The Wandering Island Factory Page 8

  Chapter 8

  He picked up the phone and called the control room. "Yes, this is Jason down in the. . . yes, that's right, the 'to chilled air injector' is hovering near it's red line. . . No, no sir, that's not the number I see here. . . yes sir," he then reported the numbers off of each of his dials.

  Something had gone wrong with the calibration between the electronic and manual sensors. Maintenance would be there in a matter of minutes. It had happened before and was the sole reason for his eyes and patience over the many months.

  He surrendered his notebooks and they checked times and dates with those recorded in the computer logs.

  He even got praise for his diligence.

  As had happened once before, the electronic sensors lost their sensitivity. After much commotion, they were replaced, and his dull task continued as it had before.

  The bowels of the ship had given him hours of quiet time to contemplate life. Loud, sure, it was deafening down there, but the headphones protected him from the intense sound. To his ears, the squeaks were muffled to a distant rocking chair.

  He listened to MP3s of his favorite late-night show, mixed with music.

  Over the last year, he had become addicted to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. It seemed the perfect mix of paranoid insanity, conspiracy theory, ghost stories, and NASA scientists with PHDs as far as the eye could see. Both ends of the spectrum, and somehow the host seemed to balance it all perfectly. It came complete with people like Gina's mother who claimed to go fishing with Bigfoot and get abducted by aliens on a regular basis.

  If she was crazy, as her children believed, she was certainly not alone. It also helped put crazy into perspective.

  Diligently, he continued taking notes and reading dials.

  The dials changed, depending on what the behemoth was building. They had stopped building island components and shifted to tidal generators, and the dials reflected it. Tidal generators seemed to be misnamed. They didn't generate anything from tides, they generated power from the waves. But water parks already had 'wave' generators that made waves in giant pools, so to avoid confusion, it received a less accurate name.

  The tidal generators were dozens of six-foot long slabs that were later connected into what resembled a hundred-foot floating pier. The 'piers', assembled locally, consisted of joining the slabs with hydraulic rams acting like joints that allowed each segment to rise and fall independent of each other while holding rigidly against lateral movement. Acting like compressors, the rams drove a generator that pumped electricity to the mainland via marine cables. Any excesses or insufficiencies due to the irregularity of the waves were stored pneumatically in a large pressurized tank at the end of the pier.

  The amount of power delivered by such tidal 'piers to nowhere' was insignificant compared to what a single thermal generator could produce (with a fraction of the footprint). But environmentalists preferred the 'piers to nowhere', much like they preferred hundreds of thousands of unsightly windmills over a single nuclear plant.

  The protests and controversy revolving around the first floating island had put future island orders in limbo, hence the change in construction.

  The thousands of unhappy construction workers that were laid off somehow translated into anger toward the few unaffected workers at the behemoth, like it was their fault instead of the fault of spineless politicians.

  By late summer, they switched to making a new kind of generic slabs that could be used for tidal generators, or for a new use pioneered by the construction industry in Florida, floating foundations for coastal homes. The floating foundations, reinforced by steel, provided both a secure hurricane/tornado proof basement and the ability to float the entire house to keep it from suffering flood damage. It was becoming one of their most lucrative products while the legalities of the island concept were still being disputed.

  They were also the most amusing to watch as they were being shipped. Two tugboats pulled several miles-long strings of floating slabs tied by steel cables off into the distance like a giant strand of floating pearls. It reminded him of the cans tied behind 'just married' cars. Or single file ducklings.

  By fall, one of the Tonga islands had built a smaller land-based factory for making generic tidal-block-sized slabs in direct competition with the behemoth. The overhead of a ship this size, plus the backroom dealings they had to make with the government of Hawaii, put them at a huge disadvantage to the simple Tonga design.

  Fortunately, with a few well-placed campaign contributions (the legalized version of bribes), the resistance to the construction of floating islands was finally dropped in the form of a bill, signed into law, and the behemoth went back to what it, and only it, did best. Huge, aircraft carrier-sized slabs started to pile up behind the ship again. And thousands of locals were hired back to their well paying jobs.

  Shifts tightened when new software and injector heads were installed. He only had one week off for every month of solid, twelve-hour shifts, but the money was great.

  He woke on the mainland with Gina in his bed.

  They had talked about getting married about a month ago. His job required strange hours, and it left him with the feeling that he was always just visiting. They hadn't fought over anything yet.

  He kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips when she woke with a smile. "Elope with me," he whispered. "Come back to the states with me next year, at the end of my contract. Let's find real jobs where we get to spend every day together. I love you, but this feels like we are always on vacation with each other. Hawaii is awesome, but it is a hundred times more difficult to find a job here than in the states."

  "I have another two years of cla—"

  "That you can take anywhere. I just—" but he wasn't going to argue with her. "I don't know if they're going to keep me on past this contract, and it doesn't look like I'd be able to pick up anything locally. Not in this market. And I just don't want to go back to a long-distance relationship, not when I was really getting to know you."

  She lay silently by his side.

  "Your family is here, I know. I understand the struggle you are a part of, here. It's one of the many things that I admire about you." He lit two cigarettes, then handed her one while he contemplated the road his words were starting to travel. "I just want normal, you know."

  She exhaled toward the ceiling. "Normal is harder to find than everyone thinks."

  There was only so much pressure he could put on her.

  "If you go back home and the distance doesn't work out," she took another drag and held back a morning cough, "then it wasn't meant to be, I guess."

  "Yeah, but, I mean for this to be. I really like you, Gina, and what's more, I'm fairly head over heels right now." He put his cigarette out. "I can't imagine being that far away from you again. It would be incredibly painful for me." But he was worried about the end of his contract. What he did, though important, could be done by anyone. It didn't warrant the large sums he was getting. At some point he was sure they were going to figure that out too, even though his diligence had saved them once already, this kind of luck never lasted but so long. He held her hand to his chest, then kissed her fingers.

  She smiled, but took another drag on the cigarette.

  "How are the classes coming, by the way?"

  "C's & B's, a few A's." She sat and faced him. "There's a reason why I didn't get on a plane to see you. Bold and adventuresome isn't who I am. It probably will never be. I lack that kind of, spontaneity. I like the security of ruts." She took a deep drag, then lay back down. "I think I'd lose my mind if I was ever hundreds of miles away from my family. Let alone thousands of miles." She blew a smoke circle and watched it drift to the ceiling. "Some kids ache to leave home far behind them. That just isn't me."

  He knew what she was saying. He wanted to be considered part of her family, but wasn't yet. And may never be. But it wouldn't keep him from trying.

  There was an old saying about you weren't just marrying the girl, but her entire
family too. He liked them all, even the slightly odd mother and very distant sister. He wasn't prepared to move so he could live near them, but in a way, that was exactly what he had been asking her to do. To move away from her family to be nearer to his.

  He watched her enjoy the last half-inch of her cigarette as he contemplated how much further he was willing to go, just for one particular girl.

  But, he already knew.