“Metacentric?”
“The metacenter is the intersection of a vertical line through the center of a floating body at equilibrium with a vertical line through the center of buoyancy when the line is tilted. That’s clear enough, I hope.”
“Of course,” she said testily. “What do you think I am, a complete idiot?”
“Certainly not! Now, as you know, ocean waves beating against and under the ice shelf break off bergs to begin with. In the same fashion, large tabular bergs with width-to-depth ratios in excess of ten will be broken up in the same way by long-wavelength ocean waves. That’s why we picked the Alamo with that particular geometry. You see?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, her eyes beginning to glaze over. “It’s very simple once you– What in the world is going on down there?” She pointed to a ship that was just coming into view, thankful for the diversion.
Forte gained altitude until they were five hundred meters above the edge of the berg onto which a ship was unloading. He put the machine on automatic hover.
Below them the sun flashed off enormous whirling propellers as a Mi-21K cargo helicopter lifted from the flight deck of a supply ship. In a cable sling it bore a length of iron pipe four meters in diameter and sixteen meters long to the afterend of the berg, where the helicopter lowered the pipe to the surface.
“What the devil is that?” said Jennifer Red Cloud, pointing.
“A helicopter.”
“Don’t you think I know a helicopter when I see one?” she said, her face turning pink within the bubble helmet.
“Then why did you ask?”
“I have never seen a helicopter so big, that’s why. I wasn’t aware that such monsters existed.”
“It’s Russian. Made to open up Siberia, where the permafrost doesn’t permit the building of roads. It can transport a three-bedroom house or two companies of shock troops–choose your pick.”
“But Russian?”
“Hated to do it, but there’s no American chopper that can do the Mi’s tricks.”
“What was it carrying?”
“Make a guess.”
“I’m no good at guesses.”
“Then think about it.”
“I’m thinking,” she replied. “Some kind of fuel storage tank?”
“No cigar. They’re cable anchors. Old Lepoint used an elaborate harness. Not bad in its way, but this is a better approach. We drive those cylinders–there will be sixteen of them at regular intervals across the aft end of the Alamo by the time we’re finished–into the snow by heating their leading edges. Their weight does the rest. Then the ice refreezes, and the anchors are held fast by the ice.”
“Yes, but there’s an energy loss in refreezing the ice,” she said triumphantly. “That’s bad.”
Forte smiled. “You’re learning.”
“Don’t patronize me, you big baboon,” she snapped at him. “Well?”
“Good thinking, as I said, but your assumption is wrong. This ice isn’t zero degrees Celsius, the freezing point of water. It’s true that up to about ten meters deep, the snow temperature is a good measure of the berg’s mean annual surface temperature. Right now, for example, that mean temperature is around -22° Celsius because that is the mean for the Ross Ice Shelf, where this berg originated. On the other hand, below ten meters the ice in a berg gradually warms. At the bottom of this berg when it separated from the Ross, it was about -12°, although that part in contact with the salty sea is quickly raising its temperature toward -1.8°, the freezing point of seawater here.”
“So what does all this tell me?”
“Simply,” said Forte, “that we don’t need refrigeration to set those cable anchors, because the berg still has a substantial ‘cold reserve.'”
“Which,” Jennifer Red Cloud pointed out, “will dissipate when we get into warmer latitudes.”
“I’m afraid so, and that’s just one of our problems.”
It took Forte’s crew three and a half days, working around the clock in three shifts, to bury the sixteen cable anchors aft and rig them with their harnesses. Each pair of adjoining cables, made of braided nylon line a hundred meters long and as big around as a weight lifter’s thigh, was yoked to a steel I beam whiffletree, to which a thicker line was attached. The sixteen lines thus became eight and, repeating the process, four.
“Only four tugs to haul this enormous berg?” Jennifer Red Cloud said as they disembarked from the helicopter for the daily inspection tour on a brilliant Sunday morning, 6 January 2008.
“Not even,” said Forte mysteriously.
