Black Gold

by Paul Kenyon

  "I'm fighting pollution," the Baroness said, and tumbled backward into the water.

  It was cold, even through the rubber suit. She spat into her mask and rinsed it with sea water, then went under. She swam in the direction of the rig and found the top of the shaft. She turned on the powerful search beam. It was strange to see all that metal piping swaying like that, as flexible as rope. A thousand feet down, at the bottom of it, a huge metal auger was screwing Mother Earth. She'd never get anywhere near the bottom; the scuba gear was only good for two or three hundred feet. But Sir Angus was going to have to follow that twisting shaft to the bottom, and it wasn't going to be easy for him in this murk. She'd have to catch up with him before she reached her limit.

  She was nicely trimmed by the lead weights. She upended herself and swam downward with powerful strokes of the flippers, keeping a circle of light on the shaft for orientation. She breathed evenly, the rubber mouthpiece in her clenched teeth. The pressure in her ears increased. The water was heavy, dragging at her movements. How far down was she? She looked at the luminous wrist gauge. A hundred feet. Stop and equalize the pressure. For a moment there was a sense of disorientation. She couldn't tell whether she was going down or up, whether she was upside down or rightside up. She hung in the water, watching her bubbles. They were traveling toward her feet. She continued her descent. A hundred twenty feet. A hundred forty. What was the record? Hope Root had descended four hundred feet, but she'd died on the way down. She kept sinking. A hundred sixty feet. What was that below her?

  It was a bulbous, ill-defined shape, shining its own spotlight on the drill shaft, sinking slowly downward.

  The Baroness played her beam over it. It was the first time she'd had a clear look at the exterior of the Crombie Beastie. Even now, the details were obscure in the murky water. She saw something shaped basically like a blimp — an egg-shaped compartment with stabilizing fins and a long columnar periscope at the forward end. What superstitious people had taken for flippers were two huge mechanical claws for underwater work.

  An obscene-looking sausage was trailing from its belly — some kind of a bladder. It was about six feet long with a blunt-nozzled end. It would be full of the oil-eating bacterial culture. She didn't blame Sir Angus for having it entirely external to the submarine: it was potent stuff. She guessed that the mechanical claws would position it against the bottom of the drill string and squeeze it like a gigantic pastry syringe. She could see the two halves of a metallic hemisphere stowed on a rack on the hull. It would make an enclosed dome to fit around the base of the shaft to keep the concentration of bacteria high until it had begun to do its deadly work. Once the germ was established, it would spread rapidly. She had first-hand evidence of that.

  She swam to the front of the Beastie. It resembled a blunt, malevolent face with the two thick glass ports staring like eyes, shedding the sulphurous yellow light that she remembered.

  She wasted no time. Holding onto an external handhold with one hand, she unslung the limpet mines, one by one, and attached them in a neat circle on the Beastie's bulbous snout. The magnets held them firm.

  She pressed her face against one of the glass ports. She could see the illuminated interior. The German sailors in their blue-striped jerseys, were at their stations, looking grimly efficient. Sir Angus was in there, too, leaning over a chart table, showing a diagram to his chief officer. Probably giving last-minute instructions for positioning the apparatus at the bottom. He was wearing the kilt, looking very much the clan laird.

  He looked up at the window and saw her face pressed against it. She smiled at him.

  His face went white with shock. When he'd last seen her, she'd been hanging by her feet over a vat of oil. She was supposed to be dead.

  She pursed her lips in an ironic kiss, then disappeared from his sight. She had to work fast now. The Beastie was carrying her down to the limits of her depth. She set the limpet mines to explode in four minutes and swam for the surface.

  Something grabbed her around the waist. Something else imprisoned her legs.

  It was a pair of huge metal crab's claws. The Beastie's grappling gear.

  She struggled to get free, but the claws were able to keep hold of her by shifting their grip every time she was about to break loose.

  The mines! When they went off, the shock of the explosion would kill her. And she couldn't pull them off the hull — the mechanical claws were extended, holding her out of reach of the mines.

  It didn't matter. She'd die anyway before they went off. The mechanical monster was carrying her down, down into the depths. Another fifty feet or so and the pressure would get her. Her lungs were already laboring, feeling the crushing weight of the water.

  The claws held her out in front of the sub's nose, bringing her down for a better look. Sir Angus' face appeared at a window, giving the glass eye a pupil. He smiled savagely at her. She didn't think he'd be smiling if he could see the limpet mines.

  The claws gave her a vicious squeeze. The bastard!

  She brandished the spear gun at him. He laughed silently behind the glass. It was a joke! That toy of a weapon against a fifty-foot steel monster built to take the ocean's pressure two miles beneath the surface!

  She raised the joke, her hand around the pistol grip, and let him see her taking aim. Too late, he realized what she was up to. The claws released their grip on her and tried clumsily to grab for the spear gun.

  She fired.

  The shaft bubbled through the water and pierced the bladder dangling from the submarine. An inky cloud enveloped the sub. Penelope pushed herself upward, out of reach of the claws.

  There was no oil for the arthrobacter germ to feed on here, except whatever oil it could find lubricating the submarine's control surfaces. There wasn't very much to go around — for a colony of bacteria sufficient to infect a major oil reserve. Greedily, the germs gobbled up the lubricating oil, multiplying explosively every few seconds, creeping into microscopic spaces.

