by John Varley
They had a seven-year run. During the second year Dave and his family moved into a five-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills. Then the show was canceled, and he’d been scrambling ever since.
He got some money from syndication rights, residuals, but that market was not what it used to be. A lot of stations preferred to sell their off-peak time to infomercial companies instead of spending money to run an old show. He had written three sitcom pilots, but none of them had been made. During the last year he had even tried to get back as a staff writer on another show, any show, but got nowhere. He was about to turn forty, over the hill for a sitcom writer. You have to be tuned in to those absolutely latest trends, and even if he felt he was, he was perceived as being an old man. At thirty-nine. A one-hit wonder.
In desperation, he was trying to write a feature movie, something he had never done. And he was using the same formula that had worked so well with Ants! That is, find out what’s popular and do that, only more. In other words, copy.
What was most popular right then was war films based on video games. So his research had to be in two parts: games, and war. The first part was easy. Even if he was a living fossil of almost forty, he could buy and play games just like anyone else. He felt he had a good handle on that stuff. But he’d never served in the military and all he knew about real war was what he’d seen in movies or read in books. Colonel Warner had been consulting for studios and gamers for years. Dave had winced when he learned how much Warner’s per diem was, but he paid it. And so far it had been a bust, he’d not heard a thing that inspired him toward a story line.
Until today. And oddly enough, the story line didn’t have anything to do with war.
He realized he was woolgathering, switched on his iPhone, and started dictating everything he could remember about the colonel’s unlikely story while it was still fresh in his mind.
That occupied him for a little over an hour, and he realized he’d better get going or he’d be late picking up his daughter.
There is a neighborhood in the Valley where most people own a horse.
It’s east of the Disney Studios, west of Dreamworks, partly in Burbank and partly in Glendale, just across the Los Angeles River—actually a concrete-lined ditch most of the year—north of Griffith Park. It surrounds the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. Drive through it on Riverside and you’ll see that instead of bike paths, there are horse lanes. Take any of the side streets and you might see blacksmith trailers parked in driveways, with the smiths busy shoeing horses. Most of the houses, and even a lot of the apartment buildings, have stables in the back. The area is crisscrossed with riding trails, and bridges connect it to the much bigger network of trails in Griffith Park itself.
This is where Dave’s daughter had stabled her ten-year-old warmblood gelding, Ranger, since she convinced Dave to buy him two years ago. Ranger was a move up from her first horse, Hannah, an even-tempered Appaloosa mare that he had been assured was a suitable mount for a ten-year-old. Back then she wanted to be a rodeo rider. Now she aspired to dressage and jumping—which she would not do as long as she was a minor living in his home. Bottom line, Addison was a horse person and enjoyed anything about riding. Including, Dave had to admit, currying, feeding, and mucking out the stable.
They say a boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money. Dave was neither a nautical nor an equestrian person, but he had learned in the last four years that a horse is a money pit, too, especially if you live in the city. There was the expense of the animal itself: $15,000 for the nag she was currently riding, which was in the low-end range. There was the cost of feeding and stabling, which was more than he used to pay in rent. There’s all the tack: bridles and bits, stirrups, halters, things he’d never even heard of, like breastplates and martingales. A good English saddle could go for $2,000 and up. And don’t forget riding lessons. You can’t just get up on the back of a horse and teach it dressage. You have to have someone show you how. A good riding coach doesn’t come cheap.
One day soon she’d be wanting a mount with better bloodlines. He wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. And, of course, she would want to keep Ranger. Dave was facing the possibility of owning two horses. Right then, he couldn’t afford just the one. He was wondering how he was going to break that to Addison.
He parked and walked over to the ring where she and a few others were putting their mounts through their paces. He had to admit, his heart swelled every time he saw her sitting there on her English saddle, wearing her white jodhpurs, gray coat, top hat, and shiny black knee-high riding boots ($600 a pair), her blonde hair tied up in a bunch at the nape of her neck. His little girl was growing up. He watched her trot the horse toward a low obstacle—two feet six inches high, the tallest he’d allow her, and he had to close his eyes every time she took one.
Then she spotted him and smiled and waved, and for a moment the poised young woman went away and was replaced by the tomboy she had been until a few years ago. Sometimes he wished she’d stuck to the rodeo dream. He thought he might rather see her barrel racing in cowgirl boots and jeans and a shirt with pearl buttons than so erect and dignified and in control. He wasn’t always sure he knew this new girl.
Dinners could be a bit stifling at the Marshall household recently. Karen and Dave were not getting along well. She had been stubbornly ignoring his ever-less-subtle hints that they were going to have to curb their spending. A showdown was coming. He had considered having the uncomfortable conversation that evening after Addison went to bed, but the colonel’s story had changed all that. Now all he could think of was wolfing down the dinner Karen had grudgingly laid out for them and heading to his office to write the whole story down.
