The Mouse That Saved The West: ebook Edition (The Grand Fenwick Series 4)

by Leonard Wibberley

  But Kokintz wasn't listening. It was a long long time since he had exercised his mind on the pleasing problems of the carbohydrates, not in fact since the days of his schoolboy chemistry. So when he and Katherine had tended to the birds together and he had made her another kite, he asked her for another piece of candy.

  He cut it off neatly with a spatula and put it in a test tube and busied himself setting up a series of flasks and retorts, pipettes and water jackets. The end result looked vaguely like an oil refinery but made of glass. When Kokintz had everything to his satisfaction, Mountjoy entered the laboratory.

  "Ah," he said viewing the apparatus. "Getting to work, eh? The energy problem."

  Kokintz peered at Mountjoy over the rims of his glasses, but it was plain from the expression in his eyes that he hadn't really heard him.

  "It's a piece of candy bar," Kokintz said. "Chocolate outside and toffee inside."

  "Candy bar?" Mountjoy cried. "What the devil has that got to do with the energy crisis?"

  "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," Kokintz said. "That perhaps is the key. It's very curious."

  "What is all this nonsense?" demanded Mountjoy and Kokintz finally emerged from the fog and seemed surprised to find Mountjoy in his presence.

  " 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee set out to fight a battle,' " he recited. "Fructose and glucose. Only they're not fighting—at least there is no evidence that they are. They have the same atomic content—six carbon atoms, twelve hydrogen atoms and six oxygen atoms. But they are not put together in the same way, though each is a simple sugar. Fructose takes no part in the development of animal tissue, but glucose plays a huge part. Fructose and glucose are equally important in the metabolism of vegetable matter. But fructose seems to have some part to play in the life of certain bacteriological cells. One should be able to play tricks with them. Tweedledum and Tweedledee."

  "Pray may I ask once more what has all this to do with the energy problem?" said Mountjoy.

  Kokintz looked mildly at the Count.

  "That is not a very good question," he said. "It is like asking Columbus when he set sail, as he thought, for India, what his voyage had to do with the erection of skyscrapers in New York. He knew nothing of New York, nothing of America and nothing of skyscrapers.

  "Yet his voyage produced, as a by-product, all these things. I am going to take a voyage of exploration myself and my ship will be a piece of your great-granddaughter's candy bar, which is a form of sugar.

  "Sugar is one of the most common substances on earth. Sugars are very easy to produce chemically and there are hundreds of sugars. But one natural sugar only—glucose—is the form most common to life on earth. Why glucose? With the same atomic content one can produce sixteen kinds of primary sugars by rearranging the atomic placement, and eight of them are mirror images of their partners. But one always comes back to glucose as the favorite of nature, though for what reason we do not know. If you were to ask me what is the most important biochemical process in the whole universe I would say without hesitation, the ability of plant life to receive energy from the sun and by photosynthesis transform it into living matter." He paused to reflect. "I put that broadly," he said. "But to my mind this is the greatest of all the wonders in the universe."

  Mountjoy was not listening. Kokintz was off on one of his scientific diversions again. "So many mysteries," he said and started speculating why all twenty amino acids known to man should polarize light to the left. Fructose polarized light to the left also, but glucose polarized it to the right. So nature knew how to perform that trick, but preferred to make amino acids, on earth at least, all left-handed so to speak.

  Mountjoy departed and entering the courtyard of the castle came face to face with his great-granddaughter Katherine in a towering rage and with a broken kite in her hand.

  "The stupid thing fell on its head again," she said.

  The two confronted each other. He politely asked Katherine not to visit Kokintz with her broken kite, stressing the importance of what the scientist was working on.

  "What about my kite?" demanded Katherine, holding up the bedraggled wreck, her rage now turned to tears of frustration and misery.

  "Let Grandpa fix it," Mountjoy said.

  Katherine eyed him with deep suspicion. In her memories of him, and although she was but seven these seemed very long memories indeed, she had never known him to fix anything. He just ordered other people to do so.

  "You know how to make a kite?" she asked.

