![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolDad approached the pit in the backyard. Milo was standing in the middle of a hole as big around as the rug in the front hall. He had no shirt on, showing how skinny he really was, and his pipestem legs looked comical sticking out from the legs of his billowing cargo shorts. The shovel in his hands looked enormous. Dad inspected the state of the digging.
"That's a lot of dirt you've moved," he said appreciatively. "When did you start, this morning?"
Milo shrugged, squinting up at Dad. "I sort of started scraping around yesterday, after dinner," he said. "Most of this was today." The heaps of dirt were an even mix of sand and clay, lying in haphazard piles around the hole.
"Looks like you're getting down to the hard-packed stuff," Dad observed. "How deep are you going to go?"
"I dunno." Milo grinned up at Dad. "I was kind of thinking I'd dig until I hit China."
"Well, all right!" Dad straightened up.
"Look," said Dad, "me and Carol are driving into town for a few hours. Are you going to be okay here until dinner?"
Milo looked around, then nodded. "Sure," he said. "I can get my own lunch and stuff."
"I'll keep my phone on," said Dad. "Don't dig so deep that the sides cave in on you, right?"
"No problem," said Milo solemnly. He watched his father leave. A minute later he heard the jeep engine gunning, and then the crunch of gravel on the drive. He turned to the piles of dirt.
"They're gone," he said. A mass of tiny crawling objects, the size and color of a new penny, crept out from under the sand and the fallen leaves, and streamed from holes in the trees and ground. There were millions of them, heaped upon one another, with currents and eddies in their collective mass constantly swirling them into new shapes and almost-patterns.
"We are ready to begin in earnest," said the voice of the Crinid mass, projected from a million tiny speakers in their bodies. Milo had built the first one when he was four. It built another dozen, and they built more, and so on and so on. The mass had reached a more-or-less steady population based on the amount of material available, not to mention the difficulty in hiding them all. Milo wasn't ashamed of the Crinid mass, but he wasn't ready to explain it to Dad. Not yet.
"I'm ready," said Milo. "How far to China?"
"Most efficient sector chord, or radial mapping?" the Crinid mass chirped.
"Radial," replied Milo. "I want to see the core."
"About eight thousand miles," said the Crinids. "Estimating five hours until Dad returns. We'll need to exceed Mach 4."
Milo nodded. "Let's do it," he said.
Milo got out of the hole and brushed himself off. A portion of the Crinid mass launched itself on tiny wings. It formed a dense cloud of copper immediately above the hole and began to heat up. Soon it was glowing a deep red, and then a white that was difficult to look at.
"You had better step back," the Crinids told Milo, and he complied. The glowing mass dove into the hole and quickly sank out of sight. A steady stream of more Crinids followed the vanguard into the pit, which was hissing and gurgling as the groundwater hit the molten rock. The remaining group of Crinids began assembling themselves into a structure.
"Query," asked the Crinids. "You spent the entire morning digging the hole approximately two feet five inches deep. We could have accomplished the same work in a very small fraction of a second. Why did you spend your time in this manner?"
"I dunno," said Milo. "I guess I wanted to feel like I was a part of the project."
"Observation: it was a symbolic gesture," said the Crinids.
"I guess," said Milo.
Some of the Crinids emerged from the pit, their circumference tripled in size from the minerals they were carrying. As the metal superstructure of a capsule began to form, the returning Crinids began to spin their cargo of quartz sand and calcium oxide into glass filaments. The capsule's viewing panels sprouted and spread, like watching a fast-forward video of a Lego project being built.
"You'll want to stand inside the frame now," the Crinids advised. "We'll build it around you. No need for a hatch."
Milo watched from the inside as the capsule flowered around him. More Crinids crept inside and spun glass filaments around Milo's body, anchoring him to points all throughout the capsule to secure him against the tremendous accelerations he was about to experience. A bladder was extruded from one wall, and then filled with fresh water, in case Milo got thirsty. The Crinids never got thirsty. They didn't need anything, except to work for Milo.
Soon the capsule was done. "The vanguard has a twenty-mile head start," the Crinids told him. "Wall containment is holding. Do you want to say 'Blast Off'?"
"Yes," said Milo eagerly. "Give me a count-down."
"Three," said the Crinids obediently. "Two. One."
