Europa: A Thousand Years of Oil

Prologue

T he hour is late. I do not know you. Therefore, I refuse to meet with you. What don’t you understand? Professor Carmen, graying, thin, a small exact fidgety man who turned sixty a week ago, shouted into the hotel telephone once again, You are not listening to me. He was repeating himself and tiring of it. I will meet you tomorrow, following my presentation, and not before. You can arrange matters through my assistant. For now, I direct you to my press release, which you may find on my website. I cordially thank you and advise that I must hang up.

How did the caller get the room number?

Then the stranger’s voice changed.

The professor asked, Where did you wish to meet? Before hanging up, he confirmed, I can meet you in thirty minutes.

It was ten-thirty, Sunday night, and cold outside. Montreal’s heavy snow arrived early this fall. Yet the hotel heating worked well given the mandatory energy restrictions, and Carmen was dressed lightly. He needed warmer clothes if he was going outside.

He pulled a thick sweater and corduroy trousers from their hangers. He removed his cashmere overcoat from the wardrobe also, the black one, not the fawn one.

He planned to save his fawn colored coat for tomorrow morning when he must dress to express. He expected to see cameras at the Dawson Adams Building. And those cameras would want to see him.

He pulled thick leather shoes over socks that were too thin for walking along Montreal’s late-night streets, having worn them from UC Berkeley this afternoon where it was much warmer. He wore rimmed plastic spectacles and combed his hair. Deep lines etched themselves down his cheeks.

He had the poise of a rooster, a sort of cock on the mound look about him, and was pleased that the soft cashmere bulked him up and gave him a stature that he almost owned.

He reached for the TV remote, and was about to switch off the TV, but watched the news headlines instead. The anchor explained how the professor was ready to release his Europan findings to the world tomorrow morning at Montreal’s famous McGill University, the Harvard of the north, at eleven o’clock sharp.

He nodded as if confirming the story - as well as his own importance - and said, Tomorrow humanity will change forever.

He was about to click the remote off when the next story caught his eye.

The world-wide war of words intensified today with the corporate giant, Global Oil, defending its proposed use of off-world shale, the environmental impact of which it says will be ‘minimal’ while its impact on profits, ‘maximal.’ Bonham Moore, Global Oil’s soon to be decade-long CEO, claimed that the United States government was right behind the oil giant. The President is yet to comment...

Carmen clicked off the remote, and the screen went blank.

The cell biologist was not an environmentalist. Enough of his friends were though. They left no room for mistake. The world’s ecological future was as uncertain as humanity’s place in it. Edgy nations walked the world in 2041 like street thugs ready to fight, regardless of economic and environmental cost, and regardless of human suffering.

The only thing certain was that Europan shale, which Global Oil wanted, would kill the Earth quicker than its own fossil fuels had killed it to date.

Tomorrow Carmen will set everyone straight with an unequivocal warning about the toxicity of off-world shale.

He turned his mind back to the strange phone call and the real purpose of tomorrow’s presentation.

It was while studying bacterial mats growing around Earth’s deep sea thermal vents that extraterrestrial life first began fascinating him. Aliens, people often commented, men from outer space? He tolerated the party jokes and smiled, correcting them with a low key, Not quite.

Actually, he studied the simple DNA strands of dead extraterrestrial bacteria, such as those that space probes found on Mars and accessible asteroids, as well as, in part, Europa, the icy, white moon of Jupiter. Now - tomorrow morning - he was to deliver a presentation in respect of just that icy moon to an auditorium in the Dawson Adams Building, packed with the world’s scientists and media.

What he had to say will cause an uproar and place him in direct conflict with Global Oil. The popular media will tear him apart on behalf of the oil giant, and he knew it.

Off-world shale toxicity was not even half the story.

Even at this late hour, with one sleep remaining until he revealed his results and, without exaggeration, watched as humanity fumbled, reacted, accepted the facts, and altered its destiny forever, no one had any idea of what he had to say, no one.

The professor locked down his laboratory and concealed his research into the Jovian moon from the very outset.

Truth is the first victim, and he would not risk it.

