by Baen Books
As I shuffled closer to the rig, I realized that the engines I heard and smelled were those of the electric generator that powered the lights and of a dirty yellow Caterpillar bulldozer. The Cat idled at one end of a newly dug, 'dozer-blade-wide trench. The engines of the rig itself had gone silent. I frowned.
The newly-dug trench looked to be deeper than a normal mud pit, because a makeshift of reinforcing wire and rusty steel pipes bordered its top edge, as though holding back the trench’s unconsolidated sides. All of it deviated from normal operations, and the only person on-site who could order such a deviation was Shade. My frown deepened.
A handful of hard-hatted rig crewmen stood leaning along the rig floor’s rail, which was elevated fifteen feet above the ground on a steel frame. They peered down into the new trench with the detached bemusement of baseball bleacherites watching a knuckle baller warm up.
The idle rig crew and shut-down rig engines meant that, although time was money, we not only weren’t making hole, we weren’t even trying.
What the hell? I shifted from walking to a dead run, stopped at the trench’s edge, and stared down into its floodlit depths.
Twenty feet below me, Shade knelt over something muddy in the sloppy sand, holding above it the yellow box I had watched him take from the trailer. My heart skipped.
It must not have been a lunch box, but a first aid kit. We were shut down because there had been a grisly accident. Oil drilling was a greasy, dangerous business. Death happened.
Shade backed away from his patient, then waved his hand at a rubber booted roughneck who stood beside Shade. Both of them stood ankle deep in slop. The roughneck held a thick canvas water hose that trailed back up and over the side of the pit. At Shade’s wave the roughneck opened the hose’s valve and blasted the patient.
I screamed down into the pit, “Shade! What the hell have you done?”
Shade turned, visored a hand over his eyes, then waved me to join him in the slop.
By the time I slipped and slid and stood alongside Shade, the roughneck had stopped hosing.
The patient gleamed beneath the floodlights.
It was a cylinder, eight feet long, give or take, tapered at both ends like a slim football, and gleamed wet chrome silver, as smooth and unmarked as the bumper of an Oldsmobile fresh off the assembly line.
My mouth hung open. “What the hell is that thing?”
Shade turned the yellow box in his hand. It had a round dial like a speedometer on its top side, behind the handle. “It’s a Geiger counter. Some of the logging trailers carry them.”
“Not that thing.” I grabbed his head with two hands and pointed it at the elongated silver football. It was suddenly obvious that the object before me was the obstruction that had blocked our drilling. While I slept Shade had ordered a hole bulldozed to unearth it. “I mean that thing!”
Shade tugged his lip. “Well…”
Geiger counter?
My stomach heaved.
MacRoy’s competitor air force, the Strategic Air Command, the friendly Omaha Midwesterners with the hydrogen bombs, had operated, out of Wheelus Air Force Base, west of Tripoli, for the last twenty years. Operated and sometimes crashed.
I looked around for some mud to vomit on, rolled my eyes. “Christ. It’s a hydrogen bomb? Shade, we tried to drill a hole in a lost hydrogen bomb? Twice? And you just dug it up and ran it over with a bulldozer?”
Shade smiled, took my hand and forced it down until my palm was flat against the cylinder’s mirror-smooth surface. His hand shook, and I suppose that mine did, too. But when he lifted his hand away, I still felt the faintest vibration and warmth from the object. “What does that mean, Shade?”
He pulled me upright. “That it isn’t a hydrogen bomb. For now, it’s best that’s all I tell you. Now, here’s what I need you to do. Take the JetStar up to Tripoli and make a deal with your friend Abi Jalloud.”
I gulped. Shade had a free hand to make any deal he chose, and to order me as the company’s lawyer to make it happen. But this?
Abdessalam Jalloud, like Khaddafi, had risen from goat country beginnings to revolutionary army officer to member of Libya’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council. Earlier in 1970 Khaddafi had, it was widely reported, sent Jalloud to Red China to buy a hydrogen bomb for one hundred million dollars. As I said, Shade and I differed with Kaddafi on the appropriate mechanism to change the world.
