The Wandering Island Factory Page 13

  Part of him agreed, but what could he do. Fair was fair. He concentrated on eating instead of conversating. It wasn't like it was a brand new car anyway. Someone had already put 60,000 miles on it. It was just new to him.

  After lunch, he helped David position the template over the tidal slab, lock it down, and started drilling the mounting holes before boring out piston holes for the rest of the day.

  He waited in the parkinglot for twenty minutes before his car pulled into view. Climbing in the passenger side, he tried not to be angry over the situation while Nathan drove home. Only, they couldn't go straight home, Nathan had a list of things to pick up, in this case taking a full two hours and three stops before they actually got home.

  Five drivers using two cars was hectic, no matter how he did the math.

  But, it was no picnic for Nathan either. Nathan had to drive an hour out of the way, as did his mother that morning. And the car was stuck in the middle of their errand marathon. But it was what it was. It was what they had to do to get by.

  Ava borrowed it immediately after they unloaded it at home.

  Jason took a shower and passed out on Gina's bed. At least he didn't have to fetch her at work.

  The days blended together, with only the weekends standing out. He had weekends off, most weekends anyway.

  Weekends were all about laundry.

  Oddly, he found he rather enjoyed his time at the Laundromat. The closest one was open all night and next to a bar and a convenience store. When he went at night, he could watch the people pour into the bar and stagger out, usually while nobody was in the matt, or even get comfortably blitzed and sober up in time to fold. When he went there in the morning, as if it was his day job, nobody was there and he could have his pick of machines and enjoy a coffee and a paper in total peace.

  The Laundromat was quiet and peaceful, almost like a library in the predawn mornings, and was perfect for reading.

  He preferred the morning, Sunday morning was ideal, because it was cleaned Saturday night and generally cooler in the mornings.

  The kids had been doing their own laundry for years, but he was in the habit of doing Gina's too because her hamper was in the same room.

  It just kept thing simpler that way.

  He unloaded the two duffle bags onto the rolling baskets and started to sort them by color and cycle in front of his favorite three machines. He added detergent and went for his morning cup and paper at the convenience store.

  It would have been nice to have spent these next few hours with Gina in the peace and quiet of the matt, but it was a bit too early for her. She got off around three, home and asleep by four. She would have had only a few hours of sleep at best. He'd have them dry and folded by the time she woke.

  Perhaps that was for the best.

  An article in the paper, A3, suggested that the early data was already coming in, and that the sun centric scientists were claiming a victory over the CO2 alarmists. Currently, the bump was a mere 0.1 degree, but that was already well outside what all the CO2 centric models could account for.

  On the following page was an article about a culling of 600 polar bear because of overpopulation of the still endangered species. Only a government bureaucrat could be so blind to keep a species on the endangered list that was so overpopulated that it needed thinning. It almost belonged in the comics section.

  He folded the section and opened to business. Above the fold was news of the high demand for the tidal generators. An economics professor at the local college provided a numeric breakdown of the technology. Each section, for which you needed a minimal of two to generate anything, averaged a few hundred watts at best and cost nearly six thousand. Their output also varied widely through the day, from week to week, and were highly erratic during storms. And because people hated the looks of them from the shore, they had to be anchored miles over the horizon, and that added distance amounted to a massive drop in the power actually delivered.

  The old design stretched out like the lines on notebook paper, or teeth on a comb, and required Acres of spacing to keep from bumping into themselves during a storm. The new design, which they worked on locally, connected more like the backing on a carpet and looked like graph paper from above. It allowed each segment to pitch in 360 degrees and went from two to four pistons, on average. This increased the cost of each unit, but generated more power per acre, which satisfied aesthetic demands, as the professor explained.

  For someone whose work depended on units produced, what he read next from the professor came with some enthusiasm. For California to meet their green goal of replacing a single coal powerplant, they would have to buy and install a minimum of two million units, carpeting a section of the ocean at least four square miles, but realistically it would cover closer to twelve and, from space, look like California had broken off a sliver into a weird island.

  The cost, a mere twenty billion.

  The professor then contrasted that with how many decades the behemoth would have to work to produce two million sections at its current pace. If dedicated solely to segments (which it would never do), the behemoth could produce a million every ten months; Tonga, on the other hand, could produce a million every five months, since that was all they did.

  It all still seemed silly, since Buck's lunchtime conversations had yet to wear off. The thermal system that all the wandering islands were designed for produced far more regular power at a fraction of the price, and could fit on a small barge, unseen from orbit. They also worked fine during storms.

  He moved the wash into four dryers, then got comfortable with the paper again.

  A few pages away, there was a related article to the thermal generator in the first island. At the opening of hurricane season, the island moved preemptively from North Carolina to Brazil to beat a 'worse than expected' tropical storm season. All the computer models predicted the first in the chain, already forming, would be a Category 5 by the time it hit Florida, but it stalled over the cooler ocean surface of the wandering island's wake and never made a Category 1. Weather model experts claimed it was just an odd coincidence, but Cuba was demanding at the UN that the US surrender its climate control technology.

  A powerplant that generated cheap electricity and turned category 5 storms into category 1. . . As Buck would say, no wonder they banned it!

  He checked his sign in the astrology section, 'A chance encounter will turn to your favor.'

  He smiled, folded it, then finished his cold coffee with the last two mini powdered doughnuts. The dryers had another ten minutes, each.

  He would be folding clothes soon.