Subterranean Technologies Corporation has continuously worked on their riverfront property, across the span of many years, maintaining a sleek industrial site. For the Dempsey family, it was a matter of pride. The people of the Hudson Valley appreciate “Sub-T.”
Here, those casual accumulations that mark other industrial plant sites are sold for scrap. Here, painters are kept continually in practice. Green belts are planted and maintained wherever practical. Nothing is thrown into the river, nor discharged into it. Subterranean Technologies is a steward of their 175 acres of the Hudson Valley. The company is closely held.
Plant-Seven rises to a majestic 80 feet at the ridgeline. This is the crane bay.
Its two levels of pitched roof can be seen for a mile across the Hudson valley, both upstream and down. The wings to either side of the crane bay are two stories tall.
It is still chilly this May, back east, and Plant-Seven is even yet comfortably cool, heading into summer. Indoors, the crane bay brightens with ranks of clerestory windows. They are operable and this spring they are open. The hot air around the machines lofts buoyantly into the breezy clerestory, below the roof ridge, where it is swept outside by gusts that chase thermals rising above the warming waters of the Hudson.
Workers, strapped into safety harnesses, poise themselves on ladders, and atop scissor-lifts. They spot themselves around the work. Visitors from the office see the shapes of two tunnel-boring machines gradually emerge from the chaos beneath the rigging and the hoist hooks. The workers are too close to their work to see the picture of it change.
Outdoors, in back, the 200 ft. boom of Sub-T’s riverside crane is painted the brightest blue and yellow. It is there to lift the finished loads of many tons of product out over the Hudson River.
Today, they are shipping another one. The family is grateful each time. Soon they will cut their invoice. Money is the blood of business. When it does not pump, something dies.
Their crane operator rigs the lifting lugs of the individual modules of a new tunnel-boring machine. He booms them out over the river. He lowers these massive parts gently among the deckhands onto a waiting barge moored along their dock. From their plant at Albany, this new machine will be floated down to the port of New York, and then loaded onto an ocean-going ship bound to a distant port, consigned to an anxious customer somewhere across the globe. Pirates and storms lurk just as they did in the age of sail. Mountainous seas forever abide at Tierra Del Fuego. A wall of headwinds waits on the other side of Cape Town.
The murder-end of a TBM is the cutterhead. Geared to this is the cutterface that rotates seven times each minute. Colonel Jeter will specify a 40-foot diameter. Locked onto it will be fifty cutter wheels nineteen inches in diameter. Riding upon an axle, each one freewheels to scribe its edge into the rock face. Fifty cutters cut fifty grooves called kerfs. The work surface continuously sheds flakes of rock, augured up into the muck conveyor that retraces the path of the big machine and hauls the spoil back out the way it came.
The cutter wheels’ size and location are carefully engineered for the type of rock guessed at by the geologists who consult on every project. The Earth Mechanics Institute at the Colorado School of Mines has long ago established the basic methods over many years of testing.
Behind the cutterhead are hydraulic pistons, which keep up the pressure against the vanishing rock face. Too little, and the cut will proceed too slowly. Too much, and the cutter wheels will break. Even under the best working conditions, the cutter wheels snap frequently. There are at least four hours of preventative maintenance to perform on the TBM each day. Every project manager always hopes for 50% TBM utilization. Problems are nearly constant. The worksite is sometimes a mile underground. Unanticipated conditions are continuously expected. A probe drill senses dozens of feet ahead. It might find a change in rock, or a ground water inflow. Even so, this is not a Sunday drive. This is not like looking down the turnpike with your high beams on.
The tunnel-boring machine must move itself along with additional hydraulic pistons pushing convex steel shoes along the tunnel sides. This is like a person hauling himself along on his elbows. This 300 feet long machine must even be able to steer. It has a turning radius often as tight as 90 feet, only twice that of an 18-wheeler on city streets.
Two tunnel-boring machines, now in the assembly process, occupy the crane bay in Plant-Seven, nearest the river. The crane bay is 650 feet long, as long as the plant. There is a loading dock at each end. Along a track of steel I-beams three double-girder bridge cranes span a bay fifty-five feet wide. Each crane is rated at a hoisting capacity of forty tons.
The factory will fully assemble the modules into each complete machine, and then run acceptance tests before shipment. An excavation site is not the place to learn that it does not work. Then the connections are broken and it breaks down into modules again.
