"Got you. Back in two."
Sorkin hung up, ran back to his personal locker, and banged open the door. He pushed aside a rain slicker and boots, a pair of good trousers kept for meeting visiting executives, half a case of sealed and rad-treated turkey franks left over from last Sunday's barbecue for the yard families, and a month's worth of log books and yard notices that he'd like to forget entirely. Everything went flying as Sorkin dug his way down to the lower levels. Finally, at the bottom in the rear corner, he found what he was looking for: the bat that his crews had used last summer in their sandlot games. It wasn't exactly nonconducting, being a spun aluminum shell weighted with lead shot and reinforced with plastic resins, but at least the handle was protected with a rubber grip. Sorkin also pulled a pair of safety glasses off the top shelf.
Holding the bat by its knob, he sprinted out into the yard.
"What you got, Pete?" called David Knell, who had just driven up in the line-patrol truck and was now standing on the edge of the gravel strip. He actually seemed to be enjoying the fireworks.
The gapping and sparking continued undiminished, showering down blazing darts. By now some of the spot-welded closers were turning a sickly red and smoking like sausages on the grill. The thick, blue air reeked of ozone and burning metal.
"Watch this, Dave!" Sorkin answered cheerfully and stomped up to the base of the first tower, where the black box sat.
For luck, he checked that the bat's label was up, then Pete Sorkin lifted it back and around until it just touched his left shoulder blade. He swung low and hard, as if he was trying to turn a low-and-inside into a fence burner.
Whang!
The blow ripped the hard, carbon-fiber shell protecting the NAT's innards right off its mounting pad. The box sat sideways on the gravel against the tower's footing.
"Home run!" Knell shouted.
But the yard was still in chaos, with the closers snapping overhead like spastic lobsters.
Sorkin could see that the NAT was still connected by its nest of wires and was pushing solenoids around up in the trestlework. Now he took a choked-up grip on the bat and swung it overhand, up, around, and down.
Bong!
The black box's shell cracked, and two of its wires hung loose, wiggling across the gravel like live eels.
Sorkin hit it again, same stroke.
Clang!
With the shell breached, this third blow went deep into the thing's guts, cracking its green-and-gold circuit boards and scattering ceramic chips like Beernuts spilling out of a dish.
The fireworks stopped abruptly.
"Hoo-ray!!" Dave Knell shouted. He was joined in his enthusiasm by Charlie Dobbs, who had just driven in to start the day shift.
Sorkin ignored them and studied the overhead, tracing out the switchwork and bussbar suspended five meters above the yard. Most of the closers had failed in the open position, and that was good. Some of them were welded solid now, and that couldn't be helped. But at least two of them—the B and C phases on the tertiary 500-kv circuit—had been stopped in a closed position, and that was just terrible. If Sorkin and his crew didn't do something about them soon, the A phase was going to migrate and then they would be carrying the whole yard.
"We've got to open those," he told the other men, pointing.
"With what?” Dobbs asked, alarmed.
Sorkin hefted the bat.
"You'll kill yourself for sure," Knell told him.
"Yeah, you're right." Pete laid the bat down in the gravel and looked around. "We got any hotsticks?"
These were insulated fiberglass poles, fitted with sockets for various tools. The longer the pole, the farther it removed the lineman from the energized circuit he was working on, and so the higher the voltage he could contact without drawing a flashover.
"Yeah, for five hundred kayvee," Knell said judiciously, "we generally use one that telescopes back into the next county. It kind of whips around a mite at the tip, though."
"All right, funny guy, what do you propose?"
"Knock the tower over," Dobbs volunteered. "That'll have the same effect—if the bussbar don't cross up as she goes down."
"How in hell we gonna push it?" Knell demanded. "You see any rubber-blanketed D-12 Cats sitting around here?"
"No, but I do have some plastique in my truck."
