The Green Trap Read online

  Cochrane thought that over. Then, “Guess he found it cheaper to buy Mike.”

  “I suppose that’s how he saw it.”

  “And now he wants to buy us.”

  “If you can deliver what he’s looking for.”

  “We’ll see.” But as he lay there waiting to fall asleep, Cochrane started building a chain of logic: Elena told Gould that there are other buyers looking for Mike’s results. If we don’t deliver to Gould he might think we’re dickering with the competition, looking for more money. He won’t like that. He won’t like that at all.

  DALLAS: GOULD ENERGY

  CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS

  Of all the gaudy office towers erected during the oil boom of the 1970s, the forty-five-story skyscraper that housed the headquarters of Gould Energy Corporation was among the more modest. No neon lights outlining its silhouette at night. No glittering metal spire at its top. A simple glass-and-steel structure from the outside, with the finest climate control and electronic security surveillance on the inside.

  Lionel Gould’s office was opulent without being extravagant. It was large, but furnished elegantly. Persian carpets on the floor and Renaissance masters on the walls. Gould sat behind his modernistic curving desk of teak and stainless steel, impatiently drumming his stubby fingers. He never enjoyed meetings with his chief financial officer. The woman was a climber, and she had climbed the slippery corporate ladder so high that her next move had to be against Gould himself. She was clearly unhappy about being summoned to the office on a Saturday morning, and even more clearly determined to show Gould that she had the determination to do whatever was necessary to further her career.

  “If you wanted the results of Cochrane’s research,” she was saying in an I told you so manner, “you should have let us buy out the Calvin labs.”

  She was a youngish-looking fifty, thanks to exquisitely skillful cosmetic surgery. Her hair was a rich chestnut brown, her face sculpted beautifully without looking taut or waxy, her figure trim. She wore a dark business pantsuit, with a tailored white blouse under the severely cut jacket.

  Gould looked at her with a jaundiced eye. “Tulius caught on to what we were seeking. He raised the price to the sky.”

  “Still, it might have been worth it.”

  “May I point out,” Gould said, “that it was your own office’s analysis that recommended against the buy?”

  The CFO allowed a wintry smile to crook her thin lips. “Since when did you allow anybody’s analysis to shape your judgment?”

  He smiled back at her, with equal warmth. “I determined that it would be far cheaper to buy the man instead of the entire company.”

  “But he’s dead now, and you have nothing.”

  Gould heaved a sigh. “I have my hopes. This thing is far too big to allow minor setbacks to stop us.”

  The CFO started to reply, hesitated, then finally asked, “Do you actually believe you can pull it off? Change the entire automotive industry—“

  “Someone will,” Gould said firmly. “It is inevitable. The world demand for oil is constantly increasing, the world supply of oil is constantly decreasing. Sooner or later the price will go so high that the market will collapse.”

  “But until that happens our profits will be astronomical.”

  Gould leaned back in his padded desk chair. “My dear lady, the reason I sit here and you sit there is that I can see beyond the p-and-1 statement for the next quarter.”

  Her face flushed but she said nothing.

  “I look further into the future than you—or any of the board members, for that matter. And what I see is a disaster of monumental proportions. Which is bad. Bad for us, bad for the industry, bad for the nation and the world.”

  “I’ve seen disaster scenarios, too,” said the CFO.

  “But you don’t believe them.”

  “You do?”

  “I certainly do. There is a point, up in the future somewhere, when there simply isn’t enough oil left on earth to sustain the world’s industrial needs. Not to mention the needs for transportation: automobiles, trucks, airliners.”

  The CFO shook her head. “That’s so far in the future.…“

  “How far?” Gould snapped. “Twenty years? Ten? Five?”

  She did not answer.

  “We must be ready for that time. We must be!” He slammed the flat of his hand against his desktop. “And I’m thinking that the time will come sooner rather than later. The world is heading at breakneck speed toward a global disaster! Why sit we here idle?’

