But that two geologists would want to investigate Perne's Folly set the Duchy tingling with excitement. It had been believed for centuries that there was treasure of some sort hidden there—gold, perhaps, or diamonds or, some said, rubies as big as pigeons' eggs lying in a cluster below the center of the stony valley. Otherwise why would that Frenchman Perne have bought the place in the first instance, centuries ago? Frenchmen were not fools when it came to money. That was something everybody knew. So when, after lying somewhat longer abed in the morning than they had intended, the two geologists arose to have breakfast, they found a score of Grand Fenwickians outside the inn, waiting to accompany them to the legendary but neglected valley.
Among them was Stedforth, editor of the Grand Fenwick Times.
To his questions they replied that they had been engaged to make a geological survey of the valley. They were not looking for anything in particular. They referred him to the Count of Mountjoy for further information. Stedforth knew of the visit of Birelli, had discovered that Birelli was a power in the world of oil, and now was confronted with two strange geologists making a survey of a little-known part of the Duchy.
He went immediately to Mountjoy and when he had been admitted said in his somewhat abrupt manner, "One question. There are two geologists here in Grand Fenwick. Birelli was here a couple of weeks ago. Would I be very far wrong if I said that they were looking for oil?"
This was precisely the question that Mountjoy wanted to be asked. But he did not want it to appear that this was so. So he took his time answering, going to the lancet window which offered him his favorite view, and looking down into the courtyard where the white cross on the ground marked the landing spot for the helicopter. It had taken off with Birelli and would return in a few days with the scaffolding, draw works and other paraphernalia of a light drilling rig. So he gazed out of the window, seemingly in deep thought, and then turned slowly to face the expectant Stedforth.
"You can certainly say that the geologists are looking for oil," he said. "And I can give you some hint of the nature of Birelli's visit. As you know, the oil supply from the nations of the Persian Gulf has become both limited and expensive. It has also become uncertain due to the military situation. As I am sure you also know, there is a world search for a new source of oil. It appears that there is a prospect—let me emphasize the word 'prospect'—of there being oil in Grand Fenwick. In fairly large quantities," he added.
"More likely horsefeathers," said Stedforth. "Tell me—does this very unlikely prospect of yours result from a fresh study of previous geological surveys?"
"No," said Mountjoy. "It appears that satellites are capable of locating minerals, water and even oil reservoirs on earth, though by means I am quite unable to explain to you. A satellite photograph which has been lying around for several years awaiting examination indicated the presence of oil in Grand Fenwick—around the Perne's Folly area."
Stedforth was somewhat shaken by this unlikely news, but surprising things, he knew, were revealed by satellite photography of the earth so he withheld judgment.
That Mountjoy was lying did not trouble him a whit. But it was important to have a bolt-hole so that it could not be shown that he was lying.
"I'll admit that there is some hint that what appears to be a reservoir of oil in Grand Fenwick may instead be some deficiency in the emulsion on the negative," he said.
"If we did find oil in Grand Fenwick," said Stedforth, "where would we store it?" This was another question that Mountjoy was very glad was being put to him.
"I'm certainly not going to put the Duchy to the expense of building a lot of storage tanks," he said. "We have one ancient reservoir which will make the building of storage tanks quite unnecessary for a long time."
"We have?" said Stedforth. "Where?"
"In the dungeon of the castle," said the Count. "I discover that it is entirely watertight, has remained so through the centuries. It will readily hold oil as well as water."
"HOW much oil?" asked Stedforth.
"Seven hundred thousand and twenty-four barrels," said Mountjoy. "That would do, I fancy, for the time being. If oil is discovered—'struck' I think is the proper term—we will merely have to construct a pipeline and pumps to get it from the well or wells to the castle dungeon for temporary storage."
"What about the Q-bomb?" asked Stedforth. "That's being kept in the dungeon for safety."
"It will be removed to somewhere equally safe, someplace where perhaps it will be of more service to mankind."
