Pathspace

by Matthew Kennedy

  Chapter 73

  Jeffrey: “Gathering fuel in vacant lots”

  It was already getting hot by the time he got there. Wiping sweat off his brow with his left hand, the Runt lifted his right to return the salute. “How's it going, Jenkins?”

  The sentry shrugged. “All quiet here on the perimeter, sir.”

  The Runt sat there in his saddle, pondering. “No incursion attempts at all from Rado?” This troubled him. Surely Rado knew from its spies what was being done here. So why hadn't they tried something...at least a little sabotage?

  Jenkins shook his head. “Maybe the savages don't know what's going on.”

  Now it was Jeffrey's turn to shake his head. “More likely, they're too busy trying to build up their defenses. Carry on, Private.”

  As he rode past the sentry the Runt frowned. What were they waiting for? If they could pop down to break a prisoner out of jail in the heart of enemy territory, why wouldn't Rado be making efforts to slow down the fuel production?

  Ahead of him he could see the remains of an old derrick lying in the weeds. Idly, he wondered if it had toppled from rusted supports, or if the Honcho had ordered it pulled or cut off the ancient well to make it easier to get at the well itself. Part of him was saddened at the destruction of a relic, but then , he reflected, it would not go to waste. No doubt the Honcho or his advisers already had plans to reuse all of that steel.

  Up ahead he could now see the well itself. A complicated contraption was welded onto the wellhead, with a hose leading to a off to a newly-built structure off to one side. As he watched, two men hauled on a metal wheel. He was puzzled by this only for a moment, and then he realized that it must be an oversized metal valve of some sort. When they seemed to be finished with what they were doing, he rode up to the two men, who saluted.

  “I don't mean to interrupt you,” he said, returning the salutes, “but tell me, what is it you were doing?”

  The taller of the two answered him. “Shutting off the flow, sir.”

  His brow wrinkled. “Why would you want to shut it off?”

  “Well, sir, the refinery can only take so much at a time.” The man glanced to the building the hose led to. “So we fill the boiler every few hours and then shut it off. Made a hell of a mess the first time, before we learned that.”

  So that was what the big valve was for. With the swizzles in place in the well itself, there was no way to get to them to turn them on or off. In the apartment buildings some of them had come from, they had been used to fill roof tanks. The weight of the water pressing down from the filled roof tanks would balance the upward thrust of the water and stop the flow. When someone took a bath or otherwise used some of the water in the tanks, the down ward pressure would be reduced, allowing the swizzles to push water up into the tanks until they had enough water-weight to stop the inflow again.

  But the system developed by the ancients would not work here, he realized. The oil sucked out of the ground filled a tank for boiling, and the tank was at ground level. There wasn't enough pressure pushing back on the swizzles to stop the outflow from the well. So the crude but effective solution was a mechanical valve on top of the well to shut off the flow.

  He supposed the Honcho could have emulated the roof-tank design, by building a tower and putting the boiling vessel up at the top. But it would have required more materials and, more to the point, more time to do so. And giving Rado more time to prepare for the inevitable invasion would not be a good idea.

  He rode over to the distillation building and dismounted, handing the reins to the second sentry at the door before passing inside. “Who's in charge?” he asked the man, not caring if he sounded ignorant for not knowing this already.”

  “Tomlinson's the chief engineer, sir. Captain Tomlinson.”

  He pulled open the door an stepped in. The first thing he noticed was that the air in the place stank of oil. In seconds he was feeling greasy just moving around in it.

  Spotting a man at a desk giving direction to a couple of others, he strode up to him. “Captain Tomlinson?”

  The man looked up, annoyed at the interruption. “What?” One of the men whispered in his ear. “Oh, it's you,” he grunted, and made a tired salute. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  He had been wondering why his father had sent him to get a progress report when there were plenty of soldiers who could have relayed the information. Now, however, he realized that there was a reason for it: he needed to be recognized by the troops. And for that they needed to meet him. It was said that the Ancients had something called a photograph that could capture an image, so that one's face could be distributed to the lower ranks instead of meeting them personally. But evidently the technology had been too complex to survive the Fall.

  “I'm here for a progress report,” he said. He glanced down at the paper spread out on the desk top. “What's this?”

  “Plans for a bigger refinery. What we have so far is working, sort of. But to fuel anything more than a short action, we're going to need a lot more gasoline and diesel than this setup can crack off.”

  That made sense. “But won't you need more swizzles and everflames than we have, to be able to build a bigger one?”

  “Of course,” Tomlinson grunted. “But with any luck we'll capture more of them when we invade Rado.”

  “Right.” Now he felt foolish. Naturally the Honcho would have planned on expanding the fuel production using artifacts from the captured territories as the Empire expanded. Before he asked another foolish question, Jeffrey gazed about him.