  “You haven’t been exactly idle,” the CFO pointed out. “We’ve bought half a dozen nuclear power plants in the past two years, six overseas refineries, and if this deal with Chrysler-Daimler goes through—”

  “Piffle!” Gould spat. “Fingers in the dike. We’ve got to develop a fuel to replace petroleum. The oil’s running out, and if there’s nothing to replace it, the world’s economy will collapse.”

  “The government won’t allow that to happen.”

  “The government!” Gould fairly shouted. “Don’t look to those politicians in Washington for an answer. They’re part of the problem!”

  She was silent for several moments. At last she asked, “You really think it could happen in five or ten years?”

  “An economic collapse that will make the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a church picnic. Factories shut down for lack of fuel. Cars without gasoline. The airlines, freight lines, trucks, ships—all stopped dead.”

  “My god,” the CFO half whispered. “We’ve already gone to war over oil.”

  “More than once.”

  “But this…”

  “War and terrorism and god knows what else. That’s why we must act! Act now! Act decisively.”

  “You should have bought Calvin Research while you had the chance. It still may not be too late.”

  “No,” Gould said firmly. “Tulius and his people don’t have what we want. But I’m on the verge of getting it from another source. And when I do…” He smiled contentedly and laced his fingers across his vest.

  “You’ll save the world from this disaster,” said the CFO, with unfeigned admiration in her voice, her expression.

  “And make unholy profits for this corporation,” added Gould. “Which is good. Which is very good indeed.”

  TUCSON:

  SUNRISE APARTMENTS

  Cochrane peered at the digital clock display on his desktop’s screen: 11:42 A.M. Close enough for a lunch break, he said to himself. He got up from his chair and stretched his arms over his head; the ceiling was almost low enough for him to scrape his fingertips. His spine popped satisfactorily and he grunted with the effort.

  “Anything?” Sandoval asked. She was sitting on the sofa dressed in denim shorts and a tan T-shirt, bare feet tucked under her, reading a novel from his bookshelf: The Sun Also Rises, he saw.

  Heading for the kitchenette, Cochrane replied, “I can see what Mike was doing, but I still don’t understand what makes it so goddamned important.”

  He opened the refrigerator, pulled out the drawer where he kept the lunchmeats. “There’s nothing there that’s worth ten million bucks.”

  She laid the opened book face down on the coffee table and stepped to the bar that separated the kitchenette from the living room. “There must be something, Paul,” she said as she perched on one of the stools. “There’s got to be.”

  Cochrane pulled dishes from the overhead cabinet, a loaf of sliced whole wheat bread from the breadbox. “How’s the Hemingway?”

  She hiked her eyebrows. “The novel? It’s about a nymphomaniac and a man who was castrated in the war. Very romantic.”

  He couldn’t decide if she was being sarcastic or not.

  Halfway through their sandwiches and fruit juice Cochrane asked, “What do we do if I can’t find anything?”

  She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then swallowed. “We’ll have to tell Gould.”

  “He won’t like that.”


  “Neither will I. No ten million.”

  “He might think we’re holding out on him. Holding him up for more money or going to another bidder.”

  Sandoval’s eyes shifted away from him for a moment, then back again. “Yes, he might at that.”

  “What then?”

  She shrugged. “We disappear. One way or the other.”

  “Are there really other bidders?”

  “Kensington thought so.”

  “Who could they be?”

  She gave him a sad smile. “We won’t know until we find out what they’d be bidding on.”

  Cochrane put down his half-eaten sandwich. “Okay. I’ll get back to work.”

  “I’ll do the dishes.”

  “Woman’s work,” he joked.

  “Watch yourself.”

  Chuckling, he went back to his desk. Doggedly he plowed through Mike’s notes: his experiment design, the different strains of cyanobacteria he was working with, the variables of water flow, temperature, hours of sunlight, nutrients in the water.

