Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (38 page)

I had altogether about ten thousand dollars in savings available and another ten thousand in American Telephone and government bonds. Martha had a bit of money of her own, but I left that alone, and without telling her, I sold my Telephone stock and my bonds. Thunder Inc. was selling at five dollars a share, and I bought two thousand shares. General Shale was selling for two dollars, and I bought four thousand shares. I saw nothing immoral—as business morality was calculated—in the procedures adopted by Thunder Inc. Its relationship to the government was no different than the relationships of various other companies, and my own process of investment was perfectly straightforward and honorable. I was not even the recipient of secret information, for the atom-bomb-shale-oil proposal had been widely publicized if little believed.

Even before the first test explosion was undertaken, the stock of Thunder Inc. went from five to sixty-five dollars a share. My ten thousand dollars became one hundred and thirty thousand, and that doubled again a year later. The four thousand shares of General Shale went up to eighteen dollars a share; and from a moderately poor professor I became a moderately rich professor. When finally, almost two years after Max Gaffey first approached me, they exploded the first atom bomb in a shaft reamed in the oil-shale deposits, I had abandoned the simple anxieties of the poor and had developed an entirely new set tailored for the upper middle class. We became a two-car family, and a reluctant Martha joined me in shopping for a larger house. In the new house, Gaffey and his wife came to dinner, and Martha armed herself with two stiff martinis. Then she was quietly polite until Gaffey began to talk about the social good. He painted a bright picture of what shale oil could do and how rich we might well become.

“Oh, yes—yes,” Martha agreed. “Pollute the atmosphere, kill more people with more cars, increase the speed with which we can buzz around in circles and get precisely nowhere.”

“Oh, you're a pessimist,” said Gaffey's wife, who was young and pretty but no mental giant.

“Of course there are two sides to it,” Gaffey admitted. “It's a question of controls. You can't stop progress, but it seems to me that you can direct it.”

“The way we've been directing it—so that our rivers stink and our lakes are sewers of dead fish and our atmosphere is polluted and our birds are poisoned by DDT and our natural resources are spoiled. We are all spoilers, aren't we?”

“Come now,” I protested, “this is the way it is, and all of us are indignant about it, Martha.”

“Are you, really?”

“I think so.”

“Men have always dug in the earth,” Gaffey said. “Otherwise we'd still be in the Stone Age.”

“And perhaps a good bit happier.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “The Stone Age was a very unpleasant time, Martha. You don't wish us back there.”

“Do you remember,” Martha said slowly, “how there was a time when men used to speak about the earth our mother? It was Mother Earth, and they believed it. She was the source of life and being.”

“She still is.”

“You've sucked her dry,” Martha said curiously. “When a woman is sucked dry, her children perish.”

It was an odd and poetical thing to say, and, as I thought, in bad taste. I punished Martha by leaving Mrs. Gaffey with her, with the excuse that Max and I had some business matters to discuss, which indeed we did. We went into the new study in the new house and we lit fifty-cent cigars, and Max told me about the thing they had aptly named “Project Hades.”

“The point is,” Max said, “that I can get you into this at the very beginning. At the bottom. There are eleven companies involved—very solid and reputable companies”—he named them, and I was dully impressed—”who are putting up the capital for what will be a subsidiary of Thunder Inc. For their money they get a twenty-five-percent interest. There is also ten percent, in the form of stock warrants, put aside for consultation and advice, and you will understand why. I can fit you in for one and half percent—roughly three quarters of a million—simply for a few weeks of your time, and we will pay all expenses, plus an opinion.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“It should sound more than that. If Project Hades works, your interest will increase tenfold within a matter of five years. It's the shortest cut to being a millionaire that I know.”

“All right—I'm more than interested. Go on.”

Gaffey took a map of Arizona out of his pocket, unfolded it, and pointed to a marked-off area. “Here,” he said, “is what should—according to all our geological knowledge—be one of the richest oil-bearing areas in the country. Do you agree?”

