He had known Oilstar’s public meeting would be a circus, but he hadn’t thought he himself would be thrust at the center of it. The bedlam in the room drowned his words. Standing at the podium, he closed his eyes and took a breath, trying to ignore the pain from the cancer chewing at his body.
Mitch Stone, at first disappointed at not being Branson’s chosen spokesman, now sat in the front row—in a new suit and tie, of course—grinning support for Alex.
The audience murmured like a torch-bearing mob ready to storm the scientist’s castle. Alex gripped the sturdy podium with stiff hands, using it as an anchor. Just get it over with, he thought.
Out in the room, the spectators fidgeted on folding metal chairs that creaked as people sat down. Tripods with cameras stood in the corners. In the back of the room a silver coffee urn crouched above flickering blue sterno flames, flanked by stacks of styrofoam cups. Alex could smell the fear, feel palpable anger rising in waves from the audience. It strengthened his resolve.
It’ll never happen again. I promise.
Alex saw two factions in the audience: “Luddites” and “Techno-Nazis.” The Luddites feared change, arguing that industry had caused the disaster in the first place. They would tear up experimental pest-resistant crops because they had been “tampered with,” only to complain later about the use of pesticides; or they would “liberate” animals from medical labs, and later complain about the lack of progress in AIDS and cancer research.
On the other side, the Techno-Nazis believed that science could solve every problem, that researchers could scribble on a blackboard and whip up a miracle cure given a few sleepless nights and a lovely lab assistant. They would wave aside checks and balances, safety regulations and argue that “natural” solutions were too slow, too late, and too ineffective.
Alex flinched but stood like a statue against the public outcry. Once he dropped the first pebble to start the cleansing avalanche, Alex could collapse and let the events bury him. But not until he succeeded in setting it all in motion.
The ear-splitting squeal of an air horn shocked everyone into silence. Alex jerked around.
Sitting in a chair toward the edge of the stage, Oilstar CEO Emma Branson held up the air horn. Her wrinkled, powdered skin was pale with controlled anger. She raised her voice beyond any need for a microphone. “Stop this nonsense!”
Near the stage, two security guards shifted, readying themselves. Their presence made Alex uneasy. Someone had taken potshots at Branson’s house the night before, blasting out her downstairs windows. The Oilstar refinery had received two separate bomb threats in less than twelve hours, and demonstrators blocked the refinery gates. Before entering the packed meeting room, everyone in the audience stepped through a metal detector.
The night before, Mitch had helped Alex put his presentation together. Branson had insisted that Alex be the one to speak at the press conference, implying that Mitch looked too young, that an older researcher like Alex had more credibility. “These people have seen too many slick fast-talkers,” Branson had said. “So we’re going to give them Pa—Lorne Greene—instead.”
Now Branson stepped to the edge of the stage, smoothing her dress and looking down at the quieted audience like a sour high-school teacher announcing detention for the entire class. “If you let Dr. Kramer finish speaking, you’ll hear how Oilstar wants to solve this problem! Why argue before you have any information?”
Alex tried to remember what he meant to say next. Glancing down at his notes, he pushed the ADVANCE button and turned to look at the slide on the screen.
The picture showed an Alaskan shore, gray sky, steel-colored water. Rocks studded the beach, and thick oil covered everything. This had been the start of it all. “Here you see part of the shoreline in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez spill. Looks familiar to all of us.”
He realized he was mumbling his words, and cleared his throat before clicking to the next slide. A rectangle of the shore, 30 meters by 12 meters, had been cordoned off. Men and women in yellow rain slickers stood outside the ropes.
“As part of the cleanup, Exxon spent ten million dollars to test bioremediation work similar to what Oilstar is proposing. They sprayed a fertilizer called Inipol to encourage natural bacteria in the environment to break down the slowly volatilizing alkanes and simple ring hydrocarbons in the spilled crude.”
He clicked to the next slide, showing the same test plot. This time the rocks inside the ropes showed little of the black stain. He let some of the pent-up anger and defensiveness leak into his voice. “Within ten days, the concentration of natural bacteria in shore soil samples had increased a hundred-fold, and you can already see the benefits. It’s obvious that this sort of treatment has a substantial effect.”
Alex took a sip of tepid water, then continued through slides showing the progress of the oil-eating bacteria. “Neither Exxon nor the EPA investigated which bacteria were doing the most work, but Oilstar has had an aggressive bioremediation program under way for years. We’ve researched Alaskan bacteria and samples from deep under the ocean near natural oil seeps. We think we have something that can radically reduce the effects of this spill.”
“But what if it gets loose!” said Jake Torgens, a well-known ‘eco-terrorist’ who had organized rallies and vocal protests. The police already had him under investigation about the bomb threats to the refinery.
Branson stood to answer. “The only way to let Prometheus work is to let it loose—but only on the oil spill. We can’t put an airtight dome over San Francisco Bay, can we? The Food and Drug Administration has followed the development of this microbe from Day One, and they’ve expedited their licensing process to grant us a waiver. Besides, the microbe cannot become airborne, isn’t that correct, Dr. Kramer?”
“Our tests show it’s perfectly safe—” Alex began.
Someone said, “That’s what Oilstar said about supertankers!”
At a long table to the left of the podium, one of the government representatives pulled a microphone toward himself. In front of each representative lay a stack of reports Alex and Mitch had coauthored, internal memos, and copies of peer-reviewed journal articles. Alex doubted many of the reps understood even the titles, like “Expression of Transposed Plasmid DNA Segments in Natural Microorganisms to Specify Hydrocarbon Degradation.”
“I appreciate Oilstar’s innovation,” the government rep said, “and I think we should strongly encourage thorough testing and perform a detailed study.”
A short-haired woman in the front row of the Techno-Nazis leaped to her feet. “They’ve already done the tests! Read the reports—what more do you want? do you want? The damned FDA even says it’s safe! The damage is getting worse and worse every second while you all just sit around arguing!”
Branson smiled with exaggerated patience. Her look seemed to say, ‘See who the reasonable people are?’ “You don’t throw a cup of water at a burning house to test if it’ll stop a fire.”
Alex thumped the microphone to draw attention back to himself. “I should point out that a test application on a cordoned section of the spill, as was done with the fertilizer in Prince William Sound, won’t work here. Prometheus is not intended to stay behind barrier tape, but it is a self-limiting organism. Our laboratory tests were successful. The woman from the audience is absolutely correct—every second we delay increases the ecological cost of the spill. We have to make our best attempt and see if it works.”