“Thank you, Your Grace,” Adam said. “We are much relieved.”
“You may be, but I am not! I am not used to this sort of crime in my domains. I am profoundly embarrassed that my subjects should behave in this manner. It is unconscionable, that nineteen healthy young athletes should, with weapons in their hands, feloniously fall on two middle-aged foreigners who were in poor physical condition, and who had only recently gotten out of their sickbeds after very serious injuries.
“And it is infuriating, that my young athletes should then have the incredible effrontery to lose the bloody bedamned fight! They had four of their number killed outright, and at least nine others crippled or maimed, probably for life, some of whom may yet die!”
“It doesn’t say much for your selective-breeding program, does it, Your Grace,” Adam said.
“No it doesn’t, dammit! In fact, it calls into question the efficacy and morality of over fifteen hundred years of controlled marriages, of which, up until now, we were so proud!
“Don’t you realize that our athletes, drawn from a population of only twelve thousand, regularly outperform the records of your Olympic champions? They do it in track and field, where things are easily measurable. Physically, we are a superior people! And mentally, why, you yourself, Treet, have commented about how intelligent our people are! Yet the two of you made hash out of the best we breed!
“Surely, there is nothing physically outstanding about either of you two. Quite to the contrary, I should say, judging by your appearances. Yet you won when you had no chance of winning! I mean, that gun of yours only killed one man. You smashed all the others, almost ripped them apart, with your bare hands!”
“And feet, Your Grace,” Adam said. I heard his bed creak and guessed he was propping himself up. “It’s much easier to kill a man with your feet. The big difference is that I grew up in Detroit, and Treet wasn’t too far away from there. Your people grew up in what amounts to a safe little small town where nobody ever thought much about fighting.”
“Physical condition is only a small part of combat effectiveness,” I said from flat on my back. “Knowledge of the warrior’s arts is equally necessary, and the most important thing of all is the martial spirit. The killer instinct. The eagerness to kill and the willingness to die.”
“The martial spirit? The willingness to die?”
“Yes, Your Grace. The true warrior lives every minute of his life ready to die at that instant, if need be.” Between the antipain drugs we’d been given and the glorious high of knowing that we had won a rough fight over impossible odds, I suppose I was getting insufferably pompous. Then again, I was just quoting my old Karate master.
“Hmmm. Would you teach us these arts?”
“Are you really sure that’s a good idea, Your Grace?” Adam asked.
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Neither am I.”
* * *
A week went by before I felt like moving around and getting busy again, and Adam took four days longer than me to get himself mobile. Somehow, big people always seem to take longer to heal than us little guys do. Maybe it’s simply that there is more body tissue on them in need of fixing, or maybe it’s that when somebody Adam’s size falls down, he falls a lot harder than ordinary people do.
Or maybe Adam just likes being waited on hand and foot by two lovely women.
I split my time between getting the boat fixed, and helping out with the island-scraping project. We only had the one diesel powered compressor, and it did double duty. During evenings and lunchtime, it filled the compressed-air bottles that the two “deep” workers used, the ones who went down to a hundred feet or so, and worked their way up, decompressing as they went.
For use during mornings and afternoons, we had cobbled up a whiffletree of hoses that went to the mouthpieces of the snorkel rigs and, at low pressure, the pump could handle the needs of a dozen men. We didn’t have the pressure regulators needed to give each man an independent air supply, so the workers had to stay in a row, and maintain exactly the same depth to breathe. You breathed in turn, rose a bit in order to inhale, and kept your tongue on the pipe at all other times.
The workers got used to it quickly enough, and before long were trading jobs with the SCUBA twins, for fun, the experience, and to even out the risk of the bends. Eventually, we got two complete fourteen-man teams trained, and work went on even on Sundays, once we had the bishop’s written permission.
We had some two thousand gallons of diesel fuel on The Brick Royal, in four integral fuel tanks built into the ferrocrete hull, enough to keep the compressor going for many months.
The problem was getting it out. With the ship on her side, draining out fuel to serve the compressor and occasionally the genset was not a simple task. We spilled a fair amount of the smelly stuff on the floor of the warehouse until we worked out a safe way to do it. Once we had the fuel out of one of the big tanks we were forced to store most of what we had removed in plastic containers. Not what an American Fire Safety Board would approve of, but like the song goes, it’s what you do with what you got that counts. Anyway, we figured that diesel fuel has a fairly high flash point, and that the risk of fire wasn’t all that great.
With the ship itself, we had the damage cut away, and the metal reinforcement sewn in by the time Adam was up and about. I had held off with doing the concrete replacement work myself, since Adam had supervised the original construction and, for the most part, I hadn’t even been there. I’d been out playing salesman, and it’s always best to put the most experienced man in charge. It was just as well that I’d waited for him, since, as it turns out, I would have screwed it up if I had started out alone.
It seems that new concrete doesn’t stick at all well to old concrete, but not to worry. Adam had brought along a can of incredibly expensive epoxy that was guaranteed to glue old concrete to wet cement. Now, the very thought of gluing something to a semiliquid like wet cement confused me, to say the very least. How can you glue a solid to a liquid?
Hell, how can anyone possibly glue anything to a liquid?
When I start hearing something like that, all of my “bullshit” indicators let loose. Inside my head, the lights start flashing, the fireworks go off, and the little American flags come out from the back of the machine and start waving.
“Naw,” I said. “Absolutely no way possible.”
“You’re just not thinking about it right,” Adam said. “A liquid is a liquid because the molecules in it don’t stick to each other in a permanent way, they just sort of slide around, right? In a setting liquid, like concrete or epoxy, the molecules attach themselves to each other either chemically or mechanically or both. The molecules of this particular epoxy can attach themselves to the molecules of both wet concrete and hardened concrete. What’s so hard to believe about that?”
“Somehow, it just doesn’t ring right.”
“It’s the truth,” Adam said. “I have it on the advice of four—count ’em, four—separate, independent experts that this stuff works, and that it’s well worth the ridiculous price you incidentally paid for it.”
“I paid for it? I don’t remember any such thing on any bill of materials.”
“Of course not. Who could possibly remember the technical, chemical name of any complex epoxy? Some of those words run to maybe forty, fifty letters. It’s easier to remember the names of some of those ancient Mexican gods. I just slipped it in with some of the paints and lubricants we also needed for the boat, and you signed it.”
“Adam, you shouldn’t do that sort of thing to your boss.”
“Yeah, but I’m your partner now. Don’t it make you feel glad?”
“I’ll feel gladder if the stuff actually works. Have you ever used it before?”
“Nope. But then I never had to fix a broken concrete boat before, either. Relax, Treet. Uncle Adam will make it all better.”
The actual cementing was done in a day, and then Adam got busy with the rest of the boat. The engine had to be drained, flushed out, and cleaned, and everything that salt water had touched had to be inspected, thoroughly cleaned and often repaired. We planned to convert The Brick Royal from a rather spacious motor sailer to a tiny cargo ship of the same size, and that involved removing a lot of furniture, bulkheads, and decking inside.