By the time that Jeter was finished on the surface, the area around each shaft looked like a Greek temple, and by the end of the story, like the ruins of a Greek temple.
Colonel Jeter explained the design process to me. Three of us had reached ruins of the industrial village at about the same time.
Unless you had an army vehicle with filters on the air intake, you had to drive only on windless days because of the volcanic ash. You also had to keep a good mile behind the car in front of you to give it time to settle. Cars breathe air, and that ash can ruin an engine fast. Trucks usually have big air intake filters and so they were okay, but mostly we had to wait for the air to clear. Jeter always took his helicopter, but that has an engine air intake as well.
Jeter did not have much left to do except pack up what had survived, and to take photos. Job done.
This was also the day that I finally met Claire, apart from the few words on the train. Cherry Brady had brought her down from Bozeman to pick up her things, and those of Digger O’Dell. Most of their belongings were in four footlockers, which had survived intact.
The whole place was going for scrap. Naturally, when you say that, you cannot help but think of Victor Rostov. Too bad he was not on our side. We think sometimes that Victor wished he had been. Anyway, Jeter gave me a lot of time. Reporters are not always that lucky.
I was fast becoming attached to the story. I did not want to see these people and events lost to time. Jeter and Claire felt the same. There would be an official record, of course, and Jeter would write much of that, but the feel of a story does not surrender to accounting.
The folks at the Ho-Hum Bar brewed us a lot of coffee that afternoon, and served us bottles of Old Faithful Ale at dinner and into the evening. Jeter’s pilot had to stick to coffee. We did not.
Jeter said he wanted all of this written down while it was still fresh and the survivors were still alive. He wondered if anything we have ever built would last even one million years. He speculated that the Svalbard Seed Vault might, and also the bunker complex inside Cheyenne Mountain. But what kind of people would that future race think we must have been when such artifacts will be all they have to go by?
Jeter said that there were three causes of fatal accidents at Madison Valley: Falling to your death, being burned alive, and being burned alive while falling to your death. The single exception was the way that Bennington got it. The Colonel thinks it was murder and that opinion jibed with what I finally learned from Raisa out in Vladivostok.
The planet’s gravity works on more than just Newton’s Apple—although, around the jobsite, falling was always uppermost in the Colonel’s mind. Gravity works on anything with mass.
Warm air is less heavy and so it rises, leaving cold air below. Just like magma. Felsic—the explosive kind—is less heavy than Mafic and so it tends to rise above it. Buoyancy works on magma and air just the same and for the same reason: gravity. That is why ships float, submarines surface, hot air balloons rise and the moon still hangs around after all this time. All of that is related.
The opposite is true for cold air. It falls. When mass of any kind moves, it creates pressure. Maybe it pushes on a sailboat, or maybe it blows the top off a mountain. All of this and much more comes from that big ball of iron at the planet’s core—an unmerited grace for the planet’s thin film of life.
When they had that first pilot hole maybe half a mile down, it struck Jeter. The temporary descent platform was going to tip. It will spill all the men and equipment that were not tied down. And then, maybe it would get stuck, wedged in somewhere down in a dark shaft, with miles to drop before you hit the bottom, with all the workers dangling in the heat from their safety harnesses. This was all about the wind load—something else that gravity brings us.
You don’t normally think of wind underground, but toward the end of the design process, Jeter realized that the minute he vented the Madison Valley Abyss to the surface, differentials of temperature and pressure—all caused by the force of gravity—would begin to assert themselves. He called it “stack effect.”
A wind of fifty miles per hour will create a force of ten pounds against a flat plate. Jeter saw the forty-foot-square temporary descent platform as simply the flat plate that it really was. The hoist was going to lower that flat plate—loaded with workers—at the rate of sixteen miles per hour right into a headwind.
Then Jeter began to consider the characteristics of that headwind. He realized that when he finished drilling and blasting the second shaft, that one of them would become a giant air intake and the other a giant air exhaust. That might have allowed for a uniform airflow instead of turbulence. But that second shaft was always going to be a month behind and they could not sit on their hands and wait on it.
With only one shaft, the flow would divide itself, half intake and half exhaust. But this would be a turbulent flow. Any cross-section of it would resemble a choppy sea, pitching and yawing. The descent platform was going to hit the sides of the shaft and that was going to make it tip. Sure the men would be tied off, but how long can you hang on to your hood while you are dangling upside down at the end of your safety harness in a 700-degree headwind? Not exactly OSHA conditions.
When the project sequence reached the point that it would allow them to replace the open platform with an enclosed, climate controlled freight elevator, the bottom of the shaft would be plugged tight by the subterranean station. But for now, during this early stage, Jeter had to find a way to stabilize anything moving up or down through the shafts.
He did this with a center spindle. It was made up of three drill strings of twelve-inch drill pipe. There was a huge toggle at the bottom end, which snapped open after the spindle was twenty feet past the bottom end of the shaft. The station would be built around that toggle just like it would be built around the slurry ice pipe. The problem at the surface was more complex.
Jeter knew that he had to yoke these three pipes together at the top, and he had to hang the weight of an aggregate of twelve miles of drill string. He had to do this while still allowing his hoist access above the center of the shaft and while accommodating the temporary descent platform, and later, the elevator. Both of those had to be built around the spindle. His plan was a little complicated but it got the job done.
Jeter fastened the tops of each of his three pipes to a circular steel yoke. He carried the load of his spindle on a tall superstructure that spanned the shaft over to columns at each end. These were cast into concrete footings. Then he ran his hoist beam through the middle of the spindle to more columns at either end. From the hoist beam, Jeter hung a giant cast iron pulley. He could not put the hoist motor over the shaft because of the heat.
The spindle controlled the movement up and down the shafts but it complicated everything. The descent platform had to be built around the spindle. Later, the elevator had to be assembled and sealed around it. As always, the work had to be done in the middle of a searing 700 degree headwind. The fire-entry suits could stand the heat somewhere between one hour and two.
When the platform was at the surface, and before its descent, Jeter had to rest it on big hydraulic tracks. Then, when the hoist took the load, pistons would pull the tracks back, allowing the platform to make the descent down the shaft.
When the project reached the stage of the subterranean station, that finally plugged the bottom of the shaft, and stopped the wind load and turbulence once and for all. Jeter still used the spindle to make sure that the elevator stayed in the center of the shaft and did not scrape into the rock walls. Now they could descend and ascend faster, even during earthquake swarms.
Jeter also forecast that the working conditions down below on the descent platform would be impossible in the 50 mile per hour wind. So, during the time the temporary descent platform was down in the Abyss, Jeter capped the top opening.
By this time in the design process, Jeter was running out of room overhead. So, he ordered caterpillar tractors of the size mining companies use and he retrofitted hydraulic forks on the front, making a huge forklift. These would move two half-moon shaped steel plates over the shaft. The plates would rest on the same tracks that the descent platform rested on. Then, workers in fire-entry suits would cap the center of the spindle manually with small plates. They did this twelve times every day, seven days a week.
The work became so complex that Jeter held rehearsals, just like the school play.