The Leak by Timothy Carstensen (best book club books for discussion .txt) 📕

Brett was not having a good day, and to put it in such terms was an understatement. This was set to be a day that would break all previous records for his terrible days.
He sat at the bar, and the bartender slid over after a minute and glanced at him, taking in the suit, rumpled shirt, messed hair. "Aw, heck. Gimme an Irish Car Bomb." The bartender raised his eyebrows, but he filled a tall glass with guinness, poured half a shot of Irish Cream, and floated the whiskey on the cream in the shot glass. He placed the tall glass of guinness in front of Brett, balanced the shot glass above the guinness, and dropped it and stirred it well. Brett took the glass, watched the mixture start to react, then raised it and chugged the alcohol.
Another man pulled up a seat by Brett. Brett dropped the glass, and looked over, already intoxicated. The Bartender took a while on the other side of the bar, but eventually sidled up, and the man called for a zombie. The tender mixed the rum, and he downed it almost as fast as Brett had downed his.
Brett looked at him, and chased the words from his mouth. "Life sucks."
"You have no idea," the man replied, slowly and laboriously.
"I think I do. I'm losing everything today, my job, my money..."
"Yeah ya are."
"Whaddya mean?"
"Wha... how..." Brett felt the alcohol start to affect him."How do you know?"
"Uh, cause, um, ya just told me."
Brett processed this. "Oh."
"And cause the world is ending." The man started to slur his words. The rum was beginning to affect him too.
"Ah." Brett paused after a second. "Wait, what?"
"It's over. We sprung a leak, and it's over. It's all our fault."
"Whaddya mean?" Brett tried to turn all the way, and his stool slid, almost falling.
"You know that oil well cavern? The one that collapsed just offshore?"
Brett seemingly recalled something he'd heard in the news about an oil rig collapsing, and a whirlpool filling the oil well.
"Yeah, that one... it's all a conspiracy."
"What?" Brett would usually have laughed, but in this light, everything seemed so much more logical than otherwise. "It's a conspiracy."
"Yeah." The man started to cry, and after a moment, Brett joined him, sobbing, though he knew not why.
They cried, and ordered more drinks, before Brett asked. "What's the conspiracy?"
"You know how the earth is flat?"
"Wait... really?"
"Yeah," the man rolled his eyes with difficulty, and continued slurring. "Of course it's flat. Prove that it's not."
"Well, people went to space, right?"
"Have you ever been to space though?"
"Ohhh." Brett struggled to think. "But what about planes flying around the world?"
"But have you ever been awake during the whole flight around the world? Has anyone? Except those..." the man tried to stab his finger into the bar, and hurt himself. "Except those who are IN on the conspiracy."
"But I thought the conspiracy was that the world was flat..." Brett began, in the kind of confusion that can only come from the highest states of inebriation.
"You're right! That's the conspiracy, and they... they..." the man paused, and continued. "And if you do look at the actual flight plans on the maps, they're all curved. Like the maps are all wrong. Here's the real way the world looks." He pulled out a few wadded papers from his tattered jacket, and sorted them out, one a fastfood coupon, a few other pages of a journal, and a wadded poster. He unrolled it, and revealed a circular map of the earth. "See? It's... it's, um straight. It's flat."
"Ohhhh." Brett was convinced. "Wow! The earth is flat!" He jumped up and danced a jive, to the consternation of the other patrons. "What else is real?"
"No! Not wow!" The other man grew upset. "It's a bad thing! It's very very bad!"
"How is it bad?"
"Cause, well, cause the earth is thin."
"How thin?" Brett was confused, again. "It can't be very thin..." He snorted and began giggling."Whenever an earthquake hit, the whole world would just kshh! Like a window!" He kept laughing.
"No!" The man grew frustrated. "It's not like that. It's a couple of miles thick, but it's thinner in the deeper parts of the ocean, the parts where we drill for oil."
"But why do you drill in the thinner parts? You could drill through."
"That's what happened!"
Brett laughed... then paused, when he realized that the man was serious. "You drilled through?" He ordered a shot of whiskey.
"Yeah. I was there when it happened. We were almost two miles down, and then all of a sudden the drill just fell through, and the whole thing just disappeared straight down into the ocean. I was the only one who knew what had happened, and knew that the water would begin draining out, so I ran for the helicopter and got away before the oil rig exploded and collapsed.
"So now all the water's draining out? So?"
"Think about it! Think about it, man!"
Brett thought about it, but couldn't figure it out.
The man explained. "If the water runs out, than the plants will die, and if the plants die, then the animals will die, and we will die! Everyone dies!"
Brett gasped. "Everyone dies?"
"That's why I'm here. Might as well die drunk, right?"
