by Nevil Shute
The pilot nodded and put the aircraft into a right hand turn around the plant at about a thousand feet, while Manny explained the lay-out to Keith; the logs coming down the river, the log pond, the jack ladder from the log pond to the mill, the drying kilns, the lumber stores along the railroad tracks. Then they had seen all that was to be seen from the air, and they came in to land softly on an open space reserved in the car park.
They spent two hours in the sawmill seeing the whole process as the logs four feet in diameter were sawn into planks and taken away for kiln-drying or stacking, while the offcuts were turned into pulpwood for newsprint. The Hansel debarker, ripping the bark off the logs by jets of water, interested Keith very much. The saws, both bullsaws and handsaws, were well within his experience though on a vastly larger scale than any he had seen before. He spent some time in the saw-sharpening shop talking to the head sawyer about set and cutting angles for the various types of wood to be cut, information that he stored away in his mind. The flying carriages, operated by four-inch roller chains running over great sprockets appalled him, but he did not say so at the time.
They lunched with the manager and the secretary at a table reserved for them in the canteen. No drinks were served, for the whole plant was dry. Emmanuel apologised to Keith for this omission. ‘We’re kind of strict on that,’ he said. ‘This is a company town. We’ve got most everything else that folks would want - a dance hall and a movie theatre and eight stores - but not a liquor shop. We find that liquor and a sawmill don’t go well together.’
‘Do you have many accidents?’ Keith asked. He had been shown a very comprehensive little first-aid room.
‘Not more than what’s average to the industry,’ Manny replied. ‘You get gangs felling the tall timber in the forests, or walking around on logs in the log pond, or dealing with quick-moving saws like what you saw - you’ll get more accidents than in the automotive industry, for example. We try and keep them down.’
‘There hasn’t been a fatality in this plant since it was set up,’ said the manager. ‘That’s seven years.’
‘That’s so,’ said Manny. ‘That’s partly due to Lou here. But he’s got a modern plant to help him. We had three at Viper Bend in the last year.’
Sol Hirzhorn leaned forward, and they all deferred to him. ‘Say, Mr Stewart,’ he said. ‘You’ve been around a bit. What do you think of safety in this plant, coming to it fresh? Now that you’ve seen it?’
Keith paused before answering, thinking over all that he had seen that morning. ‘I don’t think you could do much better with the saws,’ he said at last. ‘With big saws running at that speed, you’ll always get the bloke who gets careless as the years go by, and puts his hand in one. You can’t help that - except by cutting out the drink, as you do. The thing I didn’t like were all those chains.’
Emmanuel and Lou glanced at each other. The old man asked, ‘You mean the roller chains that work the carriages?’
‘That’s right. I saw that they were well lubricated. How do they get greased? You don’t keep stopping the plant?’
‘They get greased nights and midday when the plant’s stopped for dinner,’ said Lou, the manager. ‘They’ll have greasers working on them now. In between, a guy goes around with a slush-can and a brush upon a five-foot stick, and puts it on with that.’
‘Does that stick ever get caught up? Some of those chains were going thirty miles an hour.’
‘Sometimes. Not very often.’
‘Does the greaser ever get caught up with it?’
‘Not here,’ said Lou definitely. ‘Not in the seven years that I’ve been manager.’
Sol Hirzhorn said, ‘Say, Mr Stewart, do you know anything about Chuck Ferris? Ferris Hydraulics, in this mill?’
Keith faced him. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘I know that Mr Ferris has a contract he’s negotiating with you. I asked Mr Rockawin if he’d tell me what it was, in case I put my foot in it and said the wrong thing. But he wouldn’t tell me. He said it was your business.’
There was general laughter. Sol Hirzhorn said, ‘Good for Jim. Manny, would you be able to come back to Wauna this evening? I don’t think we’d lose anything by telling Mr Stewart what’s proposed, now that he’s seen the plant.’
‘Sure, Dad.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll call the office, and have them send the plans out to the house. They can call Rachel, too — tell her I’ll be late.’
