Twenty-five million tons of water didn’t make a sudden, dramatic roar when it leaned against a wall.
It made a sound like a wet finger being rubbed around the rim of a crystal goblet. A high, singing shaking that hummed through the soles of Giles Croft’s boots. He walked along the concrete crest of Cell Twenty-Two.
Beside him, Master Mason Orson Briggs was sweating heavily into the collar of his wool jacket. He held a shaking-wire strain gauge against the web of pile forty-two.
“Lateral bending is three-eighths of an inch across the eighty-foot width, my lord,” Orson reported. His voice shook slightly.
“The steel is in hoop tension. The interlocks are singing like harp strings.”
“Hoop stress is twelve thousand pounds of pressure,” Giles said, reading his handheld galvanometer.
“Well within the elastic yield limit of thirty-six thousand PSI for low-alloy Larssen steel.
The crushed stone core is taking eighty percent of the lateral thrust through internal grain interlock. The metal tube is behaving as a solid gravity monolith.”
