A Meeting With Medusa (35 page)
First published in
Newsletter
, Pentagon Defense Science Board, August 1986
Collected in
Tales from Planet Earth
This was my first response to President Reagan’s so called Star Wars initiative. I’ve since been involved with almost all the people concerned, including the writer of his famous speech, and the Pentagon General who cheerfully goes under the nickname ‘Darth Vader’. I am happy to say that I am on good terms with all of them, even if we don’t agree on what could, and should, be done in this controversial area.
Contrary to the opinion of many so-called experts, it is now quite certain that President Kennedy’s controversial Budget Defense Initiative was entirely her own idea, and her famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech was as big a surprise to the OMB and the secretary of the Treasury as to everyone else. Presidential Science Adviser Dr George Keystone (‘Cops’ to his friends) was the first to hear about it.
Ms Kennedy, a great reader of historical fiction—past or future—had chanced upon an obscure novel about the fifth Centennial, which mentioned that seawater contains appreciable quantities of gold. With feminine intuition (so her enemies later charged) the President instantly saw the solution to one of her administration’s most pressing problems.
She was the latest of a long line of chief executives who had been appalled by the remorselessly increasing budget deficit, and two recent items of news had exacerbated her concern. The first was the announcement that by the year 2010 every citizen of the United States would be born a million dollars in debt. The other was the well-publicised report that the hardest currency in the free world was now the New York subway token.
‘George,’ said the President, ‘is it true that there’s gold in seawater? If so, can we get it out?’
Dr Keystone promised an answer within the hour. Although he had never quite lived down the fact that his master’s thesis had been on the somewhat bizarre sex life of the lesser Patagonian trivit (which, as had been said countless times, should be of interest only to another Patagonian trivit), he was now widely respected both in Washington and academe. This was no mean feat, made possible by the fact that he was the fastest byte slinger in the East. After accessing the global data banks for less than twenty minutes, he had obtained all the information the President needed.
She was surprised—and a little mortified—to discover that her idea was not original. As long ago as 1925 the great German scientist Fritz Haber had attempted to pay Germany’s enormous war reparations by extracting gold from seawater. The project had failed, but—as Dr Keystone pointed out—chemical technology had improved by several orders of magnitude since Haber’s time. Yes—if the United States could go to the Moon, it could certainly extract gold from the sea…
The President’s announcement that she had established the Budget Defense Initiative Organisation (BDIO) immediately triggered an enormous volume of praise and criticism.
Despite numerous injunctions from the estate of Ian Fleming, the media instantly rechristened the President’s science adviser Dr Goldfinger and Shirley Bassey emerged from retirement with a new version of her most famous song.
Reactions to the BDI fell into three main categories which divided the scientific community into fiercely warring groups. First there were the enthusiasts, who were certain that it was a wonderful idea. Then there were the sceptics, who argued that it was technically impossible—or at least so difficult that it would not be cost-effective. Finally, there were those who believed that it was indeed possible—but would be a bad idea.
Perhaps the best known of the enthusiasts was the famed Nevermore Laboratory’s Dr Raven, driving force behind Project EXCELSIOR. Although details were highly classified, it was known that the technology involved the use of hydrogen bombs to evaporate vast quantities of ocean, leaving behind all mineral (including gold) content to later processing.
Needless to say, many were highly critical of the project, but Dr Raven was able to defend it from behind his smoke screen of secrecy. To those who complained, ‘Won’t the gold be radioactive?’ he answered cheerfully, ‘So what? That will make it harder to steal! And anyway, it will be buried in bank vaults, so it doesn’t matter.’
But perhaps his most telling argument was that one by-product of EXCELSIOR would be several megatons of instant boiled fish, to feed the starving multitudes of the Third World.
Another surprising advocate of the BDI was the mayor of New York. On hearing that the estimated total weight of the oceans’ gold was at least five
billion
tons, the controversial Fidel Block proclaimed, ‘At last our great city will have its streets paved with gold!’ His numerous critics suggested that he start with the sidewalks so that hapless New Yorkers no longer disappeared into unplumbed depths.
