enthusiastically. ‘Wanna see our lectrik power?’
Valérie smiled hesitantly. ‘All right.’
‘Not hard to find.’ Jacob led the way out of the chicken rooms, shooing a few of them away as they opened the door. ‘All we need to do is follow the stink,’ he said, pulling a face.
They stepped out onto an external walkway, thick with the rustling leaves of runner bean plants climbing panels of green plastic trellis on either side of them. If the metal grating beneath their feet had been covered with a thick bed of spongy moss they could almost have been walking down a jungle trail.
‘This way,’ said Jacob leading.
They made their way carefully along it, passing several children and an elderly couple carefully picking pods from the stalks. Hannah announced to one of the children with solemn authority that she was doing her official job showing the newcomer around.
Jacob and Nathan grinned at each other.
Presently Jacob stepped to the left, and reached through a veil of leaves dangling down from the gantry above and doing their best to completely obscure a doorway. ‘Guess you can smell it now?’
Valérie wrinkled his nose and nodded.
Jacob pulled the leaves to one side and opened the door. They stepped into an almost completely pitch black interior.
‘Just a sec,’ said Jacob. He fumbled in the dark for a moment before finding the torch dangling from a hook just inside the door. He snapped it on. They were in a narrow passageway, ahead of them a steep flight of steps leading down to the module’s bottom floor. The smell of fermenting faeces quickly grew unpleasantly strong as they made their way down the steps and along a passageway lined with tall lockers on which were fading name tags.
‘Down here used to be the shift workers’ changing room,’ said Jacob. ‘Walter said it’s the best place for our digesters because it’s insulated. It’s the warmest place on all of the rigs.’ He opened a door and led the way in, holding his nose as he did so. ‘Here we are . . . the stinky rooms.’
Valérie and Nathan stepped inside, wincing at the overpowering odour.
‘Sorry, Hannah,’ said Jacob, gently holding her arm. ‘You know the rules, no children inside.’
She frowned indignantly. ‘But I want to show him the jenny-rater.’
Jacob smiled. Hannah frequently heard Walter referring to the generator as the ‘genny’. Knowing how her faultlessly logical mind worked, Jacob suspected his niece assumed, quite reasonably, that the machine was named after her grandmother.
‘No children inside without Mum or Walter around. You know that, Han.’
She scowled at him, but stood obediently out in the passage watching Valérie intently studying the machine by torchlight.
Jacob stepped across the floor towards the doorway to an adjoining room. ‘In here is where the methane is brewed up,’ he said.
Valérie followed him inside. The smell was almost overpowering in the generator room, but in this room the odour was even more pungent.
‘Can you feel how warm it is?’ said Nathan.
‘The crap actually generates its own heat as it ferments,’ said Jacob. He stepped across to the nearest plastic drum and rested his hand on it. ‘Feel it.’
Valérie touched the plastic and nodded. ‘Oh, yes . . . it is almost as warm as a radiator!’
The room was quiet, save for a gurgling coming from inside the large plastic containers. The only place on any of the rigs that seemed almost completely devoid of sound; the endless rumble of the sea, the whistle and moan of wind, insulated from them. Just that soft contented gurgling and bubbling from inside.
Nathan grinned. ‘What do you think?’
Valérie studied the plastic drums, the feed-off pipes coming from them and leading to several gas storage containers. Another pipe winding its way across the low ceiling and out through the door they’d entered, into the generator room.
‘That’s the feed pipe,’ said Jacob. ‘Feeding methane to the generator. ’
They stepped through the doorway back into the generator room. Hannah was tapping one foot impatiently out in the passageway.
‘We make enough fuel for about three hours of power every night,’ said Nathan. ‘Walter said maybe one day he’ll improve it so that we get even more power and we could have spare for things like music systems.’
‘Maybe even a TV and we could watch movies and cartoons,’ added Jacob.
‘Or even, if we find a working PlayStation,’ added Nathan, ‘we could play video games again.’
Hannah, standing out in the passage, giggled. ‘Viddy-oh games!’ she chorused. She’d heard the term many times. Jacob had even described to her what