"How can you handle it?" demanded Sandringham apprehensively.
"The brine freezes at minus thirty," said Hardwick. "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, 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 topsoil 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 did not give adequate EMF in the little battery-cell designed to show how much corrosive substance there was in the brine. Hardwick took samples from the fluid draining into the lake. It was not mud any longer. Brine flowed at the top of bedrock, and it left the mud behind it, because salt water remarkably hindered the suspension of former globigerinous ooze particles. It was practically colloid. Salt water practically coagulated it.
The brine flowing from the salt-water tunnels upwind showed no more ship-fuel in it. Hardwick called Sandringham and told him.