Orthodox science was immediately polarized into two antagonistic groups. One prayed Stanley wouldn’t wipe the colony out. One prayed that he would. The former argued that not only would pads dramatically increase man’s living space; that they would provide cleaner air and reduce greenhouse gases. The latter argued that millions of human beings would surely be slaughtered by tropical storms in countries like Bangladesh because poverty and overcrowding would drive people unto floating slums.
The public was largely indifferent. Governments were indecisive. Congressmen from Florida and Texas tried to make political hay of the situation, arguing their states had the most tropical coastline and would be the most affected. But the effort was largely a failure because nobody knew what “most affected” meant.
Most everybody else in congress took the position that if what happened in the middle of the ocean was anybody’s business it was the UN’s business. The UN thought so too. It would have liked to add a bureau or two, but couldn’t get the membership to fork over funds to do this. Too many people agreed with Timothy Zahn, who had once called the UN the biggest unlanced boil in the known Universe.
Nevertheless, when Stanley made a fickle and unlikely change of course which spared the infant stand of pads, there were those who breathed a sigh of relief for other than altruistic reasons. One of them was Martino Rossi, old, sick, and nasty as ever, still clinging to life and still a greedy guts from head to toe.
“I don’t care how much it costs, Black, get me one. If you can’t charter it, then buy it. If you can’t buy one, steal one.”
Winston Black didn’t much care for the idea of going out to sea in a superannuated flying boat. The fact that Hurricane Tina was following hard on the heels of the feckless Stanley only made things worse. But there was still the reality of two kids in college, one of them doing very well at the prestigious and expensive University of Heidelberg. That thought stiffened his spine. “Yes, sir. You want a Catalina, I’ll get you a Catalina.”
When he had embarked on the mission, Winston Black had still retained a little hair. Not much, but enough to justify a growl at the barber if he cut too close. When he got back from the Sargasso the hair was gone, pulled out and strewn all over the cabin of the Catalina while the pilot was desperately trying to yank it off the boiling sea with the heavy lily pad aboard.
To get the thing inside they had chopped the starboard blister out with a fire ax. That was a near-fatal mistake considering Catalinas were notoriously underpowered and lumbering. The takeoff run had consumed many miles across the choppy water. Barrels of seawater sprayed through the demolished blister.
Black was grateful that the added lift of a vagrant updraft had finally saved them, and that quick thinking by the crewman who opened the bilge cocks enabled them to stay in the air.
It had been a harrowing flight but in the main Black had been successful. He was astonished at the praise Rossi gave him when he got back. Never before had he known Rossi to compliment anybody.
But Black knew better than anybody else why Rossi was being so expansive. It had to do with money. From the moment Rossi first heard of the new strain he had been in a feeding frenzy. Back in the 1920s Fritz Haber had experimented with gold extraction as a means of paying off the French claim for World War I reparations. Every cubic mile of seawater was thought to contain nine pounds of dissolved gold, and there was absolutely no chance Tina would miss the feral stand. Since Rossi had a specimen of the seagoing mutant, chances were good he would also possess the only one surviving the storm. But Black still had to determine what substances it could concentrate.
Black installed the pad in a tank filled with seawater heated to ideal temperature, laced with nutritious and filling plant goodies, and illuminated it with banks of powerful lights. To ensure species survival, his horticulturists carefully clipped tissue for cloning.
The acid test had to wait for nature to take its course, but when the time came, and it turned out just as Rossi hoped, Winston decided that barring some calamitous boo-boo on his part his kids would probably get to graduate. Chromatographs of the samples showed clearly that the pad’s tissues were accumulating gold. The quantity was minute, of course, but the purity was unbelievable.
Even that wasn’t the cap to Rossi’s luck. He had the blister repaired and sent the Catalina out again as soon as weather permitted. The crew spent a week in the survey, spiraling over millions of square miles of ocean, searching unsuccessfully for fragments of pads.
Nothing turned up. To clinch it, Rossi contracted with a satellite survey company whose equipment was state-of-the-art, capable of resolving a human face from altitude in sufficient detail to identify its owner. To Rossi, legalities didn’t matter so long as he had the only lilies capable of flourishing in salt water, and it looked as if he did. He knew he could depend on human greed and that the petty dictators of many small, tropical countries were for sale to the highest bidder.
Two weeks later, after the computer had reported absolutely no hits for anything remotely resembling a pad, or even a dinner-plate-sized fragment of a pad, Rossi celebrated with an office party. Twenty minutes after it started Rossi had a stroke.
They rushed him off to a hospital, where doctors determined his body would live. His malignant persona, however, was now a prisoner within his own skull, able to see, able to comprehend, but quite incapable of any but the most superficial control over his business. The ground floor of a brand-new enterprise appeared to have opened up for all the company insiders. This new enterprise would need prodigious amounts of capital, and there was only one place this could be obtained.
“Well now, Joe, I’d say that’s a good start.” Black had scarcely looked at the supporting figures. In his opinion, the dividend line said it all. Rossi Enterprises common was paying a third-quarter dividend of $9.80 a share. He gave out a low whistle, then thought about his own stock option agreement a moment and whistled again, even louder.
“Isn’t it, though? But, you know, Winston, in spite of his illness Rossi still manages to poke his nose into the operation a little too much. I’ll admit we’ve made a killing on our stock but that’s all on paper, and the only way to turn it into real money is to cash out. I think we ought to do that.”
“Are you nuts, Joe?”
“No,” Duffy replied somewhat icily, “but Rossi is. He’s got a monopoly, he’s effectively cornered the gold market because he can produce it cheaper than anybody else. Worse, he’s got voting control over the company, which means we can’t do anything to regulate production unless he agrees. Inevitably; that means overproduction and depressed prices. When the price of gold drops so will the dividends and the value of our shares.”
“Can’t we get him committed or something?”
“Maybe, but even if we do there’s still another joker. Rossi’s not the only greedy member of the race. Consider where our installations are. I get the shakes whenever I do that.”
“It was necessary, Joe, and you know why as well as I do.”
Duffy nodded, as if to acknowledge that was true. Both Somalia and the People’s Republic of The Solomons were police states, both were on bad terms with the United States and its allies, and both offered safe anchorages. The Somalia plantation was off the storm track and so was the one at Tulagi. Hurricanes never troubled the Coral Sea.
As a bonus, both dictators were for sale cheap—at least they had been initially—and neither country belonged to the patent convention. But, and this was the point he made to Black, “It’s like paying blackmail. You never get finished and the price never ceases to rise.”