Apparently the Chinese differed too, because Jalloud returned to Tripoli empty handed. So Khaddafi had put him in charge of managing Libya’s oil resources. Therefore, I had negotiated with Jalloud before. Abi did like Westerners better than his boss did. But my idea of a friend wasn’t a guy who laid his loaded pistol on the table while he negotiated.
My jaw dropped. “You want me to sell a fake hydrogen bomb to a revolutionary with a gun?”
“No.” Shade shook his head. “I want you to buy this object from the People’s Republic of Libya.”
“What?”
“You’re right. Barter would be a more accurate description. Trade a bigger share of Marathon’s oil reserves for it. We expected to give up a bigger share to preserve the concession anyway.”
I shook my head back at Shade. “This regime won’t—”
“Yes, it will. You saw when we cleared customs. Regime change in the Middle East merely increases prices.”
My eyes widened. “Amend the Concession Agreement? That will take—”
Shade nodded. “All it will take is an offer that looks so good that Jalloud will insist that the suckers sign a binding deal before he lets them out of his country. I think an extra hundred million barrels should get his attention, don’t you?”
It did. I did what Shade told me to not because it made sense to me, but because it made sense to Shade, who I thought was a genius. And maybe just a little bit because MacRoy, who I thought was a mean-spirited idiot, wouldn’t like it. We were wheels up off the Sahara forty-eight hours later with a signed amendment in hand.
By the time MacRoy climbed out of the back seat of the car that drove him out to meet us in Findlay, it was night in the Eastern United States. The JetStar already sat parked under the lights in the company hangar, regal amid turboprop Beechcrafts and pipeline patrol Cessnas.
MacRoy frowned at the JetStar as he stalked toward Shade and me. The pilots walked around the plane, pouting and grumbling as they fingered chips in the paintwork. They had already removed to the hangar floor the seats Shade had made them unbolt and store sideways for the flight, and one of the pilots groused and sucked at a finger he had skinned while unbolting the seats.
MacRoy’s face gleamed extraordinarily pink that night, so he had obviously gotten the telex Shade had sent when we stopped for fuel on the way home.
First MacRoy kicked an unbolted seat. “You porked my airplane!”
The shareholders’ airplane, actually.
MacRoy stopped in front of us, nostrils flared so wide that his nose hairs showed. “What the hell kind of joke was that goddam telex, Shade?”
“No joke. Do you want to see it?”
Shade and I climbed back aboard the JetStar, and MacRoy followed, at least far enough to poke his head in and peer back down the main cabin.
Shade’s football lay on the rear sofa, visible because the seats that had obstructed its passage now lay unbolted on the hangar floor. The mysterious silver torpedo was wrapped in the blanket I had tucked Shade in with, and was secured with a spider’s web of knotted cargo straps. It looked just as it had in the trench, a gleaming three hundred pound streamlined capsule so hard that no bulldozer blade nor industrial diamond could scratch it.
MacRoy snorted. “That’s nothing but a goddam fighter plane drop tank. They find whole B-24s left over from World War II buried in the Sahara.” He backed down the JetStar’s stairs, and we joined him on the hangar floor, where he stood, arms crossed, tapping one foot.
MacRoy’s hands shook as he stared at Shade. “You traded an additional ten percent of our L
ibyan reserves, a hundred million barrels of oil, for a war souvenir?”
Shade shook his head. “Given the depth of burial and the strength of the outer shell it’s no human relic. It’s emitting a little radiation, but if it contained fissionable material it would be emitting more. Or the shielding would weigh tons.”
MacRoy closed his eyes, nodded. “Ah. An itty bitty spaceship from Mars. Much better, Shade. Much better value.”
Shade said, “Not a spaceship, necessarily. Though it could be spaceship flotsam or jetsam. Or a child’s lost toy. Or a robot exploration probe. Regardless, it is the construct of an alien intellect. But not constructed on Mars. Or anywhere in the Solar System. There’s nothing near us but cold, dead rocks. So whatever powered this thing, and is still powering it, has continued to operate for decades of travel time. Or centuries. Or longer.”
