The twenty gallons of gasoline permitted under the French quota allowed the Duchess in her Daimler and Mountjoy in his Rolls to drive between them a total of eighty miles per month.
Mountjoy, true to his word, immediately sent off a strong letter of protest to the President of the French Republic and to the President of the United States.
From the first he received no reply.
From the second he received, after some while, a short note signed by Kurt Hannigan, Executive Assistant to the President, assuring him that every effort was being made to increase oil production in the United States but adding that the situation in the Near East, coupled with the vastly expanding use of oil for fuel, made any immediate hope of relief improbable.
This was followed by a pamphlet from the Department of the Interior on how to insulate a house in order to cut down heating costs, emphasizing that the expenditure involved was deductible from income tax.
"Damn fools," exclaimed Mountjoy when he received the latter. "How do they expect me to insulate a castle? And what effect would stuffing the roof with some kind of artificial sponge rubber have on the temperature of my bath water? They've been bungling for years and we in Grand Fenwick are the first victims of their inspired incompetence. I insist that the terms of our peace treaty with the United States be carried out to the letter. I insist on my hot bath. I shall write again."
"I don't think it's the United States," said Bentner, to whom Mountjoy had been fulminating. "The Americans are nice people. Just a bit too trusting. It's them Arabs. They're the ones holding up the oil supply, creating a shortage and hoping for a rise in price. Supposing we were to send twenty longbowmen over there like when we invaded New York and capture a couple of oil wells for ourselves. Maybe even a refinery."
"Good Lord, Bentner," Mountjoy exclaimed. "Do you think we are back in the time of the Crusades with the Arabs riding around on camels dressed in flowing robes and armed with small shields and lances? Don't you realize that the Arab nations at the present time probably have an air force and armament of modern weapons, including rockets, sufficient to challenge Great Britain?"
Bentner considered this for a while and shook his head. "Where did they get them?" he asked.
"From the United States, of course. Great Britain and France as well, I suspect. They got a lot of money for their oil. Billions of pounds and bought arms in return. Largely because of the Israel situation. As I see it, we in Grand Fenwick are caught in a conflict between Moses and Mohammed with the result that I cannot get a hot bath.
"You don't suppose they'd have any use for a score of longbows and a few bushels of arrows?" asked Bentner.
"No. I certainly don't. We'll have to think of something else. First I am going to insist that the terms of our peace treaty with the United States are implemented to the letter. Then I see that I'm going to have to put my mind to the solving of the oil problem on a worldwide scale. Civilization cannot exist and progress without a plentiful and cheap supply of fuel oil. But if this is truly a shortage and not a piece of manipulation to drive oil prices up, an alternative source of energy is plainly called for. I'll talk to Dr. Kokintz about it. After all, the man who developed the Q, or quadium, bomb singlehanded should readily be able to come up with an inexpensive method of heating water and running an automobile."
The prospect roused him. He, Mountjoy, was once again going to take a hand in saving the world from its follies.
"Bentner," he said. "We are going to have to stand shoulder to shoulder in this crisis. The question is not one of politics but of the salvation of society. What has happened here now in Grand Fenwick will shortly be happening all over the world. People will be shivering in their homes, their automobiles motionless in their garages, their great factories closing down one by one, and with each closing, thousands put out of work and unable to use their Visa cards. That in itself will put thousands more out of work, shake the financial foundation of many great corporations, and spread gloom and despair like a plague through the domain of Western Man. Western civilization stands at its greatest crisis—a crisis involving not freedom of speech nor of thought nor of worship, but the equally great freedom to live at some level of dignity and comfort above that of a medieval peasant. Something must be done. You and I must do it."
"Look," said Bentner, "aren't you making a bit too much fuss about not getting a hot bath? Do what I do. Put the tub down in front of the fireplace in the kitchen, kick everybody out and enjoy yourself. Let the world solve its own problems. We've got enough wood here to last us for centuries."
