had roused in the others. Wingstead had cut his teeth on engineering problems such as this and he was deeply concerned for the safety of his men. I had expected him to back me all the way.
The problem solved itself. He stood up suddenly, shaking his head almost in bewilderment, took a dozen paces away from us and collapsed in the dust.
We leapt up to race over to him.
'Go and get a doctor!' Kemp barked and Proctor ran to obey. Gently Kemp cradled Wingstead whose face had gone as grey as putty, sweat-soaked and lolling. We stood around in shocked silence until Dr Kat and Dr Marriot arrived.
After a few minutes the surgeon stood up and to my amazement he looked quite relieved. 'Please send for a stretcher,' he said courteously, but there was one already waiting, and willing hands to carry Wingstead to the mobile hospital. Dr Marriot went with him, but Dr Kat stayed behind.
'I should have seen this coming,' he said. 'But you may set your minds at rest, gentlemen. Mister Wingstead will be perfectly all right. He is not dangerously ill.'
'What the hell is it then?' I asked.
'Overstrain, overwork, on top of the injuries he suffered in the plane crash. He should have been made to take things more easily. Tell me, did you notice anything wrong yourselves?'
I said, feeling sick with anger at myself, 'Yes, I did. I've seen him losing his drive, his energy. And I damned well kept pushing at him, like a fool. I'm sorry -'
Kemp cut me off abruptly.
'Don't say that. I saw it too and I know him better than anyone else here. We must have been crazy to let him go on like that. Will he really be all right?'
'All he needs is sleep, rest, good nourishment. We can't do too much about the last but I assure you I won't let him get up too soon this time. I might tell you that I'm very relieved in one respect. I have been afraid of fever – cholera, typhoid -any number of scourges that might strike. When I heard that Mister Wingstead had collapsed I thought it was the first such manifestation. That it is not is a matter of considerable relief.'
The Doctor's report on Wingstead was circulated, and the concern that had run through the convoy camp like a brush fire died down.
I found Hammond. 'I want to talk to all the crew later this evening. The medical staff too. We'll tell them the whole plan. It's risky, but we can't ask people to work in ignorance.'
Then I went to find Sam Kironji.
'Sam, what's in that little hut inside the compound?' I asked him.
He looked at me suspiciously. He'd already found the compound gate unlocked and Harry Zimmerman and two others counting empty drums, much to his disgust. 'Why you want to know?'
I clung to my patience. 'Sam, just tell me.'
There was nothing much in it. The hut held a miscellany of broken tools, cordage, a few other stores that might be useful, and junk of all sorts. It was where Sam put the things he tidied away from everywhere else.
I made a space in the middle of it, had Kironji's desk brought in, and established it as my headquarters. The roadside cabin was too far from the camp and too exposed. Some wag removed a Pirelli calendar from the cabin wall and hung it in the hut, and when Kironji saw this I think it hurt him most of all.
'Stealers! Now you take my women,' he said tragically.
'Only to look at, same as you. You'll get them back, I promise. Thank you for the desk and the chair, Sam.'
He flapped his hand at me. 'Take everything. I not care no more. Mister Obukwe, he fire me.'
Hammond was listening with amusement. 'Never mind, Sam. If he does I'll hire you instead,' I said and hustled him outside. I sat down and Hammond perched on the end of the desk. We each had a pad of paper in front of us.
'Right, Ben. This is what I've got in mind.'
I began to sketch on the pad. I still have those sketches; they're no masterpieces of the draughtsman's art, but they're worth the whole Tate Gallery to me.
Take an empty drum and stand it up. Place around it, in close contact, six more drums, making damn sure their caps are all screwed home firmly. Build an eight-sided wooden framework for them, top, bottom and six sides, thus making a hexagon. No need to fill the sides solidly, just enough to hold the drums together like putting them in a cage. This I called the 'A' hexagon, which was to be the basic component of the raft. It had the virtue of needing no holes drilled into the drums, which would waste time and effort and risk leaks.
How much weight would an 'A' hexagon support?
We got our answer soon enough. While we were talking Sandy Bing reported breathlessly to the office. 'Mister Mannix? I got forty-three and a half gallons into a drum.' He was soaking wet and seemed to have enjoyed the exercise.
'Thanks, Sandy. Go and see how many empties Harry Zimmerman has found, please.' Zimmerman and his team were getting very greasy out in the compound.
The drums were forty-two gallons nominal but they were never filled to brimming and that extra space came in handy now. We figured that the natural buoyancy of the wooden cage would go some way to compensate for the weight of the steel drums, and Bing had just handed me another few pounds of flotation to play about with. We decided that my 'A' hexagon should support a weight of 3,000 pounds: one and a half tons.
But there wouldn't be much standing room. And a floating platform about six by five feet would be distinctly unstable. So my next lot of figures concerned the natural development upwards.
All this would take a little time to produce but it shouldn't be too difficult. Testing the finished product as a floating proposition would be interesting, and finding a way to push it along would stretch a few minds, but I didn't really doubt that it could be done. And the final result, weird of shape and design, was going to win no prizes for elegance. I jiggled with a list of required materials; some of them were going to be hard to find if not impossible. All in all, I couldn't see why on earth I was so confident that the plan would work.
'We have to go up a stage, Ben,' I said,, still sketching. 'Look at this.'
The hexagon is a very useful shape, ask any honey bee, but I doubt if it has been used much in naval architecture.
'Start off assuming we've built an 'A'-gon,' I told Ben. That was how new words came into a language, I guess, though I didn't think this one would last long enough to qualify for Webster's Dictionary. Ben caught on and grinned in appreciation. 'Here's what comes next.'
Take an 'A'-gon and float it in shallow water so that a man could stand on the bottom and still handle equipment. Float another six 'A'-gons round it and fasten together the hexagons of the outer ring. There is no need to fasten the inner one because, like the first drum, it is totally surrounded and pressed in from all sides.
The result is a 'B' hexagon, a 'B'-gon in our new nomenclature, with a positive buoyancy of ten and a half tons, enough to carry over a hundred people or a medium sized truck. We decided to make two of them, which is why we needed a hundred drums.
Hammond was impressed and fascinated. 'How do we make the cages?' he asked.
'We'll have to find timber and cut pieces to the exact size,' I said. 'That won't be too difficult. I'm more concerned about finding planking to deck it, otherwise it'll be unsafe to walk on.
Nyalan women make good cordage, and We can lash the 'A'-gon frames together, which will save nails. But I'm worried about the fastening of the larger 'B'-gons. Rope and fibre won't help us there. We need steel cable.'
'I've got some,' he offered, a shade reluctantly.
'I don't want to have to use that yet. We'll figure out something else.'
I stood up. 'It's only four o'clock and I need some exercise. There's two hours of daylight yet. Let's go build us an 'A'-gon.'
We were just leaving the office when Bing arrived back.
'Mister Zimmerman says they've only found sixty-seven drums.' he said.
At the compound we found Zimmerman, Kirilenko and Derek Grafton looking mucky with old oil and somewhat bad-tempered. It appeared that there were not many empty drums. Kironji seldom got them back, and these had not been placed neatly away from the full drums but stood all over the place. Here Kironji's normal tidiness had deserted him, to our detriment. It didn't help that neither Grafton nor Kirilenko knew why they had to find empty drums, and of the two only the Russian was equable about taking unexplained orders.
I commiserated with them and sent them off for a breather, after we'd rolled eight or nine drums down to the