  “Same old shit,” Cochrane muttered under his breath. The BMAA stuff had been a sideline, a red herring, he knew now. Mike wasn’t after a way to produce neurotoxin.

  Then Mike’s reports started dealing with something quite different. Gene splicing. Genetic engineering. Altering the genetic structure of several lines of cyanobacteria. Checking their output of oxygen against the changes made in their DNA.

  Three hours later he pushed his wheeled chair back and got to his feet again.

  Sandoval looked up from her book hopefully.

  “It makes sense,” Cochrane said, “but it doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’ll have to explain that,” she said.

  He came over to the sofa and sat beside her. “From what I can see, Mike was engineering some strains of cyanobacteria. Making deliberate changes in their DNA.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s what doesn’t make sense,” Cochrane said. “It looks like he was trying to see how he could make them put out more oxygen. At least, that’s what he was measuring: oxygen output.”

  “Oxygen,” she murmured.

  “That isn’t worth ten million dollars. You can buy all the oxygen you want from commercial producers like Linde.”

  “Why would he want to make oxygen more efficiently?” Sandoval wondered aloud.

  Cochrane looked into her sea-green eyes: they were troubled, questioning, searching for an answer.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, unconsciously rubbing his chin. “Just because oxygen is what Mike was measuring doesn’t mean that oxygen is what he was after.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “He was measuring oxygen output, yes. But maybe he was looking for something else, and measuring the oxygen his bugs gave off was just the easiest way to see—”

  His whole body stiffened. “Holy shit!”

  “Paul, what is it?”

  Cochrane grinned like the only kid in class who knew the answer. “How do those bacteria produce oxygen?”

  “How should I know?”

  “They split it out of the water molecules!” Cochrane was so excited he started bouncing up and down on the sofa. “Water is haitch-two-oh! Two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen atom!”

  Sandoval was staring at him, her eyes wide now.

  “Two hydrogens for every oxygen! Don’t you get it? Don’t you see?”

  She shook her head.

  “Mike was making the cyanobacteria produce hydrogen for him. Hydrogen! For fuel!”

  “Hydrogen for fuel?” she echoed.

  “Look,” he said, grasping her arms intently. “Lots of people have been talking about using hydrogen to replace gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel for planes—”

  “Fuel cells for cars,” Sandoval interrupted. “Don’t they use hydrogen in the fuel cells?”

  “Right. And the waste product is water.”

  She nodded.

  “You can use hydrogen in your car, just burn it instead of gasoline. What comes out the exhaust pipe is water vapor.”

  “No greenhouse gas,” she said, starting to share his enthusiasm.

  “No imported oil. No OPEC. No more crap from the Middle East.”

  “And your brother found out how to do this?”

  Calming down a bit, Cochrane replied, “The big problem with hydrogen is producing the stuff.”

  “You get it from water, don’t you? You just said so.”

  “Yeah, but the water molecule isn’t easy to crack. Takes a lot of energy. In fact, it takes more energy to pry the damned water molecules apart than the hydrogen gives you back when you burn it as fuel.”

  Sandoval sank back into the sofa’s cushions, looking disappointed.

  “You can electrolyze water,” Cochrane went on. “High school kids do it in chemistry class. But it takes too much energy to do it on a practical scale. You’d have to build hundreds of new power stations and run them day and night at top capacity to turn out enough hydrogen to replace all the gasoline we burn. The price would be too damned high.”

  Sandoval said nothing. She waited.

  “But green plants break the water molecule all the time. Split it apart into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen and carbon from carbon dioxide in the air to make carbohydrates for themselves and release the oxygen into the air.”

  “And cyanobacteria?”

  “They’ve been splitting water molecules for damned near four billion years.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. No sweat.”

  “So what did your brother accomplish, then?”

  Cochrane shook his head admiringly. “Mike tinkered with some strains of cyanobacteria to get them to split more water molecules than they need to live on. They release not only oxygen into the air, they release the excess hydrogen, too.”