  Rising like a bubble to the surface, the Baroness could see the Crombie Beastie go out of control. It plunged downward like a wounded creature. That was fortunate, because she didn't dare to surface too fast.

  It must have been a couple of hundred feet below her when the explosion came. She couldn't see anything down there in the blackness, but she felt the shock in her ears and all through her body.

  She hung motionless in the water for a few moments, breathing at a measured rate. It was over. Floating in sea water, the oil-eaters were no more dangerous than any other microscopic life in the ocean. They'd be gobbled up by other microscopic life. Small marine creatures would clean up the remnants.

  She grinned behind her face mask. Sir Angus didn't know it, but he'd just made a real contribution to ecology.

  She expelled air from her lungs and continued her slow ascent to the surface. She made it just as her air ran out. Wharton was paddling about in a rubber dinghy. When he saw her, his face broke out in an enormous grin.

  She swam over and he helped her into the dinghy. He gave her a flask of brandy, and she took a long, grateful swallow.

  "What happened to Sir Angus?" he said.

  "I think," she said, "he ran out of oil."

  * * *

  "Coin left a bit of a mess for us to clean up," the president's man said. He didn't seem at all unhappy about it. "The West Germans have agreed to close down Biotikum UberGesellschaft. The government's under a lot of pressure from the press because they can't explain why. The British are apologizing to the Norwegians and the Dutch. The Israelis have officially forgiven everyone concerned."

  "It's the Russians that worry me," said the admiral in charge of the Defense Intelligence Agency. "They're being nice as pie. They ought to be mad as hornets after that stupid caper in Baku."

  The director of the CIA flushed.

  The National Security Agency's general came charitably to his rescue. "They can't afford to get too indignant. They know that we know that it'll take them a year or more
to build up their mechanized forces along the southeastern perimeter." He paused. "Of course, we know that they know that it'll take NATO a year to build up the northwestern European forces."

  The secretary of defense sighed. "What a weapon it would have made! It was a pity that Coin destroyed all the cultures of the virulent strain at the Bane castle. There's nothing left except the tame bacteria that the Israelis are working with."

  "There's one other thing left," the president's man said.

  "Yes?"

  "Our oil."

  * * *

  The Baroness lay face down in the sand, her bikini top undone and the hot Mediterranean sun beating down on her.

  "Rub a little oil on my back," she said.

  "With pleasure," Hughes said. He poured some suntan lotion between her shoulder blades and began to knead it in with his fingers.

  He was too young and handsome to be a duke, but he had a magnificent four hundred room chateau near Blois and this marvelous little forty-room villa at Cap Ferrat. "My beach house," he called it. When she turned her head she could see it through a screen of trees, a sugar cake of a castle surrounded by lush gardens.

  It was just the place to unwind in for a long weekend.

  "That feels good," she said, purring with pleasure at the little massage.

  "I know," he said, moving his hands around to work at her breasts. She lifted up a little to accommodate him.

  "Are you really the Duc de Chataigne?" she said.

  "Cross my heart. Are you really the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini?"

  "Cross my heart."

  "I already am."

  "I know. Cross it a little more."

  His fingers found the ripe plums of her nipples and attempted to pluck them. She shivered.

  "You're not cold?" he said in surprise.

  "Far from it. Darling, let's have a swim and go inside. I want you to show me that Louis the Sixteenth bed again."

  "It's Louis the Fifteenth. Madame DuBarry slept in it."

  "My, what illustrious footsteps we've been following in."

  "I wouldn't call them footsteps."

  She laughed and sat up, not bothering to fasten her bikini top. She raced him to the water's edge and they dashed in, splashing. The water was glorious — dazzling blue and unusually clean. The usual flotilla of luxury yachts and cruisers was at anchor offshore.

  "You must have brought it all with you, Penelope," Hughes said, a big white smile animating his bronzed face. "The sun, the good weather. Even the oil's gone this weekend."

  "Oil?"

  He grinned ruefully. "That's one thing we can't buy here — clean beaches. It's been terrible the last year or two; globs of tar washed ashore, oil slicks in the water. It gets worse all the time."

  "It's the same all over the Mediterranean, darling."

  They were walking hand in hand across the sand toward the villa. "But everything's been perfect since you arrived," Hughes said. "Confess! You're the one who's responsible."

  She stopped and looked at him, wide-eyed.

  "I hope not, darling," she said.

  She turned and looked at the blue water. Was arthrobacter out there after all, breeding secretly, getting ready for a comeback? It would be a world without oil. But it would be a world without pollution, too. She stepped in something. She looked down at her foot. It was a gob of oil. She smiled at her fears. The oil-eaters were gone for good; it had been silly to imagine otherwise.

  "Come on, darling," she said, tugging him toward the villa.

  They walked barefoot through the stately rooms, tracking sand on the magnificent carpets. The bed was a confection of elaborate rosettes and carved cherubs. She shed the bottom half of her bikini and arranged herself on the silk sheets.

  "I wonder what he saw in it," she said, looking up at the smug face of a cherub.

  "He saw Madame DuBarry," Hughes said.

  She took the scepter in her hand and pulled him toward her. "Fit for a king," she whispered. "Darling, why did they call him Louis the Fifteenth?"

  "Perhaps it was his score."

  "I'm sure you can do better," she said.

  He did.