Giles Croft kicked the heavy steel toolbox at his feet with a solid, echoing clatter.
“Eighteen hair-fractions,” Giles growled. His voice shook with the cold, measured rage of a checker whose bridge had just failed its final check by a fraction of an inch.
“Eighteen thousandths of a tiny fraction of an inch.
Direct sunlight in a near-empty pocket heating a fifty-foot load-bearing metal ring expands the south pipe rim like a cast-iron skillet on a campfire.
The building physics of heat swelling in a high-empty pocket environment was one of the most frustrating problems Giles had ever faced.
On Earth, sky air acted as a natural heat buffer, conducting and convecting heat away from hot surfaces and distributing heat across metal structures.
But here at ninety-eight thousand feet, where surrounding air pressure was barely one-hundredth of an air, rising heat was non-existent.
Heat could only transfer by direct heat flow through the metal, or by streaming into the black void of space.
