Conventional Wisdom
IN LATE 1987 the financial pages of the Houston Chronicle had noted the rise to prominence of one George Preston and his new company, Petroleum Genetics Laboratories or PGL for short. Preston was a mysterious figure. He had appeared on the Houston oil scene out of nowhere. Even after considerable effort the Chronicle financial reporter had been unable to learn anything about his background, credit history, previous experience, education, or source of financial backing. The local banks had records of substantial PGL deposits but no loans.
Petroleum Genetics Laboratories had started by using recombinant DNA techniques to “engineer” a species of rapidly multiplying but generation-limited petroleum-eating bacteria that was proving very useful in erasing the effects of oil spills. Several small Gulf Coast spills in 1987 had demonstrated the value of PGL’s oil-eating bacteria and placed the company’s profits on a steeply rising trajectory.
Preston had used these profits to buy up “worthless” oil leases in the long-dead oil fields of East Texas, leases for wells from which all the recoverable oil had been removed decades earlier. This has been treated as a joke at first, and in late 1987 many holders of ancient East Texas leases had rushed to sell them to this “crazy Yankee” before his money ran out, he came to his senses, or he was institutionalized.
Then in December of 1987 an unexpected thing happened. PGL’s dried-up East Texas wells in the area between Gladewater and Tyler began to produce oil. Their yield curves rose, week by week, until by Christmas they equaled peak production during the golden days of Spindletop and the great Texas oil boom. In early January speculators began to buy up the dead wells nearby, but they soon found that the PGL bonanza did not extend to them. Disappointed, they sold their leases to Preston cheap to cut their losses. PGL’s profits from the producing wells fueled further acquisitions. Suddenly, the major oil producers came to the realization that there was a significant new player in their business.
Several of the big oil companies had already initiated well-funded research and industrial espionage programs aimed at discovering PGL’s secret, when Preston revealed it to the news media at an April 1988 press conference in Houston. He announced that the privately held Petroleum Genetics Laboratories would henceforth become PetroGen, Inc., a public corporation whose stock would be listed on the New York Stock Exchange after an initial stock offering of 20 million shares at about $50 per share.
PetroGen, in addition to its now-vast oil holdings in Texas, Oklahoma, Venezuela, and elsewhere, and its exponentially rising revenues, had filed unique patent applications describing a genetically engineered family of bacteria that could free valuable petroleum from its bonds in porous layers of rock, sand, and shale, while at the same time trimming sluggish long-chain hydrocarbon molecules to the more marketable octane and septane sizes. As a proof-of-principle, these slimmed down, pre-refined petroleum products were already flowing freely at the PetroGen well heads. In less than a year a new blue-chip stock had been created on Wall Street.
August 16, 1988, was a very hot and humid Tuesday in New Orleans. The Republican Platform Committee had been meeting for a week to hammer out the new party platform. The Republican National Convention was to begin the following week in the Superdome, and thousands of reporters were converging on the Big Easy in preparation for the media feeding frenzy to come.
George Bush had campaigned hard for the Republican presidential nomination, easily outdistancing Patrick Buchanan in the primaries and gaining President Ronald Reagan’s implicit support. He now had the lion’s share of the convention delegates and was assured of the presidential nomination.
The real unresolved issue in New Orleans was Bush’s imminent choice of a candidate for Vice President. The eleven “finalists” on Bush’s short list were one-by-one making their way to the Marriott Hotel on Canal Street to be interviewed by Robert Kimmit, who had been an attorney with the Treasury Department before he resigned to join the Bush Campaign. Bob Kimmit now had the responsibility for checking out each candidate.
PetroGen had rented an entire floor in the Canal Street Marriott just upstairs from the floors of suites that the Bush campaign organization was using as its base of operations. Roger “Fulton,” prominent British diamond merchant and member of the PetroGen Board of Directors, sat in the suite’s large living room with his colleague George Preston, rising star of the resurgent Texas oil business and “Eagle Class” contributor to the Bush campaign.
“Any late-breaking news from Washington about the SSC?” Roger asked.
