Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “How long will you be here in Washington?”

  “Just for today. I’m giving a speech over at the DOE in a couple of hours. If I can get them on board it’d be a good thing.”

  “Not commerce?”

  “No.”

  “Fund-raising?”

  Eve’s lip curled. “I hate it with a passion.”

  “But it’s part of the game,” McGarvey said, and he realized that being with her was easy and pleasant. She was good-looking and very bright.

  She smiled. “I don’t suppose you have a spare billion or two for the cause?”

  That Afternoon

  The Department of Energy’s auditorium was large enough to seat two hundred, and the hall was packed this afternoon: people from the department, of course, and environmentalists and earth scientists, but people from Homeland Security too, which Eve supposed was because she’d been at Hutchinson Island yesterday; the Coast Guard, because of her work in the Gulf Stream, also coincidentally just offshore from the nuclear power plant; representatives from the White House and the State Department, because what she was proposing would cost in the trillions; a few executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and others, and a couple of senior analysts from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Department of the Interior, which controlled oil drilling and mining and the Department of Commerce which ran NOAA.

  And a rep from the International Energy Agency, who stood up and told the group that an investment of one trillion dollars per year would be needed through 2030 just to keep up with the demand for conventional energy.

  That had opened the debate after Eve’s familiar forty-minute talk about not only the need for alternative energy sources and her solution, but the need to control greenhouse gas emissions, which would effect global weather patterns, and with her broader, thus more controversial, proposal to control the weather.

  But looking out at her audience, all of them smart people, many of them the top minds in their governmental departments, think tanks, and universities, she was struck once again how much they were not hearing. As with just about every other group she’d talked to over the past fourteen months, these experts had only heard what their field demanded they hear.

  “If you’re talking about dumping oil and especially coal to produce energy in favor of ethanol, we’ll run into a big problem right off the bat,” an alternative energy expert from the University of Manitoba argued. “Just to replace oil we would have to plant corn on seventy-five percent of all the farmland on the entire planet.”

  To which one of the oil reps got up and reported that his company was cutting all of its investments in hydrogen, solar, and wind power in favor of biofuels.

  While the vice president of another oil giant told the audience that his company was scaling back its alternative energy research and returning to its primary goals of finding more oil reserves and more efficient means to pump it out of the ground, and how to better refine and use it.

  “The point is,” Eve broke in, keeping her anger in check as best she could, “we all have to agree that natural gas and especially oil are not renewable resources. We will run out sooner or later — probably sooner.”

  “With present technologies, and what’s on the drawing boards, that won’t happen until well into the next century,” the same oil executive argued, and Eve could see a general agreement among a sizable portion of her audience.

  “And greenhouse gases, and global warming?” she asked, though she suspected her question was rhetorical here. “Those issues will not go away. I don’t think there can be much argument about that basic premise, which is why my proposal for a World Energy Needs program is so important.”

  She stood at the podium at one side of the small stage, while the diagrams and some calculations she’d brought with her had been projected on the big flat-panel monitor to her right. The DOE had been gracious enough to allow her to make her presentation, and had been in some ways even more cooperative than Commerce.

  Her boss, Bob Krantz, had come over from Silver Spring, and was seated at the back of the auditorium. She’d gotten the proof she’d needed from her work last year in the Stream, and despite the accident — sabotage hadn’t been proved or disproved — he’d finally agreed to let her publish her findings.

  “But you’ll need a lot more,” he’d warned her. “You’ll have to convince a lot of people to go along with your scheme — not only other scientists and environmentalists, but the politicians and administrators.”

  “I know,” she’d agreed. “And the oil people.”

  “They’re the ones with the big bucks, and the ones whose throats you want to slit.”

  He hadn’t painted a very pretty picture, and this far away from him now, even though she couldn’t really tell the expression on his face, she knew damned well that he was thinking: I told you so.

  Don Price had been seated next to Krantz, but he was gone, and for some reason his absence bothered her.

  “Look at the science and the data and draw your own conclusions,” she told them. “For the next stage of my research I need money to purchase an out-of-commission oil drilling platform, refurbish it, and have it towed to a spot in the Gulf Stream just offshore from the Hutchinson Island power station. I need money to commission General Electric to build four Pax Scientific impellers, just like the ones aboard the Gordon Gunther , only these need to be eight meters in diameter, deliver them to the platform, and hook their generators by underwater cable to the Hutchinson Island power connection.”

  “Hutchinson Island will probably be down for a long time,” someone in the audience said without standing up. “Could be years.”

  “I spoke by phone earlier today with Sunshine State Power and Light’s chief engineer who says the power connection would most likely be feasible in one year or less, and it will take us that long to prepare the rig and the generators and run the cable ashore.”

  “You have claimed that your original Gulf Stream experiment was sabotaged, which resulted in the death of one of your crew members, and the near drowning of another,” someone else from the audience spoke up. “And Hutchinson Island may have been sabotaged. So now aren’t you concerned that if you go ahead with your experiment that you’ll become a target again?”

