail, and office buildings, so this was kind of new to me. Mostly I was going on union-picnic shop talk and secondhand info. But I couldn’t let on to the apprentice. I kept my chin up and acted like I did this every day.
We walked down a stark corridor lined with numbered doors. Maybe it was an evil lair of some kind, but except for some roof support girders and other architectural details seemingly borrowed from Forbidden Planet (1965, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and pre-Naked Gun Leslie Neilsen) it could have been a ministorage based on appearances.
Never mind that. I quickly found what I was looking for-a large, conveniently accessible air register. I hooked my fingers around the edge, and it easily popped open without the need to remove any screws. From what I’d heard around the union hall, conveniently opening registers were popular lair-specific features. I tossed my tools inside and climbed up, noticing as I did that it was far easier to see out through the register than in from the outside.
Rudy climbed in behind me, dragging the heavy tank of refrigerant, and closed the register after us.
I considered unclipping the flashlight that I carried on my belt, but it was surprisingly well lit inside the ducts. I stuck my index finger in my mouth to wet it, and held it up into the air flow. “This way,” I said, heading “upstream.” I noticed, as we walked, that these were top-quality ducts, heavy metal. We were able to move silently. None of that thin, galvanized sheet metal that thumps like a kid’s tin drum every time you shift your weight. “Quality all the way,” I said.
We followed a series of twists and turns past many other registers. Occasionally I would stop to look out into empty control rooms bristling with blinking lights, workshops equipped with menacing looking industrial robots, labs filled with colorful, bubbling beakers, and a room with the biggest damned hot tub I’ve ever seen (and when you’re from L.A., that’s saying something).