"Bah," Mountjoy said. "I will not be driven back to the sixteenth century by half a million Arabs who seem to have made a captive of every brain in America. Forward, I say, into the thick of the battle, and let the banner of Grand Fenwick lead the way."
"Still think you ought to try having a bath in front of the kitchen fire first," said Bentner.
The interview had taken place in Mountjoy's study in the castle. When it was over Mountjoy decided to call immediately on Dr. Kokintz, who, as noted, was the inventor of the appalling Q-bomb which Grand Fenwick had captured during its war against the United States.
Kokintz, now a citizen of Grand Fenwick, had his office and laboratory in the dungeon of the main keep of the castle, and there he carried out various experiments of which Mountjoy knew little and cared less. Kokintz was dressed as usual in a rumpled pullover, a pair of shoddy trousers and a jacket of his own design. It was without a collar or lapels but had numerous pockets in which Kokintz kept pencils and pens and scraps of paper on which he made cabalistic calculations. In the side pockets he kept crackers and pieces of bread with which to feed the birds during his daily walks about Grand Fenwick, for he was very fond of birds and prided himself more as an ornithologist than as a physicist.
When Mountjoy entered, Kokintz was seated at a long table, littered with retorts, Bunsen burners, spirals of glass tubing which connected with series of bottles, an apparatus for producing old-fashioned ruby laser rays and another, not yet completed and of his own design, a white laser capable of penetrating a foot of high-tensile steel. All around were cages of birds: some pets and others he was treating for a sickness or injury. He was at the moment tying a lump of something white to a long piece of string.
"What's that?" Mountjoy asked.
"Suet," Kokintz said. "I hang it in the garden. It helps the birds get enough fat when seeds and berries are getting scarce."
When he had finished tying the piece of suet to the string he held it up smiling with pleasure.
"The titmice will love it," he said.
"I suppose they will," said Mountjoy, who didn't give a hang for titmice. "Actually I came to talk to you about the energy crisis and perhaps get you working on the problem. Do you have any thoughts on energy?" The question was as close as Mountjoy could come to being scientific.
"Energy," said Kokintz, vaguely, as if he had heard the word somewhere. His mind was still on the suet. He took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his pullover. "Energy," he repeated, putting his glasses back on his nose and pulling his mind together. "We are surrounded by energy. Everything we see or touch is energy in one form or another. Energy is something we will never run out of."
"Well, we just ran out of it," said the Count. "My Rolls is down in the village at this moment and utterly useless. We are out of petrol. Also heating oil."
Kokintz shrugged. "Oil is but one source of energy," he said. "A minor source, in fact, though the one that comes easiest to hand. But you are surely aware of solar energy in all its forms—radiation from the sun, winds, tides, the growth of vegetable matter and even ourselves. Yes, my friend, we are a result of solar energy, without which we would die.
"Then there is the energy to be obtained from coal, itself solar energy stored from the sunshine of billions of years ago, and from wood and from the burning or distillation of vegetable matter, and then of course there is nuclear energy, and the energy which results from the mys
terious force known as gravity, though that source is perhaps but two percent of the energy available on earth. I might add the energy whose primary source is sound—a great deal of which is of course inaudible to the human ear, though we have instruments which can pick up much, but not all of it. We are, as you perhaps know, being constantly bombarded by energy from outer space, some of which consists of sounds and some of which can be transformed into sounds—"
"What about oil?" said Mountjoy, interrupting, for he knew from experience that once Kokintz started talking on any subject of scientific interest, he was all but unstoppable.
Kokintz puffed through his lips, which was a mannerism of his when he had been asked a question on a hopeless topic. He considered the vast swarm of the galaxies with their trillions of planets spinning around their billions of suns. He considered the possibility of organic life decomposing on these planets and turning into oil, oil shale and coal.
"There must be enough oil in outer space to drown the earth under a sea of it thousands of fathoms deep," he said.
