Paul Chartrain thus intended to telephone Timbuktu, as he was accustomed to do almost every day, by virtue of his functions as a liaison officer.
The cabin did not resemble the booths employed for telephones in the twentieth century; it as a pleasant little room illuminated by a soft pink light. It had no window but one of the walls was coated from floor to ceiling with a milky substance reminiscent of porcelain.
The young engineer sat down in a comfortable armchair facing that screen, and waited.
A woman’s voice—that of the telephone operator—became audible.
“May I connect you?”
“Yes, please do.”
There was a slight crackle, and the milky wall in front of Chartrain was illuminated, seeming to vanish, allowing another small room similar to the first to appear, which prolonged it exactly, making the room seem twice as large.
A young woman was sitting there facing Chartrain. It was Claire Nolleau, dressed in white, as is appropriate in the tropics.
The engineer had the impression of really being in the presence of his colleague, who was speaking to him from Timbuktu. A novice having such a conversation for the first time would have been tempted to get up in order to go to meet the other, but he would have bumped into the wall that had apparently vanished.
In any case, Chartrain’s gaze did not perceive the same illumination in the part of the room in which he was sitting and the one where his correspondent was seated. Whereas he was bathed in a pink half-light, Claire Nolleau was subject to an intense radiation, whose brightness was a trifle excessive.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the cable that put the station at the Franz-Josef fjord in communication with that Timbuktu station, the young woman had an inverse impression.
In fact, in order for the correspondents at the opposite ends of the line to have a clear view of their interlocutors, it was necessary not to be blinded by the light to which they were exposed themselves. The inventors of the television had had a difficult problem to solve in that regard; they had found an elegant solution.
The photoelectric cells that collected the image of each correspondent on departure were stimulated, not by white light, but by infra-red light, devoid of action on the retina. On arrival, the cells corresponding with those of the departure cabin, were illuminated by white light. The reflection of the screen nevertheless spread a certain brightness in the space where, before it was illuminated, only a soft pink light had reigned.
Since they had met in Paris, Paul and Claire had both looked forward impatiently to these conversations, which, limited as they were to matters of service, furnished them with the opportunity to talk to one another and see one another again. They had communicated once between Liverpool and Algiers, and a second time between Liverpool and Timbuktu; this conversation between the Franz-Josef fjord and Timbuktu was the third since their separation.
In spite of the pleasure they obtained from meeting like this, at a distance, they did not waste time in greetings and testaments of sympathy; that was not the custom of twenty-third century.
“I can confirm,” the young woman declared, “that our tropical base will be completely equipped and ready to function one month from now.”
“We hope to be ready ourselves by that date. The mounting of the ice-dividers in the sixty-kilometer frontal tunnel has begun.”
“Don’t you fear that a month might not be enough to complete such a task?”
“No. We already have two hundred and fifty machines in operation. In two days we’ll have a thousand. The whole framework is in place. In a month, we’ll have finished placing the wires and the sections of masonry, constructed with fast-drying cement, will be solid enough for the protective wall on the side of the glacier to be demolished. Let’s hope that there isn’t any mishap between now and then. If there were an error in the mounting of the line or a flaw in the cables, and the current didn’t flow, the pressure of the ice in the frontal gallery might end up overcoming the resistance of the great divider.”
“That won’t happen. The cables have been checked too carefully. By the way, Chartrain, I have to notify you of an incident. You need to inform Professor Gainsworth in order that precautions can be taken in your sector.
“A few days ago, it was observed here that a cable had been sabotaged near its extremity, in a hall of the thermic base, at the point where it emerges from its sheath in order to spread out into the heating apparatus. A series of five elements had been cut with an oxyhydric torch, which naturally rendered the cable unusable. The gravest aspect is that an attempt had been made to conceal the damage with a coating of the same color as the insulating envelope protecting the wires.
“The attention of a watchman was attracted by a black streak that had dripped on to the floor from the cable when the saboteur had melted the elements and their enveloped with his torch.
“It was thought that it was a matter of an act of vengeance by a worker. The damage was repaired and the incident was considered as a warning to have surveillance increased. When I arrived here two days ago, precautionary measures had been taken so that no one could get near the bare cables without any reason of service. No further sabotage occurred.
“However, as the installation of the heat accumulators for the first cable had been completed, a trial was carried out yesterday. The hall had been evacuated the previous evening, as usual, but the ventilation panels were left open, because it was not yet known whether the trial would take place yesterday or today. The order to close the panels was given by Hurlaut only an hour later. The operation, as you know, is completely mechanized. The engineer installed in the control booth lowers a lever; the panels, activated by hooks, slide in their frames and block al the openings.”
