by Wilbur Smith
‘If we’d had one of these computers to analyse the geological drilling reports from Silver River, we’d have already saved ourselves almost the entire cost of the thing, and we’d be a lot more certain of our final decision than we are now.’
‘How can a machine be better than a human brain?’
‘Just come and have a look at it,’ David pleaded. ‘The university has just installed an IBM 701. I have arranged a demonstration for you this afternoon.’
‘OK, Davie,’ Shasa capitulated. ‘I’ll look, but that doesn’t mean I’m buying.’
The IBM supervisor in the basement of the engineering faculty building was no more than twenty-six years of age.
‘They’re all kids,’ David explained. ‘It’s a young people’s science.’
The supervisor shook hands with Shasa, and then removed her horn-rimmed spectacles. Suddenly Shasa’s interest in electronic computers burgeoned. Her eyes were clear bright green and her hair was the colour of wild honey made from mimosa blossom. She wore a green sweater of tight-fitting angora wool, and a tartan skirt which left her smooth tanned calves bare. It was immediately obvious that she was an expert, and she answered all Shasa’s questions without hesitation in a tantalizing Southern drawl.
‘Marylee has a Masters in electrical engineering from MIT,’ David murmured, and Shasa’s initial attraction was spiced with respect.
‘It’s so damned big,’ he protested. ‘It fills the entire basement. The ruddy thing is the size of a four-bedroomed house.’
‘Cooling,’ Marylee explained. ‘The heat build-up is enormous. Most of the bulk is oil cooling baffles.’
‘What are you processing at the moment?’
‘Professor Dart’s archaeological material from the Sterk-fontein Caves. We are correlating about two hundred thousand observations of his against over a million from the sites in East Africa.’
‘How long will that take you?’
‘We started the run twenty minutes ago, we’ll finish it before we shut down at five o’clock.’
‘That’s in fifteen minutes,’ Shasa chuckled. ‘You’re having me on!’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she murmured speculatively, and when she smiled her mouth was wide and moist and kissable.
‘You say you shut down at five?’ he asked. ‘When do you start up again?’
‘Eight tomorrow morning.’
‘And the machine stands idle overnight?’
Marylee glanced down the length of the basement. David was at the other end watching the print-out and the hum of the computer covered their voices.
‘That’s right. It will stand idle all tonight. Just like me.’ Clearly she was a lady who knew exactly what she wanted, and how to get it. She looked at him directly, challengingly.
‘We can’t have that.’ Shasa shook his head seriously. ‘One thing my mummy taught me was “Waste not, want not”. I know a place called the Stardust. The band is far beyond belief. I will wager a pound to a weekend in Paris that I can dance you until you plead for mercy.’
‘It’s a bet,’ she agreed as seriously. ‘But do you cheat?’
‘Of course,’ he answered. David was coming back and Shasa went on smoothly and professionally. ‘What about running costs?’
‘All in, including insurance and depreciation, a little under four thousand pounds a month,’ she told him with a matching businesslike expression.
As they said goodbye and shook hands, she slipped a card into Shasa’s palm. ‘My address,’ she murmured.
‘Eight o’clock?’ he asked.
‘I’ll be there,’ she agreed.
In the Cadillac, Shasa lit a cigarette and blew a perfect smoke ring that exploded silently against the windscreen.
‘OK, Davie, contact the Dean of Engineering first thing tomorrow. Offer to hire that monster all its down time from five o’clock in the evening until eight the next morning, and weekends also. Offer him four thousand a month and point out that he’ll get the use of it for free. We’ll be paying all his costs.’
David turned to him with a startled expression and almost drove up onto the pavement, then corrected with a wild swing of the wheel.
‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ he wondered when he had the Cadillac under control.
‘You have to get up earlier.’ Shasa grinned and then went on, ‘Once we know how much time we will need on the thing, we’ll sublet the surplus time to a couple of other non-competitor companies who must be thinking about buying a computer themselves. That way we’ll get our own usage free, and when IBM have improved the design and made the damned thing smaller, then we will buy our own.’
