The first trial used a fraction of Hearth’s return, routed through the manifold and back out into Meridian’s outer radiator.
The well’s own flow would come later. This was Hearth’s return, which had been coming back through the lattice for weeks now, steady and known, and which Eshel could measure at Hearth’s end and at Meridian’s. A fraction of it, a tenth, sent down through the reservoir’s inlet into the manifold’s trunk. Then out through the branches, each one in turn, to its own outlet, and from each outlet onward to the outer radiator: the great cold fins on Meridian’s outer ring, built to shed heat into the dark when nothing else could take it.
Ten minutes, planned. Every branch opened once, read, closed.
Eshel sat at the control desk.
He looked smaller at it than he did at the rack. He had his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and a pencil behind his ear and another in his hand, and he kept glancing at the rack across the chamber, where the twelve green lamps glowed, as if checking that it was still there. The rack was his. The desk was the manifold’s, and the manifold was six people’s, and tonight he was the one sitting at it because somebody had to call the branches and he had the steadiest voice. It was a small desk Sen’s crew had brought up from the pump hall with the battery lamps, with the manifold’s governor controls on it: eight small levers…