“Not much,” said George. “There’s been no mention of it during the primaries. The focus of attention in DC is all on the campaign, and science has no value as a campaign issue. I heard recently that the DOE added a correction to its cost estimates for inflation and now admits that the SSC might cost $5.3 billion instead of $4.4 billion. Also, certain members of Congress have decided that a very visible opposition to drugs makes a good campaign issue, and they want to be assured that the SSC laboratory and other federal laboratories will be ‘drug-free work-places’, which had become their new buzzword.”
“Drug - Free - Work - Place,” Roger repeated slowly. “It does have a certain cadence. And I suppose it’s preferable to a work-free drug-place.”
George laughed. “There’s a story going around,” he said, “that President Reagan himself decided to set a good example for the nation by asking his Cabinet Members to submit to a urine analysis test during a recent cabinet meeting. They all complied, of course, and the following day the Surgeon General came to the President with the test results. ‘Mr. President,’ he said, ‘I’m pleased to report that you and all of your Cabinet Members have passed the urine analysis test, and I can certify that the Presidential Cabinet Meeting Room is indeed a drug-free workplace. But next time, Mr. President, please don’t ask everyone to pee in the same bottle.’”
Roger chuckled. “I suppose,” he said, “that we’d best get on with revising history.” He looked uncomfortable. “I hope that we do it right.”
George winced. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat,” he said, “worrying about whether we’re doing the right thing. What gives us the right to engage in this kind of manipulation? We think we’re saving the world, but suppose we end by making things worse?”
“Worse than the Hive? I doubt that would be possible,” said Roger. “But in any case, history is already changing in subtle ways, even without our intervention.”
“It is? How can that be?”
“I’ve found evidence that events at the quantum level are having different outcomes,” said Roger, “even in situations where we could not possibly have had any influence. My lapstation contains an electronic almanac that, among other things, contains a 20 year database of stock market quotations and sporting event scores. I checked the correspondence of those from my lapstation against those in newspaper files. Up to February 2, 1987, the records are a perfect match. But forward of the date of our splashy entrance at Galveston, a difference between records sets in and the discrepancies grow with time. For example, within two hours after our splashdown, a Hannover soccer team won a close match played in Munich, Germany that should have been won by Bayern München. That isn’t something we could have affected directly.”
“This is a different universe,” said George. “We melted it and it’s re-crystallizing.”
“Exactly,” said Roger. “Iris described the effect of the time vortex as an unraveling of the frozen-in history of the universe, so that it has to re-evolve from the earliest point of the disruption. Apparently during that re-evolution, every quantum event is a new game of dice with a strong chance of a new outcome. This is a new universe developing a new and different history, with or without our intervention. The general trends should be the same, of course, but detailed events from the quantum scale up are different. We should think of what we do as steering an intrinsically chaotic process rather than altering history.”
George looked at his watch. “History alterations or not,” he said, “we have to focus our influence on Bush’s selection of a vice-presidential candidate.”
“Your system of government,” said Roger, “is still a deep mystery to me, I’m afraid. “We’re here in New Orleans to affect the nomination of the Vice President, but I fail to understand the political priorities. Why is this vice-presidential nomination so important to us? It was my impression that the U. S. Vice President is a kind of administrative spare tire, a non-functional ceremonial position that is of no importance unless something happens to the President.”
“That‘s certainly been the tradition,” said George, “but during the Carter and the Reagan Administrations a new tradition was established. The VP was given a leading role in the areas of science and space, in part to give him a somewhat visible activity that the President was glad to relinquish. Since the Carter/Mondale Administration all the Presidential Science Advisors have worked closely with the VP in proposing new science initiatives and in defending the existing ones. And, of course, the VP normally has a good chance to become the next president, one way or another.”
“I see,” said Roger. “It’s the link to science policy.”
George nodded. “In our version of the future, George Bush selected Bob Dole as his Vice President. He’s a rather reserved, taciturn person, but it proved to be a great choice as far as the SSC was concerned. There were some significant SSC Contractors in Kansas, and Dole was interested in the project. He retained powerful connections in the U. S. Congress, which he used to protect the SSC. And of course Dole was elected in his own right in ‘96 and continued his SSC support. He may actually have saved the project.”
“And so,” said Roger, “ we need to find a less effective alternative to Dole.”
“The less effective, the better,” said George. “Tell me about this person you and your computer picked out. What’s his name? Quade?”
