Darkness Falls (13 page)

"Udo, what --"

"Michael, come! There is something you must see."

A jolt of adrenaline caused sweat to break across Teague's back as the German pulled him through the building's crowded interior.

It was true that the bacteria Jenna had developed performed beyond their expectations, but its very design resulted in significant limitations. Udo had spent nearly two years working to correct those limitations to create something beyond anything Jenna or anyone else had ever imagined.

His work had started well enough and he was able to make the bacteria more broadly destructive and prolific with little difficulty. Then the delays and excuses had begun. Although insanely committed, Udo simply wasn't as talented as Jenna, who had gone to great lengths to ensure that her creation would never get out of control. Reversing the safeguards she'd built into the bacteria's genetic structure had proved more difficult than anyone expected.

The large Plexiglas tube that they stopped in front of was one of the few pieces of equipment in the lab that Teague was intimately familiar with. More than twenty feet long and a foot in diameter, it was surrounded with sunlamps and connected to various cooling hoses. It expanded at both ends into a bulb the size of a beach ball, each filled halfway with oil.

Udo pointed to the right side of the tube. "There. Look at it, Michael."

Teague took a hesitant step forward and reached out, brushing the cold glass with his fingertips.

He'd seen this experiment fail so many times before. At first, when Udo contaminated the oil on the left side of the tube with bacteria, it would almost immediately die from solar radiation, ambient temperatures, and overabundant oxygen -- just as Jenna had designed it to do. Eventually, the German managed to improve it to the point that it could survive long enough to destroy the oil it was in contact with, but it died the moment it lost its food supply.

Now, though, just inches beyond his fingers, Teague could see the telltale reddish slick on top of the oil -- twenty feet from the initial contamination.

"It survived," he said quietly. "It spread."

Udo reached for one of the cooling hoses and then withdrew his hand, leaving a well-defined print in the frost. "It's below freezing in there, with extremely low humidity and UV more powerful than it would ever encounter in nature. And despite all that, it crossed a sterile seven-meter gap."

"Is this it, then? It's ready?"

"I need to perform a few more tests, but I'm hopeful. With luck, we'll be able to start breeding it within a week."

Teague turned and walked unsteadily back out into the hot Texas sun. He had begun to wonder whether this day would ever come -- whether Udo would be able to deliver what he had promised.

But now everything had changed. They were standing on the precipice of a completely new world. With a sufficient initial release, this new strain had the ability to spread through the air without the involvement of human hands. While the governments of the world panicked over the reserves that were already infected, a new kind of bacteria would silently infiltrate petroleum in all its forms, no matter where it was hidden. The brief aberration that was industrialized society, made possible by abundant energy, would collapse.

That collapse, though, was inevitable whether he acted or not. No matter how carefully people blinded themselves to the reality that the oil was running out, it was a geological fact that would eventually devastate the world in ways few had even imagined.

At first, people would compensate by stripping the earth of what few resources it had left, abandoning any pretense and environmentalism in a futile attempt to maintain the unsustainable living standard of billions of people. Then, as the dense, readily available energy dwindled, the wars to control what was left would begin. Eventually, though, governments and militaries would disintegrate and chaos would descend as neighbor turned on neighbor in a desperate bid to stay warm and keep their bellies full. Animals worldwide would be hunted to extinction as the forests were burned and the air filled with greenhouse gases. Finally, when everything was destroyed, the light would go out on the miracle of life.

His plan, though almost certain to cause a die-off of at least two-thirds of the world's human population, would ensure a future for his species and the other wondrous forms of life that had spread across the earth. Brutality and chaos would still flare, but it would be mercifully brief. There would be no time for sophisticated war machines to go on genocidal rampages, no time for humanity to burn or irradiate the surface of the earth, no time to cause the global climate to spin out of control and turn his home into just another lifeless rock circling the sun.

He would return the world to a sustainable balance. Plant and animal species would once again thrive, the climate would stabilize, and humans would return to being nothing more than another widely scattered cog in the wheel of life.

Chapter
16.

"That was great, Mark. Just fucking great," Jack Reynolds said as he burst through the door. "Ever think that maybe telling the president of the United States to screw off isn't the smartest thing to do?"

Erin leapt from the chair he'd been sulking in as Beamon slammed the door.

"I'm always the one who gets stepped on in the end, Jack. And maybe I'm stupid and desperate enough to live with that, but I sure as shit don't have to take it with a smile."

"Hey!" Erin shouted. Both men looked at him as though they'd just realized he was there. "Who the hell do you think you are, having your thugs lock me in here? I told you everything I know. You don't have any right to hold me."

"I have the right to do whatever I goddamn well want," Reynolds said.

Erin watched Beamon slide a chair up next to him, unable to ignore the change in the man. The skin seemed to hang a little looser from his face, creating a tired worldliness that hadn't been there before. Suddenly, it was possible to see the man Mohammed Asli had described.

"What Jack means," Beamon said, "is that you dropped kind of a bomb in there and you're the only person who might know how to defuse it. Constitutional rights get a little gray when the scale gets this large."

There was a hint of anger in Beamon's expression, but it didn't seem to project anywhere -- as though he was angry at only himself.

"I already told you that there's nothing I can do," Erin protested.

Reynolds fell into the chair behind his desk. "Let's forget stopping the bacteria for a minute. Let's assume you're right and it's going to run rampant. What happens then?"

"How should I know?"

"Because you wrote a fucking book about it "

.

"Hold on, now. I wrote a book about oil slowly becoming scarce. Not about the spigot suddenly being turned off on a third of the world's supply."