"That's not company issue, is it?" Sorkin asked quickly, chilled by the thought one of his people might have forgotten to sign out for blasting materials. Sorkin would have to fill out the long form on that kind of infraction.
"Naw, I got it from a cousin of mine works down at the air base. Black market stuff out of Tangier. I wanted to blow some stumps on the ranch."
"Do you know how to use it?" Sorkin pressed.
"Be a damn-fool if I didn't, wouldn't I?"
"You got detonators?"
"Enough."
"Okay." Sorkin wiped his forehead first with one shirtsleeve, then the other. "This is not exactly regular procedure, Charlie, and you for damn sure never heard me say this, but it would be a real nice thing if you wired up about a half a kilo of your putty to that leg over there." He indicated the northwest corner of the tower. "And the one opposite." He pointed to the southwest corner. "Just enough to kind of tease that trestlework apart. You think you can do that and then keep your mouth shut about it for the rest of your natural life?"
Dobbs showed a buck-toothed smile. "Sure thing, boss."
"Then get going."
Sorkin and Knell followed Dobbs out to the truck and helped him unload his assorted junk down to the level of an anonymous green duffel bag. Inside, wrapped in wax paper and looking like a mild white cheese, was the explosive. A manila envelope held the pencil-thin detonators, each trailing a pair of short, thin wires, one red, one black.
"How're we going to work this?" Knell asked.
"Well…" Dobbs paused to think for a minute. "You guys each roll yourselves a snake of that goop about a centimeter in diameter and ten or twelve centimeters long. Then mold it into a nice collar around the main upright of whichever leg you favor. Leave a little knob on the high side, and stick one of these pencils in it. Meanwhile, I'll go rustle up a nine-volt cell and some lightweight wire."
In five minutes, Sorkin and Knell had made their collars and set the detonators. Dobbs came out and inspected their work, nodding his approval, and then twisted the ends of some phone wire out of general stores onto the red and black leads. Under his arm he carried a big emergency flasher.
Unlooping the wire, the three of them walked backward around the corner of the maintenance office and crouched down. Dobbs pried the lens and bulb off his flasher, exposing the contact points of the battery.
"You've done this before, I hope," Sorkin said.
"Well," Dobbs said slowly, "at least my cousin showed me how."
"Oh, great!"
"We supposed to shout 'timber' or anything?" Charlie asked then, holding the ends of the wire poised over the battery.
"Just pray Internal Auditing never finds out about this."
Dobbs brushed the wires across the terminals. The other two men instinctively hunched lower, and Knell slapped his palms over his ears.
Ba-bang!
That was all, a sound barely louder than when Sorkin had beaten the NAT to death. They looked out around the corner of the office. The hanging trestle that supported all those fused switches was still standing upright.
"Shit!" Dobbs said.
Before he got the word fully out of his mouth, however, the steel framework pulled apart, slowly at first, then faster and faster as gravity worked on its two halves. Those frozen switches snapped apart with a feint, blue spark of lightning. Twisting metal shrieked and groaned as it fell to the ground. The circuits severed cleanly.
Sorkin stared at the wreckage for a full minute.
"I'd better go call Power Control," he said finally.
500 kv
230 kv
120 kv
60 kv
Powe
r Control, San Francisco, 6:27 a.m. PST
One by one, the high voltage circuits winked out on the color-coded system map, which was about the only coherent thing the damaged intelligence could display inside Meers' helmet.
Just how SIDNEY knew which lines were still whole and which had gone to a fault condition, when he lacked all authority to control them, Meers didn't want to ask. Maybe the map SIDNEY was showing him was just plain wrong—but that didn't bear thinking about, either.
When that fellow Sorkin had called from the company's backbone substation out near Sacramento, SIDNEY was just discovering how cut off he actually was. The cyber's suggestion to close down the switch-server by hand had seemed like lunacy. But even in the throes of his electronic madness, SIDNEY had been harboring the glimmer of an idea.
