Los Angeles Read online

  Los Angeles

  A.D. 2017

  Philip Wylie

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE CONSPIRACY

  There were thirty-seven men in the room.

  Their ages differed by a half century. Tall, short, skinny, overweight, blond, dark, bald, they were unlike enough to represent the major possible variations on the male theme. But in two ways, Glenn Howard thought, they were alike.

  All thirty-seven were under tension.

  And all, in as many different ways, shared a look of command, of authority, of that certain quality men have who stand at the top of their field, their business or profession.

  Those notions briefly intrigued Glenn Howard. Power, authority personified Cleaton Conners who had been president of Petro-Chemical-Royal-Europa for—what? Ten years, about. Cleat Connors was big and he was bull-strong, he had a large head and a voice of muted thunder. He looked like a two-billion dollar corporation, the one with the most—also the subtlest—influence in Congress and in other bodies both similar and very dissimilar save where national policy was involved.

  Dr. Augustus J. Vance was the opposite version: a quiet man with brown hair like feathers, a face that was tan but not from the sun, an inherently brown face. A long jaw and a wide, very workable mouth. Hard to hear him speak and what one heard seemed apologetic, till one listened closely. A nervous man, a wriggler, lean, tall and perhaps much stronger than his thin frame suggested. One who rarely made a definite statement but usually prefaced or ended his assertions with a seeming disclaimer:

  “I believe.” “I suspect.” “It is thought.” “In my opinion.” “According to present theory.”

  And yet, after listening to those qualifiers for a time, an astute person would realize that what this scientist “believed” or “suspected” or set forth as somebody’s “thought” was not in any way self-diminishing. On the contrary, the scientist was being precise, acknowledging, merely, that no branch of science has final answers and any current concept may later be changed, modified or even abandoned. This was precision itself and the man who employed it indicated, by that inverse-seeming manner, a simple fact: whatever he discussed was known by him as well as, and often far better than, by any other ecologist. Knowledge was his power-source just as money in vast and used sums was the source of the power in the twenty-six men present who were “industrialists”—“tycoons” to the ordinary man, heads of giant corporations, and, in the main, the biggest of the American giants.

  Nine of the others were scientists, ecologists, biologists and one bio-physicist, Morton, from Cal Tech, Du Pont, and now, Morton Industries, a big and explosively-growing firm near Boston on “Electronics Row.”

  The meeting was secret.

  Even the President (of, merely, United States of America) was believed not to know of this gathering. The President knew … because of Glenn Howard. Glenn had been invited and supplied with his “itinerary” for secret arrival here, on merit, like the others. Howard Communications added up to something less than a billion dollars worth of newspapers, radio and TV stations, trade publications of a singularly informed nature and other odds and ends, among them, a book publishing house. Financially, Glenn’s holdings were below par for the men of industry, here. But they possessed a power that was not shared by corporate holders of mines, mills, banks, or timber and metal resources. Glenn could, if he wished, and occasionally he did, influence the minds and emotions of almost half the people in the nation, directly or by some less personal use of the “media.”

  No other man of industry here, or anywhere, could do that. None but the media tycoons have access to so many and with that, any comparable opportunity to make, change, direct or even erase public opinion.

  It is a modern kind of leverage, one that not many men have ever possessed. Of them, few have used that force as responsibly at Glenn Howard. Yet Glenn was as shrewd as honorable. He did not flaunt his personal integrity when he used the media he owned for some valued end. This, he did seldom. But his occasional support of policies, of candidates, of crusades, always admirable, or so-intended (though results sometimes disappointed his trust) was of a careful sort. Even these, these men of fathomless cunning, had always assumed Glenn and the Howard “empire” were on “their side.”

  That Glenn could not be bought, they knew. But that he stood for capitalism, for the right to make money and even an enormous sum of it, was evident: He’d done it. So it was assumed that Glenn Howard could be trusted absolutely to keep this top-level gathering to himself. It did not occur to his fellow-industrialists that the secrecy of the assemblage and its membership would cause their colleague many nights of sleepless conflict that ended only when Glenn decided that, whatever was intended and whatever the outcome, he had a higher duty. So much American business muscle, and such specialized and superlative brain-power of science, in a covert meeting, meant that at least one other person ought to be told of the plan and then, the result.

