A galley and mess hall, an administrative section, three workshops, and an electrical generating unit big enough to supply a town of forty-five thousand quickly followed. Inflatable bubble structures warehoused the supplies that kept coming in a never-ending flow. The bunkhouses, auxiliary buildings, and materiel depots were widely separated from one another so that a crevasse opening beneath their feet could swallow at most one or two buildings and their crews but would spare the rest.
Lepoint’s first, major task was to take the Salvation in tow. For this purpose he had contrived a restraint system based on the net shopping bag traditionally carried by French shoppers. Consisting of interwoven straps of Strylene, a high-strength synthetic, each strand was fifty meters long, half a meter wide, and five centimeters thick. These were fashioned into a loose mesh a thousand meters wide and two kilometers long. Across the berg’s midline, six leaders from the net were brought forward over the berg’s forward lip and made fast to the six tugs that waited
there, barely making steerageway. The net’s opposite end was dragged to the rear and lowered over the afterportion of the berg by electrically operated winches. At water’s edge the mesh, along with buoys and a Strylene leader attached on either side, was taken in tow by net-tending tugs and deployed in the berg’s wake like a bridal train. When the mesh stretched out behind by about a kilometer, the buoys were released and the net sank, now restrained only by its two outboard leaders. The leaders, made of braided French-made grimpalon cable as thick as a weight lifter’s biceps, were brought by tug around to the forward edge of the berg and the net hauled up snug against the bottom. The restraining device was completed by bringing the submerged lines forward to the surface and making them fast around bitts on the six powerful tugs that were to pull the Salvation north.
That Dr. Lepoint had anticipated every problem was evident in the smooth deployment of the Strylene harness and the making fast of the twelve hawsers aboard the tugs less than fifty hours later. On the day of departure, Dr. Lepoint made final rounds, personally inspecting arrangements, and pronounced himself satisfied. The men were comfortably installed in their bunkhouses and looked forward to a dinner prepared by French chefs, a selection of fine French wines, and old cognac and cigars. The oceangoing tugs were operating well within their predicted performance envelopes. The steady pull on the harness, now that maximum forward momentum had been attained after four days under way, translated into a speed of 1.3 knots, very close to the anticipated 1.46 knots.
At midnight, Dr. Daniel Valery Lepoint went to the radio shack and dictated a message to be transmitted at once to Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud in San Diego:
Madam: I have the honor and pleasure to inform you that today, January 19, 2006, the Salvation has been taken successfully under tow and is proceeding northward at the rate of approximately one and a half statute miles per hour. Barring misadventure, we expect to bring the Salvation into its berth in San Francisco Bay during the second week in July
2006. I look forward to presenting the Salvation to you personally on that historic occasion. Bonne annee! Vive les Etats Unis! Vive la France! /s/ Lepoint.
14. SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
14 MARCH 2006
A COUPLE OF OFF-DUTY CREW MEMBERS CLAD IN YELLOW wet suits were racing wind surfers. Others sunned themselves on a raft anchored near the shore of the frigid manmade lake. Fast motorboats, used for transporting workers, buzzed between the floating supply sheds and the work sites. Huge rubber lighters powered by outboard engines ferried supplies and equipment from the loading dock at the edge of the Salvation to warehouses spotted around the lake. The warehouses, like all the other structures on the lake, undulated gently on inflated rubber bladders.
There was little sound but the gentle slap and swish of waves against the base of the berg as it was drawn ponderously northward by its tugs, like a slumbering polar bear being dragged by six white mice. At midmorning another sound was heard, that of a distant plane approaching. Minutes later an amphibian Grumman TiltJet 301 appeared on the horizon.
