by Unknown
Not hobbies?
Pat was dressing the drill casing as I slid down from the crew quarters next morning at change of shift. I called out a “Good Morning” to her but she couldn’t hear me over the racket. Four solid days of boring with white-hot plasma had not made much of a dent in Hawking’s coat. But it was beating the crap out of the drill.
In the early Wildcatting days on Earth, a steel drill was raised by winch up a tall wooden tower erected over the hole, and then released to let gravity slam it into the dirt. The crew just raised and dropped it, raised and dropped it, slowly digging a well to the oil. The process was time consuming and tedious, and drill bits wore out quickly. The tool dresser was the person who stood by with a sledge hammer when the drill was withdrawn from the bore hole. He’d examine the bit, and hammer the cutting edge back into shape when it got dull.
In space ‘catting, a plasma gun had replaced the drill bit. The working end of the gun was surrounded by a double shelled foreskin made of a ceramic alloy. The inner shell provided a magnetic focal ring for the plasma stream, and the slag was carried away by suction between the inner and outer shells. The stuff we drilled through, and the energies we pumped, could distort the hell out of that foreskin.
The really expensive rigs had self-correcting nozzles. But like I said, this was a speculation ship, so we still carried our own tool dressers. On Wildcatter they were Cal and Pat, though they, like the rest of us, had several jobs on board. Their “sledge hammer” was a laser dressing tool—sort of a miniature version of the plasma gun—that they used to keep the nozzle trimmed and open. And in Texas or on Hawking, the tool dresser’s first commandment was the same: never do any work over the hole. A gee is a gee, as they say, and the only thing that must go into a well is a drill.
Anyway, as I came down through the access port into the work area, I saw Pat break that commandment. Proper dressing of the gun required that it be partially disassembled so that it could be swung out and away from the hole. It’s a lot of work, and a pain in the ass. I’ve seen a couple of dressers in my time take a shortcut and just slide the dressing tool out over the hole and underneath the plasma gun instead. That way they could get at the nozzle without taking the gun apart first. This is the first time I saw one not get away with it.
The dressing tool cart was balanced on its rear wheels at the edge of the four foot diameter drill hole. She had the rest of the cart suspended over the hole, front wheels dangling over a thousand feet of nothing. Pat had managed to partially cover the opposite edge of the hole with a slab of some heavy metal—it looked like a short section of shield wall material—and that provided just enough ledge to support the front lip of the cart. Pat stood on the slab like a shapely Atlas, legs spread wide straddling the hoses and lines, and was lasing the nozzle tip suspended directly over her head.
Cal came sliding down right behind me and when he saw what she was doing he was immediately pissed. He shouted at her in that booming voice he’d developed from years of working around noise. I saw her jerk her head down to look at him, and then she lost her balance. Instinctively she kicked off of the slab to keep from falling into the hole. The slab shifted, the cart tumbled, and Wildcatter lost an essential and irreplaceable tool down a 300 meter throat of rock.
All of us froze. Even Bartley was speechless. We stood there, not knowing what to say, staring like morons at that black, earthy mouth in the floor. Williams and Chan and several other members of the B-shift crew came on duty and as soon as they took in what had happened, they stopped their early morning chatter. All of us had been around rigs long enough to understand what this meant.
Finally the Old Man slid down to start his change of shift inspection. It took him only seconds to understand and he was the first one to break the silence.
“Get it out,” he grunted. That was all. He didn’t even glance at Pat. No frowns, no recriminations. Just that short command directed to all of us and then he turned and disappeared back up the ladder.
We all jumped as if we’d been goosed. We knew we were in trouble. McRae had computed that we had a week, maybe two at the outside, before Hawking’s velocity carried us too close to the sun for us to stay. After our first day of drilling we’d known it was going to be tight, since whatever Hawking was made of was not intimidated by our plasma drill.
