5.1
18 February 2057
Thalia Buoyant Island
Southern Stratosphere
Venus
“Frédéric Ortega, you come away from that edge.”
Frédéric turned and saw his father, Julian. In a gray T-shirt and leggings, bright yellow breathing mask, beige kaftan and sun hat, Julian was dressed for work. Under the broad, blue sky, the Sun cast a fierce, hot shadow beneath him on the carbónespuma pavement.
Frédéric was not dressed for work. In just a T-shirt, shorts, and an air mask he’d nearly outgrown already, Frédéric was, at best, dressed for school. But not really even that.
“What do you think you’re going to see down there?” Julian demanded. “The ground? The future? It’s nothing but clouds.”
He did not, at least, warn Frédéric about the risk of falling. When you lived on an island floating in the sky, the risk of falling was not something that really needed much discussion.
But Thalia—the island—was small, and Frédéric needed, every now and again, to remind himself that there was a whole planet down below it. At night, he sometimes came out by himself, to lie down on the soft carbónespuma and look up at the stars. Especially the blue one: Earth.
“You skipping school again?” Julian said.
Frédéric shrugged. “Skipping” seemed like an awfully specific term. He just happened to not be in school at this exact moment, because he couldn’t stand the idea of even one more hour of recorded lectures and AI-proctored quizzes. School here on Venus was a sort of parody of actual learning, heavy on obsolete skills like reading and algebra.
“You don’t want an education?” Julian said.
“Not that one,” Frédéric said, flicking sweat off his arms.
Julian said nothing for a few seconds, then nodded slowly. “Okay. I hear you.” And then, surprisingly, he said, “You want to come to work with me today?”
“Yes,” Frédéric said, because that sounded a lot better than school. Not good, but better.
“You gotta pass the tests, at least, before your mother and I will let you out of school completely. Whether you think so or not, there’s stuff you gotta know, to build any kind of future for yourself, much less the whole island. Now come away from that edge, please. You never know when the wind is going to gust on you.”
Frédéric nodded. It was dangerous, standing on the edge like this. That was the point, or part of it, to feel really alive for a minute or two. Barely a kilometer below the island at the moment, the cloud tops were all puffy and innocent beneath a blue, Earthlike sky, hiding the truth that they were actually sulfuric acid. Often, they would engulf the island entirely, making it impossible to go outside without a full spacesuit. Also, they extended downward for twenty-five kilometers, toward the furnace-hot surface thirty kilometers below that. If you fell off the edge, your body would fall for an hour and a half, burning and crushing and dissolving into vapor as it drifted down through the thick atmosphere, before some diminished lump of it finally hit the ground. If you had your mask on, you’d be alive for the first twenty minutes of that, totally unable to save yourself. Paradise, right?
He stepped away from the edge, toward his father, and saw his own relief mirrored in his father’s eyes. He’d gotten his jolt of adrenaline; he could step to safety now.
Behind Julian Ortega stood the Ship—a cone of metal, alone and out of place in this environment. Behind that, Thalia Village glittered like diamond.
Exactly like diamond, because that was what its domes and barrels were made from. They sprouted like jeweled toys from the carbónespuma pavement at the island’s center. Farther from the edge now than they used to be. The island grew, a little bit every day, as 3D printers spiraled around it, churning out more pavement. Never enough, was it? Though opaque as concrete or asphalt, and every bit as ugly, the pavement was graphene aerogel filled with hydrogen gas, pulled from the atmosphere of Venus itself. It yielded under your weight a little bit, like a thin mattress on a not-too-rigid bed. Frédéric had been walking on it for a third of his life now—five years out of fifteen, and he had always always hated it.
Reading his expression, Frédéric’s father said, “You know we’re very lucky, right?”
“Yes, exceedingly,” Frédéric answered, trying to keep the sarcasm to a minimum.
“They’re not doing so well on Mars. They can’t stand outside like this, in just a T-shirt and mask. They can’t feel the Sun on their skin or the wind in their hair. They get a leak in one of their buildings, they have to evacuate the whole thing. We got leaks we pretty much ignore. Just a little CO2, at atmospheric pressure. You see what I’m saying?”