  It was too probable that such a group gathered with such incredible efforts to disguise their collective presence, meant something of national moment and even, something dangerous to America. Glenn knew the President well enough to have some minutes with him, alone.

  The President listened, as usual, but with rare evidence of surprise, and then, of worry, and at last, of gratitude. He knew ten or twelve of the men Glenn listed very well and another dozen well enough so that the President, too, inferred quickly that their planned session might be threatening—how, he could not guess—and that it was, to him, a kind of treachery, since it had been kept from him.

  When thirty-seven men, many, personal friends, all, giants of various sorts, assemble while taking care not to leak even a hint to the White House, then, it is time for the man who sits at the bitter desk in the Oval Room to worry.

  “Not a clue about the purpose, Glenn?”

  “None, Mr. President.”

  A long pause. A double twist of the revolving chair. “Thanks, then, for coming to me. Let me hear the story. And don’t, repeat, don’t, feel the way you looked when you came in.” A chuckle. “Like a tattle-tale schoolboy. Maybe—probably, whatever the meeting decides, will be brought to me at once. I am almost sure of it. But suppose it isn’t? Suppose those Big Boys and their blackmailed scientists didn’t report the minutes of the meeting to me? I’d never know. I need to. Think of yourself, Glenn, as—brave—and a very great patriot. It’s hard to carry tales, but sometimes necessary, now.”

  A wiry hand went out. Ten days ago.…

  Now, it was nearing noon.

  The huge room was very cool, air-conditioned not just silently but excessively, to carry away the clouds of cigar and pipe and cigarette smoke. And to fend against the temperature at Boiling Wells in the Mojave Desert which, in the scanty shade was above 100 degrees and in the near-ubiquitous noon sun, incredibly higher.

  At the moment, Dr. Ramus Pearson, the world authority on phytoplankton (taxonomy, distribution, physiology and environmental effects) was endlessly putting forward his knowledge. He did not know how to express it well for laymen. And his audience, saving the other eight scientists, but including the two military men (in mufti) were laymen, here. Most of what he was saying, Glenn already knew. That was why his mind drifted as the monologue—and interrupting demands for simplification—clattered on. Only when a new fact or concept was entered did Glenn pay attention.

  “… to put it in, ah, primitive terms,” Dr. Pearson said, as if translating English for a foreigner, “green plants, vegetation, on land and in the seas, take the carbon dioxide with which we pollute the air—”

  Elias Gant, the aged spiderlike motor maker, cut in. “Just a moment, doctor. You said that all animals take oxygen from the air and return carbon dioxide. People, included. And a
ll combustion does the same. A camp fire. An accidental forest fire. Burning coal or oil or gas for heat, or to raise steam. Now, why do people contend the automobile is the major guilty agent in this air-pollution, this oxygen-use that releases CO2—when nature has done it before man—and man, by breathing, man, as soon as he was man, and all his ancestors, dinosaurs, even, if they are distant relatives? Isn’t the anti-automobile-engine claim somehow a bit exaggerated?”

  Pearson’s “Version” of what Glenn had thought a common quality of these men, was short-fused and temper-driven. His scholar’s face now became taut and his voice reached a level near to shrill. “Mister Gant,” he said, with an emphasis that made “mister” seem a term of derogation, “if you will give me a few minutes more, I can answer you, in a proper frame of reference, and for the fifth time.”

  Gant grinned like a mean monkey and waved a claw. He was too old, too rich and too thick-skinned to be insultable.

  “If,” Pearson then continued, “you now perceive the air we breathe is subject to the process I have stated, that oxygen is ‘burned up’ by fire and by living beings for their energy, and if I have made it somewhat clear that this process would, eventually, turn the atmosphere into a mix of gases in which carbon dioxide had become a major element, you may then see the air has to be regenerated, somehow, to continue to support life. And if you see, as I have tried to make plain, that the green plants of the planet use CO2 and water, or, H20, to get their nourishment, an act that also releases free oxygen, you can reach my next point.”

