The Star (21 page)

By this time Harry had begun to appreciate his friend’s psychology. He could think of few better ways of escaping from a New England law practice. George was a repressed romantic—and not such a repressed one, either, now that he came to think of it.

They cruised along happily for a couple of hours, keeping in water that was never more than forty feet deep. Once they grounded on a dazzling stretch of broken coral, and took time off for liverwurst sandwiches and glasses of beer. ‘I drank some ginger beer down here once,’ said George. ‘When I came up the gas inside me expanded and it was a very odd sort of feeling. Must try it with champagne some day.’

Harry was just wondering what to do with the empties when the
Pompano
seemed to go into eclipse as a dark shadow drifted overhead. Looking up through the observation window, he saw that a ship was moving slowly past twenty feet above their heads. There was no danger of a collision, as they had pulled down their snort for just this reason and were subsisting for the moment on their capital as far as air was concerned. Harry had never seen a ship from underneath and began to add another novel experience to the many he had acquired today.

He was quite proud of the fact that, despite his ignorance of matters nautical, he was just as quick as George at spotting what was wrong with the vessel sailing overhead. Instead of the normal shaft and screw, this ship had a long tunnel running the length of its keel. As it passed above them, the
Pompano
was rocked by the sudden rush of water.

‘I’ll be damned!’ said George, grabbing the controls. ‘That looks like some kind of jet-propulsion system. It’s about time somebody tried one out. Let’s have a look.’

He pushed up the periscope, and discovered that the ship slowly cruising past them was the
Valency
, of New Orleans. ‘That’s a funny name,’ he said. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I would say,’ answered Harry, ‘that it means the owner is a chemist—except for the fact that no chemist would ever make enough money to buy a ship like that.’

‘I’m going to follow her,’ decided George. ‘She’s only making five knots, and I’d like to see how that dingus works.’

He elevated the snort, got the diesel running, and started in pursuit. After a brief chase, the
Pompano
drew within fifty feet of the
Valency
, and Harry felt rather like a submarine commander about to launch a torpedo. They couldn’t miss from this distance.

In fact, they nearly made a direct hit. For the
Valency
suddenly slowed to a halt, and before George realised what had happened, he was alongside her. ‘No signals!’ he complained, without much logic. A minute later, it was clear that the manoeuvre was no accident. A lasso dropped neatly over the
Pompano
’s snorkel and they were efficiently gaffed. There was nothing to do but emerge, rather sheepishly, and make the best of it.

Fortunately, their captors were reasonable men and could recognise the truth when they heard it. Fifteen minutes after coming aboard the
Valency
, George and Harry were sitting on the bridge while a uniformed steward brought them highballs and they listened attentively to the theories of Dr Gilbert Romano.

They were still both a little overawed at being in Dr Romano’s presence: it was rather like meeting a live Rockefeller or a reigning du Pont. The Doctor was a phenomenon virtually unknown in Europe and unusual even in the United States—the big scientist who had become a bigger businessman. He was now in his late seventies and had just been retired—after a considerable tussle—from the chairmanship of the vast chemical-engineering firm he had founded.

It is rather amusing, Harry told us, to notice the subtle social distinctions which differences in wealth can produce even in the most democratic country. By Harry’s standards, George was a very rich man: his income was around a hundred thousand dollars a year. But Dr Romano was in another price range altogether, and had to be treated accordingly with a kind of friendly respect which had nothing to do with obsequiousness. On his side, the Doctor was perfectly free and easy; there was nothing about him that gave any impression of wealth, if one ignored such trivia as hundred-and-fifty-foot ocean-going yachts.

The fact that George was on first-name terms with most of the Doctor’s business acquaintances helped to break the ice and to establish the purity of their motives. Harry spent a boring half hour while business deals ranging over half the United States were discussed in terms of what Bill So-and-So did in Pittsburgh, who Joe Somebody Else ran into at the Bankers’ Club in Houston, how Clyde Thingummy happened to be playing golf at Augusta while Ike was there. It was a glimpse of a mysterious world where immense power was wielded by men who all seemed to have gone to the same colleges, or who at any rate belonged to the same clubs. Harry soon became aware of the fact that George was not merely paying court to Dr Romano because that was the polite thing to do. George was too shrewd a lawyer to miss the chance of building up some good will, and appeared to have forgotten all about the original purpose of their expedition.