“I don’t compare myself to the people on Mars,” Frédéric said. Why would he? He had supposedly given his enthusiastic agreement to coming here, to being a founding colonist on Thalia. Supposedly. But he was only ten years old at the time, with no way of knowing what he was actually agreeing to. None of them knew; none of them had envisioned . . . this. But especially the children. If Social Services existed on Venus, they would call it abuse and take him away to somewhere safe.
“Come on,” his father said, now walking back toward the village. “You get your hands dirty today. Make you feel better.”
“Okay,” Frédéric said, and followed. He didn’t think it would actually make him feel better. He didn’t think anything would. But it would make him feel something, and right now he would take it.
As they passed by a landing leg of the Ship, they trailed their hands along it, as was customary. A piece of Earth on Thalia. A connection.
“Why can’t we just fly back to Earth?” Frédéric used to ask. But the answer was always the same: “Supermajority.” That was how Thalia was governed, and nothing ever happened without it. The ship was ready to fly; refueling it had been one of the colony’s first priorities, in case they had to beat a hasty retreat to Venusian orbit. But without sixty-six percent supermajority consent, it was little more than a shrine.
The other reason, unspoken, Frédéric had had to work out for himself: there was no escape from Venusian orbit. That would require the Booster Stage, which the people of Thalia had yet to construct, because the supermajority had yet to agree to it. Or it would require someone to come and rescue them—a service any of the Four Horsemen could easily provide, for a few billion dollars. Money the people of Thalia did not have.
He tried not to think about it as he and his father passed under the twenty-meter roof of the photovoltaic array. Cool shadows underneath, a tickling of wind on his sweaty armpits. The Array was a half-kilometer ring, fully encircling the village. Beyond it, they passed the Orchard Dome, the Field Dome, and the East Residences, and finally came to the Well.
Basilio del Campo and Diego Nunez-Talamantes were there already, dressed for work like Frédéric’s father.
“Let’s get you some gloves,” Julian said, “and a hat. And some sleeves; you’re going to get a sunburn, guy.” He paused for a moment, then said, “You know what? Just take mine. I’ll go inside at lunchtime and get myself fresh gear. Right now I could use the vitamin D.”
Laughing at his own remark, Julian stripped off his gloves, kaftan, and hat, handing them to Frédéric. They were moist inside, but Frédéric did not complain, because his alternative was to go inside and fetch his own stuff. And if he did that, there was a good chance he’d run into his mother, or some other authority figure who’d overrule Julian and send him to school.
“We’re getting ready to swap out a section of cable,” Diego said to Frédéric, not bothering to ask what he was doing here. It was pretty obvious.
Diego was pointing at the winch, slowly winding in a gray-white cable that ran up over an idler wheel and down through the opening of the Well. Basilio was just leaning on the sidewall of the Well, looking down. The wall was a cylinder of the same material as the island itself, surrounding a two-meter circular opening that led down through several meters of carbónespuma and out into the open air. Frédéric positioned himself next to Basilio, put his hands on top of the wall, and looked down at the clouds.
At an average altitude of fifty-five kilometers, Thalia moved with the trade winds, which meant she moved with the clouds, so there was no real sense that they were actually traveling eighty meters per second over the Aino Planitia of Venus’s southern hemisphere. It all looked very serene.
The cable, though, ran straight down through the clouds, all the way down to Hell itself, although Frédéric couldn’t even follow it as far down as the cloud tops. You could not, of course, roll up fifty kilometers of cable on a single spool. A new spool had to be swapped in every day—sometimes multiple times per day.
“The trawler’s coming up today,” Basilio said.
“Lucky,” Frédéric said. Even when everything was working perfectly, the trawler only actually surfaced every five days. And when things weren’t perfect—which was most of the time—it could be a week or longer.
“Get ready,” Basilio said over his shoulder. “The splice is coming up.”
“ETA?” Julian asked.
“Two minutes, maybe less. Definitely less.”