They had had to let their cook/housekeeper go the previous month, the gardener the month before that. Now they had no help at all, and help was something Karen had come to believe she was entitled to. She seemed to have deliberately forgotten all the culinary skills she had when they were newlyweds living in the Valley. Tonight the menu was scooped out of plastic containers from the Whole Foods down the hill. Last night it had been delivery Chinese. Tomorrow he expected pizza. He knew he was being punished for being a bad provider. Karen picked at her food. Addison ate in silence, well aware of the tension between Mom and Dad.
Not a happy home. Addison loaded her dishes into the dishwasher, gave him a kiss on the forehead, and retreated to her room, saying she had a paper to turn in at school tomorrow. Karen just glared at him as he got up. He knew there was no point in telling her he thought he had a way out of their financial crisis if he could nail this story and sell it to Universal or Paramount. At that point, he didn’t think she would have believed him.
So he went to his office with the million-dollar view of Century City and West Hollywood, booted up the computer, and started to write.
CHAPTER TWO
THE PROMETHEUS STRAIN
A motion picture treatment by Dave Marshall
The people who worked there called it Area 52, when they called it anything at all. Officially, it didn’t exist. It was an inside joke, Area 51 being the airbase in the Nevada desert where the aliens from the Roswell UFO crash were allegedly taken. The people who worked there didn’t even know where they were. They were flown in and out on jets with no windows. They worked on projects funded from the unaccountable Black Budget, and the money supply was almost endless. Ask for a new piece of scientific equipment, and it would show up within a week.
Eddie Parker didn’t care where the place was, never even thought of it as Area 52. He simply thought of it as the Lab.
Eddie did not work well with others, never had, and he knew that he would never rise very high in the rat-maze bureaucracy and backstabbing atmosphere of most research establishments. Luckily for him, interacting with his fellow humans was not high on his list of priorities. At least that’s what he told himself, until he met Jenny.
The security people would have preferred keeping the scientists at the Lab all the time. But th
ey had tried long-term sequestration and found that it tended to drive the researchers a little crazy. Since many of them were borderline crazy already, it didn’t take much of a nudge to push them over the edge into uselessness. A certain amount of R&R was needed. Two weeks decompression every three months was deemed about right.
Eddie did not want R&R very much, as it took him away from his toys. But rules were rules. They asked him where he wanted to go and, picking a name out of the air, he said New York City. He’d never been there.
They put him up in a suite in a fine hotel and he spent most of the first week at his highly secure laptop, communing with the supercomputers back at the Lab. But eventually he did venture out. He took in a movie, ate a hot dog at Nathan’s, but mostly he just walked.
She was good. He would think he had lost her, then spot her wearing a different hat, with her coat reversed. She was there as both bodyguard and watchdog, and it seemed silly to him. He wasn’t going to talk about his work and he wasn’t going to run away. So he approached her and told her he knew what she was doing. She admitted it, and they had coffee together. After that, she stayed by his side. Her name was Jenny.
She was no raving beauty, but she was pretty enough, and smart. He found it easy to talk to her.
Then one evening as she was putting him to bed for the night, she kissed him, and though he was never sure just how it happened, he found himself in bed with her. It was his first time, and she seemed to know it—later, he realized it was probably in his dossier, which she would have memorized—and she was gentle and supportive of his awkwardness. That night, as sleep eluded him, he knew he was in love.
The next day he had to return to the Lab. They parted at the airport with kisses and made plans for their next meeting in three months.
His work suffered for a while, but it was all he really knew, and soon he was back into the project he had left behind. But for the first time he began to entertain notions of a life after the Lab. Perhaps even of quitting the Lab entirely, going to work in the private sector. He tossed ideas around, ideas he planned to share with Jenny when he returned to New York and met her for breakfast at Windows on the World, at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
They never found enough of her to identify. He stood all day just outside the police lines, inhaling dust and grit, until his new handler gently led him back to the hotel, where he informed them he was ready to return to the Lab. For a few days he hoped for a phone call—missed my train, the taxi broke down, oh my God, Eddie, when I think of how close I came to being there…but it never came.
He felt the same frustration all Americans felt in the aftermath of the atrocity. How do we get our revenge on nineteen dead men? Killing Osama bin Laden would not be enough. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave him no satisfaction. Gradually he came to focus on the nineteen. Two things about them immediately stood out. All of them were Muslim. And fifteen of them came from Saudi Arabia.
Why are we bombing Iraq? Why aren’t we bombing Saudi Arabia?
He was not the only one who harbored such thoughts about America’s erstwhile ally in the newly declared “War on Terror,” but Eddie happened to be the only person who was equipped, personally, to do something about it.
Someone once said “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Eddie was in no hurry. His field was bacteria, those tiny bits of living material that descended from the very first life to appear on Earth, around 4 billion years ago. It was quite likely that he knew more about bacteria than anyone else alive. It was certain that he knew more about methods of manipulating, cloning, and even creating them than anyone, because no one else in the world had the facilities available to him.
