The Sure Thing (The Shell Scott Mysteries)

by Richard S. Prather

  “Enough."

  “It might help you understand what you're dealing with—if you're really interested in getting to the bottom of this Roman mess. For Gippy and Audrey, I mean. Are you?"

  “Yeah. And I expect I will get to the bottom of it, wherever it is, if it has one, and assuming I can recognize it—one way or another."

  “Spoken just like Dick Daring or Tom the Telephone Boy, whichever was more retarded. Shall we go?"

  “Where?"

  “Out into the nearest boondocks, where I shall demonstrate my genius. Thus some day you will be able to say you knew him, knew fabulous Devin Morraigne, before he had even his first billion."

  “Wonderful. Don't forget, you can tell those same people you knew me before you had your first billion."

  “I may get to like you yet, Shell. Let's go."

  We went.

  Chapter Sixteen

  We went, though not precipitously—not until we got out of the house, at least, but then precipitously—for Morraigne was thoughtful, or libidinous, enough to spend a minute in his bathroom for the alleged purpose of telling his multinamed and probably multitalented young companion that we would be gone for a little while, and she wasn't to leave more than one ring in the tub.

  When he returned, his hands and forearms were wet. After drying them on a towel, he said—dryly, of course—"Woman work is never done,” then we went outside together and climbed into his motor home.

  * * * *

  “You don't talk much when you're driving around, do you?” Morraigne asked, about twenty-two miles and not nearly that many minutes later, when he'd parked out in—well, it looked like nowhere to me, and to me it was beautiful. Mainly because it was not flashing past in a terrifying blur, but just sat there, as I had concluded a landscape should.

  “I didn't know that was what we were doing, you maniac,” I said. “I thought you were trying to catch up with some light waves."

  “Used to drive racing cars, a long time ago,” he said, as if that explained anything.

  We got out and Morraigne unlocked the rear door, climbed inside. There were clicking sounds as he opened a couple more locks, then he stepped out, carrying—carefully, watching his step—a black box about two feet wide and high and a foot across its top. Set into the top of the box were three large circular meters, or calibrated instruments of some kind, and below them three opaque inserts, without any figures or lines or needles, just circles of dull off-white plastic. Projecting upward from each outer front corner of the case was a telescoping metal antenna, similar to the kind used on portable television sets but much thinner, almost like fine silvery wire.

  “That's it, huh?” I said.

  “That's it. The only Magnesonant Holaselector in the world. Doesn't look like much, does it?"

  “No."

  “Wait till I put it on the Magnetropic Stabilizer—on its base, to you."

  Morraigne reached inside the camper and lifted out a flimsy-looking lightweight stand, much like an ordinary three-foot-high table except that a metal band was secured around all four sides of the table top, projecting upward a couple of inches above its surface and thus providing a space into which the black-painted instrument case could be securely fitted. Instead of a table's usual four legs, this had only three, in the shape of a triangle, one leg at its front and center, the other two at the rear corners. Additionally, in the exact center of the metal-banded stand's base, projecting up through the base for two inches and extending downward perhaps six inches farther than the three legs of the triangle, was another “leg” of shiny metal, round, polished, and pointed at its bottom end.

  Morraigne set the instrument's base on the earth, forcing that pointed middle leg into the ground, then picked up his black box from where he'd carefully placed it, eased it into position atop the little table.

  “There. Look more impressive now?” he asked me.

  “No."

  “Follow me."

  I followed him overland, and zigzagging about, for the next half hour, and—so far as I could tell—Morraigne didn't deliberately conceal anything from me. Not verbally, at least. Needless to say, he did not open up his magical box and let me poke around at whatever was inside it, but he did tell me what should happen to the various dials and meters and needles and circles, when it should happen, and what it meant.

