by Cixin Liu
“Then how was this tunnel constructed?” Before whatever fate awaited him, Huabei wanted to know.
“Let us start at the beginning.” Mr. Deng seemed willing to share. “The key component of this tunnel’s construction was the tunnel sections. Every tunnel section was about three-hundred-thirty feet long. The entire tunnel is made up of about twenty-four-hundred of these sections. As for the specifics of the construction process, you are smart; you should be able to figure it out.”
You have reached a depth of 2,550 miles
Your speed is 4.7 miles / sec
You are now in the liquid Earth core
“Using an open caisson?” Huabei gave it his best shot.
“Yes,” Mr. Deng confirmed his conjecture, “an open caisson operation was used. First, well sections were lowered into the Earth from both the Chinese and the Antarctican end and eventually joined to a single pipe, passing through the entire planet. The second step was to extract the matter from this pipe to form the actual tunnel. You saw the iron hills outside the tunnel's entrance; those are made up of the iron-nickel alloy extracted from the tunnel sections that passed through the Earth's core. The actual construction work was carried out by subterranean ships. These vehicles, made of new solid state materials, can swim through the deep layers of the Earth. Some models could even dive down to the Earth's core. It was these ships that installed the tunnel sections and aligned them deep within the Earth.”
“The way you describe it, the tunnel would have only needed a hundred-twenty-thousand tunnel sections,” Huabei noted.
“The super solid materials used could easily withstand the immense pressures and temperatures of the lower reaches of Earth, but many regions of those depths are liquid. In the relatively shallow areas it was liquid magma, but the liquid iron-nickel flows in the Earth's core were much more dangerous,” Mr. Deng told him. “These flows could strike out against the tunnel walls with shearing force. Even though the strength of the new solid state materials was great enough to withstand such hits, the joints between the tunnel sections could not. Therefore, the tunnel was placed inside two layers of tunnel sections. The inner layer was firmly attached to the outer layer, the two layers actually being interwoven. This made the tunnel strong enough to resist the nickel-iron shears.”
You have reached a depth of 3,350 miles
Your speed is 4.8 miles / sec
You are now approaching the solid Earth core
“Now I suppose you will want to tell me what a disaster the Antarctic Doorstep turned out to be.” There was little doubt in Huabei's voice as he continued to plummet.
CHAPTER
6
Disasters and Catastrophes
“Twenty-five years ago, the Antarctic Doorstep suffered its first disaster, just as the project entered its final survey and design stage,” Mr. Deng resumed. “This stage required that a large fleet of subterranean ships work on the project. One of these survey ships was the Setting Sun VI. This ship capsized in the Earth's mantle and sank to the Earth's core. Of the crew of three, two died in the accident, but the young pilot was fortunate enough to survive the catastrophe. Even so, she was now trapped in the Earth's core, damned to live her life encased in the claustrophobic confines of the subterranean vessel. The ships neutrino-based communication equipment had lost its ability to broadcast, but it could still receive communications. Incidentally you should know, her name was Shen Jing; She was your granddaughter.” There was more than a slight hint of cruel pleasure in Mr. Deng's voice.
Pain and sorrow gripped Huabei's heart.
At his unimaginable velocity, the rings of the lights all blurred into one, making the wall of the well glow in blinding blue light. Plummeting at close to peak speed, it seemed that he was falling into a tunnel of light; an experience that would soon repeat.
You have reached a depth of 3,600 miles
Your speed is 4.9 miles / sec
You have entered the Earth's solid core
You are now approaching the center of the Earth!
“As the Antarctic Doorstep Project entered its sixth year, the tragic Core Breach Disaster struck,” Mr. Deng said. “As I have already mentioned, the tunnel was constructed utilizing interlocked layers of tunnel sections. Before the inner layer pieces could be inserted, the outer layer had to be joined and the material extracted from its core. The latter was vital to avoid any foreign material getting caught between the layers and affecting the closeness of the fit. The engineers extracted the matter from the outer tunnel, section by section, and then inserted the inner tunnel pieces as each outer section was hollowed out. This left a window of sorts. Just as the material was being extracted from each section and as the inner tunnel was being inserted, there was a window during which the sections and the joints between them were vulnerable to external forces. As the work approached the Earth's core, the sections had to withstand the onslaught of nickel-iron flows. Of course, the joints between the well pieces utilized extraordinarily sturdy riveting technology designed to withstand just such assaults for extended periods of time.
“As the work encroached within three hundred miles of the Earth's core, disaster struck. Just as the matter was being extracted from the outer well section, the joint was subjected to an unusually powerful flow – five times more powerful than any of the previously surveyed flows. The forces it exerted dislocated the two well pieces. Super-hot and super-pressurized material from the Earth's core immediately burst through the breach, shooting up the already completed tunnel. As soon as the breach was detected, the acting director of the project, Shen Yuan, immediately ordered the closing of a valve-gate located in the Gutenberg Discontinuity, known as the Gutenberg Gate. In the moment that he gave that order, more than twenty-five-hundred engineers were working in the three hundred miles just below that gate. These workers boarded high-speed freight elevators to evacuate the tunnel as soon as they became aware of the breach. In total there were more than one-hundred-thirty elevators up. The last elevator was outrunning the rising tide of the iron-nickel flow by a mere twenty miles. In the end, only sixty-one elevators made it through the Gutenberg Gate before it closed; all others were trapped on the wrong side and swallowed by torrents of the core flow, burning at more than seven thousand degrees. One-thousand-five-hundred-twenty-seven perished in the Earth's core that day.
