"How can you handle it?" demanded Sandringham apprehensively.
"The brine freezes at minus thirty," said Bordman. "In one per cent solution it's only five per cent sensitive at minus nineteen. We're handling it at minus nineteen. I think I'll step up the brine and chill it a little more."
He waved a mud-smeared hand and went away.
That day, bolster-trucks began to roll out of Survey Headquarters. They rolled very smoothly, and they trailed a fog of chilled air behind them. And presently there were men with heavy gloves on their hands taking long things like sausages out of the bolster-trucks and untying the ends and lowering them down into holes bored in the top-soil until they reached places where wetness made the holes close up again. Then the men from Survey pushed those frozen sausages underground still further by long poles with carefully padded—and refrigerated—ends. And then they went on to other holes.
The first day there were five hundred such sausages thrust down into holes in the ground, which holes to all intents and purposes closed up behind them. The second day there were four thousand. The third day there were eight. On the fourth the solution of ship-fuel in brine in the lake was so thin that it did not give enough EMF in the little battery-cell to show how much corrosive substance there was in the brine. It was not mud any longer. Brine flowed at the top of bed-rock, and it left the mud behind it, because salt water hindered the suspension of former globigerinous ooze particles. It was practically colloid. Salt water almost coagulated it.
The brine flowing from the salt-water tunnels upwind showed no more ship-fuel in it. Bordman called Sandringham and told him.
"I can call in the civilians," said Sandringham. "You've mopped up the leaked stuff! It couldn't have been done—"
"Not anywhere but here with bed-rock handy just underneath and slanting," admitted Bordman. "Tell them they can come if they want to. They'll sort of drift in. I want to tap some more ship-fuel for the rest of those bore-holes."
Sandringham hesitated.
"Twenty thousand holes," said Bordman tiredly. "Each one had a six-hundred pound block of frozen saturated brine dumped in it with roughly one pound of ship-fuel in solution. We've gone that far. Might as well go the rest of the way. How's the barometer?"