A Good Old-Fashioned Future Read Online Free PDF Page B

from a bottle. Smooth, clear ketchup. Snot.
    “The Ditheree hole’s oozin’ with Urschleim right now!” said Revel, settling a pair of Italian sunglasses onto his freckled nose. He looked no older than twenty-five. “I brought three gallons of it in a tank in my duffel. One of my engineers says it’s a new type of deep-lying oil, and another one says it’s just water infected with bacteria. But I’m with old Herr Doktor Professor von Stoffman. We’ve struck the cell fluid of Mother Earth herself: undifferentiated tissue, Tug, primordial ooze. Gaia goo. Urschleim!”
    “What did you do to make it start oozing?” asked Tug, suppressing a giggle.
    Revel threw back his head and crowed. “Man, if OPEC got wind about our new high-tech extraction techniques.… You don’t think I got enemies, son? Them sheikhs play for keeps.” Revel tapped his knuckles cagily against the car’s closed window. “Hell, even Uncle Sam’d be down on us if he knew that we’ve been twisting genes and seeding those old worn-out oil beds with designer bacteria! They eat through tar and paraffin, change the oil’s viscosity, unblock the pores in the stone, and get it all fizzy with methane.… You wouldn’t think the ol’ Ditheree had it in ’er to blow valves and gush again, but we plumbed her out with a new extra-virulent strain. And what did she gush? Urschleim!”
    Revel peered at Tug over the tops of his designer sunglasses, assuming what he seemed to think was a trustworthy expression. “But that ain’t the half of it, Tug. Wait till I tell you what we did with the stuff once we had it.”
    Tug was impatient. Gusher or not, Revel’s bizarre maunderings were not going to sell any jellyfish. “What did you think of that artificial jellyfish I sent you?”
    Revel frowned. “Well, it looked okay when it showed up. About the size of a deflated football. I dropped it in my swimmin’ pool. It was floatin’ there, kinda rippling and pulsing, for about two days. Didn’t you say that sucker would run for weeks? Forty-eight hours and it was gone! Disintegrated I guess. Chlorine melted the plastic or something.”
    “No way,” protested Tug, intensely. “It must have slipped out a crack in the side of your pool. I built that model to last three weeks for sure! It was my best prototype. It was a chemotactic artificial jellyfish designed to slither into undersea vents and find its way to underground oil beds.”
    “My swimming pool’s not in the best condition,” allowed Revel. “So I guess it’s possible that your jellyfish did squeeze out through a crack. But if this oil-prospecting application of yours is any good, the thing should have come back with some usable geology data. And it never did come back that I noticed. Face it, Tug, the thing melted.”
    Tug wouldn’t give in. “My jellyfish didn’t send back information because I didn’t put a tracer chip in it. If you’re going to be so rude about it, I might as well tell you that I don’t think oil prospecting is a very honorable application. I’d really rather see the California Water Authority using my jellies to trace leaks in irrigation and sewage lines.”
    Revel yawned, sinking deeper into the passenger seat. “That’s real public-spirited of you, Dr. Mesoglea. But California water ain’t worth a dime to me.”
    Tug pressed onward. “Also, I’d like to see my jellyfish used to examine contaminated wells here in Silicon Valley. If you put an artificial jellyfish down a well, and leave it to pulsate down there for a week or two, it could filter up all kinds of trace pollutants! It’d be a great public-relations gambit to push the jelly’s antipollution aspects. Considering your family history, it couldn’t hurt to get the Pullen family in the good graces of the Environmental Protectionpeople. If we angle it right, we could probably even swing a federal development grant!”
    “I dunno, hombre,” Revel grumbled. “Somehow it just don’t seem