by Baen Books
Actually, the oil industry hid the carburetor in the same dungeon where it kept the flying saucers and the Second Gunman who shot Kennedy.
MacRoy shook his head at me. “You go to Libya. One of the other shysters can go to Washington. Hell, you’re breeding like rats on the third floor these days.”
True, but that was because in 1970 the Code of Federal Regulations and vacuous Senate hearings were breeding like rats, too. Like most American companies, we were hiring more lawyers just to keep up.
Shade stood, gathered his notebooks. I gathered my rat droppings, and the two of us headed for the street with a brief detour by our offices. If you worked international for MacRoy you kept a packed bag, and your passport, handy. You also kept your resume updated. Shade’s and my plan to remake the world was not free from risk.
MacRoy had his phone in one hand, covered the mouthpiece with the other and called after us. “There’ll be a car downstairs and the JetStar’ll be on the ramp. At least don’t pork it up worse, for Christ’s sake.”
MacRoy’s inspiring sendoff lent wings to our feet, and Shade and I were wheels up eastbound sixty-two minutes later.
It was impossible to conduct operations in twenty-three time zones from a city whose population was less than the Cleveland Indians drew on Free Bat Day without a corporate aviation department.
So MacRoy commanded the largest air force headquartered in midwestern North America that did not haul either passengers for hire or hydrogen bombs. MacRoy didn’t mind us being numerically inferior to the Strategic Air Command, but I do think he coveted their nuclear capability.
After our first fuel stop—a Lockheed JetStar’s four jet engines had no carburetors and therefore even an oil company’s model got considerably less than a hundred miles per gallon—we flew through the night above the Atlantic.
I sat facing Shade, and the wood-paneled cockpit bulkhead behind him, on a reclineable leather throne that matched his. The main cabin’s other seats, and the sofa that ran along the side of the main cabin’s rear third, were empty. A table top that we had pulled out from the JetStar’s curved interior skin separated the two of us.
Shade had unrolled across the table’s polished wood surface a seismic section, a paper scroll cross section snapshot of the Earth’s uppermost crust, constructed from sound waves reflected off subterranean rock layers.
The particular section Shade was interpreting depicted a distant part of the Earth’s crust. That part underlay some third world country that smelled like urine, and everybody who believed in the 100 MPG carburetor knew the self-evident truth that it held no oil whatsoever. Which was why oil explorers like Shade had to be optimists in all things. Of course, everybody knew there was no oil there only until some optimistic oil company gambled, and seven times in ten lost, a fortune poking meaningful holes in that part of the world, as Marathon had in Libya. When the oil company discovered All the Oil Left on Earth, everybody suddenly knew that the oil company had known the oil was there all along. The oil company knew this from consulting the secret map that was kept in the dungeon with the flying saucers, etc.
Shade’s slim fingers trembled slightly as the plane’s engines whistled us through the darkness. He traced the section’s blurry blue lines left to right. As he thought, his lips moved.
I asked, “Whatcha doin’ Shade?”
“Eating peanuts.” In his off hand Shade cupped cocktail peanuts that he periodically dabbed at with his tongue.
MacRoy never troubled to have his minions’ flights catered, so all the two of us had to eat were canned peanuts scavenged from the drawer beneath the main cabin’s sofa.
More accurately, Shade was eating some peanuts. More of them slipped between his fingers than his tongue captured. The escapees hopped and rolled across the section’s blueprint paper. The peanuts left behind little blebs and grease trails that some future geophysicist would mistake for All the Oil Left on Earth.
It wasn’t entirely the peanuts’ fault. Lately Shade had seemed to me to have become an increasingly messy eater.
I pointed at the seismic section. “No. Seriously.”
Shade kept tracing and tongue-dabbing and said, “I think they’ve miscalculated NMO. I’m redoing it.”
NMO was Normal Move Out, a correction applied to data recovered from seismic listening devices that “heard” sound waves produced by exploding dynamite at the Earth’s surface. The waves were reflected back up to geophones on the surface by the rock layers below. NMO was determined by an equation wherein v squared was the square of the velocity of the medium above the reflecting interface. Plus a bunch of other stuff that I understood even less.
