by John Varley
It would he harder to cover up in Iran, Iraq, and Russia, but not impossible. For a while. That seemed to be the key here: for a while. Weeks? A month? He didn’t know how long this had been going on, so it was pointless to try to figure out how much time might be left until it all came out. Because it would have to. Surely the people living around Samotlor knew something beyond sabotage was going on. You can prevent people from traveling, cut off electronic communications, but you can’t cover all the bases. Word will get out. In time, even the absence of news from the region becomes noteworthy.
So he decided the story was plausible. But plausibility was not truth. If it was all true, he should be doing something about it. Even if only a part of it was true, there were probably things he should be doing. Things like stocking up on food and water. Things like—worst-case scenario—buying a gun.
But what? What would be prudent, and what would be panicky?
He realized he didn’t have enough information. First he needed to answer the basic question: What would things be like in Los Angeles if there were no gasoline? What would they be like in the state of California, for that matter? What would they be like in America?
He went online to try to find some answers.
In a few hours he was much more frightened than he had been before.
“Did you know that Los Angeles has about a sixty-day supply of water?”
Karen looked up from her plate of take-out Thai food and frowned.
“You mean with the drought? We’ve already cut back to watering the plants once a week. What more do they expect us to do?”
He wasn’t going to tell them the story of the last two days until he was sure of a few more things. But his mind was swimming with recently learned information, and he wanted to share it.
“We get almost half our water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct. It’s a hundred years old now. It brings water from way up north in the Owens Valley and Mono Lake. It’s downhill all the way.”
“No it’s not,” Addison said. “There are mountains between here and there.”
“The water is siphoned over them,” he told her. “There are no pumps needed. Doesn’t cost much to run it. Not that the people of the Owens Valley have ever been happy about it. They were bamboozled by William Mulholland back in 1905. Without that water, Los Angeles could never have developed the way it did.”
“Didn’t we see a movie about that?” Karen asked.
“Chinatown was based on the water wars. The thing is, the people way up there in the Sierras have never really forgiven L.A. for it, and in fact, the way they figure it, we’re still stealing their water. And we keep wanting more. I was just thinking, if they ever got angry enough, it would be easy to sabotage that big pipe. You know how many people the Los Angeles metro area could support without the water we bring in?”
Karen didn’t even look up, already bored with the subject.
“How many, Daddy?”
“Nineteen out of twenty people who live here would have to go somewhere else.”
Neither of them had anything to say about that. Dave figured he might as well give them the rest of the story. It’s not as if conversation had sparkled around the Marshall dinner table lately.
“Most of the rest of our water comes from the Colorado and California Aqueducts. That water has to be pumped.” And pumps need electricity or fuel to operate. But he didn’t add that. “Only about 10 percent of our water comes out of the ground.”
“That’s fascinating, Daddy.”
He could tell she didn’t really think so, but Addison had always been tactful. He smiled at her.
“So, would you like to hear about our power supply?”
Neither of them did.
In trying to answer that basic question—what would Los Angeles be like with little or no petroleum fuel?—he had found some interesting and alarming facts.
He was surprised to learn that L.A. got about half its electricity from coal-fired plants, some of them in the city, some in the neighboring states. Another quarter came from burning natural gas, 10 percent from nuclear plants, and around 5 percent from hydropower, mostly from Hoover Dam. But all the coal for the plants in Arizona and Utah was brought in by trains that ran on diesel fuel.
How would Los Angeles, perhaps the most gasoline-dependent city in the world, react to a severe shortage?
He had an idea that it wouldn’t be pretty.
The next day after taking Addison to school Dave dropped Karen off at the Burbank airport for a flight to San Francisco. She was attending a conference there. He wasn’t sure what it was about. He felt guilty about that, but he had a hard time keeping up with her causes at the best of times, and this was far from the best. He couldn’t stop thinking about Colonel Warner and the burning oil wells.
He decided to go on a shopping spree. But first he decided to make a list. What would he need to survive with limited or no gasoline? He went down to the basement to see what he had.
It was under the guesthouse/office, and reachable only by an outside stairway going down the hill, almost overgrown with vines. The door was sturdy steel with a strong padlock. He hadn’t been in there in ages.
His earthquake supplies were good for only the recommended three days, and it was all years old. The first-aid kit was a joke.
Against the east wall was a hodgepodge of stuff that most people accumulate.
When Addison was six and joined the Girl Scouts, Dave thought it would be fun if the family camped out together. So he bought a tent, a camp stove, a giant cooler, cots, air mattresses, all top-of-the-line, and they set out like pioneers on the Oregon Trail for the wilds of Lake Tahoe—where you have to make reservations several weeks ahead, and pay $75 for a three-day weekend. He had pitched the tent among a horde of forty-foot RVs. The Marshalls were the only tent people at the campground.