MacRoy opened his eyes, narrowed them at Shade. “If you’re right, Shade, and if you’re right I swear before the Lord Jesus Christ that I am a goat rapist, so what? It’s a museum piece. It’s a headline in Popular Science. But it’s not worth a hundred barrels of oil, much less a hundred million barrels.” MacRoy shook his head again, stared at the hangar’s concrete floor. “Shade, you’ve done fine work for this company. For many years. But you’ve just traded a cow for a magic bean that fits on an airplane sofa.”
Shade opened his mouth. I touched his arm to shut him up. He shrugged me off. “You don’t get it, do you, Hugh? This object contains a hydrogen fusion reactor. And one that’s generations more sophisticated than any reactor man could develop if we devoted our combined gross planetary product to the development for the next hundred years. If we can reverse engineer it, energy will effectively become a free good.”
“Gross planetary product? A free good? Now you’re dictating to a Doctor of Economics about economics? We’re an oil company, not an energy company, you uneducated little snot!”
I nudged Shade again to shut him up, but he was rolling.
“And the railroads who decided they were railroad companies and not transportation companies, Hugh? Go buy a plane ticket from them! A hundred million barrels of oil in the ground won’t be worth even a regular bean. Think about it, Hugh. If oil is the root of all evil like people say, this can cure it. And the patents on hydrogen fusion will be worth the Earth. To anyone with a brain, that’s a self-evident truth.” Shade snorted, shook his head. “Hugh, don’t be an even bigger fool than usual.”
MacRoy sighed, though his lips trembled. “Shade, you’re relieved of your duties. Terminated. Fired! Clean out your desk. Tonight.” Then MacRoy’s eyes found me as he pointed at Shade. “How do we break this fool’s deal with the ragheads?”
I took a deep breath. The politic thing that a lawyer, especially one who valued his regular paycheck, would do would be to begin by offering a plausible argument that could be made on the client’s behalf. But in a moment that MacRoy would have found unusual in a shyster, I told him the exact truth as I saw it. “We don’t break the deal. Because we can’t. Hugh, I didn’t write the amendment to be breakable. By either side. If Shade’s right, it’ll be Khaddafi who wants out, anyway, not us. But we’ll have a strong case. A stronger case against Libya for title to the antiquity than the British have against Greece for keeping the Elgin Marbles. And the marbles are still in the British Museum.”
“Have you gone as crazy as Shade?” MacRoy rolled his eyes. “Antiquity? It’s junk.”
During that moment, I agreed that maybe Shade had gone crazy. He certainly had just said things an employee was crazy to say to his boss. But I also hoped that I could still save my friend’s job. I stepped alongside MacRoy and whispered behind my hand, “Sir, if we do choose to try and break the amendment, Mr. Shade’s testimony as the company signatory would be critical. A current employee makes a more cooperative witness than a bitter former one.”
MacRoy’s eyebrows shot up. “Christ! You’re supposed to be my shyster!” He pointed at Shade. “Not his. But now you’re bullshitting me to save your little buddy’s job? You’re fired, too, you disloyal son of a bitch!”
MacRoy turned his back and stalked to his car, the only sounds echoing in the hangar’s vastness the clicks of his heels on concrete and Shade’s and my breathing.
When Shade and I stood there, small and alone, he sighed, and his lip trembled, but his voice rang firm and confident. “I guess there’s no such thing as self-evident truth.”
I said, “There’s one.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“You and I are screwed worse than MacRoy’s goat.”
. . .
On May 11, 2020, the smiling Honorary Chairman of the Green Sierra Coalition leaned forward across the table in Prometheus Energy’s visitor conference room. Fifty years before the room had been the conference room of Dr. Gilbert Hugh MacRoy.
The environmental group’s Honorary Chairman was a Hollywood actor who lent his celebrity to environmental causes. He was tan, trim and wore a T-shirt with a whale on it beneath a tailored silk jacket.
Nodding round at the four other guests in the room he said to me, “I think I speak for us all when I say that after fifty years it’s a privilege to finally hear that historic story from one of the men who lived it, Mr. Trueman.”
