Smith said the French word again.
"Enough!" the captain barked. "Smith, control your tongue! That sort of thing won't help us." He jerked his head around. "Mr. Kelvin, do you have any suggestions?"
Jayjay played another card. "No. Not yet. I'm thinking."
"Smith? Any ideas?" The tone of the Arab's voice left no doubt that he meant business.
"No, sir. Without a properly equipped machine shop, there's nothing we can do."
"How so?"
"Because that's a precision job, sir. The threads are tapered so that the fit will be gas-tight. That's why the threads have a ten-thousandth of an inch of soft polyethylene covering the hard steel, so that when the threads are tight, the polyethylene will act as a seal. Everything in that connection is a precision fitted job. The ends of the tubes are made to be slightly mashed together, so that the seals will be tight—they're coated with polyethylene, too. If the oxygen and hydrogen mix, the efficiency of the fuel cell goes down to zero, and you run the chance of an explosion."
"Show me," Al-Amin said.
Smith took a pencil out of his pocket and began drawing a cross section of the connection on the top of the nearby table.
"Look here, captain, this is the way the two are supposed to fit. But they don't, because the male plug can't get far enough into the female socket to make the connection. Like this, see?"