The plane’s pilot checked his instruments and then punched in the frequency of the Salvation’s homing device on the autoland system, flicked the switch, and lit a cigarette as the computers took over. A moment later the twin throttles eased back, and the two big fanjet engines began to swivel upward. The plane decelerated and descended swiftly as the engines rotated to the vertical, and the plane fought the battle against gravity it was programmed to lose, but only on its own terms. The thrust
vectoring sent the plane sliding down through the sky like a bead on a string toward the homing transmitter floating atop a buoy in the center of a group of widely spaced aluminum-roofed buildings. An instant before touchdown, the jets roared at full power and then throttled back to idle as the aircraft settled in the water that covered the entire iceberg except for a ten-meter-wide Strylene border at the edge. The pilot snubbed out his cigarette and shut down the engines. The copilot pulled the handle that released the fore and aft anchors. In the rear, the stewardess pressed the main hatch button, and the door swung back to reveal a big rubber boat approaching.
The sixty-odd reporters of the media pool clambered single file down the steps into the boat. When all were aboard, the coxswain cast off, and the craft lumbered off toward the administration building two hundred meters away. The floating barracks and maintenance shed swayed gently as the boat passed by.
“Nothing like as bad as being aboard a destroyer,” explained the boat’s pilot to a reporter, “but some of the crew live on seasick pills, especially when they see the buildings rolling one way and the ships down below us pitching the other.”
“Novel way to build,” observed the reporter.
“Yeah. It was either put up the buildings on air suspension cells or sink deep piles into the berg. Dr. Lepoint figured, though, that pile driving might set up stress lines that could precipitate calving.”
“Very perceptive of Dr. Lepoint.”
“Yes, indeed,” said the coxswain with conviction. “That’s one smart hombre. He’s thought of everything.”
He hadn’t, however, thought of this press conference to announce the imminent passage of the Salvation across the equator, when it would have completed more than three-quarters of its journey from the Antarctic to San Francisco Bay. That had been Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud’s idea. Although the iceberg had received a tremendous amount of publicity in the United States, until now the press had been forbidden to set foot aboard, for fear of infiltration by corporate spies intent on learning exactly how Dr. Lepoint had accomplished his miracle.
Mrs. Red Cloud, on her part, foresaw that a flood of news stories, generating an intense public interest on the eve of Salvation’s arrival, would pave the way for new bond issues, essential now that her liquid assets were so heavily committed to the Salvation.
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen of the press,” said Dr. Valery Daniel Lepoint from the podium of the small screening room into which the press had been crowded. “Welcome to the Salvation, and welcome to a new era in science and technology. What you will see here today on your inspection tour is a glimpse of the future, when man will alter the world’s geography, its very weather and climate, for his benefit and survival. This first great step will provide a continuous supply of the purest water in the world to America’s West Coast. Not only will it and those icebergs to follow provide water to the states of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, but they will relieve the current pressure for supplies on the Colorado, Columbia, Missouri, Arkansas, Platte, and other rivers, allowing their waters to slake the thirst of the droughtplagued Midwest and plains states.
“The mechanics of this vast redistribution of American waters you must discuss with specialists in the United States. Here you will learn how we intend to fill this nowempty pipeline.”
Dr. Lepoint, dapper and bow tied, was in the environment he liked best: the classroom. These were his students, and today he would teach them as much as they could absorb. He smiled, as if to give them confidence that the scientific wonders he was about to unveil were something any reasonably intelligent man or woman could comprehend. But before he saddled them with technicalities, they would need to have a concise, overall picture of the operation.
“The Stars and Stripes were raised over the Salvation as sovereign American territory on January 19, 2006. It was then taken under tow by a crew from Raynes Oceanic Resources. For the first thousand miles of its journey, the Salvation was hurried along by the winds of the Screaming Sixties, Furious Fifties, and Roaring Forties, the eastward-flowing circumpolar current, and of course, our fleet of oceangoing tugs. Together, the winds, currents and diesel power allowed us to make good an average of 42 nautical miles per day, that is to say, some 50 statute miles. The Salvation is about 2,000 meters long, 1,000 meters wide, and 229 meters from surface to bottom. Fortunately– perhaps miraculously–we have experienced no calving problems whatsoever.