I understood even that bit only because I once cross examined an expert witness during a well spacing hearing in Wyoming. The expert was a doctor of geophysics and taught at MIT. He testified that he couldn’t revise his NMO calculations to answer my hypothetical question because he had made his original calculations only with the assistance of a computer bigger than the hearing room.
Shade, whose doctorate came from the University of Nonexistent, was recalculating NMO in his head while eating peanuts.
“Shade, do you ever think you’re a genius?”
Shade didn’t look up. “If ninety percent of genius is timely perception of the obvious, then yes. But anyone can perceive the obvious.”
“Anyone can’t do NMO in his head.”
“Can’t is different from doesn’t. It’s not that hard.”
I stared out my window, at the full white Moon, reflecting the sun’s rays like a searchlight onto the cloud tops miles beneath us. Then I stared at the stars that winked beyond the Moon. “Shade, it took mankind until ten months ago just to reach the Moon. If that was so hard, how long do you think it will take before we can reach the stars?”
Shade looked up from his blueprint scroll. “Forever. If you hold with Tsiolkovsky’s Rocket Equation.”
“And what lawyer doesn’t?”
Shade smiled. “Basically, as applied to traveling light years of distance, the Rocket Equation postulates a paradox. To reach the stars within even several human lifetimes, a rocket needs to accelerate its mass to a velocity that’s a substantial fraction of the speed of light. A rocket accelerates its mass by burning fuel. The more the rocket accelerates, the more fuel it needs. But the more fuel the rocket carries, the larger its mass, so the more fuel it needs to carry. And so on.”
I stared out at the stars, suddenly more distant than ever. “In English, you’re saying we can’t get there from here?”
“No, I’m saying we can’t get there with rockets like the ones that got us to the Moon.” Shade pointed out his own window at the Moon. “The Moon shines because the sun lights it. The sun produces the energy that lights the Moon by fusing hydrogen atoms. Fusion power would change the equation. Fusion would provide inexhaustible clean energy beyond all the oil left on Earth.” Shade smiled. “Just imagine.”
I smiled back, then reclined my seat and closed my eyes. “Imagine? I imagine fusion would put you and me out of jobs faster than the 100 MPG carburetor would. Now I’ll have nightmares.”
Shade said, “Not nightmares. Dreams.”
I nodded as I drifted off.
Shade and I got along, despite opposite skill sets, because we shared dreams. The reason I helped Shade close on his house was because it had been the house I grew up in. I sold it after my mother no longer needed it, because pancreatic cancer ate her alive. It turned out that pancreatic cancer also ate Shade’s mother, the classics professor, alive. Shade and I discovered that we shared altruistic dreams to change such things for the better. Eradicate diseases. Gift mankind with cheap, clean, limitless energy. Change the world in ways that mattered. But at the moment, we had our hands full changing whatever mattered to the likes of MacRoy.
When the risen sun woke me, Shade’s seat was empty.
As I shuffled in my socks, stiff from sleeping in my seat, to pee and shave in the john in the JetStar’s tail, I pas
sed him, curled up on the sofa asleep and dreaming like a prematurely balding bundle of twigs. His blanket had slipped onto the floor, and as I picked it up and retucked him I looked out the window above the sofa’s back.
Below us, the Mediterranean already glittered, turquoise blue as a backyard pool. By the bulkhead clock we were fifty minutes out from clearing customs and immigration in Tripoli, on the easternmost edge of Middle Eastern oil development, and thus the eastern boundary of the current definition of All the Oil Left on Earth.
Eighty years before man landed on the Moon, it was a self-evident truth that All the Oil Left on Earth was contained within a subterranean puddle centered on Findlay, Ohio.
The Standard Oil Trust controlled not only the puddle and a few like it, but controlled the means to refine All the Oil Left on Earth and to transport it. Therefore, the ancestors of the politicians who fretted over the 100 MPG carburetor conspiracy broke the Standard Oil Trust into bits.
