The Salt Flats job was different, the hardest we’ve ever done.
First off, the breakage incidents had occurred right at the surface, not high in the sky. Usually it’s just sighting out the line, deploying the balloons and attaching the netting–but this time we had to sink shafts into the ground, the post-hole borers spilling out an odd mixture of sand and salt that reminded me of frozen cappuccino. Thirty feet down, and then we slid long, copper-sheathed iron pipes into the holes.
With all the salt, the bimetal pipes made an electrical current even while we were handling them. Lionel made us wear thick rubber gloves under our rouster’s gloves and rubber boots until we could ground the pipes to the Leyden reservoirs. Every 120 yards for fifty miles we sank them, in a laser-sighted line aligned with magnetic north-south. Just that part took three weeks, and hot as blazes, too. Hotter than the three other times we’d done Vandenberg jobs.
The press and the public pretty much left us alone for that part, but when we started rigging the net it got crowded. Crowded for the middle of the desert, anyway. We’d marked out observation areas, and there was a steady stream of 4×4s and Airstreams and Winnebagos full of people coming to watch us repair the sound barrier.
We got a lot of volunteers at that point, but what with the heat and the salt they never lasted much more than a couple of hours. I thought they were a nuisance, myself. Took more time to supervise than we seemed to get out of them in work, but Lionel was all for it. “Involve the community and you engage the zeitgeist,” he always says.
Lionel always says a bunch of things, over and over, because the reporters always ask the same questions. Once we really get going on a project he has to give most of his instructions to us at night because he spends the whole day dealing with the media. Which is okay, since we know what we’re doing by now. It seems dumb to me that he keeps it up, over and over. But I guess it’s not much different from us rigging the same nets and laying out the same balloons day after day, which I don’t mind. It’s a good job.
Anyway, the reporters are always working up to asking if Lionel is aware that the sound barrier is just a figure of speech. They go at it sideways, mostly, like they’re trying to break it to him gently or something. As if he hadn’t come across that concept in the eight or nine years he’s been at it. There are lots of companies doing it now, especially over there in Russia, but Lionel was the first guy to bid the first job. That was for Air France, when they got worried about the Concorde after bringing the fleet back from retirement.
Lionel always tells them the same old thing. “Breaking the sound barrier is a metaphor, not a simile. If people said ‘it’s like breaking a barrier’ or ‘it’s as if the jet broke some kind of barrier’ we wouldn’t be out here. But they don’t. The passing through to Mach 1 is breaking the barrier. Metaphors are truth.”
I don’t much know what he’s talking about, but it shuts up the press.
What I understand is the netting. It’s really light, fragile-looking stuff just a few molecules thick, but tough as piano wire. It’s tinted a light purple, so the birds won’t run into it. Something about the outside of it can carry an electric current, but not the inside, so it’s not like wire. The lines of the net are spaced a yard apart, both horizontally and vertically, and then there are diagonal lines, too. They keep the shape. And all this rolls up into long canisters that can pay it all out without a hitch as the balloons rise, and then reel it back in once the job is over. If it’s needed, we can hang this stuff 35 miles up in the sky, like we do around the launch pads at Vandenberg and Canaveral.
Another thing they’re always asking Lionel is, what’s the point. When a jet breaks the sound barrier, sure it shoves the air aside, and sure there’s some ionization along the leading edge of the shock wave, and sure this disturbs the distribution of the Earth’s magnetic field through the atmosphere, but doesn’t the air just all move around again afterwards and everything go back to normal? “Sure,” Lionel always says. “Sure it goes back, eventually. But when you have a bad smell in the house you air it out as soon as possible, you don’t wait for it to go back to normal on its own. After all, there may well be another bad smell by then, and another after that accumulating into who knows what health hazard. No, no, it’s best to address the situation when it comes along.”
We get a lot of the nature lovers come out to see us, too. I find them puzzling. Most of them that live out here have wood stoves, which is just about the dirtiest way to generate heat there is, but they get all huffy about our diesel generators. Still, we get a full day’s work out of them, those times they volunteer. We puzzle them, too. Somebody brings up the idea that breaking the sound barrier is against Nature, and what we’re doing is restoring the balance, but Lionel won’t let that one go by. He tells them that meteors falling out of space break the sound barrier every day. It’s Natural as brook trout, he says. But it behooves humans to clean up their own messes, he says. The Nature people are okay with that, usually.