Trueman was me. Trueman was I. Trueman was the person who is telling you this story. Morton Trueman, Esq., General Counsel, Secretary, and one of two shareholders of Prometheus Energy, Inc.
One of the heads that nodded at the Hollywood activist’s comments, the Secretary General of the United Nations, held up one cocoa colored finger, while he grasped his robe with his other hand. “Mr. Trueman, before we continue, you mentioned ground rules for our conversation with Mr. Shade?”
He pronounced “rules” “roo-walls.”
I nodded. “Mr. Shade has insisted on a few. However, he doesn’t really want this occasion to be about rules, Mr. Secretary, but about cooperation.”
The Hollywood activist frowned. “What could we ask or say in the next sixty minutes that could bother a man who nobody has seen in the last fifty years?”
The others glared at him. They didn’t want this meeting called off.
He was actor enough that he instantly turned his frown to a smile that replicated all of theirs.
The lucky five smiled the smiles of the flattered. Shade had culled these five people, from a short list of the two thousand most influential people in the world, to meet with him on May 11, 2020. It was the fiftieth anniversary of Shade’s discovery of what the patents called the Prometheus Process Fusion Reactor Prototype, and what the New York Times called the most important machine in the history of the world.
Fifty years before these five arrived in this room with me, MacRoy and Marathon’s board had rethought MacRoy’s decision to fire Shade and me. The board had also thought about the gathering storm of expropriation that, going forward from 1970, Libya might trigger across the Middle East. Then they upheld MacRoy’s decision and left us fired. But in return for our agreement to cooperate in future proceedings they assigned to Shade all Marathon’s rights in what the board regarded as airplane debris of nominal value.
And then Shade, like his namesake from Greek mythology, Prometheus, stole the secret of fire from the gods.
We took a second mortgage on his house in Findlay, pooled the rest of our savings, then bet the pile on reverse engineering Shade’s alien curiosity into the first commercial Prometheus hydrogen fusion reactor. It wasn’t easy. It took Shade four months just to invent and build a drill that got him a look inside the football without damaging its guts.
But we ultimately repaid Shade’s mortgage. We also remade the world. Prometheus Energy became the most valuable business enterprise in the history of the human race.
I looked at the Chairperson and CEO of ManCo, the multinational manufacturing giant that was second in worldwide revenue only to Prometheus. She had short, gray hair and granny glasses. She also had an athletic female body guard wearing a b
lazer who stood, arms crossed, in the conference room’s corner. But I’ll get back to that.
I said, “First ground rule. No rehashing Prometheus’ rights. Every tribunal from the Supreme Court of the United States to the World Court in the Hague sided with us.”
Everybody smiled, nodded.
After we got our first reactor on line, some oil companies saw the future as clearly as Shade did. They licensed the technology from us. They, and we, prospered. Today Prometheus and its licensees sold squeaky-clean, dirt-cheap energy to giant enterprises like ManCo. But we also sold it to you. To light your home and cook your food and power your electric runabout and do all the other things a world of human beings want to do. But today you buy that energy for a song. Which gives you more time and money to write a song if that’s what you want to do.
However, many oil companies, like Marathon, chose to believe, as Shade had predicted, that they were oil companies, not energy companies. They slugged it out against Prometheus, in the courts and and legislatures of the world as well as against hydrogen fusion in the marketplace. They lost in every arena and they withered away to nothing.
MacRoy, by the way, died in rural Manitoba two years after Marathon folded. He suffered a sudden and massive heart attack in a goat pasture. I won’t speculate.
But we didn’t buy the Marathon building for Prometheus’ headquarters for spite or revenge, or even because it was cheap.
We bought it because we knew from experience that a business that covered twenty-three other time zones could be run effectively from there, and still give our employees time to raise their families or write songs if they wanted to.
Besides, Shade still owned the same house in Findlay that he had owned when he and I got fired, the house he remortgaged to grubstake Prometheus. Although Shade hadn’t lived in it for years. I’ll get back to that, too. Unhappily.
I looked at the Network Chairwoman, whose intrusive theatrics not only had goaded us to locate in quiet, remote Findlay but were also a reason Shade was finally meeting the world today.