The bit that came to be called Marathon Oil Company was one of the bits that found, then produced, Standard’s oil, which is why Marathon was in Findlay. I told you I would get back to that.
But here’s the thing: by 1970 all of that oil had been pumped out of the ground. The only bulk commodity that came out of the ground around Findlay in 1970 was sugar beets. Based on prior self-evident truth as known by the politicians who had broken up Standard Oil, the world had run out of oil when the puddle in Findlay was used up.
Yet the world had not run out of oil. How could that be, you ask? Well, it turned out that All the Oil Left on Earth was actually not under Findlay, Ohio after all. It was under Texas! Then All the Oil turned out to be under the Dutch West Indies! Then Persia! And so on.
Every time the politicians got the cuffs on the conspirators who had hoarded All the Oil Left on Earth, the Earth made liars out them.
Oil, unlike politicians, was so supremely useful that it became the Earth’s biggest business. Some people loved the good that oil fueled. Some people hated the evil oil fueled. Oil drove man’s prosperity, but also drove man’s challenges to his environment, and drove many of the never ending wars by which men challenged one another. Like most useful things, oil wound up empowering worse-than-useless individuals like MacRoy, Muammar al Khaddafi, and most Washington politicians.
It occurred to me then that oil might be the root of mankind’s problems, even though it kept me employed.
When I emerged from the john, Shade was already back on his throne. I hefted my two lawyer’s brief bags out of the rear closet, set them beside my seat, then flopped down across from Shade.
He sipped coffee while he brushed peanut debris off his shirt. “I had the pilots radio ahead. I made some changes to our plan.”
“We have a plan?” I cocked an eyebrow. “Will I like the changes?”
“Yes, we do. And no, you won’t.” He shrugged. “Well, at least the pilots didn’t like 'em.”
I wrinkled my forehead.
What the pilots liked, indeed loved, was flying the JetStar, which was a hairy-chested design boasting four jet engines that hung off its rear flanks like a gunfighter’s pistols. The Jetstar also boasted not one, but two, enormous phallic fuel tanks built into its wings’ leading edges. James Bond’s super villain nemesis Auric Goldfinger even owned one.
“Why don’t the pilots like your changes, Shade?”
Shade said, “I told them we’re just gonna stop in Tripoli to clear immigration and customs, take on sandwiches and fuel, then go visit the rig.”
I nodded. “Aha. No wonder, then.”
The pilots disliked many things, but particularly disliked taking their beloved JetStar into bad neighborhoods. Desert rig airstrips were bulldozed to accommodate genuinely hairy-chested cargo planes, not tiny-tired super villain luxorockets.
I frowned. “The rig? The deadline’s blown. I thought we just were going to Tripoli, to renegotiate. Besides, the rig strip’s for cargo planes. And what if there’s another sandstorm?”
Shade rolled his eyes. “I’m landing on the same dirt that you and the pilots will be. Just be glad I remembered sandwiches.” Then he sat back, crossed his arms, and stared out his window.
One reason MacRoy gave Shade a free hand, which included command of the aircraft until such time as the pilots mutinied, was that over the years Shade had demonstrated that he wasn’t afraid to use it. Shade was skinny and balding and myopic and seemed to get clumsier by the day. But once Shade had done the math in his head neither whining shysters, sandstorms, nor gloom of night broke his will.
More to the point, over the years Shade’s will and his intuitive genius had found Marathon enough of All the Oil Left on Earth that our shareholders had made a bundle.
As the JetStar crossed the coast I bowed to the inevitable and pouted out my own window at North Africa.
On the tarmac in Tripoli we stayed aboard with the door open and breathed in the hot, humid coastal Mediterranean air while we savored sandwiches laced with the kerosene aroma of jet fuel.
The customs and immigration guy also boarded us, pocketed the two crisp U.S. twenties each of us had inserted in our visa-less passports, chalk-marked my two locked brief bags as “inspected” without opening them, then left without a word.