"BLAST OFF!" shouted Milo. The capsule lurched, powered by fifty thousand tiny fusion flares provided by Crinids lurking in the thrust cowls. It leaped skyward, brushing the limbs of the tall pines that surrounded the back yard, and then turned its nosecone downward. The probe dove into the hole and then turned on the burn in earnest.
The second wave of Crinids had been busy spinning a glass containment shell within the wall of the tube, keeping it from collapsing in on itself. The quality of glass was very good; Milo could see all the rock strata whip by as they accelerated into the shaft. The superheated first wave had vaporized much of the material it contacted, leaving little behind to fuse. Deeper into the earth, where pressures were extreme, things would be different.
"Approaching Mach One," the Crinids advised.
"Won't the shock wave break the glass?" asked Milo anxiously.
"No," said the Crinids. "Near the expected transition point we've reinforced the glass with steel banding."
"Oh," said Milo. "That's smart. That's what I would have done."
"Yes, exactly," said the Crinids.
Indeed, the transparent walls of the tunnel turned a dark grey, and a moment later a rumble rippled through the capsule. Then the grey washed out, the increased velocity turning it to a blur, with the walls illuminated by an honor guard of Crinids with their lumen-buds extended, but the speed was so high that there was nothing to see.
"The temperature is rising," the Crinids informed Milo. "It will climb almost linearly until it hits 7000K in the core."
"I take it you're using the extra heat to power the entropy engines," Milo asked.
"Of course," replied the Crinids. "Coming up on Mach Two."
Another blur as the reinforcement density increased, another shudder as the capsule's second shock propagated behind the craft.
"Won't the speed of sound go down with the rise in temperature?" asked Milo.
"No, up," said the Crinids. "The increase in pressure will outweigh the temperature effects."
They were into the mantle. It didn't look too much different from the crust, but then it was whipping by at an incredible rate of speed. The composition was very similar, but the viscosity of the material had changed. It was a good thing the containment wall was in place; the mantle material would otherwise bulge into the shaft. Here and there the metallic ribbing used to reinforce the walls was buttressed with ceramic hoops.
"Mach Three," said the Crinids. The walls turned dark for a stretch with a major change in the wall's reinforcement. When they came out the other side, Milo thought he detected a subtle change in the illumination. "Kill the lights," he ordered.
The Crinids turned off their lumen-buds. The material of the mantle outside the shaft was glowing a faint orange. It was beautiful. Milo marveled at it for several minutes.
"Mach Four. We're almost at peak speed, and we will stay there until we decelerate at the core," said the Crinids matter-of-factly, like an automated voice announcing stops on the subway. When the acceleration of the capsule had stabilized, Milo noticed the walls of the shaft seemed to have closed in somewhat.
"That's the impact of the high heat of the lower mantle," said the Crinid mass. "We've had to double-bottle the wall containment to be able to maintain environment, even with the entropy engine soaking up heat."
"Oh," said Milo. "Well, I can't imagine there's much of interest to see for the next hour or so."
"That's true," said the Crinids. They offered Milo a drink, and built him a lunch out of synthetic organic molecules. He watched a television program that the Crinids had recorded from the previous day. When the show was over, Milo noticed the luminosity of the surroundings had markedly increased.
"We're crossing into the liquid core," said the Crinids. "It's very hot here, very high pressure. We had to synthesize some new materials to create a good containment vessel that's still translucent. There's also significant currents here, and since the material is so high a mass, that means there's a not insignificant chance that the entire shaft will be sheared away."
"Well, we knew the risks in advance," said Milo philosophically.
"That's right," the Crinids agreed. "We're going to start decelerating soon. That will mean another series of shocks in quick succession. Brace yourself."
The shuttle slowed and slowed. Milo noticed that the material of the shaft wall, beyond the glassy double-tube, was a dull silver in color. "Nickel-iron alloy?" he said.
"Correct," said the Crinids. "Solid all the way through, a sphere almost the size of the moon. We're so hot here that if we were exposed to surface pressures we'd explode. Here's our stop, we're coming to the center."
The vanguard Crinids had cleared a kind of turning sphere in the center of the core. The capsule jetted into the heart of it and stopped. Milo craned his neck looking in all directions.
"Get me out of the harness," he demanded. "I want to see what it feels like at the center of the Earth."
The glass fibers twanged as they were parted, one by one. Milo found himself floating in zero gravity. He laughed as he kicked and bounced his way around the cabin. Some of the Crinids bounced around with him. Milo giggled like a loon watching their tiny legs flail as they cartwheeled across the cabin.
