Forte wasn’t worried. He had every confidence in the sails that would propel the Alamo to its intercept position with the Benguela. His aerodynamic engineers had computed that all seventy-eight sails, taking advantage of the prevailing winds of the West Wind Drift, would be sufficient to nudge the Alamo into the Benguela, but with only a 12 percent margin of error. He couldn’t take any chances: if the wind dropped by only eight knots, he would need every one of the seventy-eight.
“So that’s why you’re so curt and grouchy this morning,” said Jennifer Red Cloud as she followed in his footsteps on this sunny Wednesday and listened to his terse explanation of the intense activity aboard the iceberg. She was in the best of spirits. The evening before, after returning from the Lupe Alien, she had thought up no fewer than six ways to sabotage the Alamo. She had then encoded her instructions to Randy Gustafson and sent them off before going to bed. She had slept the sleep of the just, knowing that given six swings, even Randy could not possible strike out.
“But I’m probably worrying for nothing,” Forte said. “These men are the best there are, and–tell me, Red,” he said, raking her from head to toe with his eyes, “don’t you own anything but flesh-colored body stockings?”
“I picked the most unobtrusive color I could find,” she said with an impudent smile.
“You’re about as unobtrusive as a sledgehammer between the horns.”
Jennifer Red Cloud shrugged and looked into the hole in the ice where Forte had led her. “What the hell is it?”
“An ice shaft,” said Forte. “It goes down somewhere between a hundred and two hundred meters. They’ve been drilling them for ten days. You must have noticed.”
“Of course,” she said, “but I thought they were shot holes for the seismographic surveys.”
“Let’s go have a cup of mud,” Forte said briskly, taking her by the arm and leading her toward the nearby seismo shack. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
Seated on a stool at a drafting table as she sipped the freshly brewed coffee, she studied the diagram of the berg Forte had just drawn for her.
“If we weren’t a bit behind schedule, those holes would be filled up as fast as they were drilled.”
“Filled up? Filled up with what?”
“Ice.”
“Ice?”
“Mostly.”
She laughed a nervous little laugh of incomprehension, “You drilled holes almost all the way through the berg, removing ice to make the holes, and now you’re going to fill them up with ice?”
“Yep. That’s about the size of it.”
“I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.”
“Sure does sound ridiculous, doesn’t it?” Forte agreed.
She looked at him balefully. “Whenever you’re ready to stop talking to me like a child, Rip,” she said finally, “I’m ready to listen.”
“I’ll go back to the beginning, Red, and you can figure out the answer for yourself. Remember how the Salvation came to grief? She calved, cracked up, collapsed. The cause was the constant incalculable billions of tiny pressures every second from waves, wind, temperature differentials, sonic stresses, and so on that a dozen BAM-IX’s couldn’t keep track of. And these conflicting pressures create, even as we are conversing here, lines of weakness within the berg.
“Now, you know that seismographic surveys can detect the existence of lines of differential stress, fault lines, the places a berg’ll crack apart, given time. Lepoint didn’t pay enough attention to these fault lines, and he bought trouble. My boys think that treating them with respect is the key to bringing icebergs back alive.”
“Uh huh,” said Jennifer Red Cloud noncommittally.
“Remember how the ancient Babylonians made sunbaked brick?”
“I’m afraid my childhood memories are rather dim. Refresh me.”
“They mixed straw with the mud, making the bricks many times stronger. That’s what we’re going to do.”
“I see. You’re going to fill those holes with ice.”
“Right, but we’re going to use the ice removed from the holes, melted and mixed with a very long chain polymer, and reinjected into the hole. The resulting crystalline structure has a high compressive strength and damn good tensile strength.”
He pointed to the diagram. “Thanks to the Brown-Ash and virtually instantaneous satellite communications with SD-1 in Houston, we can process millions of seismic readings every hour. The Mark IX will pinpoint locations to drill the holes and tell us how deep and at what inclination they must be in order to neutralize the stress before it can magnify the fault line, causing calving. Within an hour of the seismographic reading, crews will have drilled the holes through strata of incipient stress, pumped the supercooled polymer-treated water back into them at the proper temperature for the local gradient, and gone on to the next.”