“How long have those Humvees been out there?” Padric Dempsey, patriarch of the family owned Subterranean Technologies, has just returned to his second floor office. He leans on the windowsill and hoists one of his steel-toed boots onto a wooden crate containing a pair of nineteen-inch cutter wheels machined from an experimental tool-steel.
The cutter wheels began in the machine shop as solid metal blocks. Their corners were eased by the cutting wire of an electrical discharge machine. Below the surface of a pool of water, its 24,000 volts sliced through the solid steel like a cheese knife.
Then these shapes were removed from the tank and mounted on an engine lathe where they were put spinning against an edge and sculpted into a final shape. Then came a drill press for the center hole and the mounting holes, and then final polishing into a sleek and powerful tool. The cutterface of a TBM often has fifty or more of these. The quantity and location is selected according to the geology of the project.
Dempsey runs his fingers roughly through his gray hair to shake out the factory dust. All factories are dusty and metal working factories require even more broom-work. There are dirty paths waiting for a vacuum cleaner in the gray carpet of his office. His usual tracks can be seen beginning at the doorway and leading to the window, then branching to his desk. He is a man comfortable with his habits.
Farrell Ryan, the manager of the machine shop, stands next to him. “First I’ve seen of them, boss.”
“Christ, they fill up the entire drive. What if a customer needs inside the building?”
“Guess they gotta walk in from the parking lot like the rest of us. Maybe the army is going to be a customer.”
Dempsey spoke thoughtfully. “Yeah, maybe nuclear waste disposal tunnels or a second Cheyenne Mountain Command Post. Look at all those antennas.”
“And machine guns.”
“I don’t see anybody getting out.”
“All just sitting there.”
“Waiting for the commanding officer.”
A muscular whumping sound now rapidly fills the plant site. The sound seems to diffuse evenly from everywhere at once. At the window, Dempsey and Ryan crane their necks left and right across the horizon and as far overhead as their sight line can reach. Finally, they must raise their voices just to be heard.
The landing gear of a Blackhawk helicopter flashes overhead. In the twinkle of an eye, it sets down in the grassy sward, just beyond the drive up. The sound ceases but the rotors still spin. The door slides open. There is a pause. Dempsey envisions some last minute talk behind the dark square of doorway.
Colonel Jeter strides toward the office building. Jim steps down then turns to help Claire. Then comes Digger, Cody, Laruso and Marshal Blevins, all strung out in a long line.
“Get a load of the babe! Say, look at that last, big guy in the cowboy hat.”
Dempsey squints hard. “Looks like a Federal Marshal. I think we’re going to be turned inside out and upside down.”
“What do you mean, boss?”
Dempsey quietly marvels. “Farrell, I think we’re going to be federalized.”
“Oh shit.”
Dempsey descends the stairs quietly. He stands on the landing halfway down, and watches his lobby. Customers are always a double-edged sword, and he thinks that this customer may be a very large sword. He has sent Farrell Ryan back to his machine shop. He will deal with this alone.
Glass display cases line the lobby walls. They showcase cutter wheels, scale models, three dimensional drawings, project photographs, and a cross section of the planet, sculpted from clay, cut through many strata, in which a motorized scale model TBM spins its cutter head at the end of a finished tunnel.
Dempsey sees one girl and six men, all of the men are big—two of them very big—intently studying the displays. The girl looks too much like a magazine cover to be in the construction industry. She has to be a lady-engineer, Dempsey reasons. Consultants come packaged in all shapes and sizes; and now, in the twenty-first century, one of them might even be very pretty. His receptionist is busy keyboarding.
He recognizes one of the men. Here, in his lobby, is Dr. Cody from the Earth Mechanics Institute. Dempsey’s father had often worked with the Institute, exchanging field experience for laboratory test data. The tunnel boring industry is based upon the research that the institute has been doing for sixty years. Dempsey marvels that the business world never ceases to amaze.
Dempsey reasons: If Cody is here, then this is all about a project. If the army is here, then they are the customer. The others must be consulting engineers. Yes, Dempsey thinks, a very dramatic way to issue a bid package. Couldn’t they have simply e-mailed it, like always? What can be too big a hurry for e-mail, he wonders? A pre-bid meeting that includes a cop. A customer arriving with machine guns. Hang on to your butt, he reminds himself.
No. This is no pre-bid meeting. There will be no bid package. He knows he is being federalized. He wonders what can be this important.
Dempsey knows that being taken-over means good money, but only for a while. Being taken-over drives away your customer base—they cannot afford to wait around forever. And there is no way to mark up your price enough to compensate for that. You pray for change-orders. You fight for every nickel. You ship as fast as you can in order to get free again.