Thus, the telephone call surprised him.

That is an understatement. It blew him away!

The stranger referred to organic systems. How can anyone have known about that?

Europan organic systems!

Carmen looked in the mirror again, pulling his shoulders high a couple of times, and letting them drop. He turned and assessed his profile, which pleased him. He locked away his presentation outline and his tiny computer in the hotel safe and shrugged and left the room, remembering his keycard at the last moment.

Organic systems. Europan.

Even though the professor acknowledged truth’s vulnerability at the outset of his research into Europa, he never examined the risk that he faced along his own road to scientific discovery.

Presently, he did not examine the risk in meeting with a stranger on the late night streets of Montreal, a stranger who had spoken to him in urgent, troubled tones at that.

He exited the hotel lobby, stepped onto Rue De La Gauchetiere West, and walked to the intersection at Rue University, a half a block away.

Sunday night Montreal was bleak, and lonely, with streetlights struggling to burrow through the unseasonable, unprecedented snowfall. Darkness captured the light and held it from moving too far. The trees along the sidewalk were bare. Municipal workers cleared the sidewalks this afternoon. Already snow piled around the edges knee deep.

When he arrived earlier today, Carmen hoped to see the Montreal that he had visited during the same part of the year as a young man. Then the Saint Lawrence River reflected the blue sky. Red sugar maple leaves were abundant. The colored gardens were alive in every way.

The professor slipped in ice as he reached Rue University intersection and twisted his knee.

He cursed at having to leave his comfortable hotel room on such a night - and at having twisted his knee.

He peered through the darkness across Rue University at the agreed meeting place and saw no one. The stranger said he would wear an orange sweater and wait outside the florist stand across from the intersection.

Professor Carmen considered heading back to the hotel.

Then, across the road, a parked car flicked on its high beam lights. The one-way street ran south to the Saint Lawrence River, though now the street was empty of traffic, except for that parked car. Its engine remained off. The vehicle had a big chrome grill like that of a gasoline vehicle from a bygone era. The high beams almost blinded Carmen.

Nothing. Was he coming or going?

Carmen dismissed the vehicle, along with its driver. He began crossing the wide, slippery street, his right knee paining him. His socks were too thin for his winter shoes, and he lost traction.

As he reached the middle of the street, at a distance of a hundred meters, he watched an electric motored, square fronted, very black SUV, fitted with a precocious looking push bar, blast toward him incredibly fast.

Unlike the car with its bright headlights, this vehicle, the SUV, drove without any lights at all.

Two seconds did not leave him time to get out its way.

While dying on the cold, icy road, the professor should not have even thought about what happened. After all, the sharp-edged push bar coincidentally projected at the height of his skull exactly. Impact of it ought to have killed him instantly.

Nevertheless, he thought of his rotten luck. Of all the nights for an accident to occur.

Remembering sugar maple leaves that lined Montreal’s streets those years ago when he first visited the city, when life promised so much, he lost consciousness and died.

GARRY WATCHED THE BLACK SUV as it raced away along Rue University, commenting to himself, Humanity’s best legal killer.

He turned the ignition over in his gasoline vehicle and switched the headlights back to low beam. He rolled the dark vehicle around the corner onto Rue De La Gauchetiere West, avoiding Professor Carmen’s corpse, and came to a stop fifty meters from the hotel entrance.

The large, black overcoat and dark trilby hat disguised the wiry power of the fifty-five-year-old man and hid his pale skin and shock of carrot-red hair. He stepped from the car. The darkness hid him deeper in the night as if a dark hand reached out to another. He entered the hotel lobby, refused eye contact with the concierge, walked to the elevator, and pressed for the ninth floor. He got out, headed straight to Carmen’s room, and entered it using a penny Arduino and a barrel plug.

His eyes grew small as if he saw the world from too far away. He stepped to the wardrobe, in which he identified the hotel room safe. He inserted the barrel plug with the penny Arduino attached, and opened the safe door and removed Carmen’s computer, as well as his lecture papers. He walked to the bathroom and soaped and washed his hands and left.

