Namibe, Angola.
'Making the desert bloom' was a laudable intention, Lazlo Svarog had always thought. But he wasn't sure if it could be applied to his present job, even if the management insisted it could.
Taking a small African town in the middle of nowhere, evicting all the small shopkeepers, demolishing the town and rebuilding it LARGE with all the bells and whistles demanded by Western tourists was all very well but you needed the infrastructure. Swimming pools needed filling. Western tourists with all their dollars and francs and GBP would be wanting several showers a day. And that is where Lazlo came in.
He - and what remained of ZelenCo - were driving pipelines through the arid coastal region, and the even more arid hills, from the brand new multi-million Pangolin constructed desalination plant to supply the only slightly older city of Caluetete. Lazlo, had he been asked, would have advised making sure of the water supply before starting construction but he understood that the tanker company had made a mint. Half an hour on the internet had shown that the same names figured on their list of directors as at Pangolin, and, indeed, ZelenCo, so the money was staying in the family.
Lazlo liked to know who he was working for. He missed the old days when Terry Green, and then his son Bill, had worked alongside them, experiencing the problems and privations at first hand and either solving them or saying 'Sorry guys, we'll have to make the best of it'. His current masters didn't do that. He reported a problem - they mulled it over and made the cheapest possible adjustment or told him to pay the complainants off and hire new workers.
It was this attitude that lead to his current preoccupation. Men who were paid the minimum they would accept for the job are always looking for ways to make a little extra, and Lazlo had had no choice but to search them as they left the site at the end of the day. After a few had been caught smuggling out tools or motorparts and had paid the penalty the pilfering lessened but they carried on doing spot checks.
It was on one of these that the first chunk of green stone turned up. Lazlo looked at it and admired it and the man admitted he planned to give it to his son who collected minerals. He took another piece from his bag and offered it to Lazlo who accepted it with a laugh. Rocks - the company didn't need rocks, even pretty green ones, so Lazlo used it as a paperweight in the makeshift office in his mobile home.
The rocks turned up frequently after that - he suspected the men thought they were emeralds - until they had finished cutting through that area. Then he thought no more about it.
A week or so later, he got a film back from the printers with a note attached to say it was blank. This could not be. Lazlo knew what he was doing and it had been a brand new film. He tried again, going back to photograph the same ground. That film too was blank. Irritated he ordered more films. The first worked fine. The second, used a week later, was cloudy. The third was blank.
He looked at the fourth, in its plastic canister on the window sill beside the now dusty piece of green rock and considered. Then he went online and poked around Wikipedia and a few more specialised sites.
What he read there suggested he take a jeep back up the line one afternoon. He got out at a certain point - where the green rocks had been found most thickly - and wandered across the newly graded roadway beside his pipeline. The little machine in his hand clicked gently, then frantically, then gently again but at no point did it stop.
Lazlo got back in his Jeep and drove back to his camp a very worried man. When he got there, the first thing he did was to walk into the shower fully clothed. The second was to throw the green rock away.