The Long Descent — hints

The hold takes six units and the shed has fourteen. Coolant is 2 and you cannot go without it. After that: the spare impeller (1) fits the pump and nothing else; the gasket set (1) fits the pump or the line, and there is one of it; copper line (1) mends the line. The radiator core (2) and the spare drill bit (2) are the ones people regret both ways. Ask Halvard about the plant before you choose.

Seal the hull (close hatch), carry coolant, read the brass plate in the engine room, and put a real load aboard. He lists exactly what is missing if you try to leave.

The seismogram wall in the office, and the noticeboard in the mess hut. One of them contradicts what you have been told.

The airlock is aft of the hold, and there is a suit on a hook. wear suit.

Its throat is packed with compressed salt. Work at it with the wrench from the cutting face — three goes.

It will, and that is the game. Outside the rock puts in more than the plant takes out; inside, the plant wins it back. Go out, do one thing, come back and let her cool.

She floats, and a floating machine gets no traction. Four units go through the jettison hatch in the hold — vent coolant, vent samples and so on. What you drop is gone for good.

Fit the copper line, or the gasket set. Spend the gasket here and you will not have it later.

A bone bank, a rock shelf with two water levels cut sixty years apart, and a machine from 1938 aground in the shallows with a radiator core still in her. Do not wade out if the gauge is already past seventy.

Mend it before you go anywhere at all. The hoist in the hold has an impeller in its hydraulic pump — strip winch. It ruins the hoist permanently and it is the right call.

In the 1944 machine, east across the chamber floor: the right bronze, the right size, never run.

Read all six records and be back in the cabin with the plant whole. Five are in the machines. The sixth is scratched into a deck plate.

Nothing. Look at it anyway.

Not outside, no. Inside she gains a degree an hour while she is whole — so go out, do one thing, and come back in.

Down at the plinth, past the gallery of marks. read marks on the way in — the strokes are not in fives, they are in fours — and then examine interval at the plinth and time it against your own watch. Those two facts turn out to be the same fact.

Only if you want to send them up. You get them the moment you have read all six — six expeditions, from 1899 onward, every one of them written by somebody who was told they were the first — and if you have not read all six by now you cannot go back for the ones you missed.

One payload: the six logbooks, the source itself, or you. Not two of them, and there is no second charge and no way to load it from outside.

None of them. The logs are six crews nobody was told about; the source is the thing itself and it is still counting; and you are a person with a family. The rating plate was stamped by a man who knew there would be an argument going on in your head and wanted to end it quickly.