The HAB Theory, page 61
“Uh-huh. Far as I know right now, anyway. There could be some changes in plans, but if that happens I’ll leave word for you.” He smiled as he got up. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Me too, Alex. Try not to let anything intervene. I’d like us to have a good evening together.”
4
No single project in Kenya’s long history had ever created such a beehive of activity as the beginning of construction of Ngaia City on the Rematta Galla highlands east of Tsavo National Park. Even though still in its most initial stages, the new complex being formed in the semiarid veldt overlooking the Tiva River Valley had begun taking shape.
Viewing it with a cordon of engineers and ministers from the most advantageous viewpoint, Daniel Ngoromu felt a quickening of his pulse. It had been his dream for so long that Kenya become an important world state that sometimes deep inside he felt a gnawing frustration at the slowness with which things changed. Years had gone by in the past when no real outward result of all his efforts had been apparent and when the faintest niggling of doubt would touch him that he would ever be able to accomplish his dream. Now it seemed that those doubts had forever been put to rest.
As far as the eye could see in all directions, foundation lines were being laid out, stakes being driven, cords being strung, excavations being dug, careful measurements being made. The ground vibrated with the rumbling of operating equipment, and thick reinforced concrete walls already were being poured in one area. Scores of men worked in small groups, sometimes obscured by the haze of dust being raised by the incredible amount of heavy machinery being moved into the area or already at work.
The Kenyan President felt Anita’s hand grip his own and he squeezed it in response and looked at her with eyes filled with a glow which said what words couldn’t say. It was a glow that was mirrored in Anita’s eyes and she reached over with her free hand and placed it on the powerful swell of his bare lower arm.
“I wonder,” he said, only loud enough for her to hear, “if what I’m feeling right now might not be very close to what the architect of the Great Pyramid felt when he saw the ground being laid out for his dream. All this,” he indicated the activity in general, “may not become as monumentally beautiful, but it has to be at least as important and, God willing, as permanent.”
“God willing,” Anita echoed, following his gaze. She turned and faced him, her blond hair turned golden in the rays of the setting sun. “Oh, Dan, I’m overwhelmed. What words can possibly express what you feel at a time like this? I’d like to just rent this space and sit in a chair here day after day watching it grow.”
“I know. I feel the same way. Well, we’ll be seeing it often enough in the months to come.”
She nodded. “It’s the first thing I want to do when I get back. I keep telling myself I’ll be gone for only a little over a week, but I feel as if I’ll be missing so much. I really hate to go, but I promised Narai. Anyway, let’s plan to come back here the day after I return from the States.”
“We will, ‘Neet, without fail.” He patted her hand on his arm and then released her hand, saying he wanted to speak with Tom Umba. He turned slightly and beckoned to one of the men standing a respectful distance away.
Umba was of medium height and well built, about forty years old and with skin nearly as ebony-hued as that of the President. His piercing eyes were framed by steel-rimmed glasses and lines of strong, genial character were at the corners of his eyes. He was chief engineer of the Ngaia City project and a graduate of both Nairobi University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also recognized as the foremost construction engineer in all of East Africa.
Clad like Ngoromu, in khaki shorts and matching short-sleeved shirt, Umba saw the beckoning and strode at once to the Kenyan President and stopped beside him. Ngoromu swept out a hand in a movement which took in the expansive activity before them.
“I know it’ll be in your reports, Tom, but let me hear some of it offhand. How’s it shaping?”
Umba kicked at a clod of dirt. “Better, I suppose, than we have any right to expect this early, but still not in full swing. That’ll take a week or two. We’ll have somewhere between ten and twenty storage units finished within another four or five days. They’re simple because they don’t involve any plumbing or electrical problems of any consequence. They’re a couple miles over that way,” he pointed, “but that’s only the start. We have somewhere just under sixteen thousand men either on hand or presently on the way.” He gave a short dry laugh. “Gets to be something of a logistics problem just supporting them here, but it’s improving daily. We have seventeen camps set up already here on the site, plus five others between here and Kalima Simba to the east, eight others active on highway work between there and Mombasa, and a dozen others setting up the road layout between here and Nairobi.”