‘Son of a gun.’ David shook his head in awe. ‘Son of a gun.’ Then with sudden inspiration, ‘I’ll get young Marylee on our payroll—’
‘No,’ said Shasa sharply. ‘Get someone else.’
David glanced at him again and his excitement faded. He knew his brother-in-law too well.
‘You won’t be taking up Matty’s invitation to dinner this evening, will you?’ he asked morosely.
‘Not this evening,’ Shasa agreed. ‘Give her my love and apologies.’
‘Just be careful. It’s a small town and you are a marked man,’ David warned as he dropped Shasa off at the Carlton Hotel, where the company kept a permanent suite. ‘Do you think you will be fit for work tomorrow?’
‘Eight o’clock,’ Shasa told him. ‘Sharp!’
By mutual agreement the dance competition at the Stardust was declared a draw, and Shasa and Marylee got back to his Carlton suite a little after midnight.
Her body was young and smooth and hard and just before she drifted off to sleep with her thick honey-coloured hair spread on his bare chest, she whispered drowsily, ‘Well, I guess that’s about the only thing my IBM 701 can’t do for me.’
Shasa was in the Courtney mining offices fifteen minutes before David the next morning. He liked to keep everybody on their toes. Their offices occupied the entire third floor of the Standard Bank building in Commissioner Street. Although Shasa owned a prime piece of real estate on the corner of Diagonal Street opposite the stock exchange and within yelling distance of Anglo-American Corporation’s head office, he hadn’t yet got around to building on it; any spare money in the company always seemed to be ear-marked for mining options or extensions or other income-producing enterprises.
The young blood on the Courtney executive board was judicially leavened with a few grey heads. Dr Twentyman-Jones was still there, in an old-fashioned black alpaca jacket and string tie, hiding his affection for Shasa behind a mournful expression. He had run the very first prospect on the H’ani diamond mine for Centaine back in the early twenties and was one of the three most experienced and gifted mining consultants in southern Africa, which meant the world.
David’s father Abraham Abrahams was still head of the legal section, perched up beside his son, bright and chirpy as a little silver sparrow. His files were piled high on the table in front of him, but he seldom had to refer to them. With half a dozen other newcomers whom Centaine and Shasa between them had hand picked, it was a balanced and functional team.
‘Let’s talk about the Courtney chemical plant at Chaka’s Bay first.’ Shasa brought the meeting to order. ‘How much meat is there in the beef against us, Abe?’
‘We are running hot sulphuric acid into the sea at a rate of between eleven and sixteen tons per day at a concentration of one in ten thousand,’ Abe Abrahams told him matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve had an independent marine biologist do a report on it for us.’ He tapped the document. ‘It isn’t good. We have altered the pH for five miles along the coastline.’
‘You haven’t circulated this report?’ Shasa asked sharply.
‘What do you think?’ Abe shook his head.
‘All right, David. What will it cost us to modify the manufacturing procedure on the fertilizer division to dispose of the acid waste some other way?’
‘There are two possible modifications,’ David told him. �
�The simplest and cheapest is trucking the effluent in tankers, but then we have to find another dumping ground. The ideal solution is recycling the acid.’
‘Costs?’
‘One hundred thousand pounds per annum for the tankers – one shot of almost three times that for the other way.’
‘A year’s profits down the drain,’ Shasa said. ‘That’s not acceptable. Who is this Pearson woman that is heading up the protest? Can we reason with her?’
Abe shook his head. ‘We have tried. She is holding the whole committee together. Without her they would crumble.’
‘What is her position?’
‘Her husband owns the local bakery.’
‘Buy it,’ said Shasa. ‘If he won’t sell, let him know discreetly that we will open another bakery in competition and subsidize its product. I want this Pearson woman far away and long ago. Any questions?’ He looked down the table. Everybody was busy making notes, nobody looked at him and he wanted to ask them reasonably, ‘All right, gentlemen, are you prepared to spend three hundred thousand pounds to give a good home to the oysters and the sea urchins of Chaka’s Bay?’