“The Core-Breach Disaster shocked the entire world,” Mr. Deng continued, his tone both bitter and dead. “At the time, Shen Yuan was subjected to intense criticism from two opposing directions: One group said that he absolutely could have waited for all the elevators to clear the Gutenberg Gate before closing it. After all, the nickel-iron flow was still a good twenty miles from the gate at the time. It was close, but there still would have been time. And even if the Gutenberg Gate had been compromised, there would have been the Mohorovicic Gate. This was another valve-gate at the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the boundary between Earth's surface and the mantle. The incensed families of the disaster's victims accused Shen Yuan of murder. His only publicized response to this was, 'I was afraid of a fissure forming'. This 'fissure' certainly had to be prevented; it even became the topic of more than one Antarctic Doorstep disaster movie. One of these movies was called Iron-Fall.
“The movie painted the nightmare scenario of matter from the Earth's core erupting to the surface, shooting a titanic fountain of liquid iron-nickel alloy into the stratosphere. High up in the atmosphere it scattered, blooming into a gigantic flower of death, its blinding, white light turning night into bright day in the Northern Hemisphere. The Earth was covered with torrents of scorching, molten iron, and all of Asia was burned to a smoldering inferno. Humanity suffered the fate of the dinosaurs.”
Mr. Deng paused giving Huabei a few moments to contemplate all he had heard.
Then Mr. Deng’s voice in Huabei’s headphone continued. “What I just described was no exaggeration and it was these fears that led another group to accuse Shen Yuan from the entirely opposite direction: They said t
hat he should have closed the Gutenberg Gate sooner. In essence, what they charged was that he should not have waited for any of the elevators. This criticism was far more widespread than the accusations from the other side. In the end, it led to Shen Yuan being charged on two counts in the court of public opinion: For dereliction of duty and crimes against humanity. Even though these two charges ultimately did not pan out in the court of law, Shen Yuan nonetheless resigned his post, leaving his position as the director of the Antarctic Doorstep program. He refused all other appointments, later working as an ordinary engineer in the tunnel.”
Just then, the rings of light on the tunnel's walls suddenly changed from blue to red.
You have reached a depth of 3,900 miles
Your speed is 5 miles / sec
You are passing through the center of the Earth!
Mr. Deng's voice again rang through Huabei’s headphone. “You have now reached escape velocity, even though you are as far away from space as possible, right at the planet's core. Right now, everything is spinning around you; all of the oceans and continents, every city and every human being. They are all revolving around you.”
Bathed in solemn red, music returned to Huabei's mind. This time it was a grand symphony. Falling down this tunnel, plummeting through the center of the Earth at escape velocity, he felt as if he was floating in the Earth's blood stream, and it made his own blood seethe with excitement.
Mr. Deng continued his lecture. “Even though the new solid state materials are incredible insulators, the temperature around you is now more than twenty-seven-hundred degrees. The cooling system of your suit is running at full power.”
The red lights on the wall continued for another 10 seconds, then they changed back to their serene blue glow.
You have passed through the center of the Earth
You are now rising and beginning your deceleration
You have reached a height of 310 miles
Your speed is 4.9 miles / sec
You are now in the solid Earth core
Huabei felt the cool of the blue glow soothe his soul. By now, he had long adapted to weightlessness and he slowly began to turn his body, moving his head to face the new up. As he sought to find the sensation of rising, he asked Mr. Deng, “It would seem that there was a third disaster?”
Mr. Deng was only too happy to answer. “The Lost Bolt Catastrophe occurred five years ago. Back then, the Antarctic Doorstep had been completed and the Earth Tunnel had formally begun regular operation and the Core Train ran it nonstop. The Core Train's cars were twenty-five feet in diameter and a hundred-sixty-five feet long cylinders. On each journey, the Core Train would be made up of a maximum of two hundred of these cars. The train had a maximum capacity of twenty thousand tons of goods or nearly ten thousand passengers. A one-way journey with the train took a mere forty-two minutes and was enabled by pure freefall, consuming no energy.