Dempsey knows they cannot federalize him until after he has accepted a contract. It is still a free country. But he worries that they have already snuck a small project into the Sub-T system and that their project, whatever it is, will grow out of that through change-orders.
Afterwards, when the feds turn you loose, when you need business once again, all of your customers are in bed with the competition. Then you have to live off savings and bank loans until you build back up. You pray you get some business fast enough to keep all your people. Dempsey knows that nobody gives a shit about his problems.
Standing there, he cannot help but feel that the die is cast. He hopes that financially it might at least wind up a wash. One last deep breath, then Dempsey steps warily down to the lobby. His receptionist notices his movement on the stairs and crisply addresses the visitors.
“Mr. Padric Dempsey will see you now.” They turn as one.
Conference rooms are places of many mood swings. Here is where you discuss giddy opportunity or the grim path forward through a sour project. Whereas failure persists like an infection, success is a fleeting matter. It gets less attention. It is discussed in smaller groups, in hallways, briefly, or maybe with your feet up, feeling lucky at the end.
This is knowledge that the visitors do not share. Only the risk-takers know this, and only if they have time to think about it. The people in construction know this best. Dempsey knows that outsiders think that he merely sits around counting his money, but he believes that you should not hate people just because they are stupid. Or else you would wind up hating everybody.
This conference room and the conference table are according to the recognizable design. The usual oval shaped table is a little larger than most. It seats 12 on each side, and one at each end. There is a projection screen and a marker board. Dempsey, always first in and last out, leads them in and walks to the head of the table at the far end.
They take their seats, each with silent thoughts.
Won’t Mr. Dempsey be surprised? Claire forecasts enthusiastically.
I hate surprises, Dempsey meditates.
I need this man, the Colonel worries.
Jim inflates on the notion that all this is his idea.
Digger hopes he will get to see the shop.
Cody wants Dempsey to know that he knew his Father.
Laruso is missing lunch.
Blevins writes Padric Dempsey’s name in his notebook and wonders if he will have trouble with this man. There is nothing personal with Blevins. He wonders this meeting anybody, excluding Claire, of course.
After the initial flurry, the pivoting chairs, the squirming butts, the looking around, the Colonel waits a beat or two, then starts. “We need two main-beam TBM’s, 40 foot diameter cutterhead, steel alloys for high temperature and for an abrasion resistance of eight on the MOHS scale—that’s Basalt. There are to be no electric motors, all hydraulics and pneumatics, and a one-hundred foot long conveying system for the muck. Both machines will be computer driven and guided by spectroscopic intakes at quarter points around the cutterface. The algorithm will be will be configured to follow trace Rhyolite with a single default compass heading, south-southeast.
We need them delivered in six months with two full sets of spare parts, except cutter wheels where we need a two-year supply. The pumps, chillers, compressors, and power step-down transformers are all by others. Everything is heavy gage, high temp, best maintenance clearances, and 60% utilization. I will also need wireless transducers on the cutter bearings to monitor vibration remotely. We’ll get you a partner for the vibration software.”
Finally, he adds, “Everything will run off of the same power plant that we are also developing for the trains that will run behind the TBM’s. These trains run back and forth along the tunnel to carry workers in and out and to haul the muck to the edge where we’ll dump it off a cliff. Both you and the train manufacturer will receive two of these from a company called Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut.” That is enough for the moment, the Colonel thinks.
Dempsey blew a long, slow breath, taking a moment to consider. “Electric Boat builds submarines. Am I to assume that your supplier is going to take delivery of two nuclear powered steam turbines?”
“Correct, Mr. Dempsey. Scaled down for your power requirement and size constraints.”
Padric thinks he hears the Colonel sound like Sub-T has the project already. Padric blew a long breath out pursed lips as he slowly shook his head. “How long is your dig?”
“Ten miles, or less,” the Colonel answers.
“Basalt, you said…how consistent?”
“Assume perfect uniformity, it is likely a city sized pluton, no ground water.”
“A Batholith? That sounds pretty deep.”
“Four miles.
This makes Dempsey blink several times. “Kinda hot down at four miles, isn’t it?
“Like I said, high temp alloys. Assume 750 degrees Farenheit.”
“That will play hell with control panels and hydraulic fluids.” Dempsey shakes his head. “We’ll need refrigeration.”
“We’ll be pumping twenty-eight degree glycol slurry ice down to the TBM.”
