Pandora: The Final Solution
I gratefully acknowledge one of the foremost creative geniuses of our times, James Cameron, for conceiving the lush moon Pandora and the "noble savages," the Na'vi, that inhabit it. This story uses the setting he created for his movie, Avatar. I have not received any money for my work based on Avatar. If I could get paid by the hour for these stories, I would retire and spend all my time dancing and writing in comfort.
This chapter contains all original characters and situations, set on Earth immediately after the end of the movie. It is the obvious approach to dealing with the Pandoran uprising, with less than obvious consequences.
Author's Note: Most of this chapter was written months ago, in the style of writing I had at that time. In the interest of getting the story line moving forward, I have not rewritten it. My bad, I'm sorry. I promise to return to my newer, and I hope better, style for the next chapter.
P.S. Please contact me if you know anyone named Griffin in County Cork, Ireland. They may be my distant relatives.
Chapter 11: "Danny Boy" Griffin
Dan is on the phone for what seems like the millionth time with this supplier, and he's certain he shouldn't even be talking to them now. They should be calling the RDA Tourism or Corporate Legal departments in New York City, not the logistics guy in New Mexico. However, he has worked with them more than any other RDA employee, so they are always calling him first to sound him out. "Your company and RDA entered into a joint venture to set up Paradise, and the contract is very specific. The resort personnel and the first paying customers are in cryo right now, en-route, and construction for Paradise hasn't started yet. You don't get any revenues until Paradise is in operation, and that's spelled out very clearly. You should talk directly to the legal department, because I can't propose any contract mods at this time. If I get involved, they'll kick my ass back to Boston so fast only my suntan will be left in this desert. I know times are tough and you need the revenue, but I can't help you." He glances at his screen and sees the arrival of the urgent email from Mr. Winston's secretary. "I'm the wrong guy. They just tell me what to buy and where to ship it. My big boss just summoned me, probably another screwed up shipment. Gotta go. Good luck with the folks in New York City." Dan hangs up the phone, glad to have an excuse to cut off this call. He gulps down the last of his coffee, he'll get a refill from his boss's secretary, she always has the best ready. He grabs his daily calendar and makes sure he has a working pen. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he still prefers keeping organized on paper. He has lost his smart phone on several occasions, and keeping his notes separate is good insurance against another loss. It also keeps RDA classified and proprietary information out of his phone, and avoids another painful visit with the security department when he loses his phone again. As he walks down the hall, he remembers that the ISV Venture Star is orbiting Pandora now. He wonders if there's a problem with its high priority cargo he negotiated after he arrived here, all that expensive high tensile strength wire cable for the new mine rush ordered from Germany. It'll take six to seven years to get any replacements out there, if the follow-up shipments can't be used.
With the current mine playing out, a new source of ore is needed immediately. Even after the monster tree is felled and cleaned up, there are many months of site preparation required before open pit mining at full-rate production becomes possible. To get to the ore quickly, a temporary solution is planned; digging the overburden and ore out of the lake bed through the water. Beyond the ridges flanking the lake, towers will be built and cables strung over the ridges and lake. Huge buckets will be lowered into the water from the cables to dig out the lake bed. The water will drain as the buckets are raised, and then the buckets will move to the ends beyond the ridges to dump their contents. The useless overburden will be dumped into the valley on one end, and the ore loaded into the huge dump trucks sitting on the mud road at the other end. The productivity of this approach is much less than open pit mining, but keeps the ore flowing through the processing plant until the huge excavators can be brought to bear within the pit.
The stereolithography plant in Hell's Gate can make many items, but there are many more items that are beyond its capabilities. High tensile strength wire cable is one of those items. The plant cannot make it, but can make the templates for the dies, tools, and machines that can produce the cable. Then it becomes a matter of raw materials, floor space and fixtures in the plant, and the number, skills, and availability of the personnel needed to produce it. Because of the high priority RDA has put on getting new mines online, the board approved the recommendation from Administrator Parker Selfridge and directed the planning and logistics groups to buy a large quantity of the needed cable and ship it out to Pandora, with the first shipment arriving on board the ISV Venture Star. This trades off the expense of shipping the finished cable from Earth with the risk, mainly schedule, of producing the cable on Pandora. Getting the cable to the new mine is just one of thousands of "challenges" that must be overcome to get the unobtainium back to Earth.