Chartrain was familiar with the disposition of the halls of solar heat concentration as they had been installed at the thermic base of the Great Current. It was a matter of vast glasshouses whose glazed surface received the sun’s rays from sunrise to sunset. The extent of that surface was calculated to admit solar radiation equivalent to an average of about forty-five million kilowatts, which represented, in such a climate, about five hectares, a rectangle of five hundred meters by a hundred. There were a thousand similar glasshouses, one for each cable, and their ensemble covered a vast extent of desert sixty kilometers across and a kilometer and a half deep, comprising ten rows of a hundred glazed halls.
The anticipated power of forty-five million kilowatts per cable corresponded to a yield of ten million kilowatts, taking into account losses along the line and resistance, which gave for the thousand cables a total motive force of ten billion kilowatts or—given that one horsepower is equivalent to seven hundred and thirty-six watts—more than thirteen million horsepower, twice the hydraulic power of France.
The whole difficulty of the problem consisted of storing and retaining the heat that the sun transmitted through the glass by radiation. It is well-known that ordinary glass possesses the property of allowing luminous rays to pass through while being almost impermeable to the invisible rays that constitute so-called black heat. The light penetrates, is degraded on contact with objects, into calorific radiation that no longer reemerges. That is a phenomenon well-known to horticulturalists, who make use, in consequence, of greenhouses or, more simply, frames with glass tops.
In the twenty-third century, the engineers of the Great Current had special glass at their disposal whose diathermal power—which is to say, its permeability to heat—was very nearly zero. The windows of the halls of thermal concentration were made with that kind of glass and coated with a cellulose-derived layer of a substance analogous to collodion, perfectly transparent but elastic and unbreakable. Such armored windows were capable of resisting extremely violent impacts. If they were submitted to too strong a pressure, one could succeed in breaking the glass, but not the window; it cracked and was deformed, but the elastic material, almost impossible to break, continued to prevent it from fracturing.
The entire framework, the b
asal walls and the doors of the hall were perfectly insulated by antithermic coatings. Thus, when the ventilation panels were closed, all the calories transmitted by the sun remained enclosed within the glass and the temperature rose indefinitely.
In order further to ensure the accumulation of the heat, large vats containing a kind of mineral oil endowed with a great capacity for calorific absorption were disposed under the windows.
The ten thousand elements composing the cable ending in the hall spread out in groups of a thousand to their extremities in broad thin sheets, insulated with mica, a poor conductor of electricity but diathermal, which, some arranged on top of one another and others alongside one another, were plunged into the vats.
The absorbent liquid rose during the day to a temperature in the vicinity of five hundred degrees and its mass was calculated to retain such a reserve of heat that its temperature could not drop more than a hundred degrees during the night, even if the Great Current were functioning at full yield.
The ten groups of a thousand elements penetrated into their thermic hall on the long side of the rectangle, over a front of five hundred meters, with appropriately calculated intermediate distances. The thousand elements of each group were then separated from one another and divided between a series of vats aligned in a hundred-meter row. There were two hundred vats in all under the glass, each containing fifty elements. To avoid inequalities of temperature between one vast and another, communication pipes and a system of pumps maintained the continual circulation of the thermic liquid.
As it would be impossible, naturally for humans to live in such an environment, where the temperature of an oven reigned, and the hall could only be allowed to cool down, by interrupting the current, in very rare circumstances, the service of supervision, maintenance and repair, and the periodic renewal if the thermic baths, had to be assumed by automata endowed with organs of television and teleaudition, and powered by electricity, which were piloted from special cabins outside.
Now, Claire Nolleau related that a check had been carried out to verify the calorific absorption capacity of a completely-equipped hall, with full vats.
As it was simply a matter of measuring temperatures, indications of which were transmitted electrically to the post of the chief engineer of the group, it had not been thought necessary to employ the automata.
The gist of the young woman’s story was that a man, a stranger to the personnel of the Great Current, had either found a means of introducing himself into the hall while work was still going on, and had remained hidden after the departure of the workers, or had got in via one of the ventilation panels while they were still open.
That unknown individual had not been aware of the experiment that was about to be carried out. He had, therefore, no suspicion of the danger to which he was exposing himself by allowing himself to be enclosed in a space that was about to undergo a rise in temperature to five hundred degrees.
He had repeated the act of sabotage that had been observed a few days earlier, but this time, making use of the time available to him during the night, he had put a large number of elements out of commission. He had not been disturbed; all the doors were closed, solidly sealed by electric bolts, and no one had suspected that there was a man in the hall.
Perhaps the saboteur had intended to get out again through one of the open panels, by repeating the acrobatic exercise that he had been obliged to execute to get in. He had been unable to do to because, an hour after the workers had left, the engineer on duty had activated the hooks of the glazed panels from his control both, which had engaged with their frames, hermetically sealed.
When he had observed that he was a prisoner, he had probably not been anxious to begin with. He had calmly finished his criminal work. Doubtless he hoped to pass unobserved among the workers in the morning when work resumed; he would then take advantage of the first opportunity to escape. But the sun had risen and its rays had immediately commenced pouring their heat into the immense glazed gallery.