“Yes, I know the area,” I replied. “I've been over it. Its oil potential is purely theoretical. No one has ever brought in anything there—not even salt water. It's dry and dead.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “That's the way it is. If we could locate oil through geological premise and theory, you and I would both be richer than Getty. The fact of the matter is, as you well know, that sometimes it's there and sometimes it isn't. More often it isn't.”

“Why? We know our job. We drill in the right places.”

“What are you getting at, Max?”

“A speculation—particularly for this area. We have discussed this speculation for months. We have tested it as best we can. We have examined it from every possible angle. And now we are ready to blow about five million dollars to test our hypothesis—providing—”

“Providing what?”

“That your expert opinion agrees with ours. In other words, we've cast the die with you. You look at the situation and tell us to go ahead—we go ahead. You look at it and tell us it's a crock of beans—well, we fold our tents like the Arabs and silently steal away.”

“Just on my say-so?”

“Just on your brains and know-how.”

“Max, aren't you barking up the wrong tree? I'm a simple professor of geology at an unimportant western state university, and there are at least twenty men in the field who can teach me the right time—”

“Not in our opinion. Not on where the stuff is. We know who's in the field and we know their track records. You keep your light under a bushel, but we know what we want. So don't argue. It's either a deal or it isn't. Well?”

“How the devil can I answer you when I don't even know what you're talking about?”

“All right—I'll spell it out, quick and simple. The oil was there once, right where it should be. Then a natural convulsion—a very deep fault. The earth cracked and the oil flowed down, deep down, and now giant pockets of it are buried there where no drill can reach them.”

“How deep?”

“Who knows? fifteen, twenty miles.”

“That's deep.”

“Maybe deeper. When you think of that kind of distance under the surface, you're in a darker mystery than Mars or Venus—all of which you know.”

“All of which I know.” I had a bad, uneasy feeling and some of it must have shown in my face. “What's wrong?”

“I don't know. Why don't you leave it alone, Max?”

“Why?”

“Come on, Max—we're not talking about drilling for oil. Fifteen, twenty miles. There's a rig down near the Pecos in Texas and they've just passed the twenty-five-thousand-foot level, and that's about it.”

Oh, maybe another thousand, but you're talking about oil that's buried in one hundred thousand feet of crust. You can't drill for it; you can only go in and—”“And what?”“Blast it out.”

“Of course—and how do you fault us for that? What's wrong with it? We know—or least we have good reason to believe—that there's a fissure that opened and closed. The oil should be under tremendous pressure. We put in an atom bomb—a bigger bomb than we ever used before—and we blast that fissure open again. Great God almighty, that should be the biggest gusher in all the history of gushers.”

“You've drilled the hole already, haven't you, Max?”

“That's right.”

“How deep?”

“Twenty-two thousand feet.”

“And you have the bomb?”

Max nodded. “We have the bomb. We've been working on this for five years, and seven months ago the boys in Washington cleared the bomb. It's out there in Arizona waiting—”

“For what?”

“For you to look everything over and tell us to go ahead.”

“Why? We have enough oil—”

“Like hell we have! You know damn well why—and do you imagine we can drop it now after all the money and time that's been invested in this?”

“You said you'd drop it if I said so.”

“As a geologist in our pay, and I know you well enough to know what that means in terms of your professional skill and pride.”

I stayed up half that night talking with Martha about it and trying to fit it into some kind of moral position. But the only thing I could come up with was the fact that here was one less atom bomb to murder man and destroy the life of the earth, and that I could not argue with. A day later I was at the drilling site in Arizona.

The spot was well chosen. From every point of view this was an oil explorer's dream, and I suppose that fact had been duly noted for the past half century, for there were the moldering remains of a hundred futile rigs, rotting patterns of wooden and metal sticks as far as one could see, abandoned shacks, trailers left with lost hopes, ancient trucks, rusting gears, piles of abandoned pipe—all testifying to the hope that springs eternal in the wildcatter's breast.