"Where?" demanded Stedforth. And Mountjoy, thinking back to happier times in the world—or so they seemed from this distance—recalled the famous reply of a famous American President and said, "Shangri-La."
Meanwhile, Johannes and Karl, wishing they hadn't drunk quite so much October ale, were stumbling about among the rocks in Perne's Folly watched by twenty or thirty people of Grand Fenwick who had nothing better to do. After consulting among themselves, these suggested to the two Swiss that they start at the north end of the valley where there was a large hill of stones under which all were convinced the treasure must lie. Despite their poor showing in geology, the two of them took one look at the hill and recognized it as a moraine—debris left by an Ice Age glacier. Still they walked around and over it, Karl wearing the earphones and Johannes carrying the crystal set and mysteriously manipulating the buttons which operated its primitive works.
Suddenly Karl stopped in the middle of the moraine.
"What is it?" Johannes demanded.
"This thing's working," Karl said. "I just heard part of a broadcast in French."
"What were they saying?"
"Hush. Give me that box." He took it from Johannes and began turning the buttons slowly. Very faintly he heard a voice saying, "Ici Radio-Paris. Nous avons reçu de joyeuses nouvelles pour tout le monde. C'est qu'on a découvert une véritable mer de pétrole a Grand Fenwick. Le problème qui éxiste maintenant est: Où est Grand Fenwick?"
"What are they saying?" Johannes demanded.
Karl looked around to see that no one of Grand Fenwick was within earshot.
"They're saying that a sea of oil has been found in Grand Fenwick," he said. "Merde. All we've been doing is walking around with this stupid thing. I haven't even looked at a rock yet."
"That's Mountjoy's work. He's forcing our hand," Johannes said. "He's making it so that we have to announce an oil strike here. Otherwise we forfeit our reputations."
"Forfeit our reputations?" Karl cried. "You out of your mind? What you mean is we'll preserve our reputations, as the two worst geologists in Switzerland. Still, I don't like being pushed around. Sounds like that Mountjoy doesn't trust us, announcing the news of an oil strike before we've announced it ourselves."
"Oh, I don't know," said the other reflectively. "Makes it easier. I mean, without a radio broadcast from Paris about the strike, who would believe us anyway?"
They came down from the top of the moraine and announced to those around that their instrument, though extremely sensitive, showed no indication of any treasure under the heap of stones left by the glacier. This discouraged the spectators, and it being now 11:30 A.M., which meant that the public bar of the Grey Goose would be open in half an hour, they trickled off in twos and threes, leaving Karl and Johannes alone.
They had brought some lunch with them, and sat down with their backs to a large worn boulder to eat. Before them, making a low table on which to put their sandwiches and Thermoses of tea, was another worn rock of a lightish color, from which the sun struck little sparkles of fire. Karl, pouring tea into his cup, upset some of it on the rock and moodily watched it soak into the surface. "What do you remember about oil?" he asked his companion after a while.
"Oh. There were big forests and insects ate into the trees and killed them. So the trees fell down and got buried in the swampy ground out of which they grew and-"
"That's coal," Karl said. "Oil was different."
Johannes thought about it for a mom
ent.
"I think it was dinosaurs," he said. "You know. Those big lizards. They died and got buried and turned to jelly and then to oil, and where a lot of them died, that's an oilfield. I read of it in an oil company advertisement in an American magazine. Why?"
"I think it's got something to do with the sea," said Karl. "Something to do with eensy weensy seashells or creatures which were just blobs of jelly like tapioca. I can't remember the name though. Miniformina or forminifera or something. Anyway, after billions of years they turned to oil. What I mean is that oil started in the bottom of the-sea."
"Which is a long way from here," said Johannes taking a big bite of his sandwich and looking around at the valley of rocks strewn with Ice Age debris and oven-hot in the blinding sunlight.
"Is, but wasn't always," Karl said. "See that?" and he pointed to the dark spot on the rock where he had upset some tea.
"You spilled some tea," Johannes said. "So what?"
