Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Of course… Kamen felt a sinking in his stomach as he realized that just one pinhole would not account for a thirty-percent drop in pressure over a colony-wide system like the irrigation sumps. There had to be a lot of little holes out here, and now he had empirical evidence that at least two of them were spaced only half a meter apart.

  He cleaned off that patch of bubble again with one hand while he rested the other against the fin to mark the exit point for the latest geyser. Finally, with a circle of his vision restored, Peter shifted his head another ten centimeters to the left and tried to get a view of the hole it was coming from.

  No such luck. The hole must be tiny—confirming his theory that there were many more than one of them—and the evaporating plume of vapor was invisible under this lighting.

  Kamen tried to feel for the hole then, passing his gloved hand slowly in a broad swipe over the fin. Since the water pressure inside was gravity induced and measured at most in the hundreds of kilopascals—rather than the thousands he might expect from a superheated steam line—he had no worries about the leak cutting into his suit or taking part of his hand off. Halfway through the exercise he felt a bump of resistance and marked the spot with his finger.

  Then he pressed his face close to it, coming in from the side.

  The hole in the black tubule was less than a millimeter across. Its edges were caked with white crystals, probably a precipitate from the salts or residual fertilizers in the irrigation water. With the tip of the Snapple™ hanging from his belt, Kamen scraped away this residue. The remaining hole, studied at extreme close range, seemed to have a necklace of pits, like an erosion in the metal. It did not show the dimpling that one would expect of an impact crater—and that blew his first half-formed theory that the fin had recently ridden through a shower of micro-meteorites. He worried the area around the hole, polishing it with his gloved finger, and a tiny flake of metal broke off from inside the tube and blew away into vacuum.

  It appeared that the heat-exchange fin and the network of tubes and drains supporting it were rotting away from within. And that was worse news than a hundred meteor storms.

  Kamen got busy in his peterpan harness then and performed three more spot checks at random points over a half-kilometer area of the fin. At each place, he found more geysers and the pattern of tiny, corroded holes. And that was as much as he was going to learn on this trip.

  As he worked his way back to the access well, he chewed over the question of why the process of oxidation had suddenly leapt into high gear, eating away at fifteen percent of his pressure differential in just ten hours' time. That was the mystery now.

  356kPa

  352kPa

  347kPa

  343 kPa

  Main Irrigation Sump, Stonybrook Farm, 5:38 UT

  "Son of a bitch!" Alois Davenport breathed in Peter Kamen's ear as the two of them watched the gauge on the pressure return drop over a ten-minute period. "How many holes did you say there were?"

  "Thousands....Maybe tens of thousands."

  "At this rate, we'll have lost all pressure by the end of the day—"

  "Sooner," Kamen put in.

  "Then we'll have to run the pumps, won't we? I mean, to get a flow in the system."

  "It doesn't work that way," the engineer said tiredly. The more he worked in this job, the more he was alternately alarmed and discouraged by the little that his general manager actually understood about the machinery supporting all their lives.

  "The pressure is dropping here because we're losing water," he explained. "It's draining out at our low point, the part of the system farthest from our center of spin and so having the greatest moment arm. That's our heat-exchange fins. The bottom of our well, as it were."

  "So?" The wrinkles were coming up in Davenport's forehead.

  "So, if that low point is leaking, then the water table is falling all throughout the colony. We see this as a pressure loss because there's no head to keep the pressure up at this point in the system. It's not just a matter of an imbalance that you'll have to pump against. We're losing water, Alois. It will keep flowing downhill, out into the fins, and evaporating there until it's all gone. Then you'll hear the percolation mats start to draw on our atmosphere."

  "You're telling me we'll be open to space?"

  "We already are open to space. It's only the water we've got left in the pipes and in the soil above them that keeps our air from bleeding off now. How long that water will last depends on how many holes we're dealing with and how fast they can pass H2O molecules."

