On the southern rim of the Great Quarry, the liquid silver column in the main pressure gauge dropped twelve points in four seconds.
Geth Marr stood with his heavy iron measuring tongs resting across his forearms, his boots planted in the freezing gravel three feet from the stone railing. He watched the gray glass tube with the careful intensity of a man observing an unexploded powder charge. The pressure gauge was a heavy-duty instrument salvaged from the lower pump house, four feet of heavy leaded glass mounted in an oak frame and connected to the lower sump by a quarter-inch copper sensing line. The sensing line was jacketed in tarred hemp to prevent the freezing mountain wind from congealing the stone oil that floated atop the liquid silver pool.
The knee pad of the silver metal, which had been shaking in wild, tiny leaps against the red line marked CRITICAL DANGER, settled with a single, sharp twitch. It held dead center at three hundred and ten units. Two points below the maximum load-bearing limit established by the Seven Wards Engineering Council in the Tram kitchens thirty-six hours ago.
“The bed is quiet,” Jarek, the rim observer, whispered beside him, his voice cracking with the strain of seven minutes of total silence. “Master Marr... The needle stopped jumping.”
