Oil Slick

by Warren Murphy

  One knife wielder came close and Remo took his wrist and fenced off another knife. He did this in a very simple way. He popped blade into brain and suddenly the second blade no longer faced his stomach.

  Remo kept walking toward the hotel, still carrying the first knife wielder’s wrist. Then one more came at him and made the mistake of getting between Remo and his hotel. It was Caesar and he saw Remo’s face and decided to get out of Remo’s way, but he changed his mind a moment too late.

  While the city of Denver would pay for Caesar’s funeral as it had paid for his birth, his house, his food, and his schooling (where he had learned to call all this sustenance oppression, though he did not feel oppressed enough to get a job), somehow the city of Denver had deserted him now in his moment of need. Caesar found himself within arm’s length of the crazy gringo. Alone. Without even a social worker to help. And that was all.

  No more Caesar.

  Chico, whose wrist had been borrowed for the fight, bawled and demanded it back. Without looking, Remo casually tossed it over his shoulder. It landed at the young man’s knees.

  Back at the hotel, he knocked on the door that had not answered for the last few days.

  “Little Father,” he called. “I have found the mountain. I always was what I am now. The ignorance has been removed.”

  And now there was an answer.

  “Good. Then we are ready and we will be found.” Chiun had been saying the same thing for weeks and Remo had not understood it. But now he did. He knew what Chiun meant by saying that they would be found, and he knew by whom.

  “I understand, Little Father,” he called.

  And from another nearby room came an angry growl.

  “Hey, you out there, shut up or I’ll come out and close your mouth for good.” And since Remo had nothing more to say, he went back to his own room and back to sleep, realizing that a mountain was a thing you climbed or fell from, but not a place where you rested.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE FIRST THING DR. RAVELSTEIN noticed about the badges was that they were upside down. If the two men in the neat gray suits were really from the FBI, wouldn’t their badges be right side up in their billfolds? Then again, Dr. Ravelstein had once met an FBI man while getting a security clearance, and didn’t he use an identification card instead of a badge? Oh well, no matter.

  “I can’t make out your badges,” said Dr. Ravelstein. He was tired. It was 3:30 a.m and since 9:00 a.m. the day before, he had been looking at greenish printouts from the terminal connected to one of the University of Michigan computers. With his tired fifty-year-old eyes, he probably couldn’t have made out whether the agents had shown him badges or sliced salami, he thought. Thinking about his tired eyes, Dr. Marvin Ravelstein, professor of engineering, suddenly realized that his eyeglasses were not in front of his eyes. He had put them somewhere when he had heard the door in the laboratory open.

  “If you put on your glasses, you might make out our identification a little better,” said the larger agent.

  “Yes. The glasses. Where are they?”

  “On your head.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Who are you? Ah, yes, Special Agent Paul Mobley and Special Agent Martin Philbin. I see. Yes. Very good. Very good. Very good. Well, thank you for dropping by. It’s been nice having you.”

  “Sir, we’ve come to discuss something very important You may be the man who can save the world.”

  Dr. Ravelstein sighed and nodded, indicating stools near his laboratory bench. Outside, the unseasonable spring heat made the Michigan campus a muggy sock of a night. In here, his own cigarettes combined with the air conditioning to turn the air into a bitter environment, especially if it had to be endured for more than six hours at a stretch. Dr. Ravelstein nodded to himself again. What the FBI men had said was correct. He not only could save industrialized society from bankruptcy, he had done it. And the amusing part was that the numbers had told him he was a success, not the tangible products in the other room. Those could be touched by anyone and anyone could say this is fine crude oil over here and this is a marvelous new building material over there, but not until the computer digested massive marketing facts, did he know that he was successful. His months-old suspicions had been borne out just twenty-five minutes ago. Twenty-five minutes, and it had taken the government bureaucrats no longer than that to get their sticky fingers into the pie.