  "What's causing it?"

  "I don't know." Kamen shook his head. "At first I thought it might be meteorites, but the holes look like rust spots rather than impacts. Still, the fin alloy is supposed to be corrosion resistant. And the progression rate is all wrong. Rust comes up on you gradually; it's a flat-line effect. This breakdown is happening on a curve, one that's getting steeper all the time. So, if the deterioration is corrosion, then something's driving it, and I haven't a clue as to what that might be."

  Alois Davenport looked at him and shrugged.

  "Has anything come in on the network?" Kamen asked with a sudden inspiration. "Anything from the other colonies?"

  The general manager appeared to search his memory. "No. All we've got in the last twenty-four is a NASA bulletin explaining that communications foulup from the day before yesterday. They said it was some kind of disturbance on the sun, sending out a blast of electromagnetic radiation, high energy gamma and x-ray stuff. With an ion storm to follow."

  "Ion storm?"

  "A cloud of protons and electrons shot out of the sun's atmosphere by the disturbance. NASAsays the colony will be in no real danger, except for some more communications lapses as the induced currents play hob with our antennas."

  "Induced currents…"

  "Yeah, something about how a magnetic field from the ions—"

  "I know all that," Kamen said tiredly. "Look at it this way. An electric current will stimulate the exchange of ions between our irrigation water and the metal in the pipes. That speeds up the oxidation, especially if the water has salts in it—as ours surely does by now. That's it, Alois. The mystery is solved."

  "Good—I guess. What are you going to do about it?"

  Peter Kamen weighed his options for a minute. "Nothing fancy, I guess. The direct approach. We have to start suiting up teams, right now, and sending them out with whatever we've got for plugging those holes—spot welders, paint guns, chewing gum, anything that will stick for a while and not dissolve. The problem will be identifying the leaks quickly, of course, and going after the biggest ones first."

  "My people don't work in vacuum," the general manager said quietly.

  Kamen, deep in his technical problem, hardly heard the man. "Some kind of dye would do the job. A radioactive tracer—but then you'd need instruments to detect it, and those are sure to be in short supply. Maybe a fluorescent dye, perhaps something that scintillates as the water goes through the phase change from liquid to—"

  "My people don't work in vacuum."

  Peter came up short. "What was that? Come on now, Alois! This is no time to get stuffy about jurisdictions. Your boat is sinking. Everybody has to pitch in."

  "You don't understand. They don't know how. They're farmers, Peter. Most of them have never been outside the can. It will take you most of the day just to teach them vacuum drill. And we don't have enough suits, air bottles, compressors—not to plug thousands of holes."

  "They can learn. We can rotate on the available equipment. Do you understand the magnitude of the job ahead of us? I've got a staff of four. Sure, they're trained to outside work, but with just ourselves, we'd never keep ahead of the losses."

  "Then think of something," Davenport insisted.

  "I'm trying!"

  "Well… I could put in a request for replacement water. Call Whitney Center and see if they can give us a priority shooting schedule—"

  "Never work." Kamen shook his head. "Even i
f they launched your water this minute, we'll all be whistling vacuum before the first pod could get here, let alone we take the time to decant it into the system."

  "Then think of something, Peter. And it better be good. And quick."

  "I know."

  "Because it's your skin, too."

  "I know!"

  Davenport took one more look at the pressure gauge. He turned his head half away, then whipped back and spat once, accurately, leaving a shiny blob of spittle in the center of the dial. The general manager climbed through the access hatch and out of the sump.

  Ladle

  Scoop

  Dollop

  Plop!

  Centerville Community Cafeteria, Stonybrook Farm, 6:10 UT

  The food server on the steam table dropped a glob of oatmeal into the bowl and handed it across to engineer Peter Kamen. He took the dish with his hand but didn't set it down on his tray. Instead, he just stood there, like a statue, with his eyes glazed and his bowl of oatmeal offin the middle distance.