  "Certainly," said Mountjoy. This was a lie, but it was told not for the sake of lying but for the sake of keeping Kokintz at work on whatever he was working on. It was, then, a diplomatic device rather than a lie and so entirely forgivable.

  Katherine said nothing and Mountjoy knew he had to follow up the lie with a bribe. Shoddy diplomacy. He disliked it but nonetheless it was necessary if Grand Fenwick and the world were to be spared the economic wreckage which would result from the fuel crisis. "You can have tea with me," he said. "Tea and toast."

  "Gooseberry jam?" asked Katherine, for she had learned her great-grandfather's wisdom in never accepting the first offer, however attractive, lest more could be obtained.

  "Gooseberry jam," said Mountjoy.

  "All right," said Katherine and the two went, hand in hand, up to the castle and then to his study, where Mountjoy rang for tea. When Meadows arrived and had been told to bring an extra cup and lots more toast and some gooseberry jam, Mountjoy went to a beautifully inlaid cabinet in which for his convenience (for he liked to write many letters by hand) there was a supply of stationery. He took out a very large, pale-blue sheet of excellent paper made from fine linen. It was his favorite sort. The big sheets he used in addressing presidents and the world's remnant of kings. A smaller size for members of foreign cabinets and smaller sheets still for ambassadors, for he had a well-constructed sense of proportion in such matters.

  At the top of the sheet of paper (it was of the king size) in Gothic letters were the words

  Duchy of Grand Fenwick

  and below this the coat of arms of the Duchy, the double-headed eagle saying "Yea" from one beak and "Nay" from the other.

  Below that, written on a scroll and clutched in the eagle's talons was the motto of Grand Fenwick: the single Latin word "Superviveo"—"I survive."

  "This should make an excellent kite," he said. And he reflected that he had used the paper in a similar fashion many times before in his diplomatic correspondence.

  CHAPTER VII

  Peter Wormsley made three drafts of his memo to Kurt Hannigan, presidential adviser, on the subject of the oil supply to Grand Fenwick before he achieved a version with which he was halfway satisfied. Then he shredded all three versions, had a short talk with Secretary of State Thatcher and put a call through to Hannigan's office.

  "Wormsley here," he said. "Can you give me a moment for a personal chat? I want to talk about the Grand Fenwick thing."

  "What Grand Fenwick thing?" asked Hannigan, who had spent a nerve-wracking day with several representatives of the OPEC countries trying to get them to agree to increase production and keep the price of oil at thirty dollars a barrel. He had failed dismally.

  "The reduction in oil supplies," said Wormsley. "Right at this moment I don't think anything should be committed to paper."

  Hannigan recalled the memoir from the Count of Mountjoy and wondered whether some form of insanity, akin to the South Sea Bubble of the eighteenth century, had taken possession of the chancelleries of the world. Here was a nation as powerful as the United States entangled in negotiations with tiny countries like Iraq and Oman and Yemen—and Grand Fenwick—while the colossi of the world, Red China and the Soviet Union, peered on from afar. Well, maybe it wasn't like the South Sea Bubble but more like Gulliver in Lilliput.

  "Look," said Hannigan. "I've had one hell of a day and I'm about to go home, drink three ice-cold martinis, take two Dalmanes and go to bed. Can't it wait until morning?"

  "No, sir," said Wormsle
y. "We must reply to Grand Fenwick almost immediately; otherwise they have the right to void their treaty with us—and that involves setting them at liberty to do what they wish with the Q-bomb."

  "Have you spoken to the Secretary about this?" Hannigan asked.

  "Yes, sir," said Wormsley. "He said I should take it up personally with you. It's an executive, not a policy matter, in his view."

  "All right," said Hannigan. "Come on over. I'll see you in half an hour."

  As a result of having written three memos on the subject, Wormsley had the main points of what he wanted to say clearly in his mind and was able to present them succinctly to Hannigan, who stared out of the window of his office, tapping his teeth with a pencil, all the time Wormsley was talking.

  When he had done, Hannigan said, "I don't see what all the fuss is about. It's obviously a mix-up. Ship the oil and prepare a letter of apology for the President's signature."