“Frédéric, get your head out of that well and watch what Diego is doing,” Julian said. “You’ve got my gloves, so if he needs you to grab the cable, you grab it.”
Spun from diamond fibers and carbon nanotubes, the cable was only one millimeter wide, looking a lot like the fishing line Frédéric used to handle as a child, back on Earth, when he and his father had gone out for a “lake day.” But the cable wasn’t going fast—just thirty centimeters per second, so he could get his gloves on it, yes. But it was also tight, holding up the entire weight of the trawler, plus the weight of all the cable that hadn’t been reeled in yet.
“How do I grab it?” he asked, mystified.
Looking annoyed now, Diego started pointing to components of the winch. “Idler wheel, yeah? Tensioner. Accumulator. Bail arm. Dancer. See this going back and forth? This keeps the cable from bunching up in one part of the spool. Carriage. Drum axle. Primary spool. Swap spool.”
“I know what a spool is,” Frédéric protested.
“You grab the cable here,” Diego said, pointing between the tensioner and the bail arm. He pantomimed a sort of scooping motion: fingers open, palms flat. “Between the tensioner and the bail arm, see how over these wheels the cable isn’t tight? That’s the accumulator, where you can pull slack. The tensioner is carrying the weight of the trawler, see? In fact, just grab the cable now. Good, now take two steps backward. Gimme a couple meters of slack. There you go.”
The cable was now sliding, slowly and frictionlessly, over Frédéric’s gloved hands.
“How long do I do this?”
“You’ll see.”
Diego held up a metal tool that had clearly been 3D-printed in the machine shop.
“This is a splice popper. You watch what I do with this, yeah?”
“Splice is in the Well,” Basilio reported. Then: “Splice is out of the Well. Splice is going over the idler. Look sharp, Freddo!”
Presently, Frédéric saw a metal object approaching his hands, with the cable wrapped through it and around it in a complex pattern.
“That’s holding two sections of cable together,” Julian said behind him.
Frédéric let the splice go through one hand, then the other. The metal object was lighter than it looked.
“Now watch,” said Diego, who then proceeded with a set of motions so quick and so practiced that Frédéric could barely follow them. Somehow, Diego took the slack line from Frédéric and looped it over the swap reel. It made one turn around the drum, then another, with Diego holding the splice in one hand and tensioning the cable with the other, while also holding the splice popper.
And then, somehow, the metal piece was off, and one loose end of the cable was flap-flap-flapping around the primary spool, which spun rapidly for a few moments and then slowed. The other loose end was jammed into a hole in the drum of the swap spool, and a slack loop of cable shrank and vanished in Diego’s hand, and then Diego was stepping back and shouting:
“Clear primary!”
At this, Julian jumped forward and did something to the primary spool, which clicked and clacked and came away on its rollers.
Diego leaned in toward the swap spool, undid some sort of latch, and shoved the swap spool along its axis into the spot where the primary spool had been.
“Lock!” Diego shouted through his mask.
Julian stepped forward again and pushed a lever, latching the swap spool in place as, apparently, the new primary. Around which the cable was now peacefully winding, as though nothing had happened.
It was strange to watch Diego giving orders to Julian, because Diego was only twenty years old, but it seemed like one of those things where the guy working that position was the guy who called.
“Ease that line back in toward me, gentle,” Diego said to Frédéric. “Two steps forward, that’s right, now just let it go and step clear. Easy to do, right?”
“That was amazing,” Frédéric said.
Diego seemed surprised. “That? Freddo, we do that every day.”
“Come with me,” Julian said, wiping an arm across his forehead and grabbing the frame arms of the now-detached primary spool, which was nearly as tall as he was. “We need to put this away and grab a fresh one.”
“Okay,” Frédéric said, actually excited by the idea.
The trawler just went up and down, through fifty-five kilometers of atmosphere, from the planet’s surface to the island and back again, over and over, ad infinitum, scooping up rocks. And yet, Frédéric discovered there were actually hundreds of different steps in that process. Springs and motors needed adjustment. Drops of lubricant needed to be delicately placed in the exact right spots. The condition of the cable itself needed to be monitored, by sending electricity and sound waves up and down its length and seeing what echoes came back.