They lasted one night. Karen complained of the cold, hated bacon and eggs cooked over a propane stove, and was eaten up by bugs. They checked out, and checked in to a luxury hotel, and spent the rest of the weekend in the casinos or lounging by the pool. Addison asked one time about a month later if they could do it again, and her mother said no. The camping gear had sat in the basement ever since.
He couldn’t blame it all on Karen. He wasn’t all that wild about sleeping on an air mattress himself. Addison seemed to enjoy the experience, but she knew better than to pressure her mother about it.
He ran a finger over the rolled-up tent, which was covered with dust. He recalled it had cost him about $600, and had been set up once. The old propane stove was still there, too, but he had no bottled gas for it. He put that on his shopping list.
Alongside the old tennis rackets and boxes of books were three bicycles that were also gathering dust. When they’d lived in the Valley, in the flatlands, they’d actually used them as a family, riding the bike trails on weekends or evenings. Then they moved to the hills, and after a few trips down and back up, pushing them the last quarter mile, they put them in the basement and never used them again.
It made him sad to look at them. What did they do as a family anymore? He’d spent most of the last decade in the high-pressure world of comedy writing, about as insecure as any job can be. Karen had flitted from one to another of her transient passions. He didn’t think Addison was actually neglected; they were involved in her school—Karen more than him—and she always seemed a happy little girl. Let’s just say she was encouraged to be self-sufficient, and she was good at that. Now he found himself wishing he’d asked her if she really wanted to be self-sufficient.
Addison had been five when they moved. Her bicycle was now much too small for her. All three of them were good bikes, with fat tires and light aluminum frames. In his youth it was all ten-speeds. He squeezed one of the tires and wasn’t surprised to find that it was flat, but the rubber also felt flaky from age. He made a note of the sizes and put that on his shopping list, along with a new bike for Addison.
By the time he left the house he had a
long list.
For once he was happy with the cavernous interior of the Escalade. He descended on Costco in Burbank like Crazy Horse on the Seventh Cavalry. For the first time he used one of the flatbed shopping carts, and he filled it up with bottled water, cases of canned meat, tuna, veggies, and whatever else struck his fancy. For good measure he bought lots of toilet paper. He figured, if it’s the end of the world as we know it, the toilet paper was going to have to last awhile.
When he had it all stowed in the back, he realized he was breathing hard, and felt like he was on the edge of a panic attack. He used to get them when they were writing to a deadline, and lately he’d had a few when he contemplated his financial situation. He knew that what he’d just done was more like a hysterical reaction than true prudent planning. He had not been able to talk this over with anyone, and the pressure of that was getting to him. He had seen a man killed. He had heard the most frightening story he’d ever heard, and he’d seen what looked like proof that the story was true, or at least partly true. And so what was it that he was most worried about at that moment? Why, it was telling Karen about all this. He was sure she would think he was crazy. And it would be hard to blame her.
When he picked up Addison she looked in back. She raised one eyebrow at him.
“Doing a little shopping?”
“No, I found all this sitting by the side of the road.”
“Neat. Spam?”
“Never know when a case of Spam might come in handy.”
“I’ve never actually eaten Spam.”
“And you probably won’t, unless we have a big earthquake.”
“Ah. Earthquake supplies.” That was really all the explanation needed for a girl who grew up in Southern California.
He spent that evening and into the night surfing the Net.
First he looked for stories about the murder of Colonel Warner. There was nothing. Not in the Times, not on CNN, not anywhere. It was such a blank that he began to worry if merely searching for his name might alert someone in a secret government agency. He quickly deleted his search from memory.
It wasn’t hard to find other stories. The oil-well explosions and fires at Ghawar, and in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Russia was the big story of the day, though it was being reported as if it had just happened. Coordinated terrorist attacks on the oil fields, most likely by Al Qaeda, though Hamas and Hezbollah were suspected, too. The National Guard was on alert, patrolling the oil and natural-gas fields in Texas and Louisiana, and the wells and pipelines in Alaska. The Coast Guard was protecting the offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The Royal Navy and the Norwegian Navy were on duty in the North Sea. Firefighting crews from Texas were on their way to or already in place in Saudi and Kuwait.
The stock market had taken its worst three-day beating since 9/11.
There was a story about oil tankers that had gone missing in the Indian Ocean. Some of them had been seen to explode, some of them had simply fallen off the radar. Somali pirates were being blamed, though no one had said how they would make a profit sinking tankers.
The most interesting stuff was on the blogosphere. The online population was confused, suspicious, and angry. As usual.
The same people who figured Arabs weren’t smart enough to fly airplanes into skyscrapers, that the Twin Towers had been brought down by charges placed inside them by their government, naturally thought these oil-well fires were a conspiracy. Who was behind the conspiracy was a matter of some debate, but that it was a conspiracy was a given. Ironically, Dave thought, they might not be far from the truth this time.
Other, more rational voices seemed mostly frustrated. They agreed that the terrorism angle was probably a lie, but that left the question of who benefited from this whole business? The obvious suspects—big business, big oil—seemed to be panicking, and hemorrhaging money, from all anyone could tell from the outside.