  “Can save the world?” said Ravelstein. “I have, if you must know. At least, I’ve given it a twenty-year reprieve. I suppose I’m in for some sort of a prize if that means anything at all. Actually, gentlemen, I’d rather have a good night’s sleep. What can I do for you? Please make it brief. I’m very tired.”

  “We have reason to believe, Dr. Ravelstein, that your life is in danger.”

  “Nonsense. Who would want to harm me?”

  “The same people who killed Dr. Johnson of Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute.”

  “Erik is dead? No,” said Ravelstein, sinking softly into his chair. “No. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”

  “Late yesterday. His back was broken in a fall. It looked like an accident, but it wasn’t. It was as accidental as a sniper shot. One of his assistants saw the two men push him down a stairwell,” said Special Agent Mobley, the larger one.

  “Yeah, it was said that he put up a real struggle for a man his age,” said Philbin, his thin, pinched face apparently mournful.

  Was the agent laughing at him from behind that mournful face? Did that agent think there was something funny about Dr. Johnson’s death? No. Impossible. It must be the hour. It was so very late.

  “I’d like to call the Johnson family.”

  “At this hour, Dr. Ravelstein? Perhaps they have just gotten Mrs. Johnson under sedation. You don’t know, do you?”

  “Are you sure he was…he was killed?”

  “Yes. He made a tragic mistake. His work in hydrocarbons came too close to providing a substitute for gasoline,” said Mobley.

  “Oh, he had that for years,” said Ravelstein. He lit a cigarette and offered the two men the pack. They refused but Mobley lighted the cigarette for Ravelstein, who sucked hungrily on the smoke. At this hour, he didn’t even enjoy cigarettes any more. Then again, he thought, how many cigarettes a day did he ever enjoy? One? Possibly none.

  “What do you mean, he had that for years?” asked Agent Mobley.

  “Erik had the gasoline substitute for years. Don’t you gentlemen understand what the oil crisis is all about? The whole energy crisis has got nothing to do with the amount of energy or whether we can find more. There is more energy available than man can ever use. He’ll be trampling himself to death for lack of space before he runs out of energy.”

  Dr. Ravelstein watched the shock on the faces of the two agents. It was always like that. As if one of the major problems of industrialized society was as mysterious as an eclipse to a savage.

  “You mean the Johnson gas substitute was not a solution?” asked Agent Mobley, his beefy face squinted in disbelief. “He died for nothing?”

  “Died for nothing. Died for something. Dead is dead. I don’t know why people consider some sorts of death noble.”

  “You were saying, Doctor, about Johnson’s substitute being no solution.”

  Ravelstein smiled. He lifted up the heavy folded computer printout forms and handed them to Mobley.

  “Here. This is the solution.”

  “It’s a chemical formula?” asked Mobley.

  Ravelstein laughed. “It is not. It is a collection of freight charges, building needs, labor costs, the rising prices of cement, brick and stressed concrete. Estimates, of course, but America now has an estimated twenty-year solution to its energy crisis. It’s a reprieve.”

  “I don’t understand. Where did you find a substitute for oil?”

  “I didn’t. I found a substitute for brick, cement, and aluminum. I found a substitute for asphalt. I found a substitute for wood.”

  Philbin looked at Mobl
ey as if they had stumbled into a sleep-crazed loony. Mobley ignored the silent communication. He felt his palms become sweaty holding the printout. He knew he was hearing the truth.

  Dr. Ravelstein lifted a small blackboard from his desk.

  “Don’t hold that printout as though it’s diamonds. It’s only a map. A way out of the energy crisis. Are you following my train of thought?”

  Mobley glanced suspiciously at the printout. “I think so,” he said hesitantly.

  “No, you aren’t,” said Ravelstein. “All right. It wasn’t until 1970 that the United States began depending on oil imports. Not because we didn’t have oil, but because it was cheaper to import oil from the Arabian gulf than to pump it at home. It becomes more expensive with any well as you get near the bottom. I don’t know if you knew that.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Mobley.

