Stepping Away From The Full Circle

 "What's the methane output here?" I had a finger on the chart table. It was approximately the center of the landfill, one of the older sections.

"Sniffer's showing about forty liters per hour. That's low but worth planting some probes."

"Any specific concentrating factors?"

"Yeah. There's two strata of pretty thoroughly densified clay at the ten meter mark but they're noncontiguous and there's a gap, so a standard array is going to miss a lot of it. Here," and she tapped her sleeve against mine, and the info she was looking at popped up as a thumbnail at the edge of my display. I poked a finger through it and it expanded.

"Okay. Line 'em up along the margins and we should get most of it."

"I think so. You need a spotter?"

"Nah. It looks pretty solid. Three hours to do the setting, two more for the plumbing. Where do you want it to go?"

"Send it to The Pig." The Pig is a giant retention bottle, about fifteen meters in diameter and forty meters long. At one end there's a protuberance with some access ports and, well, it looks like a nose. The whole thing is covered with insulation which is luridly pink. If this flow is right and we can get it all, it would take about twenty years for it to completely fill The Pig and that's only at atmospheric pressure, but there's an awful lot of other feeders flowing into The Pig. The feeders don't go in through the "nose," though. The Pig appears to be getting a, uh, large enema. There are other retention bottles but they're mostly smaller, not pink and don't have names.

"Done. Later," and I tapped a forefinger to the hardhat. Safety first, hardhats. Them's the rules.

The crawler is electric, powered by overhead lines. With care and not getting the umbilicals snagged on anything again and choosing your route carefully, you can get as much as much as four kilometers away from the base before the tension sensors lock out everything but Reverse. You could override the tension sensors of course, but why would you? Go about four more meters and the power cables pop, the crawler dies, and the supervisor gives you every flavor of Hell she can think of as she brings out the extenders. And the extenders, by design, will only power the Reverse motor.

Every now and then we find interesting stuff in the ancient landfills. Usually you expect that a couple hundred years of rot and rust will break down everything and that's the end of it, but not always. You'd be surprised what you can find. You go deep enough and there's no oxygen, precious little moisture filters down if they did the capping wrong, and there can be pockets of ancient junk. The landfills are constantly crawling with amateur archaeologists, none of them approved by the central office, and nobody runs them off. They're mostly harmless.

Well, there was that one guy but never mind him.

Sometimes, from the very deepest strata, you can unearth newspapers. Newspapers! I know what they are, but the notion of something as temporary as news being committed to paper is just boggling. And they did it every day. That's a LOT of paper. I do remember reading an unusual section of the paper that carried cartoons and puzzles. Some of the cartoons were just mystifying, but the puzzles were okay. Some words didn't make sense, I guess they just aren't used anymore. And in some places I tried to answer the clues with the correct word, but the word didn't fit. Maybe meanings shift over time. I guess they must. They're like modern crosswords like you can play on your sleeve, but on paper. Why would you even do that?

Four probes go in slick as a whistle. Eighteen meters or more of perforated steel pipe, topped with another four meters of solid pipe, and a nice big cap on top. The crawler vibrates like a massage chair as the probes go in. It can pound, it can twist, it can vibrate the probes for insertion. Vibrating is pretty consistently the most effective method but twisting can get you through some resistant layers. The tip of the probes is a drill point.

Do not use the pounding action for insertion. That's how you break probes. When it's difficult to remove a probe, that's when you use the pounder.

The fifth probe went in, but then it must have hit a pocket because the probe fell out of the driver, zoop! It just disappeared from view. And then the hole cratered.

When that happens you slap the direction lever into Reverse and floor it. Probe in the ground still stuck in the driver, tension sensors already in the red, whatever. Doesn't matter. Floor it. You don't want to be there when the crater's edges propagate. And you have a hand on the door handle, ready to bail out if it looks like the crawler's going in.

See, what people don't realize about landfills is that they're largely airtight when looked at from the bottom. You wouldn't think so to look at them but they certainly are , especially as you go further down. Gases build up pressure as the materials decompose and they can build up big bubbles, caverns even, with nothing in them but methane. The probes usually provide a good enough seal that there isn't a catastrophic blowout, but it happens. And sometimes the pressure is low enough that a probe breaking through doesn't cause a blowout, but a collapse. The material around the probe falls into the cavity, and then more, and more, and you can see how this can be bad. If you're on a big cavity, the entire crawler can fall into a meters-deep, even tens-of-meters-deep hole. If the fall doesn't kill you, the methane atmosphere might.

Assuming you don't blow up. That's a possibility too.

This collapse isn't too bad. I've seen worse, lots worse. But I've got to retrieve the probe.

The crawler on any given day appears to be made mostly of rope. Or snakes. Or tentacles. There's the spool for the main power leads leading back to the catenary sled, there's the other spool for running feeders back to the tank farm, there's the other other spool for hydraulic lines feeding the driver, there's the other other other spool...you get the idea. The crawler appears to be a way for a rack of giant needles and lots of thread to get around.

One of those spools has a lot of good rope for holding a person, and another has a couple hundred meters of breathing hose. Because this isn't the first time a probe has disappeared into the ground, and it isn't the first time the egads cable has broken or popped off, and it isn't the first time some poor bastard - hello, that would be me - has to go down there and attach another line to pull the probe back up.

Call it in. Safety first. "Angie."

"Yo." I've heard it rumored that Angie sleeps with her radio close to her ear, I haven't yet experienced a moment when she didn't respond promptly. It's reassuring, actually. You want the person in charge to respond quickly when you need them.

