"Sure," Smith said bitterly. "If we had the tools, it would be duck soup. All we'd have to do is trim down the male plug to fit the female, and we'd have it. But we don't have the tools. We've got a couple of files and a quarter-horsepower electric drill with one bit. Everything else was in the tool compartment—which is long gone, with the engine room."
"Can't you ... uh, what do you call it? Uh ... jury-something—" Hull's voice sounded as though he were forcing it to be calm.
"Jury-rig?" Smith said. "Yeah? With what? Dammit, we haven't got any tools, and we haven't got any materials to work with!"
"Can't you just use a wrench to tighten them more?" Hull asked helplessly.
Smith said a dirty word and pushed himself away from the screamer unit to glower at an unresisting wall.
"No, Mr. Hull, we couldn't," said Captain Al-Amin with restrained patience. "That would strip the threads. If the electrical contact were made at the same time, the high-pressure oxygen-hydrogen flow would spark off, and we'd get a big explosion that would wreck everything—including us." Then he muttered to himself: "I still don't see how it could happen."
Jayjay Kelvin pulled a nine of spades from the back of the deck to the front. It matched the four of spades that had come three cards before. Jayjay discarded the two cards between the spades. "You don't?" he asked. "Didn't you ever hear that the total is greater than the sum of its parts?"
"What?" Captain Al-Amin sounded as though he'd been insulted—in Arabic. "What are you talking about, Mr. Kelvin?"
"I'm talking about the idiocy of the checking system," Jayjay said flatly. "Don't you see what they did? Don't you see what happened? Each part of a screamer has to be checked separately, right?"
Al-Amin nodded.