They said, “How is that?”
“Well,” I said, “the pressure up top will not be that bad. Even just a plywood barrier might do the trick.”
This they found amusing, nevertheless we got in the truck and drove wildly to Cairo Lumber over a road sheeted with big hail balls, and we bought their entire stock of plywood sheets. We were too nervous to tell them what we wanted it for.
Back at the dam we set up the plywood sheets against the railing, nail-gunning them to the plastic footing of the rail just to keep the wind from blowing them away before the water trapped them against the railing. It started to rain again while we did this. We worked at the highest speed we could manage, I assure you—never have I worked with such a sense of haste. Even so, by the time we finished our work, the water had lipped over the concrete, and we had to run back along the road on the top of the dam splashing ankle deep through the water—an awful experience.
Once off the dam and up the road toward the command center, we stopped to look back. If the plywood did not hold and the dam gave way, the rim there would very likely go too, and we would all be killed; nevertheless, we stopped to look back. We could not help it.
The last squall had passed while we labored, and the sky had gone wild over our heads: dark orange to the east, then both to north and south an intense turquoise, like no sky color we had ever seen. It was still black to the west, but the sun was peeping under a distant cloud, illuminating the scene in brassy horizontal light. Below us we saw that the lake was continuing to rise, up the sides of the plywood. Finally, as dusk fell, it was quite a bit more than halfway up the plywood sheets. When we couldn’t see it very well anymore—and I didn’t want to see it either, I confess, it looked so flimsy—we walked back to the command center.
Up there we waited. Very possibly the whole structure would go very quickly; we would see this on the instrumentation, then perhaps be taken along with it, swept down with the rim walls. So all night we watched the readouts on the computers. Meanwhile we told people over the phone what we had done. My throat stayed dry no matter how hard I swallowed. We occupied ourselves telling jokes—a specialty of mine, but never had people laughed so hard at my jokes before. After one Mary hugged me, and I felt she was shaking; and I saw my hands too were shaking.
In the morning the water was still flush against the plywood, but it did not seem so high. It seemed it was going to hold. It remained a frightening sight, however; the lake surface was simply too high, as in some optical illusion; yet undeniably there below us, spread vast and colorful in the morning light.
So the dam held. But our celebration, after pumps arrived and we slowly lowered the water level back below the top of the dam, was muted, almost stunned. We too were drained, so to speak. Looking at the wet curve of plywood sheets topping the dam, Mary said, “By God, Stephan, we did a Nadia on that dam!”
Later of course they took it out. I cannot say I regret it.
Chapter 18
Big Man in Love
When Big Man fell in love with a human woman, it was big trouble.
Her name was Zoya. Yes, she had the same first name as Zo Boone—she was a clone of Zo’s, in fact, cloned by Zo’s friends after Zo’s fatal accident. So genetically Zoya was another daughter of Jackie’s, therefore granddaughter of Kasei, and great-granddaughter of John Boone himself. That wasn’t all; because Zo’s body had floated for a while in the north sea, she had been slightly salted, and thereby became inadvertently related to the resurgent archaea. And in that salty fizzing primeval soup of a sea it seems she also picked up traits of kelp and limpet, dolphin and sea otter, and who knows what else. So she was a lot of things—big like Paul Bunyan, wild like Zo, rebellious like the archaea, happy like John, and as stormy and tempestuous as the northern sea. That was Zoya; Zoya was everything. She swam through icebergs, and flew in the jet stream, and ran the round-the-worlder for an afternoon jog. She drank and she smoked and she took strange drugs, she had casual sex with strangers and even with friends, and she skipped work anytime the waves were big. In short, she was a thrill seeker; she was a disgrace to propriety and morality; she mocked all principles of human progress. She could kill with a glance or a palm punch to the nose. Her motto was “Fun at all costs.”
Thus when Big Man dropped by Mars one day, and saw Zoya out surfing the hundred-meter waves of the Polar Peninsula, it was love at first sight. This was his kind of woman!
And Zoya proved agreeable. She liked big men, and Big Man was a big man. So they played around Mars together, Big Man stepping carefully in his old footsteps to avoid wreaking any new havoc, and trying hard not to get tangled in things. But he couldn’t help it. They gamboled along the Ius Ridge Trail, and his tiptoeing is what brought down all those cliffs ten years ago. He went swimming with Zoya and that’s what flooded Boone’s Neck peninsula, even though he only went in knee deep. He flew in the jet stream with her and his shadow caused the first year without a summer. They didn’t notice any of that; they were having too much fun together.
They even tried to have sex together. Zoya would climb into Big Man’s ears and fool around, and afterward he would hold her in the palm of his hand and moan like King Kong with Fay Wray, you know, Come on, baby, please let’s make love, make love with me, and she would just laugh and point down at his erection and say, Sorry, Big Man. I’d like to but you won’t fit. Why it’d take me all day just to climb that willful tower, it’d be as hard as climbing Dishes in the Sink or the Other Old Man of Hoy. And to show him she even tried a little of that too, free-climbing to the overhang and massaging what she could reach. But to Big Man it felt like he was being pinched by an ant.
Too bad, she would say, going for a swim. Best I can do.
But I gotta, moaned Big Man, I wanna, I hafta, I needta, the usual line, familiar to guys and gals everywhere. But this time there was nothing to be done. Sorry, Zoya would say. No can do. If only you were smaller.
Then one time, looking a bit flushed and frustrated herself, she said, Look, it’s a matter of will. If only you were smaller we’d be fine! I’d ride you all night. Maybe you should look into getting yourself a smaller cock.
What? Big Man cried. What do you mean?
I mean a smaller cock. You know, get a transplant. Have that one cut off and a smaller one sewn on in its place.
A smaller one? Cut off?
That’s what the situation calls for, big guy. That’s what will have to happen for us to work out.
What? What?
Transplant! Transplant! You can get one wherever you get organ transplants. Hospitals, right?
No way, said Big Man. For one thing—and there’s a lot more than one here—transplanted organs come from cadavers.
You could get your own cultured and grown to a smaller size. They do stuff like that now.
Oh please, Big Man said. It makes me queasy just talking about this stuff.
Not my fault, Zoya said. Where there’s a will there’s a way. And she went out flying by herself.
Well, you know. Life was no fun anymore. Eventually Big Man got desperate. He got so desperate that he very surreptitiously began looking into the matter, going to a clinic and telling the people there a clever story about a friend of his who had a very small fiancée. And he found out that the latest in what people called starfish biotechnology was indeed up to the task as described. He could have his private parts surgically removed and replaced by a cultured replacement grown from cells of the original. Cells from its most sensitive part, one doctor assured him. A two-magnitude reduction done twice would make him about right for Zoya.