Once outside, and seated in his vehicle, he telephoned Shannon Winder, who haunted the halls of UC Berkeley at this late hour.

Have you deleted the file? he asked.

Deleted, she replied.

Garry rang off and accelerated away, ignoring the ambulance lights and the small crowd that gathered around the deceased professor back on Rue University, and continued along Rue De La Gauchetiere West.

Chapter 1

G otta keep it together , Jamie Caldicott said while sitting alone at his desk and staring out his office window. A rainless sky canopied the San Antonio northern outskirts. He swung back to his desk, scanned a spreadsheet, and uttered, Where’s the commercial solution? This isn’t an era for the faint-hearted. Dominate it.

He had to cut costs if he was to keep GeoWay’s business.

Later tonight, he will travel to San Francisco to meet with GeoWay first thing in the morning. Without GeoWay, the foremost submersible and aviation mining equipment manufacturer, Texan Fasteners’ overdraft would present problems. Caldicott might need to close the factory.

His family will suffer, not to mention the families of Texan Fasteners’ two hundred and thirty-eight workers. Some of them worked at the factory since Granddad and Caldicott’s father, Chick, incorporated it forty-nine years ago.

We’ve been doing it a long time, Caldicott thought. Why stop now?

When he took over the family business, Chick had warned his son, I’m retiring because I have to. Illness caught up with him. Some of the workers taught me the trade, they’ve been here so long. You have to look after folks, is what I say, and it’s what your Granddad used to say. He slapped his son on the back, and added, You won’t let me down. He laughed before toning it back, Good to have you home, son, where you belong.

Did he belong?

Presently, Caldicott reached across his desk for the small, framed photograph, which a colleague at the Space Institute snapped fifteen years ago. In it, he wore an old style gas-filled space suit and carried a helmet under one arm.

He looked the photo over, put it back on his desk, and forgot about it. He had other things to consider. Everything fell to him, including a changing world.

Texas, where everything is bigger and better, and for so long a predator in the wild expanses of globalization, now ran with the pack and sometimes behind it. When you operate a San Antonio factory - rare enough in anyone’s language - and it makes nothing except aviation-grade fasteners, you want to make sure you are good at it, and not only good at it, but also cheap. Nowadays better the latter than the former if you want to survive.

He was not going to be the generation responsible for losing his family’s business.

He scanned the spreadsheet, fighting for a way to pitch the deal to GeoWay tomorrow.

The workers relied on him, and he did not mind.

He will do the workers, Chick Caldicott, and Granddaddy proud.

CALDICOTT LOOKED UP as Alistair Lovell arrived at his office door, interrupting his train of thought. You’re wanted, Alistair announced, in the conference room. Rather urgently, apparently.

Caldicott blinked trying to make sense of what his office manager told him. He flicked a loop of black hair from his forehead. It fell back down. He glanced at the Englishman’s curly brown hair in comparison, and at his smallish round head, and his gold-rimmed spectacles. He considered his own long face, his own high forehead, his horsey nose and knitted brow, his deep, heavy green eyes, his downcast expression - his glower.

Alistair, always well dressed, worked as an attorney in LA when Caldicott rescued him from the legal profession two years ago. Caldicott realized that he, on the other hand, looked like a shabbily suited engineer, which he had become during the recent years. He looked older than his subordinate who, at forty-two-years-old, was a year Caldicott’s senior.

Lately, Caldicott was older with responsibility, with authority, and with circumspection, as if he had never been a younger man.

Ignoring his office manager’s protestations of urgency, he declared, I found a way out of our trouble provided GeoWay accepts the deal I put to them tomorrow.

Is there any reason why GeoWay should not accept the deal we put to them tomorrow? Alistair asked.

Caldicott dropped his head, and said, You know how the market works nowadays. Everyone’s a friend until they find a cheaper dollar elsewhere. He looked up for a reply. None came. Anyway, he asked, where’s the fire?

Downtown, the River Walk. Alistair adjusted his spectacles.

I thought you said the conference room.

He called from Downtown demanding to meet you in person, Alistair explained. Jules told him that you were unavailable until next Tuesday, at which point he requested to talk to you by video phone. I slipped his call to the conference room so that I can sit in if I’m needed.

