Pressure Man

by Zach Hughes

  He practiced self-control. He picked up Art’s notes on a new alloy and studied them, and then he was into it, going over J.J.’s specs for a ship which would be impossible to build. They wanted a five-hundred-yard monster with a cargo hold taking up four-fifths of her volume.

  “What the hell are we going to do?” he exploded, when he first saw the specs. “Carry the bogie home in her belly?”

  “Is that a bad idea?” J. J. asked.

  “You’re compounding the problems,” Dom protested. “You’re giving me an impossibility on top of an improbability. How can I build a pressure hull with nothing inside but a huge empty space?”

  “You can build as many bulkheads as needed,” J.J. said.

  “Not if you’re going to carry the bogie in the hold,” he said.

  “Dom, we’ve got to make everyone think she’s nothing but a giant tanker,” J.J. said.

  “To carry water to Mars?”

  “To carry water to Mars. To carry phosphates back. She’s too big to be built in secret. We’ve got to have the backing of powerful men, even if we keep her construction secret from the public. Can you see the senator from New Mexico buying the bogie-on-Jupe idea? Water to Mars he can understand. Even the most rabid antispacers are already half convinced of her economic value, because she can multiply the cargo tonnage between here and Mars.”

  “But you can’t pressurize that much empty hull space,” Dom said. “She’ll have to be slim. Just about enough space inside the thick hull for a man to walk upright. The smaller and tighter she is the easier it will be to build her to resist pressure.”

  “She has to be a tanker.”

  “A tanker or nothing?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “That’s about the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,” Dom said.

  “I admit that,” J.J. said. “But she was sold to the movers and shakers as a tanker. If she can’t be built, then we’ll just sit here twiddling our thumbs and watch the whole space program go down the starving throats of the breeding billions in Asia and Africa.”

  Dom started to tell him what he could do with his starving billions, but instead he went back to his office, had a drink, and went back to the specs. In the next few days he developed a sore neck from shaking his head in frustration.

  Building a pressure hull was, in principal, a simple matter. Man had been building them for a long time for use in the ocean. In the first of the twentieth-century wars, German pressure hulls, submarines, had almost won a war for a tiny country in central Europe, and the feat was repeated in the second of the wars. Following that, the art of building pressure hulls was refined for submarines designed to travel fast and deep and launch nuclear weapons. The Polaris submarine program, begun in the 1960s, was tied in closely to advances in space. To enable submarines to cruise submerged for long periods, new techniques of communication were developed using ultra-low-frequency transmitters whose signals could be detected underwater. Refinements of those techniques would be used to try to communicate from the dense atmosphere of Jupiter. Moreover, much of the guidance work which was done during the Polaris program was applicable to space navigation. The jump from Polaris to space was a small one.

  There were differences between designing a hull for underwater use and for use in open space, but there were also similarities. An underwater hull faces uniform pressure around the entire hull. Thus, it is simple to calculate the exact hydrodynamic load for any portion of the hull. Balance hydrodynamic load against the need for compression inside the hull, and you come up with figures for correct proportioning of the structural elements and the required thicknesses of various parts.

  Dom Gordon’s pressure hull, which had worked and was still working in experiments and exploration in ocean depths of thirty-five thousand feet, was, essentially, a refinement of the hull design used by submarine engineers since 1918. It utilized a cylinder of circular section, which is another way of saying cigar-shaped, stiffened by ring-shaped frames with a longitudinal spacing of from one-fifth to one-tenth of the diameter. Dom’s greatest departure from traditional sub design was in the use of metals which were quite flexible. As the pressure increased, the external loading can cause an entire hull to change shape, thus putting more stress on certain members than on others. The result is excessive localized strain.

