Foothold, page 27
part #1 of Foothold Series
David shook his head and made a face. “If I never see that reactor move again it’ll be too soon. We’ll ship it in, I guess with the rover?”
“Yeah, that would be best. Unless it’s a long way away, in which case we’ll have to use the shuttle. The good news is that we won’t need that much. Well, relatively speaking.”
“Relative to what?” Veronika asked.
“Relative to a mining operation on Earth. We’re the only customer, so we’ll mine what we need and no more.”
David nodded. “OK, so the three of you start prospecting, and take Josh and Nigel along for the ride. That leaves Veronika, Heidi and me. What should we do?”
Heidi spoke up. “There are some more design considerations. We know we can seal the cavern well enough, and we can deal with the atmosphere with planting backed up with a physical plant. But there are other issues. We need to find a way of getting rid of a lot of heat.”
“I thought being a cavern the temperature would be quite even,” David said.
“The rock mass will help a lot, but once we have all of that glazing in place, it will become like a greenhouse. We are already experiencing daytime temperatures in the low thirties, and we haven’t reached the peak of summer yet. Without active cooling, it will most likely get to the low forties.”
David looked thoughtful. “So what do you suggest?”
“We will need a refrigeration plant, but like the atmosphere plant it should only be for, how do you say, smoothing the bumps. For the atmosphere, plants will do the heavy lifting to drop the CO2 and raise the oxygen. For the cooling, we need a heavy lifter as well, and the best option is water, the more of it the better. Water to spray and mist from the ceiling, and bulk water on the ground to moderate the temperature.”
“So pump it up from the lake?”
“We could, but we have another idea,” Heidi replied, looking at Nathalie uneasily, no doubt thinking of the events of the past couple of days. “Nathalie and I have worked on an idea to deliver much more water than we could pump without using any energy. It will be better, and safer.”
David guessed that their collaboration had been before John and Nathalie’s news had broken.
Nathalie cleared her throat delicately and elaborated. “To the west and the north there are many rivers and streams, and they are at a higher altitude than the cavern. We have found one that used to flow near here in the past, but has changed to a new channel. We ought to be able to divert it back here easily.”
Heidi continued. “It used to pass around to the west of the cavern and flow into Lac Cartier. What we can do is divert it to above the rear of the cavern and through a new tunnel that we blast. From there into an artificial river to a lake in the impact crater, then out under the front window and down to the lake.”
“Won’t that pull a lot of CO2 into the cavern?” Grace asked.
“It will bring some in, but if we make sure that the entry and exit holes carry only water it will be limited to the CO2 dissolved in the water. The combination of plants and physical plant will be able to handle it easily.”
“OK,” said David, looking around. “It seems like we have a plan.”
***
The shuttle was in the air almost continuously for the next two days, as Grace flew in grid search patterns while Nathalie, with her geologist’s hat on, worked the scanners looking for the ores that they needed. From time to time they put down and Nigel and Josh would spread out taking samples, and then they would be off again. Nigel and Josh had loaded enough equipment on board so they could examine their samples while they were in the air, keeping them occupied most of the time.
Meanwhile, David and John had taken the rover northwest to survey the route for their water supply; as Heidi had said, the route was mostly already in place, in the form of a dry streambed. Once they reached the top of the old channel it was easy to see why the stream had changed course.
“There might have been an earthquake,” John said. “You can see where the hillside has slipped into the river and pushed it back to the west.”
David nodded, wondering if it was an earthquake, and if so how frequent they were here.
“Diverting it back may not be easy,” he said, surveying the slip thoughtfully.
“Nah, that’s the easy part. We’ll get Grace on the job.”
“Grace?”
“She’s a chemist, remember?” John reminded him with a grin. “She’ll have no trouble whipping us up something that goes bang. We’ll just blow all of this away.”
David still looked doubtful.
“We don’t have to move it all. We just need to make a big enough hole that some of the water will come back this way. It’s the other end that’s going to be harder.”
David nodded. “If you say so. I guess we’d better go and decide how to tackle it.”
An hour later they were back in the area behind the cavern.
“See here,” John said. “The old river course drops to the west away from the cavern. What we’ll need to do is make a new channel and push it over there,” he pointed to the point where the rocky cavern wall sloped down into the ground, “and knock a hole in the wall.”
“Explosives?”
“For the hole, yeah. We’ll have to dig the diversion though, and a holding pool by the hole. If we get it right the hole will be well under the holding pool surface and that’ll stop air getting through.”
“So we do this end first, then divert the stream?”
“Yeah,” John said. “Should be a blast. Pun intended.”
A day later they were together again, and could compare notes.
“The good news is we found bauxite, and we found fluorite,” Nathalie said. She emptied a bag of samples on the ground and they all picked through them curiously.
Veronika held one of them up to the light. “This looks like it should be made into a ring,” she commented, angling a rock containing purplish crystals to the light.