“Suits?”
“We’ll do the suits. We’ll use 2,000 degree fire entry suits with kiln boots.”
“Those suits are good but are not designed to let you set up housekeeping inside a fire.”
“We assume a man can stay one-hour twenty-minutes at 750 degrees Farenheit. We will use one-hundred cubic foot air tanks. We will have a refrigerated subterranean station located at the junction between the beginning of the tunnel and the end of the vertical shaft.
“Kinda hard to work in those suits, isn’t it?
“Suits weigh 70 lbs. They’ll get used to it.”
“Who alls bidding the job?”
“Just you.”
“How did I get so lucky?”
“You’re the best.”
“What’s eventually going to use the tunnel, autos, trains, drinking water?”
“Magma.”
“Magma? You mean the stuff that comes out of volcanoes?”
“No, that’s called lava. It’s called Magma when it stays underground. That is the idea. We want it to stay underground.”
“You want to move magma?”
“Ten miles.”
“As in liquid rock.”
“Yes. As in liquid rock.”
“Project got a name?”
“Madison Valley Pressure Relief.”
“My God,” Dempsey whispers. He realizes in a thunderclap, “This is Yellowstone, isn’t it? It’s going to blow. Is it?”
Blevins takes this one. He speaks slowly. “No, it won’t, Mr. Dempsey, Yellowstone is not going to have a chance to blow, if you get your ass in gear and get to work. Padric, your engineering department is, as of this moment, now working only for the Federal Government.”
“But we have not accepted a contract. How can you federalize?” He knew that they would find a way.
“Your sales department accepted one yesterday, in writing. We believe its language will allow this entire project to become a change order to that existing agreement.”
Entrapment, Padric thinks. “You snuck one in.”
Blevins ignores this and continues, “Up until the time that shop drawings are approved, you can finish up and ship anything to anybody. But, once we approve your drawings, this whole place, both the office and the shops, works only for us. You’ll be served with the papers for this tomorrow from federal court.”
“I’d better get my business team leaders in here for this.”
“Yes, do that, but first, I want you to hear the story. I want to make sure that we get our point across with zero misunderstandings. This is Professor Bennington from Purdue University. He will start. Absolutely no one else outside of you and your business team leaders gets this information. When we leave, I want you and your business teams to completely forget that you ever heard the word ‘Yellowstone’. And Padric, you’ll either come out of this a rich man or an inmate in Lewisburg Penitentiary. And somehow, I just know that you are gonna make the right choice.”
Dempsey wonders if he will learn to like these people, or will learn to hate them. Customers are a two-edged sword.
Jim explains the Yellowstone geology. Claire describes the lava flooding. Digger explains what lies beneath the Madison Valley. When they finished, the table full of people, manufacturers and scientists, a Federal Marshal and a soldier-engineer, all wait on Dempsey.
He takes his time. He taps a pencil on the conference table. All faces incline expectantly. Dempsey studies them in return. Dempsey has seen how others looked as they prepared to take a crack at the impossible. He is looking for a quality. He knows that he will get through it. He always gets through it. But he also knows that sometimes it turns very ugly.
They are all basically alike, except for the girl. Dempsey thinks that Claire looks too young and pretty to have seen very much, just yet. Although she did see a volcano, which, he confesses to himself, is more than he has ever seen.
Finally, he speaks. “Thank you for the presentation. I see a lot of grit in this room. I admire that. However, I am sorry. This cannot be done.” He waits. No one says a word.
He signs, then begins again. “Okay, folks. Here it is. First, the entry shaft. You can’t use a TBM vertically to bore down through the ground to reach that empty magma chamber. So, that means drill and blast and a drag-line shovel, like they use in strip mines. Except that won’t work past 300 feet unless this becomes something like the Escondida copper mine in Chile, but that takes years, not months.
“Four miles is over 20,000 feet. All you can quickly dig is ten-percent of the way down. Of course you can drill, but the largest diameter bit is eight-feet, not fifty-feet. Now, I’ve got more for you, but I’m gonna stop there to see if you can get past this much.”
The Colonel smiled. “Padric, we are going to drill a two-foot diameter pilot hole down four miles to vent the Madison Valley Abyss to the surface. In the 1990’s the Russians sunk to Kola Super Borehole down 50,000 feet. That’s about 6 miles more than we’ll need.”
Dempsey interrupted. “You can’t ventilate an underground chamber of hundreds of cubic miles through a two-foot hole.”
