Sweet Fortune Page 15

  “I'll give you some quick background first,” Sherry said. “The island was originally owned by a timber baron who made his fortune back in the early nineteen hundreds. He had this beautiful house built as a retreat and as a place to entertain his guests.”

  “How did DEL get the place?” Hatch asked.

  “It was donated to the foundation a few months ago by the last surviving member of the family. Dr. Bright took advantage of the offer to move his headquarters here. The previous owner was a strong supporter of DEL.”

  “Was?” Hatch glanced at her.

  “She was a very old woman,” Sherry said sadly. “She died not long after she had put DEL in her will.”

  “Kind of appropriate, isn't it?” Jessie murmured. “Using a timber baron's old home as the base for an environmentalist operation. Poetic justice.”

  Landis chuckled. “Not quite. But I'll explain that part later. The general routine is to start with a video presentation of the work of DEL.” He opened the front door of the huge house and ushered his visitors into a vast paneled hall. “The show will give you an overview of what we're doing.”

  “No offense,” Hatch muttered as he followed Jessie into a small auditorium, “but I'd have thought a bunch of radical environmentalists would have wanted something a little more environmentally efficient than this old pile of stones. Must cost you a fortune to heat it in the winter.”

  Sherry shook her head sadly as she handed him a plastic cup of coffee. “I'm afraid that, like most people, you don't really understand what DEL is all about yet. But you will soon.”

  Jessie eyed the cup of coffee Sherry was offering. “I'll admit I didn't expect to see anyone up here using plastic cups.”

  Landis nodded, his handsome face turning more serious. “I understand what you must be thinking. Have a seat and let me run the video. That should give you a good idea of what DEL is really doing.”

  Jessie sat down beside Hatch in one of the plush auditorium seats. She glanced around quickly as the lights were dimmed.

  “Know what this reminds me of?” Hatch asked under cover of a rousing musical score that heralded the film.

  “What?”

  “The kind of expensive presentation prospective clients get when they fall into the clutches of some slick real-estate-investment outfit.”

  Jessie scowled in the darkness. “Hush. They'll hear you.”

  Hatch shrugged and sat back as the show began. A deep, concerned, masculine voice filled the room:

  Most of the scientific community is well aware that the environment is on the verge of disaster. It will be a disaster every bit as catastrophic as the nuclear winter that would be caused by a third world war. Each day the radioactive waste piles up in our oceans. Acid rain destroys our agricultural lands. The destruction of rain forests threatens the very air we breathe.

  The ultimate fate of our planet is no longer a matter of debate. All that can be debated now is the timing of that fate and the method of saving ourselves from it.

  “Pretty fancy graphics,” Hatch observed softly as the music swelled again. “Someone hired a first-class ad agency to put this show together.”

  The narrator's voice rose again, this time sounding confident and reassuring:

  One man, an expert in computer programming, climatology, and ecology, has studied the problem more intensely than most. His name is Dr. Edwin Bright. And he is the founder of Dawn's Early Light. Meet the one individual who can make it possible for you and me to survive the disaster that is already on its way.

  The scene on the film was of the cove in front of the DEL mansion. The camera zoomed in to show a man dressed in well-cut blue trousers and a crisp white shirt standing on the dock. He was gazing past the camera, out toward the horizon, as if he could see something extremely important approaching.

  Jessie leaned forward to study the film more closely. Dr. Edwin Bright appeared to be in his late forties and there was no denying the camera loved him. He looked very, very good on film.

  He was a striking individual with rugged features, closely cut brown hair, and vivid blue eyes. A pair of steel-framed aviator-style glasses gave him an air of serious intelligence coupled with a bold, decisive, almost military look. When he finally turned toward the camera, his eyes met the lens unflinchingly, as if he could see past it to the audience. The vivid intensity of his gaze was mesmerizing. Jessie remembered what David had reported about the man being extremely charismatic.

  “Looks like one of those characters on television who will offer to save your soul if you'll just send him the contents of your bank account,” Hatch muttered.

  “Shush. I told you, Rick or Sherry will hear you.”

  Dr. Bright agrees with his fellow scientists on many points. However, he has run his own computer forecasts based on his own calculations. He has simulated climatological events over the next fifty years. There is little doubt that environmental disaster is inevitable. Dr. Bright's estimate of the timing of this disaster differs from many in the scientific community.

  According to Bright's carefully constructed programs and calculations, that disaster will overtake us much sooner than most people predict. It will very likely strike within the next ten to fifteen years.

  Edwin Bright also disagrees with his associates in the scientific community and with the radical environmentalists on the subject of how to survive this disaster.