Right away George Meers had called on the other transmission subs, gotten the same story about fireworks and devastation from their human maintenance crews, and told them all to disable their local controllers.
Meers immediately brought up his relief operator, Leo Brucelles, who had been lounging over coffee in the ready room.
"SIDNEY wants us to get these guys opening and closing the circuits by hand," Meers explained.
'Jesus!" Brucelles swore. "This puts us way back in the mid-nineties or something."
"Can't be helped. Get on your goggles and pick up a phone. You tackle the southern end of the system, I'll take the north."
Soon he and Brucelles were telling the maintenance techs which switches they wanted to open—preferably with a long-handled hotstick, and in some cases with dynamite—and which to leave closed, even if it meant the conductor was crackling and steaming. SIDNEY was guiding the dispatch operators with voice output, supplementing his instructions, when George or Leo became confused, by flashing the appropriate lines on the maps in front of their eyes. The method was clumsier than a dancing bear, but it worked.
One by one, they managed to shut down the generating units, close out the distribution load centers, and isolate the longest runs of wire or ceramic conductor, which happened to be those that were misbehaving the most. Whole blocks of Pacific Energy's California customers were getting shed, and there would be hell to pay with the Law Department when Monday morning came around. But in the meantime, the system had escaped burning out whole linear kilometers of long-distance conductor. And that would cause a statewide outage they probably wouldn't get fixed until the Fourth of July.
"How long did the ops guys say this ion thing was going to last?" Brucelles asked Meers when the two of them got to a breathing space.
"They didn't. But NASA's advisory put the system on notice for an average of thirty hours. You can work it out from there."
"Well then… we're going to need more coffee, chief. And maybe a backup team."
"Yeah, you're right. I'd better call upstairs."
Chapter 24
Fumble Flub
504km/h
506km/h
509km/h
513km/h
Waller County, Texas, March 22, 8:13 a.m. CST
As the Lone Star Special accelerated across the flood plain of the Brazos River between Austin and Houston, the only sounds that engineer Howard Sage could hear were the steady whoosh of the wind and the hum-mm of the transformers. Gone forever from his ear were the old-time whir-rr of hundreds of steel wheels riding on journal bearings and the clickety-tap as they all crossed rail-ends joined by bolted fishplates.
Under this train, there were no rails. Nor wheels either.
The secret to both its suspension and propulsion was magnetic levitation. The twenty-one cars—except the front office wanted you to call them "passenger units" these days, but "floating stock" was what Sage privately preferred—glided on pads of alternating north and south electromagnets which pushed against like-minded poles buried under the shallow guidepath. More magnetic fields inset into curbs along the path buffered the cars around corners and kept them from lurching side to side. When the system was fully energized, then nothing touched anywhere, except for the contact paddles on each car which rode along the powerstrip and picked up DC current for the levitating pads, their control circuits, the air-conditioning, lights, refrigerators in the dining and lounge cars, and so forth.
By alternating the polarity of the magnets buried in the guidepath, the system forced the pads to slide off one spacer and drew them on toward the next, like the poles of an electric motor chasing themselves around in a circle, except these went in a straight line. The car literally tiptoed over the fluxing magnetic fields. Only "tiptoe" wasn't the right word. If you jiggered the polarity fast enough, the cars could accelerate up to truly amazing speeds. Sage guessed the top end speed of his train was limited only by wind resistance and friction heating of the fuselages.
The essence of the control protocols was that, aside from the simple mechanisms which pulsed the polarity reversals at a faster and faster rate to accelerate the train, the system was cybernetically dumb. No feedback loops operated to increase the gauss of each field to compensate for the weight of varying numbers of passengers and amounts of baggage in each car. The system just assumed a constant high-load condition and pumped up the field accordingly. No sensors in the guidepath took readings of the train's speed as it pushed into a curve and boosted the sidewall magnets to compensate for the lurch. Those embedded poles simply repelled everything entering their domains with a field strength that would reject a flying artillery shell and bounce it back into the groove.