“Not trying to. You’re getting too far ahead of me, Padric. I said ‘vent’ not ‘ventilate’. Then, after we drill the pilot hole, we’re going to lower an explosive charge down to the underside and detonate. The spoil drops eight miles to the bottom. We never touch one shovelful. We explode our way upward—one charge after another until we reach the surface and have excavated a fifty-foot diameter shaft four miles straight up.”
Dempsey’s eyebrows are raised as far as they can go. He looks ready to slap his forehead. The Colonel presses on. “We’re going to erect a crane over the shaft so that we can lower an insulated freight elevator with a self-contained life support system down four miles. It will dock with an insulated subterranean station, which will open via an airlock onto a steel platform, and an open dock area that we will drill and blast into the face of the rock wall at the top of the Abyss.
“We will lower your TBM one module at a time down the shaft. We will assemble the machine in the dock area with an overhead crane, and then off it goes. The rest you can probably guess.”
Dempsey did not surprise easily, but this surprised him. He replied quietly, “You said you wanted two machines.”
“We’ll start a second tunnel a half mile away about a month behind the first one. Each man-day will include two shifts of eighty minutes. We’ll go round the clock.”
“Okay. I’m amazed. This might work. How long do we have?”
They all looked down to Jim Bennington. Jim replied, “If all that blasting doesn’t set off the supervolcano, we could have years. We might need two years. We might have 100 years. We might only have six months.”
Dempsey reflects that no one ever knows the ending of a project. They just claim they do. But this one is so audacious that to admit otherwise, they would sound like fools.
“So my machine bores a tunnel between this empty cavern and the magma chamber which is ready to burst?”
Jeter replies, “Right.”
“At the point where the cutterhead breaks through into the magma, what happens then? The TBM is blocking your tunnel.”
Jim Bennington steps in. “Simple. The magma melts the TBM. The magma slices right through it like butter and proceeds like a river down this 40 foot diameter tunnel to the Abyss where it drops over edge, falls eight miles. Then the Volcano goes back to sleep for another 50,000 years.”
Padric Dempsey is shaking his head in such as way that it looks like he is saying “No.”
Claire beams at Jim. The others silently wondered why the girl was smiling, why anyone would smile. Except Blevins who thinks, Okay, I get it. So that’s the way it is. She’s his girlfriend. Yeah, nice work if you can get it, buddy.
Dempsey asks, “Professor, how hot is this Magma, again?”
A realization now drains the color from Colonel Jeter’s face.
“1,652 degrees Farenheit.”
“Professor, you may know rock, but you don’t know steel. Colonel, what alloy have you picked out?”
Everyone but Claire now looks over to Colonel Jeter. His reply is muffled. His face is buried in his hands. He speaks through his fingers, “Cobalt-Steel.” Jeter gloomily reflects on the fact that they have not even left the conference room and already their project has had its first major aw-shit.
Padric continues. “As I recall, Cobalt-Steel melts at 2,700 degrees Farenheit. Gentlemen, it is not that you need a high temperature alloy, the reverse is true. You need a steel alloy with a LOW melting point. After you drill your tunnel, the TBM is blocking the magma and the magma is not hot enough to melt it. The magma actually dissipates its temperature in contact with the TBM, and, therefore, cools while trying to flow around it. You wind up with the end of your tunnel plugged tight.
“Further, the term ‘high temp steel’ is misleading. It does not refer to the melting point, but to the yield point.
“You need a high strength, but low melting point steel alloy. A steel alloy lowers the melting point of steel, as compared to iron—which is around 2,800 degrees. However, such an alloy does not exist for the simple reason that no one has needed it until now. This will take years for the steel industry to develop—if it can.
“You’ll have to find another way. You may as well choose a steel with a yield point as high as you can find regardless of the melting point. This steel will never melt, but it can always fail. Remember that heat can change the metallurgy while the tool is working.
“It sounds like my TBM will serve you well for 9.9 miles and then—right at the point of success, the TBM itself turns into a major project liability. You need to find a way to get the TBM out of there, or change its shape or blow it up.
Dr. Cody suggests, “How about a reactor overload? The reactor could melt the TBM.”
Padric shakes his head again. “Unlikely. The China Syndrome is only a theory. We only have Chernobyl to go by, but that was a graphite weapons reactor. You are in uncharted territory. Your schedule is too short for unknowns. You need to work with things whose properties are perfectly understood, like explosives.”
Jeter wonders what Dempsey will think when he finds out that his reactor will also be a scaled down weapons reactor, though not as primitive as Chernobyl.
