Poste Maurice Cortier, better known in the Sahara as Bidon Cinq, is as remote a spot on earth in which man has ever lived. Some 750 kilometers to the south is Bourem on the Niger river. If you go west of Bourem another 363 kilometers, you reach Timbuktu, the nearest thing to a city in that part of the Sudan. If you travel north from Bidon Cinq 1,229 kilometers you reach Colomb-Béchar, the nearest thing to a city in southern Algeria. There are no railroads, no highways. The track through the desert is marked by oil drums filled with gravel so the wind won't blow them away. There is an oil drum every quarter of a mile or so. You go from one to the next, carrying your own fuel and water. If you get lost, the authorities come looking for you in aircraft. Sometimes they find you.

In the latter decades of the Twentieth Century, Bidon Cinq became an outpost of the Sahara Reforestation Commission which was working north from the Niger, and south from Algeria as well as east from the Atlantic. The water table in the vicinity of Bidon Cinq was considerably higher than had once been thought. Even artesian wells were possible in some localities. More practical still were springs and wells exploited by the new solar-powered pumps that in their tens of thousands were driving back the sands of the world's largest desert.

Johnny McCord and Derek Mason ate in the officer's mess, divorced from the forty or fifty Arabs and Songhai who composed their work force. It wasn't snobbery, simply a matter of being able to eat in leisure and discuss the day's activities free of the chatter of the larger mess hall.

Derek looked down into his plate. "Hiram," he drawled, "who ever invented this here cous cous?"

Johnny looked over at the tall, easy-going Canadian who was his second in command and scowled dourly. He was in no humor for their usual banter. "What's the matter with cous cous?" Johnny growled.

"I don't know," Derek said. "I'm a meat and potatoes man at heart."

Johnny shrugged. "Cous cous serves the same purpose as potatoes do. Or rice, or spaghetti, or bread, or any of the other bland basic foods. It's what you put on it that counts."

Derek stared gloomily into his dish. "Well, I wish they'd get something more interesting than ten-year-old mutton to put on this."

Johnny said, "Where in the devil is Pierre? It's nearly dark."

"Reuben?" Derek drawled. "Why Reuben went out to check the crops up in the northeast forty. Took the horse and buggy."

That didn't help Johnny's irritation. "He took an air-cushion jeep, instead of a copter? Why, for heaven's sake?"

"He wanted to check quite a few of the pumps. Said landing and taking off was more trouble than the extra speed helped. He'll be back shortly."

"He's back now," a voice from the door said.

Pierre Marimbert, brushing sand from his clothes, pushed into the room and made his way to the mess-hall refrigerator. He said 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............