"Look a little closer," Karl said. "That rock's made up of tiny shells. There's masses of them all over it. They're not part of the glacier deposit. They were thrust up out of the bed of the ocean."
"Look," said Johannes. "We agreed in our second year at Lausanne that we weren't going to believe that crap, except for the purpose of passing exams. We agreed that the Bible was simple and probably right and everybody since Darwin has been wrong. Seashells come from the Flood."
"Okay," said Karl. "They come from the Flood. But they are seashells. And more than that, those eensy weensy seashells are the ones associated with oil deposits, I think. It's just possible that there is oil in Grand Fenwick."
"If there was the Americans or the British or the Arabs would have found it long ago," said Johannes.
"Nope. Because up to the present they weren't looking hard enough. What are you doing?"
"Shush," said Johannes. "I'm seeing if I can get more of that Paris broadcast." He held up a hand for quiet and with the earphones in place twiddled with the knobs of the crystal set. For a while he got only a series of whistles and howls which made him grimace and then a voice, a very faint voice saying, "…et pour bonbon nous avons pour vous ce canard délicieux—on met en évidence incontestable qu'on a découvert un mer véritable du pétrole en Grand Fenwick. La difficulté qui éxiste maintenant est de découvrir Grand Fenwick."
Johannes switched off the set and looked thoughtfully at his fellow geologist.
"They're making fun of us," he said. "They're broadcasting that the joke of the week is that an oil strike has been made in Grand Fenwick. We're the fall guys. We're the ones everybody will be laughing at when we announce that there is oil in Grand Fenwick as Mountjoy is paying us to do. Johannes Dupin and Karl Stampfli, the geological idiots of Europe."
"Well, wasn't that why we got the job in the first place?"
"The point is," said Johannes, "that we just may be able to turn the tables on them. We just may be able to find oil in Grand Fenwick. Then we'd have the last laugh. Let's look for more of these rocks with the eensy weensy shells in them."
"I've run out of tea," Karl said.
"You don't need tea. Just look closely at the rocks. The tea just makes it easier to find them." They spent the rest of the day searching the valley and found a number of shell-bearing rocks forming a rough dome to one side of the valley, which encouraged Karl. Domes, he said, were significant, but he couldn't remember whether in connection with salt or with oil deposits. "We'll look silly if we hit hot salt water," said Johannes, overcome by gloomy afterthoughts.
"We can't look silly whatever happens," replied his companion. "If we find oil we're brilliant. If we don't we announce that we have found it and Mountjoy has to supply the stuff and make the announcement good."
When they returned to the Grey Goose that evening they were tired but cheerful. The temptation to have a bottle of October ale was all but overwhelming, but Karl ordered the vin du pays—the great wine of the country known as Pinot Grand Fenwick.
"Nineteen sixty-five, gentlemen," said the bartender, pouring the wine as solemnly as if this were the world's first baptism. "What a year, premier grand cru. I assure you that I have put one bottle aside to be brought to me in my dying moments so I may leave the world joyfully and after my last sip leap straight into the arms of God."
They both sniffed and then sipped the wine and nodded in appreciation, for little as they knew of geology, they were Europeans and knew a great deal about wine. "You are celebrating something, gentlemen?" asked the bartender.
"Yes indeed," said Johannes. "We celebrate the riches of the earth of Grand Fenwick."
Every ear in the bar was cocked to hear what would come next.
"Our wine, perhaps?" suggested the bartender.
"No," said Karl, who had finished his glass, rather loutishly in a couple of swallows and on whom the vintage was beginning to tell. "Not wine, gentlemen. Black gold. I say no more."
The two left while the bar buzzed with excitement over the discovery of black gold, whatever that might be, in Perne's Folly, rich with its legends of buried treasure.
