The shift from twenty-five to thirty-five percent sky-slit altered the physics of the governor chamber from a heavy-duty boiler room into a roaring wind tunnel of pure striking force.
The upright discharge chimney pipe, a six-foot bore lined with dressed dark rock blocks and heavy with bands of cold-hammered bronze, had become a blazing bright pillar of liquid daylight. Through the eight-inch salt-glass check port set into the pit floor, Len Vey looked directly into the stream. It wasn’t fire. There was no smoke, no ash, and no fine dust matter to scatter the wavelengths. It was twelve years of sky-high sunlight that had been tightly packed into an energy thickness so huge that it flowed like molten lead, lighting up the crystal-clear grain of the dark rock stonework until four feet of solid rock glowed a deep, semi-clear honey-gold.
The sheer speed of the discharge created an induced draft of terrifying size.
Forty thousand heat units surged downward into the four-hundred-foot shaft leading to the Quarry heat sink. Then, they dragged thousands of cubic feet of sky air down behind them. The air was drawn in through the high outside angled slats of the granite peak, howling down the stonework shafts like an October gale funneled through a mountain gorge. The draft roared around Len’s ears, fluttering the torn wool of his postal tunic and tearing the sulfur steam off the floor in twisting, violent vortexes that vanished down the drain.