“Next? How long is this process going to go on?”
“All the way to Matagorda Bay, probably. The internal structure never really stabilizes, you know.”
“But what about the enormous power that you’re going to need to supercool water down to the minus twenties that you encounter in the center of the berg?”
“Have you already forgotten about the wave and solar power that will be generated by the Sun King?”
She had, indeed. And that left today’s score: Forte, 1; Red Cloud, 0.
Forte watched her. He could practically see the wheels and gears and levers of her mind at work. He chuckled.
“What are you laughing about?”
“You–you and those vicious little thoughts I can see parading behind those beautiful blue eyes.”
“They’re violet, and which vicious little thoughts on parade did you have in mind?”
Forte leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his balding head, and regarded the ceiling acoustic tile.
“Well, let’s see. You were thinking about all those holes in the ice, and those precious little fault lines, and what interesting little sheer forces could be developed with a ton or two of dynamite dropped down one of them some dark night. Too bad, Red–that dynamite shed is under round-the-clock guard. Also, in about six hours the refrigerating crews will have finally caught up with the drilling crews, and there won’t be any unguarded shafts to stuff with high explosive. How’m I doing?”
She looked at him venomously. He was nearer the mark than she would admit.
“Don’t be mad, Red. Think of the trouble I’m sparing you.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “Now, then, since you can see you won’t get any mileage trying to sabotage the drilling and refrigerating operations, how do you propose fouling up the sails?”
He was uncanny. The moment she had realized that sabotaging Forte’s mud and bricks scheme was impossible, her mind had proceeded directly to the matter of the sails. Forte had emphasized that in order to insert the Alamo into the Benguela Current, all seventy-eight sails would be needed. They had not actually rigged the sails yet, but the enormous white cylindrical steel masts were already in place. She would only have to set fire to three or four sails, say, and the Alamo would never make its rendezvous with the Benguela.
“But before you decide,” said Forte, rising and donning his fishbowl helmet, “let’s have a closer look at them.”
They were arranged in a rectangular pattern, six rows of thirteen tall columns spaced evenly across the huge expanse of the Alamo. From a distance they appeared to be factory smokestacks painted in white enamel, a measure, Forte told her, to minimize solar-heat absorption. They were perfectly cylindrical, their six-meter diameter varying not a millimeter from top to bottom, except for a regular pattern of spheroidal dimples over the entire surface. Their tops were covered by flat discs projecting around the entire circumference four meters or so like hat brims.
As they approached the nearest cylinder, Jennifer Red Cloud noted that at its base was a powerful engine, big enough to drive a tugboat. That made sense. A lot of horsepower would be needed to raise the gigantic sails such masts would carry. But where were the booms? Or would the sails be deployed as spinnakers? And where was the rigging and the blocks, cleats, and winches needed to handle it? These and other questions she addressed to Ripley Forte, who answered them all with the same infuriatingly bland reply.
“What you see is what there is.”
“What do you mean?” she remonstrated. “I may not be the old salt you are, Rip Forte, but at least I can tell masts from sails.”
“Apparently not. What you’re looking at are sails– Flettner sails, invented by the German aeronautical engineer Anton Flettner, the man who conceived the trim tab for aircraft. As far back as the 1920s he had installed these weird chimneylike sails on boats, and one of his large craft had nearly succeeded in crossing the Atlantic before a sail collapsed from structural failure.”
“These things are sails?”
“That’s right. What is a sail, after all? Simply an air foil with the air pushing against it. Most people think the push is what makes the boat go, but that’s only partly so. The wind creates pressure on the windward side, all right, but at the same time it creates a vacuum on the leeward side, thereby pushing and pulling. That’s what is happening here–an application of the Magnus effect, named after another German, who discovered that a spinning object moving in a fluid such as water or air curves away from a straight path because of pressure differences in the fluid, resulting from velocity changes induced by the spinning object. Clear?”