Commander Cantrell in the West Indies(43)

Ann started. “Mr. Grady, what are you doing up here?”

He looked away from the devastation with a baleful expression. “Why, to check on your progress.”

Ann—broken-hearted but also quite suddenly aware that not only was she in love with Ulrich, but had been for almost three months now—felt conflicting emotions of joy and loss roil and bash into each other. They came out of her as a burst of laughter. “Our progress! Wow, did you pick the wrong day for a visit, or what?”

Grady shrugged. “Machines can be rebuilt, if they’re worth rebuilding.”

Grady’s serious, level tone was like a bucket of cold water in Ann’s face. So this isn’t the end of all our work, maybe? “And what determines if they’re worth rebuilding?”

“Well, how was the rig doing before this happened?”

“That is the irony of this disaster, Herr Grady,” Ulrich sighed. “Tomorrow, we were scheduled to get to four hundred feet. And the equipment had been working quite well. We had to be careful not to push the system too much. The mud flow cannot keep up with our top operating speeds.”

“Why?”

Ann thought Dave Willcocks might explain, but instead he nodded at her to continue, smiling like a proud uncle. She shrugged, answered, “The rate that we get fresh mud in the hole determines how much we can cool the system. It bathes the hot drill bit, removes extra friction by carrying away the cuttings. But the mud hose is the bottleneck. We can’t push the pressure in the hose over two hundred fifty psi without risking a rupture. That reduces how much we can cool the system, and how fast we can clear cuttings out of the hole. And that determines our upper operating limit.”

“But if you stay beneath that limit—?”

“We were making good progress, and this design was holding up pretty well.”

“We still have challenges,” Willcocks put in. “We’ve got to have better threading between the separate sections of drill pipe. And I’m not sure that we’ve got enough horsepower from the current steam engine to really do the job when we get under six hundred feet.”

“But in principle, this design is functional?”

“Functional, yes. Ready to drill, no.”

Grady shook his head. “But I didn’t ask you about readiness.”

David frowned. “Two months ago you did.”

Grady shrugged. “That was two months ago. Things change.”

“Like what?”

“Like never you mind. Look, it was always a long-shot that you’d have a rotary drill ready for the New World survey expedition, anyhow. And as things are developing, we won’t need it until next year, probably. By which time, I expect it will be ready.” Grady glanced at the smoldering ruin, through which rescuers were picking their careful ways. “Well, this one won’t be ready, but you get what I mean.”

Ann almost smiled, but it felt wrong, somehow. “Thanks, Dennis. I wish I could be happier. But we’ve lost so much: so many people, so much hard work, and a chance to set foot in North America again.”

“Oh, now hold on,” said Grady. “Just because you won’t have a rotary drill, doesn’t mean you’re not still going along for the ride to the New World. We need your scientific and technical skills on site, and there are drills besides your rotary wonder, you know.”

Ann shrugged. “I ought to know. We were working cable rigs at Wietze for the better part of two years.”

“And you’ll be working them again, half a world away.”

Ulrich looked flustered, possibly heart-broken. “So then, if Ms. Koudsi is—is gone, who shall resume building the rotary drill?”

David kicked at the gravel. “I guess that would be me and the technical assistants that have been helping you out here. And I could bring up Glen Sterling from Grantville. And actually, we did learn something important about the drill design today: that the weak point is no longer at the juncture of the swivel and the mud hose, but at the juncture of the mud-hose and the standpipe.”

“So how much time do I have to help David with the improved model before I leave?” Ann asked Dennis, while looking at Ulrich.

“None, I’m afraid,” answered Grady. “We’ve got to get you up north for special training and equipment familiarization. Besides, there’s not going to be much breakthrough engineering going on for a few months. I figure it will take that long just to get all the drill pipe and casing out of the ground.” He looked at David for confirmation.

Willcocks nodded. “Gonna be a bitch of a job. But it will be our golden opportunity to own the next rig outright, without worrying about financiers.”