The Dam Builder was first published in World Wide Writers, Vol 3 no 10, 1999, a now defunct paperback-book shaped publication that was a kind of ongoing short story competition. I have mislaid my copy so can't put up a cover. It is also available in a Braille edition from the National Library for the Blind, though I have no idea how that happened.

Click here for a PDF of The Dam Builder or here for html.

The huge and controversial dam-building project Neil Andersen has been running for years is coming to fruition. The dam curtain is built, the reservoir beginning to fill up. Soon mighty turbines will deliver electricity to a million homes, and all cleaner than atomic power.

At least, that's what Andersen had always believed. But villagers living downstream of the dam or displaced by the enormous new artificial lake have been constant in their opposition. Now, as Andersen lies awake at night, he too can hear the sounds of building high on the valley slopes above him, as though someone is constructing something big and heavy and threatening. But no-one in the area has a permit to build anything - apart from Andersen's dam, of course - and no-one else knows of any construction. So he determines to find out what is going on himself.

The idea for this story came from walking about in the Alps, I think in 1984. There are well-trod paths in the hills, but high up on the valleys sides and deep in the mountains you can imagine there might be areas where no-one has stood before. Tying this in with a massively disruptive piece of civil engineering and the world's constantly recycling water system seemed like a good idea.

Illustrations: The top photo is Hoover Dam taken on the short flight from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon, and I have stretched and messed with it. The little waterfall was taken by my father in 1965, and the walker is my brother John in 2005 - it is not a waterfall behind him, only the sky squeezed up.