Hal Clement - Noise

Hoani had supposed he could do the work of two or maybe three, but had forgotten his traction problems; the others wore studded boots. The foreman saw the difficulty, but a glance convinced him that looking for anything to fit the visitor’s feet would be a waste of time.

Fortunately the threads were well lubricated, and the capstans were free in less than a quarter hour. Nothing visible now supported the projecting rods. Everyone backed away from them and watched tensely.

The people at the main release controls, whoever and wherever they were and however the controls themselves worked, were holding the buck. Until the rods vanished…

After a reasonable time of suspense, they did vanish. There was no way for Mike to tell whether they were encased in pipes or wider shafts or anything at all, and the sounds that accompanied their departure weren’t informative, but he thought he could feel a slight and brief upward acceleration.

The end of the tense silence suggested that others had felt it, too. There was no shouting or cheering, though most of the danger was presumably over; but conversation resumed. At the foreman’s order, all started up the ramps.

Mike assumed—no, hoped—that he had merely not felt the much smaller acceleration when the city had settled to allow the launch. If for some reason that had not occurred, and the ships were still in the harbor, of course, it still might not be a catastrophe; the launching had been merely a worst-scenario precaution, after all. It would bother Wanaka, though. There would be no way for anyone to get to sea, as far as Mike knew, until tons upon tons of replacement ballast had been collected and processed. Of course, water for the control tanks might now be enough; there was no telling without a supply of numbers he didn’t have.

And preparing the other ballast would take a very long time, considering how much would obviously be needed and how slowly it would be collected.

He felt quite sure, now, what the ballast was.

He wondered what Wanaka would do if the launch had indeed taken place. If she decided to get away, leaving Mike behind—this somehow seemed improbable—it was unlikely that anyone would follow, unless someone badly wanted to recover the children. He knew the basic planet-wide customs pretty well now, and Aorangi seemed to be following them fairly closely as far as family matters were concerned, but couldn’t feel quite what the reaction would be this time. The people could be sure the kids were safe enough, except for the normal risks of the sea, but they didn’t seem enthusiastic about contact with the temperate-zone cities.

Don’t worry, idiot. There’s nothing you can do about it now. It would be nice to get home again sometime, though.

The group paused in the cavern of the city model; apparently everyone regardless of profession could read its various symbols. He was encouraged to see that the icons he had interpreted as ships were no longer visible—encouraged, since it seemed likely that if this implied anything worse than a successful launch there would be a lot more general excitement.

Quite sure that he could now find his way from here to the entrance, he unobtrusively left the crowd and made his way into the tunnel maze. He managed not to get lost.

As he approached the air lock he found a large crowd of people, mostly men and unarmored like himself, going in the same direction. He began once more to wonder, since about half of them seemed to be carrying hail shovels.

It couldn’t be an emergency; while noise armor was not really needed in air—the thunder was a nuisance above water, but not the deadly menace the overpressure waves from the core-ocean interface represented to a swimmer. Something must be expected, though. He saw no sign of Hinemoa anywhere, and of course didn’t want to look foolish to anyone ignorant of his background, so he simply went with the crowd. It could be that they just wanted to make sure the ships with their children were all right, but there seemed far too many people here to be only the parents, or even uncles, aunts, and adult cousins, of the youngsters who could possibly have fit in eight vessels, even if only one child from each family had been launched. Besides, that didn’t explain the shovels.

Outside, the crowd didn’t even head toward the lake. It divided, with very little conversation, into five streams, each fanning out in a different direction. Mike joined one of these, and shortly found himself in a crowd of somewhat over a hundred people assembled around one of the hail-filled craters he, Keo, and ’Ao had found on their first walk and blamed on lightning.

It was not, however, filled with hail now; it was a gaping hole of indeterminate depth.

There was plenty of hail on the ground; there had, after all, been at least two storms since Mata ’s original arrival, and very probably more. The shovels went to work at once, and loose hail began to vanish into the pit. Mike could only watch and wonder.

In a few minutes it became evident why there were fewer shovels than men; the latter tired fairly quickly—once again, it was plain that only a small fraction of the citizens could be sailors—and the tools changed hands often. Hoani, seeing nothing complicated about whatever was going on, began to take turns himself. This seemed to be appreciated, but after he had slipped and fallen two or three times someone suggested that he work a little farther from the pit. It was not, after all, necessary to hurl each shovelful all the way every time, and if he went in himself it would delay matters seriously, they pointed out.

Most of the hail by now was too far from the edge for anyone, even Mike, to toss it all the way. Throwing toward the hole was enough; someone else could make the next toss.

The basic ice had been cleared of hail for a radius of fully two hundred meters when Hinemoa found him.

“Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t know where you’d gone, but you’re being about as useful as you could have been anywhere.”

“What’s going on here, anyway? You don’t need all this water for the city.”

“Not as water, but we need the ice. The shafts take it down about a kilometer. It gets drained, packed, and shoved outside. The lump floats up and catches on the bottom of the ice section. Any meltwater, plus any that gets in through the lock while the ice is going out, drains to a lower tank and vines take it back to the top and dump it into the sea at the edge.”

“Vines? Oh, I see. Sap rising. I should have guessed. I wonder why we didn’t see them when we were sailing around the city. Plants—trees most impressively—do it on Earth. Osmosis or capillary?”

“Osmosis, usually, but we’re always trying to design better vines. Better hand that shovel to someone else; even you must get tired sometime.”

Rather gratefully Mike obeyed.

“I take it the launch went all right.” “Oh, yes. And we’ve found a good current and are moving faster toward the edge of the cap. The hailstones are helpful, but wait until you see how we do it with the floe ice. The big chunks are hard to get up to this height; it’s lucky ice is slippery. They lose a lot less to melting than the hail does, though. Within a year or so we’ll have the bottom of the city cap replenished, and be on our way to replacing the emergency ballast. What do you think we could offer your captain for her supply?”

Mike was speechless for some seconds. He had been almost sure before, as several pieces of formerly disconnected information had joined up, but had not expected confirmation from Hinemoa, of all people. He’d have to start ridding himself of the Wanaka Conviction.

“The gold? You do use gold for ballast.”

“What else would tonnes of it be good for? A couple of kilograms would keep the pseudolife designers happy for a year. I know the stuff is pretty, but how much could the people of one city use up in jewelry? Why do you think we grow gold-fish at all, and try to keep improving them?”