The boring of the hole had been going very slowly, and we had to dress the tool much more frequently than usual. Our chances of tapping into Hawking’s veins before the sun turned us into prune juice weren’t very good. Now we had two new problems: a plugged well and an unreachable tool. There was no time to start a new well and no way to get very far without a dressing tool. We had to retrieve it, and in working order, or we might just as well lift off right then—which seemed like a better choice to most of us.
Everyone pitched in. Both crews stayed on the rest of the shift and more members of second shift came on early as word of what had happened reached them. We spent the first hour or so puzzling about ways to get at the cart. Of course, the first thing we tried was pulling it back up by its long power cable that trailed up from the well and tied into the primary power source in the ship. But a little tugging there and we knew that was hopeless. The cart had managed to wedge itself tight in the rough throat of the well and Cal insisted we leave the power cord alone. He was worried that we’d damage the tool beyond repair if the cable ripped out its guts, so we dropped that idea.
We spent most of the first day lowering hooks on long chains but couldn’t get them to engage anything that gave us much support. We hooked the cart handle first and immediately yanked it off of the cart. Murphy had been working overtime against us. Not only had the cart lodged upside down, wheel and flat base upward, but when Pat jumped off, the metal slab had shifted and fallen down there as well. It had wedged itself obliquely over the cart and there just wasn’t much exposed that we could get a hook around. We wasted a lot of hours with those damned hooks before we finally realized they just weren’t going to work.
The Old Man came down again at the end of the shift. He didn’t say a word to us after that first time. He just walked past us to the hole, cigar smoldering in his mouth, and shaded his eyes to look down past the flood lights we’d rigged over it. He saw we weren’t getting anywhere so he turned away and went back up to his cabin.
We went at it like that for three days: experimenting, huddling in twos and threes for ideas, sketching out and discarding all sorts of Rube Goldberg contraptions. Every member of the crew was giving it their full attention—Pat most of all. I’m sure she must have gotten some sleep but she was down there every time I came onto the site, and she was always there after I left. And I put in a lot of hours.
Somewhere along the way, the mood of the crew shifted too. Getting at that friggin’ dressing tool became a team goal now and you could sense the feeling of shared responsibility and participation growing every hour that we worked at it. Everyone chipped in an idea and I don’t recall that anyone’s opinion was dismissed out of hand by the rest of us. Someone would suggest an approach and we’d all stand around sounding it out, weighing its chances, and sometimes giving it a try. Then, as each attempt failed, we all regrouped and brainstormed some more.
Many times now when I think back on that week I spent on Hawking I feel that, in some ways, it was the most enjoyable tour I’ve served. Some close relationships were cemented there; people who before had been no more than co-workers have become friends I still value, and attend to, to this day. Several other members of that crew have expressed the same feelings to me since.
In the end though it was Pat who came up with the answer. Early on that fourth day someone, it may have been Nick Stroemann, the suction operator from Crew One, had rigged up a makeshift electromagnet. We all got excited about this idea, and worked like hell getting it suspended from a pulley and lowered into the well. It worked great too, except it couldn’t budge the damn slab, and we couldn’t angle it around the slab to slap it onto the tool housing. We f
ished all over that well with the magnet, guiding it remotely using the fiber optics monitor that we’d lowered down there the third day, but it just wasn’t going to work.
Everyone was feeling pretty low by then. It was like being stopped on the five yard line with time running out.
Then Pat shouted, “I’ve got an idea!”, and all of us dropped dead silent and looked at her. It was the most animated I had seen her since the accident. I’ll always remember that glow on her face as she beamed back at us.
“Pull the magnet back out of there,” she said, “and let’s turn on the dresser.”
We just looked at one another, not understanding what she meant to do. But she turned off the magnet’s power switch that Stroemann had rigged, and that dangled from a cantilever near the nozzle of plasma drill. Stroemann grabbed the chain that snaked over the pulley and pulled the magnet out of the pit. Pat saw it come clear and then turned toward the monitor screen. She slowly returned power to the dresser tool. As soon as the orange pencil of pure energy appeared, I understood what she was doing. The tool’s barrel was pointed generally up the well in the direction of the metal slab. The beam flecked over one corner of the plate and we saw it shift color, bubble, and then vaporize.
