Colonial Survey

by Murray Leinster

  “I can call in the civilians,” said Sandringham. “You’ve mopped up the leaked stuff! It couldn’t have been done—”

  “Not anywhere but here, with bedrock handy just underneath, and slanting,” admitted Bordman. “Tell them they can come if they want to. They’ll sort of drift in. I want to tap some more ship-fuel for the rest of those bore-holes.”

  Sandringham hesitated.

  “Twenty thousand holes,” said Bordman tiredly. “Each one had a six-hundred pound block of frozen saturated brine dumped in it, with roughly one pound of ship-fuel in solution. We’ve gone that far. Might as well go the rest of the way. How’s the barometer?”

  “Up a tenth,” said Sandringham. “Still rising.”

  Bordman blinked at him, because he had trouble keeping his eyes open.

  “Let’s ride it, Sandringham!”

  Sandringham hesitated. Then he said:

  “Go ahead.”

  Bordman waved his arms at his associates, whom he admired with great fervor in his then-foggy mind, because they were always ready to work when it was needed, and it had not stopped being needed for five days running. He explained that there were only three more miles of holes to be filled up, and therefore they would just draw so much of ship-fuel and blend it carefully with an appropriate amount of chilled brine and then freeze it in appropriate sausages…

  Young Lieutenant Barnes said:

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

  Bordman said:

  “Barometer’s up a tenth.” His eyes did not quite focus. “All right, Lieutenant. Go ahead. Promising young officer. Excellent. I’ll sit down here for just a moment.”

  When Barnes came back, Bordman was sleep. And a last one hundred and fifty frozen sausages of brine and ship-fuel went out of Headquarters within a matter of hours. Then a vast quietude settled down everywhere.

  Young Barnes sat beside Bordman, menacing anybody who even thought of disturbing him. When Sandringham called for him, Barnes went to the phone-plate.

  “Sir,” he said with vast formality. “Mr. Bordman went five days without sleep. His job’s done. I won’t wake him, sir!”

  Sandringham raised his eyebrows.

  “You won’t?”

  “I won’t, sir!” said young Barnes.

  Sandringham nodded.

  “Fortunately,” he observed, “nobody’s listening. You are quite right.”

  He snapped the connection. And then young Barnes realized that he had defied a Sector Chief, which is something distinctly more improper in a junior officer than merely trying to instruct him in topping off his vacuum-suit tanks.

  Twelve hours later, however, Sandringham called for him.

  “Barometer’s dropping, Lieutenant. I’m concerned. I’m issuing a notice of the impending storm. Not everybody will crowd in on us, but a great many will. I’m explaining that the chemicals put into the bottom soil may not quite have finished their work. If Bordman wakens, tell him.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Barnes.

  But he did not intend to wake Bordman. Bordman, however, woke of himself at the end of twenty hours of sleep. He was stiff and sore and his mouth tasted as if something had kittened in it. Fatigue can produce a hangover, too.

  “How’s the barometer?” he asked when his eyes came open.

  “Dropping, sir. Heavy winds. The Sector Chief has opened the Reserve Area to the civilians if they wish to come.”

  Bordman computed dizzily on his fingers. A more complex instrument was actually needed, of course. One does not calculate on one’s fingers just how long a one per cent dilute solution of ship-fuel in frozen brine has taken to melt, and how completely it has diffused through an upside-down swamp with the pressure of forty feet of soil on top of it, and therefore its effective concentration and dispersal underground.

  “I think,” said Bordman, “it’s all right. By the way, did they turn the irrigation systems hind end to?”

  Young Barnes did not know what this was all about. He had to send for information. Meanwhile he solicitously plied Bordman with coffee and food. Bordman grew reflective.

  “Queer,” he said. “You think of the damage leaked ship-fuel can do. Setting off the rest of the store and all. Even by itself it rates some thousands of tons of TNT. I wonder what TNT was, before it became a ton-measure of energy? You think of it exploding in one place, and it’s appalling! But think of all that same amount of energy applied to square miles of upside-down swamp. Hundreds or thousands of miles of upside-down swamp. D’you know, Lieutenant, on Soris II we pumped a ship-fuel solution onto a swamp we wanted to drain? Flooded it, and let it soak until a day came with a nice, strong, steady wind.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Barnes respectfully.

  “Then we detonated it. We didn’t have a one per cent solution. It was more like a thousandth of one per cent solution. Nobody’s ever measured the speed of propagation of an explosion in ship-fuel, dry. But it’s been measured in dilute solution. It isn’t the speed of sound. It’s lower. It’s purely a temperature-phenomenon. In water, at any dilution, ship-fuel goes off just barely below the boiling-point of water. It doesn’t detonate from shock when it’s diluted enough to be ionized, but that takes a hell of a lot of dilution. Have you got some more coffee?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Barnes. “Coming up.”

  “We floated ship-fuel solution over that swamp, Barnes, and let it stand. It has a high diffusion-rate. It went down into the mud…And there came a day when the wind was right. I dumped a red-hot iron bar into the swamp-water that had ship-fuel in solution. It was the damndest sight you ever saw!”

