It was maddening, waiting for the old man to make his point. I knew he must have one, he was completely methodical in every other way. I asked him point blank, “If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t him, who did discover it?”
“I told you, son, nobody. Nobody discovered it. I made it, in my lab, right here in Texas, and then I took a bunch of them down to Venezuela and planted them all over the place. That’s what Gonzalez was threatening to tell everybody.”
“You made the oilbush?”
“Yeah, I made it. Well, it’s true that in a sense I did discover it, but then it didn’t look anything like it does now, and it didn’t produce much oil—and I didn’t get it from the rain forest. I found it growing in a swamp in North Carolina.”
“Why the big production about Venezuela, then?”
“Because solving the world’s oil crisis would merely have aggravated other problems without some additional compensations. Fossil fuels were already under an enormous pressure from environmentalists because they raised carbon dioxide levels at the same time when the principal consumers of that gas were being reduced. I decided that if I altered the former and not the latter the net effect would be oblivion, so I developed the oilbush as a tropical plant.
“That wasn’t easy to do. In fact, it’d be much more efficient and productive if grown in groves like oranges are. I purposely made it extra sensitive to ultraviolet. That way, changes in the level of UV would hurt it more than any other essential crop and the best place to grow it would be under the rain forest canopy.”
“I see.” I didn’t really. To me it sounded like a cock and bush story.
“I’m not convinced you do see, Mr. Anwalt. The problem I had then was that what I could do, other molecular biologists could undo, and they could do that much more easily if they knew what my original stock had been.
“Even Gonzalez didn’t know that, but he did know that no precursor of the oilbush had ever grown in the rain forest and no mature plant could be found there anytime close to when I claimed my discovery. I knew that if any real expert was to pick up on that idea the whole thing would crash.”
Again, Thompson’s face became grim. “The best way to see that this doesn’t happen is to keep my murder of Gonzalez strictly personal, let the world think exactly what you thought—that I stole his discovery. After all, there is precedent for that, because often in the past it’s been the old, established scientist who got credit for the discoveries of subordinates.
“Let the world think this is what I did. That way maybe nobody will ever find out where the real oilbush came from, and maybe the people who are trying to break the monopoly of the tropical countries will be a while longer taking this away from them. Let the people of this world remember how it was with rubber back in the last century. Let them speculate, no—let them fear what might be just around the next bend of the river, waiting for them to discover.
“The way things are now these countries are making a bundle off the oilbush. Their people are happy out there in the jungle tending little plots under the big trees. At the moment, the shelter of the rain forest is worth more to them than either the lumber in the trees or the minerals beneath them, worth enough more so that they can afford to grow oil and import food from countries with climates too cold for the oilbush to tolerate.”
The old man was now getting a trifle didactic, I thought. Still, what he was saying was finally making sense, and a lot of sense at that. So long as the big industrial countries needed the fuel to run their cars and trucks and tractors, there would be a market for what the tropical countries produced; and so long as the oil producers had money they would be the primary buyers of the food and machinery and textiles the oil consumers produced. Furthermore, now that they had a grip on their runaway populations and a means of stabilizing their economies, the oilbush-growing countries would also have the incentive to protect other undiscovered botanical bonanzas that the forests presently concealed. There would always be a fear that, as with rubber, the boom could turn to bust overnight.
I had it figured out.
Thompson could tell, presumably from the expression on my face. “Tell you what, son,” he said calmly, “you just let me lead the way, while you take care of the technical details. See to it that 1 get to plead with as little publicity as possible, and let it go at that. I know what they’re going to do with me already.”
“Y-you do?”
“Sure. You think I haven’t been smart enough to copper my bets? Let me ask you this, Mr. Anwalt. If you were the state of Texas, and you used to be the kingpin of the national energy industry but now you get almost all your fuel from some other country, and you knew that it was only a matter of time until somebody like me cracked the secret of temperate cultivation, what would you do with me?”
“P-put you to work in a lab someplace under minimal supervision and hope you cracked it before somebody else did. After all, you’re not likely to repeat your crime.”
“Exactly.”
“But you’ll never quite make it, will you?”
“Wrong. You see, I already have. I did it years ago, simultaneously with my development of the tropical variety. You see, I do have a sense of civil responsibility, Mr. Anwalt. I couldn’t take a chance that my country might also be blackmailed by unscrupulous and irresponsible leaders of producing countries. That’s happened before, with petroleum-producing nations.
“This is where you can really do me some service. All the details are locked up in my safe, and I want you to take charge of them. I don’t need to remind you that I’m a wealthy man, Mr. Anwalt, and I promise you that if you do follow my instructions and keep my secret you’ll never miss a meal.”
I was stunned. Basically, what the man was asking me to do was to con the whole world. Aside from ethical considerations there were practical objections. I wasn’t altogether certain I was up to it. “Let me think about that for a minute,” I said.
It didn’t take that long. Thompson was right, I knew that almost instinctively. Nobody with a monopoly can be trusted not to get greedy and squeeze the customers. In time, ambitious national leaders would overspend their national incomes and go into hock with international bankers, and the bankers would certainly be tempted to goose up the revenue even if the growing countries didn’t. Natural petroleum couldn’t take up the slack if that happened; there wasn’t enough of it left anymore, and what there was was far too valuable as chemical feedstock for the world’s plastic industries.
That left no alternative. Somebody 100 percent trustworthy and utterly reliable had to take charge of this thing and look after the welfare of the human race. There was only one person I had that much confidence in, and that was me.
“OK, Dr. Thompson,” I answered finally, trying to sound thoroughly overawed with the idea, “I find myself compelled to agree with you.”
“Good. Now, about this court appointment thing, that looks a little awkward. Is there any reason why I couldn’t just hire you to take care of my plea?”
“None that I can think of.”
“Good, that’s settled. Suppose you get busy and work up a retainer agreement. Naturally, I’ll need somebody to take care of all my business interests while I’m locked up, so why not you? Uh—except for the technical stuff, like patents. I’ve always wanted to set up a research foundation but I never had the time for it before. Now that it appears I will have time on my hands and somebody with enough youth and ambition to get it done, there’s no reason to put it off any longer. That’ll also insure that there’ll always be somebody who can launch the temporate strain, if it’s necessary, and even if I’m dead.”