They left in the helicopter after lunch and flew for twenty minutes eastward up the river. They came to the Eight Mile Cut, a timber camp, and put down on a level platform built of logs with a plank decking specially for the helicopter. They got into a truck with the young manager and were driven a mile or two through the devastated forest to where the felling was going on.
This was wholly strange to Keith; he could make no useful comment and he said so, though he found it full of interest. He watched a couple of Douglas firs about a hundred and fifty feet tall as they were felled, watched the branches being lopped off by men standing on the trunks working with axes. He tested the edge of an axe and found it as sharp as a razor. He watched the bulldozers pulling the logs down to the lake and rolling them in, to be made up into rafts by the boom-men and floated down the river to the log pond at the mill.
The work seemed to him to be excessively dangerous, but on enquiry he found that the Hirzhorns were not worried by accidents in the forest cuts. They said that the accident rate was lower than in the mills, possibly through the average age of the men being lower; most of them were unmarried anyway, so that accidents made less trouble. Keith thought that the monotony of work in the mills might have something to do with it. In factory work when men get thinking of other matters than the job in hand accidents are apt to happen, but out in the forest where no two jobs were ever quite alike men kept alive to the chance of a tree rolling over and crushing them.
They drove back to the helicopter in the truck and took off for home. They landed at the Seattle-Tacoma airport as cars on the main highway were beginning to put on their lights, changed into the Cessna waiting for them on the tarmac, and landed on the strip below the house at Wauna a quarter of an hour later. The car was there to meet them and take them the few hundred yards to the house, Sol Hirzhorn being forbidden to climb hills. An hour and twenty minutes after leaving the forest cut a hundred miles away they were seated with cups of tea and cookies before the fire in the great living-room at Wauna.
Julie had come back to Wauna from the head office in Tacoma in the car, and had brought with her a great packet of plans and specifications from Ferris Hydraulics, a file of correspondence, and a sheaf of photographs. She had laid these out upon the table in the middle of the room; she showed them to the men and retired to her own office. When they were warm and comfortable before the fire Sol Hirzhorn said, ‘I’d like you to know the way things are at the Flume River, Keith.’
‘I’d like to hear it, Mr Hirzhorn.’
The old man paused in thought. ‘It started over a year ago,’ he said. ‘I got an invite to attend a demonstration of rockets at this place Cape Canaveral in Florida, Thor and Atlas and things like that. Well, I don’t know anything about rockets or satellites or space vehicles, or what you call them, and not much interested either, but an invite like that don’t come very often and I was taking Sarah to Palm Beach, so I decided to go. I didn’t understand much of what I saw or what they told me either, but one thing did interest me. They had one of these things lying horizontal on the launching base while they serviced it and did things to it. Then they had to lift it up into the vertical position for fuelling and firing. It was eighty or ninety feet long, and they put it up vertical with two great hydraulic jacks, one on each side, all in next to no time. Those jacks must have been thirty feet long, the extension, I mean, and I never saw jacks go so fast.’ He paused. ‘Well, you know how it is. You know at the first sight it might be useful in the business but you don’t know what it is you’ve got in mind. So I asked the officer showing u
s around who made the jacks, and he said, Ferris Hydraulics.’ He paused again.
‘It wasn’t till the middle of the night I thought that if those jacks could push at that speed they could push our carriages in the mill just the same, ’n cut out every chain. I don’t suppose you ever saw a man caught up in a four-inch roller chain that runs over a sprocket, Mr Stewart?’
‘No,’ said Keith.
‘Well, you don’t want to, either. I got in touch with Ferris Hydraulics, and Chuck Ferris he came down with his engineers, and left them with us for a week. I guessed it would be best to try it out in the one mill for a start, and we picked on the Flume River. Well, what they proposed was that we didn’t stop at the carriages but put hydraulic motors on the saws as well, worked off the same hydraulic mains, from the same plant. Well, that’s attractive in some ways although it’s a big increase in the costs. I don’t care about high-voltage electric motors in a sawmill much more than the chains. Six hundred volts can kill a guy quite quick, and you take an eight-foot bull-saw, that’ll take close on two hundred horsepower. You get a saw break and hang up and things are apt to happen.’ Keith nodded. ‘Well, with the hydraulics they just put a sort of safety valve across the mains and no one’s likely to get hurt, no damage to the motor either. I don’t care about high-voltage current in the mill, any more than the chains.