  “I’ve considered that possibility. Yes.”

  “Yet you’re willing to gamble your life and perhaps the lives of your crew to test your hypothesis?”

  “I think solving our energy needs and reducing the intensity of destructive storms around the planet is worth the risk,” Eve said.

  “Who’s behind the attacks on you and on Hutchinson Island?” the same man asked. She thought he was one of the reps from the White House, but she wasn’t sure. “No group has come forward to claim responsibility.”

  And it was the sixty-four-dollar question she’d hoped wouldn’t be asked, but had expected. Here and now, however, was not the time or place to give them the answer that was on the tip of her tongue, had been on the tip of her tongue since she’d evacuated from the power plant. Oil interests, she wanted to tell them, and their reactions would be as predictable to her as they would be inevitable. Preposterous. No evidence. Certainly no proof. And she would be cutting her own throat, as Krantz had warned. Blaming big oil, or the financial organizations that most profited from the manipulation of oil exploration, market development, and the futures and derivatives that resulted, would completely cut her off from funding by them. Even though it was for a project that would guarantee the future of their companies.

  Think beyond oil production, she wanted to tell them. Think energy production instead. From her project, from wind farms, from solar mining.

  But in the end what she most wanted to say to them was that once the impossible was eliminated, whatever was left — however improbable — would be the truth.

  Don Price came in from the rear of the auditorium, said something to Krantz, and then headed up the aisle to the stage, with such an over-the-top l
ook of excitement on his face that he practically ran the last few feet and leapt up the stairs to her side.

  “Excuse me, Doctor Larsen,” he blurted.

  And something in the way he said it — he never called her Doctor Larsen — was alarming. But it wasn’t bad news. She didn’t think.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said into the microphone on the podium. “But this is important.” He looked at Eve and smiled in the way she found devastating.

  “What?” she asked.

  But he turned back to the audience. “I got word just a few minutes ago that Dr. Larsen had received an e-mail at her lab from Oslo, Norway, informing her that she has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on energy and climate change.”

  Eve was rocked back on her heels. The physics prize she had expected, though not for several more years, perhaps even a decade or more — because most Nobel laureates were a hell of a lot older than her. But the Peace Prize, and just now?

  For just a few seconds no one moved, no one said a thing, until Krantz got to his feet and began to clap, which started everyone else applauding, some with more enthusiasm than others.

  Whenever Don wore a tie, it was almost always loose; some sort of a rebel statement he was making, but for some reason she noticed that he had snugged it up.

  The applause didn’t last long, and when it died down, Don continued.

  “She’ll be presented with the gold medal and diploma at Oslo’s city hall, on December tenth,” he said, and he turned to her again, and held out his hand. “Let me be the first to congratulate you,” he said, loudly enough for those in the front row to hear.

  And then they shook hands, hugged, and he kissed her on the cheek.

  “You beat the bastards after all,” he said in her ear.

  She didn’t know how she felt, except that she was on the verge of tears, which she would not allow to happen. Not here and now. So she grinned. “Not yet,” she told him. “But it’s a start.”

  “Yeah, the damn thing works.”

  * * *

  Although Department of Energy’s Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell had not attended Eve’s presentation, someone from his staff who was there, had called him with the Nobel Prize news, and he showed up as Eve was making her way up the aisle accepting congratulations and handshakes from just about everyone within reach. He was at the back of the hall, smiling broadly.

  “Congratulations, Doctor,” he said, shaking her hand. “This must be a wonderful vindication for your work.”

  “And a surprise, Mr. Secretary,” she said gracefully. She hadn’t met him before, although of course she knew of him, because he had given his initial blessing to approach SSP&L with her project. He was one of the Washington insiders who was on his way up.

  “You were mentioned a couple of years ago for the Prize,” he said.

  “Physics,” she said. “But thank you, and thanks for the use of your auditorium.”

  “Yours is an important project, and I suspect that the Peace Prize will stand you in greater stead than a scientific prize, especially with the people who you’ll want to help with funding.”

  “You were one of the first people I was going to approach, after my boss at NOAA.”

  His smile was neutral. “The department cannot fund you, but I certainly can direct you to some folks who might be able to help. Perhaps Exxon or BP would be willing to give you one of their retired or soon-to-be retired oil platforms I know people over at Interior.”

  “I don’t believe I have many friends in the oil industry,” Eve had said.

  “You don’t understand how things work in the business world; this has nothing whatsoever to do with friendship. It has to do about appearances. Most of the oil producers are backing away from alternative energy research.”

  “Just what I mean.”

  “But they’re taking heat in the media because of it, and because of the BP Gulf spill. Giving you a piece of hardware that they’re no longer using would cost them nothing — hell, it would even save them the money they’d have to spend at a breaker yard. And this way they’d get the benefits of some good PR for a change.” He shook her hand again. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  Eve and Don followed Krantz up to his office in Silver Spring and for the first ten minutes neither of them said a word, especially not Eve who was so caught up with the Nobel Prize thing that she could not think of anything else. She realized at one point that what she was feeling was a legitimate sense of wonderment or rapture, perhaps even the Rapture, but instead of meeting Christ at the midway point down from heaven, she was seeing her project actually happening. As Krantz had told her before they left the DOE auditorium: “It’ll be hard to say no to a Nobel laureate.”

