Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

The landing stage was packed with penguins. It was the women of the harem, all in long black gowns and headdresses, stepping clumsily into the launch. One looked up toward him, but he had no way of telling who it was.

From behind him Tigrito said irritably, “Come on, man, take your shot!”

“Sure. What’s happening?”

Tigrito glanced casually over the side, then grinned. “Going into battle, you know? They send the women and children to the hotel, get them out of the way. Don’t worry, old Hassabou will bring them back tomorrow morning.”

“I wasn’t worried,” said Hake, coming back into the lounge to take his shot, but it was a lie. He was worried about a great many things, not the least of them whether the tape he had just made had had time to reach Leota.

Hake took the afternoon bus back along the coast, got out at the path to the guard shack, climbed the dune and presented himself to the guards. The noise from the solar tower was immense, even at this distance, rumble of pumps, roar of gas and steam, scream of tortured molecules ripped apart. The rifleman sitting on a canvas chair outside the shack took a plug out of his ear, yawning and scratching. He glanced uninterestedly at Hake’s forged identification badge and made a coarse remark about male scrubwomen. “Too bad you’re a man,” he said. “You can’t go down for an hour yet, and if you were a woman we could pass the time more interestingly.”

“Not very many trespassers to keep you busy?” Hake offered conversationally.

“Trespassers? Why would anyone trespass? All we do is keep silly people in boats from coming too near the tower. Go, sit in the shade. When the noise stops, you can go down to the control.”

So Hake sprawled out under a clump of sunflowers, fingering the badge that had once been Leota’s, his mind clear and almost blank. He could not plan very far. All he could do was go through with his orders until he saw a chance to do something else. When the sun set the guard waved him down. Actually the noise had not stopped. There was still plenty of heat in the receptor cavity at the top of the tower, and the turbines continued to roar.

Scrambling down the path in the dusk, Hake remembered the summer’s moonlighting—he had still been in the wheelchair—when he held a part-time job cleaning heliostats for Jersey Central Power & Light. The big, jointed mirrors were stowed shiny side down to keep dust from coating and salt spray from pitting their surfaces. Even so, Hake, or someone like him, had to get out and spray them clean once a month—a job that never ended, because by the time the last sector was detergented the first was beginning to cloud up again. But the sunplants cleaned themselves.

Going inside the control dugout was like entering the bridge of a ship. CRTs glowed in a rainbow of colors at half a dozen monitoring stations, displaying a hundred different kinds of data about temperature, pressure and every other transient state at every point in the process. One set monitored the air as it was forced through its tiny pipes across the heat receptor. Another tracked the expanded air as it turned gas turbines to generate electricity. Others reported on the sea-water as it was boiled into steam, the splitting of the steam into its elements, the exhaust of waste brine back into the ocean, the pumping of hydrogen and oxygen to the liquefaction plants beyond the end of the cove. Hake knew this was so, from knowing how the plant worked, but he could read none of the indicia. They were only glowing masses of colors and symbols to him.

A short, dark woman looked up from one of the screens to glance at his credentials. “You’re not our standard brand of cleaner,” she said.

“I needed the job. Later on I might get something better, they said.”

“Be nice having you around,” she said, looking with more interest at Hake himself than at his badge. “The rest of the crew’U be here by boat any minute. They’ll show you what to do.”

Between the dugout and the tower was a long, underwater tunnel. The night crew leader, an Egyptian engineer named Boutros, took his gang through it at a brisk walk. They had seen the tunnel a hundred times, and it was of no more interest to them than his driveway is to a suburbanite. But for Hake it was something to see. Half a mile of nothing but distance. It was like being in a long birth canal, a ten-minute half-trot with spaced red lights before and after, always seeming to stretch out to the same indefinite, maybe infinite, length.

The sunflowers had long since folded themselves into buds for the night. No more energy was coming to the receptor. It was safe for the maintenance crew to come in and start their work. But the generators were still turning, the pumps were thudding, the compressed air was screaming through the criss-cross of thin pipes. Boutros had a spare set of earplugs for Hake. Without them, he was deafened.

The tower was tightly sealed most of the time, but sealed or not, fine sand from the dunes and salt spray from the water found its way inside. That was Hake’s job. While the skilled mechanics split off to check and repair the brains and entrails of the system, Hake and a couple of others were set to sweeping’ and polishing. The first job was the brass railings that surrounded the open central shaft at every level. Hake, following the finger of the woman working with him, could see where to start. The rails on the three lowest levels, looking up from the base of the heat exchanger column, were bright and clean. What looked like a sudden change to green-black iron in the railings of the fourth was only the change to the dirt they had to clean. Far, far up—near the hundred-meter level at the top of the tower—he could see that the rails brightened and gleamed again. Cleaning corrosion inside the tower was another of those jobs without an end.

That part of the job was only make-work and fussiness. Hake and his co-workers scraped and polished to complete the fourth level, until Hake was actually sent to push a broom for a while until it was time to do the more important jobs. The solar collector retained enough heat to generate power for several hours after sunset. Then, with a suddenness like a crash, everything shut down—the pumps, the valve motors, the yell and whistle of fluids forced through tubes—and everyone took earpfugs out. There was total silence for a minute before the pumps started again, this time at low pressure, and Boutros appeared to wave his crews toward the stairs.

It was a long climb. A hundred meters of climbing.

When the generator was going and sunpower was pouring in, the pumped air swallowed energy to turn into electricity in the generators. At the same time the flowing air kept the pipes from burning through. The critical time was only a matter of seconds at full power. The cavity was hot —could, in theory, be as hot as the surface of the Sun, some 9000° Fahrenheit; was, in practice, only about half that. But hotter than anything Hake had ever encountered. If the pumps failed, the reflected heat from the sunplants would convert that delicate grid into slag unless the plants were deflected away at once. Now that was not the problem, because the sunplants slept. But the pumps were cooling the pipes for Hake’s crew, so that they could chip them free of the thin, tough corrosion of sea-scale that reduced the heat conductivity of the pipes and wasted energy.

To do that, they had to go up where the heat receptor was.

A hundred meters is not a great distance, when it is stretched out flat. An Olympic runner can cover it in a matter of seconds. But a hundred meters straight up from the nearest flat surface is something quite different. The physical exertion was the least of it, although Hake reached the top deck panting and shaking. Worse. The wind blew. Clinging to the safety rails, Hake thought his hair would fly off. The tower shook—not entirely in his imagination; there was a bass organ-pipe thrumming that he could feel through the hand-holds. And, although the pumps had swept most of the 4000° heat out of the piping, it blistered his fingers at a touch.