I grabbed one of the grappling hooks and shouted at Pat to switch off the dresser. She did and I lowered the hook back down the hole and then swung it and jiggled it past the newly cut gap in the slab. I fished for the dresser tool, guiding it by the monitor screen, and saw the hook loop around one of the legs of the cart.
“You can’t pull it up with that,” Williams shouted at me. But I just shook my head and gave a few tugs on the chain. After a couple of tries, I managed to rotate the dresser a few degrees so that the beam’s aim was shifted. Pat saw what I was up to and she flipped on the power again. Another section of slab melted away.
I heard a cheer and looked up to see that everyone was standing around us now. Their eyes were jumping back and forth from the monitor to the hole as Pat and I ran off our final series of downs. I twisted the tool a little further; she powered it on and burned away more of the blockage. Once she burned through the chain holding the hook and I tumbled backward as it snapped free. There was a bit of snickering as I landed on my ass. We had the end in sight now and the mood had improved considerably.
Before I could stand up Chan Singh had already lowered another hook into place and was signaling for Pat to turn on the power. I stood back, unceremoniously thrust into the role of spectator, and grinned. I saw movement to one side of me and saw that the Old Man had slipped into the work area unnoticed. He was standing silently, arms hanging loose at his sides and a thin streamer of white smoke was ascending from the tip of his cigar.
I heard Pat shout, “I got it!”, and everyone except the Old Man let out another cheer. With no words between them Chan jerked the hook back out of the hole and Stroemann powered up the electromagnet. He lowered it hand over hand until we all heard the snap as it kissed the metal slab—now sundered. Stroemann tugged and we could hear and see the section of slab break free from the wall of the well. Stroemann wheeled up the cable and the jagged fragment appeared at the lip of the hole. Several hands reached out to grab it.
Another cheer—we could all sense touchdown now. The magnet dropped out of sight again and the other section of slab was free. Pat called for Chan to lower the hook onto the cart and he did, snagging it easily the first time. I grabbed another hook and lowered it from the opposite side of the hole. Chan and I stood there like ice fishermen, with a catch too big to lose and too heavy to reel in. Then Stroemann dropped the magnet so that it snicked onto the dresser cart. The three of us began to pull slowly, and very carefully, and the cart shifted in the monitor. Several others grabbed one or the other of our chains and we all tugged together. Someone began to chant, “Go, go, go,” and we all joined in.
Finally, and grudgingly, Hawking’s throat disgorged its unwelcome lodger. Pandemonium broke loose. People were clapping, cheering, crying all at once. I hugged Chan and Stroemann and I guess just about everyone else in the crew. You would have thought we had just won the Super Bowl. We all went crazy and Pat just stood off to the side with a big grin on her face and tears streaming down her cheeks.
The Old Man let us carry on like that for maybe a couple of minutes and then he slowly worked his way through the circle of bodies and stood near the edge of the hole. As soon as we became aware of him standing there we quieted down. In a minute we were standing around with stupid grins on our faces, holding our breath and waiting to see what the Old Man would say.
He reached out and lightly touched the dresser cart, still hanging like a misshapen fruit from the end of the electromagnet. With a sudden chill I realized that no one had thought to get it down from over the hole. I saw a couple of heads jerk and I knew that thought was belatedly making the rounds. But with Snyder standing there none of us were too anxious to move. He looked at each of us one at a time, meeting each pair of eyes, challenging us. Then he turned to Pat.
“Talbot,” he said, staring at her, “come here.”
Pat looked at him uncertainly and hesitated. She let the smile melt from her mouth and she wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand. I saw her tense as she crossed the space to where the Old Man waited. When she was next to him he said nothing at first, just continued to look at her through that wispy veil that rose from his cigar. When he finally spoke it was almost a whisper.
“Look at this dressing tool, Talbot. Take a good look. Do you see what your carelessness has caused?”