Caldicott flicked away his rogue hair, deliberatively this time, and successfully, and arose from his chair. You’re needed, he said. One hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall, he stooped and then arched his shoulders back.

He did not question his colleague’s assessment as to the importance of the call.

But he asked about the subject matter as anyone might.

Alistair did not know about the subject matter. I know that he made a special trip from Australia to meet you in person, though. He was quite certain about telling me this.

Australia! Who do we know in Australia? Caldicott corrected himself, joking, Apart from your Aunt Dora in Melbourne, Queensland?

Melbourne, Victoria.

Caldicott loved seeing the effect he had on the English prude when he joked with him. Other run-of-the mill Brits were not as prudish nowadays as was his office manager. Maybe the ex-lawyer in the man made him so. On the other hand, the poor guy recently exited an awful divorce. It had not helped him see the fun side of life.

Actually, Alistair said, the gentleman flew in from the Antipodes this morning, while in fact, he speaks with a very telltale New York accent.

Let’s hear what he has to say, Caldicott said. He led Alistair to the conference room. But if he has anything to confess about Aunt Dora, I’ll ask you to leave the room so that he and I can talk in confidence.

JULES, ONE OF TWO RECEPTIONISTS employed at Texan Fasteners, sighed with relief when Caldicott arrived at the conference room with Alistair in tow. She repeated what she had repeated to the caller several times, Mr. Caldicott is unavailable to meet you in person until next Tuesday. The caller grunted, not so friendly. She muted the mike.

Caldicott winked at her, Thanks, Jules. We’ll take it now.

Alistair motioned her to stay.

Caldicott positioned himself at the conference table to get a good look at the video screen. He hoped the call would lead to new contracts. Australian minerals and New York money made for a good start. If more customers signed up, Texan Fasteners could reduce its reliance on GeoWay. Though, with its eggs in one basket, Texan Fasteners would need plenty new customers before it does reduce its reliance on GeoWay.

He switched on the camera and the screen, delaying the camera by seconds to catch a glimpse of the potential new customer first.

The man was in his late fifties. The camera showed him as short and tubby. He was balding, though with thin, longish dark hair to his collar. The stranger wore a mustache as if he styled it from an old mobster movie. He dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and thin black tie.

He looked like he was serious, though not with the sort of business that Texan Fasteners encouraged. He was not the usual engineering type that lobbed on the factory doorstep. He was not, as Caldicott had hoped, a new customer.

Texan’s camera went live, and the caller glanced at Caldicott and Alistair. He noticed Jules, and asked, Why's she still here? Without waiting for an answer, he said, I flew in from Australia this morning. As if Caldicott and his team were responsible for this inconvenience, he asked, Do you know how far that is?

Caldicott’s hot head glowed its trademark red. Alistair leaned away as if getting ready to duck shrapnel. Jules too.

Am I missing something? the stranger asked. Again, he continued without waiting for a reply. Beyer is my name. I prefer talking to you in person. I have things to show you. I’ll tell you one thing, talk to you I will. I’m not leaving town until I do.

With GeoWay hanging over his head, Caldicott just wanted an opportunity to blast someone, and the interloper fit.

The fact that he had spoken rudely to two of his staff members made it seem right in his head too. He opened his mouth.

Beyer spoke first, Control theory. Application of control theory. Aerospike engines. Atmospheric re-entry. Am I getting through to you?

Caldicott closed his mouth.

Alistair, however, got out his chair and, via the camera, looked the stranger in the face, Now look here...

Caldicott held his friend’s arm. Alistair sat down. Beyer smiled.

Caldicott gave Beyer his full attention. Nonetheless, he did not want him at the factory. He should have taken the stranger’s lead and asked Jules to leave the room before the discussion got going. Are you Downtown? he asked.

I am, the stranger confirmed.

Caldicott looked at his watch: nine-thirty. He said, I have a few things to do. I can meet you at the Walk just before noon, in around ninety minutes. I’ll call you when I get there. On this number?

