Chapter 11
Imagine
Everybody screwed up. Everybody insisted it would never happen again. No one learned the lesson.
Alex Kramer felt numb, standing in the eye of a storm of shouting and accusations at Oilstar’s “town meeting.” He wanted to shout back, to wring a few necks at the insanity of the entire situation: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. More than anything, he wanted to be at home, alone, searching for peace.
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, thirty meters by twelve 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 that 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 Micro-organisms 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? 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.”
“And what if it doesn’t?” a woman from EPA asked.
Alex shrugged. “Then we try something else.” He turned at the sound of a scuffle outside the auditorium entrance.
A bearded black man wearing an oil-smeared raincoat pushed his way past two security guards, slapping their hands away. “I passed through your metal detector and I’m not carrying any weapons!” he shouted, as if intending to make the audience hear every word. “Let me in!”
On stage, Branson stiffened. The guards tightened near her.
Alex thought he recognized the intruder from one of the news clips he had been watching obsessively since the day after the spill. Harris. Jackson Harris, the man leading the volunteers on Angel Island. In one hand Harris carried a large plastic garbage bag; stains of crude oil covered his boots and pants. His nostrils flared as he marched to the stage. One of Branson’s guards unsnapped his holster.
Harris stepped to the bureaucrats’ table, casting his gaze across city council members, designees from the Coast Guard, the Petroleum Industry Response Organization, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Food and Drug Administration, and the EPA. Then he reached inside his garbage sack.
The representatives shrank back, as if Harris was going to pull out an Uzi. Instead, he lifted a dripping black mass that might once have had feathers. As he held it in his hand, the shape sprawled out, letting long wings loll down. Thick oil spattered the table, staining the stacked reports.
Harris let the bird drop on the wooden table. A pelican. Its long, rapier beak gaped, as the bird slowly drew its dangling wing back toward its body. It was still alive, but not for long.
“What is this!” An outraged councilman from Sausalito slid his chair back.
“This is what’s really going down out there, man. This bird is one of thousands,” Harris said. “If you’d get off your fat political asses and get your hands dirty, you might understand why we’re so worked up!” He raised his voice to a shout directed at all of them. “Stop fucking around and do something!”
He turned toward Alex hiding behind the podium. “You’re not talking any germ warfare or genetic-engineering shit are you, Mr. Big Oil Company?”
Alex barely shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “These are natural bacteria.” Though not exactly naturally occurring bacteria, he left unfinished.
Harris turned to the audience. “Oilstar got us into this mess, and we can sue their asses later—but right now, if they got a solution, how can you not try it?” He crossed his arms over his slicker. “I’ll do it myself, right now, if Oilstar gives me some of their magic oil-eating shit. You red-tape lovers can arrest me, but at least something’ll get done!”
Branson returned to the podium. Alex stepped aside to yield the microphone. The Oilstar CEO seemed determined to show some progress, as if that would be enough to quench the outrage directed against her.
“Thank you, sir, but it’s our responsibility,” Branson said. “I appreciate the urgency of your concern—we have been forgetting the real effects of this disaster.” She took a deep breath. “Oilstar will take the risk … and accept the legal consequences. On my authority, Oilstar will deploy the Prometheus option, using our helicopters, our pilots, our equipment. And we will do it at the earliest possible moment.”
Branson frowned at the dying pelican on the table and at the representatives. “If we encounter any interference from the government in trying to clean up this mess, I personally guarantee you will find the biggest lawsuit in California history right in your lap.” Accompanied by her guards, Emma Branson walked with self-assured dignity off the stage and out the rear exit.
Before attention could return to him, Alex climbed down from the stage. Mitch clapped him on the back. “We got it!”
Alex felt the world growing fuzzy. Branson had set the wheels in motion, but he had fooled her as thoroughly as everyone else. He closed his eyes to shut out the hubbub in the room—but he was left with only the emptiness inside him.
It’ll never happen again. That was certain.
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