“In all respects, the Salvation has been a resounding success. It was acquired, ablation-shielded, harnessed, and hitched to its team of six tugs with minimum difficulty. Two men were lost, it is true, when their clothing got tangled in a steel cable and… well, there is no use in going into this tragic occurrence–but otherwise everything has gone according to plan. The tugs succeeded in pulling the Salvation clear of the circumpolar current 380 miles west of Tierra del Fuego, on the tip of South America. For the next eight days we made good only 28 nautical miles per day. Then we caught the Humboldt Current, a cold current which sweeps up the coast of Chile and Peru, and made excellent time. Just off southern Ecuador, we pulled out of the Humboldt, which there swings west, and picked up the Peru Current, which will carry us almost to Panama. The Salvation will arrive in San Francisco Bay, where the basin to receive it is nearing completion, in early October.
“The ablation/friction shield is functioning flawlessly. Freshwater loss through tears in the ablation/insultion shielding and through evaporation will amount, it is estimated, to 17 percent by the time we make port. That will allow us to reclaim 800 million tons– 180 billion gallons– of the purest water on earth, enough to float the United States on its way to national recovery along the maritime highway created by Raynes Oceanic Resources.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen of the press, before I have the pleasure of conducting you on a tour of our installation aboard the service barge, are there any questions?”
A hand shot up. It belonged to the correspondent of a stuffy scientific magazine, Future Technologies.
“Howard Foster,” said the reporter, “F.T. My readers would like to know, Dr. Lepoint, what will keep the Salvation from melting away now that it is in tropical waters?”
“A good question, Mr. Foster. Icebergs do melt fast in warm water. One, 400 feet long, reportedly melted completely in 36 hours in 80° Fahrenheit water. Fortunately for us, somewhat different conditions prevail. For the first thousand miles, of course, the water temperature was approximately zero degrees Centigrade, so we suffered little loss. The next 400 miles were through water of 4° Centigrade, then we encountered a 300-miles band of 8° Centigrade water, and finally the Humboldt Current, 12° Centigrade for 1,500 miles. We are now in the Peru Current, averaging 16°. Thanks to the protective insulation, the melt rate has been inconsequential, and the water that has melted on the surface itself serves as insulation.”
“But from here on?”
“There will be a higher melt rate, but remember, we are already more than three-quarters of the way home… Yes?”
He pointed to a woman with upraised arm.
“Ginny Moyer, Tuscaloosa Times. You mentioned the California Current, Dr. Lepoint. As I understand it, the California Current shifts in the summer–very soon, in fact–from northwesterly to southeasterly. So instead of the current assisting, as it has up to now, it will actually hinder the iceberg’s progress.”
“Quite true, Mrs. Moyer,” said Dr. Lepoint amiably. “This fact–and quite a crucial fact it is, too–has been taken into account. You may be interested to know that the timing of your visit has not been accidental. It was coordinated with the arrival of six additional tugs from Panama, which should be coming along at any moment. Supplementing the six now on station, they will add tractive power sufficient to increase our daily progress from thirty-nine to forty-one nautical miles.”
“Will the harness be strong enough to bear the extra strain?” she asked.
“Yes, indeed. The harness and lines all have a 40 percent safety factor above any anticipated load applied by the twelve tugs.”
As Lepoint spoke, his operations chief, Guy de la Chance, was hunched over a readout-spewing computer in the seismography shack. He had heard the whirr of the Grumman TiltJet’s props as it came in for a landing, but it didn’t register. His mind was on the perturbations in the seismic patterns that the readouts revealed.
He had observed, for instance, that the refraction and reflection patterns that were recorded from the daily but limited explosions picked by geophone arrays never seemed to be the same. Chief seismographer Elliott explained patiently that this was because an iceberg, unlike a section of Texas prairie, for instance, was always in a state of flux. Its passage through water of changing temperatures, through currents of varying speeds and directions, set up waves of internal pressure that disturbed the iceberg’s crystalline structure. In effect, it responded to exterior influences almost like a living organism, something like an amoeba drawing back and rearranging its internal architecture when encountering a pointed object. The structural stability of an iceberg, therefore, did not depend on a completely rigid and unchanging solidity, like a bar of iron, but on its ability to absorb, transmit, refract and reflect, and finally dampen trillions of tiny shock waves, which in effect canceled one another out. Its stability was that of a bowl of Jell-O.
de la Chance was silenced but not convinced. Temperamentally, he preferred iron to Jello-O. And so, more on hunch than scientific evidence, he kept studying the seismographs, looking for changes in patterns long after the men responsible became bored. The most they would concede was that yes, accumulated random vibration could threaten the Salvation. That danger point was represented by a red line across the top of the bar graph on which they registered their daily readings. But so long as the plot of daily readings continued straight across the bottom of the graph, there was absolutely nothing to worry about.
de la Chance nevertheless worried. He worried while Dr. Valery Daniel Lepoint conducted the press on a guided tour of the various floating facilities. He worried as the newly arrived tugs took up their stations and their burden of pulling the Salvation against the adverse current. And,
on his regular morning visit to the seismograph shack three days later, he finally found the reason for his worry: There was a blip in that lower graph line where before there had been none.
de la Chance pointed out that blip as the first item of his noon inspection report to Dr. Lepoint on 26 May. Dr. Lepoint did not respond. The next day the blip was still there. Worse, it had a brother blip a notch up on the graph paper. De la Chance immediately notified Dr. Lepoint by telephone. Dr. Lepoint reassured him, saying that naturally, with the cavitation vibrations from the propellers of twelve tugs instead of six, a new level of random vibration must be expected; it was no cause for concern, since the line would soon stabilize.
It didn’t. On 28 May, a Sunday, when all but a skeleton crew were off duty, de la Chance ordered the entire seismographic crew to report for a special assignment. When they assembled, in less than hearty spirits, he instructed them to run six surveys every hour, using full geophone arrays. He signed the requisition order for the six hundred pounds of high explosive that would be required for the shots. The men put on their wet suits, grumbling audibly, and slouched down the passageway to the motorboats that would take them to their stations. Chief seismographer Elliott, as annoyed as his men, stayed behind with de la Chance to await the data.
Elliott sipped his coffee and flipped morosely through the pages of Playboy, avoiding de la Chance’s eye as they waited, not speaking, for the first data to come in. When they did, Elliott ran them through the computer and reached for the graph. The base line–that line which had not varied more than a tenth of a unit since the Salvation had been christened and begun its voyage north–was 2.6 on the chart, de la Chance’s blips of the day before had been at 2.7 and 2.78, respectively. Elliott’s new entry was 2.83. The next five tapes ranged from 2.76 to 3.01.
The average was now 2.92.
That was still a long way from the red danger line at 13.77, but it was edging closer. There was no reason for it to do so. The new pattern of vibration should have been well established by now, since the twelve tugs had been
pulling together for almost a week. Of course, there were no statistics on how long it took an iceberg’s vibration pattern to stabilize. Such data didn’t exist, but Elliott’s guess was that three or four days should have been sufficient. Yet the plot line was steadily rising. He bit his lip and shot a sideways look at de la Chance.
The operations chief was impassive. He nodded and went back to his study of the computer printouts of the previous weeks. If they told him anything, he didn’t share it with Elliott.
“Let’s go to lunch,” said de la Chance finally, stacking the printouts in a pile. He locked the graph in a desk drawer.