“Then how–”
“All in good time.
The rest of the day Forte spent mainly on logistics and getting the permanent seismographic survey organized. Like Lepoint, he spotted the facilities checkerboard fashion at wide intervals to minimize human loss in the event of calving, although he was fairly sure he had that problem licked, at least. Unlike Lepoint, Forte didn’t construct his facilities on inflatable bladders, for with the berg totally encased in Ultravac, the best and toughest insulation man had yet devised, there would be very little surface melt, even in the tropics. Much of the material had been stacked at preselected sites where it would be used. This included dozens of enormous white-painted steel cylinders that seemed to Mrs. Red Cloud identical to those used for the cable anchors but which Forte assured her had an entirely different function.
The permanent seismographic survey team’s ten technicians were constantly on the prowl about the surface of the Alamo, planting strings of sensors like rare flowers and then, after a brief sharp blast of powder, uprooting them and moving off to repeat the process elsewhere. The masses of data they accumulated were beamed to a geostationary satellite and routed to SD-1 in Houston for analysis by the BAM-IX, the results being radioed back within seconds. He wasn’t sure how much notice of impending disaster the seismographic soundings would
give, but even an hour would be enough to evacuate the berg if necessary.
That evening they had cocktails in the wardroom of the S.S Isabel Jordan, the converted U.S. Navy hospital ship that served as Forte’s floating headquarters. They were sitting in a corner apart from the ship’s officers, who were noisily kibitzing a game of acey-deucy between the chief engineer and the boatswain. Forte was in clean but disreputable dungarees and docksiders, and Mrs. Red Cloud wore a long black-and-silver lamé gown nearly as revealing as her daytime attire, a diamond pendant, and matching earrings. Her long, black, upswept hair had been the object of two hours of painstaking comb-and-spray-can virtuosity by her Filipino hairdresser Rudolfo, who had interlaced it with what appeared to be about five meters of strung pearls. It would probably take him another two hours to extricate them later that night. Her open-toed silver pumps had spike heels long enough to nail railroad ties together.
“So far, so good,” said the beast to the beauty as they sat opposite each other.
She raised her glass and gazed at him appraisingly over the rim. “To crime.”
“Speaking of which, how’s your little plan to sabotage the Alamo coming along?”
“Not well. Of course, it’s early days, and I have–how many did you say?”
“About 185.”
“Yes, I have 185 days to go. Plenty of time.”
“True, but there’s plenty of berg, too,” he taunted her. “You just can’t let the air out of the tires, you know. It’s got to be something big and gaudy, like a cosmic ray gun, and cosmic ray guns take space. I mention this simply to remind you that down here on the high seas I own about the only space there is: that fleet of twenty-three ships out there, each manned by men I know and trust. I’m not sure that even if you persuaded one of my captains to fill up his ship with dynamite and ram the Alamo that it would sink. Bergs are like women–cold, hard, and unforgiving and tending to go to pieces when you least expect it.”
“Don’t worry about me, Rip,” she said with a steely smile. “I’ll think of a way.” But nothing she had seen this morning seemed very promising. She couldn’t put a torch to it, push it off a high place or in front of a truck, blow it up, or sink it. If she could somehow, she thought sourly, procure the services of a couple of thousand little men with blow torches…
“I’m sure you will–you and your computer brain.”
“Speaking of which,” she said casually, “how is the BAM-IX working out?”
“Like a dream, according to the boys back in SD-1. We feed it lots and lots of little numbers, and it processes them into a million points on a graph, and we step back to look at it, and lo! instant Seurat.”
Seurat.
Jennifer Red Cloud blinked. How could a man who had spent his life at sea and in boisterous tent camps know about a relatively obscure nineteenth-century post-impressionist French painter, a pointillist who fashioned masterpieces from tiny dots of color on a broad canvas, for God’s sake? And he didn’t say Georges Seurat, either, as he would have if he were trying to impress her. Even more disconcerting, he had pronounced it correctly.