Needle (illustrated) by Hal Clement

Author:Hal Clement [Clement, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1949-04-30T21:00:00+00:00

Part 2

From Seattle to Honolulu, Honolulu to Ponape; in a smaller machine from Ponape to Papeete; and finally, from the deck of the ‘small tanker that made the rounds of the “power islands.” Bob and the Hunter watched the cone that marked Tahiti’s position disappear beneath the curve of the sea, and they were embarked on the last lap of the trip. The boy had let considerations of the chase drop momentarily in anticipation of the meeting with his parents and friends; and the Hunter, for reasons of his own, made no attempt to control his host’s attention. He was in no mood to answer questions—particularly questions he was industriously asking himself.

The island that finally revealed itself to Bob’s eager gaze was not large. The Hunter estimated, and the boy confirmed, its greatest length to be about three and a half miles. It was shaped roughly like a capital L, with the harbor formed by the interior angle facing north. The reef that surrounded it was more nearly circular, so that the inclosed lagoon was very broad on the north side. Through the reef on this side were two natural passages; the more easterly was still too shallow for large vessels, but the other had been deepened by blasting away the coral until the tanker was able to make its way through safely at any time. Bob remarked, as they nosed their way into the carefully marked passage, that it was still sometimes necessary to employ dynamite as brain-corals and similar growths established themselves in the channel.

The lagoon itself was nearly free of the islets which are usually to be found in such places, but scattered over its surface were a number of low, nearly featureless concrete structures, each about two hundred yards square. These, according to Bob, were the principle reason his family dwelt on the island; they were the culture tanks, built in the shallow, sun-warmed water of the lagoon to permit easy replacement of the heat used up in the endothermic reactions by which special strains of bacteria produced usable hydrocarbons from water and carbonaceous waste materials.

A similar but somewhat smaller structure topped by a large rectangular superstructure and connected to the shore by a metal causeway some six hundred yards in length, proved to be the tanker’s regular dock. The upper portion was a storage building, connected directly to the culture tanks by pipe lines which sprawled invisibly along the hard bottom of the lagoon; such portions of the building as were not occupied by tanks were devoted to pumping apparatus and other equipment used in the transferring and elementary processing of the island’s products.

Bob, not waiting for his small supply of luggage, went down the gangplank the moment it was lowered and raced at top speed around the corner of the storage building, which from the ship’s position cut off his view of the causeway leading from the shore. A jeep was speeding toward the dock, and Bob’s eyes quickly confirmed what his intuition had instantly informed him.

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