If the lower levels had been straight twentieth-century tech with their spark plugs and pistons, Minus One was all modern robotics. Slightly below them was a massive construct that could only be the “mouth” of the “bottle”—the upside-down funnel that accepted and channeled the pulse of hydrogen gas being driven upward by the rising piston. A short distance above that were the bottoms of the six barrels, which were simply cut off at their bases, open to the room. In between those obvious and easy-to-understand elements was an elaborate, massive, rotating contraption that, if Saskia was any judge of these things, had consumed the lion’s share of the engineering resources. She couldn’t really puzzle it out until T.R. issued a command that caused a vertical
conveyor system to go into motion. This thing—“Shell hoist” on the cross-sectional diagram—had run parallel to the elevator all the way down from ground level. It served a similar purpose to the lift, but it was smaller and it ran much faster. After it had been whirring along for a minute or so, it slowed.
A giant bullet descended into the room. The bullet was a bit longer than Saskia was tall, and somewhat fatter than a beer keg. It was machined aluminum in some places, carbon fiber in others. It had a Flying S logo and was stenciled “RETURN TO FLYING S RANCH - REWARD” in English and Spanish. It glided down past them on the hoist and was seized by a massive robot arm, which pulled it away, indexed around, and fed it point-first into the base of one of the gun barrels. Another mechanism, pushing up from below, then rammed the shell upward until it had completely disappeared into the barrel. Something went kerchunk. The robot arm retracted, but the shell did not fall out.
“Now, let’s say we want to send it on its way,” T.R. said. He nodded to a technician, who pressed some buttons.
The whole massive robotic platform went into motion, pirouetting around the central axis of the main shaft. Saskia couldn’t help thinking of the big cylinder in a cowboy’s revolver. It had a single large orifice in its top, offset to one side, matching the diameter of the gun barrels. When this was positioned below the breech of the barrel that had just been loaded, the whole thing rose upward in a swift, smooth movement until the connection was made.
“That’s how the hydrogen flows to the barrel,” Bob guessed.
“There’s now a direct unimpeded channel between the two,” T.R. confirmed. “If you were Spiderman you could go back down to Minus Four, into the same port we just used. You could climb up the cylinder wall, through that funnel we looked at, and up a short, oblique, snergly tube to where you could reach up into that barrel and touch the base of that shell we just now loaded.”
“And it’s all hot?” Saskia asked.
T.R. nodded. “Good point, Your Majesty. The shell was preheated above, and it’s still hot now—hot enough to keep the sulfur in its molten state. For as long as it sits in that barrel waiting to be
fired, it will be kept hot by electrical heaters built into the barrel walls. The space on the other side of this window is quite warm—and it’s about to get warmer.”
“How many of those barrels are loaded?” Bob asked.
“As of now? Six of six. All we gotta do is get out of here and turn on the gas.” He checked his watch. “And then we should be ready for this month’s meeting of the Flying S Ranch Employees’ Model Rocketry Club!”
The elongated bowl, four thousand feet above sea level, in which this complex had been constructed, was referred to by T.R. as Pina2bo （“Pin a two bo”）。 Anyone familiar with the literature on climate change and geoengineering would get the joke. Pinatubo was the name of a volcano in the Philippines that had exploded in 1991. It had blasted fifteen million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The result had been a couple of years’ beautiful sunsets and reduced global temperatures. The two phenomena were directly related. The sulfur from the volcano had eventually spread out into a veil of tiny droplets of H2SO4. Light from the sun hit those little spheres and bounced. Some of it bounced directly back into space—which accounted for the planet-wide cooling, as energy that never entered the troposphere in the first place couldn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect. Other light caromed off those droplets, billiard-ball style, and came into the troposphere at various oblique angles. Since that was where humans lived, those who lifted their gaze saw that light as a general brightness of the sky. This was hard to notice in the daytime but quite obvious when the sun was near the horizon, the sky was generally dark, and the light was red.