Part 15: Re-Fettered

Our ancestors walked from East Africa to Novaya Zemlya and Ayers Rock and Patagonia, hunted elephants with stone spear points, traversed the polar seas in open boats 7,000 years ago, circumnavigated the Earth propelled by nothing but wind, walked the Moon a decade after entering space – and we are daunted by a voyage to Mars?  Carl Sagan

            Dr. Cinza Brown had never seen the Studebaker Institute so busy.  Outsiders were coming and going all day, people he recognized from television.  There were President Hapgood’s cabinet secretaries, his advisors, network media pundits, and CEOs from large corporations in the private sector.  The titans of industry and banking had their snouts feeding at the public trough yet again.

They wanted the SI to help them get government handouts and craft tax loopholes to keep more of their profits given the ongoing severe recession, while at the same time the government was looking to raise taxes to fund the ongoing wars in the Middle East.  Jerusalem had become a hotbed of terrorist activities once again with bombings and shootings it seemed daily.  It was a ticking time bomb. 

The Feds were running out of money as were states, counties, and municipalities throughout America.  The SI’s success and longevity were owed to the fact it could make money in good economic times and in bad, and it seemed the furthest end of the spectrum in both cases produced the most profits.

                Such was the case in today’s Washington.  Every day it seemed Cinza was getting more projects to work on and tons of assignments in addition to his main project responsibility of Operation GERDA – Gold Extraction and Relocation for Defense of America.  New consulting gigs were pouring in from departments and agencies in the nation’s capital because Cinza’s firm was considered the premier go-to think tank to help with government downsizing, which meant laying off thousands of federal workers under a reduction in force campaign.     

                This explained why the United States Geological Survey or the USGS, a bureau under the Department of the Interior, was so reluctant to meet with the good Dr. Brown even though he assured their office of public affairs that his interest had nothing to do with downsizing, but had to do with an important geological assignment he was working on. 

This was the cover story he invented, a client of the SI was a mining company and he needed to talk to the Geological Survey to speak to their experts and gather related technical information to help the client who was working on a Defense Department top secret project.

The project was crucial to national security and had a very short window of completion of only 48 to 60 months.  This time frame mirrored the time frame under GERDA which amounted to a calculated risk under Cinza’s tier one and tier two scenarios to get the project kicked off. 

Even if actual physical gold extraction and relocation took several years, as long it was guaranteed to happen, America could declare it was returning to a gold standard and Cinza was sure the economy would improve within a very short period of time.  At least, that was the theory.  In any case, what choice did America have, something had to be done because the recession was worsening daily?

                To complicate matters, Cinza had not spoken with Chairman Greese in months, and had only spoken with Buddy Peoples a few times because Buddy was busy schmoozing new clients it seemed day and night.  He told Buddy he was having problems getting into see the Geological Survey.    

A disturbing rumor floating around the office was that Greese had lost interest in GERDA because he was making so much money elsewhere – the worse the economy got the more money the Studebaker Institute made – so why bail out the economy with some grandiose project?  Cinza did not believe this rumor, but even if there was some truth to it, he would never give up.  He was a high-scaler.  However 900,000 metric tons of gold was a lot of gold, so he couldn’t blame the chairman if he was having second thoughts.

                On a positive note, the SI had stopped receiving new chapters from the weirdo over at the State Department, Sam Noble, and vigilance over his partner in crime, Archie Jefferson, had turned up no further leads or suspicious activities.  The only one still sniffing around the theft of documents from Cinza’s discredited “Atlantean Geodesy” paper was Mac Kopstein who told Cinza that this stoppage could be a bad omen and harbinger of some sort of looming terrorist strike, the signal of which to be orchestrated by their handler Duke Mitchum. 

Cinza said no, he thought Noble just got tired and ran out of things to write about.  Mac’s response was, “Hey Dr. Brown, did you hear the one about Uranus?  Seems it’s been the butt of a lot of jokes lately.  It’s full of ass-teroids!”  With that he laughed out loud and shuffled away.  Kopstein was such a dick.  About Noble and Jefferson Mac simply said, “Tag ‘em and set ‘em loose into the wild a little while longer.”

