heard is that they are under tow direct to the Persian Gulf. Nick stared
solemnly across the ship, blinking his eyes against the stinging wind.
I must have been out of my mind/ he whispered, to dream up a monster
like that. But there was a touch of defiant pride in his tone.
It's so big - beyond imagination/ she encouraged him to talk about it.
How big is it? It's not a single vessel/he explained. 'No harbour in
the world could take a ship that size, it could not even approach the
continental United States, for that matter, there just is not enough
water to float it. Yes? She loved to listen to him expound his vision,
she loved to hear the force and power of his convictions.
What you're seeing is the carrying platform, the accommodation and the
main power source. He held her closer.
On to that, we attach the four tank pods, each one of them capable of
carrying a quarter of a million tons of crude oil, each tank almost as
large as the biggest ship afloat. He was still explaining the concept
while they sat at lunch, and Charles Gras and Jules Levoisin listened as
avidly as she did.
A single rigid hull of those dimensions would crack and break up in
heavy seas, he took the cruet set and used it to demonstrate, but the
four individual pods have been designed so that they can move
independently of each other. This gives them the ability to ride and
absorb the movement of heavy seas. It is the most important principle
of ship construction, a hull must ride the water - not try to oppose it.
Across the table, Charles Gras nodded lugubrious agreement.
The tank pods hive on to the main hull, and are carried I upon it like
remora on the body of a shark, not using their own propulsion systems,
but relying on the multiple boilers and quadruple screws of the main
hull to carry them across the oceans. He pushed the cruet set around
the table and they all watched it with fascination. Then, when it
reaches the continental shelf opposite the shore discharge site, the
main hull anchors, forty or fifty, even a hundred miles offshore,
detaches one or two or all of its pod tanks, and they make those last
few miles under their own propulsion. In protected water and in chosen
weather conditions, their propulsion systems will handle them safely.
Then the empty pod ballasts itself and returns to hook on to the main
hull. As he spoke, Nicholas detached the salt cellar from the cruet and
docked it against Samantha's plate. The two Frenchmen were silent,
staring at the silver salt cellar, but Samantha watched Nick's face. It
was burned dark by the sun now, lean and handsome, and he seemed charged
and vital, like a thoroughbred horse in peak of training, and she was
proud of him, proud of the force of his personality that made other men
listen when he spoke, proud of the imagination and the courage it took
to conceive and then put into operation a project of this magnitude.
Even though it were no longer his - yet his had been the vision.
Now Nicholas was talking again. Civilization is addicted to liquid
fossil fuels. Without them, it would be forced into withdrawal trauma
too horrible to contemplate. If then we have to use crude, let's pipe
it out of the earth, transport and ship it with all possible precautions
to protect ourselves from its side effects Nicholas/ Charles Gras