“That’s fluorite,” Nathalie said. “The crystals are calcium fluoride. We have these other colors as well, she said with a smile, indicating a green crystal.
“And this is for the windows?”
Grace nodded. “We get the fluoride from these. It might not look like it, but from these we can make strong clear plastic sheets.”
“This must be the bauxite then,” David said, holding up a rock studded with coppery circles.
Grace nodded.
“And the bad news?” he asked, not forgetting how Nathalie started the conversation.
“None of it is close by,” Nathalie answered. “The bauxite, it is 500 kilometers from here, and the fluorite 400.”
David was silent for a moment. “So we’ll need to shift it here,” he mused.
“Maybe. We should think about this,” John said. “We’re currently just thinking in terms of ‘we get these rocks and make windows out of them’, but it’s not that easy. Mining is a dirty business; you can take my word for it. We’ll need to use some nasty chemicals – acids, cyanide, and stuff like that. Do we really want that where we live?”
“What about power? What other options are there?”
“We could run a power cable to another location,” John said. “But all jokes about moving the fusion plant aside, I’d like to suggest moving it to the mining site and running the cable back to Haven.”
At the questioning looks from the others, he shrugged. “Same principle. I don’t like the idea of messing up our home with mining waste, and I’m not that keen on living next door to a fusion plant either.”
There was silence as they digested this.
“You know,” John continued, “We’re pushing this way ahead of schedule. Now that we have the habitat up and running, we’re supposed to be working on increasing the population.” He had the grace to look slightly embarrassed at this point – “And then slowly build up industrial capacity over the next couple of decades. Now you’re suggesting we should do all of that at once, which won’t leave much capacity for population growth.”
David was slightly taken aback for a moment. Until now, he’d had the luxury of complete agreement with all of his decisions, and at some point had started taking it for granted that everyone would line up with his vision of how they should develop. Suddenly, he realized that he had forgotten to take everyone else along for the journey, and made some assumptions which perhaps weren’t correct.
“You’re right,” he said, pausing for thought. “We would be deviating from the plan. But the plan was always meant to be changeable. They did their best back on Earth, but they had no idea what we would end up dealing with. For all they knew, we might have had to land on an airless moon, in which case we’d be stuck in the habitat for a long time. They couldn’t know that we’d land on a world like this one, that’s almost perfect for supporting our kind of life, or that we’d find a place like Haven, which is almost perfect for us until we can terraform the planet.”
He looked around the others. “This is our decision. John has quite rightly pointed out we have options. The two main options as I see them are either we proceed according to the standard plan from Earth, or switch to a plan that sees us focus on developing Haven first and then starting on our families.”
Debate started at once, and David could see straightaway that there was not going to be a unanimous decision, with most supporting developing Haven and John and Nathalie seeming to oppose.
“I’m going to make a decision,” he said, holding up a hand. He looked at John and Nathalie. “That decision is to delegate deciding which option we take to John and Nathalie.”
They both looked surprised. Actually, everyone looked surprised at this announcement.
“They are impacted the most,” he said. “They have a baby on the way right now, and if we go down the early development path, it will impact Nathalie straightaway, and their child will be without the company of other children, maybe for several years. I think they should decide.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment, but David could see that they accepted this as being fair. John and Nathalie looked at each other, and then John spoke up. “Thanks mate, we appreciate this. Can we think about it?”
“Sure,” David replied. “Take as long as you need. In the meantime, we can get on with developing the gardens in the dome, and I think start on the river diversion project. That won’t be wasted no matter which way we go.”
***
David enjoyed the next two days immensely, as John and Nathalie pondered. He was at last able to turn his attention to the dome, and his secondary role as a horticulturalist, or as he preferred to think of himself, a farmer.
Josh and Nigel had been busy turning out plants from their stored tissues, and carefully he worked on planting to their landscape design from Earth. The primary purpose of the dome was to provide them with food; second of course was its role of conditioning their atmosphere by using plants to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. But the area was far larger than they needed for food production alone, so as well as planting more food crops he was also planting trees and shrubs. The end result would be a green paradise that would provide them with a touchstone to their sanity; humans can only take being cooped up in metal boxes for so long.
Grace came up behind him as he bent over their first crops, humming happily to himself as he noted that some of them were turning to seed.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she said with a smile. “I haven’t seen you so happy for a while.”
“Hakuna matata,” he replied with a grin. “For now I have no worries.”
Grace hugged him as he stood up. “So what are you planting?”
“Well, over here we have a full range of food crops going in. Cabbages, carrots, corn, beans, chilies, potatoes, onions, every herb you can think of, you name it, and we’re going to have it. Over here”, he indicated an area of greyish sand with little green dots growing in it, “trees, shrubs and flowers. And there,” he said, pointing near Central Park, as their meeting area had lately become known, “Big trees.”