By the time Cinza finally got the opportunity to talk to the Geological Survey it was early summer, and happened only after Chairman Greese called in a favor from the Secretary of the Department of the Interior to get him inside.  This act alone perked Cinza up a bit because it showed the Chairman was still interested in GERDA, now all he had to do was deliver the goods.

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Cinza was now forced to turn to his only viable option: looking within the Earth itself to find the incredibly large quantity of raw gold needed to make Operation GERDA a viable project, but in order to make a professional determination he needed access to topnotch information and professional people since time was running out. 

                Because of the Studebaker Institute’s stellar reputation, its high-level government contacts, Dr. Brown’s top-secret clearance, and his federal employee identification badge, he was given a warm greeting by the Director of Protocol at the Department of the Interior who, after finding out the sensitive nature of Cinza’s research, turned him over to the Department’s intelligence office, who then turned him over to an Acting Assistant Director and Division Chief of the U.S. Geological Survey bureau, a mid-level functionary by the name of Dr. Morris Vine. 

                NASA may consider themselves experts of outer space, but Cinza learned very quickly that the domain of the USGS, one of the various bureaus within the 80,000-person Department of the Interior, was the federal source for science about inner space – the Earth, its natural and living resources, natural hazards, and environment.  It was the preeminent map maker for the federal government using the military’s intelligence gathering satellites.

Although its mandate “officially” covered the United States, it had listening posts stretching from both poles around the planet so any seismic activity above or below ground was read by the USGS and its data instantly shared with NSA.  This ultra-secret entity was also jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency.” 

And as Cinza would discover during his weeks of doing research, it became increasingly apparent that he had not been the first person to ask questions about gold within the Earth’s crust.

                In his first series of meetings, there was just he and his handler at USGS, a professional geologist.  Dr. Morris Vine was a tight-assed, green card-holding Brit with thin, David Niven-style mustache, who fell all over himself to provide Cinza with an amazing array of facts.  Like all true experts irrespective of their fields, Dr. Vine was brilliant and could take complex theories and boil them down to easy to understand concepts for the layperson. 

Cinza told Dr. Vine he wanted to know, give or take a few thousand tons, whether or not the Earth still had within its bowels a large amount of gold.  And if so, using the most modern gold-extraction technologies available today, about how long would it take to begin recovering large quantities of the yellow metal. 

Cinza gave Vine the impression that his consulting firm was working on a high-level government project and the Interior Department’s help was needed to complete the project.  Conventional wisdom held that there was approximately 50,000 metric tons still below ground worldwide.  His question to Vine was, “Is it possible there is much more gold than this still below ground?”

                “Dr. Brown,” Morris Vine began, “I will answer your question in due course, but first let’s start with some basics.   The Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a giant molecular cloud of hydrogen, helium, and debris left over from the ‘Big Bang,’ as was the rest of our solar system.  We are part of the Milky Way Galaxy and our Sun is one of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way.  The Milky Way is but one of an almost infinite number of galaxies. 

That the planet Earth survived at all is a major miracle, given the millions of killer asteroids, meteorites, and comets buzzing around space at 70,000 miles an hour.   Earth has been struck thousands of times by space rocks of varying dimensions but none big enough to obliterate it. 

It was our gigantic big brother Jupiter that saved us with thirteen hundred times our volume, who as fate would have it ran interference for us over the millennia and took millions of space-rock hits on our behalf, many larger than Earth itself, before they could destroy our planet.  Am I boring you Dr. Brown?” 

                “Oh no, Dr. Vine, not at all,” Cinza replied.  “Please continue.” 

                “Thank you Dr. Brown.  As you will see as the time we spend together unfolds, understanding these basic principles of our planet will help to answer your questions concerning gold in due time.  But regardless of what I and my colleagues tell you, please keep in mind that very little is still known about the interior of planet Earth.”

“Excuse me but are you saying the Earth’s real enemy has, in reality, been the cosmic rocks bombarding it over millions of years, along with the rest of the planets in our solar system since their creation?” Cinza asked, thinking an innocent question every now and then would be a polite thing.