  He glared in a sort of restrained way at Gant, who sneered.

  “My field,” Pearson went on, “phytoplankta, concerns the green plants in the seas. Algae. What the layman might call scums or slimes—masses of single-celled green organisms. These green-plant organisms in the oceans are responsible for seventy per cent, or around that, of the whole process. To clarify that, let me repeat, green land plants do only 30 per cent, roughly, of atmosphere re-oxygenation. Oceanic plants, though in the main minute, one-celled, even, visible only by microscope, do the larger part. Nearly three-quarters.

  “To go on. Industrial progress had meant a constant escalation of the rate of CO2 added to the air. In USA about 60 per cent of this exponentially rising pollution is done by the automotive vehicle.…”

  Gant cut in again as Glenn had guessed he would. And Glenn had also guessed the man’s question. Carbon dioxide was a natural additive and not, itself, toxic. So why was science in a swivet about this oxygen-plant-car matter?

  Pearson sighed audibly and went at it again.

  If the air kept being a CO2 dump, if green plants, land and sea, couldn’t keep up with the additional carbon dioxide, in time, the planet would get warmer. Sunshine went through CO2 as it does through glass. But the heat that the light generates on the surface does not reflect back through CO2 into space. Heat is a different thing, another wavelength, and carbon dioxide, like glass, lets in the light, retains the light-changed-into-heat—as in greenhouses—so, the world would warm up.

  Half-past noon.

  They’d been over a vast territory of dangers to man’s spaceship Earth.

  The “greenhouse effect” was widely known. If it came, polar ice would melt, and glaciers everywhere and so, all land at some point below a hundred or two hundred feet would drown in the risen seas—very tough for port cities, for mankind, who had concentrated in the menaced areas.

  They’d gone over the oxygen depletion bit. Keep using it faster than green plants replaced it—and smother.

  They had been briefed and brilliantly, by Roy Morrison, the youngest person ever to be given a Nobel Prize, on man’s degradation of his fresh waters by making them sewers and what that meant.

  Collin Strout had done the pesticide story—and Strout was a man with a memory for facts and figures that amazed even the tycoons, who were good at it, too, as well as by his knack for illustrating a given threat to the environment by some dramatic yet comprehensible and believable picture of what that (or this, this, that, the yonder folly) might lead to. Nightmares for the near future.

  Pearson bumbled on. Gant and others put in wedges of question or request for simplification. Only once was Glenn’s mind brought to attention.

  When the man who knew the most about phytoplankton pointed out their delicate natures, their dependency on a special and stable environment, he also stated their environment (the seas) was becoming utterly unstable. Then he explained that man’s wastes usually reached the seas in the end, that few of them were sorts these organisms had encountered in their hundreds of millions of years of existence, that many ocean-received compounds were known to be lethal to all life forms and, finally, shocking Glenn, that, “an estimated” five hundred thousand compounds new to nature are today being dumped in the oceans by USA. “And that frightening figure is rising.”

  Glenn hadn’t known there were so many. He had known all about human dependency for breathable air on those tiny, incredibly abundant green, oceanic “phytoplankton.” And he did realize that the half million waste compounds just mentioned might in general be harmless to mammals, say, or fish or crustaceans, but lethal to single-celled beings.

  Rufus Cooper, their host and the man who’d planned this meeting, looked at his watch. Board Chairman of Cooper Copper. But in that aggregate company, the Board Chairman was boss. Big buy, Glenn reflected: genial, courteous, full of novel ideas, a man who, at sixty, could and would attract almost any female with the masculinity he projected, had, and used. A man with a personality that was self-selling—and eccentricities that were many and odd. This very room, for one thing, Glenn thought, was built for just such meetings as this meeting—even if it was the first of its precise sort, which Glenn believed to be true.

  Cooper’s “ranch” was not, itself, secret, though it was remote. Nothing so extravagant could be hidden. Indeed, some of Rufus Cooper’s parties were famous. Others were not given photo-coverage in the press, or TV time, though they were whispered about. Even Glenn, who’d heard much of the “spread” was amazed on arrival—at this, his first visit.

