Farmer by Mack Reynolds (free ebook novel txt) 📖

nothing further until he had a can of beer open.

Johnny said, "Damn it, Pierre, you shouldn't stay out this late in a jeep. If you got stuck out there, we'd have one hell of a time finding you. In a copter you've at least got the radio."

Pierre had washed the dust from his throat. Now he said quietly, "I wanted to check on as many pumps as I could."

"You could have gone back tomorrow. The things are supposed to be self-sufficient, no checking necessary more than once every three months. There's practically nothing that can go wrong with them."

Pierre finished off the can of beer, reached into the refrigerator for another. "Dynamite can go wrong with them," he said.

The other two looked at him, shocked silent.

Pierre said, "I don't know how many altogether. I found twenty-two of the pumps in the vicinity of In Ziza had been blown to smithereens—out of forty I checked."

Johnny rapped, "How long ago? How many trees...?"

Pierre laughed sourly. "I don't know how long ago. The transplants, especially the slash pine, are going to be just so much kindling before I get new pumps in."

Derek said, shocked, "That's our oldest stand."

Pierre Marimbert, a forty-year-old, sun-beaten Algerian colon, eldest man on the team, sank into his place at the table. He poured the balance of his can of beer into a glass.

Johnny said, "What ... what can we do? How many spare pumps can you get into there, and how soon?"

Pierre looked up at him wearily. "You didn't quite hear what I said, Johnny. I only checked forty. Forty out of nearly a thousand in that vicinity. Twenty-two of them were destroyed, better than fifty percent. For all I know, that percentage applies throughout the whole In Ziza area. If so, there's damn few of your trees going to be left alive. We have a few spare pumps on hand here, but we'd have to get a really large number all the way from Dakar."

Derek said softly, "That took a lot of men and a lot of dynamite. Which means a lot of transport—and a lot of money. We've had trouble before, but usually it was disgruntled nomads, getting revenge for losing their grazing land."

Johnny snorted, "Damn little grazing this far north."

Derek nodded. "I'm simply saying that even if we could blame our minor sabotage on the Tuareg in the past, we can't do it this time. There's money behind anything this big."

Johnny McCord said wearily, "Let's eat. In the morning we'll go out and take a look. I'd better call Timbuktu on this. If nothing else, the Mali Federation can send troops out to protect us."

Derek grunted. "With a standing army of about 25,000 men, they're going to patrol a million and a half square miles of desert?"

"Can you think of anything else to do?"

"No."

Pierre Marimbert began dishing cous cous into a soup plate, then poured himself a glass of vin ordinaire. He said, "I can't think of a better place for saboteurs. Twenty men could do millions of dollars of destruction and never be found."

Johnny growled, "It's not as bad as all that. They've got to eat and drink, and so do their animals. There are damned few places where they can."

From the door a voice said, "I am intruding?"

They hadn't heard her car come up. The three men scrambled to their feet.

"Good evening," Johnny McCord blurted.

"Hell ... o!" Derek breathed.

Pierre Marimbert was across the room, taking her in hand. "Bonjour, Mademoiselle. Que puis-je faire pour vous? Voulez-vous une biere bien fraiche ou un apéritif? Il fait trés chaud dans le desert." He led her toward the table.

"Easy, easy there, Reuben," Derek grumbled. "The young lady speaks English. Give a man a chance."

Johnny was placing a chair for her. "Paul Peterson, from Poste Weygand, radioed that you were coming. You're a little late, Mademoiselle Desage."

She was perhaps thirty, slim, long-legged, Parisian style. Even at Bidon Cinq, half a world away from the Champs Elysées, she maintained her chic.

She made a moue at Johnny, while taking the chair he held. "I had hoped to surprise you, catch you off guard." She took in the sun-dried, dour-faced American wood technologist appraisingly, then turned her eyes in turn to Derek and Pierre.

"You three are out here all alone?" she said demurely.

"Desperately," Derek said.

Johnny McCord said, "Mademoiselle Hélène Desage, I am John McCord, and these are my associates, Monsieur Pierre Marimbert and Mr. Derek Mason. Gentlemen, Mademoiselle Desage is with Paris Match, the French equivalent of Life, so I understand. In short, she is undoubtedly here for a story. So ixnay on the ump-pays."

"I would love cold beer," Hélène Desage said to Pierre, and to Johnny McCord, "These days a traveling reporter for Paris Match must be quite a linguist. My English, Spanish and Italian are excellent. My German passable. And while I am not fluent in Pig-Latin, I can follow it. What is this you are saying about the pumps?"

"Oh, Lord," Johnny said. "Perhaps I'll tell you in the morning. But for now, would you like to clean up before supper? You must be exhausted after that 260 kilometers from Poste Weygand."

Pierre said hurriedly, "I'll take Mademoiselle Desage over to one of the guest bungalows."

"Zut!" she said. "The sand! It is even worse than between Reggan and Poste Weygand. Do you realize that until I began coming across your new forests I saw no life at all between these two posts?"

The three forestry experts bowed in unison, as though rehearsed. "Mademoiselle," Derek, from the heart, "calling our transplant forests is the kindest thing you could have said in these parts."

They all laughed and Pierre led her from the room.

Derek looked at Johnny McCord. "Wow, that was a slip mentioning the pumps."

Johnny was looking through the door after her. "I suppose so," he said sourly. "I'll have to radio the brass and find out the line we're supposed to take with her. That's the biggest magazine in the French-speaking world and you don't get a job on it without knowing the journalistic ropes. That girl can probably smell a story as far as a Tuareg can smell water."