My bags contained no briefs, but fifths of scotch and several copies of the latest Playboy for our expatriate employees in Libya.
Both commodities were forbidden in the old and Islamic Kingdom of Libya, and even more stringently forbidden in Khaddafi’s more Islamic People’s Republic of Libya. Khaddafi, like Shade and me, wanted to change the world for the better. We just differed with him on the definition of better and the mechanism to change the world.
In retrospect, we should have taken a lesson from Khaddafi’s Revolutionary Command Council military junta about the difficulty of world changing. Because the only practical difference that regime change in the Middle East made was that the price of sin rose, in this case from a single twenty dollar bill to two of them.
The practical difference between landing a JetStar in Tripoli and landing one in the desert was, however, greater.
When the JetStar banked over the Rig That Could Not Make Rathole, the orange windsock alongside the airstrip that had been scraped out of the Sahara’s ochre sands flapped parallel to the ground and perpendicular to the airstrip’s long axis.
Landing in a strong crosswind meant the plane landed cocked sideways, and crooked, like a canoe about to capsize. It was bad to capsize a canoe. It was worse to capsize an airplane full of kerosene.
As we plummeted toward our fiery death I clutched my seat’s arms so hard that my fingers trembled white. Across from me Shade rode backwards, grinning, his fingers loose and barely trembling.
One of or tiny tires struck the desert first, and jarred the jet back into the sky. We floated like angels-to-be, then the pilots flattened and straightened our trajectory, and Shade and I settled onto North Africa. Over the thrust reversers’ roar and the clatter of gravel against the JetStar’s belly, grinning Shade shouted, “Wasn’t that exciting?”
Getting to remote drill sites was often exciting. Staying at them for the months required to drill miles into the Earth rarely was.
The drill site was a hamlet of living and laboratory trailers centered on the drilling rig. The rig comprised a steel skeleton mast that rose one hundred feet above a complex of motors, hoists, pipe racks, pumps, and rectangular pits in the ground, each scooped out by a bulldozer, and as wide as its blade. During drilling the pits were filled with a mud-like fluid that circulated like blood, pumped and re-pumped down through the hollow drill stem, then out and up through the borehole itself.
While Shade sought out and conferred with the rig’s senior toolpusher about what Shade wanted done, I sought a place where I could finally sleep horizontally.
I found an empty bunk in the logging contractor’s trailer. The bunk was empty because “logging” involved dangling fencepost-shaped steel tools from cables, then lowering th
e tools deep into the borehole to record a log of what was down there. The tool gathered information by, among other things, bombarding the surrounding rock with neutrons.
But Shade and I were here because there was no borehole to bombard. Therefore, the logging contractor’s trailer was unoccupied.
The trailer was clean, air conditioned, and probably not radioactive. I say probably because many of the logging tools were radioactive. All things considered, however, barnstorming the sky with Shade was likely to kill me before radiation poisoning could. So I kicked off my loafers, lay back atop the trailer bunk’s blanket, and slept.
I was awakened in darkness by the clatter of rummaging in the trailer’s kitchen.
Foraging Bedouins? My heart thumped as I stretched for, then flipped, the light switch.
Instead of Bedouins I saw a twiglike figure wearing baggy, muddy derrickman’s coveralls.
He held aloft in two hands, by its handle, what looked like a yellow lunch box. His eyes glittered behind his glasses as he stared up at the box, like he had found one of Goldfinger’s bullion bars. “Thank God!”
I sat up, scratched. “Didn’t get enough sandwiches, Shade?”
As he turned and dashed out of the trailer carrying his box, Shade called over his shoulder, “Get out here! Now!”
I stepped into my loafers and stumbled out into the clear cold two a.m. desert night.
A flood light halo englobed the drilling rig’s base, and a string of naked electric bulbs climbed the rig mast so it resembled a miniature Eiffel Tower. The sound and smell of diesel engines rumbled to me on the breeze. All that was usual. Time was money and therefore rigs operated twenty-four hours every day.
