"All right, Pramod, we're ready to roll. Bring up the water hoses."

Pramod unrolled several lengths of tubing and gave them to the waiting quaddies; another quaddie ran a final check of their connections to the nearest water spigot. Leo switched on the freezer coils and took a hose.

"All right, kids, watch me and I'll show you the trick of it. You must bleed the water slowly onto the cold surfaces, avoiding splash into the air; at the same time you must keep it going constantly enough so that your hoses don't freeze up. If you feel your fingers going numb, take a short break in the next chamber. We don't need any injuries out of this."

Leo turned to the back side of the vortex mirror, nestled among but not touching the freezer coils. The mirror had been in the shade for the last several hours Outside, and was good and cold now. He thumbed his valve and let a silvery blob of water flow onto the mirror's surface. It spread out in swift feathers of ice. He tried some drops on the coils; they froze even faster.

"All right, just like that. Start building up the ice mold around the mirror. Make it as solid as you can, no air pockets. Don't forget to place the little tube to let the air evacuate from the die chamber, later."

"How thick should it be?" asked Pramod, following suit with his hose and watching in fascination as the ice formed.

"At least one meter. At a minimum the mass of the ice must be equal to the mass of the metal. Since we've only got one shot at this, we'll go for at least twice the mass of the metal. We aren't going to be able to recover any of this water, unfortunately. I want to double-check our water reserves, because two meters thick would certainly be better, if we can spare it."

"However did you think of this?" asked Pramod in an awed tone.

Leo snorted, as he realized Pramod had the impression that he was making up this entire engineering procedure out of his head in the heat of the moment. "I didn't invent it. I read about it. It's an old method they used to use for preliminary test designs, before fractal theory was perfected and computer simulations improved to today's standards."

"Oh." Pramod sounded rather disappointed.

Leo grinned. "If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, boy, choose learning. It works more of the time."