recorder in his pocket, listening only with the surface layer of his
mind, pondering all he had heard so far from this extraordinary little
man - so that when it came he almost did not realize what he was
hearing.
n 10th January Christy Marine entered a contract of carriage with Orient
Amex. The tenure is ten years. The vessel to be employed is the Golden
Dawn, The rate is 10 cents US per hundred ton miles with a minimum
annual guaranteed usage Of 75,000 nautical miles. Nicholas registered
the trigger word Golden Dawn and then he assimilated it all.
The price, ten cents per hundred miles, that was wrong, high, much too
high, ridiculously high in this depressed market. Then the name, Orient
Amex - what was there about it that jarred his memory?
He stopped dead, and a following pedestrian bumped him, Nicholas
shouldered him aside thoughtlessly and stood thinking, ransacking his
mind for buried items of information. Lazarus had stopped also and was
waiting patiently, and now Nicholas laid a hand on the little man's
shoulder.
I need a drink. He drew him into a brasserie which was thick with steam
from the coffee machine and the smoke of Caporal and Disque Bleu, and
sat him at a tiny table by the window overlooking the sidewalk.
Primly, Lazarus asked for a Vittel water and sipped it with an air of
virtue, while Nicholas poured soda into his whisky.
Orient Amex/ Nicholas asked, as soon as the waiter had left. Tell me
about it. That is outside my original terms of reference/ Lazarus
demurred delicately.
Charge me for it/ Nicholas invited, and Lazarus paused as the computer
reels clicked in his mind, then he began to speak.
Orient Amex is an American-registered company, with an capital of
twenty-five million shares at a par value of ten dollars - Lazarus
recited the dry statistics.
The company is presently undertaking substantial dryland exploration in
Western Australia and Ethiopia, and offshore exploration within the
territorial waters of Norway and Chile. It has erected a refinery at
Galveston in Texas to operate under the new atomic catalyst cracking
process, first employed at its pilot plant on the same site.
The plant is projected for initial operation in June this year, and full
production in five years. It was all vaguely familiar to Nicholas, the
names, the process of cracking the low-value high-carbon molecules,
breaking up the carbon atoms and reassembling them in volatile
low-carbon molecules of high value.
The company operates producing wells in Texas, and in the Santa Barbara
offshore field, in Southern Nigeria, and has proven crude reserves in
the El Barras field of Kuwait, which will be utilized by the new
cracking plant in Galveston. Good God/ Nicholas stared at him. The El
Barras field but it's cadmium-contaminated it's been condemned by The El
Barras field is a high cadmium field, naturally enriched with the
catalyst necessary for the new process. What are the cadmium elements?
Nicholas demanded.
The western area of the El Barras field has sampled at 2,000 parts per
million, and the north and eastern anticline have sampled as high as
