She started with the items floating on the ceiling. “Pretty unlikely to be tools but who knows?”
She moved them all to one side of the room and nominated that side as the place she’d stack everything she had searched. Then she moved everything on the floor to the other side of the room, then started opening storage bins on the shelves and rearranging them as she went.
After half an hour she had been through all the items on the shelves and re-stacked everything. She had found a small toolkit of screwdrivers, cutters, wire ties and some electrical tape. She put the box by the tunnel hatch and started on the piles of boxes on the floor. This was a bit more difficult than the shelves. With the shelves she had been more or less upright and could hold the shelf supports for stability. Moving the boxes around on the floor meant trying to use her buoyancy to lift them or to put her feet down. The fins kept getting in the way, and in the end she took them off and put them by the tunnel hatch. She let all the gas out of her BC and just stood on the floor.
Gradually she worked through the storage bins and bags of stuff. Most of it was of no use at all. She found a box of Ramen noodles and put that by the door. She finally got most of the stuff she had put on the floor either back on shelves or stacked on the far side of the room. That let her get at the bottom row of shelves and there she found another tool kit. This one opened to show wrenches, sockets, and a hacksaw. Kate smiled and her mask flooded.
She cleared the mask and dragged the toolbox over to the tunnel hatch. She finished searching the bottom shelf and found a small bag of pipe clips and some rubber hose. It looked like the hose from a scuba regulator. The markings on it showed it was rated at 200 PSI. She put that by the door with the bag of clips.
Pleased with her haul, Kate moved everything into the moon pool room and then up the ladder to the floor of the ops room. She checked her scuba gas level and found it was almost in the red. “Well, I still need to dig through the moon pool room lockers so I might as well get another tank at the same time.”
In the moon pool room, Kate pulled the full tank she’d left in the rack and pushed it up ahead of her onto the ops room floor. She stood on the ladder with just her shoulders out of the water. After adding some gas to her BC so it would float, she shrugged it off and pushed the rig up onto the floor. She climbed up a couple of steps so she could reach, and swapped the tank over. Once she had the gear back on she pulled the empty tank towards her and dropped back down into the moon pool room.
At the fill station, she put the empty tank into the rack, and then found another tank to add to it. She set both to fill and went to look for a regulator to keep in the ops room as a spare.
The tanks filled as Kate searched for more tools. She found another save-a-dive kit and added a couple of regulators to that in a small pile at the base of the ladder.
By the time she had finished searching all the lockers, the tanks were full and she shut off the fill valves and removed the whips. The two full tanks and the tools she’d found all made their way up to the ops room. Kate looked down a last time to make sure there was nowhere she hadn’t looked, then climbed up the ladder out of the water.
On the surface, Williams had convened a meeting to discuss Kate’s idea about using the oxygen generator to provide hydrogen into the hab’s atmosphere. Williams had flown down Babin and Leclerc, the two engineers from the Pheia’s construction company. Both Leclerc and Babin had laptops open and were going over the design of the gas generator. Between them they were explaining the difficulty of Kate’s idea. Mostly, Leclerc spoke french to Babin who attempted to translate. Williams wondered how they had managed to build the Pheia if they couldn’t talk to each other. Babin had seen frustration on Williams’ face every time they started to answer a question. At one point she had said simply: “Dr. Williams, we are engineers. We communicate with schematics, whiteboards and occasional mathematics. The language is irrelevant. Our only real problem occurs when we discuss dimensions as I occasionally use inches in discussion whereas Monsieur Leclerc only uses millimeters and meters. He gets very annoyed when I make that mistake and gives me a lecture about how stupid the United States is to be using such ancient units. Nonetheless, we work well together. Monsieur Leclerc is an excellent engineer.”
Evidently Leclerc’s understanding of english was enough to follow what Babin was saying. He nodded at her. “Merci Madame.”
Babin continued with her explanation: “There are two main problems with the idea of using the oxygen separation apparatus to provide hydrogen to the gas mix in the Pheia. The first is rather simple: The pipe that vents the hydrogen from the separator through the hull would need to be cut. There is no valve to open to release the gas. We’ll get to the issue of actually cutting the pipe in a minute. The second issue is that with the pipe cut, there is no way to control how much hydrogen is released into the atmosphere. The generator runs when the oxygen system sensors detect that the oxygen storage tank pressure is below a threshold value. This is controlled by the rate at which the crew consumes the oxygen, and any leaks from the overall system.”
Williams nodded. He knew all this but had the sense not to say so.
Babin continued. “We have done some computations. We are assuming no leaks, which may be invalid but we needed somewhere to start. We also assume one crew member, Miss Moss, who is breathing normally. Based on her rate of oxygen consumption, and the volume of the hab, and the current gas measurements Miss Moss supplied, the gas system is running so infrequently that it will never produce enough hydrogen to affect the gas mix even if its entire output was vented into the interior.”
Williams spoke up now. “So can we dump some of the oxygen to make the generator run more?”
Leclerc responded. “Oui, ce est possible, mais difficile.”
Williams looked over at Babin who translated.
“Yes. Possible but difficult.” She went on. “We would need to vent the oxygen from the separator somehow. Or possibly vent some of the gas mix from the atmosphere. This would cause the oxygen pressure in the storage tank to drop and make the generator run. This also requires helium to be added to the mix. We think there is enough helium, but again the problem lies with the volume of gas we are trying to affect. As Monsieur Leclerc said, it is difficult. The best approach is to find a way to vent the oxygen from the storage tank to the outside and to let the hydrogen vent into the interior.”
Williams stood up and stretched. He’d been sitting too long and it was hard to concentrate when he was inactive for long periods. “I follow your thinking, but how can Dr. Moss do any of this?”
Babin spoke. “We have no idea. But this is the only solution we can think of. According to the inventory of the Pheia, there are enough tools on board if Miss Moss can locate them. Do you think Miss Moss is capable?”
It was a simple question but Williams did not answer.
Dr. Subramanian had sat silently through the entire discussion. He found the engineering discussion tedious but the interaction between Williams and the engineers was fascinating. Babin had made the most interesting point of the whole meeting: the two engineers could communicate with a few words and a schematic. That was their shared language. He had been thinking about Kate while they discussed the problems and had come to a conclusion. Before Williams could answer Babin’s question, he spoke up.
“In my opinion, Dr. Moss is a most capable woman indeed. She clearly has the intellectual capacity to deal with the problem. She has demonstrated her ability to deal with her situation numerous times in the last few days and I think that she can accomplish whatever task you set her, so long as you can explain it to her. It is this last point which worries me most. I see that the engineers can communicate through a few words and pointing at a diagram. But Dr. Moss is a biologist, not an engineer. And she does not have your diagrams. So if you are to succeed, you must create a set of instructions that someone who is wholly unfamiliar with the system can understand. Furthermore, we must not frustrate Dr. Moss by sending instructions she cannot follow, for whatever reason. So I propose that you write down exactly what you want her to do, and we test the instructions on me. I am clearly the person here with the least understanding of the vessel’s systems. My only reservation with this idea is how you will show me the nature of the task.”