“You’ve already mapped the layout for the road?”
“Pretty well now. There were three alternatives we were considering for linking with Nairobi. Each had advantages and liabilities. Running straight north on the Kitui and Tana River boundary line up to Highway B-3 and then widening that eastward into Thika and Nairobi would’ve been all right, except for excessive mileage.”
“How much?”
“It checked out at two sixty-five. Part of the problem, of course, is Tsavo. If we could shoot straight west through the park, that would be ideal, but you turned thumbs down on that plan.”
“Absolutely. The national parks have become sacrosanct. That won’t mean much if and when the HAB cataclysm comes, but for the here and now, people won’t buy it. If we start carving up Tsavo, we’d not only have our own people down on us, we’d get criticism from all over the world. We’re going to have problems enough without that. All right, what was the mileage for the choice you made and where does it go??
“Two hundred twenty-four miles. It angles up somewhat west of north thirty-three miles to Tsavo’s northeast corner, then straight west another fifty miles to Mutomo. From there we follow B-26 and B-3 again another hundred and forty-one miles through Thika into Nairobi. That route’s not only shortest, it gets the most advantage from existing roads and will cost least. Survey’s under layout now.”
“Fine.” Ngoromu nodded approvingly. “What about electricity and water?”
“Electric’s being run in already. Mombasa’s the prime source for now, but we’ll be tapping Nairobi soon as an alternate. We’ve already begun construction on our own generating plant, but it’ll be a while before it’s operational. Again, according to your instructions, all cables coming in will be running five feet underground. Where water’s concerned, we’ve lucked out pretty well. Six experimental tapholes either in the bed of the Tiva or adjacent to it show abundant water. Pumping stations are being designed already. Until then, we have eight makeshift wells working full time and they’re more than keeping pace with the demand. That,” he added, “may change with the increase in personnel. Three or four thousand more of our own people coming in within the next two weeks and somewhere around twenty-five hundred others from the United States. That may make it sticky for a while, but the first permanent pumping plant ought to be in operation within a month, so that’ll resolve whatever problem excess personnel creates. All in all, we seem to be in pretty good shape.”
“How about the city construction itself?”
“Coming along, sir. We’re combining the excavations for the connecting tunnels and the conduit pipes for water, sewage and electricity. That work’s top priority right now. Incidentally, as of last Monday we’ve been on the twenty-four-hour schedule you wanted. Three duplicated shifts, eight hours on and sixteen off per man.”
“Good. Keep it that way. Any problem with sewage disposal?”
“Gravity’s a big help. We’ll have to do some initial pumping eastward to the edge of the plateau slope, but from there on it’s all downhill. The plant itself will be set up on the Tana River-Kalifi border, about thirty-eight or forty miles southeast of here, just a couple miles south of the road linking us with Kalima Simba. We’re planning initially on six steeping pits, but leaving room to double that pretty quickly, and treble it if it becomes necessary.”
“Sounds good on the whole, but there’ve got to be some bugs.”
Tom Umba hunched his shoulders and grinned. “Surprisingly few, so far. Biggest one, I guess, is keeping the men working. They were all pretty well keyed up when they arrived, but Kenyans aren’t geared to moving fast. Steadily, yes, but not fast. They run out of steam quickly most of the time, but since they’re making more on this project than on any work they’ve done before, they’re coming into line pretty well. I set up a rule that helps. Slackers get one warning to get back to work. If they’re found idling again within a week of the first warning, they’re dismissed on the spot. On the whole, though, the work’s going remarkably well. Heavy mechanization helps and,” he grinned at Anita Ngoromu, “I’m glad your Uncle Sam came through with the air cargo shipments as quickly as promised. There’s more arriving every day by air, and evidently a tremendous shipment already en route in freighters, but they’ll take about eight or nine days.”
