They secured the launch and trooped ashore. All were armed in spite of the small army of laborers nearby. Bradford had insisted, explaining that unlike in their own world, the large number of workers going about their business here wouldn't frighten predators away; they would only alert them to a smorgasbord. A fair percentage of the Lemurians present were, in fact, dedicated to security. They were armed primarily with oversized crossbows that threw a bolt two feet long and an inch in diameter.
Matt remembered Bradford telling him there were some truly astonishing predators lurking in the jungles of this new Borneo, but he'd paid only passing attention at the time, preoccupied with the refit of his ship. Now he tried to remember some of the creatures Bradford had described. They must be pretty big, he mused, if it took a handheld ballista to bring one down.
At the edge of the clearing, three large cylinders stood atop adobe furnaces with a maze of heavy, local copper pipe twisting among them.
Matt recognized the cylinders as the ill-fated torpedo tubes of the number three mount. He hoped they would prove more useful here than they had aboard the ship. Furry, kilted workers scampered around the apparatus that they hoped would become a functioning refinery—if they found anything to refine. Chief Donaghey and Mahan's Perry Brister were supervising the project, and by their filthy appearance, they'd done more than that. Matt waved at them to carry on as the party continued past the high tower set in the center of the clearing. In it was a now fully recovered Leo Davis and one of their precious BARs. He looked like a prison guard overseeing a chain gang, but the obvious distinction was that he was there to protect the workers, not to prevent escape. More Lemurians stood guard at intervals along the trail leading from the fueling pier into the dense jungle surrounding it.
The wellhead lay almost a mile inland. The trail was wide, and down the center was a pipeline constructed from the curious oversized bamboo that seemed, in every respect except for its massive size, just like bamboo "back home." They'd seen it used extensively in local construction and for masts, of course, and it was a natural choice for those applications, being generally the diameter and length of a telephone pole. Matt hadn't known they were going to use it to transport the crude. Bradford and Letts noticed him appraising the arrangement as they walked alongside.
"Bound to leak like a sieve, Skipper," said Letts resignedly. "The couplings are short pieces of tin pipe pounded into the ends and sealed with pitch. I guess we can build something better once we have the time."
"No, Mr. Letts. It's ingenious. I hadn't even thought how we'd move the oil from the well to the refinery. Well done."
Letts looked embarrassed. "Well, it was really Spanky's idea," he demurred.
"A good idea, no matter whose it was." Matt paused, looking at the pipeline with a thoughtful expression. "I can't help but wonder, though.
A fueling pier, a pipeline, even a refinery—all situated where they are just because of the wellhead. Are you sure we're not taking one small detail a little too much for granted?"
Bradford blinked at him and wiped the ever-present sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that might once have been white. Then he grinned mischievously. "Never fear, my dear captain. As you Americans would so quaintly say, the fix is in." He stopped and glanced at the sky. It was visible above the quadruple-canopy jungle only because of the pipeline cut. As so often happened at this time of day, the bright blue they'd basked beneath much of the morning had been replaced by a sodden gray.
"Oh, dear."
Isak Reuben took a final, long drag off his cigarette, and it burned fiercely almost to his lips. He flipped the tiny butt off the platform, where it hissed and drowned in a puddle. The deluge had become a gentle drizzle, but it fell long and hard enough to soak him completely. Not that it mattered.
He was always soaked, with sweat, and his filthy T-shirt clung to his skinny torso like a slimy, splotched, translucent leech. His fireroom pallor was gone, as was Gilbert's, replaced by the harsh reddish brown he remembered so well from his life in the oil fields. It was a color he'd hoped never to see on his own body again.
"Goddamn," he exclaimed matter-of-factly, "ain't White Mice now."
He grabbed the cable that dropped down from one end of the walking beam and disappeared into the hole at his feet. The slack felt about right.
"Wind 'er up, Gilbert," he croaked at his companion, who made a rotating motion with his hand.
A short distance away, a pair of young 'Cats sat on a brontosarry's back, and one made a trilling sound and whacked its flank with a stout bamboo shoot. With a guttural groan of protest, the beast began to move.
It was harnessed to a giant windlass, and as it trudged through a slurry of mud, round and round, a belt running from a large-diameter central shaft transferred its meager rotation to a smaller, faster wheel. Another belt ran to yet another wheel, between the two in diameter. This one turned a crank that raised and lowered a pitman, causing the walking beam to go up and down. As it did so, it raised the cable-tool bit far down in the hole and then dropped it with a resounding "thud." The bit drove a few inches deeper every time.
Isak looked at the sky, beyond the eighty-foot bamboo derrick that still struck him as just . . . wrong somehow, and saw patches of blue struggling to disperse the clouds. He shook his head unhappily. Every time a squall blew up, he hoped subconsciously that it, like the one that had brought them here, would take them home. Home to the real world, where he could bask in the honest warmth and isolation of his beloved boilers, where steam was magically made. Steam that turned honest turbines. He frowned. Anywhere but here, where steam rose from the ground because the sun cooked it out, and where stinkin' dinosaurs pretended to be motors! He groped for another cigarette and frowned even deeper, staring at the massive animal trudging slowly around. "RPMs ain't much, but the torque's pretty respectable."
Gilbert touched the cable himself at the bottom of its stroke, as he walked over to join him. "What?" he asked.
"Nothin'."
Gilbert nodded. "Quiet rig." Both were used to loud engines doing the work of the dinosaur.
"Too quiet," complained Isak. "Ain't natural."
Gilbert nodded again, in solemn agreement. "Gimme a smoke, will ya?" His customary monotone was as close to a wheedle as it ever got.
"No."
"Why not? I shared mine with you."
"Yeah, and now yer out, ain't ya? Stupid."
Gilbert stared down at the well as the cable went slack, pondering. No question about it, Isak was the smart one.
The other fireman sighed heavily, shook a soggy cigarette out of the pack, and handed it over. Then he peered inside. "Now I'm as dumb as you. Only one left."
The well was situated in another artificial clearing, and one of their Lemurian security guards trilled a call from his watchtower near the pipeline cut.
"What's he jabberin' about?" Isak asked, irritably reaching for one of the old Krag rifles they always kept nearby. "I hope it ain't another one of them Big Ones. We really need bigger guns for huntin' around here."
The "Big Ones" he referred to were forty-foot monsters Bradford insisted were allosaurs. Unlike most of the other dinosaur species they'd encountered, Bradford's modern allosaurs were not stunted. They'd hardly changed at all from those in the fossil record—the only difference he could see, if anything, was they were bigger than their prehistoric ancestors. There weren't many of them, though, and even if they looked built for speed, they preferred to lurk along well-used trails in the dense jungle and let their prey come to them. The destroyermen called them "super lizards" in spite of Bradford's protests. Isak only knew they were hard as hell to kill and they scared the shit out of him.