"Which way to China?" he asked, after a sufficient interval.
"About sixty degrees deviation of ascension, since China's also in the northern hemisphere," the Crinids replied. "A relatively minor latitude correction. We need to get going; we're running behind schedule."
"All right, strap me back in," said Milo. The Crinids busied themselves tethering the boy back in place. Then the capsule started the process of accelerating back up to above Mach Four.
The process was no longer interesting to Milo. He slept. The Crinids thoughtfully layered themselves over the viewing windows to block the light from the outside. Milo had a nice long nap, jouncing around in the hurtling capsule, and didn't wake up until they punched through the outer crust.
The craft burned through the hole the vanguard had created in the Earth, spun about, and landed tail-first on the ground. It was night here. One side of the craft melted away, and Milo stepped out. The air was cool and dry. Silhouettes of mountains in the distance were visible in front of a backdrop of stars. Milo frowned.
"This doesn't look like China," he said. "Where are the rice paddies?"
"We're in Tibet," said the Crinids. "The Chinese government has considered this area part of China since 1951."
"I wanted to see rice paddies," moped Milo.
"Time schedule optimization demanded surface-fall in Tibet," the Crinids insisted. "Sorry, Milo, but any later and we wouldn't get home before Dad."
"That's okay," said Milo. "But we made it to China, and that was the point."
"Very true," agreed the Crinids.
Milo took a deep breath, looked around in all directions, and then turned back to the capsule. "Okay," he said, "let's go back."
"We have a slight problem," said the Crinids. "The vanguard has gone back down the hole. They're reporting a loss of containment in the pipe. Apparently we misjudged the rate of rotation of the inner core; it's spinning faster than the rest of the earth, and the containment tube has sheared away. We could try to reestablish the shaft, but it would be messy."
Milo frowned again. "Pretty tough to go back across the surface of the Earth," he said.
"We'd have to go just as fast as before," agreed the Crinids. "Anything moving at that high a rate of supersonic speed is bound to be noticed."
"We could go orbital," Milo suggested. "As long as we can avoid detection, we could go however fast we wanted."
"That's true," the Crinids said. "High catenary trajectory, initial escape burn, then acceleration to twenty thousand miles per hour before a controlled re-entry – we could be back an hour ahead of schedule."
"Let's do that," Milo decided.
So they did.
"That's a lot of dirt you've moved," he said appreciatively. "When did you start, this morning?"
Milo shrugged, squinting up at Dad. "I sort of started scraping around yesterday, after dinner," he said. "Most of this was today." The heaps of dirt were an even mix of sand and clay, lying in haphazard piles around the hole.
"Looks like you're getting down to the hard-packed stuff," Dad observed. "How deep are you going to go?"
"I dunno." Milo grinned up at Dad. "I was kind of thinking I'd dig until I hit China."
"Well, all right!" Dad straightened up.
"Look," said Dad, "me and Carol are driving into town for a few hours. Are you going to be okay here until dinner?"
Milo looked around, then nodded. "Sure," he said. "I can get my own lunch and stuff."
"I'll keep my phone on," said Dad. "Don't dig so deep that the sides cave in on you, right?"
"No problem," said Milo solemnly. He watched his father leave. A minute later he heard the jeep engine gunning, and then the crunch of gravel on the drive. He turned to the piles of dirt.
"They're gone," he said. A mass of tiny crawling objects, the size and color of a new penny, crept out from under the sand and the fallen leaves, and streamed from holes in the trees and ground. There were millions of them, heaped upon one another, with currents and eddies in their collective mass constantly swirling them into new shapes and almost-patterns.
"We are ready to begin in earnest," said the voice of the Crinid mass, projected from a million tiny speakers in their bodies. Milo had built the first one when he was four. It built another dozen, and they built more, and so on and so on. The mass had reached a more-or-less steady population based on the amount of material available, not to mention the difficulty in hiding them all. Milo wasn't ashamed of the Crinid mass, but he wasn't ready to explain it to Dad. Not yet.
"I'm ready," said Milo. "How far to China?"
"Most efficient sector chord, or radial mapping?" the Crinid mass chirped.
"Radial," replied Milo. "I want to see the core."
"About eight thousand miles," said the Crinids. "Estimating five hours until Dad returns. We'll need to exceed Mach 4."
Milo nodded. "Let's do it," he said.
