The Green Trap Read online

  “The hydrogen process?”

  Kurtzman nodded as Tulius tapped away at the keys with trembling fingers. Michael Cochrane’s data began to scroll slowly down his display screen.

  “It’s all there,” Kurtzman said. “I spent an hour looking it over.”

  “Cochrane sent it to you?”

  “Must’ve been him. Who else?”

  “And he sent a copy to me,” Tulius said.

  Kurtzman replied, “And to a Dr. Esterbrook at Georgetown University with a ‘cc’ to the National Academy of Sciences. And to Science magazine. And Nature, over in England. And everybody else he could think of, it looks like.”

  Tulius scrolled up to the address list. It more than filled the screen.

  “Oh, my god,” he moaned.

  Kurtzman nodded. “Yeah. There goes any chance of keeping Mike’s work proprietary. Cochrane’s blabbed it to the whole friggin’ world. It’s public information now. No patents, not even proprietary rights, I guess.”

  “This is a disaster!”

  Strangely, Kurtzman smiled. “For the Calvin Research Center, maybe. But for the human race, it’s a gift. Now anybody who wants to can figure out how to produce hydrogen. If he has the brains for it, and there’s plenty of people who do.”

  “It’s the end of the petroleum industry.”

  “I guess it is. Not overnight, but the end is in sight.” Kurtzman seemed happy about the prospect.

  But Tulius wondered how Gould would react.

  MANHATTAN:

  GOULD TRUST HEADQUARTERS

  Lionel Gould scowled at the display screen on the wall of his private office. Page after page of chemical formulas and mathematical gobbledygook scrolling past: all of Michael Cochrane’s work, apparently.

  Standing before his desk in a nervous knot were two of Gould’s corporate lawyers and the chief scientist of the Gould Trust.

  Wiping at the perspiration beading his forehead, Gould looked up at them, his face a thundercloud.

  “Is this what I think it is?” he growled.

  “It’s Michael Cochrane’s work,” said the scientist, in a voice that quavered slightly. “His hydrogen process.”

  “You’ve checked its authenticity?”

  “As far as I was able to, sir. I have a team looking it over now.”

  “But as far as you can see, it’s authentic?”

  The scientist swallowed visibly before replying, “Yes, sir, I believe it is.”

  Gould turned to the attorney who specialized in patents and intellectual properties.

  “What does this do to our chances for obtaining a patent on this hydrogen process?”

  The attorney hid his tension better than the scientist, but still he licked his lips before replying in a subdued voice, “I’m afraid it throws the information into the public domain. It will be impossible to claim patent protection for it.”

  “Paul Cochrane,” Gould muttered.

  “Sir?” asked all three men in unison.

  “Nothing,” Gould answered. He took a deep breath, then slapped both hands on his desktop hard enough to make the three men flinch.

  “Very well, then! We can’t claim exclusive rights to this process, but by god we’ll be the first ones to offer it to the public!”

  Banging on his intercom keyboard, he boomed, “Get Zelinski and Adamson in here! At once! We have a lot of work to do!”

  The scientist and the two lawyers scuttled out of his office. Gould leaned back in his padded chair and mopped his face again. Cochrane’s won, he told himself. The idealistic young twit has made it impossible to keep his brother’s hydrogen process safely locked up. So we go in the opposite direction: Gould Energy Corporation will be the first to offer hydrogen power to the world. We will lead the way to a new era.

  He spent the rest of the day rattling off orders to his department heads and corporate executives. He told his secretary to set up an emergency meeting of the corporation’s board of directors.

  To his public relations director, he blustered, “This is not a crisis, it’s an opportunity. I want this breakthrough announced as good news, wonderful news for the entire world. Never mind what happens to the corporation’s stock. Never mind what the oil industry’s prices do. In fact, we should be prepared to buy when those shares come tumbling down!”

  His aides and department heads from Dallas to Dubai nodded their heads in agreement, no matter what their inner feelings.

  “We’ll make this look like you’re giving a Christmas present to the world,” said the sharp-featured woman who ran his public relations department.

  “That is good,” said Gould, thinking: When they hand you a lemon, make lemonade.