  Barnes served him more coffee. Bordman sipped it, and it burned his tongue.

  “It went up in steam,” he said. “The swamp-water that had the ship-fuel dissolved in it. It didn’t explode, as a mass. They told me later that it propagated at hundreds of feet per second only. They could see the wall of steam go marching across the swamp. Not even high-pressure steam. There was a woosh! and a cloud of steam half a mile high that the wind carried away. And all the surface-water in the swamp was gone, and all the poisonous swamp-vegetation parboiled and dead. So—” He yawned suddenly—“we had a ten-mile by fifty-mile stretch of arable ground ready for the coming colonists.”

  He tried the coffee again. He added reflectively:

  “That trick, it didn’t explode the ship-fuel, in a way. It burned it. In water. It applied the energy of the fuel to the boiling-away of water. Powerful stuff! We got rid of two feet of water on an average, counting what came out of the mud. It cost—hm—a fraction of a gram per square yard.”

  He gulped the coffee down. There were men looking at him solicitously. They seemed very glad to see him awake again. Outside a monstrous bank of cloud-stuff was visible piling up in the sky. He suddenly blinked at that.

  “Hello! How long did I sleep, Barnes?”

  Barnes told him. Bordman shook his head to clear it.

  “Well go see Sandringham,” said Bordman. “I’d like to postpone firing as long as I can, short of having the stuff start draining into the sea to leeward.”

  Several mud-stained men were standing around the place where Bordman had slept. When he went, still groggy, out to the bolster-truck young Barnes had waiting, they regarded Bordman in a very respectful manner. Somebody grunted, “Good to have worked with you, sir,” which is about as much of admiration as anybody would want to hear expressed. These associates of Bordman in the mopping-up of leaked ship’s fuel would be able to brag of the job at all times and in all places hereafter.

  Then the truck went trundling away in search of Sandringham.

  It found him on the cliffs to the windward side of the island. The sea was no longer a cerulean blue. It was slaty-color. There were occasional flecks of white foam on the water four thousand feet below. There were dark clouds, by then covering practically all the sky. Far out to sea, there were small craft heading for the ends of the island, to go around it and ride out the coming storm in its lee
.

  Sandringham greeted Bordman with relief. Werner stood close by, opening and closing his hands jerkily.

  “Bordman!” said the Sector Chief cordially. “We’re having a disagreement, Werner and I. He’s confident that the turning of the irrigation systems hind end to—making them surface-draining systems, in effect—will take care of the whole situation. Adding the brine underground, he thinks, will have done a good deal more. He says it’ll be bad, psychologically, for anything more to be done. He didn’t speak of it, and it would injure public confidence in the Survey.”

  Bordman said curtly:

  “The only thing that will make a permanent difference on this island is for the water-fresheners to be a little less efficient. Barnes has the figures. He computed them from some measurements I had him make. If the water-freshener plants don’t take all the sea-minerals out; if they don’t make the irrigation water so infernally soft and suitable for hair-washing and the like; if they turn out hard water for irrigation, this won’t happen again. But there’s too much water underground now. We’ve got to get it out, because a little more’s going underground from this storm, surface-drainage systems or no surface-drainage systems.”

  Sandringham pointed to leeward, where a black, thick procession of human beings trooped toward the Survey area on foot and by every possible type of vehicle.

  “I’ve ordered them turned into the ship-sheds and warehouses,” said the Sector Chief. “But of course we haven’t shelter for all of them. At a guess, when they feel safe they’ll go back to their homes even through the storm.”

  The sky to windward grew blacker and blacker. There was no longer a steady flow of wind coming over the cliff’s edge. It came in gusts, now, of extreme violence. They could make a man stagger on his feet. There were more flecks of white on the ocean’s surface.

  “The boats,” added Sandringham, “were licked. There simply wasn’t enough oil to maintain the slick. The radio reports were getting hysterical before I ordered them told that we had it beaten on shore. They’re running for shelter now. I think they’d have stayed out there trying to hold the slick in place with their tow-line, if I hadn’t said we had matters in hand.”

  Werner said, tight-lipped:

  “I hope we have!”

  Bordman shrugged.

  “The wind’s good and strong, now,” he observed. “Let’s find out. You’ve got the starting system all set?”

  Sandringham waved his hand toward a high-voltage battery. It was of a type designed for blasting on airless planets, but that did not matter. Its cables led snakily for a couple of hundred feet to a very small pile of grayish soil which had been taken out of a bore-hole, and went over that untidy heap and down into the ground. Bordman took hold of the firing-handle. He paused.

  “How about the highways?” he asked. “There might be some steam out of this hole.”

  “All allowed for,” said Sandringham. “Go ahead.”

  There was a gust of wind strong enough to knock a man down, and a humming sound in the air, as wind beat upon the four-thousand-foot cliff and poured over its top. There were gradually rising waves, below. The sky was gray, the sea slate-colored. Far, far to windward, the white line of pouring rain upon the water came marching toward the island.

  Bordman pumped the firing-handle.

  There was a pause, while wind-gusts tore at his garments and staggered him where he stood. It was quite a long pause.