Milo got out of the hole and brushed himself off. A portion of the Crinid mass launched itself on tiny wings. It formed a dense cloud of copper immediately above the hole and began to heat up. Soon it was glowing a deep red, and then a white that was difficult to look at.
"You had better step back," the Crinids told Milo, and he complied. The glowing mass dove into the hole and quickly sank out of sight. A steady stream of more Crinids followed the vanguard into the pit, which was hissing and gurgling as the groundwater hit the molten rock. The remaining group of Crinids began assembling themselves into a structure.
"Query," asked the Crinids. "You spent the entire morning digging the hole approximately two feet five inches deep. We could have accomplished the same work in a very small fraction of a second. Why did you spend your time in this manner?"
"I dunno," said Milo. "I guess I wanted to feel like I was a part of the project."
"Observation: it was a symbolic gesture," said the Crinids.
"I guess," said Milo.
Some of the Crinids emerged from the pit, their circumference tripled in size from the minerals they were carrying. As the metal superstructure of a capsule began to form, the returning Crinids began to spin their cargo of quartz sand and calcium oxide into glass filaments. The capsule's viewing panels sprouted and spread, like watching a fast-forward video of a Lego project being built.
"You'll want to stand inside the frame now," the Crinids advised. "We'll build it around you. No need for a hatch."
Milo watched from the inside as the capsule flowered around him. More Crinids crept inside and spun glass filaments around Milo's body, anchoring him to points all throughout the capsule to secure him against the tremendous accelerations he was about to experience. A bladder was extruded from one wall, and then filled with fresh water, in case Milo got thirsty. The Crinids never got thirsty. They didn't need anything, except to work for Milo.
Soon the capsule was done. "The vanguard has a twenty-mile head start," the Crinids told him. "Wall containment is holding. Do you want to say 'Blast Off'?"
"Yes," said Milo eagerly. "Give me a count-down."
"Three," said the Crinids obediently. "Two. One."
"BLAST OFF!" shouted Milo. The capsule lurched, powered by fifty thousand tiny fusion flares provided by Crinids lurking in the thrust cowls. It leaped skyward, brushing the limbs of the tall pines that surrounded the back yard, and then turned its nosecone downward. The probe dove into the hole and then turned on the burn in earnest.
The second wave of Crinids had been busy spinning a glass containment shell within the wall of the tube, keeping it from collapsing in on itself. The quality of glass was very good; Milo could see all the rock strata whip by as they accelerated into the shaft. The superheated first wave had vaporized much of the material it contacted, leaving little behind to fuse. Deeper into the earth, where pressures were extreme, things would be different.
"Approaching Mach One," the Crinids advised.
"Won't the shock wave break the glass?" asked Milo anxiously.
"No," said the Crinids. "Near the expected transition point we've reinforced the glass with steel banding."
"Oh," said Milo. "That's smart. That's what I would have done."
"Yes, exactly," said the Crinids.
Indeed, the transparent walls of the tunnel turned a dark grey, and a moment later a rumble rippled through the capsule. Then the grey washed out, the increased velocity turning it to a blur, with the walls illuminated by an honor guard of Crinids with their lumen-buds extended, but the speed was so high that there was nothing to see.
"The temperature is rising," the Crinids informed Milo. "It will climb almost linearly until it hits 7000K in the core."
"I take it you're using the extra heat to power the entropy engines," Milo asked.
"Of course," replied the Crinids. "Coming up on Mach Two."
Another blur as the reinforcement density increased, another shudder as the capsule's second shock propagated behind the craft.
"Won't the speed of sound go down with the rise in temperature?" asked Milo.
"No, up," said the Crinids. "The increase in pressure will outweigh the temperature effects."
They were into the mantle. It didn't look too much different from the crust, but then it was whipping by at an incredible rate of speed. The composition was very similar, but the viscosity of the material had changed. It was a good thing the containment wall was in place; the mantle material would otherwise bulge into the shaft. Here and there the metallic ribbing used to reinforce the walls was buttressed with ceramic hoops.
"Mach Three," said the Crinids. The walls turned dark for a stretch with a major change in the wall's reinforcement. When they came out the other side, Milo thought he detected a subtle change in the illumination. "Kill the lights," he ordered.
The Crinids turned off their lumen-buds. The material of the mantle outside the shaft was glowing a faint orange. It was beautiful. Milo marveled at it for several minutes.
