Blue Gold

"Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink," Austin said, quoting the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem.

"Precisely. But suppose the Mariner had a magic wand could wave over a bucket of seawater, changing it into fresh."

"His ship would have survived."

"Now extend that analogy to millions of buckets."

"The global water crisis would be over," Austin said. "Nearly seventy percent of the world's population lives within fifty miles of the ocean."

"Exactly," Francesca said, her mood lightening.

"Are you telling me you have this magic wand?"

"Something almost as good. I have developed a revolutionary means to extract salt from seawater."

"You must know that desalting is hardly a new concept," Sandecker said.

Francesca nodded. "The extraction of salt from seawater goes back to the ancient Greeks. Desalination plants have been built around the world, including many in the Middle East. There are several methods, but all are costly. In my doctorate I proposed a radically new approach. I threw out all the old methods. My goal was a process that would be efficient and cheap, available to the poorest farmer trying to scratch a living from the dust. Think of the implications. Water would be nearly free. Deserts would be come centers of civilization."

"I'm sure you thought of the undesirable consequences," Sandecker said, "the fact that cheap water would stimulate development, population growth, and the pollution that goes with them."

"I thought long and hard about that, Admiral Sandecker, but the alternatives were even more unpalatable. I would make orderly development a requirement before allowing a country to use my process."

"It goes without saying then that your experimentation was a success," Austin said.

"Very much so. I was bringing a working model of the process to the international conference. Seawater would go in one end, fresh water come out at the other. It would produce energy and little to no waste products."

"A process like that would have been worth millions of dollars."

"No doubt. I had offers that would have made me immensely rich, but I pla

"That was quite generous of you. You say you had offers. Then someone knew of your process and plans?"

"Once I contacted the United Nations to attend the conference it became an open secret." She paused. "Something has al ways puzzled me. Many people knew about my process. The people who tried to kidnap me would be immediately exposed if they tried to profit from my work."

"There's another possibility," Austin suggested. "Maybe they wanted to bury your work and keep the process a secret from the world."

"But why would anyone try to stop a boon to humanity?"

"Perhaps you're too young to remember," said Sandecker, who had been listening intently. "Years ago stories circulated about the inventor who supposedly built a car engine that could go a hundred miles on a gallon or burn water. The details aren't important. The oil companies reportedly bought the secret and buried it so they could continue to make profits. The stories were apocryphal, but do you see my point?"

"Who would prevent the poor nations from enjoying cheap water?"

"Our investigations have given us an advantage over you, Dr. Cabral. Let me ask you a theoretical question. Suppose you con trolled the world's supply of fresh water. How would you greet the arrival of a process that suddenly makes cheap water avail able to all?"

"My process would end your theoretical water monopoly. But this is a moot point. It is simply not possible for someone to control the world's water."

Sandecker and Austin exchanged glances.

Taking over from Sandecker, Austin said, "A lot has been happening in the past ten years, Dr. Cabral. We can fill you in on the whole story later, but we've discovered that a huge pan national organization called the Gogstad Corporation is very close to acquiring a monopoly over the world's fresh water."

"Impossible!" "I wish it were."

Francesca's eyes hardened. "Then this Gogstad must be the one who tried to kidnap me, who stole those ten years from my life."

"We have no solid proof," Austin said. "There is certainly strong circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction. Tell me, what do you know of a substance called anasazium?"

Francesca's mouth dropped open in surprise. Recovering quickly she said, "Is there anything you people at NUMA do not know?"

"Quite a bit, I'm sorry to say. We know very little about this stuff other than the fact that it can affect the hydrogen atom in strange ways."

"That's its most important property. It's a very complex relationship. This material is at the heart of my desalting process. Only a few people know of its existence. It's extremely rare."

"How did you come across it?"

"By chance. I read an obscure paper written by a former Los Alamos physicist. Rather than try to improve on the existing methods of desalting, I wanted to deal with it at a molecular or even nuclear level. A solution had eluded me until I heard about this substance. I contacted the scientist who wrote the article. He had a small amount of the material and was willing to part with it when I told him why I needed it."

"Why is it so rare?"

"Several reasons. With no apparent economic use for it, the demand was nonexistent. Then, too, the refinement process is quite complicated. The main ore source is in a troubled part of Africa that is constantly at war. I had several ounces, enough for a working model. I would have proposed that the nations of the world pool their resources to produce enough anasazium to set up pilot projects. Working together we could have viable quantities of this substance within a short time."

"Gogstad was ru

"Tell me more about this installation."

Austin gave her a quick summary, starting with the death of the whales. He described the storage cylinder after the explosion and how he traced it to the flying wing. Sandecker filled her in on the cold war mission to Siberia.

'A fantastic tale. It's too bad about the whales," she said sadly. "My process produces heat which can be turned into energy. The material can be unstable and under certain circum stances becomes a powerful explosive. These people must have been trying to replicate my desalination process and were unaware of the material's instability. Where would they have acquired the anasazium?"

"We don't know," Austin said. "We are aware of a large source but don't know its exact location."

"We must find it so I can resume my research," Francesca insisted.

"There's an even more important reason," Sandecker interjected.

"I know no more important reason than to continue my work," she said defensively.

"In time, Dr. Cabral, in time. Your work will have little meaning if Gogstad succeeds in its plans. Whoever controls the world's water controls the world."

"It sounds as if you're talking about global domination, Admiral Sandecker."

"Why not? Napoleon and Hitler failed, but their attempts were made through force of arms. In each case they came up against somebody with a bigger stick." He took a smooth puff on his cigar and watched the cloud of smoke. "The people protesting globalization, all that business with the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, were onto something. The danger is not in these entities but in the i;dCt that it is easier now for someone to exert total control over a economic sector."