Page 26 - Unlikely Stories 3

Gaea Omphalos

geophysicist, went into great detail telling me how a series of shafts
will be connected to gigantic turbines generating cheap electricity.
Seawater will cycle through the rock tunnels, coming up hot and
going down cold. He’s kind of cute, but it all sounded a bit crackpot
to me. Nevertheless, the science behind it has to be sound, or the
government wouldn’t have approved the expenditures; the Star Wars
boondoggle had to teach Congress some kind of lesson. They
certainly applied it to the supercollider! Well, I think I showed Si that
I’m not just another pretty face: having done my research in
anticipation of just such a revelation, I knew about the Mohole
project of several decades ago; a failure, and I told him so, but he had
all sorts of technical reasons why this new attempt would be a great
success.

March 19: I met more of the project team today, though none as
interesting as Dr. Klopperman. The librarian and communications
support officer is a rather unpleasant man with a bristly black beard,
Umberto Foucault. I felt as if I had met him before, but I couldn’t
remember where or when. He certainly subjected me to an
inquisition before he would talk about GAEA. If anyone gives me
trouble here, it’s going to be Foucault. He has three assistants, the
only females employed down here, whom he browbeats into
submission: Alexa, Meg, and Tish. I can’t recall their last names, or
even if he said them when we were introduced. No matter: they are
nonentities, ex-secretaries looking for a little spice in their otherwise
drab careers. I cannot imagine any man with an ounce of intelligence,
like Si, giving them a second glance. Anyway, I played dumb, myself,
when Foucault was showing me the computer setup. It’s all state-of-
the-art stuff, and he probably knows from a scan of on-line
bibliographies that my area of expertise is alternative energy, not
information technology. So I let him act like a big shot, explaining
real-time telemetry and process control to me in a fairly patronizing
way. I just batted my fake eyelashes at him and tried to act impressed.
Even so, I hope my memory of him returns before his does of me.

March 20: Si told me today that the drilling is approaching its goal.
The mantle has been penetrated for the first time, and the shaft will
be continued until the desired temperature is reached. The boiling
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