  “We could be sitting on a pool of oil right now and be out of oil—economically out of oil, that is—just because it is too expensive to pump out of the ground. We have literally oceans of oil in shale. Oceans of it.”

  “But it’s too expensive, right?” said Mobley.

  “Was too expensive,” said Ravelstein.

  “Well, even I know you have to process tons and tons of shale to get oil. Tons and tons,” said Mobley.

  Dr. Ravelstein grinned mischievously. “That’s right,” he said. “Tons and tons of worthless shale to get out the oil. The oil would be priced sky high Too high to be of any use to the driver, to the corporation, to the utilities. No one could afford it. That was what was wrong with Dr. Johnson’s gasoline substitute. It cost three dollars a gallon to produce. The country can’t run on three-dollar-a-gallon gas.”

  “So what’s your solution?” asked Mobley.

  “Come. I’ll show you.”

  “C’mon, Philbin,” said Mobley. Philbin nodded dully and hitched up his shoulder strap. Dr. Ravelstein saw the handle of a .45 caliber automatic and thought it was strange because he had been under the impression FBI men used only revolvers because revolvers were said to be less prone to jamming. Or was it that they used only automatics? No matter, it was not his field.

  He led the two men to a small door; it opened without a key.

  “If whatever you’ve discovered is in there, shouldn’t you have it under lock and key?”

  “I guess working with criminals so much you’ve developed a criminal mind.” said Ravelstein. “What’s in there is free, anyhow. As free as common sense.” He opened the door and turned on the lights.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have bothered turning off the lights. We’re all going to have as much cheap energy as we can use for the next twenty years. Gentlemen, here it is.”

  “Here what is?” asked Mobley as he heard Philbin chuckle. All he saw was a pile of bricks, some thin wall-board, and a bin of dust.

  “Gentlemen, here is brick, here is wallboard, and here is cement. They’re all economically competitive, and they’re all made from shale.”

  “I think I get the idea now,” said Mobley. “That printout back there had nothing to do with oil needs, did it?”

  “You’d make an excellent student, Mr. Mobley. What do you think those figures were about?”

  “They were about bullshit,” said Philbin. He tapped Mobley on the back. “C’mon, let’s do what we gotta do instead of hanging around here pulling on our ears.”

  Mobley gave the thin man an icy look.

  “I think,” he told Ravelstein, “those printouts were about America’s building needs for the next decade.”

  “Not only America’s,” said Ravelstein. “South America and Asia, too.”

  “You mean there are transportation figures in there, too?”

  “Right,” said Ravelstein. “Now for an A plus, tell me the cost of producing oil by my method?”

  Philbin looked bored. Mobley looked astonished.

  “Not a penny,” he said. “Brilliant. You produce salable building material and what’s left over is the oil. The key is not taking the oil out of the shale, but making use of the shale with the oil left over. Fantastic. Where do you keep the formula?”

  “In my head,” said Dr. Ravelstein. “But it’s no great discovery. A simple process which most chemical engineers could duplicate if asked to do so.”

  “Thank you,” said Philbin and unsnapped his shoulder holster. Dr. Ravelstein watched in fascination beyond horror. He saw the smaller man take out a large gun that somehow fit very well into the small hand. He saw the flash around the barrel and nothing else. His last thought was, “I do not believe this is happening to me.”

  He experienced no terror nor even a wish that what he saw transpiring should not transpire. He made a very accurate and dispassionate assessment of the situation. He was going to be killed. And then he was.

  Paul Mobley watched the elderly head snap back with a big fat red hole in the center of the skull. Ravelstein hit the laboratory floor like a sack of his own shale cement.

  “You damned idiot. What the hell did you do that for?” Mobley yelled at Philbin.

  “That’s what we’re supposed to do instead of standing around here jerking around.”

  “We were supposed to close down Ravelstein’s research. Burn his formulas. Steal his samples or whatever we found. We were supposed to stop his project, not necessarily kill him.”