“This last section is the one that gets the most wear,” Frédéric’s father explained. “It goes all the way down into the supercritical fluid layer, where the atmosphere is so thick it acts almost like a liquid. It’s a strong solvent, and picks up a lot of ions from the soil, and of course it’s hot, so it’s a rough environment, even for diamonds. And down there, the cable is going fast, and it sometimes drags along the ground. It gets hit by lightning a lot, and of course there’s the acid. We get maybe three, four months out of this section, and then we just throw it down the Well and swap in another one, which is why the cable fabber never sleeps. We got to get about a hundred and seventy meters a day out of that little machine. That’s two millimeters per second. Can you imagine all the little atoms and molecules that sucker’s got to assemble? I get tired just thinking about it.”
“I see the bucket,” Diego reported. He had swapped stations with Basilio, and was looking down into the well. “It just cleared the cloud tops, so the ETA is about . . . fifty minutes.”
“It’s a two-point-three-kilogram payload,” Basilio said.
Frédéric got the feeling they were speaking mainly for his benefit.
“How do you know the weight?” he asked.
“We weigh it,” Diego said, pointing to a gauge on the winch.
“Is two kilograms a lot?”
“Not really,” Julian said. “It means we’ve been scraping hard rock, and we picked up a couple of chunks. A good haul would be ten kilos of real dirt. Best we ever had was a hundred and twenty, but that’s a major outlier. Now come with me again; we got to get the hoist.”
That proved to be another complex piece of hardware that had to be rolled and locked into place, unfolded and adjusted. And then the catch basin needed to be installed, which seemed redundant to Frédéric if they had only caught two kilograms, because the basin was the size of two couches pushed together. But what did he know?
When the trawler was closer, he could see not only the bucket, but the frame and the scoop, which were made of diamond but were so scratched up they’d gone an opaque gray-white, hard to distinguish against the clouds.
“We’ve got two broken teeth,” Diego reported, though how he could see that, Frédéric was not at all sure. “Bad luck. Do you want to replace?”
“I do,” Julian said. “We’ve got three in storage, and that’s what they’re for.”
And so Frédéric was sent back to the storage hut again to look for “teeth,” which turned out to be on a labeled shelf. Each one was a chisel-shaped diamond the size of his fist, with a hole and a collar on one side, and a removable diamond pin running through the hole. It must have taken the fabber hours to produce each of these; it was hard to see how the loss of two such teeth could be worth a couple of kilograms of random surface rocks. But what did he know?
He brought the teeth back to the Well, and watched the men perform various tasks in preparation for the trawler’s arrival. They joked and laughed and seemed to be having a good time, despite the heat.
We must all be losing a lot of water, Frédéric thought, because the air was always drier than even the worst deserts of Earth. But although one man or another would occasionally lift his mask for a moment to sip from a canteen, they mostly ignored the issue. Probably because the air inside a breath mask was not dry at all. But water was easy to synthesize from the crap that was in the atmosphere—the trace acids and sulfur dioxide—so nobody seemed too worried about it.
Frédéric tried that trick, lifting his mask to drink, but caught a whiff of the stinking air and couldn’t swallow for all the coughing. They were well above the clouds today—the air was not so acidic—but still it was awful stuff. Even when he put his mask back on, he couldn’t stop clearing his throat for ten minutes.
The masks were solar powered except at night, and they let the nitrogen through and cracked the CO2 into oxygen and expelled a steady stream of carbon monoxide back into the atmosphere. The air inside the mask would be considered wildly unsafe by Earthly standards—too much oxygen, too much CO2 and SO2, too much H2SO4, not nearly enough “filler gases” like nitrogen and argon. But people were adaptable, especially when the alternative was carrying the weight of a whole spacesuit on your shoulders all day. Still, Frédéric had never worn a mask for this long, and his lungs and his airway were starting to really object. He started to dry-cough, a few times per minute.