  "What about Birelli?" Wormsley asked. "The indications are that the Grand Fenwick supply was radically reduced—cut off, you might say—at his express instructions. His support of the administration in the coming elections is—er, critical."

  "What do you mean by 'indications'?" asked Hannigan.

  "Well, the Secretary had a casual conversation with him, and he said that in view of the growing world shortage, with the need (not yet announced) that international quotas have to be imposed to reduce consumption, bring the price of oil down again and combat inflation, Grand Fenwick would not get any oil at all. Actually if the quota as now worked out were strictly applied, Grand Fenwick would get about a gallon and a half of gasoline a month, and about two pints of fuel oil."

  Hannigan considered this, all the time staring out of the office window as if somewhere outside his office and beyond the White House grounds lay the answer to the problem.

  "We're seeing more in this thing than there is," he said at last. "Someone in Birelli's organization obviously had the figures run through the computer and started imposing the Pentex quotas without even thinking of what they were doing. There's no need for a quota for places like Grand Fenwick. Christ, if they increased their consumption three hundred percent, it wouldn't have the slightest effect on the world oil picture. This is just the result of someone sitting down before a computer and carefully removing his head first. It's a phenomenon which is becoming more and more common. I'll tell the Navy to get the gasoline and oil to Grand Fenwick until the Pentex supplies can be restarted. Have that letter of apology from the President to Grand Fenwick on my desk tomorrow morning and that's all there is to it."

  When Wormsley had gone Hannigan reached for the telephone and called Caleb Abrams, Secretary of the Navy. The Secretary was not in his office, but his executive assistant, Tom Fielding, took the message.

  "Two hundred gallons of unleaded gasoline and one hundred of fuel oil to be sent immediately to Grand Fenwick?" he said. "An emergency? All right, sir. We'll fly it there right away. Delivery once per month until canceled? Got it."

  He put down the telephone and speculated which of the United States Navy installations throughout the world bore the code name Grand Fenwick. The name seemed vaguely familiar but he couldn't place it, so he went to the console and typed out a question for the Navy memory bank. Back on the sheet of glass above the console came the answer.

  "GRAND FENWICK CODE NAME FOR GROUP A 247 DL COORDINATES 80 N 80 W ELLESMERE ISLAND ARCTIC OCEAN."

  "Poor bastards," said Fielding. "They must be freezing." The Navy plane with the oil supplies was on its way to the frigid twilight of the roof of the world within an hour, where a dozen technicians, warm as toast in their underground dwellings, were studying meteorological conditions and incidentally keeping a close radar watch for the launching of hostile intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  A week later the Count of Mountjoy, who had had his last hot bath several days earlier, received a letter from the President of the United States saying that it was entirely the result of an oversight that oil supplies to Grand Fenwick had ceased and that he had personally given orders for their immediate resumption. A new and ample supply of gasoline and heating oil could be expected by air immediately.

  "By air?" said Mountjoy. "Where are they going to land it?" The nearest airport was Besançon, many miles from the Duchy, from which delivery would have to be made by road. But it pleased him that the supplies were being flown and he daily awaited the arrival of the tank trucks. But when, after two weeks, not a drop of oil had reached Grand Fenwick, his patience was exhausted and he summoned a special meeting of the Council of Freemen to discuss the situation.

  "What we are presented with," he told the assembled members, "is a flagrant and I might say cynical disregard of an important clause of the treaty between this Duchy and the United States of America. Members may examine at their leisure the correspondence which has passed between me and the President of the United States. They will see that despite my several complaints and the specific promise of the President to implement that important clause under which it is their duty to supply this nation with both gasoline and fuel oil, the United States has failed to do so.

  "It is my duty then to bring to the attention of the House that the aforesaid treaty is now null and void and no longer binding on the Duchy of Grand Fenwick as of this day."

  "What about the Arabs?" asked Bentner.

  Mountjoy fixed him with a look of icy disdain. "I fail to see what the Arabs have to do with this," he said.

  "Well, can't we get enough oil to heat your bath water from the Arabs?" Bentner replied. "That's what it's all about, isn't it?" And he looked about at his colleagues on the opposition benches, who were chuckling with delight.