Dumb, rigid, and dependable—those had been the designer's ideals, just like in the old days of heavyweight American railroading. And hurrah for that, Howard Sage said. Enough of this delicately balanced, poised, and artificially smart age, where everything was pared down to a nicety and nothing, from your telephone bell to a good piece of garlic salami, ever came on strong. In fact, it was the train builders' singularly robust design philosophy that probably saved the lives of Sage and the 2,347 passengers hurtling toward Houston under his care.
When the lead car he was riding first "stepped into a hole"—or that was how Sage later described the sensation of a magnetic domain collapsing—he immediately chopped the throttle. His action told the pulse boxes buried along the side of the guidepath to slow down the pole reversals, and do it right fast. "Increasing the rate of decrease," as the design engineers would say. Then the shift from north to south to north would drag at the train's own electromagnetic fields and brake all forward motion.
With the failure of a second magnetic domain, some three hundred meters farther along, the lead car actually bottomed out on the guidepath. Whump! Howard Sage thought for a bit about making a general announcement to his passengers, something on the order of an airline pilot's "This is the captain speaking, folks, and we're experiencing a little turbulence, but there's nothing to worry about," except he couldn't say that for a fact. Maglev trains just weren't supposed to dance around like this. And besides, at this point his hands were too busy to go reaching for the microphone.
The invisible magnetic bubbles within the guidepath had suddenly gone to pieces, like a patch of Roman road where the paving stones had been pushed up and sideways by a hard frost. The bearing pads on the cars' undersides, small shovel-shaped, spring-loaded, carbon-steel blocks designed only to support the train's weight at rest, were now bucking and banging into the concrete bottom and curb walls of the trough. The noise was beginning to sound like church bells being taken apart with sledge hammers.
Sage's fingers were busy on the control board snapping switches. One at a time, as soon as a check of his display showed the internal doors were clear, he threw the circuit breakers that would unshackle the magnetic couplers between each of the cars. This was against standard company practice, of course, other than when the complement was moving about in the yards. But Sage knew better what he was doing.
With the field flux falling apart like it was, creating dropouts and holes in the domains that supported the individual levitation pads and pushed
them forward, inevitably some of the cars were going to end up moving faster than others. Sage could see in his mind the result of that: those streamlined passenger units would soon be jackknifing all across the Texas countryside, dragging each other out of the guidepath and flying sideways into the slower ones in line ahead. So, instead he was trying to separate the train into its component modules. Then any one of them might buck and sway, but not all of them would pull out of the groove and tumble along like a string of beads with a broken cord.
Second by second, the profile display on Sage's control board showed the effects of his work. Gaps were opening up in the train. The slower units were now dropping behind, with just a few of the rear-end cars bumping and butting into them. That was good, too, because it meant the tail-end Charlies were losing speed with each impact. The train's lead cars were quickly spacing themselves out along the guidepath.
All Sage could do now was watch that profile, chant down the speedometer, and pray to God that nothing more went wrong.
Five hundred kilometers per hour, four hundred… three hundred… two hundred.
The milepost markers flashed past at longer and longer intervals. The bashing of the bearing pads now came more slowly, but somehow louder, too. Howard Sage felt his teeth click with each jolt, as if his body were taken with a sudden chill. He supposed that after this ride the Power and Way folks would have a couple of kilometers of spalled concrete to freshen up.
One hundred fifty, one thirty-five, one fifteen… one hundred.
The dropoff came faster as the force of inertia—the train's weight multiplied by its speed—fell into relative balance with the braking effect of the guidepath's magnetic fields.
Seventy-five, fifty, twenty, ten.
The lead car Sage rode in was barely moving now. What at high speed had been a shuddering jitter as the car frames and pads collided repeatedly with the concrete sidewalls now turned into a hump and a wallow. With a final heave, the car settled first its back end, then its front. It slid a meter or two along in the trough, and then stopped with a head-nodding surge.
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