Harry had to wait for a suitable gap in the conversation before he could raise the subject which really interested him. When it dawned on Dr Romano that he was talking to another scientist, he promptly abandoned finance and George was the one who was left out in the cold.

The thing that puzzled Harry was why a distinguished chemist should be interested in marine propulsion. Being a man of direct action, he challenged the Doctor on this point. For a moment the scientist appeared a little embarrassed and Harry was about to apologise for his inquisitiveness—a feat that would have required real effort on his part. But before he could do this, Dr Romano had excused himself and disappeared into the bridge.

He came back five minutes later with a rather satisfied expression, and continued as if nothing had happened.

‘A very natural question, Mr Purvis,’ he chuckled. ‘I’d have asked it myself. But do you really expect me to tell you?’

‘Er—it was just a vague sort of hope,’ confessed Harry.

‘Then I’m going to surprise you—surprise you twice, in fact. I’m going to answer you, and I’m going to show you that I’m
not
passionately interested in marine propulsion. Those bulges on the bottom of my ship which you were inspecting with such great interest do contain the screws, but they also contain a good deal else as well.

‘Let me give you,’ continued Dr Romano, now obviously warming up to his subject, ‘a few elementary statistics about the ocean. We can see a lot of it from here—quite a few square miles. Did you know that every cubic mile of sea water contains a hundred and fifty
million
tons of minerals?’

‘Frankly, no,’ said George. ‘It’s an impressive thought.’

‘It’s impressed me for a long time,’ said the Doctor. ‘Here we go grubbing about in the earth for our metals and chemicals, while every element that exists can be found in sea water. The ocean, in fact, is a kind of universal mine which can never be exhausted. We may plunder the land, but we’ll never empty the sea.

‘Men have already started to mine the sea, you know. Dow Chemical has been taking out bromine for years: every cubic mile contains about three hundred thousand tons. More recently, we’ve started to do something about the five million tons of magnesium per cubic mile. But that sort of thing is merely a beginning.

‘The great practical problem is that most of the elements present in sea water are in such low concentrations. The first seven elements make up about ninety-nine per cent of the total, and it’s the remaining one per cent that contains all the useful metals except magnesium.

‘All my life I’ve wondered how we could do something about this, and the answer came during the war. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the techniques used in the atomic-energy field to remove minute quantities of isotopes from solutions: some of those methods are still pretty much under wraps.’

‘Are you talking about ion-exchange resins?’ hazarded Harry.

‘Well—something similar. My firm developed several of these techniques on AEC contracts, and I realised at once that they would have wider applications. I put some of my bright young men to work and they have made what we call a “molecular sieve”. That’s a mighty descriptive expression: in its way, the thing
is
a sieve, and we can set it to select anything we like. It depends on very advanced wave-mechanical theories for its operation, but what it actually does is absurdly simple. We can choose any component of sea water we like, and get the sieve to take it out. With several units, working in series, we can take out one element after another. The efficiency’s quite high, and the power consumption negligible.’

‘I know!’ yelped George. ‘You’re extracting gold from sea water!’

‘Huh!’ snorted Dr Romano in tolerant disgust. ‘I’ve got better things to do with my time. Too much damn gold around, anyhow. I’m after the commercially useful metals—the ones our civilisation is going to be desperately short of in another couple of generations. And as a matter of fact, even with my sieve it wouldn’t be worth going after gold. There are only about fifty pounds of the stuff in every cubic mile.’

‘What about uranium?’ asked Harry. ‘Or is that scarcer still?’