"Guess."

"I'm not an economist. I --"

"Jesus Christ, Erin! Here's your shot. How many people like you do you think have ever sat in this office? Now's your chance to do what you've always dreamed of -- directly affect government policy. If what you're telling me is true, we have to prepare, right? Do you want to be part of that preparation? Or do you want to leave it to the government hacks you people always complain about?"

Erin eased back into his chair. Reynolds was right. He'd spent a lot of time thinking, though not about this particular problem but one very similar. And there was no doubt that the U. S. government had the potential to react with incredibly destructive stupidity. It almost always did.

"It's hard to predict," Erin said finally. "Oil is so cheap and plentiful it's almost impossible to follow the economic chain. I mean, everyone thinks it's great to buy a hybrid car, but no one thinks about how much energy it took to build it. In the end, would it have been more environmentally friendly just to keep your old SUV? The world is full of examples like that."

"You're not helping me," Reynolds said. "Well, then, why don't you call a goddamn Republican think tank. I'm sure --"

"Erin!" Beamon cut in. "Calm down.

We're all on edge. Go on. Jack's just going to sit there and listen. Right, Jack?"

Reynolds frowned deeply. "A lot of books out there say the loss of oil is going to be a disaster for the world. That everybody's going to freeze or starve --"

"Yeah," Erin said. "The peak oil Chicken Littles. In my mind, oil prices were set to rise slowly and we would change our behavior and find power substitutes as they became economically attractive. This is different. There's no time to build solar panels or nuclear power plants, no time to beef up public transportation -- let alone to completely redesign the way our economy works. Take food for example. The average distance food travels from farm to plate in the U. S. is thirteen hundred miles. It might take a hundred calories of energy to produce and deliver one calorie of broccoli."

His mouth was becoming increasingly dry as he thought through the ramifications of what was happening. Of what Jenna had started.

"Our entire economy is based on people spending hours a day in the car -- going to the store, to work, whatever. Heat, medicine, and clothing all take huge amounts of energy to produce. And then you have the shipping costs of imports. Did you know that no shoes are made in the U. S. anymore? So if we suddenly can't fuel the ships to get shoes here, everyone goes barefoot. It sounds kind of stupid, but think about what it would take to create a shoe industry that had the capacity to cover the feet of more than a quarter of a billion people."

"You assumed that virtually all the oil will run out in the next fifty years," Reynolds said. "We're going to lose it faster, but not as much. Thirty percent, right?"

"Right. But it's impossible to predict exactly how it will affect us because nothing like this has ever happened before. I mean, we're not just talking about some minor supply fluctuations that cause an increase in prices or a few gas lines. We're talking about an actual long-term shortage. The oil just won't be there, no matter how much you're willing to pay. Figure ninety-seven percent of petroleum in the U. S. is used for transportation. If it's just Ghawar, then the market can probably deal with that. Gas prices would go up to six dollars a gallon or so and people would react by driving more efficient cars fewer miles, and forgoing luxury products that have huge transportation costs attached to them. Painful, and probably pretty devastating to the economy in the short term, but not really a disaster."

"But you don't think it's just Ghawar." "No. And that leaves you in a gray area. You're talking about a complete reorganization of the world economy in an environment that will make it hard to reorganize because creating energy-efficient systems takes energy. Depending on how you calculate the numbers, it might take a hundred gallons of oil to make one solar panel."

"So, at some point between a ten percent reduction and a thirty percent reduction, the government is going to have to institute some kind of rationing," Reynolds said. "Isn't that right? Agriculture, for example."

"Yeah, I suppose. Below ten percent, you'd probably do a little pandering with the strategic reserve and run up the deficit a little more with tax rebates, but in the end the market would take care of things through pricing. Eventually, though, you cross the first line, where oil becomes so valuable to the public good that it has to be centrally controlled to some degree. You don't want ambulances to run out of gas because some rich guy wants to drive his Hummer around."

"So where is that break point?" Reynolds asked. "The point where the government has to take control of the market?"

"I wouldn't worry about that so much.

It's the next line that you should be thinking about."

"The next line?"

"Where the reduction in energy availability creates a cascade effect. The economic cascade is obvious: If people can't get to the mall, the people at the mall lose their jobs. Then they don't have the money to go out to dinner, so the restaurant people lose their jobs, and so on. But the energy cascade is way more dangerous. To get energy, you have to input energy. An obvious example is the big diesel engines that drive coal extraction. If you can't get fuel to run the mines, then we lose most of our electricity. If you lose your electricity, what happens to all the industries that count on it? Lights? Heat? Communications? The Internet? And if we lose those --"

Reynolds held up his hand. "I get the point. We'd go back two hundred years."

"Yeah, but with a complete loss of survival skills. How many people even cook their own food anymore, let alone grow and butcher it? And our population isn't a hundred thousand, it's three hundred million -- all of whom would start fighting for what few resources were left. Who's going to keep the peace? The army? No way. Even when it's not fighting, the U. S. military still uses more energy than the entire country of Austria."

Reynolds turned and looked out the window behind his desk, following the cars crowding the street below. Washington D. C.'s rush hour had expanded over the years, and now the city seemed to be constantly flooded with the bumper-to-bumper traffic that kept the country -- and the world -- moving forward.

"Okay," Beamon said. "Maybe you could talk about what we can do to make sure none of that happens."

Erin didn't answer. He just wanted to get the hell out of there. To figure out how Jenna did or didn't fit into this. To find out if she was alive or if this was just another desperate fantasy he'd conjured up.