“Quayle,” said Roger, “J. Danforth Quayle, U. S. Senator from the State of Indiana. His father is a rich publisher who has pushed his son’s career. Hard. Dan is good looking. He looks rather like a vacant Robert Redford. He makes a very good first impression, has a pretty wife and an attractive family, and is an excellent and dedicated golfer. He’s actually done quite well as a Senator, with good press and no conspicuous screwups. Lately he’s been receiving press attention as a leading supporter of the Star Wars Initiative in the Senate. He comes from the right wing of the party and is one of the few VP finalists that can pass Senator Gordon Humphrey’s ‘True Conservative’ litmus test. And unlike Jack Kemp, he’s never offended George Bush. He perhaps has only one principal failing. He’s simply not very bright, even as judged by the rather undemanding standards of U. S. politics.”
“Are you sure about that?” asked George. “Many politicians in this country act dumber than they are, in order to stay on the right wavelength with the home folks.”
“In my one conversation with Dan,” said Roger, “we discussed the space program. He’s sincerely interested in it, but he seems to think that the planet Mars had canals with water in them. I’d suppose that he read Edgar Rice Burroughs as a child and never learned better, except that he never seems to have read any book for recreation except a few about golf. Perhaps his notion came from a comic book. It would be interesting to watch him in the role of leading defender of the SSC. He’d probably claim that it was being built to find a cure for cancer or something.”
“He sounds like just the man for us,” said George. “What did you Write for him, when you were with him?”
“I boosted his output of an obscure human pheromone by two orders of magnitude. He would now reek of the stuff, except that no modern human is able to smell it. It comes from a feature of the human genome that was taken out of active service a million years ago when our sex and mating practices became non-seasonal. I Wrote a little targeted retrovirus and gave it to Danforth as we shook hands, when I was leaving after the interview.”
“Was that good for him?” George asked. “I would have thought you’d be impeded by your Hippocratic wiring.”
“It certainly did him no harm,” said Roger, “and I combined it with a neuro-coordination boost that will improve his golf game. I also Wrote in a temporary boost in his synaptine level, so he’ll be a bit smarter for about the duration of the campaign. All very beneficial to the recipient, and therefore I could Write them without feeling any Hippocratic qualms. So now the rest is up to you.”
George consulted a piece of paper. “Quayle’s screening interview with Bob Kimmit is scheduled for tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ve arranged to have dinner with Bob tonight, and I’ll be able to see Bush tomorrow to express my support for Quayle. If I provide a short duration boost in sensitivity to the same pheromone for the two of them, we’ll be able to create instant rapport between them and Dan Quayle.
“Bush is going to love his new running mate.”
Roger laughed, then frowned. “But isn’t there a danger for the U. S. in what we’re doing,” he said. “Suppose something happens to Bush, and Quayle has to actually function as President? We’re clouding the judgments of those who should be selecting the best person to serve as a substitute President.”
“We’ll deal with that problem if and when it arises,” said George. “We can boost Quayle’s intelligence and provide him with similarly intelligence-boosted advisors, or if necessary we could get him out of the way with a debilitating disease. It’s a small risk for the country and the world compared to the danger of a probable Hive invasion. These are desperate times.”
Roger nodded.
There was a knock at the door, and George answered it.
A young man with a shock of unruly white-blonde hair stood outside. He was wearing PetroGen coveralls and carrying a tool box. “Excuse me, Mr. Preston,” he said. “I just thought you’d want to know that I’ve got all the cables and wirin’ installed in the strategy suite, so you folks can watch the Convention next week and use those special computers and telephones, just like you wanted. Tested ever’thang myself, and it all works just fine.”
“That’s great, Whitey,” said George, patting him on the back. “ I really appreciate your fast work.”
He closed the door and returned to the conference table.
“Was that ...?” Roger asked.
“Yes,” said George, “that was none other than Whitey Buford. When I was busy buying up East Texas oil leases last year, I decided to hire his father, Ernest Buford, to help me. He did an excellent job, and he’s now a PetroGen executive. Whitey’s still in high school, but we hired him for the summer. He’s helping us with technical details for the Convention. He’s a very bright kid. He told me that he plans to go the Texas A&M when he graduates from Waxahachie High and take a dual major in Petroleum Geology and Molecular Biology. I think it’s very likely that he’ll get a scholarship.” He smiled.