  The interior of the building was all one huge room, dominated by an enormous metal tank, supported by massive legs, under which a grid of everflames nestled in a metal tray. The flames were all off at the moment. On top of the boiler he saw piping leading off to the condenser. Another pipe stuck out of the bottom of the condenser, with a spigot on the end of it. As he watched, a couple of men turned off the spigot and screwed a cap on a tank resting on a wagon. Then they pulled open a large double door and waved at the wagon's driver, who flicked the reins and pulled out of the building. The two men then closed the double doors, trotted across the floor to another set of double doors, and hauled them open. Another tank-carrying wagon rolled in, its horses snorting as they muscled the weight of all that iron into the building and around a U-shaped path that ended up beside the condenser. There the driver halted.

  Jeffrey blinked. Even his eyelids felt greasy. “Why does it stink so much of oil in here, Captain? Do you have leaks?”

  Tomlinson grinned humorlessly. “Absolutely, sir.” He pointed to the top of the boiler.

  Squinting, Jeffrey could see steam escaping from a valve. “What's that for?”

  “Well, sir, naturally, when we are filling the empty boiler, it compresses the air inside. Have to let it out, or the pressure could build up and bust the boiler. It's not thick metal, not like the Ancients used to have, so we have to go easy on it. We close the pressure relief valve when we're cracking, of course.”

  “Where does the steam come from?”

  “Some of it's water mixed in with the oil. The boiler is still warm from the last distillation run, and water boils at a lower temperature than the fractions we want, so we vent it.”

  “I think I understand,” said Jeffrey, who didn't, not completely. “But why couldn't you pipe the relief valve out through the roof, or a side wall, and avoid stinking up the place? Isn't it dangerous, letting oil vapor leak out when you're going to light the everflames again soon?”

  Tomlinson folded up the plans and shoved them in a drawer. “In answer to your first question, I plan to, but as you can see we've used a lot of pipe, and the vent is a lower priority.” He paused to scratch his neck. “In answer to the second question, no, it's not all that dangerous. Crude oil, straight out of the ground, doesn't evaporate very fast, and is hard to ignite. It stinks, but there's not much chance of a fire or an explosion.” He glanced at Jeffrey. “I know, I know, it's a crude system, at the m
oment. We'll do better with the next refinery. But we're getting results. So far the gas and diesel is not as pure as we'd like, but good enough to be usable.”

  “It looks to me like you lose a lot of time shutting down to refill the boiler,” the Runt commented. “Couldn't you change the design to let you constantly pipe in oil while you're boiling off the gasoline?”

  Tomlinson shrugged. “We could. But we'd still have to shut it down every time we fill up a wagon tank from the condenser.”

  “Why?”

  Instead of answering, Tomlinson led him over to the spigot at the end of the pipe projecting from the condenser. He held his hand under the spigot and caught the last few drops leaking out of it in his hand. “Look,” he said, holding the hand palm up in front of Jeffrey.

  The palm was wet with what looked like water. But as Jeffrey watched, the wetness evaporated in less than a minute.

  “Gasoline's not like crude oil,” the engineer informed him. “It evaporates pretty fast at room temperature, and when the vapor mixes with air, the combination is explosive. That's how the old engines of the Ancients worked. Lots of little explosions, over and over, inside the pistons. Pushing rods that drive the crankshaft.” He paused to take a breath. “If we had gasoline vapor in the air in here and turned on the everflames, well, we'd have problem.”

  “I see.” Jeffrey thought about it. “But how did the Ancients solve that problem?”

  Tomlinson sighed. “They had much better designs, and machines to control the machines. From the books I've seen, their refineries were better than we're likely to see in my lifetime. Having electricity to work with instead of just manual wheel valves made everything easier to monitor and control. But don't you worry, sir. We're getting the job done.”

  The Runt nodded. “Looks like you are, Captain. Is there anything we can do to help you at this stage of your operations?”

  The engineer considered the question. “Well,” he said, finally, “we only began to fill the wagons day before yesterday. So far we can only fill two wagon tanks a day, so we haven't run out of wagons yet, but getting them to Abilene and back takes time, so we'll be needing more wagons soon. And more guards to go with them.”

  Jeffrey frowned. “Why didn't you set up closer to Abilene? Or just store the gas here until we have enough?”

  “Good questions. I'm told the wells here were the easiest to use. And considering how explosive gasoline is if it leaks...it's better to store it in the vehicles themselves, in Abilene. Or in the fuel tanks they have there, that are better than anything we could build ourselves.”

  “Sorry to be so full of questions,” Jeffrey said. “But if you know my father, then you know he's going to ask me the same things when I give my report.”

  The Captain gave him a sympathetic half-smile. “Well you can tell him we've had a few problems, but with a little patience, we'll get it done.”

  Jeffrey sighed. “My father,” he said, “is not a patient man.”