Confrontation (The Seamus Chronicles Book 4) Read Free Page B

it. If you can’t do it, ask for help. But if there are tasks here that you think are important but are not willing to do them yourself, I advise that you keep your mouth shut. We all have our own stuff to deal with and no one, NO ONE, needs someone else adding to their list.” She is nearing the end of her rope and snaps the last few words.

Chapter 3
     
    Some days feel so normal I actually forget that we’re not on Earth. While I have been thinking about how to get Luke enough protection to explore outside of the containment field, I had an idea for refrigeration.
    I’m convinced that the only reasonable way to explore safely is with a portable containment field. There is a spare reactor on the space plane at the bottom of the lake. Grace is the only one who has been down there, but seeing as she is pregnant now, there is no way we are asking her to go out there again.
    As the reigning king of logic jumps, this helped me to solve three challenges we have been facing: how to explore beyond the containment field, how to re-invent refrigeration, and salvaging the space plane.
    The only reason Grace was able to retrieve the pedal generator and get back to the surface was by using the air pocket trapped in the space plane. As a result of her using it, the air pocket is depleted or possibly not even there anymore. How do we get a new air bubble down into the space plane?
    Easy, pump some air down. But we do not have piping or tubing to use for this. Both of the C-5’s have been picked clean. Anything resembling plumbing or a pipe has been pressed into service to irrigate the garden. I can be a dreamer but there is no way I would dream of asking to use any of those resources so we can help someone leave.
    So how do I manufacture pipes? Knowing that the sun’s radiation and the water combined create a foundry for the rock, we can extrude pipes using gravity. I’ve been knocking off the rust from my math skills calculating how much material I need to extrude a pipe that is one inch in diameter, one hundred feet long, and with a one sixty-fourth of an inch thick wall.
    I’ll conduct a few tests, but I know the process will work. We’ve cut stones at the quarry using this logic, and in the back of my mind I can see the extrusion process. The trickiest part is putting together the template to make sure that the shape coming out the other side is correct. At times I wish I had played with Play-Doh as a kid. It will be so cool to watch the length of pipe magically grow beneath the life raft while I sit there. 
    The other problem this will solve is refrigeration, sort of. Grace said that the water down by the space plane was cold. It’s probably a relative thing, but I expect that it is much cooler than the air. Seeing how building pipe is going to be easy, I’ll extrude enough to run it all the way back to the village. We can line the root cellar we’ve dug with pipes with the cold lake water running through them. It will be like a natural refrigerator.
    On top of it all, the process is going to be quick enough that I can get it done in a way that the sun won’t poison me while I make pipes. We’re about to take a nice leap forward. I think maybe the human race does need me after all.
     
    This rest session was the best I have had in months. Having projects for my brain helps me sleep. It also makes the manual labor go by much faster. I’ve been able to carve out some time from the meal sessions and the rest sessions to conduct tests on my extrusion process. It’s flawless.
    I have support from Mom and Dad to go out during the next work session and build a few lengths of pipe. The challenge I’m struggling with now is how long to make each pipe. I’m going to make a few connectors, but I would rather not have them if I can help it. Dad has cautioned me to make the pipes a length reasonable for us to work with. A hundred-foot length of pipe may break or bend, and it could be too awkward for us to lift.
    “Seamus?”