And he was stranded there. Spencer hoped someone would come by sooner or later. He listened to the wind. He popped the hood, listening to the faint sounds of gurgling and wheezing in the engine. The Mazda was a rental car, after all, but he could see nothing obviously wrong, no snapped belts, no loose hoses. The radiator had not overheated. The rotten-egg smell clung to everything, but he could not imagine where it came from. He sighed, feeling his stomach churn. This was supposed to be a relaxing trip, a way to get away from it all. Perhaps he had gotten too far away from it all….
Ten minutes later, he was decidedly uneasy. Still no cars. Could people die out here because their cars broke down? Chances of a highway patrol cruising this section of road seemed slim. He realized with a sinking feeling that Rita Fellenstein had only a vague idea where he was. How long would it be before anybody started searching for him? Or would they?
He suddenly felt thirsty. There was no place for shade, and he did not want to leave his car. He had to stay there, just in case somebody came.
Just in case.
Fifteen minutes more. His shirt clung to him. How long would he wait? The desert silence was maddening.
Finally Spencer heard a throbbing in the air, a distant hum, and he snapped to alertness. He wondered if it might just be a plane flying overhead. He squinted down the road, watching the liquid heat make the air ripple over the blacktop like gasoline fumes rising from a tank. In the clear, empty air, Spencer heard the engine much sooner than he made out the shape of the approaching vehicle. As soon as he could discern a jeep clipping toward him at 90 miles an hour, Spencer stood in the middle of the road waving his hands.
What if the driver passed him by? Spencer didn’t usually stop to help people with car trouble. He redoubled his efforts and shouted, “Hey!”
The pitch of the oncoming engine changed as the driver downshifted. Spencer stepped back to his car, trying to figure out what to say.
His rescuer drove a black jeep jacked up for high clearance and off-road driving. The jeep slewed in a partial doughnut, spraying sand and gravel from the road shoulder as it stopped. The canvas top flapped from a loose snap, showing tools, a cooler, and rumpled clothes tossed in the back. Spencer walked toward the jeep as the driver’s door popped open.
The young man’s face was sunburned. The size of a football player, he looked clean-cut and friendly. He wore tattered jeans, a t-shirt with NAVY emblazoned on the front, and a broad grin. “Boy, lousy place for a car to break down.”
“You’re telling me!” Spencer said. “Could you lend me a hand? I think I’ve got a leak in the gas tank—I just filled up a couple hours ago, but I’m on empty already. You don’t happen to have a spare can with you, do you? A gallon or two would get me to another town where I can dump this hunk of junk.”
“Take more than a gallon to get to a town where you can trade in a rental car.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Bobby Carron. I don’t have a spare gas can, but I do have a hose. We could siphon some of my gas into your tank. That should get you to Lone Pine, about twenty miles back on 136.”
“All I need is a phone.”
“Then that’ll do ya. Ridgecrest is where I’m heading, China Lake Naval Weapons Center. A lot bigger city, but that’ll take you an hour. If you got a leaky gas tank, I wouldn’t chance it.”
Bobby Carron rummaged around in the back of his jeep, finally pulling out a length of narrow hose. “I do a lot of off-roading in this puppy. Need to be prepared for most anything.”
From the dust and caked mud on the sides of the jeep, Spencer could imagine some of the places Bobby Carron might have taken his vehicle. “Anything I can do to help?” asked Spencer.
“Yeah, pop your gas tank,” Bobby said, sliding one end of the hose into his own tank. He got down on his knees, put the end of the tube in his mouth and sucked, puckering his cheeks as he drew gasoline out of his tank.
When fuel finally gushed out, Bobby grimaced and spat, then jammed the other end of the hose into Spencer’s tank. The spoiled reek drifted out of the rental car’s gas tank. “Problems with the catalytic converter, I think,” Spencer repeated Dick Morgret’s diagnosis.
Bobby sniffed. “I smell like that myself when I’ve had too much Mexican food.”
Bobby let a few gallons flow into Spencer’s car, then pulled out the hose, letting the gas trickle back into his jeep’s tank. “That should take you far enough to get some decent help. Sorry I couldn’t do more, but I gotta get back to the base.”
“You’re a life saver, Bobby. Thanks a million!”
Bobby made a dismissive gesture. “No problem. Glad to be of service.” He rolled up the hose and tossed it in back of his jeep. “Let’s prime your carburetor so you can get going.”
Spencer let Bobby tinker under the hood for a few moments. “All right, try it!” Bobby said.
Spencer started the car, heaving a sigh of relief to hear the engine rumbling. If his tank did indeed have a leak, he would lead-foot it to the next town. He’d had enough of this supposedly relaxing side trip. It was time to call an end to this vacation, and just get himself back to White Sands.
Bobby Carron honked the jeep’s horn as he spun around, then peeled off on the desert highway toward the China Lake Naval Base.
Chapter 25
The coffee at Stanford’s Tressider Union wasn’t any better than the stuff from Iris Shikozu’s own pot—but sometimes she just had to get out of the lab, smell the morning air, and watch the other students going about their business.
When she had only light teaching duties to muddle her post-doc work, she took a break each morning to sit under one of the red-and-white umbrellas at Tressider, sipping coffee as she read the student paper. But today she took a large cup to go and tucked a copy of the paper under her arm.
A shocking picture of a scrawny, grime-smeared black man holding an oil-smothered pelican dominated the front. An old photo of herself, oversized glasses and all, appeared in the lower right-hand corner. The article said that Stanford researcher Iris Shikozu had overseen the Prometheus spraying. The reporter made Iris out to be a patsy for the big oil company, while Todd Severyn and Alex Kramer, not to mention Oilstar management, were the bad guys. Some students, irate at her involvement, had made crank phone calls to her lab, but Iris just snapped back at them.
On the kiosks she had seen flyers announcing a rally against Oilstar that morning, but the turnout of protesters was much lighter than Iris expected—only a few people waving banners and attempting to pass out leaflets to other students who had no interest. Their noise seemed insignificant in the laid-back flow of students in the mall.
Stanford hadn’t experienced a real protest in years, but she thought that frustration over the Zoroaster spill would have brought the demonstrators out screaming. Maybe everyone wanted to see if Prometheus worked before they complained—and although thick crude continued to gurgle from the sunken tanker, the spreading slick was shrinking measurably.
A few people claimed a connection between Prometheus and the rash of car breakdowns supposedly caused by a “bad batch” of gasoline from the Oilstar refinery. To disprove those rumors, Iris herself agreed to perform a quickie analysis for one of the TV stations looking for a scoop, just to prove that the two couldn’t be linked. She had even shipped blind samples via overnight mail to a few of her colleagues.
Now, as she took her styrofoam cup of coffee and made her way across campus, dodging bicyclists and skateboarders, Iris barely noticed the groups of students playing tag-football, frisbee, or just lazing in the sun. By the time she returned to her lab, the combustion-product spectrograph analysis of the bad gasoline would be complete.