  When the Polaris submarine Scorpion was lost in 1968, the implosion of her hull was heard at great distances by sensitive instruments. The Scorpion was operating in a mere ten thousand feet of water, but she was not designed to resist even half of that pressure. That’s how much Dom had to go to design a mobile and operable self-powered vehicle for resistance of the one-thousand-atmosphere pressure at thirty-five thousand feet. He did it by holding the size of the cylinder to a minimum and holding the spacing of the support frames to less than one-tenth of diameter. He moved pressure-hull science ahead in a quantum leap, and that leap was small compared with what he was being asked to do now.

  Now they wanted him to throw away all of the knowledge gained from experience in the past and build a monster ship which, first, had to fly through space with a negative loading on the outside hull, since space is a near vacuum, then pressurize itself for resistance of not just one thousand atmospheres, but three thousand. In addition, there had to be a slight safety factor. The hull was to penetrate Jupe’s atmosphere to three thousand atmospheres, but what if there had been a slight miscalculation and the alien ship lay in three thousand and fifty atmospheres? To put it simply, they’d have to turn around and come home if the hull’s limit was a mere three thousand atmospheres, or they could risk becoming a Jovian Scorpion and implode.

  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that the task was impossible. J.J.’s tanker requirement compounded the difficulties, and the impossible demands swirled around in his head and left him feeling defeated. He pondered ways of welding seams and the construction of hogging girders, metal fatigue factors, twist and flex, plating thicknesses. The information coming from Art and Doris’ work on the newer high-tensile, special-treatment alloys was not encouraging enough.

  The first process of putting a ship on the drawing board is to draw an outline of operational requirements. The outstanding and most demanding requirement of the TTS hull was J.J.’s huge cargo hold. A rough layout of the ship, drawn around that hold, made her far too big, even without making allowances for housing other functional requirements. Still, it was possible to make a drawing. After a few tries Dom had a tentative layout for a monster the size of some of the smaller Caribbean islands which could be built, without the TTS features, at a cost just slightly smaller than the national debt. From the impossible, he began to think of compromises, working components into cramped spaces, overlapping where possible.

  The entire process was an exercise in futility, for the entire design was based on an illogical premise. It was an excellent example of Gordon’s First Law: “Start with crap, end with crap.”

  Gordon’s Law of Agitation also applied: “The more you stir crap, the worse it smells.”

  He’d been smelling the mixture for several days when Larry Gomulka arrived, a bit yellow from treatment of his malaria but smiling, his round face cheerful, his short body bouncy, his eyes alert, his brain already at work.

  Larry Gomulka was a phenomenon. He was, by training, a physicist. He was nowhere close to tops in his field as a physicist. Doris was tops in her field, Art in his, and Dom was the world’s leading authority on pressure hulls, but Larry couldn’t, or wouldn’t, conduct a basic experiment with accuracy. Larry hated tedious, methodical work. His boredom threshold was low. In conversation, Larry jumped from one subject to another, dazing and confusing many plodding types.

  Larry had once been offered a very lucrative contract by a textbook publisher to do a series of books titled: The Poseur’s Guide to Physics, The Poseur’s Guide to Chemistry, The Poseur’s Guide to Astronomy, and so on down the list of the sciences. He refused, because it would have become a s
ameness after the first book or two. He was lazy, he loved to play, he tired of a subject easily, he drank too much beer, and he was in top demand whenever there were problems with a project in any field.

  Larry Gomulka was a man who knew a little bit about everything. He was omnivorous in his continued learning. He was interested in everything under the sun, and inside the sun, and in the black holes of space. He was a jack of all trades. Had he chosen a field and applied himself to it he could, in all probability, have been a landmark genius. By scattering his interests he was not tops in any specific field, but he was a master at putting things together. Larry was the top problem solver of the century. Not once but many times Larry had walked into a stalled project, talked trash with puzzled scientists who wondered what that clown was doing there, confused them with bad jokes and rapid changes of subject, talking with physicists about the properties of antimatter, the sex urge of the Predicted Moth, and, infuriatingly, without even seeming to try, solved the problem with a simple comment which left dedicated scientists tearing their hair in frustration. Larry had the ability to put it all together, to relate the work of one specialist to others.