  Then a vapor came jetting out of the bore-hole. It was perfectly white. It came out with a sudden burst which was not in any sense explosive, but was merely a vast rushing of vaporized water. Then, a hundred yards away, there was a mistiness on the grassy surface. Still farther, a crack in the surface-soil let out a curtain of white vapor.

  Here and there, everywhere, gouts of steam poured into the air and tumbled into the storm-wind. It was noticeable that the steam did not come out as an invisible vapor and condense in mid-air. It poured out of the ground in clouds, already condensed but thrust out by more masses of vapor behind it. It was not super-heated steam that came out. It was simply steam. Harmless steam, like the steam out of the spouts of tea-kettles. It rose from individual places everywhere. It made a massive coating of vapor which the storm-wind blew away. In seconds a half-mile of soil was venting steam. In seconds more a mile. The thick fleecy vapor swept across the landscape. The storm-wind could only tumble it and sweep it away.

  In minutes there was no part of the island to be seen at all, save only the thin line of the cliffs reaching away between dark water on the one hand and snow-white clouds of vapor on the other.

  “It can’t scald anybody, can it?” asked Barnes uneasily.

  “Not,” said Bordman, “when it’s had to come up through forty feet of soil. It’s been pretty well cooled off in taking up some extra moisture. It spreads pretty well, doesn’t it?”

  The Sector Chiefs office had tall windows—doors, really—that looked out upon green lawn and many trees. Now sheets of rain beat down outside. Wind whipped at the trees. There was tumult and roaring and the vibration of gusts of hurricane force. Even the building in which the Sector Chief’s office was vibrated slightly in the wind.

  The Sector Chief beamed. The brown dog came in, looked around the room, and walked in leisurely fashion toward Bordman. He settled with a sigh beside Bordman’s chair.

  “What I want to know,” said Werner, “is, won’t this rain put back all the water the ship-fuel boiled away?”

  Bordman said:

  “Two inches of rain would be a heavy fall, Sandringham tells me. It’s the lack of heavy rains that made the civilians start irrigating. When you figure the energy-content of ship-fuel, Werner, an appreciable fraction of the energy in atomic explosive, it’s sort of deceptive. Turn it into thermal units and its gets to be enlightening. We turned loose, underground, enough heat to boil away two feet of soil-water under the island’s whole surface.”

  Werner said sharply:

  “What’ll happen when the heat passes up through the soil? It’ll kill the vegetation, won’t it?”

  “No,” said Bordman mildly. “Because there was two feet of water to be turned to steam. The bottom layer of the soil was raised to the temperature of steam at a few pounds pressure. No more. The heat’s already escaped. In the steam.”

  The phone-plate lighted. Sandringham snapped it on. A voice made a report in a highly official voice.

  “Right!” said Sandringham. The highly official voice spoke again. “Right!” said Sandringham again. “You may tell the ships in orbit that they can come down now, if they don’t mind getting wet.” He turned. “Did you hear that, Bordman? They’ve bored new cores. There are a few soggy spots, but the ground’s as firm, all over the island, as it was when the Survey first came here. A very good job, Bordman! A very good job!”

  Bordman flushed. He reached down and patted the head of the brown dog.

  “Look!” said the Sector Chief. “My dog, there, has taken a liking to you. Will you accept him as a present, Bordman?”

  Bordman grinned.

  Young Barnes made ready to rejoin his ship. He was very strictly Service, very stiffly at attention. Bordman shook hands with him.

  “Nice to have had you around, Lieutenant,” he said warmly. “You’re a very promising young officer. Sandringham knows it and has made a note of the fact. Which I suspect is going to put you to a lot of trouble. There’s a devilish shortage of promising young officers. He’ll give you hellish jobs to do, because he has an idea you’ll do them.”

  “I’ll try, sir,” said young Barnes formally. Then he said, “May I say something, sir? I’m very proud to have worked with you. But dammit, sir, it seems to me that something more than just saying thank you was due you! The Service ought to—”

  Bordman regarded the young man approvingly.

  “When I was your age,” he said, “I’d the very same attitude. But I had the only reward the Service or anything else could give me. The job got done. It’s the onl
y reward you can expect in the Service, Barnes. You’ll never get any other.”

  Young Barnes looked rebellious. He shook hands again.

  “Besides,” said Bordman, “there is no better.”

  Young Barnes marched back toward his ship in the great metal criss-cross of girders which was the landing-grid.

  Bordman absently patted his dog as he headed back toward Sandringham’s office for his orders to return to his own work.

  So Bordman went back to his wife Riki and the job he’d been working on. After that there was another job, and another. He received the high honor of being given the most impossible of the tasks the Survey was forced to do. Which was deeply satisfying. He regretted that he had to become relatively inactive when he became Sector Chief.

  But his wife liked it very much. There was assurance, then, that they would be together for always, and Bordman still had his work and she could make—again—a home. When one of his daughters was widowed and came to live with them with her children, Bordman was beautifully contented. Then he had absolutely everything he wanted. As reward for a life-time of work and separation, he had the satisfactions—in his family—that other men enjoyed as a matter of course.

  But sometimes he was embarrassed when his juniors were too respectful. He didn’t think he rated it.