  Edwin Bright looked straight into the camera and spoke for the first time. His voice was rich, measured and imbued with almost hypnotic intensity:

  It is technology that got us into this environmental mess, Bright said grimly, “and it is technology that will save us. I'm afraid it is far too late to employ conservation measures, in spite of what the liberal extremists tell us. Switching from plastic to paper bags at the supermarket is like trying to plug a leak in a dam with a Band-Aid. In any event, we cannot go back to some primitive time before the invention of electricity or antibiotics. To do so would be to deny the very thing that makes us human, the very thing that can save us, namely our intelligence. Such a retreat into the past is unthinkable. It is, to put it bluntly, too late to return to that world of early death and periodic famine that our ancestors endured. We do not have enough time to reverse our economy or change our life-styles drastically enough to forestall the cataclysm.

  Jessie glanced down at the cup in her hand. “I guess that philosophy explains the plastic. Why bother trying to recycle when the damage has already been done and there's no time left to clean it up anyway?”

  “Convenient sort of theory,” Hatch murmured. “Bound to appeal to a lot of people. Lets 'em have their cake and eat it too.”

  But there is hope, Edwin Bright continued in a strong, reassuring voice. And that hope lies with the work of the Dawn's Early Light Foundation. Here at DEL we are attacking the problem the way real Americans have always attacked their problems: with the power of modern science and technology and with good old American-style know-how. My friends, we are making great progress. With your help, we can continue our important work. But time is short. I urge you to give what you can now, today, to the cause. Without your support, we can do little. With it, we can save the world.

  The narrator took over once more as the camera went high for an aerial shot of the island:

  You may be surprised to know that much of the technology needed to save our world already exists. Part of the work of the DEL Foundation is to correlate data on that existing technology and find ways of employing it effectively. We cannot wait for the world governments to do this. They are too bogged down in red tape and bureaucracy. Only private enterprise has the ability to react to this kind of crisis. Farsighted Americans believe in private enterprise and they support it because they know it works. We hope you will help us.

  Jessie listened to the rest of the filmed lecture and realized ruefully that she wanted to believe that somehow DEL really could save the world with existing technology. It was reassuring and inspiring to think that the tools
were already available and all it took was a master plan to put them into use. She had to remind herself that Dr. Edwin Bright was probably nothing more than a fast-talking salesman.

  The music swelled once more as the film came to a stirring conclusion. The lights brightened slowly in the auditorium as the film came to an end.

  “I imagine you've both got a lot of questions,” Landis said as he got to his feet.

  “Right,” said Hatch. “For starters I'd like to know how the hell this Edwin Bright came up with his time frame for the total destruction of the environment. Ten to fifteen years is a damn short prediction. Everything else I've read says we'll have longer to solve the problem than that.”

  “Good question,” Landis agreed gravely. “Let's go downstairs to the computer room and I'll show you how we do Bright's calculations.”

  Sherry Smith fell in behind Jessie as Landis led the way down a darkly paneled hallway. He paused once to open a door briefly.

  A hum of voices greeted Jessie as she glanced inside what must have originally been the mansion's formal dining room. Banks of telephones and desks were set up in a long row. They were manned by several men and women who all appeared to be in their early twenties. It was not difficult to figure out what was happening. Jessie focused on the voices of the nearest telephone operators while she scanned the room for anyone who looked like Susan Attwood.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Williamson, we've made enormous progress and we're now dealing with a major corporation on a contract to mass-produce the machine. It will go into production next month and will be available to all of the nation's cities and towns within eighteen months. The profit potential on this is enormous. It is an affordable product and will be mass-produced. You will easily triple your investment in the next eighteen months. Can we count on your donation?”

  The operator reminded Jessie of her friend Alison, the stockbroker. She caught Hatch's sardonic eye and realized he was thinking the same thing.

  One of the other operators was selling something else.

  “As I explained,” the vivacious, earnest young woman was saying to the person on the other end of the line, “the Bright Vaporizer totally eliminates all garbage via a chemical process. The end product is pure, clean oxygen. It will eliminate the need for landfills, ocean dumping, and every other kind of garbage facility. All we need is a little more financial help from you. If you can see your way clear to donate a minimum of five thousand dollars, you will be considered a registered investor and thus a potential stockholder. You will share in the profits, which are guaranteed to double every six months for the next five years.”

  Landis quietly closed the door and went on down the hall to a stone staircase. “The original owner of the mansion had a huge basement built down here,” he explained as he started to descend the stairs. “We've turned it into our computer facility. Dr. Bright runs all of his programs on the computers you'll see here. Those programs are being constantly updated with all kinds of information, including the latest climate information and reports of accidental releases of radiation, toxic spills, and such.”

  “The programs are almost unbelievably complex,” Sherry confided. “We chart the amount of rain forest destroyed each day, the quantity of pollutants being released into the atmosphere from all major manufacturing plants around the world, as well as concentrations of natural gases from such things as volcanic eruptions. Then we do our projections, using the past several thousand years of the earth's climate history.”

  “And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as they say.” Landis smiled as he reached the bottom of the staircase and opened a door in the narrow hall. “A whole different kind of research is done to pull together all the information we can get on existing technology, including the work of small private inventors around the nation and material buried in our country's research labs.”

  Jessie heard the unmistakable high-pitched whine of computer machinery. She moved to the doorway and stood looking into the windowless room. Hatch came up behind her and studied the scene over the top of her head.