"Never mind outer space," said the Count of Mountjoy testily. "I mean how about oil right here in Grand Fenwick, enough to run two motorcars and heat my bath, to start with."
Kokintz shook his head. "Most unlikely," he said. "The mountains are igneous rock—granite for the greater part. No oil-bearing formations. It would appear that Grand Fenwick was never subjected to the pressures and marine conditions which produce oil."
Mountjoy decided to try another tack.
"What are you working on right now?" he asked, looking over the complicated apparatus set up on the long table.
Kokintz, forgetting for the moment the laser on which he had been engaged for some months, said, "I'm making a kite for your great-granddaughter Katherine. A blue one," he added.
Mountjoy took a deep breath. His great-granddaughter, he well knew, was a persistent little being and had been bothering everybody she knew in the Duchy to make her a blue kite. Kokintz, one of the most eminent physicists in the Western world, had now been cornered into doing the job.
"Well," said Mountjoy, a trifle huffily, "when you get through with Katherine's kite, would you be good enough to turn your mind to the problem of finding a cheap and abundant source of energy other than oil, so that not only can I get a decent bath each day, but the whole of Western civilization can be saved from complete chaos." He then went back to his study to take up the matter again, this time quite firmly, with the President of the United States. Kokintz watched him go, shook his head and went out into the garden to hang up the piece of suet for the titmice. When he came back his mind was involved not with energy or lasers but with the design of a kite which could be readily flown by a seven-year-old child. For Kokintz, such problems were not unimportant.
CHAPTER IV
President John Miller of the United States was surrounded by worries, predominant among which was how long he was going to remain the President of the United States. Presidential elections, he well knew, swung not on the real needs and problems of the country, the greater part of which were quite unknown to the electorate, and if known would probably put them in a panic.
The presidential election at the moment swung on the issues of how warm it was going to be in people's houses in the coming winter, for the energy shortage was becoming more apparent (despite efforts to play it down) week by week, and how much gasoline they could look for to run their automobiles, and how many hostages foreign students were going to seize in American embassies.
The word had gone around that Americans were big oil users and therefore were wicked. Sometimes it wasn't just oil that the Americans were accused of using in Gargantuan quantities. It was energy. They used, it was said, with pious scorn, more energy than any other people on earth and the fact that they did more with the energy they used than any other people on earth was quite beside the point. Americans had become ogres, vampires, destroyers rather than leaders of mankind, and in their humanity they destroyed bluebirds, anchovies, pine trees, grass, grizzly bears, black people, the soul, the oceans of the world, and having left their footprints on the moon were probably intent upon doing the same thing there and through the whole of outer space if they were not stopped.
The old slogan "Yankee go home" had been replaced by "Yankee get lost," which was much more hurtful.
"If only they'd read our Constitution," the President said to Secretary of State Henry Thatcher, who was the first to arrive for an unscheduled cabinet meeting.
"If only we would read it ourselves," said the Secretary of State.
Present at the meeting, hurriedly summoned from various parts of Washington and indeed the United States, were the Secretaries of the Interior, Defense, Energy, Agriculture, State, Space and Electronics. The meeting had been called to discuss the three Es—Energy, Economy and Election. But it was the matter of Energy which dominated the meeting, for the other two depended upon it.
The Secretary of Agriculture, Wayne Ritchers, a tall, red-faced man with a protruding underlip which gave him a perpetual pout, was asked what progress was being made in the production of alcohol from agricultural waste—a project which had been headlined about the country the last time the OPEC nations had announced an increase in the price of oil per barrel.
"Mr. President," he said, "by next year we hope to produce fifty million gallons of alcohol from this source. That represents an all-out effort as the program is set up now—that is to say, utilizing what is called agricultural waste by converting it into alcohol. But I'd like to point out, Mr. President, that there really isn't such a thing as agricultural waste except in the newspapers. It's all organic matter which can be plowed back into the soil in one form or another to bring along next year's crop-whatever that crop may be. It contains a large proportion of the phosphates and nitrates taken out of the soil to nourish the particular plant.