  The porridge was still in a lump, almost a round ball in the shape of the ladle it came from. One edge, though, was cut by a darker patch of crust, where the surface of the cereal in the steamer pot had started to congeal. In the five seconds that he held the bowl out like that, Peter Kamen watched his mother making oatmeal in his mind.

  She always started with the original rolled oats, tiny creamy-brown flakes that went into the cold water and just lay in the bottom of the pot. As the water started to boil, however, they seemed to expand and fill… No, that wasn't right. They didn't just bloat up, like rice. They gummed up, too, into a paste with the consistency of glue. But not until they were heated.

  Thinking of his mother brought back her family stories. Something about oatmeal… Granduncle Harry Barnes and his Oldsmobile. That was the one....The radiator had started leaking that time Uncle Harry was driving across the Nevada Desert, and he had thought he was a goner, stuck out in the noonday sun with a blown cooling system. But then Harry remembered he had some instant oatmeal in the back. Why he was carrying oatmeal, Mother never explained. Maybe he just liked it. Anyway, he poured some of it into his water system, where it cooked up and the paste—except she always called it the starch—sealed the holes in his radiator. It baked them over solid with a tight seal like little pieces of bread dough.

  When Peter became an engineer and understood something of cooling systems and fluid mechanics, he always wondered what happened to the oatmeal flakes in Uncle Harry's radiator. Why didn't the porridge clog up all the tiny passages and stop the flow of water right there? Ever since then, Peter had always doubted the truth of that story.

  But true or not, now it was giving him an idea.

  "Don't you like your food?" the cook asked him.

  "What?" Peter came out of his trance.

  "Your food. Something wrong with it?"

  "No… Oh yeah, it's fine."

  "Then why don't you move along so others can get served?"

  "Sorry… Look, do you have anything like starch—cornmeal, or maybe cornstarch—back in the kitchen?"

  "What do I look like, a grocery store?"

  "Sorry."

  "So get moving already."

  Peter Kamen put the bowl down on his tray, left it in line, and walked away. He was halfway out of the cafeteria on a dead run, so he never heard the shouts coming from behind him.

  "Hey, buddy! You gonna pay for that or what?"

  Wrinkle

  Crinkle

  Wrinkle

  Blink!

  General Manager's Office, Stonybrook Farm, 6:15 UT

  Peter Kamen could tell from the way the skin tightened around Davenport's eyes that the man wasn't following his story. Clearly, the farm manager had never heard of an Oldsmobile, did not understand the structural similarities between a passive solar heat exchanger and the air-cooled radiator on an internal combustion engine, and possessed only the vaguest idea of where the Great Basin of Nevada was and why an unscheduled stop there might be a life-threatening experience. Peter cut the tale short and got to the heart of the matter.

  "Do you have any vegetable starches in store? Preferably something that's fine ground and completely soluble."

  "I… um… unhhh…" Davenport searched his memory. "We had an order once, was it two?—no, three years ago!—from one of the subtropical countries. It might have been Tanzania or Thailand or one of those T-places. Anyway, they wanted a starch extract for making baby formula. We planted two whole sixties with a genetically engineered barley and processed the crop right here in the colony because their contract specifically forbade paying shipment on any 'in-situ waste products,' by which they meant vegetable fiber. Anyway, when the time came to deliver, they'd had a revolution and weren't honoring any of the old government's commitments. We damn near got foreclosed that year."

  "And you didn't ship the starch out?" Kamen supplied.

  "Nope. We decided to plow it back into the soil."

  "Oh shit!"

  "Hold on....Now I remember. We were going to plow it, until one of our selectmen pointed out that the colony might need an emergency food source one day, and although the stuff was nearly indigestible, it was better than chewing concrete."

  "So where is it?" Peter asked.

  "We buried it—but clean. It's in a lined pit under the East One Twenty. The kids around there call it Baby Puke Hill."