  I'll say this, as far as I could tell, he didn't personally make the needles of those three larger meters wiggle or the small circles of opaque plastic glow while little dots moved across them, much like the visible records doctors make of heartbeats—unless it was by some sort of telepathy, which would have been more unbelievable than that his mysterious dingus might actually react in some way to minerals and hydrocarbons hidden in the earth. That is, he didn't poke any buttons, or fiddle surreptitiously with valves or wires when I was presumably not looking, merely moved the instrument itself into various positions and locations, and each time adjusted one of the large dials and also adjusted either one or both of those thin silver antennae.

  He even let me perform those operations a couple of times, and although there was no way I could interpret with any accuracy what was happening, what it really meant, something sure as hell was happening, and it was a weird, almost unnerving, sensation to watch those long thin needles slowly move, stop, remain steady at one point on a calibrated dial, while one or more of those plastic circles began eerily glowing and a dot like dark light moved erratically across its face.

  There was, for example, the moment near the end of our half hour in the field when, for the first time, though at a spot selected by Morraigne—I set up the instrument on its base and turned the large left-hand dial until the needle under a circle of glass began moving by itself, then waited, watched, saw all three of those small plastic circles start to glow, faintly, then brighter, the third one brightest of all and at last almost brilliant like the center of a luminously incandescent pearl, all three with dark dots moving, and I yelled, actually yelled loud enough to be heard a half-mile away, “My God, that's oil—there's oil down there!"

  I felt silly as hell immediately afterward.

  But I would not forget the sudden jarring shock of emotion, the literal quickening of my pulse and quick sharp hammer of my heart, when I saw that needle and those dials telling me—or at least when I believed they were telling me—there was rich black oil beneath me, I was standing squarely above it, it was there somewhere beneath my feet. There, and for a wild moment, mine.

  Of course, I reminded myself, I interpreted that play of movement and light as the instrument's reaction to the presence, in some quantity, of hydrocarbons, because that was what Devin Morraigne had told me such a reaction, when and if it occurred, would mean. He could as easily have assured me that the same or other indications would prove there was a rich vein of subterranean alfalfa growing down there, or deposits of minerals from ancient Atlantean oyster beds. In which event I might just as easily, and loudly, have shouted, “My God, there's oysters in the alfalfa down there!"

  Still, I would not forget that sensation, the excitement, the thrill of making a discovery, of “finding oil.” And, naturally, I thought of how enthusiastically a naive and hopeful potential investor, or even well-healed and hardboiled gambler—or “mark,” as con-men refer to their half-hypnotized victims—might react to what had just turned me so noisily on. Tapping a mark at that moment for everything he owned plus fifty percent would be, I had no doubt, a piece of cake.

  Morraigne was looking at me, half smiling.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to him. “Didn't mean to whinny like a horse—"

  “Don't apologize, Shell,” he said. “Happens to me every time, still happens. Inside, anyhow. I've learned not to show it on the outside. Not to show it that much, at least. Kind of grabs you, doesn't it?"

  “It felt a little bit like a heart transplant I wasn't expecting. Of course, it doesn't mean a damn—” I cut it off, started over, “Let me put it as a question, Dev. Do you ass
ume from your instrument's—not my—reaction that there may be a little oil somewhere below us here?"

  “Not may be, is. Not a little, plenty.” He waved one long arm around in a half-circle. “Hell, you can see we're in an oil field here, most of the wells abandoned but half a dozen still producing."

  Dev himself had earlier operated his instrument at three separate places within the square mile we'd tramped over, before urging me to have my solo try at it. He'd taken me first to a spot near one of the producing wells, where the walking beam of an ungainly pumping unit, moving up and down, activated a subsurface pump, forcing crude oil to the earth's surface and into a pipeline that led off to the north.

  There his instrument had reacted—to something—dial moving to twenty on its 180-point scale, and the first two of those three plastic circles becoming a little brighter than the rest. Oil, Dev had said, part of what was left of reserves from which the producing well near us, and many others now shut down, had been pumping for the last twenty-five years. He fiddled with dials and those antennae, estimated what amount of crude oil he believed was left here, in tons, translated it into barrels for me—something less than five thousand barrels.