The primary difficulty with building a new mine on the site of the native village is its distance from Hell's Gate. Much time will be lost transporting workers and equipment from Hell's gate to the mine, and back. The two sites are about fifty kilometers apart, as the banshee flies. The mud road between them cannot be straight, it must weave through the topography, around mountains and over fords, and will easily exceed seventy kilometers when complete. Building a work camp near the new mine is a must. The site for the work camp should be a large, flat clearing adjacent to a source of flowing water. The leadership at Hell's Gate has identified such a site, and cleared it when the mud road reached it. On the milestones in their plans, the site for the work camp is called "Willow Grove." The willows must be removed for the construction, so this name is will be the last vestige of the trees that gave the site its name. The site is slightly smaller than desired, situated between a ford for the mud road and a cliff with a series of spectacular waterfalls. It is very near the village, practically within walking distance, if it were safe to walk anywhere on this wild moon.
Another major problem RDA is facing is the lack of suitable facilities for tourism on Pandora. From the earliest days of mechanized transportation, wealthy travelers have always been willing to pay extravagantly to explore the latest frontiers in luxury. RDA has made a fortune by providing luxury resorts and spas in Earth orbit and on Luna and Mars. Once pictures of the lush forests, exotic and brightly colored animals, and spectacular landscapes made it to Earth, the idle rich have been clamoring to see it in person. "If grubby miners can go to Pandora, why can't we shareholders?" is a question RDA executives are tired of hearing. RDA has resisted tourism to Pandora for one simple reason: Hell's Gate is so ugly and industrial, taking tourists to that hell hole will kill off all future prospects. Since RDA funded the development of the cryo vaults, they have been able to keep them out of the hands of others. However, the very rich have their own space ships, and RDA could sell them cryo vaults if they were comfortable with having visitors drop in at Pandora. Thus was born the idea to build a separate tourist facility, the Paradise Resort, Spa, and Rehabilitation Center. It must be away from Hell's Gate, but with the right planning, it could be co-located with the work camp for the second mine.
The president of RDA Tourism and her staff flew out to New Mexico to begin the process with the mine planning team, and were stunned at what they found. The engineers work in the usual ugly cube farm, but the walls were covered with color satellite and aerial photographs of a spectacular site. She was told these pictures are part of the site survey for the new mine. The engineers were making plans to stop the waterfalls, pump out the lake and river, and rip open the land in this natural bowl housing a ginormous tree. Getting the mine equipment in and the unobtainium out is proving a huge challenge, as mountains surround the site on three sides and a river blocks the fourth. Drawings for several proposals were hanging in one hallway. The direct route entails blasting away the escarpment, destroying all waterfalls. They don't matter, a diversion channel will dry them up before blasting. The big concern is the huge effort needed to move the rocks after blasting, and the chance that the loosened material may fall into the lake, delaying access to the ore. Several indirect routes were also proposed, all following the diversion channel behind one ridge to the downstream plains, and crossing the channel and river with bridges, dams, or buried drainage pipes.
The tourism team commandeered the biggest conference room and talked about the site of the new mine. They "borrowed" the best pictures off the walls, took large pieces of paper out of a plotter used for oversized drawings, and begin sketching plans for Paradise on the mine site. The waterfalls and lake retain their natural grandeur. The main hotel tower, tentatively named Hometree Hotel, stands where the great tree stood. It is flanked by six separate domed pavilions, named Pharaoh, Caesar, King, Czar, Sultan, and Emperor. Each pavilion is richly decorated in the style befitting its name. On the plain behind these structures, opposite the lake, are a series of huge domes covering two 18 hole golf courses, swimming and diving pools, tennis courts, running tracks, riding and walking trails, and other athletic amenities. Also planned for later construction are baseball and football fields, soccer pitches, and basketball courts, not so much for the tourists, but for children once RDA opens Pandora to families. Behind the domes are the numerous connected low buildings housing the rehabilitation center.
The rehab center is the Tourism President's pet project. Earlier discussions about the size of the work camp made it clear that there was not enough usable land area to allow it or the extensive athletic facilities. This new site has plenty of room, and the rehab center is located where it can be expanded as necessary in the future. She has received many requests for such a facility from celebrities and the private doctors that cater to them. Being in cryo does not affect one's chemical dependencies, but the long round trip to a place with no official political status does wonders for escaping most legal entanglements. ICA has honored her request and now investigates and clears all space tourists, absolving RDA from all legal liability if a fugitive does get off Earth. Besides, the lack of communications channels makes it ideal for hiding from the paparazzi. By moving Paradise to the native village, the rehab center can become a reality. It has the potential to become the largest profit center for tourism on Pandora, and second only to the mining of unobtainium.
