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 D.C. 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 has 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 twenty-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 Munchen. That isn’t something we could have affected directly.”
“This is a different universe,” said George. “We melted it and it’s recrystallizing.”
“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 nonfunctional 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 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.”