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"It's a wobbler!" the electrical systems officer explained like a town crier. He said he had seen it once before. His explanation was that the turbine shafts had excessive play in their bearings and caused gap variations at the generator rotors.
I noticed the mechanical engineering officer putting both hands over his face. God, if that man was right, it meant that we had to invent a new type of bearing, manufacture them aboard ship, and install them in five generators the size of a house.
"How much time do we have?" cried the mechanical engineering officer.
The captain was as he wasn't there; white as a sheet; silent.
"Twenty four hours, with one generator running," calculated the bio-plant officer. Twenty-four hours was the maximum time he said we could run the agro plant in the dark and without feed stations operating. After this we would risk our food supply.
We could risk having one generator damaged beyond repair while we rebuilt the others, suggested the electrical engineering officer.
"But anything longer than a day will damage our food supply," warned the bio-plant officer again.
Someone shook the captain up. "Make some decisions!"
In time, decisions were made. Four of the ship's five generators were turned off. The one with the least bearing noise was chosen to stay in operation. The others were to be rebuilt. Orders now flowed from the captain in one continuous stream, as to who would be responsible for any specific phase of the repair work, etc. etc.
Strangely, nobody complained. Neither did anyone swear at those engineers at home who had overlooked the obvious, that the weightlessness of space would cause the rotors to sit freer in their bearings, free to move, free to start bouncing, putting greater stress on the metal than the steady force of gravity would have on earth. They also had overlooked the possible loss of redundancy through simultaneous failures when using the same design throughout the ship. They certainly had "screwed up royally," as the mission specialist had put it. We could have lived indefinitely with two of the five generators functioning. But since the design fault had imposed the same damaging stress on every unit, we were lucky we had had anything left running. The entire complex could have been out. Of course nobody knew for how long the unit would last that we had still running. This was an emergency situation of the severest order?
The captain assigned me the task of creating a new metal for the new bearings, appropriate for the increased stress. This was easily said, but not easily done. He obviously had no idea what he was asking.
Three other persons were given the task of re-designing the functional structure of the bearings. The rest of the work was assigned to whoever had any experience with heavy equipment. Recruitment started immediately to get the disassembly of the turbines and generators under way as soon they had cooled down enough to be handled.
No one dared to say no to the captain, not to any request, or disagree with what he had ordered, even when it seemed the impossible. Except it dawned on me in the elevator to the machine room that I didn't have the faintest idea of how it could possibly be done, of how I might come up with an improved alloy in so short a time. As it happened, the first idea that popped into mind was the right one. No struggle was necessary. I didn't have to wrack my brains. The idea came, like rain out of a cloudless sky.
The metal object on my towel had appeared the same way. I stared at it from time to time. It had a perfect shine to it. It appeared like a dream now, of a metallurgist searching for the ideal metal to make bearings from. It certainly wasn't made of any ordinary metal. No ordinary metal could be super-polished to this perfection. I supposed that it had to be extremely hard and very dense.
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