  Don finally looked over at her. “You’ll have a lot of crap facing you in the next few days. I didn’t say anything back there, but the FBI wants to interview you about what you were doing at Hutchinson Island.”

  “Begging for them not to laugh me out of there,” she said.

  “Debbie said this guy sounded serious.”

  Debbie Milner was the general office manager at NOAA, and it was she who’d also taken the e-mail from Oslo through Eve’s lab at Princeton. Nothing got by her.

  “I’ll talk to them,” Eve said. “But we have a lot of work to do, and probably less than a year to get it done, because I want to be ready to plug into Hutchinson Island’s power connection once it’s up and running.”

  Don laughed. “You’re not thinking straight, Eve.”

  She looked at him, really looked at him this time. He was an arrogant, conceited, irritating man, a prick at times, but at thirty-one he was one of the most intelligent men, other than her ex, she’d ever known, and she’d known a lot of bright guys. His Ph.D. thesis at Princeton three years ago was on possible methods of controlling the planet’s climate, and its sheer brilliance and clarity were among the main reasons she had considered him for postdoc work, even though she hadn’t been his thesis adviser. The fact she’d found him attractive had almost, but not quite, made her drop him from consideration, but in the end she’d hired him, and was still very glad she had done so.

  “The Nobel Prize thing?” she asked.

  “Right from the get-go; they’re setting up a party for you in the boardroom, but that’s just the start. Debbie says the phones have been ringing off the hook, and our Web site is damn near in gridlock with people wanting to talk to you. Mostly the press, but M.I.T., Cal Tech, Harvard, and a bunch of other department heads, plus the environmental geeks want a piece of you, too. She didn’t have time to tell me everything, but on top of all that you’re going to have to come up with a statement for the media — a sound bite that won’t put everyone to sleep — and beyond that you’ll need to start work on your acceptance speech.”

  She had to laugh with him, because of course he was right. And she’d never understood until just this moment why just about every writer or scientist complained that getting the Nobel Prize had kept them from their work. But Krantz was right too, when he assured her that it would be tough to say no to a Nobel laureate. Look what it had done for Al Gore; taken him from a failed presidential candidate to a respected, even renowned world figure who’d spoken at the U.N. And she relaxed a little, knowing that she would have to start learning how to go with the flow.

  Sensing her new mood, Don reached over and patted her on the knee. “That’s better.”

  “As long as they don’t try to put my face on Wheaties boxes,” she said.

  That Evening

  Anne Marie Marinaccio had buried herself in her work over the past year plus, each month that passed with no news driving her ever deeper into a funk that seemed at times to be bottomless. Ominously she’d not been pressured by al-Naimi or anyone else from Riyadh or any of the royals who’d invested, and continued to invest with the MG. And in some ways their new investments, many of them quite heavy, in the range of several hundreds of millions U.S., were even more t
roublesome to her. It was as if they — collectively — knew something that she didn’t. And at times she’d been afraid that some sword of Damocles was about to drop down and chop her head off.

  But except for the dismal state of the economy, worldwide, during which the MG had continued to invest not only on shorted oil issues, in secret as much as that was possible given the volume of money she was hedging, nothing seemed to be lurking around the corner. Al-Naimi had kept the wolves at bay as he had promised for fourteen long months.

  And suddenly it was as if the dam had burst. Gunther had called her yesterday around ten in the evening. “It’s been done.”

  And she remembered her feelings of relief mixed with a bit of awe at what she had set in motion, and the reasons for it as well as the consequences. Especially the unintended consequences, the even more important thought that came into her head as she watched the CNN news reports on the scene, and listened as the commentators explained that although the incident was bad, circumstances had made the meltdown and release of radiation far less disastrous than the Three Mile Island incident more than three decades ago, and especially less disastrous than the more recent Chernobyl accident.

  A National Nuclear Security Administration official was the first to use the term sabotage, but that for two NNSA teams on the ground at Hutchinson Island the incident would have been nothing short of catastrophic. When pressed for details the official cited national security concerns, leaving the newscasters, and a few nuclear energy experts from industry as well as academia to their explanations of emergency shutdown procedures that included automatic scramming and coolant water dumping and why they did not work as designed.

  Which, of course, led to even more intense speculation about the safety of the other 100-plus nuclear power stations in the U.S., and the call for more security, and it reminded Anne Marie of the hue and cry over airport security in the wake of the 9/11 disaster.

  Then early this morning she received a telephone call at the same encrypted number Gunther regularly used, this one from her friend and longtime heavy investor from as far back as the dot-com boom, that a situation in Caracas had been successfully handled.