                “I’m sure you’ll agree with me, Dr. Brown, that nothing’s more frustrating than having an ignorant audience to teach to, so allow me to clarify the accurate nomenclature of loose space rocks within our solar system,” was Vine’s rather curt comeback.  Why, Cinza mused, was it always the genius science geeks who were the most eccentric?

                “By all means, Dr. Vine, please continue.”  Cinza would keep his questions to a minimum in the future.  So Vine began his detailed explanation to Cinza.

#

                Asteroids are a mass of rock and metal held together by gravity, mostly orbiting in the belt between Mars and Jupiter known, logically enough, as the Asteroid Belt and are also present at the outer end of the solar system inside the icy Oort Cloud.  A comet is usually a small ball of dirty ice, frozen gas, and rock particles a mile wide leaving a long tail of gassy vapor behind, and will take years to orbit around a planet. 

The comet’s tail is composed of dust and gas driven off by the Sun’s heat and is blown away by the solar winds.  Bathed in solar ultraviolet light, the gas molecules break down and are excited, producing a characteristic glow of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen combinations in the tail – which can stretch for millions of miles.  

These “dirty snowballs” leave almost no trace when they impact with Earth and melt, far fewer metallic fragments than meteorites.  A meteor is a small asteroid burning up upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, and if it is not vaporized by heat and friction upon entering, the surviving chunk of rock and/or metal is called a meteorite. 

The problem is the asteroids which are larger in number and can produce the most damage, when for some reason they break off their orbit in the Asteroid Belt and crash into Earth producing unimaginable calamity.  The explosive power of an asteroid impacting with Earth is astounding.   

                The world’s total nuclear arsenal currently consists of about 20,000 weapons with the bulk in the hands of the United States and Russia.  But the former Soviet states and satellites, who developed small suitcase size atomic bombs that are hard to find, are also believed to have hidden stockpiles, as are the better known arsenals in the possession of China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, and Israel. 

It is generally accepted by the intelligence community that rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran are very close, or have indeed developed at least one or two crude nuclear weapons of the Hiroshima kilo-tonnage yield.  The total yield of the world’s nuclear arsenal is estimated to be 10,000 megatons which is equivalent to the explosive power of 10 billion tons of TNT. 

                The lone dinosaur killer-asteroid was ten thousand times more powerful than the world’s entire existing arsenal of nuclear weapons – it had the mass of a fireball the size of Mount Everest traveling 25,000 miles an hour, yet was only seven miles across when it struck Earth 65 million years ago. 

                “I hope I’m not boring you too much with all this non-gold explanation, Dr. Brown, but I can assure you there’s method to my madness so bear with me,” Dr. Vine, interrupting his monologue, shot in Cinza’s direction. 

                “Not at all, Dr. Vine, I find this all very fascinating,” Cinza replied, which wasn’t a complete lie, despite the furtive glance at his watch that he hoped Vine had missed.  He continued.

Everything was vaporized by the explosion, and a torrid, ballistic pyroclastic cloud filled with white-hot debris spread across the globe in a shock wave traveling at more than 13,000 miles an hour. 

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Three-mile-high ocean tsunamis were produced, rolling one right after the other, traveling at the speed of sound.  Before a fraction of a second had passed, the expanding crater, which scientists call today the Chicxulub Impact Crater, was 300 miles across and ten miles deep, growing even larger and deeper with each passing second. 

                The crater eventually reached a diameter of over 700 miles and penetrated to a depth of about twenty-five miles within a minute of impact.  Forest fires were touched off around the planet, continuing for months, filling the air with smoke and gas, and blotting out the Sun for a year – and any rain that fell was acid rain. The hot, vaporized material of dust and rock blasted its way into the atmosphere to an altitude of thirty miles, and almost 60-percent of all life on Earth, including dinosaurs, was no more. 

Whether the energy is in chemical form like TNT, or atomic form like nuclear weapons, it’s the rapid conversion of this energy, in the case of Chicxulub kinetic energy, into heat that is at the heart of any massive explosion.

