Termination Shock

“Or the alligator that chased the pigs. Or the refugees who chased the alligator. Or the fire ants that burned out the relays in their air conditioners. You can go on spreading the blame as far as you like. But I was flying the plane. The buck stops at the pilot’s chair.”

“Formally, it was your responsibility,” Alastair agreed. “And yet at some level you feel that the universe owes you a free jet airplane.”

“I’d never come out and say it like that. But yes.”

“Do you know how to fly it?”

“Absolutely not! Since the crash the only thing I’ve flown is the Beaver. Clyde would have to loan me Ervin until I could get certified.”

“So they’re throwing in a pilot. Probably just a round-off error at this point.” A thought occurred to Alastair. “Where does one gas it up? Can you buy hydrogen at airports?”

“I have no idea. Maybe the crown prince of Norway would know!”

Prince Bjorn had been edging closer, waiting for an opening. “Your Royal Highness,” he began, “I have been admiring you from the other end of the table all evening. You are magnificent.”

So Bjorn—unlike Alastair, who hadn’t said a word about her hair and gown—knew how it was done. Saskia accepted the compliment with a wink. “It’s amazing, I just sit there checking my Twitter and it’s all handled for me by people who actually know what they’re doing.”

She went on to introduce Alastair as a close adviser. Which was no longer technically the case; but whatever. The point was to signal to Bjorn that he could speak as though among friends, should he so choose. “I heard,” he said, “about your new plane.”

“It’s not mine until I accept the gift,” she cautioned him.

“Well, should you decide you are in an accepting mood,” he said, “on behalf of my father, I am offering you the unlimited use of the royal yacht Bøkesuden.”

“Really?”

“Really. The hydrogen-fueled jet can, of course, take you to many places much more quickly . . .”

Saskia held out one hand, palm down, and bobbled it from side to side. “I can’t leave, though, until a truck full of hydrogen shows up. Could take a while!”

“My point exactly. For some missions, a boat is really what you need.”

Saskia raised her eyebrows. “So it’s missions I’m to be going on now, is it?”

“Perhaps the wrong choice of words. We talked about this before. I am too much the engineer sometimes.”

“You’re forgiven, Bjorn, since you’re trying to give me a yacht.”

“The use of a yacht,” he corrected her.

“What if His Majesty the King of Norway has a mind to go boating? While I’m on his yacht, on a mission?”

“It’s Norway. We’ll make another.”

She went to bed thinking that it was all perfectly ridiculous—just a case of some well-meaning friends with too much money, taking this “Queen of Netherworld” gag too seriously, and acting on impulse. Tomorrow, the second and last day of the conference, she would find a way to take these guys aside one at a time and let them down easy.

Saskia woke up in the opposite frame of mind. Looking down at the snoring Michiel, she realized it was him she was going to have to let down easy. The other guys she had to begin taking seriously.

What had changed was a series of messages and news reports that had come in while she was sleeping. It seemed that a lot was going on in both New Guinea and West Texas. India was making noises about “climate peacekeeping” and denouncing the firing of the gun in Albania yesterday—in a way hinting that it justified their taking unilateral action. China was talking in an equally menacing way about the instability in Papua. Indonesia, they were saying, might claim the western half of New Guinea for their own, but that was really just a holdover from the days of Dutch colonialism—a discredited way of thinking. The United States—which used to intervene in such situations—was a basket case and global laughingstock; the United Nations couldn’t act fast enough; something had to be done to protect the defenseless Papuans and incidentally safeguard the world’s copper supply. Jumping out from all these news feeds were words like “Sneeuwberg” and “RoDuSh”—constant jabbing reminders of the connections back to the Netherlands.

Yesterday, during all the talk about carbon in the atmosphere, Norway had been taking a bullet that might otherwise have been aimed at the Netherlands. Royal Dutch Shell had been one of the world’s great petro-powers and had amassed great wealth during the twentieth century. It was only in the last five decades that Norway had turned into a petro-state and eclipsed the Dutch—who at the same time had been retreating from their colonial empire. The workings of the stock market had spread the ownership of Shell and its profits and its liabilities among shareholders all over the world. Saskia’s country had been happy to quietly park Norwegian crude in vast tank farms at Rotterdam, to refine it, and to pipe it up the Rhine.