Daily Scifi Shorts, Sketches, & Starts

Monday, October 13, 2014

A young man stood in black regulation swim trunks at the highest platform. He was a boy, really, with the sour, serious look of someone thrust into adult responsibility too early. The platform was fifty-four feet above the surface of the pool; the top of his head cleared the ceiling by less than two feet. Fifty-four feet was no accident--it was the precise distance from the deck of the fuel processor to the cold water below. The processors--they resembled nothing so much as the aircraft carriers of decades ago; they were a little taller and a little smaller. The young man did not look at the several people who were standing at the edge of the pool in street dress; he concentrted on the surface of the water impossibly far below.
    The boy reached over to a panel just above the safety handhold and pressed a black button near a grating that covered a speaker inside the wall. The speaker crackled to life. "Yeah?" It was a feminine voice.
    "Bring the temperature up a little," the young man said. "Confirm the inertia dampers are working."
    There was a pause, and Abe thought he felt a sort of invisible-hand tug on his bare feet as he stood on the platform.
    "Dampers working," the computer confirmed.
    "Start rotation."

Far away from the laboratory where Abe stood on the platform and readied himself to jump off of it andd into the water far, far below, the planetoid Titan, major moon of the Saturn system, was a busy place. Titan was complete encased in water, the top ten feet or so of which was frozen; the processors' hulls were heated, which melted the water and permitted them to be mobile, constantly melting a path in front of them and passing into it as the water behind them froze. One the ship was stable in the melted water, intakes at bow and stern brought in the cold liquid from below the ice line and processed the Helium-3 out of it. There wasn't much helium on Titan, but by some quirk of its path through Jupiter's magnetosphere, the helium that was recoverable was nearly 40 percent Helium-3. This compared to an average concentration of 0.04 percent in Titan's wispy atmosphere, 0.23 percent in Jupiter's atmosphere, and 0.47 percent in Saturn's atmosphere. In fact, the deep cold water of Titan's planetary ocean under the ice was the Solar System's most highly concentrated resevoir of Helium-3. Abe sat in the ship's narrow control room watching a display rise and fall with the levels of He-3 in the entering feedwater. He barely noticed Sasha Donaldson come into the room and sit down on the unoccupied stool beside him.
    "It's good feed, then?" Sasha said after studying Abe's face for a moment.
    Abe shrugged. "Yeah," he answered noncommittally.