"Mach Four. We're almost at peak speed, and we will stay there until we decelerate at the core," said the Crinids matter-of-factly, like an automated voice announcing stops on the subway. When the acceleration of the capsule had stabilized, Milo noticed the walls of the shaft seemed to have closed in somewhat.
"That's the impact of the high heat of the lower mantle," said the Crinid mass. "We've had to double-bottle the wall containment to be able to maintain environment, even with the entropy engine soaking up heat."
"Oh," said Milo. "Well, I can't imagine there's much of interest to see for the next hour or so."
"That's true," said the Crinids. They offered Milo a drink, and built him a lunch out of synthetic organic molecules. He watched a television program that the Crinids had recorded from the previous day. When the show was over, Milo noticed the luminosity of the surroundings had markedly increased.
"We're crossing into the liquid core," said the Crinids. "It's very hot here, very high pressure. We had to synthesize some new materials to create a good containment vessel that's still translucent. There's also significant currents here, and since the material is so high a mass, that means there's a not insignificant chance that the entire shaft will be sheared away."
"Well, we knew the risks in advance," said Milo philosophically.
"That's right," the Crinids agreed. "We're going to start decelerating soon. That will mean another series of shocks in quick succession. Brace yourself."
The shuttle slowed and slowed. Milo noticed that the material of the shaft wall, beyond the glassy double-tube, was a dull silver in color. "Nickel-iron alloy?" he said.
"Correct," said the Crinids. "Solid all the way through, a sphere almost the size of the moon. We're so hot here that if we were exposed to surface pressures we'd explode. Here's our stop, we're coming to the center."
The vanguard Crinids had cleared a kind of turning sphere in the center of the core. The capsule jetted into the heart of it and stopped. Milo craned his neck looking in all directions.
"Get me out of the harness," he demanded. "I want to see what it feels like at the center of the Earth."
The glass fibers twanged as they were parted, one by one. Milo found himself floating in zero gravity. He laughed as he kicked and bounced his way around the cabin. Some of the Crinids bounced around with him. Milo giggled like a loon watching their tiny legs flail as they cartwheeled across the cabin.
"Which way to China?" he asked, after a sufficient interval.
"About sixty degrees deviation of ascension, since China's also in the northern hemisphere," the Crinids replied. "A relatively minor latitude correction. We need to get going; we're running behind schedule."
"All right, strap me back in," said Milo. The Crinids busied themselves tethering the boy back in place. Then the capsule started the process of accelerating back up to above Mach Four.
The process was no longer interesting to Milo. He slept. The Crinids thoughtfully layered themselves over the viewing windows to block the light from the outside. Milo had a nice long nap, jouncing around in the hurtling capsule, and didn't wake up until they punched through the outer crust.
The craft burned through the hole the vanguard had created in the Earth, spun about, and landed tail-first on the ground. It was night here. One side of the craft melted away, and Milo stepped out. The air was cool and dry. Silhouettes of mountains in the distance were visible in front of a backdrop of stars. Milo frowned.
"This doesn't look like China," he said. "Where are the rice paddies?"
"We're in Tibet," said the Crinids. "The Chinese government has considered this area part of China since 1951."
"I wanted to see rice paddies," moped Milo.
"Time schedule optimization demanded surface-fall in Tibet," the Crinids insisted. "Sorry, Milo, but any later and we wouldn't get home before Dad."
"That's okay," said Milo. "But we made it to China, and that was the point."
"Very true," agreed the Crinids.
Milo took a deep breath, looked around in all directions, and then turned back to the capsule. "Okay," he said, "let's go back."
"We have a slight problem," said the Crinids. "The vanguard has gone back down the hole. They're reporting a loss of containment in the pipe. Apparently we misjudged the rate of rotation of the inner core; it's spinning faster than the rest of the earth, and the containment tube has sheared away. We could try to reestablish the shaft, but it would be messy."
Milo frowned again. "Pretty tough to go back across the surface of the Earth," he said.
"We'd have to go just as fast as before," agreed the Crinids. "Anything moving at that high a rate of supersonic speed is bound to be noticed."
"We could go orbital," Milo suggested. "As long as we can avoid detection, we could go however fast we wanted."
"That's true," the Crinids said. "High catenary trajectory, initial escape burn, then acceleration to twenty thousand miles per hour before a controlled re-entry – we could be back an hour ahead of schedule."
"Let's do that," Milo decided.
So they did.