  Routine work was impossible when Larry was around. When he showed up in the lab, Art and Doris halted their work. The three of them burst into Dom’s office. Dom shook hands and examined Larry’s round, beaming face and wondered what Doris saw in the man.

  Larry ordered in a vile brand of beer, dominated the conversation with wild tales of adventures in India, where the government had paid him well to set up a workable optional method of family planning. Between tales he threw in a question or two about the current project, sometimes not waiting for an answer before burping happily and moving forward into another change of subject.

  Dom noted a look of almost maternal adoration in Doris’ eyes. He drank too much, laughed until his stomach muscles ached at Larry’s outrageous tales. When he finally retired to his quarters he fell into bed with a self-hating groan, disgusted by his overindulgence. He was awakened by Larry’s cheerful whistling from the office. He repeated the groan which had been his last waking sound, called for breakfast in the office, dressed, shaved. He took his time, knowing that Larry was at his desk, going over the specifications. He came into the office just in time to accept his breakfast tray. Larry had his feet on the desk. Papers were scattered everywhere.

  “Crazy design,” Larry said.

  “Insane,” Dom said.

  “Looks damned impossible.”

  “It is.”

  “The impossible takes a little longer,” Larry said. One of his more irritating habits was the use of glib, trite old phrases. It was just another one of the things you had to forgive if you worked with Larry.

  “Coals to Newcastle,” Larry said.

  “Water to Mars,” Dom said.

  “Can you carry water and phosphates in the same hull?”

  “If you use a lot of water here on Earth to wash it out,” Dom said. “Or, you could use the second and subsequent loads of water for agricultural purposes on Mars, or run it through a purifier.”

  “This hull would hold a helluva sample of the atmosphere of Jupiter,” Larry said.

  “Thousands of tons of it?” Dom asked.

  “J.J.’s not being totally open with you, is he?”

  “I don’t know. He claims that the ship was sold to the budget makers as a tanker and that if it’s built at all it will have to be able to serve as a tanker.”

  “So, I guess we build him a tanker,” Larry said.

  “Just like that.”

  “Damn the torpedoes,” Larry said.

  Dom was beginning to feel better with each bite of his breakfast. “The preliminary layout is neither feasible nor economical,” he said.

  “The preliminary layout is junk,” Larry said. “If you put the entire industry to work on it it would take years just to build the outer hull.”

  “And there’s not much of the aerospace industry left.”

  “They’re making intrauterine devices and toasters,” Larry said. “It’s too big. We’d have a helluva time just getting it to hold together under its own weight in the gravity of the moon, much less Jupiter. The mission is incompatible with the design. What we need is a small, thin hull built solidly around a minimum crew’s quarters and the power plant. Instead, we’re thinking of building a pressure hull around a large volume of space.”

  “Which will have to be pressurized.”

  “To what?” Larry asked.

  “Forty-five thousand pounds per square inch.”

  “Jesus,” Larry said. Then, “Here’s how we’ll do it. You’re hung up in the old forest-and-trees analogy. You’re looking on the ship as one unit.”

  “Isn’t it?” Dom asked.

  “Why should it be?”

  “It’s a ship. It’s self-contained. It’s a unit.”

  “Why?”

  “Pressure on the widest portion of the hull is distributed to every other part of the hull,” Dom said.

  “So we make that force work for us, instead of against us.”

  “How?”

  “You ever hear of mush bonding?”

  “No,” Dom said.

  “They’re working on it at Caltech. Mush bonding. You expand the distance between molecules and inject alloying atoms. The whole thing compresses under pressure.”

  “I’m listening,” Dom said.

  “The technique utilizes superheating. Need lots of power.”

  “There’s ample power on board,” Dom said.

  “We’ll run the seams along the length of the hull instead of around it,” Larry said.