The insider blogs, opinion pieces from people who might be in a position to know, sounded flat-out frightened. These were government insiders, reporters, policy makers. No one was telling them anything. Whatever was going on, real knowledge of it was the most closely held secret anyone could remember. The top presidential advisors, cabinet secretaries, congressmen heading key committees and their staffs looked like they weren’t getting a lot of sleep. A few had even disappeared and couldn’t be found.
The next morning he opened Quicken and scanned through his financial data. It hadn’t magically improved since the last time he checked. If they were going to have to hunker down, he would want to lay in even more supplies. If they were going to move, he’d want to be as liquid as possible.
There was no point in trying to sell their cars, with gas prices the way they were. Selling the house in the current market would be a disaster, and it might not move at all, but he could possibly get a loan on it.
The best news was that his family had not yet reached the point where they had maxed out their credit cards. He still had a few thousand of what was to have been their savings in the bank. He had cashed in all their investments to make ends meet, so it was all in low-interest checking. That would come in handy. And the balances on their four platinum cards were low. None of them had a credit limit. He could buy pretty much whatever he thought they might need, and worry about paying for it all later.
An army surplus store in the Valley sold olive drab five-gallon metal jerry cans that might have been left over from World War Two for all he could tell. There was a lot of empty shelf space around the ones they had left, which was eight. He bought them all and earned a dirty look from a guy who came in the store as he was paying for them.
The Target store at Santa Monica and La Brea had sold all their plastic gas containers. He called around to some other stores and found they were out, too. But at another surplus store on Hollywood Boulevard he found another dozen metal containers. He bought them all. Then he found a Shell station on Sunset and got in a line with six cars ahead of him. He killed the engine and waited.
When he got to the pumps he first filled the Escalade. Then he opened the back and started in on the gas cans. As he topped off the third one an attendant approached him. He had bought gas there before and never seen the attendant leave his post behind the counter.
He said, “Sir, we’re asking customers to only fill two containers, plus their gas tank.”
“Why is that? It just makes it inconvenient for me, I’ll have to find another station and wait in line again.”
“I don’t really give a damn.” He looked hassled and frustrated. “It was up to me, I’d sell you all the gas you wanted. But I got a call from the distributor, and he said that’s what we gotta do.” He shrugged. “It won’t matter pretty soon, anyway. I’m gonna be dry in about another hour, and the tanker don’t come by till day after tomorrow.”
“Just one more can?”
“You already done three.”
He was right. Dave could see the people behind him were impatient, so he closed the rear gate and set off in search of more of the precious fluid that he’d taken for granted all his life.
He found a station with only two cars in line and managed to fill the rest of his cans. On the way home he passed a station with a sign out front that said NO GAS.
He unloaded the full gas cans and stored them away in the basement.
On the way back to the Valley he did something he had thought about all day. He called up the members of his posse and invited them over for a friendly game of poker.
He didn’t remember who first started using “the posse” when referring to his writing team on Ants! It wasn’t all that original, but they all liked it better than “the team,” or “the group.” Who wouldn’t? There were five of them, all but one of them first-timers at working together as a comedy-writing team.
The exception was the oldest, Bob Winston, who had worked on three successful shows before Dave’s, and became a sort of mentor to the rest of them. The sad fact was that Bob was a bit of a burned-out case. He had lost w
hat the rest of them called his comedy mojo, though they would never say it to his face. They respected him, he knew the ropes, how to handle the fickle and demanding higher-ups. Though Dave was the titular leader of the posse, Bob was the father figure, and naturally the one he turned to that day.
It took a little convincing, but Bob agreed to contact the others when Dave told him how important it was. Naturally, Bob assumed it would be about a new project, which he wasn’t all that interested in, being pretty much retired and well-set for life with residuals coming in steadily. He had invested well when he was one of the hottest writers in town. He had a big house in Holmby Hills that backed up on the Los Angeles Country Club, in the same neighborhood as the Playboy Mansion and the Spelling estate.
“Can you give me some notion of what your idea is?” Bob asked.
“It’s not really…” Dave decided it might be easier to assemble everyone if they did think it was a story idea.
“It’s not a comedy,” he said. “More of a continuing drama.”
“Give me a hint. Are we talking The Sopranos? Law and Order? Or more in the neighborhood of Lost?”
“Stranger than that,” Dave said.
Bob promised he’d do his best to get everyone together, Dave’s place, seven o’clock until whenever. Dave hung up and pulled to the curb outside Valley Scooters, which he’d found after a brief Internet search.
He walked down a line of scooters parked on the sidewalk. They were bright and shiny as new pennies, and as colorful as a basket of Easter eggs. A salesman approached him.
“Get ’em while you can,” he said. He was a young, thin guy with tattoos around his neck and a ring in his left eyebrow.
“Selling a lot of these things?”
“I wish I could get two or three hundred more of them every month. But the factories can’t turn them out fast enough. You checked the prices at the pump these days?”
Dave admitted that he had.