‘No questions!’ he nodded instead. ‘All right, let’s take on the big one now. Silver River.’
They all shifted in their seats, and there was simultaneous and nervous exhalation of breath.
‘Gentlemen, we have all read and studied Dr Twentyman-Jones’s geological report based on his drilling on the property. It is a superb piece of work, and I don’t have to tell you that it’s the best opinion you’ll get on Harley Street. Now I want to hear from each of you your own opinions as departmental heads. Can we start with you, Rupert?’
Rupert Horn was the junior member of the executive team. As Treasurer and Chief Accountant he filled in the financial background.
‘If we let the option lapse, we shall be writing off the two point three million that we have spent on exploration over the last eighteen months. If we take up the option it will mean an initial payment of four million on signature.’
‘We can cover that from the rainy-day account,’ Shasa intervened.
‘We are holding four point three million in the provisional fund,’ Rupert Horn agreed. ‘We have it invested in Escom seven per cent Stock at present, but once we utilize that fund we will be in an extremely exposed position.’
One after the other, in ascending order of seniority, Shasa’s managers gave their views as seen from their own departments, and David put it all together at the end.
‘So it seems that we have twenty-six days remaining on the option, and four million to pay if we take it up. That is going to leave us bare-bummed, and facing development costs of three million pounds for the main shaft alone, plus another five million for plant, interest and running costs to see us into the production phase, four years from now in 1956.’ He stopped and they all watched intently while Shasa selected a cigarette and tapped it lightly on the lid of his gold case.
Shasa’s expression was deadly serious. He knew better than any of them that the decision could destroy the company or take it up onto a new high plateau, and nobody could make that decision for him. He was up on the lonely pinnacle of command.
‘We know there is gold down there,’ he spoke at last. ‘A thick rich reef of it. If we reach it, it will go on producing for the next fifty years. However, gold is standing at thirty-five dollars an ounce. The Americans have pegged it, they have threatened to keep the price there for all time. Thirty-five dollars an ounce – and it will cost us between twenty and twenty-five an ounce to go down that deep and bring it to the surface. A slim margin, gentlemen, much too slim.’
He lit the cigarette, and they all sighed and relaxed, at the same time disappointed and relieved. It would have been glorious to make the charge, but disastrous to have failed. Now they would never know. But Shasa hadn’t finished. He blew a spinning smoke-ring down the length of the table, and went on.
‘However, I don’t think the Americans are going to be able to keep the lid on the gold price much longer. Their hatred of gold is emotional, not based on economic reality. I know, deep down in my guts, that the day is not far off when we will see gold at sixty dollars and one day, sooner than any of us think, it will be a hundred and fifty dollars – perhaps even two hundred!’ They stirred with disbelief, and Twentyman-Jones looked as though he might break down and weep in the face of such wild optimism, but Shasa ignored him and turned to Abe Abrahams.
‘Abe, at noon on the eighteenth of next month, twelve hours before the option expires, you will hand over a cheque for four million to the owners of Silver River farms, and take possession of the property in the name of a company to be formed.’ Shasa turned to David. ‘At the same time we will simultaneously open subscription lists on the Johannesburg and London Stock Exchanges for ten million one-pound shares in the Silver River gold-mining property. You and Dr Twentyman-Jones will start today drawing up the prospectus. Courtney Mining will register the property in the name of the new company in return for the balance of five million shares transferred into our name. We will also be responsible for the management and development.’ Quickly, succinctly, Shasa laid out the structure, financing and management of the new company, and more than once these wily seasoned campaigners glanced up from their notepads in blatant admiration of some deft and unusual touch he added to the scheme.
‘Is there anything I have left out?’ Shasa asked at the end, and when they shook their heads, he grinned. David was reminded strongly of the movie he and Matty had taken the children to see the previous Saturday afternoon, The Sea Hawk, though the eye-patch made Shasa look even more piratical than Errol Flynn had done in the title role.