  After that, we'd visited the sites of two other wells, both of which had stopped producing and been abandoned. Results from the ever-alert Magnesonant Holaselector: nothing. It was a boring fifteen minutes, even though Dev allowed me to play with his machine at one of the dead and cement-plugged holes. It's no fun playing with something that doesn't do anything, which at the abandoned holes it didn't. I found myself wondering what little Petrushka—actually, not-so-little Petrushka—was doing. Was she in the tub, soaping? Making bubbles? Playing with a celluloid duck?

  And then—I'd struck oil.

  Everything changed in that instant. I didn't care if Petrushka was stuffing green olives into her nose, or elsewhere. For that one, long, heart-thumping moment only, of course.

  By then Dev had educated me somewhat in the technique of using his instrument, at least enough so he could simply tell me to set it up and see what happened. And he'd guided me to this spot, where a small steel-pipe marker rose about four feet above the ground, on it a sign recording the well's name and the fact that it was abandoned. There were a lot of those two- or three-inch pipes visible in the area, marking spots where other now-abandoned wells had been drilled, a long time ago.

  Now I looked from Dev to that pipe sticking up from the earth a dozen feet away and said, “What the hell? Why abandon a well when—if—there's an ocean of oil down there? Or at least a little pool. If that's what your dingus ... your instrument is trying to tell us."

  “That's what it's told us, Shell, even with you futzing around with it. I've been here before, as you must have guessed if you're really a detective. That's why I brought you to this location."

  “I assumed something more than a freak of fate brought us here. You've checked this spot out before, and with some care, I assume?"

  “You better believe it. Watch."

  For five minutes he adjusted those three dials, both antennae, making notes on a pad—the first time I'd seen him write anything down—talking quietly all the time. Most of what he said made sense to me, even if I didn't believe all of it, but some was simply beyond my understanding.

  When he was through, Dev summed it up, occasionally indicating a figure he'd noted on his pad. “So, there you have it. The old casing—metal, of course—was simply left in this hole when production petered out. Now, that casing ends at sixty-two-hundred feet, and it's one of the deepest wells in this particular field. I've checked."

  “Dev, bear with me. I saw you do it, watched that right-hand needle drop off suddenly, flop down to zero, at a point you say represented sixty-two-hundred feet below us. Assuming I buy that, do you mean some kind of ray or feeler from this”—I pointed at the black box—“actually differentiates between the pipe and dirt around or underneath it?"

  “Sure. Down there the casing string isn't in dirt, by the way, but solid rock for the last eighty feet. Must have been a sweet hole to drill. It's not a ray, though, more like a pulse sent out from the Holaselector and returned to it. There's no trick to noting the difference between solid steel pipe and soft earth, or even granite. And the time lapse between emission and return of the pulse can easily be translated into feet."

  “Especially if you can do it in your head."

  “Right. Or, equally well, better in fact, by computer. It's a very simple equation, time in microseconds divided by two and multiplied by speed of the pulse in feet per microsecond equals distance in feet to the point being probed."

  “Yeah, but.... What have you got inside there, super-socko little batteries?"

  “Not what you'd call batteries, exactly. Certainly no motor, nothing turning, no moving parts as they say."

  “But the damn thing isn't—isn't plugged into anything. Where's your power source, Dev?"

  “Sure it's plugged in.” He pointed to the polished round bar or fourth “leg” extending down from the center of his instrument's three-legged platform.

  I knew there was, in the instrument's base, a small circular opening into which the top two inches of that silvery rod projected, and fitted snugly. And the other end of the rod, the pointed end, went down six inches into the ground. Still....

  “It's plugged into the earth,” Dev said.

  “Of course. Next time the lights go out in my apartment, I'll just stick a lamp plug into the lawn socket."