"Dropped a probe. Looks like the hole cratered a bit but I can save it. It's about three meters across, a two-ring shield ought to cover it well enough."

"Need a hand?"

"Oh yeah. I need a handler topside at the least. A spotter wouldn't be a bad idea either. Who've you got?"

"Well, just me. Leo's on his lunch break and you know how he gets if you try to step on his break. Teela is at the far side and wrapping up an array connection so she's got enough to do."

"Well, come on then. We can do it without the spotter. I'm roping up and I'll be ready to drop by the time you get here. The hole's open so mask up."

"Copy."

And I was ready. The harness is part of the coveralls, so it's just a matter of routing the manrope over the driver's auxiliary sheaves and clipping the primary and secondary carabiners to my outfit, purging the breathing gear, and holding my breath to make the breather connection.

When you're on the breathing gear, every inhalation smells and tastes like 200 meters of rubber hose because, well, that's what it's coming from.

Angie's canopy came over the nearest ridge before her crawler and then, finally, her face. As specified, masked.

The e-masks are just for emergencies. They'll give you about five minutes' worth of oxygen and rebreathing - it's really only about one minutes' oxygen, and a scrubber to capture your CO2 and give your leftover oxygen back to you. Even walking, five minutes' of breathing will get you a pretty good distance away from an environmental hazard. If you know what direction the wind is going, it's plenty. She only needs to jump off her crawler and into mine, then she can take her mask off and set it to purge and recharge. There's good air inside the cab, of course.

Over the hiss of the hosed mask from my crawler, I can hear her voice from the radio. "Okay. I'm in. I can see your connections from here, you look good."

"Damn right I look good."

"Not good enough to turn me on to boys, Billy. I'm taking up your slack," and I could feel the coveralls cinch up under my arms and groin, never a pleasant sensation. "Here's the cable."

The loose end of the cable dangled over the crater. I slapped a mangle hook on it, flipped its first latch over and wound the cable around the pegs and tightened down the second catch. It's not as good a proper swaged connection but it's tough enough to lift three probes at once, and in the field it's what you have time and equipment for.

"Okay. Air's good. Cable's ready. Lift away."

This is always the scary part. When your weight comes completely off your feet, if you're not directly under the lift, you swing. Having the cable in my hand gives me a way to manage some torque, so I won't be spinning around.

"Whoopsie!" Letting the cable slide a bit back and forth through my glove quickly damps the oscillations. "Okay, I'm good. Lower away."

"Down you go." She's always conservative with lowering rates. Leo will drop you as fast as an elevator, Angie lowers you about as fast as you go on your own feet, going down stairs. "Anything?"

"Smells like rubber hose down here."

I go down for nearly thirty seconds.

"Whoa. Visual." My descent stopped. "What happened?"

"You said, 'whoa.' I whoa'ed."

"My bad." I estimated. "Give me about another three meters, please."

"How's your clearance?"

"It's a little close but not bad. Any closer and I'd want the borehole box." Strictly speaking we were in gross violation of established safe practice, going down without a box to support the sides of the hole against further collapse. It's such a huge pain in the ass to deploy, it takes forever and a crew of another six guys to run it properly. The standard wisdom is that once a hole has collapsed, it's probably done collapsing for at least the next little while so if you don't disturb the sides you should be good.

For what it's worth that "standard wisdom" has served me so far, but it's also let a lot of people down. No, they aren't around to comment on how it went wrong.

But anyway, I'm here now. "Angie, I've got liquid down here."

"Water."

"Uh...no?"

"Leakage?" There's all kinds of things in landfills and some of the stuff that leaks out of what got thrown away - historical peoples were insanely wasteful - can be pretty gross. "Shmoo?"

"Shmoo" is the catch-all term we use to describe the liquefied biological goo that is left when enough dead things decompose and their moisture cannot evaporate away. It's pretty gross.

"No...I think? Hang on." I clipped the mangle hook to the top of the probe and gave it a yank. It didn't pop loose. I pulled hanky out of my pocket. "Give me another two meters, please." There was a hum through the cable and the level of the liquid rose to meet me as the rest of the tunnel slid up past my hardhat's light. I could just barely dip the far corner of the hanky into the liquid surface. "Okay, I think I have a sample. Lift away."

Forty-five seconds later I was on the surface again, and five minutes after that the probe was up too. We fitted a shield to the top of the probe, then expanded it with another width of ring, and lowered it back down. The edge of the ring settled onto the ground.

A few minutes later the sniffers reported that the methane levels had dropped to their usual background levels. Angie came out of the crawler's cab and picked up the hanky where I had dropped it next to the toolbox.

"So what is this stuff?"

"I think it's oil."

"Oil? After all this time? I though the reserves were dead. Too deep to bring up."

"I think it's new oil. I think this is oil from all the stuff living down there, eating up all the plastic."

"Think so?"

"It's all I have at this moment."

"Huh. So does that mean we could have another Oil Age?"

"No." I considered. "I mean, we could. But I don't think we can afford it. So no."

Angie looked at the hanky with its darkly stained corner. She smelled it carefully, and wrinkled her nose. "Stinks."

"We're in a landfill. Nothing here smells great."

She crumpled it up. "It's almost hard to believe that this nearly made this planet uninhabitable."

"Which part? The oil or the plastic?"

"Doesn't matter. Leave it down there." She looked around. "You want this back?"

"After where it's been? No."

"Need a hand hooking up?"

"No. I got this."

"Okay. Heading back."