‘Manny’s got the drawings and the specifications on the table there,’ he said. ‘I wondered if you’d care to take a look at them.’
‘I’d like to very much,’ said Keith. ‘I don’t know that I’d be able to help much, you know. It’s not as if I was a consulting engineer.’
‘No. But you’ve been around a bit. I’d appreciate it if you’d look the scheme over.’
Keith crossed to the table with Emmanuel and they started to discuss the scheme, while Sol Hirzhorn sat on in his chair before the fire. They started on the plan of the mill, then turned to the Ferris drawings and the specification. It was all straightforward enough to an engineering mind, a well prepared scheme, easily comprehensible. It was good, too; Keith Stewart liked the look of it. It was one which would remove most of the apprehensions which had troubled him that morning in the mill. It would certainly make the work safer.
‘What happens to the waste heat?’ he asked Emmanuel at last.
‘What’s that?’ asked the mill-owner.
Keith turned to the specification. ‘The power going into the hydraulic system is the brake horsepower of these diesel motors, the prime movers,’ he remarked. ‘Six thousand five hundred horsepower.’
‘That’s so.’
‘That’s the power going into the mill when everything’s going at full blast. Well, of course, nothing works at hundred per cent efficiency.’ Emmanuel nodded. ‘I don’t know what the efficiency of these hydraulic rams would be,’ said Keith thoughtfully. ‘The motors might be ninety per cent. Suppose we guess that as the figure for the whole mill — ten per cent power loss. That means that when the plant is going at full blast, six hundred and fifty horsepower has to be got rid of as waste heat.’
‘Seems a lot,’ said Emmanuel.
‘I don’t know that it is,’ said Keith reflectively. ‘Not in the scale of the whole job. I suppose it goes into the hydraulic fluid. I saw something about that.’ He turned over the pages of the specification. ‘Here it is. Maximum temperature of the fluid, 110°F.’
‘That’s what these intercoolers are for, I think,’ said Emmanuel. ‘They’ve got them stuck around behind each motor and each ram, with water from the river running through them. Here’s the drawing of the water mains and pump.’
‘I see.’ Keith took the drawing and studied it. ‘That’s all right. This is the drawing of the intercooler … In two sizes.’ He studied the dimensions. ‘It’s not very big.…’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Emmanuel.
Keith smiled. ‘Tell you the truth, I don’t know either.’ He sat in thought. ‘How hot does it get there at the mill?’ he asked. ‘Outside, I mean — on a fine day in summer?’
‘Oh, it gets quite hot,’ said Emmanuel. ‘The guys outside, they work in pants and singlet. Eighty degrees, I’d say — maybe eighty-five. It’s right down in the valley, so you don’t get much wind.’
‘That’d be the inlet temperature of the hydraulic fluid by the time it got from the power plant into the mill,’ said Keith thoughtfully. ‘It must go in at around about air temperature.’
‘I guess it would,’ said Manny.
Julie brought the tray of drinks into the room, and the two men crossed over to Sol Hirzhorn by the fire. ‘How did you make out?’ he asked.
‘I’d like to think about it just a little bit,’ Keith said. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know much about hydraulics, and they know just about everything there is to know. There are one or two things I don’t understand, but that’s probably my fault.’ He paused, and took a drink. ‘I’d like to read that specification through quietly after dinner, by myself.’
‘Do that,’ said Mr Hirzhorn. ‘I’ll be down in the workshop starting work on the gear wheels.’
‘Not after nine o’clock you won’t,’ said Julie firmly. ‘You’ve had quite a day.’
Keith settled down after dinner at the big table in the middle of the room, while the old man retired to his workshop and Emmanuel sat in a long chair before the fire smoking a cigar. He read the specification through twice and did a little figuring on the back of one of the drawings. At the end of it, when Julie went downstairs to flush Sol Hirzhorn from the workshop, Keith was as much in the dark as ever.
He got up as the old man came into the room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply, ‘but I still don’t understand these intercoolers. I’d say they were too small and they should be about three times the size. There’s almost certainly some factor here that I don’t understand.’
