Chapter 16: High Finance

The afternoon ended with a huge pile of money in the council room, adding up to more than 600 Conchs. I got paid my 170 Conchs for my half of the Pirate’s Gift, and I was clear. I no longer owned half of a ship, and the rest of what was going on in there really wasn’t any of my business. I took my share straight to the bank and deposited it, keeping some back to pay Erna in the morning.

Even with all that I’d paid out, my balance was still over 250 Conchs.

There wasn’t any point in trying to screw the town out of the money I’d paid workers to fix up the Pirate’s Gift. I’d gotten out of that mess with a good profit. I did go talk to the workers and point out that they’d have to get the town to pay them as it wasn’t my ship any more. I offered to continue to help with the refit, but the town would have to choose a new foreman and/or Captain.

Who did they go to, to get paid? Good question. I did suggest that they pick a spokesman who would go get the pay for all of them, maybe with a couple of buddies along to make sure their spokesman stayed honest. They elected Michael, one of the work team leaders, and I went back to the council room with him to see who he should talk to.

The people collected there were also dismissing the secretary, as he had known what was going on for years and never told anyone, just saying “We don’t have the money for that” whenever anyone asked the council to pay for something. That was true, but he could have told people WHY it was true.

There was an undercurrent of desire to lynch him, but he had been a loyal employee of the council who had served them honestly and well, as far as I knew, and I thought that they should just let him go to start over again somewhere else. He could take his family, if he wanted. And if they wanted to go with him, of course.

That left this huge pile of money being drooled on by half of the town, it seemed, and guarded by the Commander’s men. Now what?

Of course some of them wanted Lord Jason’s opinion on what to do next.

“My opinion? My opinion is that I’m a nobody. I have no authority and no responsibility. I’ll give advice, though. I love to give advice.”

That got some laughs. I made that speech every time anyone asked me what they should do, at least once a week. I wasn’t a local and my advice had no value. Or, it had saved the town from being captured and everyone in it being killed, raped, or taken as slaves. Maybe raped AND taken as slaves.

“Look, Widemouth is still just a small town. You aren’t a big city that needs a lot of officials and courts and tax collectors. You all know each other. Most of you probably grew up here, and you know which of your neighbors you can trust and which ones you can’t. Pick someone you trust to be the town’s Administrator. You can call him the Mayor if you want. It may not even be a full-time job. As the town grows you’ll have to start getting people to work for the town full-time, but you may not be there yet. I don’t know.”

“Behind the Administrator should be a council. Select people you trust, who know the town, the people, your problems. Don’t select some stranger like me who just walked in and talks nice. I don’t know your problems well enough. The council make the big decisions, like whether to raise taxes or not, and whether or not we should compensate people for injury caused by the town. They decide how much the Administrator gets paid, and they give the Administrator instructions. The Administrator does the work.”

“I recommend that no employee of the town be allowed to serve on the council. As an example, the Commander has his position because we all trust him, but if he commanded the town guard and the militia as well as having a voice on the council which decides what the guard should do, he would have too much power. If you decide that you want him on the council, make him choose between commanding the guard or being on the council.”

“Only the Administrator and maybe a secretary or assistant can handle the town’s treasury. The council for SURE doesn’t have access to it. They get to hire and fire the Administrator, but they can’t get to the money themselves. Put all this in the bank. You can trust the bank with your money. It is honest and will keep the town’s money for you, but they won’t help you run the town.”

“Tell the bank that either the Administrator or his assistant can withdraw funds, and tell the bank that every withdrawal will be public. There will be no hidden funds. Anyone in town can ask the bank what deposits and withdrawals have been made lately. If Michael here wants his work crew to be paid, the bank will say “Seven Shells were withdrawn earlier today and given to Michael to pay for work on the Pirate’s Gift.”

“Make sure the bank will tell anyone in town what money was withdrawn and why. If the bank says eight Shells were taken but Michael says he only got six, then you send a couple big men with clubs to ask the Administrator what happened to the other two Shells. And maybe you tell the bank to not let the Administrator withdraw anything that doesn’t sound right.”

I was positive that the bank was part of the Crossroads organization. Certainly, they had to have access to the portals to move peoples’ boxes around. Their money, too. Maybe this would nudge them into taking some responsibility for how screwed up Chaos was.

