Storytime
Sometimes, bad results can come from good intentions; just as good can come from bad. But I remember a time when I couldn't have told you going in which kind of intentions we were operating on... and I still to this day have no idea how to classify the results. It'd probably be easier to pick, if there were any credit or blame assigned; but even with Alfred standing right in the middle of things, no-one's ever pinned either kind of tail on him. Anyhow, it began (more or less) underground...
Left to myself at the bottom of the brightened cavern, I'd relaxed a bit and was entertaining myself with a few of the acausal toys that Goya had given me as a souvenir of my last vacation. You have to be careful, I discovered, not to shuffle the cards too many times between hands; but otherwise they make for a decent game of solitaire at the bottom of a deep hole. A game that was disturbed all too often by Alfred's Cyclonic lift system starting up as he spiralled down toward me with whatever new 'excavation specifications' he'd developed. Perfectionists; you know how they can be.
We'd been Up here on the Topside Of Beyond for so long that I was used to skimming the ice off my morning tea; and I'd developed the parlor trick of clapping my hands just after washing. The mist of water springing off of my hands froze and trapped the sound, leaving a small globe that could be thawed someplace where the unexpected 'pop' would do the most good; or thrown and shattered, so that the shards would individually melt with a sound like a miniature Dragon Parade. We'd also managed to build a nice little bungalow with nothing more than a garden hose and good aim; but what's the use of a bed you sink into as you sleep?
Anyway, on this particular day, Alfred had spun down to land in the bottom of his custom-built hole in the ground, and was standing impatiently next to the perpetual shovel, waiting for me to get to my feet and come see which unoffending chunk of the deep underground he wanted removed next. I took a moment to gather up my cards, ground them, and slip them back into their insulated casing before I walked over. Sure, it's a good idea not to take them too close to the shovel uncased, but I was also tired and ready to head back up to my bunk. Al, on the other hand, seemed to have gotten something lodged permanently athwart his craw.
"Right here!" He excitedly indicated another section of permacrust off to my left. "This is too planar! Beveled another half degree parabolically, it..." I drowned out the rest of his technical explanation in the grind of the shovel. Left uninterrupted, I knew from experience that he'd gradually expand the details to expose their critical integration with nearby facets of the "perfect pit", as I'd taken to calling it. From there, a recitation of the entire plan would follow, leading to a dialogue on the theorems behind it, a list of principal forces at work within those, and on and on and on. Heck, for all I knew he'd prequelize himself all the way back to something that sounded suspiciously like "Let There Be Digging," or something. I had never let it go on that long.
Just then, I noticed a ringing in my ears that had been slowly building behind the clank of the shovel (and the rattle of Al's Trap). I eased off pressure a bit, and the ringing rose more slowly for a moment. I stopped, and it slowly died away, leaving only slight echoes under Al's droning magnetic field descriptions. Hmm. I took out my flask for a quick sip of something warming while I thought about what it might mean.
Al noticed that I'd stopped, and for a wonder, so did he. I noticed his look, and offered him a sip from the flask as well, but he shied away from it. Some people just can't handle their liquor, I guess. But as I recapped it, he looked like ratcheting up again, so I held up one finger in a gesture for silence, and considered my work for a moment. That ringing reminded me of something... ah! The half of Mister Verne's sphere made a sound like that when he polished it unbraced. Have to be careful here, but...
I spun the shovel one more time around the bottom curve of the chamber, pressing down just a bit harder where I'd been digging a second before, and then stopped in the center with it. It was the work of a moment to load the scrapings of hard frozen earth into the hopper attached to one side, and then to slip the end of the lift rope into the 'walker gears' Eli'd fitted along the upper curve of the machine. I stepped back as it winched itself quickly out of sight, pushing Al back with me, and gesturing again for silence. After a minute or so, the noise of the shovel rattled its way to the upper gantry, and I heard the magnified clanking of the chain as it climbed across from there to the storage bunker at the edge of the excavation. Once everything was quiet again, I whispered to Al, "Now watch... and listen. SILENTLY."
I walked to the center of the cavern, and fished through my pockets for a small coin. Let's see... Doubloon? No, too heavy, and too pure. Silver dollar? No, Ben's 'double milling' edges might be too harsh. Atlantean Crystal was definitely a bad idea... Ah! Here it is!
