The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. Jonas Jonasson

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СКАЧАТЬ these reasons she continued rather cheerfully to serve her time for her poor judgement in allowing herself to be run over on a pavement by a plastered man that winter day in Johannesburg in 1976. What she was experiencing now was in every way better than emptying latrines in the world’s largest human garbage dump.

      When enough months had gone by, it was time to start counting years instead. Of course, she gave a thought or two to how she might be able to spirit herself out of Pelindaba prematurely. It would be a challenge as good as any to force her way through the fences, the minefield, the guard dogs and the alarm.

      Dig a tunnel?

      No, that was such a stupid thought that she dropped it immediately.

      Hitchhike?

      No, any hitchhiker would be discovered by the guards’ German shepherds, and then all one could do was hope that they went for the throat first so that the rest wasn’t too bad.

      Bribery?

      Well, maybe . . . but she would have only one chance, and whomever she tried this on would probably take the diamonds and report her, in South African fashion.

      Steal someone else’s identity, then?

      Yes, that might work. But the hard part would be stealing someone else’s skin colour.

      Nombeko decided to take a break from her thoughts of escape. Anyway, it was possible that her only chance would be to make herself invisible and equip herself with wings. Wings alone wouldn’t suffice: she would be shot down by the eight guards in the four towers.

      She was just over fifteen when she was locked up within the double fences and the minefield, and she was well on her way to seventeen when the engineer very solemnly informed her that he had arranged a valid South African passport for her, even though she was black. The fact was, without one she could no longer have access to all the corridors that the indolent engineer felt she ought to have access to. The rules had been issued by the South African intelligence agency, and Engineer Westhuizen knew how to pick his battles.

      He kept the passport in his desk drawer and, thanks to his incessant need to be domineering, he made lots of noise about how he was forced to keep it locked up.

      ‘That’s so you won’t get it into your head to run away, whatsyourname. Without a passport you can’t leave the country, and we can always find you, sooner or later,’ said the engineer, giving an ugly grin.

      Nombeko replied that it said in the passport whathernamewas, in case the engineer was curious, and she added that he had long since given her the responsibility for his key cabinet. Which included the key to his desk drawer.

      ‘And I haven’t run away because of it,’ said Nombeko, thinking that it was more the guards, the dogs, the alarm, the minefields and the twelve thousand volts in the fence that kept her there.

      The engineer glared at his cleaning woman. She was being impudent again. It was enough to make a person crazy. Especially since she was always right.

      That damned creature.

      Two hundred and fifty people were working, at various levels, on the most secret of all secret projects. Nombeko could state with certainty early on that the man at the very top lacked talent in every area except feathering his own nest. And he was lucky (up until the day he wasn’t any more).

      During one phase of the project development, one of the most difficult problems that needed to be solved was the constant leakage in experiments with uranium hexafluoride. The engineer had a blackboard on the wall of his office upon which he drew lines and made arrows, fumbling his way through formulas and other things to make it appear as if he were thinking. The engineer sat in his easy chair mumbling ‘hydrogen-bearing gas’, ‘uranium hexafluoride’ and ‘leakage’ interspersed with curses in both English and Afrikaans. Perhaps Nombeko should have let him mumble away: she was there to clean. But at last she said, ‘Now, I don’t know much about what a “hydrogen-bearing gas” is, and I’ve hardly even heard of uranium hexafluoride. But I can see from the slightly hard-to-interpret attempts on the wall that you are having an autocatalytic problem.’

      The engineer said nothing, but he looked past whatshername at the door into the hallway in order to make sure that no one was standing there and listening, since he was about to be befuddled by this strange being for the umpteenth time in a row.

      ‘Should I take your silence to mean that I have permission to continue? After all, you usually wish me to answer when I’m spoken to and only then.’

      ‘Yes, get on with it then!’ said the engineer.

      Nombeko gave a friendly smile and said that as far as she was concerned, it didn’t really matter what the different variables were called, it was still possible to do mathematics with them.

      ‘We’ll call hydrogen-bearing gas A, and uranium hexafluoride can be B,’ Nombeko said.

      And she walked over to the blackboard on the wall, erased the engineer’s nonsense, and wrote the rate equation for an autocatalytic reaction of the first order.

      When the engineer just stared blankly at the blackboard, she explained her reasoning by drawing a sigmoid curve.

      When she had done that, she realized that Engineer van der Westhuizen understood no more of what she had written than any latrine emptier would have in the same situation. Or, for that matter, an assistant from the City of Johannesburg’s department of sanitation.

      ‘Please, Engineer,’ she said. ‘Try to understand. I have floors to scrub. The gas and the fluoride don’t get along and their unhappiness runs away with itself.’

      ‘What’s the solution?’ said the engineer.

      ‘I don’t know,’ said Nombeko. ‘I haven’t had time to think about it. Like I said, I’m the cleaning woman here.’

      In that instant, one of Engineer van der Westhuizen’s many qualified colleagues came through the door. He had been sent by the research director to share some good news: the team had discovered that the problem was autocatalytic in nature; this resulted in chemical impurities in the filter of the processing machine, and they would soon be able to present a solution.

      There was no reason for the colleague to say any of this, because just behind the Kaffir with the mop he saw what the engineer had written on his blackboard.

      ‘Oh, I see that you have already figured out what I came to tell you, boss. I won’t disturb you, then,’ said the colleague, and he turned round in the doorway.

      Engineer van der Westhuizen sat behind his desk in silence and poured another tumbler full of Klipdrift.

      Nombeko said that this certainly was lucky, wasn’t it? She would leave him alone in just a minute, but first she had a few questions. The first was whether the engineer thought it would be appropriate for her to deliver a mathematical explanation for how the team could increase the capacity from twelve thousand SWUs per year to twenty thousand, with a tail assay of 0.46 per cent.

      The engineer did.

      The other question was whether the engineer might be so kind as to order a new scrubbing brush for the office, since his dog had chewed the old one to pieces.

      The engineer replied that СКАЧАТЬ