“You need to go back inside, guy,” his father warned him. “Your body’s not used to this abusive environment.”He laughed, and punched Frédéric lightly on the arm. “You’re doing good, really. These things take time.”
“Can I wait until the trawler comes up?” Frédéric asked.
Julian shrugged. “You tell me. Can you?”
But the question answered itself, when Diego called out, “Trawler in fifteen seconds, guys. Trawler is in the Well.”
And then the trawler frame was rising up out of the Well, and then the bucket and scoop.
“Ready to stop!” Basilio called out. Then: “Stopping.” He pressed the big red Stop button on the winch, and suddenly it was a lot quieter out here.
With surprising speed and urgency, Diego and Julian swiveled the trawler frame until the bucket was over the catch basin, and then Basilio worked another control, and the bucket and scoop opened like a clam shell, dropping out a rock the size of two closed fists, along with a handful of dust.
“That’s it?” Frédéric said.
“That’s it,” Julian confirmed.
“It’s a nice chunk,” Basilio said. “See those shiny flecks? Metal ore. Maybe some salts. Some rocks are just silicon and oxygen.”
Unable to help himself, Frédéric dropped his father’s gloves, leaned into the basin, and picked the thing up. He could not remember the last time he’d held a rock in his hand. The rough, solid texture of it was amazing: not at all like diamond or metal or plastic. Here at last was something real. It was hot, though, and after a second he dropped it, clattering, back into the basin.
“What’d you do that for?” Julian said, more concernedly than angrily. “It’s covered in acid, guy. Jeez, you got to wash that hand.” Clucking in disappointment, he fetched his canteen, unscrewed the cap, and upended it on Frédéric’s now-outstretched right hand. He didn’t feel any acid—just heat—but the blood-warm water did feel good.
“Rub your hands together until they stop feeling slippery,” Julian instructed, “and wipe them on your kaftan. My kaftan, actually. All right, let’s get you inside. I think you’ve had enough grown-up work for one day.”
Frédéric was not in agreement if that meant he had to go to school, so he said, “Maybe enough outdoor work.” And then, as if to emphasize the point, he coughed.
Sighing, Julian grabbed the catch basin by the handles and started wheeling it toward the airlock. Julian followed behind.
The airlock didn’t require any pressurization or anything; it was just a manual door that rolled up in front of them and back down behind them, and another door behind it that did the same. A little bit of interior atmosphere was allowed to escape each time, and a little bit of Venusian air was allowed in.
Inside, it was cool and very humid. Plants hung from niches in every wall and in the arched diamond ceiling, filtering the sunlight into a thousand narrow rays.
Frédéric gratefully stripped off his mask, and then his father’s hat. He breathed deeply, letting the clean, moist air down into his lungs. Then he coughed a little more; it would take him ten minutes to really shake it. It was like when you accidentally inhaled a bit of food; the irritation went on and on, long after you coughed it out of your airway.
“Come with me,” Julian said. “Let’s see what Tohias has to say about our catch.”
“Aren’t Diego and Basilio going to need you?”
“Right now?” Julian said. “They’re just going to swap out those broken teeth and send the trawler back down. They’ll be a little slower without a third hand, but I think we can afford a few minutes, right?”
Frédéric didn’t answer.
To the right of the airlock was the processing room, where Tohias Nunez-Talamantes was waiting for them. As they walked in, he raised the back of one hand to cover his nose. People smelled bad when they came in from outside—an acrid, sulfury reek that took time to dissipate.
The processing room was full of meter-wide machines—furnaces and centrifuges and deconstructors, some made of native diamond and plastic, but most of metal and unmistakably of Earthly manufacture. Along the clear diamond wall ran a shelf, all the way around, of bottled chemicals.
“You kept me waiting,” Tohias said to Julian. “The bucket’s been up for ten minutes.”
“It’s been up for five and a half,” Julian said. Then, more diplomatically, “We’re showing Frédéric the ropes today, literally. I’m sorry if that slowed things down a little.”
Tohias was Diego’s father, and the mayor of Thalia. He was also the rogue mechanochemist whose work in carbon allotrope 3D printing had made all of this possible. He was not a patient man.