  Dom’s breakfast, unfinished, was forgotten. The idea of running welding seams along the length of the hull was damned silly, except that Larry was reaching for pencil and paper. Dom pushed the wheeled breakfast tray aside and leaned over Larry’s shoulder.

  “The seams slip over each other,” Larry said, “as they are compressed. The more pressure you apply, the tighter the bond.”

  “What’s the limitation?”

  “Don’t ask me, you’re the pressure-hull engineer,” Larry said.

  “Larry, get the hell out of here,” Dom said. “Get me all the dope on mush bonding. Brief it down for me at first. Talk with Art when you’re ready and see if the technique can be applied to hull metals.”

  “I was thinking about taking Doris into L.A.,” Larry said.

  “Not a chance.”

  “Slave driver.”

  “Out,” Dom said.

  “That’s gratitude. Solve a man’s problem and he throws you out,” Larry complained.

  Dom wasn’t listening. He was drawing busily. He didn’t even hear the door close behind Larry. Two hours later he was putting figures into the computer, because the basic research on mush bonding had been tossed into his lap by Larry. He worked from his desk, communicating with Doris and Art by a closed video circuit. Doris’ computers hummed and clacked out possibilities. Art smoked cigarette after cigarette and began to cough.

  It came out looking like a ship, with the traditional cylindrical shape, but it would be unlike any other ship ever built. The hull would be constructed of mono-welded longitudinal sections joined by thicknesses of mush bonding. The more pressure was applied to the hull, the more the mush-bonded sections compressed, and the stronger they became. At three thousand atmospheres, the hull would have partially wrapped around itself, compressing the ship into a solidarity held by massive beams across J.J.’s bedamned cargo hold. It would cost billions. It would be huge, but it would work if the mush bonding worked.

  After forty-eight hours with little sleep, Dom threw the preliminary recommendations onto J.J.’s desk. He expected an explosion of protest at the cost and the size.

  “Mush bonding?” J. J. asked.

  “We’re going on inadequate data there,” Dom said. “The technique needs a lot of testing.”

  “Get on it.”

  “After I’ve had some sleep.”

 
“Take a pep pill.”

  “I’ve taken a pep pill,” Dom said.

  “Take another one.”

  “I’m not going to be pushed into becoming a speed freak,” Dom said.

  “We’ll pay your bills at a rehab center.”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Well, put the team to work on it.”

  “The team is already in bed,” Dom said. “I’m going to farm out some preliminary tests to Caltech, where the work on mush bonding is being done.”

  “That’s no good,” J.J. said. “Security on a college campus is impossible.”

  “We can go through a front organization. They won’t have to know that the research is going to be applied to a spaceship.”

  “All right, but make it open. Try to hide the work and you’ll have every nut in the country onto it. Do it openly and they won’t even notice.”

  “The purloined letter,” Dom said.

  “Do your correspondence on your own time,” J.J. said.

  Chapter Five

  Officially she was named the John F. Kennedy, because it made for good publicity possibilities to name the biggest ship ever built after the President who spent the money to put the first American atop a stick of dynamite and blast him a few thousand feet into the sky. The decision about the name was made at the top of DOSE.

  Those who worked on her called her J.J.’s Folly, or just Folly.

  From the beginning, Folly was a bear, a real bear. She was a tremendous hole surrounded by a hull. She was the one great example of political expediency. Workmen said good men and good money and good materials were being squandered on a ship which would not be able to lift her own weight out of moon orbit.

  Dom made one last attempt to change the design. He did a mockup of an ideal hull for six thousand atmospheres, a sleek, slim, simple hull built to carry a crew of four, a hydroplant, and a grapple. His design could have gone deep into the Jovian atmosphere, locked onto the alien ship, lifted her out, and had plenty of muscle to spare. His design, which would withstand almost double Folly’s maximum pressure load, would have cost a third less.