The mining engineers were shocked. They thought the hotel complex was part of the work camp, and now it is sited on top of the mine. Immediately, the phone lines with Corporate Headquarters were buzzing with calls trying to sort out the priorities between the tourism and mining visions. As always, money in the form of maximizing revenue is the deciding factor. The mining engineers must remove the unobtainium from the site as quickly as possible, while minimizing the damage to the site. This eliminates the direct route completely. The rehab center and athletic facilities are the furthest away from the mine, and work on them can begin immediately, on a non-interfering basis, after the tree is demolished and removed. Once the unobtainium is mined out, the waterfalls, lake, and river will be restored, and the hotel and pavilions built. The initial Paradise resort will be built on the work camp site facing the waterfall across the river. It will be scaled back from the original plans, as it will be used only while the mine is active. The complete natural food production facility will be built as planned on the work camp site, and will remain there because it is considered a "back office" function. Large domes will be built to house the aeroponics and hydroponics for raising herbs, spices, grains, fruits, and vegetables, beneath which are the stockyards and fresh and salt water ponds for fish and other seafood. The rich demand the very best food, and Paradise will have the facilities needed to provide all of the most familiar healthy and natural foods now in short supply on Earth. In time, if production proves plentiful, the natural foodstuffs can also supplement the diets of the workers stationed on Pandora and the ISVs.
The images ignored by the tourism personnel were the black and white blowups of the frames from ancient newsreels that documented the construction of Boulder Dam, later renamed Hoover Dam to honor the thirty-first president of the United States who was a mining engineer with one of the first degrees in geology from Stanford University. A cableway was built across the valley and used to deliver large buckets of concrete to the forms for the dam below. These newsreels were the inspiration for the Pandoran cableway. What started out as a generic approach for mining waterways has become the preferred initial approach after the tourism group laid claim to the mine site.
To keep the site pristine, the best access way into the open pit mine is the riverbed that drains the lake. The mud road from Hell's Gate is nearing completion. One of the large mining excavators will travel that mud road from the existing mine down to the river, well downstream from the site. It will dig a diversion channel parallel to the ridge up to the river feeding the waterfalls from the top of the escarpment. Before breaking through the bank and flooding the channel, it will travel back down the channel and build a coffer dam across the river above the channel. The bank will be blasted open, diverting the water from the waterfalls into the channel, and the lake and river pumped dry. The tree will be demolished and wood from it placed in the river bed to support the excavators from sinking too deep into the mud. The planners have no depth readings for the lake floor, but they hope that the overburden is thin enough that the unobtainium ore can be reached without extensive prep work. They will adjust their plans after better remote sensing equipment can be brought into the site to identify the location of the ore.
Dan Griffin is from County Cork, Ireland, and is the Manager of ISV Logistics. He oversees the buying of everything going to Pandora, including the ISVs themselves. As a boy, he wanted to be a professional football player, but a bad leg injury, rupturing his Achilles tendon while playing a pickup game with the neighborhood boys, ended that dream. His family was typical working class, and his prospects were limited. He was good enough with numbers that his parents pushed him into business school, and he ended up a bookkeeper for a local furniture store chain. He would have happily stayed there for the rest of his life, but fate intervened. He uncovered a sophisticated scam with a Russian furniture supplier, and helped An Garda Síochána, the Irish National Police, break up the Russian crime ring involved on Irish soil. That made him a marked man, and after his help, he was sent to the United States of America with a new name and identity to work as a buyer in the RDA medical labs in the Boston area. He easily blended into the Irish community around Boston, but no one prepared him for the fact that his new first name, Daniel, was forever linked to the old song "Danny Boy" in America. In no time, he was stuck with the nickname "Danny Boy," and often was drunkenly regaled with that song whenever he walked into his favorite Irish pubs. He did well as a buyer, and when RDA Logistics needed buyers in New Mexico to support their Pandora operations, he was asked to transfer out west. With few attachments to Boston and his international experience, he jumped at the opportunity, and quickly rose through the ranks, now managing the procurement of the ISVs and all materiel going to Pandora. He put down roots in Las Cruces, with a wife and kids in the RDA suburbs on the main road to the Spaceport, and has even developed a taste for the chiles that are present in practically all food in that border area with Mexico.