He raised his hand and touched the edge of the cart. “I want you to have this dresser, Talbot. I’ll make it a gift to you as soon as we are finished here. You keep it as a souvenir, a reminder of your incompetence.”
Pat was glassy-eyed now. She said nothing and didn’t move.
“Because, Talbot,” the Old Man continued, “you will get nothing else from me for this job. You are fired. If you can afford to pay, I’ll sell you passage back to Konstantine. If not, find your own way back. And I promise you this. You will never work for this or any other outfit again.”
The rest of us were dumbfounded, unbelieving. The camaraderie had changed to outrage. I looked at Pat, searching for a reaction. But she stood staring at the Old Man soundlessly.
And then in a single motion that must have taken seconds but seemed endless, she raised her right hand to the power switch for the electromagnet. Her fingers lingered there for a moment, and she said just two words.
“Fuck you.”
She turned off the power. I watched the dresser cart plunge out of sight down the well and I heard a gut-churning crunch.
Snyder’s cigar dropped from his mouth and followed the cart. I’d never seen a look like that on his face before. He was catatonic. Pat turned away from him and walked away.
Her movement seemed to shake Snyder from his trance. He became aware that all of us were staring at him; his eyes narrowed and he glared at us in turn. Then he looked at Pat, who’d reached the bottom of the ladder. He started to say something, hesitated, and turned toward me instead.
“Mowboata, you’re in charge of getting that dresser tool back,” he snapped. “I want it out by end of shift.”
He turned to go after Pat.
“No,” I said quietly. There was a gasp from several members of the work crew. Pat was nearly up the ladder now and I saw her glance back at me when I spoke.
Snyder was frozen where he stood. He looked at me, uncomprehending, as though he was witnessing a breakdown in natural law. A member of his crew had refused an order. I shied from the open fury of his stare, turned my back and walked away from him. Behind me I heard the sound of tools being dropped, and of shuffling feet, but not even a faint murmur of a human voice. I folded my arms across my chest and turned again to face him. I found that nearly half the crew had joined me. The others were standing immobilized like statues, as though some slight movement might shatter the fragile shell of restraint and invite des
truction down on all of us.
Snyder’s eyes glazed over. Every filament of muscle in his neck, face and arms was stretched tight like a cobra ready to strike. His fists were balled into hammers and his chest was rising and falling with shallow breaths. We were transfixed in a tableau that could explode in an instant.
It was Pat who released us. She started climbing again and disappeared up through the access hatch. Snyder saw the movement and turned toward the ladder. He looked back in my direction once, and there was loathing in his face. Then he scrambled up the ladder and left us alone.
We stood around looking at each other for a while, making nervous noises. I had a gut-twisting like I’d just been told I had days to live—which might not have been too far wrong. I had to get away from the work site; I decided to go after Pat. She wasn’t in her cabin when I got there.
An hour later the word came down from the Old Man.
“Stow up and lift off.”
We did. It took several hours to stow and I spent as much time as I could searching for Pat. Williams said he thought Snyder had summoned her to his cabin. No one had seen her since.
I went back to her cabin just before liftoff and it had been emptied out, though a few personal belongings were still there. She’d apparently taken her strange rocks with her too. I couldn’t find them and no one on the crew even knew what I was talking about when I asked around. Singh had thought to check the lifeboats and sure enough one was missing. One of the dinghies could hold three people and they were designed for a few weeks survival at most. Being alone and conserving her supplies Pat could stretch that quite a bit, but it wouldn’t do her much good. The boats didn’t have enough delta-vee to escape from Hawking and they sure couldn’t withstand being this close to the Sun for very long. I felt sick and mostly stayed in my cabin until we lifted off.
Two hours later we were burning away from Hawking. It disappeared toward Sol with Pat Talbot astride it and with its mysteries intact. We had scooped out a couple of tons of its surface, which would no doubt be of interest to the scientists. But the Science Salvage Act guaranteed the Wildcatter crew would get little financial reward for that. The venture had been a bust for the Old Man—and none of us were losing any tears for him. Snyder never mentioned his missing assistant tool dresser again.