  “They give off hydrogen?”

  “They sure do. Mike turned those little blue-green bugs of his into tiny hydrogen factories. They make hydrogen just as naturally as God makes little green apples. They’re going to make hydrogen fuels cheap enough to replace gasoline and all the other petroleum-based fuels we use! They’re going to transform the world!”

  “No wonder Gould is after it.”

  Cochrane leaned back on the sofa and grinned happily at the ceiling. “I’d say that’s worth ten million bucks, wouldn’t you?”

  Hydrogen Fuel Storage for

  Automobiles

  Modern gasoline-fueled automobiles can go approximately 300 miles on a tank of gasoline. While environmentalists have praised the idea of fueling autos with nonpolluting hydrogen, cramming enough hydrogen into a car’s fuel tank to provide a 300-mile range before needing a fill-up is a daunting problem.

  Despite all efforts to date, engineers have not yet come up with a way to get enough hydrogen—the lowest-density element of them all—into an automobile.

  The most common method for storing hydrogen on board a car is to compress the hydrogen gas to as much as 10,000 pounds per square inch (psi) or cooling the stuff down to a cryogenic temperature of—252 degrees Celsius, at which point hydrogen turns from a gas into a liquid. Rocket boosters such as NASA’s space shuttle burn liquefied hydrogen. But compression or cooling can only produce about half the density needed to stuff enough hydrogen into a normal automobile’s fuel tank and produce a 300-mile cruising range.

  More recently, research efforts under way at several automotive laboratories have turned to cryoadsorption and destabilized metal hydrides.

  In the cryoadsorption technique, the hydrogen gas is first cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen (–196 degrees C) and then compressed to about 1,000 psi. Both these conditions can be achieved rather inexpensively. The cooled and squeezed gas can then be adsorbed by materials with high surface area, such as powdered carbon.

  However, synthetic substances such as high-porosity polymers or organo-metallic hydrocarbons offer promise of adsorbing considerably more hydrogen, perhaps enough to provide a 300-mile driving
range with an ordinary-sized fuel tank.

  — SCIENCE MONTHLY

  TUCSON:

  ARIZONA INN

  Let’s celebrate,” Sandoval said happily.

  “We’ve got something to celebrate about,” said Cochrane, “that’s for sure.”

  She got up from the sofa and tugged at his hand to get him to his feet. “Pack a bag and we’ll go to the inn. We can spend the rest of the week there, right through the weekend.”

  “The Arizona Inn?”

  “You’ll love it,” she said, leading him to the bedroom. “I’ll get us a beautiful suite.”

  Cochrane hesitated. Looking around his living room, he had to admit to himself that they’d been cooped up in this little cave for days now. A break would be great. And with ten million coming to them, he could afford a comfortable suite at the inn or anywhere else. But…

  “Aren’t you going to call Gould?” he asked.

  “Yes, sure. I’ll set up a meeting for early next week.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “I’ll pack my toothbrush.”

  “Bring a swimsuit,” she said as they entered the bedroom.

  “I don’t have one,” he realized.

  She laughed brightly. “We’ll get one at the inn. Or go shopping somewhere. There’s plenty of malls in town.”

  Cochrane had never seen her so cheerful, so delighted. It was infectious. He started whistling happily as he pulled his battered travel bag from the closet and began tossing in socks and underwear.

  “Don’t forget your laptop,” Sandoval said. Her capacious tote bag was on the bed and she was rummaging through the dresser drawer that she had appropriated for her underclothes.

  Suddenly Cochrane stopped packing, lifted her bag off the bed, and let it drop to the floor. She gave him a puzzled look, then understanding lit her face and she melted into his arms.

  “If we’re going to celebrate,” he murmured into her ear, “let’s do it right.”

  The Arizona Inn was a walled-off oasis of beauty and ease set in the middle of a residential neighborhood only a few blocks from Cochrane’s office on the University of Arizona campus.