  It was actually a minor city. In multilevel ranch-type villas, detached and also in groups, two hundred guests could be accommodated in about that many suites and these were more luxurious than any motel could boast or, for that matter, many hotels. The riding ring and giant swimming pool were covered by miniature astrodomes of translucent, greenish plastic, and air-conditioned. Cooper’s own “house” included a ballroom, a theatre and a dining room for two hundred. There was a gymnasium. The meeting room where the thirty-seven men sat was near the house. There was a library. Concrete of some unfamiliar mix connected every facility and whoever wished could have an electric cart—the distances were considerable. Even the pitch-and-putt golf greens were roofed and air-cooled. And to supply the power-needs of this vast establishment there was a distant, inaudible but town-sized generating plant.

  The whole affair was called “the Kettle,” a rather obvious name for the locus, Boiling Wells, but that, too, was like the owner. Cooper Copper was not just a copper mining or copper refining company.

  Glenn wondered what it had cost—many, many millions—and what the maintence bills would be—a million a year? Maids and chauffeurs, armed guards, engineers and technicians, grounds-keepers, pilots for the twin-jet planes and the helicopters parked, now, on Cooper’s airstrip where heat wriggled over long runways that ended in mirages. And yet, and yet, there was a modesty about Cooper. He behaved as if his guests owned the desert fantasy. He was a super-host who took pains to find out all their tastes and crochets, pleasures and antipathies, and he supplied what they enjoyed.

  If you liked your breakfast in bed, you got it there. Chicory in your coffee? You had it. A pretty maid to bring the tray, cornflakes or fruit, juice or pancakes? She appeared. If you preferred red-headed ladies to blondes or brunettes, she had red hair. And if, as was true of more than a few aging males, your sexual capability (and desire) was limited to mornings, or
even to moments after being wakened, your favorite style of female, your maid, would cooperate on signal and with skill as well as every sign of delight.

  No end to the host’s “thoughtfulness”! A legend. With lesser whisperings. Senator Gilvan Kreeshow’s beautiful wife, Doletta, for instance, had made one such—and told on herself. Men aroused her but by men she was never satisfied, her powerful politician-husband, included. Cooper had learned that, even, so when the Kreeshows came to Boiling Wells, Mrs. K. had all the gratification she could bear. The Senator didn’t disapprove.

  Glenn, having arrived in the early morning after flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco and then going, by helicopter, to join “a hunting party in the Sierras”—his cover story—wondered vaguely what special luxuries Cooper would provide for him. Quite a challenge, Glenn thought, with some amusement, since his wants were normal and his only unusual aspect was the fact that, in slightly-past-middle forties, he was a bachelor. When his chopper landed some fifty miles from Boiling Wells, and as he was taken onward in a closed, air-conditioned car, he had cogitated on that, for a time. Why was he a bachelor, still? Because he’d seen the marriages of many friends turn into loveless and even hateful relationships? Because he had seen how often marriage became a trap? Because he was, secretly, afraid of women? Or had never met the ideal woman? None of those.

  Perhaps, the thought had come and gone, along with a wry grin, Cooper would try to guess how to be the perfect host to Glenn—and, say, guess Glenn was a covert homosexual. That would be some error! He did not want or need casual female company, however gorgeous, now. What if one was inserted into his suite? The legends were surely exaggerated. He was on a double mission, like a double agent, in a way—and that was stressful enough. He quit idle speculation and soon reached The Kettle.…

  As Rufus Cooper glanced a second time at his watch, Glenn contemplated these men and the aim of the twenty-five.

  They were not “self-made men” in the old sense. A few had started at a ladder-bottom, missed higher education and made the top—but done that because, in the years between, they’d educated themselves, learning all the manners and the sophisticated ways of the rest. Of the twenty-five, half had graduate degrees of sorts appropriate to business. Cooper, for instance, had two doctorates—in law and in business management. The industrial majority, sitting in zebra-skin-upholstered chairs around this table, behaved in civilized ways. They listened, or seemed to, even when bored. When they did speak, they followed rules, almost parliamentary in form. They did not hesitate to reveal areas of ignorance when such areas existed.