"Some of it is used for cattle, sheep and hog feed. Turn it all into alcohol and you'll have a rise in meat prices and a rise perhaps in the price of artificial fertilizers."
"Aren't you forgetting that there are hundreds of millions of acres of land—scrub land, desert land—which could be brought under cultivation to produce crops purely for conversion into alcohol?" asked the Secretary of Energy.
"Nope," said the Secretary of Agriculture. "And I'm not forgetting that from the point of view of the ecologists these lands—mostly federal lands, mind you—are the last disappearing traces of wilderness America. Most of them are national parks, state parks or parks of some kind. Millions of acres are leased for grazing.
"Start plowing them up for fuel for automobiles or for industry and you've really got a cat fight on your hands. You know what would be the effect of that kind of program on election prospects.
"One other point. Even if you can fight down the ecologists and the cattle people, I'd hate to think of the effect on world opinion when the stories got around that we were growing food crops to run automobiles while millions were starving in Africa, Cambodia and elsewhere. I think we'd lose a lot more embassies."
The President wasn't amused. "What you're telling me," he said, "is that only a very small percentage of our energy problems can be solved by the decomposition of farm wastes."
"That's right," said the Secretary of Agriculture. "Ignoring the actual supply, turning grain or any vegetable matter into alcohol is an expensive business, as I'm sure you found out the last time you bought a fifth of bourbon."
"A lot of that was tax," said the Secretary of the Treasury.
"So's a lot of the price of gasoline and fuel oil," replied the Secretary of Agriculture. "And you can't even drink the stuff."
There was more discussion on the subject, mostly wearying and negative, before the Secretary of the Interior, Benjamin Rustin, whose misdirected note on the energy crisis had wound up in the hands of the Count of Mountjoy, went over the coal situation in a few brief sentences which were only a restatement of what they all knew. There were enough coal reserves, both bituminous and
anthracite, in the continental United States to supply the nation's energy needs for two hundred years, allowing for a vast increase in the demand for power over that time.
But it wouldn't be cheap power. The cost of extracting coal, of storing it, of transporting and distributing it was rising fast and would continue to rise.
"It was that cost, plus the pollution factor, you will recall, Mr. President, that brought about our greater and greater dependence on oil," Rustin said. "Railroads switched to diesel and so did shipping, including the Navy.
"If we switch back again and on the increased basis now demanded, we'll have a pollution problem far beyond anything we've ever known. Hundreds of thousands of factory chimneys pouring pollutants into the air, and I'm not just talking about smoke. I'm talking about ammonia and sulfur and carbon monoxide gas and so on. Sure we can have controls and sure we can strive to develop ways of extracting these pollutants before they reach the atmosphere. But they will take a lot of time to develop and a lot of money to enforce.
"Coal isn't an immediate solution even as far as household heating is concerned. Also it's about the most wasteful solution we can come up with."
"Wasteful?" said the President.
"Yes, sir. There are something like two hundred thousand by-products which can be extracted from coal, many of which are going to be desperately needed in the future and the majority of which are utterly lost when coal is burned. What we need right now in my view—what we have to have, not only to solve the mounting energy crisis but to put a brake on world inflation, is a cheap and abundant and instantly available source of energy. Coal is not the solution."
So the talks went on. Solar energy was discussed in some detail, but while all agreed it was a tremendous potential power source, they also agreed that the cost of conversion was enormous and the technical problems of storing solar energy formidable.
It was decided that the President would announce an intensive research program into a cheap method of mass producing solar cells to heat the homes of America. The announcement at least would cost nothing and might reap a harvest of needed votes. Nuclear energy was scarcely mentioned. It had become, following the Three Mile Island incident, the Boston Massacre of nuclear physics.
The Mouse That Saved The West: ebook Edition (The Grand Fenwick Series 4) Page 3