  It wasn’t until the long, tension-charged day was over and he had taken his private elevator up to his penthouse quarters that Gould allowed the fury to overtake him.

  Cochrane! he fumed silently. He thinks he’s won.

  Gould stalked through his sumptuous living room, his fingers curled into claws, perspiration dripping from his face. He snatched at the graceful Athenian vase on the end table and hurled it into the Gainsborough portrait above the fireplace. Its shattered pieces slashed the canvas. Then the table lamp. Gould yanked it out of its socket, power cord dangling, and banged it to the floor. The carpeting was too thick, the lamp bounced instead of breaking, so he kicked it across the room. Then he knocked over the delicate little table itself, stamped on its slim legs, crushing them into kindling.

  Smashing, tearing, throwing, Gould rampaged through the room and on into the dining room, where he knocked over chairs, hurled delicate china platters and exquisite stemmed glassware against the walls. He gasped and grunted with a furious need to destroy, to demolish, to work out the frenzy that boiled in his blood.

  His butler and one of the housemaids cracked open the pantry door, eyes goggling wide as their master stormed through the dining room trashing everything he could get his hands on.

  “Shouldn’t we do something?” the maid whispered. “Call his doctor?”

  The butler shook his gray head. “No. For heaven’s sake, don’t let him know we’re watching this!”

  “But all those beautiful things! He’ll hurt himself.”

  “Leave him alone. I’ve seen him like this before.”

  “You have?”

  “When his second wife left him. He went wild, just like this.”

  “His second wife? The one who died in the auto accident?”

  The butler nodded.

  At last Gould ran out of things to smash. He sank heavily on the only chair still upright in the dining room, his shirt drenched with sweat, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his chest heaving painfully.

  “Cochrane,” he muttered again, his voice murderously low. “Cochrane.”

  Gould Energy Corp.

  Confirms Hydrogen Fuel

  Breakthrough

  HOUSTON, TX—In what he playfully described as “an early Christmas present to the world,” Lionel Gould, president and board chairman of Gould Energy Corp., personally confirmed rumors that a new breakthrough will make it possible to produce hydrogen fuel efficiently and economically.

  “This is the beginning of a new era,” Gould announced at a news conference in Houston. “The age of petroleum is about to end. The age of hydrogen is beginning. And we at Gould Energy intend to lead the way.”

  The scientific breakthrough was made at the Calvin Research Center of Palo Alto, California, recently acquired by the Gould Trust, a not-for-profit philanthropic organization based in New York. The process involves using primitive bacteria to produce pure hydrogen, which can be used directly as fuel in cars, trucks, planes and other transportation systems. Gould added that hydrogen could be used for heating fuel, as well.

  “Within a few years the United States will no longer be dependent on oil imported from overseas,” Gould stressed.

  Gould’s announcement confirmed rumors that had been blazing through the Internet for several months. Bloggers and sc
ientific Web sites alike were buzzing with the anonymous revelation of the Calvin Research Center’s work.

  Oil stocks plummeted on the world’s stock exchanges, but Gould said he expected energy stocks to recover, since most of the energy corporations around the world were also moving to develop hydrogen fuels.

  “We intend to be at the forefront of the shift from petroleum to hydrogen,” Gould said. “But we welcome competition from others in the industry. Competition is the heart of the free enterprise system.”

  — HOUSTON CHRONICLE

  UA Professor Killed In

  Hit-and-Run Accident

  TUCSON—A University of Arizona faculty member was killed in a hit-and-run accident yesterday afternoon.

  Dr. Paul Cochrane was struck by an unidentified sedan as he crossed the intersection of Campbell Street and Speedway. According to witnesses, the dark-colored sedan sped through the intersection against the traffic signal and struck Cochrane in the pedestrian walkway, then raced away without stopping.

  Cochrane was pronounced dead on arrival at the nearby UA Hospital’s accident ward.

  “It’s almost like the car was trying to hit him,” said one witness. “It just bore down straight at him.”

  “He was limping,” another witness told police. “He never had a chance to get out of the car’s way.”

  According to police, Cochrane was on his way to a meeting at the Steward Observatory to discuss his reinstatement on the UA faculty, after an absence of several months.

  — ARIZONA DAILY STAR