The Green Trap (16 page)

“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?”

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.

—
S
CIENCE
M
ONTHLY

L
et'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.”

 

T
he 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.

It's another world here, he thought as he sat back in a wrought-iron chair on the patio outside the inn's lounge. The inner square of the hotel was blooming with colorful flowers, birds flitted among the tall palm trees, and stately, slender cypresses swayed in the warm breeze.

Sandoval seemed in her element, completely relaxed, smiling at him as they sat side by side and sipped at tall, cool glasses of Pernod and water. Sandoval had ordered the drink and Cochrane followed her lead. The pale pastel-green liquor tasted of licorice.

She was wearing a light sleeveless short-skirted dress of pale green, almost matching their drinks. Expensive-looking gold jewelry glittered with gemstones at her wrists, throat, and earlobes. Her contented smile tightened a bit as she asked softly, “You brought the discs, didn't you?”

He tapped the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. “Right here, next to my heart.”

She laughed. “We ought to make a copy of them and put them in a safe place, Paul.”

“I already did,” he replied. “Soon as I booted up the laptop when we got into our room.”

“Good.” She sipped at the Pernod. Then, “Are you sure the copy is safe?”

“Copies,” he said. “I made three copies and sent them to three different places.”

“Good,” she repeated, although she seemed a little less certain than before.

“Did you talk to Gould?” he asked.

“I left a message for him. He's out of the country until Monday. We'll hear from him before then, trust me.”

Noticing that Sandoval's purse, lying on the table, was hardly bigger than her hand, he asked, “Did you bring your cell phone with you?”

“It's back in the room, recharging.”

Cochrane nodded and looked over the greenery and the low pink buildings of the inn. She's really relaxed if she didn't bring the phone with her. He felt totally content. The sky was a perfect cloudless blue, with a thin white contrail so high above that he could neither see nor hear the plane that was making it.

He pulled in a deep, satisfied breath. “You know, a guy could get accustomed to living like this.”

Sandoval gave him her brightest smile.

The message light on their telephone was blinking when they returned to their spacious room.

“Gould,” she said, going to the night table beside the king-sized bed.

Cochrane watched her face as she sat on the bed and listened to the message. She nodded as she put the phone down.

“He'll send his own plane to the airport here in Tucson Monday morning. He's invited us to have dinner with him that evening.”

“Where?” Cochrane asked.

“New York. Manhattan.”

“His own plane, huh? I've never flown in a private jet.”

Sandoval pointed to the open laptop. “You're certain that you've got the copies in a safe place?”

“You don't trust Gould?”

“Why should I? Ten million is a lot of money, even for him. If he can get the information for free, why pay us?”

Why not kill us? Cochrane thought. Aloud he said, “I sent the data on the discs to three different friends of mine in zip files, with instructions not to unzip the files unless they find out I'm dead or disappeared.”

“You trust them?”

He smiled at her. “We all went to high school together. We were pretty tight.”

She nodded, seemingly satisfied. Cochrane waited for her to ask for more details, and found that he was glad when she didn't. Three high school buddies. He tried to picture their faces. Haven't seen them in years. But they're all I've got. If I can't trust them, I can't trust anybody.

L
ionel Gould was in rare form as he sat at the head of the dining table in his penthouse atop the Gould Tower on Park Avenue West. Through the sweeping windows on one side of the spacious dining room, Cochrane could see the row of hotel and condominium towers across the open space of Central Park silhouetted against the purple glow of the twilight sky. Lights were beginning to twinkle in the windows like a galaxy of stars coming to life. Far, far below the noise and dirt and stress of everyday life on Manhattan's streets were nothing more than a faint background buzz.

Gould was playing host to Sandoval and Cochrane, telling ponderous jokes, graciously approving of the wines that his servants brought for him to taste, explaining the origins of the mussels and scallops of their first course, the baby lamb chops of the entree.

“Irish lamb,” he said grandly, tucking a starched white linen napkin under his chin. “The Irish don't do many things well, but lamb is their gift to the world.”

Sandoval dabbed lightly at her lips. Seated across the table from Cochrane, she was wearing a glittering green sequined dress that she'd bought that afternoon in Saks Fifth Avenue. On Gould's credit. They were staying at a town house on Sixty-eighth Street that Gould owned; he had insisted on that.

She smiled at Gould and said, “I thought that the Irish have given the world most of the great poetry and prose of the English language: Shaw, Yeats, Wilde—all the great British writers are actually Irish, aren't they?”

“Shakespeare?” Gould countered, his face alight with the joy of intelligent conversation with a beautiful woman. “Churchill?”

“Christopher Marlowe,” Cochrane heard himself say, surprised that he remembered anything from his English Lit classes. “If he hadn't died so young—”

“You can't count Churchill,” Sandoval said, still looking at Gould. “He was a politician.”