Brett shook his head. "Nooo! We have to do something about it! We have to save the world!"
The man laughed drunkenly. "There's no way we can keep the water from leaking – and now it's going too fast.
"No! We gotta try. We gotta try something."
"What could we do?"
"Well, we gotta go out there, so we gotta get a boat or something, and maybe..."
"Hey, I know," the man interrupted. "The whirlpool is going one way, so if we get on a boat and go the opposite way, we could slow it down!"
"That'll work!" They each downed another shot, and left stumbling for the door. They got back to Brett's car before he realized something. "Wait, we don't have a boat."
They paused, and struggled to think, and after a moment, the man suddenly exclaimed, "Wait! I have the helicopter! It's still on the roof! I could just fly us out there!"
"But what could we do then? Go around in circles?"
"That might work." The man led him to the stairs, and they stumbled up.
"Do you know where it is?"
"I fly out every day, of course I do! Idiot!" the man slurred, as he almost tripped over a stair. "There she is!" he announced proudly as the old chopper came into view. He tried several times to climb up to the cockpit before he actually succeeded, and finally they were both in and he was hitting random switches."
Suprisingly, sobriety was certainly not a requirement for this craft, as they quickly rose into the sky, each of them chattering about how flying in circles around the whirlpool could slow it down.
It only took them an hour or so to reach the spot, and the reached it at the peak of their inebriation. "There it is!" The man pointed it out needlessly, the large vortex reaching down far into the ocean. "There's the whirlpool! Lets start spinning!" The man pulled the chopper into a tight spin, opposing the current of the vortex. They circled it faster and faster, lower and lower, but it didn't seem to do any good.
Brett finally voiced his fear. "What if it doesn't work?"
"It'll work. We just need to figure it out. That's all."
Brett watched the water, and eventually came up with another idea. "Hey! You know how when we fly, the wind pushes everything away under us? Like on the rooftop?
"Yeah?" The man listened up.
"Why don't we just go close to the water and blow it all away from the hole? Then it won't go through!"
The man thought about it. "Wow! You figured it out!" They whooped and screamed, and the man brought the craft lower. He lowered it closer to the spray, closer to the waves, until they could see the fringes of water being pushed away by the wind from their rotors. "It's working," the man yelled excitedly. "We're doing it!"
Brett joined in. "We're saving the world! We're heroes!" He jumped around in his seat excitedly as the chopper got closer and closer to the whirlpool, then suddenly a small wavelet caught their skid. The chopper gracefully flipped, both of the passengers yelling in glee, and smashed deep into the water. It didn't combust on impact, but simply collapsed, as it was too thouroughly soaked. On a related note, the passengers didn't experience any reaction to the catastrophe either, as they too were too thouroughly soaked.
The helicopter spun deep into the water, disappearing from view, and the vortex continued growing, slowly increasing in speed, and suddenly splashed up in an explosion of foam as it disappeared.

In an National Areonautics and Space Agency building in florida, 18 scientists were gathered around a table participating in a heated discussion. One of them was continuing, "I just don't see how we can stop the leak, and what's more, even if it is stopped in the next few days, I don't see how we could contain the situation. Even a basic understanding of the event will unravel everything we've worked so hard to build up, to conceal. And the water loss is immense, and the hole is growing larger every second."
"There is an option we could use." The attention of the room went to the new speaker, a younger speaker. "I don't see how we can plug the leak, but we can spin the story to the earth having hollow cavities in it."
A few other scientists agreed, and after the resulting commotion, a third speaker rose. "However, this doesn't solve the problem. How will we stop the leak, if it's even possible?"
There was silence for a moment, and a voice. "We could construct a glory hole, a very long tube the diameter of the hole, and place it over the hole so that the water won't leak unless the water level is over the top of the tube."
Several of the others mused on the idea, and he continued. "It could be constructed in a matter of days, and last up to a week. It would have to be heavily weighed down."
Another volunteered. "We could try to send a spaceshuttle around to the bottom of the earth, and try to force the water up with a type of jet or underwater propulsion system. The fuel would be a problem, but it could be worth a shot.
An orderly ran into the room, and handed the chairman of the meeting a press release. The chair read the release, and motioned. "There may be no need. It seems a helicopter pilot from the collapsed rig, returned to the sight with a friend, certainly both of them skilled mechanical engineers, and recognizing the threat, they collapsed their helicopter skillfully and carefully into the whirlpool, maneuvering it succesfully to plug the leak."
Cheers erupted from around the table, as the scientists applauded the heroic act of unknown Brett and the helicopter pilot. Voices began right away, however. "Are we to stick with the hollow cavities in the earth theory?"