  “Crack wise all you want, Shell. Tesla believed it was possible to tap the earth for power at any point on its surface, no armatures, no dynamos—except old Mother-Earth dynamo. Hell, the earth's essentially a magnet. Large one, true, so it helps if we mentally reduce it in size, say to a foot or a few inches. And there she is, round magnet, north and south poles, magnetic flux stretching around the entire body, and through it, from pole to pole. Spinning in a space filled with other magnetic fluxes and enormous quantities of power. But the hell with all that.” He glanced at his watch. “I've got to be getting back to the house pretty quick."

  “Maybe we'd better leave now, so we won't have to hurry."

  “There's time. To wrap up what I was telling you, Shell—and listen closely, my dubious friend, because the next minute might make you filthy rich. This well here, now abandoned, was drilled to sixty-two-hundred feet. The deepest well in this field reached only sixty-seven hundred. Now, you can see”—he touched one of the figures scribbled on his pad—“the indication we got, actually the indication you got, Shell, indicates very substantial quantities of hydrocarbons three-quarters of a mile below the greatest depth explored in this area."

  “You're saying the original developers of the field didn't go deep enough, right?"

  “Not exactly. They got what they were after a quarter of a century ago, reached a very profitable zone, achieved excellent production. Which, in the last twenty-five years, has been almost entirely exhausted. What they didn't know, what nobody alive knows except me—except me, and now you, Shell Scott—is that three-quarters of a mile farther down into the earth there is another extensive zone, another entire reservoir of oil and natural gas. Enough gas pressure to force that oil up without pumping, let it flow, actual goddamn gushers when that zone's hit. And I'm not certain—haven't checked the entire area yet—but I'll lay odds there's not less than a hundred million barrels below us right now, waiting for someone to come along and take it.” He paused. “Someone, of course, who realizes it's there."

  I blinked. I had been blinking for a while. “Hundred million barrels? Hundred million barrels? Only three-quarters of a mile farther down?"

  “Not quite three-fourths of a mile, which would be three-nine-six-oh feet, but about one-sixty less than that. Have to drill to about ten-thousand-five, or point-seven-one-nine-six-nine-plus, call it point-seven-two miles—thirty-eight hundred feet—beyond the sixty-seven hundred-foot depth I mentioned."

  I whistled. “I remember that the first well yo
u checked, the one still pumping, sent that needle”—I pointed to it—“only up to about twenty points, or degrees, twenty whatever. But this one, that same needle flipped way the hell over, past a hundred for sure. Of course, I don't suppose that has to mean anything wonderful—"

  “Hundred and twenty-six, to be exact. On a one-eighty max scale. And it means plenty. Stronger the reading, the richer the reserves, the more massive the oil-bearing structure, at that point. Doesn't tell you the field's width, its boundaries—I'd have to test the entire area, take hundreds of readings, find the edges so to speak and within that periphery determine varying depths or thicknesses, and concentrations, of the hydrocarbon deposits, and from all of that compute the probable reserves.” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it somewhat tousled. “Think of it in part as similar to determining the outline and mass of a kidney, or liver, any internal organ in a living body, much as you might X-ray it, only instead of X-rays you employ a combination of ultrasonics, and resonance and laser technology, and produce a hologram, a two-D map you can reproduce or project in three-D, in three dimensions for analysis."

  I shook my head, looked at his remarkable dingus, which was beginning to look less and less like a doodlebug, or even a dingus.

  “That little beggar must be worth a few bills,” I said.

  “I've got six hundred thousand in it so far."

  “Six hundred thousand dollars?"

  “I don't mean peanuts. If it weren't for recent advances in solid-state, molecular circuitry, microminiaturization—and undeniable brilliancies solely attributable to Devin Morraigne, of whom we shall hear more—that little beggar would have cost ten times as much and be bigger than my house."

  He checked his watch again, adding, “To which I suggest we speedily repair."

  “Not too speedily, huh?"

  Dev carried his instrument and I hauled its platform back to the motor home. There, just before he stowed it away and locked it up again, I took my last gander at the thing. And, I will freely confess, that rather ordinary black box with a few dials and plastic circles set into its top looked to me, at last, like a real zippety-doodah Magnesonant Holaselector.