"Well, then undoubtedly she's already sniffing. Because, between that clan of Tuareg with its flocks and the pump saboteurs, we've got more stories around here than I ever expected!"

III

In the morning Hélène Desage managed to look the last word in what desert fashion should be, when she strolled into Johnny McCord's office. Although she came complete with a sun helmet that must have been the product of a top Parisian shop, she would have been more at place on the beaches at Miami, Honolulu or Cannes. Her shorts were short and fitting, her blouse silken, her walking shoes dainty.

He considered for a moment and then decided against informing her that Moslems, particularly in this part of the world, were little used to seeing semi-nude women strolling about. He'd leave the job of explanation to Pierre, as a fellow Frenchman and the oldest man present to boot.

"Bonjour," she said. "What a lovely day. I have been strolling about your little oasis. But you have made it a garden!"

"Thanks," Johnny said. "We've got to have something to do after working hours. Entertainment is on the scarce side. But it's more than a garden. We've been experimenting to see just what trees will take to this country—given water and care through the early years. Besides, we use it as a showplace."

"Showplace?"

"For skeptical politicians who come through," Johnny said, seating her in a chair near his desk. "We give them the idea that the whole Sahara could eventually be like this square mile or so at Bidon Cinq. Palm trees, fruit trees, pines, shade trees. The works."

"And could it?"

Johnny grinned sourly. "Well, not exactly. Not all in one spot, at least. You've got to remember, the Sahara covers an area of some three and a half million square miles. In that area you find almost everything."

"Everything except water, eh?" She was tapping a cigarette on a polish-reddened thumbnail. As he lit it for her, Johnny McCord realized that he hadn't seen fingernail polish for a year. He decided it was too long.

"Even water, in some parts," he said. "There's more water than most people realize. For instance, the Niger, which runs right through a considerable part of the Sahara, is the eleventh largest river in the world. But until our commission went to work on it, it dumped itself into the Gulf of Guinea, unused."

"The Niger is a long way from here," she said through her smoke.

He nodded. "For that matter, though, we have a certain amount of rain, particularly in the highland regions of the central massif. In the past, with no watershed at all, it ran off, buried itself in the sands, or evaporated."

"Mr. McCord," she said, "you are amazingly optimistic. Formerly, I must admit I had little knowledge of the Sahara Reforestation Commission. And I deliberately avoided studying up on the subject after receiving this assignment, because I wanted first impression to be received on the spot. However, I've just driven across the Sahara. My impression is that your Commission is one great—Comment dit-on?—boon-doggling project, a super-W.P.A. into which to plow your American resources and manpower. It is a fake, a delusion. This part of the world has never been anything but wasteland, and never will be."

Johnny McCord heard her out without change in expression.

He'd been through this before. In fact, almost every time a junketing congressman came through. There was danger in the viewpoint, of course. If the fantastic sums of money which were being spent were cut off, such pessimistic views would become automatically correct.

He took the paperweight from a stack of the correspondence on his desk and handed it to her.

She looked at it and scowled—very prettily, but still a scowl. "What is this? It's a beautiful piece of stone."

"I picked it up myself," Johnny said. "Near Reggan. It's a chunk of petrified wood, Miss Desage. From a tree that must have originally had a diameter of some ten feet. Not quite a redwood, of course, but big."

"Yes," she said, turning it over in her hand. "I can see this part, which must have once been bark. But why do you show it to me?"

"The Sahara was once a semi-tropical, moist area, highly wooded. It can become so again."

She put the piece of fossil back on his desk. "How long ago?" she said bluntly.

"A very long time ago, admittedly. During the last Ice Age and immediately afterwards. But, given man's direction, it can be done again. And it must be."

She raised pencilled eyebrows at him. "Must be?"

Johnny McCord shifted in his chair. "You must be aware of the world's population explosion, Miss Desage. The human race can't allow three and a half million square miles of land to be valueless." He grunted in deprecation. "And at the rate it was going, it would have been four million before long."

She didn't understand.

Johnny spelled it out for her. "A desert can be man-made. Have you ever been in the Middle East?" At her nod, he went on. "Visitors there usually wonder how in the world the ancient Jews could ever have thought of that area as a land of milk and honey. On the face of it, it's nothing but badlands. What was once the Fertile Crescent now looks like Arizona."

Hélène Desage was frowning at him. "And you suggest man did this—not nature?"

"The goat did it. The goat, and the use of charcoal as fuel. Along with ignorance of soil erosion and the destruction of the wonderful watershed based on the Cedars of Lebanon. Same thing applies to large areas of Libya and Tunisia, and to Morocco and Spain. Those countries used to be some of the richest agricultural areas of the Roman Empire. But you can't graze goats, probably the most destructive animal domesticated, and you can't depend on charcoal for fuel, unless you want to create desert."

"Those things happened a long time ago."

Johnny snorted. "When we first began operations, the Sahara was going south at the rate of two miles a year. Goats prefer twigs and bark even to grass. They strip a country."

"Well," the reporter said, shrugging shapely shoulders, "at any rate, the task is one of such magnitude as to be fantastic. Yesterday, I drove for nearly eight hours without seeing even a clump of cactus."

"The route you traveled is comparatively untouched by our efforts, thus far," Johnny nodded agreeably. "However, we're slowly coming down from Algeria, up from the Niger, and, using the new chemical methods of freshening sea water, east from Mauretania."

He came to his feet and pointed out spots on the large wall map. "Our territory, of course, is only this area which once was called French West Africa, plus Algeria. The battle is being fought elsewhere by others. The Egyptians