bolted the tower together, then I climbed up the crisscross supports, hauled the alternator and the gear assembly up with a rope, and affixed it to the pivot on the top of the tower. Next came the six turbine blades. They look more like the blades one finds on a classic farm windmill than the graceful slender blades of a modern turbine, but it was the best Jack could do with the materials at hand. I hauled them up one at a time and attached them, did the same with the large fin that would keep it facing into the wind, then finally climbed down.
We both stared up at it. A gentle breeze blew. It remained motionless.
“Kind of anticlimactic,” Jack commented.
“It's bigger than I expected,” I observed. The blades must extend twelve feet from tip to tip. “Now that it's done, though, I've an idea for another project.” I started to explain the crazy idea I had when Max was wishing for spy satellites. Jack got more interested the more I told him, and we were about to head to the shop so I could show him my drawings and the parts I'd set aside when the wind finally picked up. The blades of the turbine began to spin, and Jack suddenly looked like a kid on Christmas morning. He snatched up the multi-meter attached to the power leads and watched the needle swing.“Well, not as good as I hoped, but it's producing power.” He took out a stopwatch, counted the number of rotations for a minute, and then jotted that down along with the output shown on the multi-meter. “OK, lets go look at this gadget of yours. We'll come back after and attach the battery.”
As soon as we arrived at the shop, we dragged the worktable under a sunbeam, and I spread my drawings out.
“See, it's actually pretty straight forward,” I assured him. The trickiest thing is the release mechanism, but I'm pretty sure I can coble something together from a walkie-talkie.
“But won't the camera get smashed on impact?”
“That's what this bit is for,” I answered, holding up a rolled up cylinder of foam padding sticking partway out of a piece of round metal ducting. I demonstrated that my camera phone would fit neatly into the four inch diameter ring of ducting so it would be protected from direct impact. “When it releases from the balloon, a small parachute or drag strip will make it flip over during descent so the foam padding hits first.” I demonstrated, holding the contraption with the camera inside the ducting facing down, then flipped it over so the padding was down and the camera up.
“And how will you trigger the pictures?”
“I'll just wire a simple timer circuit directly into the shutter switch. I've already found a real-time clock chip with an integrated oscillator and all the other parts I need. See, I've drawn out the circuit diagram here. With a laptop and the right software I could just write an Android app to do it, but that's not really an option in our case.”
“I'll take your word for it,” Jack answered, “I'm better with the mechanical end of things.” He picked up one of my early concept drawings. “So let me see if I've got this straight. We release the balloon up-wind from Blackwell. It drifts over, snapping pictures the whole way, then when it's safely beyond the town, the team on the down-wind side hits the squawk button on the other walkie-talkie to trigger the release. The electronics all fall safely to earth to be recovered, and all we lose is a bunch of trash bags filled with helium.”
“Exactly. The trick will be getting the altitude right. We need to be high enough to actually see a decent size area, but not so high we can't make out any detail. The phone has a 5 megapixel camera, which should be good enough to make out individual zombies from quite a distance. I've got a 32 gigabyte flash card in it, so it should store plenty of pictures.”
Jack picked up the phone from where I had laid it down and examined its tiny camera lens. “This could actually work.”
“It was your 'get well' balloons that gave me the idea. Do you think that tank you found has enough helium for a test flight or two?”
“I don't know,” Jack answered. “We'll need to work out the volume of helium needed to lift the camera package first.”
“We could fly it with hydrogen if we needed to, but then we risk the thing going Hindenburg on us.”
Jack scooped up a couple of my concept drawings. “I'm going to show these to Max and Sarah. You keep working on the details.” I began sketching out a circuit design for a release actuator that could be tripped by a walkie-talkie. If I run the speaker output through a frequency filter and a signal inverter, then used a watchdog chip to check for duration, it should work. Just hold the squawk button for long enough, and the actuator will trip. I'll breadboard it tomorrow and test it. I worked until the sun had crept away from my worktable and began climbing its way up the far wall, then I dug out a flashlight and worked a while longer.
Finally, I had to stop when the flashlight began to dim. Too many late nights writing in this journal has taken its toll on the batteries I think; they don't hold a charge like they used to. I headed to the offices to get some sleep but first made a detour to retrieve the battery for Jack's wind turbine. I installed it in the waning red glow of the slowly setting sun. The car battery, along with a 12 volt car outlet and a 110 volt AC adapter, is housed in an old plastic storage bin to keep it safe from the elements. I looked at the adapter for a moment, then pulled my nearly dead flashlight from my pocket, unfolded the AC outlet charging prongs from its side, and plugged it into the AC adapter, then plugged that into the 12 volt outlet. The flashlight glowed with renewed life when I switched it on. I lifted the entire contraption and balanced it carefully on the lid of the container, taking care not to pull the battery leads loose.
I nestled my back against the turbine tower, pulled out this journal, and began to write.
May 12 - The Factory, Oklahoma
Today was mostly consumed with reinforcing the office ground floor. Yesterday, a dozen people went to disassemble and bring back sturdy timbers from a barn a few miles away. Today, we hauled those timbers off the old farm truck and set about sealing up all the vulnerable ground floor windows. Jack says he would have preferred to brick in the windows, but that would take time and materials we don't currently have. Instead, he reinforced the doors to the stairwells so they can be made impenetrable. The windows should hold up to any small groups of dead that stumble across us, but if worse comes to worse, we can easily abandon the first floor and survive. We've also made it so the offices can be sealed off from the machine shops, factory floor, and warehouse. Those all have smaller windows, higher in the air, and are less likely to be breached from the outside.
The atrium also has an open air staircase that leads to the second and third floors. It's concrete poured into a metal frame and sturdy as a rock. Jack thinks we can make it zombie proof by removing a bunch of steps, but it won't be easy. We're leaving that for another day. When Kalee learned about the potential for the ground floor to be abandoned, she began to rethink the design of her hydroponic farm. The original plan had some water tanks and support structures down on the first floor in the center of the old plant beds, but she moved the tanks to the second floor balconies and now the entire plant lattice is suspended across the third floor balconies. I took a slightly longer lunch break than Jack would have liked and spent some time sketching up plans with Kalee. She is totally in her element with this stuff and has happily turned cafeteria duty over to others.
“I can picture it,” she said as we leaned on the railing of the third floor balcony, “this whole area overflowing with green. Tomatoes and peas vining right up to the top of the skylight.” She looked happy.
“You've got seeds?” I asked.
“Better. That farm southwest of here, Milo mentioned it had a garden. Someone managed to get their early spring planting in before everything went to hell. It's a bit weed choked and neglected now, but I plan on heading out there with a scavenger team tomorrow to dig up what I can and transplant it here. I'll also poke around for seeds, fertilizer, gardening tools, gloves, and a big floppy hat. Just call me farmer James.”
“Do you think of them?” I asked, before I thought to stop myself.
“All the time,” she whispered. She glanced over at me, then cast her eyes down at the atrium plants far below. “My dad used to call me that sometimes. Farmer James. I was always growing potted plants. Running little experiments to see what made them grow best. I even played around with hydroponics on my own. It drove Mom nuts, me filling up every spare container and every bit of window space with plants. Dad never complained though and made Mom put up with it.” She laughed briefly. “He kept promising her it was a phase I would grow out of.” She grew somber again. “I never did.”
“I was never terribly close to my parents,” I admitted with some hesitation. “Oh, I loved them, and we got along well enough, but we never really
The Bolachek Journals - Part 1 Page 10