CHAPTER XIV
The next few weeks saw the importation into Grand Fenwick from France of a light drilling rig: draw works, pipelines and rotary pumps, and the plates out of which a small oil storage tank could be constructed. All this was arranged by Birelli, and the excitement was so great in the Duchy that work almost came to a standstill. Everybody now knew that the "black gold" which the two Swiss geologists had mentioned in the bar of the Grey Goose meant oil, and Mountjoy had called another special session of the House of Freemen to announce that his geological survey had resulted in a report that there was the highest expectation of a large reservoir of oil of excellent quality being found in Grand Fenwick.
The Count was rather irritated at the time with Birelli. Birelli, testing public reaction, had leaked the story in France previous to Mountjoy's announcement, resulting in the scoffing report on French radio already referred to. Birelli hadn't expected such a reaction, but then he was unaware of the centuries-old rivalry between France and Grand Fenwick. His serious mention at a reception given in his honor at the American Embassy in Paris of the prospect of there being oil in Grand Fenwick, exaggerated to an actual oil strike by reporters, had been taken as the richest joke of the year, particularly since it came from such an authority as himself.
As soon as the joke was out, world oil prices began to rise again, for the secret meaning of what Birelli had said was taken to be that there was not the slightest likelihood of any new oil strike being made anywhere on earth. The world, in short, had all the oil it was likely to get. Such a conviction could only lead to the hoarding of supplies and reduced distribution, forcing prices up higher, to Birelli's annoyance.
Mountjoy, however, went ahead with his end of the scheme. He had passed around a handful of the minute seashells which had been discovered by Johannes and Karl in Perne's Folly, and they had been examined with grunts and dubious looks by the members of the House of Freemen. They didn't look much like oil to anybody, but Bentner, who was of course in collusion with the Count, talked learnedly of oil shell and oil shale, mixing the two together, and Karl and Johannes being produced and asked to address the House acquitted themselves so well, and were so serious about the prospect of an oil strike, that Mountjoy concluded that not only had he hired the two worst geologists in Switzerland, but he had as a bonus received the two best actors in that nation.
The drilling platform was assembled on a place selected by the two geologists which was first cleared of boulders, and then the exploration rig was erected. Drilling did not commence until two pipelines had been laid underground—one from the French road outside the borders of the Duchy and the other to the dungeon of the castle. Everybody now understood the use of the one leading to the dungeon—that was the place where the oil was to be stored. Some thought that the smell would be more than those living in the castle—including Her Grace and Mountjoy—could tolerate. Others thought it dangerous—that
there might be a fire or an explosion which would blow the castle up. Mountjoy pooh-poohed such thinking. Safety precautions, which he did not detail, would be quite sufficient. And the dungeon had always smelled, so the smell of oil would come almost as a relief to the occupants.
The other pipeline, leading first to a small pump and storage tank on the borders of the Duchy and then beyond to the French military road, required explanation, which was soon provided. This was the pipeline by which Grand Fenwick's oil would be conveyed out of the Duchy to be pumped into the big tank trucks which would soon be coming to collect it.
The opposite, of course, would be the case. The big tank trucks under the Birelli-Mountjoy agreement, would actually be pumping oil—millions of gallons of it—into the dungeon, whence, of course, it would later be pumped out, having in the interim become not Arabian but Grand Fenwick oil.
While all this business was going on—the erection of the drilling rig, storage tank, pipelines, Mountjoy had been writing to the sheiks of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq and other Persian Gulf oil-producing nations, saying that he had a matter of high diplomatic importance to discuss with them, involving their security in the atomic age, and asking that a representative be sent to Grand Fenwick to open talks.
He had a plan of his own concerning the Q-bomb which he had not mentioned to Birelli, a plan which went beyond the stabilizing of international oil prices at some sensible figure, and ensuring continued supplies. He decided he must now discuss this plan with Her Grace and Bentner—with the latter with some reluctance, for Bentner, though the leader of the Duchy's Labor Party, was conservative to the core and abhorred any proposal which involved even the slightest degree of risk.
The Mouse That Saved The West: ebook Edition (The Grand Fenwick Series 4) Page 10