  “A little blood bother you, Paulie?” laughed Philbin, putting his gun back in its holster. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

  “Out of here, you idiot?” Mobley’s beefy face flushed red. “What good will it do to get out of here?”

  “Take that printout and let’s go.”

  “Weren’t you listening? The printout isn’t the key. It’s these building materials. Somebody takes a good look at these and Ravelstein might as well be alive.”

  “But they don’t have the formula to make the stuff, Paulie. Come on, let’s go.”

  “They don’t need the formula, idiot. Didn’t you hear him? Any chemical engineer could do it, if he was told to.”

  Lights went on across the campus. They heard footsteps running up the stairs. The weary elevator motor hummed into life.

  “Come on, Paulie, come on,” said Philbin desperately.

  “We can’t go without this stuff.”

  “I’m going, Paulie. I don’t want to wait for the cops.”

  “We either face the cops or you know who.”

  “He don’t have to know.”

  “You think he ain’t going to know?” asked Mobley.

  “Oh, Jesus,” whined Philbin.

  “Shut up and listen this time.” Mobley outlined a plan.

  When the campus watchmen barged into the laboratory, Mobley flashed his badge and immediately demanded to know who the watchmen were. His tone was harsh and authoritative, with a lingering ring of suspicion.

  They were old men, these campus guards, retired machine operators or gas station attendants, whose main job was filling a blue uniform with an official-looking badge that had no more legal power than a belt buckle.

  Mobley had no trouble badgering the watchmen into servitude. Had any of them ever attended a murder scene in an official capacity before, he would have realized one did not wrap the victim in a canvas bag or just trundle out large objects as evidence.

  “This box is heavy,” said one of the watchmen, grunting behind a large crate of pinkish powder.

  “Yeah,” said Philbin. “We need the fingerprints.”

  “What do we have to bring the whole thing for?”

  “Because I say so,” said Mobley. The watchman was used to such explanations and he didn’t ask any more questions. Also, he couldn’t have cared less, which seemed to be the prevalent attitude of campus watchmen everywhere.

  When the body and the cement and the wallboard and the bricks were loaded on the campus maintenance trucks, the night watchmen were informed that their presence would be required at FBI headquarters.

  To a man, the university employees had
one question.

  “Do we get overtime?”

  “Absolutely,” said Mobley. “The FBI guarantees it. You’ve got a federal guarantee.”

  That the FBI could not authorize someone else’s payment of funds did not occur to the watchmen who had helped load what they thought was evidence. They had a promise from someone in a white shirt and tie who had an official-looking badge and the magic word was “overtime.”

  So they drove off that pre-dawn spring morning in the small truck, and that was the last time they were seen on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

  They were driven to an abandoned football field where they were told to mix water with the pinkish powder and when the crate of strange cement became gooey, they were all given an eternity at time and a half from the barrels of two .45 automatics.

  “Kill one or four, they only hang you once,” said Mobley.

  “They don’t hang you ever, these days,” laughed Philbin.

  “Yah. The law doesn’t. Unfortunately, you-know-who does.”

  “‘Deed I do,” said Philbin. “‘Deed I do.”

  And they left the football field in the cab of the small truck, which they soon parked on the bottom of a river. Dr. Ravelstein, three watchmen, cement, wallboard, and bricks went down with their truck.

  Dr. Ravelstein’s disappearance was noticed the next day.

  The disappearance of the three night watchmen was only discovered by the University a month later, when an administrator finally noticed that three employees had not been showing up for work.

  Because of this incident a symposium on university-employee relations was held. The chairman of the communications department presided. All groups were invited to participate to “achieve maximum meaningful participation.” The conclusion of the symposium, called “Outspeak,” was that there was a lack of communication between employees and the university. The only reasonable solution was to double the budget of the communications department in “a massive stopgap restructuring of employee relations through radical communications techniques.”

  Then Dr. Ravelstein’s body floated up from his own cement, along with the three campus guards. The funny pink substance clinging to their bodies was analyzed and found to be a component of shale.