                “Now Dr. Brown, imagine all this explosive force reigning down on Earth, concentrated in an area the size of the asteroid upon impact on the ocean floor, say a diameter of seven miles, with explosive power incomprehensible to humans.  Yet it barely penetrated the Earth’s crust into the upper portion of the mantle, the lithosphere.   

Our direct knowledge of the Earth’s interior is minuscule – we know more about getting to the Moon and its make-up than our own planet.  The deepest we’ve ever been able to drill into solid ground is seven miles down and this was with only a two-inch drill bit. Hell, the Marianas Trench is seven miles deep, but the immense pressure makes exploration at that depth almost impossible.  The pressure at that depth is almost 20,000 pounds per square inch compared to only fifteen at the ocean’s surface.”  The good Dr. Vine went on to explain other related phenomena. 

                On land, it gets harder and harder to drill deep into the Earth because rocks get softer and softer.  Brittle at the surface, rocks become plastic at depth and the pressure caused by the weight of the overlying crust – about 52,800 pounds per square inch at a depth of ten miles – collapses deep wells, making further drilling impossible.  But between us and the planets there’s only air, with an environment of no gravity, so space exploration doesn’t have this problem. 

The Geological Survey has amassed an enormous amount of information over the decades about the Earth’s surface, and as far as we can determine, it’s interior.  Its data on Earth’s history shows that there were over 22,000 asteroid strikes on the planet with impact craters at least twenty miles in diameter that we know about, and many more we still don’t know about or never will.  As far as the more numerous smaller meteor and comet strikes, we have no idea the number.

                Dr. Vine spent days and days taking Cinza around the various USGS offices involved in data gathering, punctuated by Cinza’s absences due to fighting fires back at the Studebaker Institute, and finally finished up with the Minerals Management Service division who made quite a presentation, along with representatives from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.  Cinza learned more than he needed to know in subsequent weeks on mineral contents of meteorites and rocks created by space-object collisions with Earth. 

He learned about granite, basalt, and obsidian; coal, marble, and slate; and he learned about the Bowen’s reaction series which produces feldspar and ultimately quartz crystals – the host very frequently of gold flecks and veins lying just beneath the Earth’s surface as rare placer gold.  The discussions regarding the mineral composition of meteorites and impact rocks he did find very interesting. 

Dr. Vine offered to organize field trips to gold mining operations around the country, involving open-pit strip mining above ground and deep-shaft mining below ground.  But once again Cinza was called back to the Studebaker Institute to work on several new projects and had to interrupt his meetings at the USGS.  This delayed finalizing GERDA yet again and it was now late summer by the time Cinza resumed his meeting with Dr. Vine and his team.

                 

#

“Dr. Brown, it’s good to see you again.  Please allow me to make introductions of my staff,” Vine said as the two men entered the conference room.  There, Cinza was introduced to one Ph.D. after another, experts all in geology, geophysics, astronomy, mining, astrophysics, and metallurgy.  These were engineers and scientists with doctoral degrees and had the names Prendergast, Crampton, Berigarg, Owens, Kielgass, and Lemkau, who collectively had over two hundred years experience working for the federal government in their respective fields of expertise. 

The team’s spokesman was Prendergast, who appeared, at least in his behavior and demeanor, to be the most senior spokesman of the group after Vine.  From time to time, other team members would chime in with the exception of a Dr. Lemkau, a rather corpulent, older, pink-skinned, and disheveled man who by the looks of him did not pay much attention to his personal appearance or hygiene, and sat quietly in the corner looking generally rather sullen and disdainful of the goings-on.

                After the precursory pleasantries and the obligatory chitchatting, the group got down to business.  “Dr. Brown, Dr. Vine tells me you want to learn everything there is to know about gold in the Earth, so let’s begin at the beginning.  Gold is formed as the result of molten rock, called magma, being intruded into solid rock.”  Accompanying Prendergast’s narrative were pictures and bullet points from an on-screen PowerPoint presentation. 

He continued, “As the magma cools and solidifies, water and other volatile substances separate out from the magma under high pressure.  The high pressure of hot water and steam, force open fissures in the surrounding solid rock through which these hydrothermal solutions travel.  When the hydrothermal solutions cool, deposition of material occurs, especially quartz in the form of quartz veins.”

