man climbed onto the deck and ran for the rail, to lean over and empty his stomach into the river.
Another face appeared over the hatch rim and the captain shouted at them.
“ở đó!” He yelled. “Stay there! Stay there! I’ll leave the cover off but you must stay there!”
He was gone and hope followed him.
Lin Poi hugged the children to her. “I don’t think we can stand three weeks of this,” she whispered to Loi. “Being caught might be better!”
“Then they would shoot us, the bastards!”
“Could that be worse?”
“I’m sure we’ll be OK when we’re out of here,” he whispered, not at all sure they would be. He looked around at his neighbours. Nobody was speaking and he read the message.
They were thinking of alternatives they might have pursued and were all wondering if they had made a terrible mistake.
10. CANBERRA
"No way, Bob!” shouted the Prime Minister. “It’s the centre piece of our climate change policy. If that goes, we look stupid.”
“I understand your problem,” reasoned his departmental head. “But the fact is, the stuff’s getting out. You can’t keep claiming it’s working when the figures show it isn’t.”
“Don’t get smart with me, Bob,” he snarled. “If it’s my problem, it’s your problem!”
“I didn’t mean it quite like that,” he smiled. “But in a way you’re right. You have policy. I only have science.”
“Well, what’s the problem?” asked Mulaney, still angry. “Is it money? It’s gotta be fixed!”
“No, it’s the basic technology. In a few sites we get complete containment and some sites we get an acceptable result of leakage of… maybe as low as a hundredth of a percent per annum, but others are not holding well at all. Too much surface fracturing. We can’t hold the pressure to keep it liquid, so it goes to gas and leaks.”
“What do we tell China? It’s their money.”
“They’ll have to know,” replied Bob Bouffler, Department of Sustainability. “They probably already know.”
“How’s that? Who told them?” demanded the PM.
“Their techs are here too, PM,” he replied. “They want to know where their money’s going; they see the reports.”
“There’s got to be a fix,” he moaned. “Look, get CSIRO onto it. No, I’ll speak to them personally. They need a shake up and you, you keep the Chinese happy until we figure something out. OK?”
“Well, yes,” he replied dubiously. “I’ll try, but they have access to the same figures we do. They’ll soon know. We see the numbers as they come in raw but within days, they have them too,” He looked seriously at his boss. “And they’ll know we know.”
“Where do we go from here, then?”
Bouffler had no answer. He was silent, calmly watching as Mulaney tapped a pen on his desk to accentuate his words, an annoying habit that indicated extreme agitation. He stopped tapping.
“I’ll get the minister to make a statement.” He tapped again. “We’ve discovered minor leaks but we’re close to a solution. We can fix it. How’s that!”
He glowered at his bureaucrat, demanding concurrence.
“But we can’t fix it,” insisted Bouffler. “There is no fix. The CSIRO has already said that, sir.”
The PM glared at him “They did not say there was no fix. They
said they were concerned. That’s the word they used, ‘concerned’. Don’t make it sound worse than it is.”
“True, sir,” he replied. “But as you know, scientists are careful to not overstate the case. Raw numbers seem to indicate a worse situation than they are yet prepared to put in reports…”
“Don’t lecture me on reports!” he shouted. “The bloody environment isn’t the only thing that’s heating up!”
“I can see that, sir,” smiled Bouffler, attempting to head off a
famous Mulaney rave. “The pressure isn’t all in the geology!”
“You’re damn right it isn’t! I’ve got the bloody Chinese bleating about spent uranium, the Yanks pushing us to undercut the Canadians, half the world is out there drilling holes all over the country for God knows what, and now this!”
“Oil,” said Bouffler quietly.
The PM had not heard him clearly. “What?” he asked.
“Oil, I said ‘oil’, sir,” he repeated. “They’re drilling for oil.”
“Of course they are. And wouldn’t you? With prices over three hundred a barrel and rising? I should be out there with the Black and Decker myself! Christ, I’m sick of it.”
“I feel it’s my duty, sir,” he said gently, “to point out that oil, even at three hundred a barrel is unsustainable.”
“Of course it’s unsustainable!” shouted the PM, missing the point. “We can’t afford to pay that much. Everything is so bloody far away. Too far. If they keep this up, even the shit-house’ll be too far for me!”
Bouffler laughed dutifully at the PM’s joke, then attempted to bring the discussion back.
“I hate to remind you, Prime Minister. What you want is just not happening and we need a fallback position.” He noted the PM’s rising anger and added the rider, “in case the boffins can’t fix it.”
“There is no fallback position!” he fumed. “And who sold me that crap about geosequestration anyway? Bloody fools!”
“The idea came from Poland, actually.”
“Is this some sort of ‘Polish joke’?”
“Unfortunately, no, it isn’t,” he answered. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, as they say, but our trials show…”
“So how come we didn’t know all this before we invested so much political capital in a loser?”
“We got sucked in because we were so keen to believe it,” he answered. “As soon as it was touted we grabbed it.”
“And who did the bloody touting? Was it you?”
“No, not me. Blackwater Coal did, sir,” he replied quietly. “It was in their Environment Impact Statement. Their EIS contained an
opinion there was a high probability it could be achieved. It was not an unequivocal assurance.”
“And who wrote the bloody EIS?” he demanded. “It’s no good going with a half-arsed EIS if we’re the ones left with our trousers down! Who signed off on it anyway?”
“I believe it was the CR Corporation, sir,” he explained. “Consulting Engineers.”
“Who the hell is CR Corp?” he demanded. “Are they credible? Maybe we can dump this back on them. I’ll need to quote some bastard when I feed the chooks. Bloody press!”
“In the industry, sir, CR stands for ‘Coal Roolz’.” He smiled. “It seems the miners pay and CR plays their tune.”
“And who gave Blackwater their licence on a dodgy EIS to start sequestration trials anyway?” demanded Mulaney.
“Well, it was a while ago, sir,” he smiled. “It was when you were minister. I’m afraid it has your signature on it.”
“Crap! You‘re not afraid,” he shouted. “You’re enjoying