They accepted the bank part, at least, of my advice, and the guards picked all the money up and took it to the bank. If I thought that the hundred-plus Conchs that Eric had given me had been a fortune, the 450-plus Conchs that they deposited in a new account for the town’s treasury was beyond many of these people’s dreams. Of course, it may not be much, for a town’s treasury. I had no idea about that.

While Erna was building the cofferdam, I was trying to come up with pumps that could make headway against all the leaks. I had no idea how bad the cofferdam would leak, but whatever the leakage rate was we needed to pump water out faster than it leaked in or the water level inside would never go down.

A US Navy mechanic could describe quite a few different types of pumps, but most of them depended upon materials not available here, machining not available here, and power sources not available here. I could only come up with four kinds that could be built here, and two of them would have to be powered by men so they were out. There was just too much water to be moved, and I wanted to make the river current do all the work.

An Archimedes screw would be fairly easy to build. It would take some time and skilled labor by a wood-carver, but that was it. So would a rocking-lever piston pump. The piston pump would lift water farther, but it would have much lower capacity. I couldn’t imagine any way to get the current to drive either one, though, so both types were out. For this application, at least. An Archimedes screw would be great for irrigation, and a rocking-lever pump would be great for pumping a ship’s bilges, but neither type was going to do what we needed done here.

The only way to get any work from the current would be to put a water-wheel in it to turn a shaft. Once we had that, any pump that could be attached to that shaft would work. That was why the Archimedes Screw and rocking-lever pumps were out. There was no good way to hook them up to a rotating shaft.

Simplest would be an endless chain of buckets, going down into the water, coming back up full, being carried up high enough to dump over the cofferdam, and then going back down for another load. That would be easy to build and it would work but it would be a maintenance nightmare. And the capacity wouldn’t be much, just whatever the buckets could hold multiplied by how fast they moved.

A little harder to build but far more reliable would be an axle crossing over the cofferdam. On the river side, a paddle wheel would turn as the river flowed by. On the inside of the cofferdam, we could build another wheel which held regular buckets, but it would be better to build wooden boxes the width of the wheel. Those would hold much more water. The problem there was that the more water being lifted, the heavier the ‘full’ side of the wheel would be, and the more power needed from the paddle wheel.

Either way, the lower the water level went the harder it would be to pump water out. You were supposed to measure this, that, and the other thing and calculate exactly how much horsepower you needed to lift that much water this far, but here I would be just pulling all the numbers out of my ass. I had no way to measure half of the variables. All I could do was build it and see how well it worked.

Of course everyone in town could see what was going on, and had the same questions. I got bizarre ideas from every quarter. Sure, cows drink a lot. We could drop a bunch of thirsty cattle in there and let them drink all they wanted, but what then? The water didn’t just go away. The cows would just piss in the cofferdam and then be thirsty again. The only difference would be that now we were working in cow-piss instead of river water. No.

I shanghaied Millie, Jim, and Gina and built a couple of models while Henry supervised. The bucket-chain pump model was easy to build, just some small clay cups held in a rope ladder which was pulled over a pair of wheels with the buckets hanging between them. One advantage was that you could also have a second set of wheels on the bottom to keep the ladder from tangling up, and they didn’t have to be right over and under each other.

If the two wheel sets were right over and under each other, the rope ladder was vertical and it was hard to catch all the water when the buckets went over the top wheel and turned upside down. A lot of the water just spilled down over the empty buckets below them and on back into whatever you were trying to pump out.

If you moved the lower wheel to one side, though, the empty buckets were pulled that way instead of just hanging from the top wheel, and you could put something down there to catch all the water without it getting hit by the empty buckets. Still not very fast, but it was efficient. All water collected went over the cofferdam.

The water-wheel model showed us that the real thing would be harder to build, simply because it would be far more powerful and it would need to be mounted more solidly. We needed additional pilings at each end of the shaft to support the wheels. Once we had done that, we could mount any size of paddle-wheel we wanted to turn the shaft, and then we could start with small troughs and just keep replacing them with bigger ones until they were too heavy and the paddlewheel wouldn’t turn it. Then, we either go back to smaller troughs or make the paddlewheel larger.