“What have you brought me?” he asked. Then, peering into the catch basin, he said, “Oh. Mmm. Another . . . We need to let the bucket drag longer than this, Julian.”
Julian clucked, grimaced, and shrugged at that. “Sir, we broke two teeth off the scoop as it is. We let it drag any longer, we’re going to lose them all. First couple of contacts, we didn’t pick up anything. This load came from our third drag, and I didn’t want to push any further than that. We get really unlucky, sir, we’re going to scrape the whole trawler off. I think maybe we’re just at an unfavorable latitude. It seems like the surface is mostly bedrock, hard and smooth.”
Tohias put a hand on his chin and nodded for a few seconds, and finally said, “I see, I see. We do want it smooth, so we don’t just smash against a cliff or something, but maybe there’s such a thing as too smooth. We were doing better a few months ago, down south over Lada Terra, right?”
“A little better, yes. Although I wouldn’t want the ground any rougher than that. We get too much terrain, it’s going to cost us. We hit a cliff, like you said, we’re going to pop the quick release, and then you’ll have to fabricate a whole new trawler.”
“Mmm. Yes. So we could go back there, but . . . there are sand dunes in Menat Undae we really ought to check out. That’s going to be mostly quartz, but we could scoop up full buckets of it, at very low risk. Depending on the exact composition, we’d probably increase our overall yields. Although, it’s three hundred kilometers away. If we move that far north, our days are going to get longer.”
Frédéric groaned. The day on Venus’s surface was 118 Earth days long, but up here above the clouds, it was dictated by the trade winds, which circled the planet much faster than that. Right now, Thalia’s “day” was around sixty hours, plus or minus, and Frédéric had never gotten used to it since they’d moved to this position. Any longer and he would definitely lose his mind.
Seeing Frédéric’s distress, Tohias said, “It won’t be popular, but it may be necessary. Mmm. Let me think on it some. I’ll estimate some numbers, and we’ll put it to a vote at the next meeting.”
“A fuller bucket would be nice,” Julian said. Then, after a long pause, he said, “Well, I’d better get back outside and make sure that trawler is on its way down again. Can you . . . Frédéric is interested in some hands-on education today. Can he watch you process this rock?”
“Yes, I suppose he can.” Tohias nodded slowly, as though the idea of a practical education for Thalia’s teens had never occurred to him.
Holding the rock in a gloved hand, Tohias said, “This is a mineral called gneiss, with stripes—you see these?—of low-grade stannite or cylindrite. Looks like some rutile impurities here and here, and some . . . halite? Venus definitely had oceans at one point, or these minerals would not be found together.”
Frédéric peered in for close inspection. “Is it good?”
“Mmm. It’s better than a chunk of pure basalt, which is what they brought me last time. We’ll get maybe thirty grams of useful metals out of this, all different kinds. Mostly tin and copper, I think, and some titanium and aluminum. Also probably twenty grams of polysalt.”
Polysalt was a highly prized commodity on Thalia—a supposedly healthier alternative to the “piss salt” purified from human urine—but twenty grams was not going to go very far.
“It doesn’t seem like much,” Frédéric said.
“It’s not,” Tohias agreed. “By weight, this is mostly oxygen and silicon, which we already have in abundance. We don’t need silica; we have diamond. We don’t need more solar panels. We don’t need silicones; we have all the CHON a polymer chemist could ever need.”
CHON meant carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Any school child knew that, especially if fifty percent of their nutritional intake came out of a CHON chow synthesizer.
“But we can get more from sand dunes?” Frédéric asked.
Tohias frowned and said, “I think so? I’m not a geologist by training. I’m consulting with a few on Earth, but of course we can’t pay them. So, we learn as we go, which is an important skill in its own right.”
“Yes, sir,” Frédéric said, because he didn’t know how else to respond.
