'Are you ready?'
'As I'll ever be,' Rachael said. 'Meet us at the marina parking lot.'
'I'll be there in about twenty minutes. Maybe just a little more.'
'Here's a section about Arcs,' Haley said. 'Ben apparently has other scientists working on this. I recognize Jacob Krevitz, a retired fellow from UW. Oh, and Miles Knoff, retired from Cornell. Ben's really been putting brainpower into this.'
She read on. 'Here are some calculations regarding a methane/sulfate cycle. Not that I know what that has to do with anything.'
'What's it mean generally?' Sam asked.
'It's a cycle that doesn't use oxygen,' she said. 'By comparison we breathe oxygen, we exhale CO; vegetation does the opposite. You know?'
'Sure.'
'According to this, some Arcs live on a methane/sulphate cycle like we live on an oxygen/CO cycle. Methane-producing Arcs take in CO and hydrogen and make 2 2 methane. The point is, if you calculate the available energy in their various chemical cycles, factoring in the normal amounts of energy required to maintain an organism, then Archaea cannot possibly live. None of them. That means that by our standards these Arcs are energy efficient beyond comprehension. It would be equivalent to discovering a race of people that could live for a year on a slice of pizza.' She returned to the pages.
'Somebody actually did the pizza calculation.' She was quiet for a while. Sam watched a couple men coming up Water Front Street-mere shadows passing through the streetlamp halos. He studied them. Not in a hurry, relaxed, nothing in their hands, they looked like people accustomed to the island.
'Wow,' she said.
'What?'
'The ramifications of what I just told you-they're enormous.'
'Tell me,' Sam said.
'Aside from the fact that these things appear to live on practically nothing, the methane makers produce much more methane than the methane eaters consume. Ben did a mass calculation for methane production by Arcs. He says there's more methane stored in the bottom of the sea than all the oil, coal, and gas reserves put together.'
Sam whistled long and low.
'Not so hard to believe,' Haley said, 'when you consider what Ben says here: 'Arcs comprise one-third of all the living stuff on earth.' Unbelievable! And to think Nelson Gempshorn worked on this.'
'Who is Gempshorn?'
'He's a vice president of American Bayou Technologies.'
'The company that's merging with Sanker?'
'Yeah.' Haley looked surprised that Sam knew this. 'That's right. And you know, I don't think I ever mentioned it to you, but I walked in on Ben and Nelson one day at Ben's place. They had some kind of a model of something and they sort of seemed to panic when I came in. The model had something to do with the seafloor and ships. Now that I think about it, American Bayou Technologies is in the energy business. Offshore oil, mainly.'
'You see where this is leading?' Sam said. 'American Bayou would have a huge stake in what we're looking at here. In the merger Ben may not only have the key for Sanker with aging, he may also have the key for American Bayou. If American Bayou obtains a big energy discovery, that would enable them to win in this merger struggle.'
'But who says you can use this methane?'
'That's a good point,' Sam said. 'Gempshorn might know something about that.'
'It's probably not relevant, but Gempshorn had cancer.'
'What do you mean had?'
The windows were fogging, reducing visibility. Sam started the motor and turned on the defrost. Twenty minutes was forever.
'I don't know. He's still alive. In fact, that day I saw them, Nelson had an IV plugged into his arm. Said it was for the cancer, but said not to tell anyone because his family didn't know. He didn't want to worry them.'
'Do you know for a fact he was treating cancer?' Sam asked. 'Doesn't that seem odd, doing chemotherapy at a friend's home?'
'Ben's a biologist, but, yeah, I suppose it does.'
'What if they were panicking in part because you saw the IV?'
'God, you have a suspicious mind. On the other hand…' She stopped.
'They told you nothing about the IV?' 'They said it was doing good things, working, whatever, and they asked that I keep it confidential.'
'And, of course, this cries out for the possible conclusion that they were giving him some kind of antiaging formulation. Would that be a huge leap?'
'I think it would,' Haley said. 'I never knew Ben to experiment with people. It's completely unethical without an approved trial, and he had no approved drug trials that I know about.'
'At any rate this document is amazing,' Sam said. 'And Gibbons was just sitting on it.'
'The question's whether it has anything to do with long life.'
'I see more pages,' Sam said.
Haley read for a minute, while Sam studied a couple men parking a car in the marina.
They had a big anchor in the back of their pickup. He doubted Frick would do anything that subtle, but he wished Rachael would hurry.
'Oh, my God.' Her voice startled him. 'Here's something else altogether. One of Ben's colleagues shows that this methane could explode up from the ocean floor.' Sam looked around, watching for Rachael, watching for deputies.
'They think methane explosions have caused catastrophes a number of times already.
Some of this looks like a literature review to substantiate the calculations,' she said as she flipped through the pages.
'According to this, it could have caused the mass extinction at the end of the Permian Era. Ninety-five percent of the marine species and seventy percent of land animals and plants. Gone.'
'That's scary, but it's just a guess.' 'It says, 'Methane was also involved in precipitating a giant underwater slide off Norway…' Man, we're talking a massive one. Sam. It was eight thousand years ago, but it created tsunamis sixty-five feet high. Compare that to Indonesia. An earthquake triggered the methane release, and that caused the landslide.'
Sam nodded, his eyes still on the parking lot. 'Oh, my God. They think that in prehistoric times the atmosphere itself lit on fire as a result of a methane release. Or even if there wasn't enough to burn, this says, oxygen could get so thin it would be like living on top of a sixteen-thousand-foot mountain.'
That one Sam could imagine, having climbed Mt. McKinley as a teenager with his father. Sixteen thousand feet was substantial. He could imagine someone sitting in their living room unable to breathe except in gasps, nauseated, head aching… incapacitated.
'Listen to this conclusion,' she continued. ''The world slumbers not realizing the great peril of an unstoppable chain reaction methane release.'
''The seafloor methane cycle is part of earth's carbon cycle and exercises a great influence over climate shifts that has not been sufficiently studied. Vast quantities of methane have been stored in ocean sediments and there are various potential mechanisms for catastrophic release.' But there is a note here that Ben wonders if this would happen over time, threatening a crisis round of global warming, rather than asphyxiation in your living room.'
'Astounding, perhaps deadly either way,' Sam said. 'I get Ben's meaning now. 'One sigh and we all die.''
He checked his watch. 'It's time.'
CHAPTER 16