  “Hell of an operation,” he said, sounding impressed for the first time.

  That was an understatement, Jessie decided. A row of computer terminals occupied one long table. Three intent young people, who all reminded her of Alex Robin, crouched in front of the screens. They were so entranced with what they were doing that they did not even glance toward the door.

  Fax machines, printers, telephones, and computer modems were sprinkled around the room. The gray concrete walls were almost entirely covered in huge world maps. Charts and bound printouts lay everywhere. In addition to the three people at the computer consoles, there were two other people in the room. They were women who appeared to be about the same age as Susan Attwood. But neither of them looked like Jessie's client's daughter.

  “You're welcome to go in and take a closer look,” Sherry said encouragingly.

  Hatch nodded brusquely and moved on into the room, followed closely by Jessie. He came to a halt in front of one of the computer screens and studied the display. It showed several rows of numbers.

  “What are we looking at?” Hatch asked the man hovering over the keyboard.

  “Climate data on northern Europe that goes back two hundred years. I'm using it to run projections for the next fifty years.” The young man did not look up. He pushed a button and the numbers on the screen flickered and altered as if by magic. “You can see the warming trend is accelerating rapidly.”

  Hatch nodded and moved on to the next screen, where the operator explained he was charting seismic activity.

  “Dr. Bright believes there will be some major shifts in the tectonic plates due to the recent increased activity of some volcanoes,” the man said. “Volcanoes affect the climate in some unusual ways.”

  Jessie stared at the screen and recalled something Elizabeth had mentioned recently. “What about the destruction of the rain forests?”

  “A major problem. But Bright has done a lot of thinking in that area and has come up with some interesting solutions. His main work is in climatology. You know, the ozone layer, global warming tendencies, that kind of thing. In fact he phoned an hour ago and said to double-check some recent projections. He's got some new data that say there might be even less time than we think.”

  “I see.” Jessie began to feel genuinely uneasy. It occurred to her that everything about the DEL operation looked extremely credible. “Where is Edwin Bright?”

  “In Texas, I think,” the young man said. “He's talking to a scientist there who's come up with a way to seed clouds with a chemical that can neutralize acid rain. Bright wants to help him rush through a patent.”

  “There is so little time left,” Sherry whispered softly.

  “Yeah.” Hatch tossed his empty coffee cup into the nearest waste can, which was overflowing with discarded computer printouts. “Would someone mind pointing me toward the men's room?”

  “Sure. There's one just down the hall.” Sherry smiled at him. “I'll show you.”

  “Appreciate it.” Hatch ignored Jessie's annoyed glance as he followed the young woman out the door.

  Jessie watched him leave and then turned to Landis with what she hoped was an innocent, curious expression. “I'll have to admit I'm very impressed by all the computers and technology here, but I was under the impression Dr. Bright was more than just a brilliant scientist. The person who gave me the invitation implied he had certain…” She hesitated. “…certain abilities.”

  Landis nodded, his eyes meditative. “You're referring to the rumor that Bright has psychic powers, aren't you?”

  “Is that all it is? A rumor?”

  Landis drew her out of the computer room and shut the door on the high-pitched hum. “I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Dr. Bright is a very brilliant man with an incredible ability to assimilate vast amounts of raw data and come up with forecasts and projections. His brain is virtually a computer. To some people that might make him look like he actual
ly has psychic powers. But he does not encourage anyone to believe that.”

  “I guess I was misinformed.” Jessie remembered that Mrs. Attwood had only assumed Bright was using claims of psychic abilities to influence people such as her daughter.

  “And where do you draw the line between natural human ability and real psychic ability, anyway?” Landis asked in a reasonable tone. “Everyone accepts the idea of intuition, and a lot of people pride themselves on the accuracy of their hunches. But if someone has an extraordinary amount of intuitive ability, as Dr. Bright does, people tend to label it a psychic gift.”

  “Good point. I see what you mean.” Jessie wondered if that was what Mrs. Valentine actually had, a keen intuitive ability and nothing more. “You appear to have quite a large staff.”

  “Only about fifteen people in all. They come to us because they're genuinely concerned with environmental issues and because they believe in our nation's proved ability to find technological solutions to problems. They stay with us because they believe Dr. Bright holds out the best hope for finding answers. We certainly hope you and Mr. Hatchard can see your way clear to assist our work with a donation.”

  Jessie started to respond to that but closed her mouth when she caught sight of Hatch returning from his foray to the men's room. Sherry Smith was walking down the hall beside him, her pretty face more intent than ever as she talked. Hatch was frowning thoughtfully as he listened. Jessie found herself strangely irritated by the air of intimacy surrounding the two. She turned back to Landis and smiled politely as she took refuge in a traditional wifely excuse.

  “About your request for another donation. I always discuss major decisions like that with my husband, Mr. Landis.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Hatchard.” Landis smiled his charming smile and motioned toward the staircase. “Shall we continue our tour?”

  CHAPTER NINE