Back on Earth, some people called Tohias the Fifth Horseman, or sometimes the Spanish Horseman, because he had not only invented flying carbónespuma and the machines to mass-produce it, but had then led fifty people to Venus with him to live on the stuff, and had (so far) kept them all alive. A remarkable achievement, surely. But Tohias was no trillionaire; this project would be impossible without the real Horsemen’s rockets and launch pads, and the example they’d set on Mars and Luna and at ESL1. Also, the machines they’d designed or commissioned, the clear guidance about what was critically needed on a space colony, and what was merely luxury.
Without all of that already in hand, the founders of Thalia could never have managed even this much. And the money for this venture had come mostly from the colonists themselves, plus a few others who’d hoped to follow along in a second wave of settlers that had (so far) never materialized. There were not enough rich people on Earth who wanted to live like this. Not enough to fill another Ship, even though a landing pad had been prepared for one three years ago, along with a whole empty apartment building.
Frédéric’s parents, Julian and Wilma, had sold their crane fabrication business to come here—here!—and work harder than their lowliest shop laborer ever had. Their example—even Tohias’s own example—was apparently not too enticing. Not yet, not until they had broken their backs constructing something minimally viable. Or died trying.
“Well,” Tohias said, suddenly cheerful, “let’s get this rock in the crusher and start extracting.”
He started up one of the machines—an open, nasty-looking contraption of toothy metal drums that rotated inward toward each other. Below that, another, smaller set of drums, and then a third set below that. Tohias handed Frédéric a pair of safety glasses, then popped on a pair himself, and then dropped the rock on top. Within seconds, the rock, bouncing and vibrating on top of the drums, was loudly broken into chunks, and then into gravel. How long had it been since Frédéric had seen gravel? Soon, the gravel was dropping down into the machine’s lower layers, and a steady rain of dust was falling into a little plastic catch basin at the bottom.
Over the din, Tohias shouted, “First we’re going to use a water bath to dissolve out the salts. We need those. Those are good for us. Then we need to pull out all the toxins like lead and mercury and tin and nickel. They’re in there as oxides right now, so we have to heat them in a furnace, with a carbon monoxide atmosphere to strip off the oxygen atoms. We’ll take most of the iron and copper and zinc, too, although we want to leave some behind to make potting soil. Fortunately, the extraction process isn’t one hundred percent efficient. What’s left after that, we hit with an electric current to pull out non-nutritive metals like titanium and aluminum, and gold. The slag that’s left over we grind up again, and that’s your mother’s potting soil. It’s mostly quartz at that point, but it’s also got calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, and, you understand, trace elements. Micronutrients.”
“Which we mix with sewage and dead plants?” Frédéric shouted, because some days that was all his mother could talk about.
“Yes,” said Tohias. “But plants need those minerals, and so do we. This surface dirt is critical to our long-term survival.”
Watching the rock crusher, Frédéric could only imagine what would happen if he stuck his hand in there. Would it pull in his entire arm? His entire body? Would there be anything left? He kept his distance.
“How much metal would it take to build the Booster Stage?” he asked.
Tohias nodded. “That would be mostly made of diamond, but yes, we’d need a number of metal components. And metal linings. Fortunately, the design is mostly rather forgiving about the exact composition. We’d also need a big balloon to float the ship off the island, and that needs a metal coating as well.”
“How much, though?”
“Altogether? About two hundred kilograms.”
Frédéric did not like arithmetic, but it had been drilled into him, to do it all in his mind, without a computer, without pencil or paper. Self-reliance! Self-reliance! So, almost without meaning to, he visualized the long division, worked through the columns, and concluded that at the rate of thirty grams every five days, it would take Tohias, optimistically, ninety-one years to extract that much metal.
“Are we in trouble?” he asked. And then, when Tohias didn’t say anything, he said, more loudly, “Tohias, are we in trouble, as a people? Are we trapped here?”
Again Tohias said nothing, until a really uncomfortably long time period had elapsed. Finally, as the din of the rock crusher started to subside, he said, “You understand, we have everything we truly need, Frédéric. I want you to remember that. We came here to start a new life—a new kind of life, not possible on Earth. We have enough. Our lives are not in immediate danger. But we may need to move the island farther north.”