Bacteria are the ultimate survivors, mutating quickly in response to antibiotics, able to thrive at high levels of radioactivity, acidity, and at temperatures up to 270 degrees Fahrenheit.
Eddie had worked on the development of bacteria targeted on oil spills. But in recent years he had been concentrating on ways to use bacteria to recover more oil from proven reserves. The problem was that though there was still oil underground, the easy oil had been pumped already. The days when you could poke a hole in the ground and stand back as the black gold gushed out were long gone. The oil reserves remaining on the planet were increasingly hard to get at. Most of the oil in fields currently producing, including those in Saudi Arabia, could only be recovered by increasingly exotic means.
Eddie had been working on a bacterium that would enable the crude in existing wells to flow more easily, or to naturally increase the underground pressure. It was called the Prometheus Project.
He focused on the largest oil field in the world, the Ghawar, a strip 175 miles long by 20 miles wide, 100 miles due east of Riyadh, in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia.
The most common technology for getting the remaining oil out of a field was to inject water into the ground. But when you pump water in, you get some water back, and the percentage of oil to water is called the “water cut.” Fresh wells produced almost 100 percent oil. With older fields, you got back more and more water until it was not worth the cost of injecting it. For some years now, the water cut at the Ghawar fields was on the order of 60 percent, and it would only continue to rise.
The Saudis wanted someone to do something about it. They wanted a magic bug that would turn the more sluggish fractions down in those wells into something that would flow like springwater, if not quite so sparkling.
Eddie told them he was their man. Everyone was hoping for results in a matter of months, but it took years. It was a real challenge, because he had to produce something that showed promise as a crude-oil liquefier while at the same time hiding his work on the real bacterium he had in mind.
This bug would freeze Ghawar solid as a coal seam.
Try pumping that, you murderous bastards.
He finally perfected an organism he officially called the Prometheus Strain. It performed to perfection, stripping away enough hydrogen from the crude-oil fractions to produce pressure, and leaving the residue liquid enough to pump.
But he didn’t tell anyone about the culture for a while. He had more work to do. He produced a second culture, Prometheus Two, a variant of the first. It was amazing what a difference a few little genes here and there could make.
When the second culture was ready, he announced that he had found the solution to the depleted-oilfield problem.
He demonstrated Prometheus in the lab, and it performed perfectly. Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi prince sent to witness the demonstration, was impressed. He wanted to try it in the field.
Eddie boarded the windowless plane with Prince bin Sultan and they flew to Washington, where they boarded the prince’s private A-380, a two-story airborne palace with a staff of twenty and only himself and the prince as passengers. Eddie ate a fine meal, and then slept soundly in a large bedroom.
He woke when the plane was descending into Dubai. He saw the gleaming spire of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest man-made structure in the world, and almost empty. He could make out the outlines of the gigantic Palm Jumeirah and the even larger Palm Jebel Ali housing developments, gigantic artificial islands, huge landfills in the shape of palm trees dotted with resort hotels and mansions.
All built not on sand, but on oil. Take away the oil, and those people down below would still be fishing from dhows and traveling on camels. They wouldn’t have much time to raise fanatic young terrorists willing to fly airplanes into buildings. They wouldn’t even have the airfare to get aboard.
The next day, Eddie was taken to the Ghawar field and, with little ceremony, added Jenny Two to the slurry being pumped into the ground.
Two weeks later, the Ghawar field exploded.
Dave thought it was his own snoring that woke him up. He was leaning back in his ergonomic chair, and when he slept in that position he could wake the dead.
The sun was turning the sky pink in the east. Most of the lights were still on in the towers of Century City, below him. A mar
ine layer of low clouds had moved in over Santa Monica, as it usually did that time of year. Much of yesterday’s smog had dispersed to wherever yesterday’s smog goes, and today’s batch wasn’t brewing yet. The streets he could see were almost deserted.
He was stiff and sore all over. Not as easy to pull an all-nighter when you’re almost forty as it was in college. He started a pot of coffee and sat back down to read what he had written.
Six pages, seventeen hundred words. It sounded good to him.
It was partly extrapolation. The truth was, at that point he was far from sure “Eddie Parker” even existed. The colonel had not given him a name, Dave made that up. He was just “one of the big brains at a very secret lab.” But that didn’t matter, as the whole story was highly unlikely, but good enough for a movie.
His cell phone rang. It was the colonel.
“Get your ass over here, right now,” he growled.
The colonel let him in, and then looked up and down the hallway before shutting the door behind him. He threw the lock and set the chain, then gestured Dave toward a glass-topped table near the front window, looking out over Hollywood Boulevard to the Pantages Theater. On the table was a laptop, a partially disassembled semiautomatic handgun, and a cleaning kit. He gestured him toward a chair at the table.
“Something to drink?”
“A little early for me,” he said.
“Me, too. I got coffee, tea…”