[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Thirty or forty swimmers, suited and helmeted like ourselves, drifted a few
feet from the control wall, all their attention focused on it. This was a
little surprising. I would have expected fewer operators on a board of this
size. If they were all necessary for manual control, it was another mark
against the general level of technical competence here, like the sharp buckle.
I hoped that -poor coordination on their part would merely result in nuisance
rather than catastrophe. No doubt there were fail-safe breakers in the
electric distribution net and some sort of emergency bleed-offs here and there
in the fluid lines, but even so that crowd of operators gave a certain
primitive air to the whole thing. I watched thoughtfully.
The ones who had come in with us looked with as much interest as I felt; I got
the impression that they hadn't been here before either. Well, that was quite
possible. The whole population could hardly be composed of power engineers.
Page 52
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
It added to the mystery, though, because I knew that Bert wasn't one either.
He had a general engineering background like my own, which of course you need
to be any good at tracking down power waste. Why should he have authority
around here?
He turned and made a couple of gestures at our escort. Then he wrote me a
message.
'Don't get close enough to distract any of these people. More than half of
them are trainees.' That put a slightly better light on the situation.
'You take your education here seriously,' I answered.
'You bet we do. You'll see why, soon. Swim around as much as you want and look
at what you want 
you know enough so I don't have to watch you like these others. Just don't get
in front of an operator.'
I nodded. For the next half hour I did just as he had written, examining the
entire board in as much detail as I could. The arrangement made more and more
sense as time went on. One very surprising reason for this was that the dials
and control knobs were marked in perfectly ordinary numbers. I hadn't expected
that, after seeing what seemed to pass for writing down here.
The numbers were alone, unfortunately - no units such as volts or megabars
were given. In spite of this, the position of each instrument on the diagram
which formed the board usually gave a pretty good clue to its purpose. In less
than an hour I felt I understood the system pretty well.
Ten shafts led down to the heat absorbers at the source -presumably a magma
pocket. The details of the absorbers themselves weren't obvious from the
board, but I knew enough about volcanic installations to guess. I'd done a
waste investigation in Java once. The working fluid was water; the still which
took in sea water and desalted it, the electrolysis units which got alkali
metals from the recovered salts, and the ion injection feeds were all obvious
on the board.
The MHD converters were also ten in number, but all exhausted into a common
condenser which appeared to be cooled by outside sea water. It did not serve
as a preheater for the still which seemed
, wasteful to me. Without units on the gauges I couldn't be sure of the net
power developed, but it seemed obvious that it had to be in megawatts at
least.
I hadn't noticed the sound of which Bert had warned, but perhaps that was
because of the suit. I took a chance and loosened slightly one of the cuffs
between sleeve and glove. There was sound, a heavy drone like a vast organ
pipe and no doubt due to the same physical cause. It wasn't painful, but I
could tell that removing the protecting suit entirely might be unwise. I
wondered how close we actually were to the steam tunnels which must be the
source of the hum. Even more, I wondered about their maintenance, but I had to
do without details for the time being.
The people who had come with Bert and me had stayed farther from the board,
presumably because of his orders. They watched a while what was going on, but
gradually began talking to each other, judging by their hand motions. They
rather reminded me of school children who have lost interest in watching the
film. Once again I was reminded of the oddness in Bert's being able to give
orders, or even act as a
guide.
He himself, after the first few minutes, paid no attention to the people who
had come with us. He had waved to me in a gesture which I had interpreted as
meaning that he'd be back later and swam out of sight. I assumed he would be
and kept on with my inspection of the board.
For a good deal of the rest of the hour, the girl and her companions followed
me around, though without getting as close to board and operators as I did.
Page 53
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
They seemed to be more interested in me than in the engineering. I considered
this understandable in the case of the girl and supposed the men were just
staying with her.
I finally decided that I had made all I could of the board and began to wonder
where Bert had gone.
There seemed no way to ask; he had taken the writing pad with him, and anyway
the futility of that method had been established. If there had been among my
satellites someone not present at the earlier experiment, I might have been
tempted to try again anyway, but as it was the absence of writing gear was
more of a challenge than a nuisance. This seemed to be a good time to start
learning the local gesture language.
I swam away from the control panel to the farther wall, the others following,
and began what I hoped would be a language lesson by the method standard in
fiction. I pointed to things, and tried to get the others to use their
gesture-words for them.
To say that it went badly is understating. It went so badly that I wasn't even
sure whether they had grasped what I wanted by the time Bert came back. They
had made lots of hand, arm, and ringer motions, both at me and at each other,
but I saw no way of telling whether any of them were the names of things I
pointed at, or symbols for the verbs I acted out. Probably I was missing a lot
of the subtle motions and attitudes anyway, but I simply never detected a
pattern repeated often enough to be learned. It was as frustrating an
experience as I'd had since - well, for a few hours, anyway. Maybe a day or
more. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]