“Hmmm,” Grace mused, thoughtfully.
“What?”
“Well, you know that we have the most sophisticated chem lab ever built, right?”
“Uh huh.”
“It can make just about anything, and can pull most of what it needs out of the air, water for oxygen and hydrogen, and carbon dioxide for carbon.”
“OK,” David said, not sure where this was going.
Grace smile. “Do you know what this world doesn’t have much of?”
David shook his head.
“Carbon. Oh, there’s CO2 in the air, but no bulk amounts of carbon. No coal, no organic matter. It would speed things up immensely if we had some. Imagine if we have to make steel with carbon we have to extract from the atmosphere. It would take forever.”
“So… what do you have in mind?” David asked, a suspicion forming in the back of his mind.
“How do you feel about burning some of your trees?” Grace asked sweetly.
David just looked at her. “They haven’t even grown yet!”
Grace smiled back at him. “You do want to develop Haven don’t you?”
David sighed, and then brightened. “I know. We could grow some bamboo. That grows really fast and develops woody stems. It would be great for charcoal!”
“Now you’re talking! Is there room in here?” she asked, looking around.
“Not here. Out there. There’s a whole planet we can use. And with all that CO2, it should grow really fast.”
Grace nodded, pleased. “So, you’re not just a pilot with a pretty face after all,” she teased.
***
Later that day they were all discussing the idea.
“This was to be one of our major decision points,” Nigel reminded them. “We were to assess the local biosphere first, and then decide whether we should release Earth-based organisms.”
David nodded with agreement. “Are we at the point where we can say this assessment is complete?”
Nigel and Josh looked at each other.
“We’ve found lots of micro-fossils. No living organisms as yet. But we haven’t explored the oceans at all.”
“Do you see any reason why we shouldn’t release land-based plants?”
There was a moment of silence, and then Josh spoke up.
“I don’t think so. We haven’t found any life at all; just evidence that it once existed. I don’t see a problem with a limited release, to harvest specific things that we need. I recommend waiting for a wide-spread release though, until we can do a planet-wide survey.”
“Agreed,” Nigel said. “I don’t see a problem with timber plantations, although you may find problems with lack of nutrients in the soil.”
“We’ll give it a try then,” David decided. “It doesn’t actually matter if it doesn’t grow that well, if all we want to do is burn it. Whatever we do next,” he said, looking at John and Nathalie, “It will be of benefit.”
“About that,” John spoke up, looking at Nathalie. “We think we should go ahead with developing Haven now. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up. I don’t know if we will ever be able to help Earth, but the quicker we can gear up to a technological society, the more likely that’ll be.”
David was relieved but tried hard not to show it. “You understand what that means for your child?”
“Yeah. She won’t have any friends for a while, and might always be a bit of an outsider because of that. We think she’ll be OK.”
There was a pause then David said, “Thanks. What does everyone else think?”
“Let’s go for it!” Josh said enthusiastically, slapping John on the back.
“Wait,” Grace said.
They all looked at her.
“Did you say you’re having a girl?”
Nathalie and John beamed proudly. “Yeah,” he said. “A little girl.”
Haven, Serendipity
May 18, 2109
Once the decision was made, it was like unleashing pent-up energy. They were all enthusiastic about doing something, and once the die had been cast they burst into action.
David took on the role of leader, project manager and chief foreman, and found he was working late into the nights just trying to keep his plans ahead of the enthusiastic work being poured into the project.
Their problem was to bootstrap industry from the small amount of supplies they’d brought with them. They needed to start a mining operation, and to do that safely they needed to relocate their reactor to a new site that was closer to their mines. To do that they needed to produce copper power cables; and to do that they needed steel to make the machines to make the cables and process their ore, as well of course make a road to the site. To make the steel they had to mine iron ore and make a mini steel mill, which is where they started.
“I know it’s a long haul,” David said, on day one. “So let’s keep the end result in mind but not be too concerned about how long it will take to get there; let’s just focus on the next thing we have to do, which is to make steel feedstock for the fabricators, right?”
“Yep,” John said. “The basics we need are iron ore, carbon and limestone. We’ve found some great magnetite over here,” he indicated a spot to their north, “which we can use directly as is as it contains over 70% iron. It’s close to the surface too, so not much digging needed. For carbon we’ll need to use charcoal, so we’ll need that bamboo sooner rather than later,” he said, looking at David.
“We’ve got some timber bamboo seedlings started. The cultivar we’ve selected grows really quickly in the right conditions. With any luck, we ought to be able to cut an early harvest to get started with in only a month.”
The others looked a little surprised at this and Nigel chipped in. “Bamboo does grow incredibly fast. With the high CO2 atmosphere here you’ll almost be able to watch it. Our biggest problem may actually being able to control it.”
“We’ve identified a place down by the lake where we’ll try the first plantation,” David concluded. “How long do you think it will take to gather the ores that we need?”