I get to hear all this stuff because on The Day it’s my job to work the radio with the air traffic controllers, so I’m in the Command trailer. Always a couple of reporters, mostly TV, hanging around doing the same ol’ same ol’. For the Salt Lake job, we set up the HQ about 20 miles east of Wendover and started inflating the balloons around noon. That time of year the lift would be best in the late afternoon, so the netting should be getting in place right about sunset.
We have a team with each balloon, every half mile, even though they’re almost fully automated. First the helium pumps in and they pull out of the big trailer beds and rise to two hundred feet. Then the teams attach the netting leaders to the guy ropes and set up the machines that will keep attaching the netting as the guy pays out. Finally it’s my turn, when Lionel gives me the signal, to get the controllers warned and wait for the all clear.
We had a cloudless day for the Salt Flats job. And a long wait for some reason. Which meant the reporters kept asking questions. One of our people was getting a kick out of mouthing to me what he thought the next one would be before the reporter asked it. He was right most of the time. “Plumbing” he mouthed, and sure enough the reporter wanted to know what good it did to keep fixing the sound barrier if the Air Force or NASA or somebody was just going to keep on breaking it afterwards.
And Lionel would say, as he always says, “Pipes and sewer lines have been breaking for at least four thousand years, but we haven’t given up on plumbing yet. We don’t get rid of electricity and cable television just because we have to keep repairing the lines. Despair is not the answer to the question of maintenance. Planning, yes. Redesign, yes. Upkeep, yes. Not despair.”
Folks are usually disappointed when the net goes up. The unlucky ones get bored after an hour or so and go home, and miss the show. The balloons are interesting, but pretty soon they get so high you can barely make them out. The netting is almost invisible. So after a while there’s nothing to see.
But at some point the magic part happens, the part that makes the big impact on the audience and puts the money in our pockets. It’s just electricity, basically. The net gets high enough to be passing through layers of air with different static charges, and current starts moving over the surface of the lines. It starts out looking like St. Elmo’s fire, with little glowing balls and funnels suddenly growing out of nothing in spots all over the net. It looks like distant fireworks. Once there’s enough current or charge or whatever it turns to liquid, trapped lightning moving like molasses toward the ground. It is moving, too, right into the reservoirs which the utility power grid will buy from us the minute the show is over. And as long as we’re not stupid enough to put the net up into a storm cloud, it’s all perfectly harmless to the netting. There’s a little arcing, but not enough to melt anything.
I have never seen anything more stunningly beautiful. Fireworks without the explosions; lightning without the rain, without the fear; the Northern Lights brought south and tamed; television without stupid plots and idiot characters. It’s like watching a wood fire burning in God’s own fireplace. It lights the night, and nobody leaves. Nobody leaves until we reel it all back in and the magic goes away, or until the whole area loses its charge and the net goes dim.
But the Salt Flats job was different, like I said. The display kicked in immediately, with the current from the pipes in the ground getting the whole thing off to a big start, the brightest and most colorful I’ve ever seen. Maybe it was the ions from the mineral salts that gave the colors, or the copper in the pipes, but they rose from the earth in waves while the liquid fire fell from the sky. Color passing one way, light the other, and for the first time in my life I realized they weren’t quite the same thing. And so beautiful. So damn beautiful it made my chest ache, made me keep forgetting to breathe.
I felt like Prometheus, and wasn’t worried about any old Zeus at all. We all did.
Ever since, I’ve been hoping they would use those rocket cars again so we could do the job over. It was almost four in the morning when we had to call it quits and reel the balloons down again, before the morning winds made the thing dangerous. There were tears in people’s eyes as we pulled it in. There were tears in mine.
The thing is so glorious to see that once you have, there aren’t any more questions about the justification for it. Which is why I love this job. You just know you’re onto a good thing every time the job is finished.
But there is that one last question. The what now? question. I think of it as the question about the Golden Age. If we could just stop the space launches and the jet flights and all that and finally get the sound barrier all fixed up, wouldn’t it make life wonderful again? Worth living, and like that?
Salt Flats was just the same. It was the two camera jockeys who asked it, as they were packing up.
Lionel told them what he always tells them, that maintenance is fundamental, but it’s not the solution. It’s not even the point. “The thing about the Universe, the thing about Life, is that there is no getting it all perfect and then stopping. A tidy house, or a healthy body, or an efficient city, are not sufficient ends in themselves. They are only the optimum beginning. The crucial thing is what you do with them, what you make of them once you have them.”
And about that point is when we’re moving on to the next job, looking to bring down more fire. Fixing what somebody else broke. And answering the questions that always seem to be asked.
No Comments Yet
You can be the first to comment!
Leave a comment