They talked a while longer and then, the sun having set and the air growing chill, the Kenyan President and his wife, dutifully trailed by ministers and aides, returned to the pad where three large Sikorsky helicopters awaited to transport them back to Nairobi.
As they circled once over the Ngaia City site, Daniel Ngoromu, at the window seat, let his eyes take in the vast dusky expanse — now becoming dotted with the twinkling of campfires — where the most incredible under-one-roof construction in man’s history was to be erected, and in his mind’s eye he saw it there already. And beside him, looking straight ahead, Anita Randall Ngoromu pressed her hands to her body and the color left her face as once again, as had been occurring in the recent past, the waves of incredible pain flooded through her.
5
“I don’t need to look out the window to know I’m not in Washington, Hazel,” Robert Sanders told his secretary in the small private room of the Presidential Suite. “It’s not often I find myself with a little free time like this without someone needing urgently to see me. Let’s keep it that way. I want to take advantage of it. I’ve got — What time is it?”
Hazel Tierney consulted her watch. “A few minutes before eleven, sir.”
“Good. That means I’ve got better than an hour and a half before the meeting with the Scientific Advisory Committee. You can bring that lunch order in whenever it gets here, but I don’t want any other interruptions unless they’re damned urgent.”
“I’ll see to it, Mr. President.”
Sanders didn’t even hear her go out. He sat comfortably in the big armchair, with his feet resting on a hassock. In his lap was a copy of the Grant summary and now, for the third time since receiving it, he began going through it page by page, attempting to fix even more completely in his own mind the full sense of the HAB Theory and its ramifications.
As before, the first seven pages of it meant little to him. They laid out the mechanics of the capsizing of the earth in terms of mathematical formulae, and he skimmed past them. Even after that portion he skipped numerous areas with which he was already thoroughly familiar and devoted his attention to areas he had not yet really studied well.
It was on the ninth page that he began reading more carefully.
Ultimately, the capsizing motion stops when the new bulge of earth materials and ice cap join to stabilize the planet on its new Axis of Figure. Because the Antarctic continent was thirteen miles closer to the center of the earth at its polar location than at the equator, it has moved upward a considerable distance, elevating far more land area than was previously there. Contrarily, equatorial areas suddenly shifted to the polar regions are thirteen miles closer to the center of the earth than they were on the equatorial bulge and therefore are now submerged beneath the sea. Thus, the kinetic energy created by the capsizing becomes absorbed to some degree in the elevation of great land masses in some areas and the submergence of other land masses in other areas.
More pertinent to the present situation, the next capsizing of the earth will result in the Antarctic continent becoming the center of a great land hemisphere and, at the same time, the Arctic area, including Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and northern Europe and Asia, will become the center of a water hemisphere and will undoubtedly become the bottom of a great ocean comparable to the Pacific Ocean we know today.
For clarification, it becomes necessary to discuss exactly what land and water hemispheres are, and their formation. The surface of the planet earth is geologically divided into what is known as a Land Hemisphere (this hemisphere presently located north of the equator) which is made up of 46.6 percent land and 53.4 percent water, and a Water Hemisphere (south of the present equator) which contains a bare 11.6 percent land area and 88.4 percent water. Thus, more than three-fourths of the land area of the earth at present is located north of the equator. The principal reason for this has been that, insofar as can be determined, the last three capsizings of the earth have been caused by the excessive weight of the north polar ice cap rather than the south polar ice cap. This becomes a very important point of consideration, since the next capsizing will be caused by the southern ice cap rather than the northern ice cap. Much greater devastation across the face of the entire earth can therefore be expected than during the previous three such cataclysms, which occurred where the land hemisphere was already in existence.
Sanders was so absorbed in what he was reading that he hadn’t even realized that Hazel Tierney had reentered the room with a small tray on which were two sandwiches, a couple of cookies and a glass of milk. She placed the tray on the table beside his chair.