He referred to the number that showed on the caller ID screen.

On that number, Beyer confirmed.

Caldicott terminated the call. He stared at the table. He could not work out if he had seen Beyer before. He lightened up. Beyer was not his biggest issue today.

Jules, waiting, said, I have things to do, and left the room.

Caldicott turned to Alistair, Hey, Alistair, are you busy?

Alistair, coming around, answered, I’m about to check the mosquito traps.

And after that? Caldicott clarified.

I’m relatively free.

Great, do you want to come Downtown with me? Caldicott aimed a friendly punch at the Englishman’s arm. A break will do us good; we’re in for a long day.

In any event, Caldicott planned to have lunch with Laura, his wife, and Eddie and Amanda, their children, around noon in the city, though not at the Walk, but near the Alamo shops, which he could make sure of now.

He did not mention not playing squash with Alistair this afternoon just yet.

CONTROL THEORY, ALISTAIR said.

Yup? Caldicott replied, prompted from his thoughts about the GeoWay meeting tomorrow.

What is it?

Jules had buggied the men to the VIA bus station in the solar cart and dropped them. Now they rode an express route Downtown. They sat together in an empty coach, with peak hour loads long since been and gone.

Caldicott said, It’s not what you think it is.

"What do I not think it is?"

Caldicott cleared his throat, and said, "If you were politically inclined or rights-aware - and I know for a fact a lot of you lawyer types are so inclined and aware - you might think that the phrase control theory had nasty connotations. As far as engineering goes, however, the theory relates to any situation where you want to keep the output variable nice and steady."

What about...aero spanking? the office manager asked.

Caldicott chuckled. "That’s aero spiking."

Yes?

You shoot a reaction mass... Caldicott corrected himself. He avoided it for now. You shoot the exhaust around the edge of a rocket nozzle - the spike. It’s tied in with control theory. You manipulate the nozzle, increasing and decreasing its aperture, making a big, wide burst, or a thin, narrow burst, to achieve peak performance relative to the environment through which you’re flying.

Like a garden hose pistol, wide for petals, narrow for roots? Alistair asked.

Caldicott said, Yes, like a garden hose pistol.

The rain had not fallen in San Antonio for two years. It would not fall today. Caldicott figured where the garden hose metaphor came from.

Alistair fidgeted, And SSTO?

Caldicott patted his friend’s arm, It’ll be painless. I promise. SSTO stands for...

Single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft, Alistair said quickly. He blinked a couple times. It means you fly the same plane from the ground to outer space. Hadn’t space shuttles managed that last century?

Not quite, Caldicott said, pleasantly surprised by his friend’s knowledge about SSTOs. SSTO craft escape the Earth’s atmosphere with nothing except their own merit. Shuttles needed airlifts and strap-on boosters. Management canned the development of experimental SSTO craft soon after my time was up with the Space Institute, back in 2032 or thereabouts. Nothing’s happened since. We’re living in the era of the great technological slowdown, don’t forget.

Caldicott drifted with his thoughts.

After half a minute, Alistair asked, So this harks back to your Space Institute days? How does this present meeting involve you? Why is it important enough to break from work on the eve of meeting with GeoWay, our biggest customer? He raced ahead. I hope this Beyer doesn’t want you to fight a war against China in one of those Triple S planes, he said.

I doubt it, Caldicott replied. My world is San Antonio, not some foreign war zone that may never happen. Anyway, we have no gasoline to run a motor car or coal to power up. We have to whip Mother Nature into line and get our motor and power industries back before we start beating war drums.

We need to whip ourselves into line first, Alistair said, almost to himself.

No. Caldicott was adamant. "God gave humanity the environment - all the creeping things. Therefore it does what we say."

The meeting tomorrow ate at him. He counted to five and calmed himself.

The Tower of the Americas came into view.

He owed Alistair an explanation, something he accepted as he calmed down. I worked on the team that was responsible for developing SSTO systems. A couple hundred souls knew about it, if that.

And you gave it away to sell fasteners? Alistair mused.

I wanted an ordinary life, Caldicott replied as honestly as possible. "The family business offered that.