Thunder Inc. was something else, a great installation in the middle of the deep valley, a drilling rig larger and more complex than any I had ever seen, a wall to contain the oil should they fail to cap it immediately, a machine shop, a small generating plant, at least a hundred vehicles of various sorts, and perhaps fifty mobile homes. The very extent and vastness of the action here deep in the badlands was breathtaking; and I let Max know what I thought of his statement that all this would be abandoned if I said that the idea was worthless.

“Maybe yes—maybe no. What
do
you say?”

“Give me time.”

“Absolutely, all the time you want.”

Never have I been treated with such respect. I prowled all over the place and I rode a jeep around and about and back and forth and up into the hills and down again; but no matter how long I prowled and sniffed and estimated, mine would be no more than an educated guess. I was also certain that they would not give up the project if I disapproved and said that it would be a washout. They believed in me as a sort of oil-dowser, especially if I told them to go ahead. What they were really seeking was an expert's affirmation of their own faith. And that was apparent from the fact that they had already drilled an expensive twenty-two-thousand-foot hole and had set up all this equipment. If I told them they were wrong, their faith might be shaken a little, but they would recover and find themselves another dowser.

I told this to Martha when I telephoned her.

“Well, what do you honestly think?”

“It's oil country. But I'm not the first one to come up with that brilliant observation. The point is—does their explanation account for the lack of oil?”

“Does it?”

“I don't know. No one knows. And they're dangling the million dollars right in front of my nose.”

“I can't help you,” Martha said. “You've got to play this one yourself.”

Of course she couldn't help me. No one could have helped me. It was too far down, too deeply hidden. We knew what the other side of the moon looked like and we knew something about Mars and the other planets, but what have we ever known about ourselves and the place where we live?

The day after I spoke to Martha, I met with Max and his board of directors.

“I agree,” I told them. “The oil should be there. My opinion is that you should go ahead and try the blast.”

They questioned me after that for about an hour, but when you play the role of a dowser, questions and answers become a sort of magical ritual. The plain fact of the matter is that no one had ever exploded a bomb of such power at such a depth, and until it was done, no one knew what would happen.

I watched the preparations for the explosion with great interest. The bomb, with its implosion casing, was specially made for this task—or remade would be a better way of putting it—very long, almost twenty feet, very slim. It was armed after it was in the rigging, and then the board of directors, engineers, technicians, newspapermen, Max, and myself retreated to the concrete shelter and control station, which had been built almost a mile away from the shaft. Closed-circuit television linked us with the hole; and while no one expected the explosion to do any more than jar the earth heavily at the surface, the Atomic Energy Commission specified the precautions we took.

We remained in the shelter for five hours while the bomb made its long descent—until at last our instruments told us that it rested on the bottom of the drill hole. Then we had a simple countdown, and the chairman of the board pressed the red button. Red and white buttons are man's glory. Press a white button and a bell rings or an electric light goes on; press a red button and the hellish force of a sun-comes into being—this time five miles beneath the earth's surface.

Perhaps it was this part and point on the earth's surface; perhaps there was no other place where exactly the same thing would have happened; perhaps the fault that drained away the oil was a deeper fault than we had ever imagined. Actually we will never know; we only saw what we saw, watching it through the closed-circuit TV. We saw the earth swell. The swell rose up like a bubble—a bubble about two hundred yards in diameter—and then the surface of the bubble dissipated in a column of dust or smoke that rose up perhaps five hundred feet from the valley bottom, stayed a moment with the lowering sun behind it, like the very column of fire out of Sinai, and then lifted whole and broke suddenly in the wind. Even in the shelter we heard the screaming rumble of sound, and as the face of the enormous hole that the dust had left cleared, there bubbled up a column of oil perhaps a hundred feet in diameter. Or was it oil?