The Engineer
By Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
It was very simple. Some combination of low temperature and high pressure had forced something from the seepage at the ocean bottom into combination with something in the water around them.
And the impregnable armor around Subatlantic Oil’s drilling chamber had discovered a weakness.
On the television screen it looked more serious than it was—so Muhlenhoff told himself, staring at it grimly. You get down more than a mile, and you’re bound to have little technical problems. That’s why deep-sea oil wells were still there.
Still, it did look kind of serious. The water driving in the pitted faults had the pressure of eighteen hundred meters behind it, and where it struck it did not splash—it battered and destroyed. As Muhlenhoff watched, a bulkhead collapsed in an explosion of spray; the remote camera caught a tiny driblet of the scattering brine, and the picture in the screen fluttered and shrank, and came back with a wavering sidewise pulse.
Muhlenhoff flicked off the screen and marched into the room where the Engineering Board was waiting in attitudes of flabby panic.
As he swept his hand through his snow-white crew cut and called the board to order a dispatch was handed to him—a preliminary report from a quickly-dispatched company troubleshooter team. He read it to the board, stone-faced.
A veteran heat-transfer man, the first to recover, growled:
“Some vibration thing—and seepage from the oil pool. Sloppy drilling!” He sneered. “Big deal! So a couple hundred meters of shaft have to be plugged and pumped. So six or eight compartments go pop. Since when did we start to believe the cack Research & Development hands out? Armor’s armor. Sure it pops—when something makes it pop. If Atlantic oil was easy to get at, it wouldn’t be here waiting for us now. Put a gang on the job. Find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again. Big deal!”
Muhlenhoff smiled his attractive smile. “Breck,” he said, “thank God you’ve got guts. Perhaps we were in a bit of a panic. Gentlemen, I hope we’ll all take heart from Mr. Breck’s levelheaded—what did you say, Breck?”
Breck didn’t look up. He was pawing through the dispatch Muhlenhoff had dropped to the table. “Nine-inch plate,” he read aloud, whitefaced. “And time of installation, not quite seven weeks ago. If this goes on in a straight line—” he grabbed for a pocket slide-rule—“we have, uh—” he swallowed—“less time than the probable error,” he finished.
“Breck!” Muhlenhoff yelled. “Where are you going?”
The veteran heat-transfer man said grimly as he sped through the door: “To find a submarine.”
The rest of the Engineering Board was suddenly pulling chairs toward the troubleshooting team’s dispatch. Muhlenhoff slammed a fist on the table.
“Stop it,” he said evenly. “The next man who leaves the meeting will have his contract canceled. Is that clear, gentlemen? Good. We will now proceed to get organized.”
He had them; they were listening. He said forcefully: “I want a task force consisting of a petrochemist, a vibrations man, a hydrostatics man and a structural engineer. Co-opt mathematicians and computermen as needed. I will have all machines capable of handling Fourier series and up cleared for your use. The work of the task force will be divided into two phases. For Phase One, members will keep their staffs as small as possible. The objective of Phase One is to find the cause of the leaks and predict whether similar leaks are likely elsewhere in the project. On receiving a first approximation from the force I will proceed to set up Phase Two, to deal with countermeasures.”
He paused. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we must not lose our nerves. We must not panic. Possibly the most serious technical crisis in Atlantic’s history lies before us. Your most important job is to maintain—at all times—a cheerful, courageous attitude. We cannot, repeat cannot, afford to have the sub-technical staff of the project panicked for lack of a good example from us.” He drilled each of them in turn with a long glare. “And,” he finished, “if I hear of anyone suddenly discovering emergency business ashore, the man who does it better get fitted for a sludgemonkey’s suit, because that’s what he’ll be tomorrow. Clear?”
Each of the executives assumed some version of a cheerful, courageous attitude. They looked ghastly, even to themselves.
Muhlenhoff stalked into his private office, the nerve-center of the whole bulkheaded works.
In Muhlenhoff’s private office, you would never know you were 1800 meters below the surface of the sea. It looked like any oilman’s brass-hat office anywhere, complete to the beautiful blonde outside the door (but