  "Great! Now, let's get your farmers digging it out. We can dump the starch right into the sumps. That's below the soil line and beyond the perc mats. Once it hits the fins, it should start cooking and seal up those pinholes."

  "Won't it clog the exchangers, too?" Davenport objected. "I mean—"

  "I'll run some tests. We should be able to control the size of the clumps through the starch concentration. Big enough to stuff a millimeter-wide hole, small enough to pass a five-millimeter tube. But even if I'm wrong, which would you rather have—a heat imbalance and a little stagnant water, or a hole out to vacuum?"

  Davenport thought about that. "I'll follow your lead on this one," he told Kamen finally.

  "Okay. I'll be over at my shop, arranging for the test work. Have your team leader bring me a sample as soon as they uncover the storage pit. We should be able to plug this thing in a couple of hours, tops."

  The general manager nodded, then stopped Kamen by jamming a hand into the crook of his elbow.

  Peter jerked at the roughness of the touch.

  “Just don't think this is going to change anything," Davenport told him gruffly. "You may have gotten lucky this once, discovering about that pressure drop and working out the source of the problem. But all that means is we—you and me and the whole colony—got unlucky, having it happen in the first place."

  "What are you driving at?"

  "You may have saved the day on this one, Kamen, but that doesn't mean I'm going to underwrite all your happy little plans. You can just stick your budget requests for fancy new equipment, and your application to bring up a whole company of engineers, and your sour-ball predictions about how this farming bucket is in imminent danger of falling apart. You're only the maintenance man, fella. That makes you just a service organization for the farmers and traders who run this colony. You're not going to end up in charge of things around here just because you found and fixed a plumbing leak."

  Peter Kamen decided to hear the man out, and he even managed to keep a grin on his face.

  “Jesus, Alois! Don't smother me with gratitude," he said when Davenport had finished. "I just couldn't stand it if you went all wet and sloppy on me."

  "Get the hell out of here," the manager growled.

  Fizzle

  Fuzzle

  Phu-utt

  Pftt

  Outside Stonybrook Farm, 8:07 UT

  Shielding his clean helmet bubble with a piece of smeary plastic, Peter Kamen hung in front of the heat-exchange fin and studied the geysers of soup that he could see at close range.

  The escaping vapor was a grai
ny white mist, turning into a snowstorm of tiny flakes as the water boiled away in vacuum. But that wasn't the effect that interested him.

  Down on the surface of the tubes and petals, Kamen could see the holes building up their own microscopic volcano cones of white crud. Sputter by spit, they were closing, until all around him the black surface was dotted with spots and dribbles of vegetable starch and runoff salts. It looked like the windshield of Uncle Harry's Oldsmobile, the time he ran though that cloud of mayflies out in the Delta. Even the lacy little bubbles that some of the smaller corrosion holes had blown looked like the wings of the dead insects stuck erect by the impact.

  Alois Davenport was wrong, of course. Kamen knew that this near-disaster was going to change just everything.

  Rousting people out of their homes at six in the morning and setting them to digging for their lives—that would have gotten them to thinking. Some of them, enough of them, would realize that the design of Stonybrook Farm was far from perfect.

  For one thing, even the youngest child could figure out by now that the drainage and heat-exchange system should have included some emergency shutoff valves. Assuming that any system which was self-actuating and self-regulating was therefore some kind of perpetual motion machine that would never need to stop for adjustment—this was just bad industrial engineering.

  In the days and weeks ahead, Peter Kamen would find fertile minds in which to plant his ideas for changing and improving the colony, for buying some insurance against future and worse disasters. So, in a way, this near-failure of their irrigation system, dire as it might have been, was the best thing that could have happened to them.

  Peter Kamen rapped his knuckles happily on the black fin and started reeling himself up toward the hull.

  Chapter 28

  Voices in the Sky

  Angle of incidence...

  Angle of reflection

  Angle of incidence prime…