‘The founder of our company, Mme Centaine de Thiry Courtney-Malcomess, has never approved of the consumption of alcohol in the boardroom. However—’ Still grinning, Shasa nodded at David, who went to open the main doors of the boardroom and a secretary wheeled in a trolley on which the rows of glasses clinked and the green bottles of Dom Perignon swished in their silver ice-buckets. ‘Old customs give way to new,’ Shasa said, and drew the first cork with a discreet pop.
Shasa throttled back the Rolls-Royce engines and the Mosquito sank down through the ribbons of scattered cirrus cloud, and the endless golden plains of the high African shield came up to meet her. Off to the west Shasa could just make out the clustered buildings of the mining town of Welkom, centre of the Orange Free State goldfields. Founded only a few years previously, when the vast Anglo-American Corporation began opening up these fields, it was already a model town of over a hundred thousand persons.
Shasa unclipped his oxygen mask and let it dangle on his chest as he leaned forward on his straps and peered ahead through the windshield ahead of the Mosquito’s blue nose.
He picked out the tiny steel tower of the drilling rig almost lost in the immensity of the dusty plain, and using it as a landmark traced the gossamer thread of fences that enclosed the Silver River farms — eleven thousand acres, most of it bare and undeveloped. It was amazing that the geologists of the big mining houses had overlooked this little pocket, but then nobody could have reasonably expected the gold reef to spur off like that – that is, nobody but Twentyman-Jones and Shasa Courtney.
Yet the reef was as far beneath the earth as the Mosquito now circled above it. It seemed impossible that any human endeavour would be able to burrow down that deep, but already Shasa could see in his imagination the tall headgear of the Silver River main towering two hundred feet above the bleak plain, with its shaft stabbing down a mile and more into the underground river of precious metal.
‘And the Yanks can’t hold out for ever — they will have to let gold go free,’ he told himself.
He stood the Mosquito on one wing and on the instrument panel the gyrocompass revolved smoothly. Shasa lifted the wing and she was precisely on her new heading of 125°.
‘Fifteen minutes, with these winds,’ he grunted, as he marked the large-scale map on his knee, and the fine exaltation o
f spirit stayed with him for the remainder of the flight until he saw the dark pencil-line of smoke rising into the still air dead ahead. They had put up a smoke beacon to guide him in.
There was a Dakota parked in front of the lonely galvanized iron-clad hangar at the end of the strip. The big aircraft had Air Force markings. The runway was of rolled yellow clay, hard and smooth and the Mosquito settled to it with barely a jolt. It had taken endless practice to develop that sort of distance judgement after he had lost the eye.
Shasa slid back the canopy and taxied towards the hangar. There was a green Ford pick-up near the mast of the windsock, and a lone figure dressed in khaki shorts and shirt stood beside the smoke pot, fists clenched on his hips, watching Shasa taxi up and cut the engines. Then as Shasa jumped down, he stepped forward and offered his right hand, but his expression, solemn and reserved, was at odds with the welcoming gesture.
‘Good afternoon, Minister.’ Shasa was as unsmiling and their grip was hard but brief. Then as Shasa looked deeply into Manfred De La Rey’s pale eyes, he had a strange feeling of déjà vu, of having stared into those same eyes in desperate circumstances before. He had to shake his head slightly to be rid of it.
‘I am glad for both our sakes that you were able to come. Can I help you with your bags?’ Manfred De La Rey asked.
‘Don’t worry. I can manage.’ Shasa went back to tie down and secure the Mosquito and fetch his luggage from the bomb bay, while Manfred doused the smoke pot.
‘You brought your own rifle,’ Manfred remarked. ‘What is it?’
‘Seven millimetre Remington magnum.’ Shasa swung the luggage into the back of the truck and stepped up into the passenger door of the Ford.
‘Perfect for this type of shooting,’ Manfred approved as he started the truck. ‘Long shots over flat ground.’ He swung on to the track and they drove for a few minutes in silence.
‘The Prime Minister could not come,’ he said. ‘He intended to be here, but he sent a letter for you. It confirms that I speak with his authority.’
‘I’ll accept that.’ Shasa kept a straight face.