“When it happened, a maintenance worker at the Mohe launch station carelessly lost a screw bolt – no bigger than four inches in diameter – in the tunnel. The bolts were made of a new solid state material and capable of absorbing electromagnetic waves. This made it invisible to the radar of the tunnel's safety monitoring equipment. It fell straight down the tunnel, passing through the Earth's core right up to the Antarctica station, and then back again. As it returned to the Earth's core, it hit a Core Train just rising toward Antarctica. The relative speed of the bolt and the train was ten miles per second; the impact may just as well have been a bomb blast. It slammed right through the first two train cars, vaporizing everything within. The explosion of these two cars derailed the entire train, sending it crashing into the tunnel wall at five miles per second. In the blink of an eye, it was torn to tiny shreds, leaving a large field of debris falling through the Earth, spreading throughout the entire tunnel. Some of these fragments fell all the way back and forth through the entire planet; most, however, had lost their momentum in the collision and simply swung around the Earth's core. It took an entire month for the tunnel to be cleaned of every last piece. None of the remains of the three thousand train passengers were ever found. Every last one of them had been cremated to nothingness in the heat of the Earth's core.”
You have reached a height of 1,370 miles above the Earth's core
Your speed is 4.7 miles / sec
You have reentered the liquid Earth core
“But the greatest disaster was the Antarctic Doorstep itself; the project was an unprecedented feat of human technology and also an act of unparalleled economic folly. Even to this day, we remain baffled how a project of such base economic stupidity could ever make it off the drawing board. Shen Yuan, with his demonic talents, certainly played a role, but the true fault lies with humanity's feverish desire to conquer unclaimed worlds and its blind worship of new technologies.
“Economists say that the Antarctic Doorstep was doomed the very day it was completed. Certainly,” Mr. Deng said, “travel through the Earth was extremely fast and consumed almost no energy. People would even say things like, 'Just throw it in', and 'Just jump in'. Even so, building the tunnel had been an immense investment. This meant the transport charges for the Core Train remained sky-high, offsetting the benefits of its speed and giving the Core Train no real competitive advantage over more conventional forms of transport.”
You have reached a height of 2,200 miles above the Earth's core
Your speed is 4 miles / sec
You are now passing through the Gutenberg Discontinuity
You are reentering the Earth's mantle
“Humanity's Antarctic dream quickly came to ruin,” Mr. Deng said. “Swarming industry and excessive exploitation had soon devastated the last remaining pristine environment on Earth. Like the rest of the planet, Antarctica was ravaged, leaving nothing but a smog-smothered dump. The ozone layer above the continent was completely stripped, inevitably changing life on Earth. The ultraviolet radiation became so strong that constant protective measures became a necessity of life for everyone just leaving their house, even in the Northern Hemisphere. What is more, the accelerated melting of the Antarctic ice sheet led to a precipitous rise of global sea levels.
“Those were long and painful years, but in the end reason prevailed and all the member states of the United Nations signed a new Antarctic Treaty, leading to the withdrawal of all human activity from the continent; Antarctica was returned to an icy desert. What remained of the dream was the hope of a slow recovery of Antarctica's environment.
“As the demand for transport to the Antarctic suddenly subsided and in the aftermath of the Lost Bolt Catastrophe, the Core Train service was altogether abandoned and the Earth Tunnel closed down. That was eight years ago. Even after all these years the economic devastation wrought by the Antarctic Doorstep still continues to haunt us. The endless thousands who bought stock in the Antarctic Doorstep Company lost all they had invested, giving rise to widespread social unrest; the investment black hole that this tunnel had become pushed our country to the brink of total economic collapse and even today we still struggle with the after-effects of this catastrophe. Your son's work has become a valley of tears for us.”
For a few seconds Huabei only heard the mournful exhaling of Mr. Deng's breath.
“Well, that is the story of the Antarctic Doorstep.”
As the speed of Huabei’s descent began to decrease, the walls' blue light began first to flash, and then, slowly, he was again able to make out individual rings of blue lights on the wall. Above and below, he could again see the dense concentric rings form and disappear.
You have reached a height of 3,000 miles above the Earth's core
Your speed is 3.1 miles / sec
You are reentering the rigid region of Earth's mantle
CHAPTER
7
The Death of Shen Yuan
“What happened to my son?” Huabei posed his final question.
Again, Mr. Deng readily obliged him. “After the closure, Shen Yuan stayed behind
as one of the last workers in the Mohe station. I called him one day and all he told me was, 'My daughter and I are reunited.' Later, I learned that he had lived an almost inconceivable life in the intervening years: Every day he would don a sealed suit and drop down into the Earth Tunnel, swinging back and forth, he even slept in the tunnel. He only returned to the station to eat and refuel his suit's energy tanks. Every day, he completed roughly thirty journeys through the Earth. This went on, day after day, year after year. He swung from Mohe to the Antarctic Peninsula, each full return journey taking eighty-four minutes as he oscillated seven-thousand-eight-hundred-thirty miles.”
You have reached a height of 3,700 miles above the Earth's core
Your speed is 1.5 miles / sec
You are reentering the viscous region of Earth's mantle
“Who knows what Shen Yuan did in his endless fall. According to his colleagues, he hailed his daughter with a neutrino communicator every time he passed through the Earth's core,” Mr. Deng said. “As he plummeted, he would have long chats with his daughter; of course he was the only one doing the speaking, but Shen Jing, alive in the Setting Sun VI drifting around the Earth's core in the flow of nickel-iron alloy, was probably able to hear him.
