"How deep is it?" the engineer snapped.
"Forty-two feet," came the reply, "now it's forty-seven. Moisture content increasing. This is the head and it's coming fast."
"Get those lasers outta there," the engineer roared, "and get those other pumps down, fast."
More cranes were clustered around the grate hole and the three other pumps went quickly to the bottom. Down in the cavernous basin, the laser rolled quickly back to the bore hole where crews slammed magnaclamps on them and lofted them to the surface.
By the time they were starting to rise, three more closer gauges were reporting underground water flow.
As soon as the first two lasers reached the surface and were swung onto the gravel bed, they were sent waddling on their tracked carriers a hundred feet upstream beyond the upper end of the underground emergency cavern. The beams were set on angle and seconds later the light lanced out and down into the earth, smashing down through the strata and punching two great holes into the roof of the upper end of the cavern. Clouds of superheated steam gushed out of the twin punctures as the beams shut off. The beams had burned through the head of the seeping waters. Now the other four lasers were on the line and in rapid order, a dozen more holes were on punched down through the bed and into the catch basin. The upstream roof of the cavern fell in for forty feet and a torrent of mud cascaded into the basin.
The instant the last beam closed down a roar arose from the workers clustered about the lip of the vertical pump bore. A wall of water came surging down from the upstream end of the cavern and smashed into the bore hole wall in a muddy, seething maelstrom. The strata-borne water had found the hole and were pouring down into the cavern and catch basin. The water began rising in the walls of the hole, sealed into a shining shaft of fused rock and silicon by the laser beams.
"It works," Troy yelled, pounding his partner on the back, "you harebrained son of an engineer, it works."
Alec's face was wreathed in smiles as the two of them hurried down the bank to the edge of the bore. By the time they reached the lip, the water level had risen past the underground upstream mouth of the catch basin and was boiling steadily upwards past the sixty-foot mark towards the surface. Despite the vent holes and the volume of water seeping through the strata from the ruptured Spokima Reservoir, there still wasn't enough pressure to raise the water level much above the fifty-foot mark, once the catch basin filled. That was the purpose of the four nuclear pumps in the sump hole. Their great million-gallon-a-minute jets forced the bore hole water up to the surface and kept sucking up the waters cascading now into the cavern.
"Get back," Harbrace yelled at the men still near the edge of the hole. "When it comes over it's going to blow and backwater."