The engineer who was observing the temperature indicators from his post, had recorded sixty degrees after only a hour. Twenty minutes later, the temperature surpassed eighty degrees. One can imagine the panic that gripped the malefactor when he felt the heat rise to that point. He could not have been very well informed regarding the conditions in which the Great Current functioned, and perhaps he thought at first that the temperature would not exceed a level compatible with life. He might have thought that the panels would be reopened, or that the workers would come to resume their work.
In the end, sensing congestion, he had tried desperately to escape from the oven in which he had imprudently allowed himself to be trapped. He had tried to force a door, and even tried to make use for that purpose of his oxyhydric torch; the traces of that attempt were discovered subsequently. But as the heat had risen rapidly and he must have lost hope of concluding the operation, he had tried to escape another way,. If he called for help, nobody heard him.
His strength must already have been abandoning him. He climbed up to the height of the first glazed panel at the top of the basal wall, and tried to break the glass. He only succeeded in cracking it and causing it to bulge externally. He fell before having broken it, overcome by the heat.
The experiment was not interrupted until the following morning at dawn. It had extended over twenty-four hours and it had been observed, with satisfaction, that the temperature of the hall, after having risen to five hundred degrees, as anticipated, had not fallen during the night, as the Great Current was not yet functioning, by more than five degrees. The absorption was excellent, the insulation perfect. The expectations of the constructors had been realized.
The panels were then reopened at sunrise in order to allow the temperature to fall, but as the vats retained a considerable degree of heat, it would probably have been necessary to wait until the following morning before being able to go into the hall.
“As I was about to telephone you,” Claire Nolleau said, “the temperature between the vats, in the bright sunlight, was still more than a hundred and fifty degrees in spite of the air currents blowing through the open panels, but this morning, a watchman making an external tour of the hall noticed the deformation of the window that someone had tried to break from inside. He alerted his chief, who immediately decided to send an automaton to explore the hall.”
The automaton to which the young woman was alluding was essentially comprised of a small vehicle mounted on pneumatic tires, slender enough to circulate easily through the walkways between the cable-beams. The body of the vehicle enclosed the engine and steering apparatus. A kind of chimney, able to tilt, elongate and retract at will, bore the artificial eye of a television apparatus at its extremity, capable of orientation in any direction. Microphones charged with transmitting sound were arranged along the four sides of the parallelepiped-shaped body. Two pairs of articulated arms of unequal length, the first pair measuring a meter and the second two meters, constituted its instruments of labor. Those arms were terminated by pincers or artificial hands with six branches or fingers, opposed in two groups of three. Such arms, equipped with flexible pincers, were adapted to all kinds of work and the usage of all kinds of instruments.
While waiting for the Great Current to become active, motive force was furnished, as for all the installations of the base, by the hydroelectric factories of the Niger. The current was transmitted by a cable, which markers guided from place to place, and which rolled up on a drum or unrolled, according to whether the machine was approaching or drawing away from its point of departure. The automaton could thus travel along the five-hundred meter transversal path reserved at the extremity of the cross-beams and, departing from that base, along any of the eleven hundred-meter longitudinal paths to the right and left of the hall between the cross-beams. Thus, by going back and forth eleven times across the entire length of the hall, moving successively along each of the longitudinal pathways, the machine could explore the entire hall and reach any point at which
some maneuver or repair was necessary.
“Set in motion,” Claire Nolleau went on, “the automaton discovered the cadaver of a man underneath the damaged window, literally cooked during his sojourn in the overheated atmosphere of the hall. The engineer realized what had happened. It’s been decided to wait until tomorrow, when the hall will have cooled down sufficiently, to carry out more precise observations and carry out the repairs, which, at present, aren’t urgent. The body has been left where it was found in order not to trouble the investigations of the police.”
When he came out of the telephonic cabin, Paul Chartrain ran to see Professor Chartrain in order to inform him of Claire Nolleau’s communication.
The chief of the Great Current’s polar base was indignant. “Can it be that in our epoch there are still individuals both criminal enough and stupid enough to commit such acts of sabotage? The miscreant has been severely punished. Let’s hope that his example will discourage those who might be tempted to imitate him.”
“The repairs won’t take long,” Chartrain observed. “The saboteur might have been able to do much more harm if, for example, he’d attacked the line in the middle of the desert.”
“But that would have been much more difficult,” Gainsworth observed. “If he’d got off a train at one of the Transsaharan stations, his arrival wouldn’t have escaped the vigilance of the guards of the line. He wouldn’t have been able to operate alone, and the presence of several shady individuals carrying the equipment, necessarily bulky, that they’d need to attack the cables, would inevitably have awakened suspicion. If the malefactors had come by road in an automobile, their presence would similarly have been noticed. On the other hand, going a long way into the desert isn’t without danger. Finally, surveillance is very active; it’s carried out by patrols in the air and on the road, and by night, searchlights are employed.
An International Mission to the Moon Page 16