“Your lunch, sir,” she said.
“What? Oh, thanks, Hazel.”
He picked up a sandwich half and began munching on it automatically, not knowing what was in it and not hearing his secretary go out. He leafed through a few more pages before pausing to read closely again.
…The North Pole does not have a true ice cap now, nor will it have unless, through unforeseeable and unlikely circumstances, the Bering Strait should be sealed. The reason, of course, is that there is no continental mass directly over the North Pole area. Pacific Ocean currents force a flow of some 41 billion tons of water daily through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean at an average speed of about 4.5 miles per hour. The ice on the ocean surface over the pole is floating ice, averaging only 12 feet in thickness and rarely exceeding 16 feet, over water which averages some 4,000 feet in depth. This whole body of ice gradually moves eastward with the ocean flow, breaking off into icebergs as it nears Atlantic waters.
If this current was not in existence, a northern ice cap would certainly have formed centuries ago. With the weight of two great ice caps being acted on by centrifugal force, the capsizing of the earth would have occurred long ago. …
The Chief Executive leaned his head back and closed his eyes, digesting this information. It was not difficult to visualize the conditions as they were portrayed here in the Grant summary. He opened his eyes again and, coming into a more familiar area, he once more moved rapidly along, skimming the lines swiftly until he reached a portion another few pages along, where his attention became more directed.
…During the mid-1880s it was discovered that the earth had developed a slight wobble in its rotation — an eccentricity for which many theories were advanced, but nothing conclusive. When first noted, this faint rocking motion amounted to only about an inch at a speed of less than 2 feet per hour. Now it is estimated to be in the neighborhood of half a mile. The linear motion is increased with each increase in the size of the ice cap, and this is reflected in a decided increase in centrifugal force and, with it, greater inertia. The pressures involved in such a rocking motion are incalculable and the buildup of kinetic energy is phenomenal.
Some of these pressures and some of the kinetic energy are expended through the occurrence of earthquakes here and there on the globe, but there comes a time when the relief this provides is not enough. The equatorial bulge being moved away from the outermost rim of centrifugal throw by the wobbling action begins to compensate. Misapplication of mathematics has resulted in general acceptance of the theory that any capsizing of the globe is impossible, but this is an error — the outgrowth of a nonanalytical initial study beginning with the false premise that the equatorial bulge is rigid and immovably solid, but recent geological studies show that in fact it is a yielding ring of earth materials which, when forced to do so by tremendous pressures, becomes relatively plastic in constitution. As such, it both can and does rearrange its constituent parts to accommodate itself to the pressures being brought against it. As was mentioned above, the equatorial bulge begins to compensate for being moved away from the peak of centrifugal force. It begins moving back toward that force, flowing beneath the crust of the earth’s surface, its force attempting to overcome the resistance to movement manifested in the hardrock stratifications. The bulge appears to move at this time like a vast underground wave, analogous to the movement that can be created by gripping one edge of a carpet, raising and jerking it downward and thus causing a large bulge to move away beneath it. But, at best, it is a relatively slow movement as compared to that of the ice cap, and it is one that is extremely disruptive to the earth’s surface, resulting in considerable earthquake and tidal wave activity.
Surface Disruption. Wholly incalculable kinetic energy develops from the movement of the poles and the shifting of the earth’s equatorial bulge. Virtually the whole of the earth is in disruptive movement at this time. The kinetic energy thus developed is absorbed through a whole series of earth surface transformations — crushing, wrinkling, splitting, elevating, descending, bending, stretching. The formation of extended mountain chains and equally extensive rifts in the earth’s surface results. The mountain ranges and rifts probably always are at or very near right angles to the forces being expended. An example of such folding or wrinkling into mountains is the great ridge extending from the Arctic to the Antarctic along the western edges of the North and South American continents, forming the Andes and Rockies-Sierra Nevada chains presently existing.