To Al's astonishment, I held up a perfectly ordinary 'slug'. This particular one was a blank that had been sheared out of the hull of one of those Elysian Galleons by a thrown rod from the first generation engines. It'd missed me and Phillip in the dry dock by about a foot and a half, burying itself in an oaken crosspiece nearby. It took a couple of hours to dig it out of the beam, but I'd made a point of getting it... if only for the luck of the thing. Anyway, I held up this featureless piece of steel like a conjurer preparing to pull a hat out of a rabbit, and then with some ceremony... dropped it.
It fell normally, and I know Al thought I'd taken leave of my senses; but in fact, it was careful attention to my senses that led me to attempt this. I'd realized that the ringing I'd been hearing earlier could only be the result of harmonics gradually coming into focus; and that in a resonating chamber of this size, that focus could be impressive in action. So it was with no small sense of satisfaction that I listened for the sound of the disc hitting the ground.
Of course, my knack for the dramatic finish does ocasionally backfire just a bit; that Mediterranean Basin thing, for example... you'd think they'd be willing to let go a few measly crops in exchange for some really nice beachfront, but some people will find fault with anything. Anyway, when the slug hit, it chimed through the chamber like Big Ben on a Bender. We both clapped our hands over our ears, and I suspect I was still grinning just a bit, even if it was through gritted teeth. But a moment later, my expression changed to surprise just as Al's had; for the coin chimed again! I looked back, to see that something in the resonant structure of the chamber had lifted the disc, spinning, on a column of vibrating air; and that it was dropping toward the floor from about head height, on its way to generating a third strike.
Fearing that too much more of this would pass through sonic and into seismic, I snatched the thing from midair and muffled it in one of my scarves for a moment before dropping it back into my vest pocket. The chamber took a few minutes more to grow still again, and by then there were several heads peering down into the pit. Neither one of us could hear them calling down, but we managed to convey the idea that we might like to be helped up. And once we were above ground, everyone nearby agreed that the chamber was about as ready as it was going to get. And, though it may sound strange to say this, that's when the trouble started.
You see, Al had dragged us all up here to build this thing so that he could experiment with magnetic fields on a large scale in an environment that was industrially uncontaminated as well as proximate to a focal or nodal point. (Now you see why I don't generally let Al go on for too long?) So he ran everybody out but the coopers, and started them on laying in the webwork of bracings and conductors he'd planned. Took 'em about three days of running around in there like ants in a shaken sugarbowl, but they got it done... and, as if they sensed something coming, requested their wages in full. They left the next day, and quickly.
Al made a few jokes about "Standing the heat", but we'd all taken to looking at him askance; and even the ex-circus crew that maintained the net and cables across the excavation walked carefully around it. All of which only got worse when the experiments began.
See, Al was undeterred as usual... he'd gone ahead and hooked up the series of Graff Boxes that weren't being used for light, and started experimenting. Like I say, I tried not to hear too many technical descriptions of what he was doing, but I could hardly avoid hearing the rush of the generators, or the crackle of lines laid so close to each other at the mouth of the pit. And sometimes there would be vibrations in the ground, as if Al was working to separate us from the continent below.
We all endured it as stoically as we could for about a week; but there was one morning that something made every last one of us so edgy that tempers flared worse than superstition, and we forgot how nervous we'd been about the experiments 'cause we were too busy shoutin' at each other for slights real or imagined... and then, just before noon, it stopped. well, there's nothing makes a man less enthusiastic about science than realizing that it's reached into his guts and flipped on his angry switch. We went to Al and told him we were leaving in the morning, and he could come with us or order up a new batch of helpers, whichever was more to his liking.
What we failed to reckon with was the tendency of many scientists to 'advance the timetable' when pressured. That night, pitch dark between sunset and moonrise, I woke to the sound of power crackling across lines far in excess of their capacity. I bundled up and rushed out, and got no further than my front door, stunned into momentary immobility. The excavation was ablaze with different light; where the St Elmo's Lamps had lit it in shades of green before, now it was washed in the flickering bluish-white light of Van Der Graaf boxes sparking to beat the band - and then flash fry it. With those things wound up like Turkish Tops, I normally wouldn't have gone near them without heavy operator's boots and a LONG asbestos rope; but near the center of it all stood Al; and it looked like he might have wired himself into a corner.
