Juggernaut

'Relax, Sam. We didn't bring them, they followed us. You said yourself you heard the travelling hospital was big magic.'

'That not magic. That theft. How I relax? How I explain to Mister Obukwe?'

'You won't have to. Mister Zimmerman will explain and Lat-Am Oil will be very pleased with you. You'll probably get a bonus. Got another beer?'

He stared at the desk top as I opened the cooler, which was empty, and then looked along his shelves which were as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. Kironji looked up sardonically. 'Stealers! I tell you. Here.' He reached under the desk and came up with a beer can which he thrust out at me as if ashamed of his own generosity. I took it thankfully and said, There's still lots of stuff here, Sam.'

'Who eat tyres? Who eat batteries? You tell me that.'

I sat down on the edge of his desk. 'Sam. You know all those petrol drums you've got outside and down by the lake?'

'Why? You want to steal them?'

'No, of course not. How big are they?'

He addressed the desk top again. 'Forty-two gallon.'

'Imperial?'

'What you mean? Gallons, man — that what they are.'

Forty-two imperial gallons, which is what they probably were, equalled about fifty American. I had tried to decipher the marks on one but they were pretty rusty.

'Sam,' I said, 'please do me a big favour. Give me some paper and a pen or a pencil, let me borrow your office, and go away for a bit. I have to do some calculating, some planning. I'll be really grateful.'

He reluctantly produced a pad of paper with Lat-Am's logo on it and a ballpoint pen. 'I want my pen back,' he said firmly and began to retreat.

'Wait a moment. What's the weight of an empty drum?'

He shrugged. 'I dunno. Plenty heavy.'

It didn't matter too much at this stage. 'How many empty drums have you got here?'

Again his shoulders hunched. 'Too many. No supplies come, I use 'em up. Many empty now.'

'For Christ's sake, Sam, I don't want a long story! How many?'

'Maybe a thousand, maybe more. I never count.'

I jotted down figures. Thanks. Sam, that cooler. Where do you get your power from?'

'Questions. You ask too much questions.' He jerked his thumb. 'You not hear it? The generator, man!'

I had got so accustomed to hearing the steady throb of a generator on the rig that it hadn't penetrated that this one was making a slightly different sound. 'Ah, so you do have one.'

'Why? You want to steal it?' He flapped his hand dejectedly. 'You take it. Mister Obukwe, he already mad at me.'

'Don't worry,' I told him. 'Nobody will steal it, or anything else. But buying would be different, wouldn't it? My company is British Electric. Perhaps we can buy your generator from you.'

'You pay cash?'

I laughed aloud. 'Not exactly, but you'll get it in the end. Now let me alone for a while, Sam, would you?'

Before he left he went and wrote down one can of beer on my tab.

CHAPTER 24

I had a bit of figuring to do. For one thing, while we Americans think our way of doing things is always best, the European metric system is actually far better than our own multi-unit way, even the conservative British are adopting it, and oddly enough an imperial gallon is a better measure than our American gallon because one imperial gallon weighs exactly ten pounds of fresh water. It didn't take much figuring to see that a drum would hold four hundred and twenty pounds of water.

There was some other reckoning to be done and I persevered, even to cutting shapes out of paper with a rusty pair of scissors. At last I stretched, put Kironji's pen safely back in a drawer, took a hopeful but useless look in the cooler and set off down to the lakeside on foot. It was only a short distance and I used the walk to do some more thinking. I went straight down to look at the pontoon once again.

It was a rickety enough contraption, just a few empty oil drums for flotation with a rough log platform bolted. on top. It was very weathered and had obviously stood the test of time, but it was as stable as a spinning top just about to lose speed and I wouldn't have cared to cross Central Park Lake on it.

I yelled for anybody and Bob Pitman responded.

'Bob,' I said, 'go round up a couple of people for me, will you? I want Kemp, Hammond, and Geoff Wingstead. Oh, and Mick McGrath. Ask them to meet me here.'

'Will do,' he said and ambled off. When they had all arrived I found that Zimmerman had got wind of the conference and had made himself part of it, though without his Russian mate. I looked around at them and drew a deep breath.

'I have a nutty idea,' I started.

This drew a couple of ribald comments and I waited until they died down before I carried on. 'It's crazy and dangerous, but it just might work. We have to do something to get ourselves out of this fix. You gave me the idea, Ben. You and Mick.'

'We did?' Hammond asked.

'Yes. I want us to build a raft.'

'I know I mentioned that but you shot that idea down in flames. You had a point too.'

'I've developed your idea. We don't use this thing as a basis, we build our own. I've done some figuring on paper and I think it will work. The trouble is that the lake isn't made of paper.' I filled in for the benefit of the others. 'Ben suggested that if we towed the landing stage it could form a raft on which we could get people over to Manzu. The pontoon isn't big or stable enough and we'd need transport on the far shore. But I think I've worked something out.'

'Build a bigger raft?' asked Wingstead.

'How could you power it?'

'What do we make it of?'

'What do you think this is, a navy shipyard?'

I held up my hand. 'Hold it. Give me a chance and I'll explain.' There were two phases to my scheme and I thought it wiser to introduce them one at a time, so I concentrated on the concept of the raft first. 'To start with, every one of these drums in the compound, when empty, has a flotation value of four hundred pounds, and there are hundreds of them. We won't need more than say one hundred for my plan to work.'

'Sounds idiotic to me,' said Kemp. 'A hundred of these drums won't make a raft big enough to take anything anywhere.' I knew he was trying to visualize the rig floating across the lake on a bed of oil drums and failing, and had indeed done that myself.

'Building a raft is the first part of my plan. And it'll do to go on with, unless someone has a better one. We can't stay here indefinitely.'

'It sounds like you have a pretty big job lined up,' Wingstead said. He didn't sound encouraging. 'Let's hear it.'

'Think about the raft. To make it we need material and muscle. And brains, I guess. We've got the brains between us and there's a hell of a lot of suitable raw material lying about. As for the muscle, that's how the pyramids were built, and the Great Wall of China. God knows we've got enough of that.'

The Nyalans?' Hammond asked. He was beginning to kindle with excitement. I wanted them all to feel that way.

'We'll need a work force. The women to plait lianas to make a lot of cordage, and some of the men to cart stuff about. I've got the basic blueprints right here.' I held up the pad of paper.

Zimmerman and Hammond looked ready for any challenge. Kemp had a stubborn set to his jaw and I knew that he was thinking about the rig to the usual exclusion of everything else, and ready to oppose any plan that didn't involve saving it.

Geoff Wingstead was oddly lacklustre, which disappointed me. I'd hoped to enrol his enthusiasm first of all, and wondered why he was hanging fire. McGrath had said nothing and was listening intently in the background. With the odd, unwanted rapport that I sometimes felt between us I knew he was aware that I had something tougher yet to propose, and he was waiting for it.