‘I rather wish you hadn’t asked that question,’ replied Dr Romano with a cheerfulness that belied the remark. ‘But since you can look it up in any library, there’s no harm in telling you that uranium’s two hundred times
more
common than gold. About seven tons in every cubic mile—a figure which is, shall we say, distinctly interesting. So why bother about gold?’

‘Why indeed?’ echoed George.

‘To continue,’ said Dr Romano, duly continuing, ‘even with the molecular sieve, we’ve still got the problem of processing enormous volumes of sea water. There are a number of ways one could tackle this: you could build giant pumping stations, for example. But I’ve always been keen on killing two birds with one stone, and the other day I did a little calculation that gave the most surprising result. I found that every time the
Queen Mary
crosses the Atlantic, her screws chew up about a tenth of a cubic mile of water. Fifteen million tons of minerals, in other words. Or to take the case you indiscreetly mentioned—almost a ton of uranium on every Atlantic crossing. Quite a thought, isn’t it?

‘So it seemed to me that all we need do to create a very useful mobile extraction plant was to put the screws of any vessel inside a tube which would compel the slip stream to pass through one of my sieves. Of course, there’s a certain loss of propulsive power, but our experimental unit works very well. We can’t go quite as fast as we did, but the farther we cruise the more money we make from our mining operations. Don’t you think the shipping companies will find that very attractive? But of course that’s merely incidental. I look forward to the building of floating extraction plants that will cruise round and round in the ocean until they’ve filled their hoppers with anything you care to name. When that day comes, we’ll be able to stop tearing up the land and all our material shortages will be over. Everything goes back to the sea in the long run anyway, and once we’ve unlocked that treasure chest, we’ll be all set for eternity.’

For a moment there was silence on deck, save for the faint clink of ice in the tumblers, while Dr Romano’s guests contemplated this dazzling prospect. Then Harry was struck by a sudden thought.

‘This is quite one of the most important inventions I’ve ever heard of,’ he said. ‘That’s why I find it rather odd that you should have confided in us so fully. After all, we’re perfect strangers, and for all you know might be spying on you.’

The old scientist chortled gaily.

‘Don’t worry about
that
, my boy,’ he reassured Harry. ‘I’ve already been on to Washington and had my friends check up on you.’

Harry blinked for a minute, then realised how it had been done. He remembered Dr Romano’s brief disappearance, and could picture what had happened. There would have been a radio call to Washington, some senator would have got on to the Embassy, the Ministry of Supply representative would have done his bit—and in five minutes the Doctor would have got the answer he wanted. Yes, Americans were very efficient—those who could afford to be.

It was about this time that Harry became aware of the fact that they were no longer alone. A much larger and more impressive yacht than the
Valency
was heading towards them, and in a few minutes he was able to read the name
Sea Spray
. Such a name, he thought, was more appropriate to billowing sails than throbbing diesels, but there was no doubt that the
Spray
was a very pretty creature indeed. He could understand the looks of undisguised covetousness that both George and Dr Romano now plainly bore.

The sea was so calm that the two yachts were able to come alongside each other, and as soon as they had made contact a sunburned, energetic man in the late forties vaulted over onto the deck of the
Valency
. He strode up to Dr Romano, shook his hand vigorously, said, ‘Well, you old rascal, what are you up to?’ and then looked enquiringly at the rest of the company. The Doctor carried out the introductions: it seemed that they had been boarded by Professor Scott McKenzie, who’d been sailing
his
yacht down from Key Largo.

‘Oh no!’ cried Harry to himself. ‘This is
too
much! One millionaire scientist per day is all I can stand.’

But there was no getting away from it. True, McKenzie was very seldom seen in the academic cloisters, but he was a genuine professor none the less, holding the chair of geophysics at some Texas college. Ninety per cent of his time, however, he spent working for the big oil companies and running a consulting firm of his own. It rather looked as if he had made his torsion balances and seismographs pay quite well for themselves. In fact, though he was a much younger man than Dr Romano, he had even more money owing to being in a more rapidly expanding industry. Harry gathered that the peculiar tax laws of the sovereign State of Texas also had something to do with it…