‘Could be,’ said Sol Hirzhorn briefly. He turned to his son. ‘Manny, how would you like to take a run up to Cincinnati with Mr Stewart, show him the hardware ’n talk to the engineers?’
‘When, Dad?’
‘Tomorrow, I guess.’
Emmanuel reflected for a moment. ‘I could do that,’ he said. ‘Go in the office first and catch the United plane midday, Flight 183, thirteen zero five. Gets in around nine o’clock their time, sleep in the hotel ’n see them in the morning. Back here next night. We could do that if you like, Dad.’
‘I’d be kind of happier, now this has been raised,’ the old man said. ‘If we don’t get it cleared up we might be worrying about it all the time.’ He turned to Keith. ‘Could you do that for us?’ he asked. ‘It seems asking rather a lot.’
‘I’d be very pleased, Mr Hirzhorn,’ said Keith. He smiled. ‘I’d be very glad of the chance of walking through the Ferris works.’
Sol Hirzhorn turned to Julie. ‘Better call United now and make the reservations. Make them for the return flight too.’
‘Okay, Mr Hirzhorn.’
The organisation went smoothly into effortless action. Keith spent the next morning in the workshop going over all the details of the clock with Sol Hirzhorn. At twelve-thirty the Cessna was waiting on the airstrip to take him across the water to the airport. At twelve-fifty the pilot escorted him to the booking hall and handed him over to Emmanuel. Ten minutes later he was sitting in the D.C.7, and at nine-thirty that night he was in his bedroom at the hotel in Cincinnati over two thousand miles from Wauna.
He had a morning of absorbing interest in the Ferris plant next day, and finished up with considerable admiration for the design and manufacture of the hydraulic motors. The morning ended with an office conference presided over by Chuck Ferris, a small, dynamic red-haired man that Keith had no difficulty in recognising as Dawn’s father. The chief engineer was present with one of his aides, a Mr Monnington.
Keith said he didn’t quite understand the intercoolers. ‘That’s all right,’ said the chief engineer patiently. ‘The cold river water comes in here from the main, picks up heat, and comes out
here, and back into the river. The oil comes in here, and goes out here, a whole lot cooler.’
Keith said he understood that. ‘What puzzles me is the heat transfer balance,’ he said. ‘I take it that the hydraulic fluid goes into the intercooler at a hundred and ten degrees? That’s the maximum temperature you work at?’
‘That’s so,’ said the chief engineer. ‘In the case of the biggest motors that would be the outgoing temperature.’
‘And it goes into the power generator about eighty degrees?’
‘More or less.’
Keith stared at the drawing, still puzzled. ‘Well, what’s the temperature rise in the cooling water, then?’
The chief engineer glanced at his aide. Mr Monnington said, ‘Fifty degrees. Fifty-five under extreme conditions.’
Puzzled, Keith said, ‘It can’t go higher than the temperature of the oil, or it couldn’t do any cooling. What’s the inlet temperature of the water?’
‘Fifty degrees,’ said Mr Monnington. Emmanuel stirred, but left the talking to Keith.
‘That seems on the cold side for summer temperature,’ said Keith.
‘It’s general in these rivers,’ said the engineer. ‘Maybe you don’t get the same conditions in England. This is snow water, made by melting the eternal snows upon the Glacier Peak.’
Emmanuel leaned forward on the table. ‘That’s baloney,’ he said candidly. ‘Flume River doesn’t rise from Glacier Peak. Flume River rises in the Troublesome Mountain, not much higher than five thousand feet. All the snow’s gone from Troublesome by the end of April, most years.’
He paused, and then he said, ‘Tell you sump’n. I went fishing up the Flume two years ago, in August, ten or fifteen miles above the Eight Mile Cut. Trout fishing. We didn’t catch anything because the water was too hot, the fish wouldn’t stir. So there was only one thing to be done, see? We stripped off, ’n went in for a swim. Real warm it was — I stayed in half an hour or more. I guess the water in that river, in the Flume, the one we’re talking of — I guess it was seventy-five degrees or more, that day.’