  Mountjoy waited for the chuckles to subside, placed his monocle in his eye and said, "I had hardly thought it would ever be necessary, in this august assembly, to point out that treaties are not personal arrangements between individuals but solemn compacts agreed between nations, and on their sanctity rests the international intercourse of the civilized world. They govern the conditions of that intercourse and of trade and of friendship between nations, and if one is allowed to be broken without firm action, then none may be held to be of solid worth and nothing but chaos can result. They have nothing to do with hot bath water."

  Bentner seemed subdued, but only for a moment. "It's all very well to say that it's got nothing to do with bath water," he said, "but we'll all be in plenty of hot water of another kind if we break that treaty. About the first thing I can see happening is the United States will cut off the market for our wine and wool. All very well to say that we can find markets elsewhere. Maybe so. But not without some trouble, and why upset the arrangement that stands at the present time?

  "I'm not even going to talk about the Q-bomb, which is covered by that same treaty. We're international guardians of the Q-bomb, but many's the time I've wished someone would take that dratted thing and explode it somewhere in space. Hens haven't been laying at all well these past several years. Got three eggs last week double-yolked and the shells were pinkish."

  "What," asked the Count of Mountjoy, "have your hens got to do with the Q-bomb?"

  "I think it's leaking radiation," Bentner said. "That's what it's got to do with the Q-bomb. Ted Weathers, that lives in the cottage nearest the castle where the bomb is kept, was telling me the other day that he gets headaches and trembling spells and sometimes can't see properly."

  "It isn't closeness to the castle that produces these interesting symptoms in Ted Weathers," said Mountjoy, "but closeness to the tavern." This brought a roar of laughter, the Grey Goose being a favorite haunt of Ted Weathers. When order was restored Mountjoy told the House that the honorable Leader of Her Grace's Loyal Opposition seemed to have missed the point of the whole debate.

  "I find I have to emphasize that it is not a matter of Grand Fenwick breaking its treaty with the United States. It is a matter of the United States having already voided its treaty with Grand Fenwick. I have called this special ses
sion to inform members of this fact. The treaty is already null and void despite every effort on my part to preserve it. Its terms have been violated, I repeat, not by ourselves but by the United States. We have no treaty with them as matters stand at this moment.

  "Members are no doubt aware of the recent talks between the United States and the Soviet Union on the limitation of strategic armaments. They are popularly known as the SALT talks. We have never been invited to take any part in them, though as possessors of the quadium bomb we are certainly an atomic power, and by no means a minor atomic power.

  "The violation of the treaty by the United States leaves us free to open SALT talks of our own with whatever countries may be interested. With the permission of the House, I propose to open such talks."

  At this there was a storm of protest which the Speaker had some difficulty in bringing under control.

  "The opening of talks does not necessarily mean the concluding of agreements," said Mountjoy. "We live, gentlemen, in a world swept by hurricane forces. I refer not merely to the proliferation of atomic armaments of horrendous potential; I refer equally to economic weapons which can cause innocent nations to wither and fall into the pit of poverty. I refer to the prospect of unemployment for millions of people, to the destruction of currency and with it the destruction of the value of the work of honest men. I refer to the chaos of world economic collapse. And that is the threat which lies before us all at this moment in world history.

  "With that threat plainly in view, we in Grand Fenwick must not shirk our duty to mankind in every part of the world. I have given the matter much thought and have formed certain tentative plans. I will ask the indulgence of the House in not insisting that I reveal them now. I ask only, as an initial step, the assent of members to my proposal that we open SALT talks—that is, talks concerned with the future of the Q-bomb—of our own, without specifying for one moment with what country or countries they are to be conducted."

  Nobody knew what to say to this. Things seemed to be getting entirely out of hand. Everybody had been chuckling earlier in the meeting about Mountjoy's determination to get a hot bath. Now world economic collapse had been thrust before them, in some way linked to nuclear disarmament and the terrible bomb which, detonated, could destroy whole continents, in the conservative opinion of Dr. Kokintz.