Bennington warns, “A large enough explosive to blow the TBM back out ten miles might trigger a worse volcano, and an immediate one.”
Cody speculates, “You could raise the temperature with a fire, but inside at the end of a tunnel, it quickly runs out of oxygen.”
Claire wonders aloud, “So how can missiles use rocket engines in space.?”
Colonel Jeter slaps the table and beams. “Yes, Claire. Because a rocket takes its own oxygen into space. It uses liquid oxygen. It has to be kept at 300 degrees below zero, which is fine in space, but not where we’re going. So, at the end, when we have bored through all the rock and when the magma is up against the cutterhead and is oozing around the TBM, we will have to bring in an explosive charge of just what Claire is getting at except it will be a solid rocket fuel which includes an oxidizer for combustion. This will be both very hot and very explosive.”
Digger shakes his head, “I wonder who the lucky guy will be at the end, when he has to haul a ton of rocket fuel four miles down a shaft and ten miles down a tunnel to a junction with a volcano. I’m not sure you could pay me enough.”
The Colonel solves part of the problem. “When we have achieved breakthrough into the Magma Chamber, we’ll load the explosive onto the train and run it to the end. It will crash into the stern of the TBM and either the collision or a timer will set it off.”
Blevins worries, “Padric, are we asking too much. Is this becoming a Rube Goldberg?”
“No. The TBM can do things that you are not even asking. For instance, it can line its own tunnel with concrete. I’m going to need that drive system diameter and profile. We have to work around it. We must design a conveying system to take the muck from the cutter head, past the drive, all the way back to…what are we doing with the spoil?”
Jeter answers, “The train will take it.”
“Well, this is another problem. The train meets the muck at its front end and wherever you’re dumping it has to be at the back end.”
Jeter explains, “The underground dock will be 50 feet high and 150 feet wide. We have room to sidetrack the muck car around the train to the tunnel opening where we up-end it and dump it eight miles to the floor of the Abyss.”
Blevins shakes his head. He continues to caution, “This is hopelessly complex.”
Padric had seen enough to know otherwise. “It may appear so, Marshal Blevins, but my experience says ‘No’. These problems are macro-problems. Their fixes are macro-fixes. We will find these and we will deal with them. On large, complex projects, the things that are going to blow up in your face will always be something small—like a valve, or a pump seal, or a control panel heating up. With those types of things, we seek to limit their number. It is not complexity that is unsafe, it is quantity. Catastrophic failure nearly always begins with some ten-dollar part. The fewer of those, the better.
“In short, never be afraid of design, but do try to keep design as simple as your project realities allow. Occam’s Razor.”
For the first time, Colonel Jeter knows that they will succeed, but just at this point, Padric Dempsey introduces a new, small, and previously unseen worry.
“There is one final thing which has never been encountered. On all previous tunnel boring projects, breakthrough is passive. By this, I mean that there is an end to the rock and the TBM bores into and through that end. Never before has the end of the tunnel been pressurized. The rock face will push back. It will fail. It will crack. It will change from uniform to fractured and unworkable. I do not see how that last thickness of rock can be removed.”
Jim Bennington steps in with the missing piece. “Mr. Dempsey, when your TBM gets that close to the Magma Chamber, heat dissipation will change. Solids conduct heat much more efficiently than does air. As the rock face thins from miles down to feet, the heat will not dissipate, and so the rock face will heat up. Those last few feet of rock will be melted. Of course, it may take a few days, perhaps a week, to bring that last few feet of rock up to temperature, but the work at the end will be done by the heat and pressure of the supervolcano itself. When the temperature gets high enough, we can load the train with the explosive that Claire and Digger have been talking about. That’s all we need. One week at the end. I don’t think that’s asking too much.”
Okay, maybe so, they thought. Anyway, that was at the end. They would figure something out. There’s a long way to go before they get to that point.
Dempsey brings his business team leaders in to hear their marching orders with the visitors present. Dempsey wondered if the visitors might have thought that the team leaders did not look too happy to hear all this, but Dempsey knew better. That is simply how a room-full of determined people look when they hear they have to do the impossible.
Dempsey marveled at a project that was like all the Seven Wonders of the World, all rolled into one. He wondered if he had been preparing for this one his entire life. Life is work and work is life, he knew.
America began their last carefree summer for a while. Dempsey’s people would not have a summer. They would work straight though it.
That summer the office lights at Sub-T would burn until midnight and the factory lights would never go out.