I ran as close as I dared to the ring of lightning around the pit, and was able to see what he'd done. He'd taken all of the boxes that powered the lamps, and linked them in series with the ones powering the grid in the pit. It was the sound of conductors pushed beyond their limits in cascade that woke me; and as I approached, I could smell the biting thin stink of the boxes overloading. And huddled in the midst of it, its creator... helpless before his own handiwork.
I couldn't find a way through that wouldn't turn me VERY briefly into the most conductive man alive... So I pulled out my flask for a sip, blithely ignored Al's appalled look, and ran my eye across the double ring of lines around the pit. Hmmm... double line... ah! I had an idea.
From the increasing glow of the lines nearby, I coul tell that I wouldn't have much time before things got so far out of hand that you couldn't even find pieces to pick up. I ran around to the hose on the other side of the circle, and considered angles. Too high, and it would freeze too soon... too low and I couldn't release in time to avoid becoming part of the circuit. Carefully, I held my thumb over the end of the hose, turned on the water, and let the pressure build up a bit. I waved to Al, and gestured to him to duck as I let fly a tightly controlled stream of water at about head height between two of the bigger boxes.
As I'd calcualted - okay, calculated and hoped - The stream passed right between the two boxes, and fell towards the lines below. I'd built enough pressure to reach all the way to the inner ring of lines, and cut the flow just a split second before the stream fell on them. Eli's 'tame lightning' flashed back along the stream towards me, but found no connection... until the other end of it fell across the lines between the outer ring of Van Der Graaf boxes. I didn't quite have time to duck, but the resulting circuit collapse was so impressive that I almost didn't mind having spots in my vision for the next few days.
Although I had planned - fine, planned and prayed - for the short-circuit to collapse the rings and stop the cascade, I hadn't thought out where all that energy was going to go. Well, outside of the self-preservation of thinking "not into ME!" As it happened, the only open path led down into the St. Elmo's Lamps in the pit... and they lit up like filling in for Old Sol while he wasn't around. And stayed lit up for hours, waxing and waning, and lighting up the night sky. And the interesting thing was, that after the popping and pinging of what were now just a bunch of "Van Der Slaag" boxes ended, the flares in the pit were perfectly silent.
Eventually, we got bold enough to dare the edge of the pit. Looking down into it, we could see the lamps still floating below us, and the lined sides of the excavation glowing with light of their own. We must have stared into it for almost half an hour (in my case, out of the sides of my eyes). It was beautiful, and just a little spooky. and then, of course, some idiot got the bright idea of dropping something into it.
Siezed by shared suspicion, we sprinted simultaneously toward the surrounding snowbanks; and some time passed before any of us surmounted the snowline. Or, for that matter, did anything else sibilant. Eventually, though, the lack of anything resembling armageddon reassured us... we crept slowly out of our burrows, into something a whole lot like sunrise.
Above us, the light coruscating within the pit rose into the sky. Gradually it blotted out the stars, brightening like dawn, but without the shadows. The only sound was an occasional admiring whistle or gasp as the less resolute dug out of hiding and into the new light. We watched it for quite a while. It was a marvelous thing to behold, and Al received a lot of compliments on his unintentional success. Of course, as the light increased rather than fading, the compliments began to take on a tone that suggested "okay, it's pretty... can you put it back now?"
I have to give Al credit... he tried. But I suspect that even with all of his "inculcae technologica" intact he'd have been hard pressed to do more than - technologically speaking - shrug. Of course, even without a single instrument, he was already tuning up a whole orchestra of explanations.
After another few hours, we all got busy packing up our gear. As hard as it had been to deal with not seeing the sun for several days, we knew we'd be even harder pressed to deal with this light in it's place. Experiment over for all of us, we headed back to civilization... and someplace with swimming pools. Al protested a bit, but we could all tell his heart wasn't really in it. He'd got some idea of adapting whatever had just happened to well digging. I resolved to make my way back through the midwest separately.
As for the remnants of this round of "science for its own sake"; they gradually dissipated. Now they only appear occasionally, and seems like people think of seeing them as being good luck. Meanwhile, I hear that his well intentioned Wyoming project has had some pretty serious ups and downs; so it's my intention to vacation in my own less excavated part of the world.