The most telling criticisms came from the Union of Concerned Economists, which pointed out that the BDI might have many disastrous by-products. Unless carefully controlled, the injection of vast quantities of gold would have incalculable effects upon the world’s monetary system. Something approaching panic had already affected the international jewellery trade when sales of wedding rings had slumped to zero immediately after the President’s speech.
The most vocal protests, however, had come from Moscow. To the accusation that BDI was a subtle capitalist plot, the secretary of the Treasury had retorted that the USSR already had most of the world’s gold in its vaults, so its objections were purely hypocritical. The logic of this reply was still being unravelled when the President added to the confusion. She startled everyone by announcing that when the BDI technology was developed, the United States would gladly share it with the Soviet Union. Nobody believed her.
By this time there was hardly any professional organisation that had not become involved in BDI, either pro or con. (Or, in some cases, both.) The international lawyers pointed out a problem that the President had over-looked: Who actually owned the oceans’ gold? Presumably every country could claim the contents of the seawater out to the two-hundred-mile limit of the Economic Zone—but because ocean currents were continuously stirring this vast volume of liquid, the gold wouldn’t stay in one place.
A single extraction plant, at
any
spot in the world’s oceans, could eventually get it all—irrespective of national claims! What did the United States propose to do about that? Only faint noises of embarrassment emerged from the White House.
One person who was not embarrassed by this criticism—or any other—was the able and ubiquitous director of the BDIO. General Isaacson had made his formidable and well-deserved reputation as a Pentagon troubleshooter: perhaps his most celebrated achievement was the breaking up of the sinister, Mafia-controlled ring that had attempted to corner one of the most lucrative advertising outlets in the United States—the countless billions of sheets of armed-services toilet tissue.
It was the general who harangued the media and arranged demonstrations of the still-emerging BDI technology. His presentation of gold—well, gold-plated—tie clips to visiting journalists and TV reporters was a widely acclaimed stroke of genius. Not until after they had published their fulsome reports did the media representatives belatedly realise that the crafty general had never said in as many words that the gold had actually come from the sea.
By then, of course, it was too late to issue any qualifications.
At the present moment—four years after the President’s speech and only a year into her second term—it is still impossible to predict the BDI’s future. General Isaacson has set to sea on a vast floating platform looking, as
Newsweek
magazine put it, as if an aircraft carrier had tried to make love to an oil refinery. Dr Keystone, claiming that his work was well and truly done, has resigned to go looking for the
greater
Patagonian trivit. And, most ominously, US reconnaissance satellites have revealed that the USSR is building perfectly enormous pipes at strategic points all along its coastline.
First published in
Time
, 28 September 1992
The genesis of this story was a surprise request from
Time
magazine saying that: ‘We have never before published fiction, intentionally.’ This of course was a challenge I couldn’t resist, and the money wasn’t bad either. A few years later I realised this would be the basis for a novel…
The danger of asteroid or comet impact on our planet is now widely accepted, and Steven Spielberg optioned the novel before he made his own
Deep Impact
.
It came in vertically, punching a hole 10 km wide through the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater 200 km across.
That was only the beginning of disaster: now the real tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great reptiles was finally over.
The clock of evolution had been reset; the countdown to Man had begun. The date was, very approximately, 65 million
BC
.
Captain Robert Singh never tired of walking in the forest with his little son Toby. It was, of course, a tamed and gentle forest, guaranteed to be free of dangerous animals, but it made an exciting contrast to the rolling sand dunes of their last environment in the Saudi desert—and the one before that, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But when the Skylift Service had moved the house this time, something had gone wrong with the food-recycling system. Though the electronic menus had fail-safe backups, there had been a curious metallic taste to some of the items coming, out of the synthesiser recently.
‘What’s that Daddy?’ asked the four-year-old, pointing to a small hairy face peering at them through a screen of leaves.