                “Now we’re finally getting somewhere,” Cinza thought to himself, and sat riveted to every word Prendergast uttered. 

                Dr. Prendergast continued his presentation, saying next, “Because gold has a relatively low melting temperature, it’s sometimes carried by these hydrothermal solutions through the fissures in the rock and solidifies inside the quartz veins.  Thus, the place to look for gold is usually in quartz veins near the intrusion of a magma body. 

One good example was the so-called Mother Lode of the Sierra Nevada in California.  If these quartz veins are eroded, the gold may be found in streams and rivers, which explains why the forty-niners were able to pan for gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills.”

                As the hours unfolded, Cinza began getting a much clearer picture of the yellow metal’s whereabouts from the presentation and discussions with the scientists present.  Because gold was a very stable metal over a very wide range of conditions, it is widespread in the Earth’s crust, with overall concentrations worldwide of about five milligrams per metric ton of ore rock. 

This meant that strip mining, the quickest way to get at gold ore, was cost-ineffective unless much higher concentrations were found, at least a hundred milligrams based on the prevailing worth of a troy ounce of gold.  Certain geological environments favor gold formation, most certainly the proximity of quartz veins, and there’s a popular misconception that natural gold has cooled from a molten state. 

In fact, as Dr. Prendergast explained, gold is transported already in a natural state through the Earth’s crust dissolved in hot salty water.  The fluids are generated in huge volumes deep in the Earth’s crust, as water-bearing minerals dehydrate during metamorphism. 

Gold and other elements such as silicon, iron, and sulfur migrate to wherever fractures in the rocks allow the fluids to pass, usually in an upward direction – to cooler regions at lower pressure.  As the gold becomes insoluble and begins to crystallize, it is most often enveloped by masses of white silicon dioxide – quartz.

                Veins and reefs of gold-bearing quartz can occur in many types of rock such as granites, volcanic pumice, and black slate; but in most cases these host rocks are not the immediate source of gold.  Gold deposits can be dated to a “formation period” of between 3 billion and 400 million years ago during a period of intense metamorphism and intrusion of igneous rocks as Earth adjusted itself. 

As chemical weathering and erosion gradually broke down the host rocks and lowered the land surface of the planet, the quartz and gold veins were eventually exposed to the atmosphere.  Since gold is more resilient than rock to chemical attack, a mechanical weathering attack is necessary to fragment the quartz and release the gold. 

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Because gold particles are so heavy, particles of gold are more difficult to transport by water so become naturally concentrated in soil or in adjacent gullies or stream beds.  These concentrations are known as alluvial or placer deposits – and provided the type of gold responsible for the large gold strikes discovered in California, Nome, the Klondike, and central Victoria, Australia.

                Alluvial deposits take many forms, including sands and gravels in the beds of modern-day streams, in old river valleys buried under lava flows, or perched on hilltops due to uplift of the land surface.  But in all history, placer gold discoveries only account for about one-percent of all gold above ground, everything else was mined either by deep-shaft or open-pit strip mining.

                As the crowd broke for lunch, Dr. Vine promised that the afternoon session would prove quite interesting and a lot less “brainiac,” and following the last speaker there would be a question-answer exchange wherein Cinza could home in on the specific information he needed for completion of his classified government project. 

During lunch, there was much heated yet friendly debate, the technical topics of which were pretty much over Cinza’s head.  Sitting by himself at the end of the table was the sullen Dr. Lemkau, looking down at his gargantuan plate of food, eating voraciously, and saying nothing.

                “Dr. Brown, now that you’ve had lunch at our primo-cafeteria courtesy of U.S. taxpayers let’s begin the afternoon session on matters related to how we look for gold,” and so Dr. Prendergast introduced his colleagues Doctors Kielgass and Crampton to continue with the presentation.  They explained that essentially, the USGS liaises with other federal agencies and departments, particularly Defense, to do computer-based virtual-gold-prospecting on an ongoing basis .

            The bureau has also cooperated in the past with many academic institutions, professional associations, and the private sector; and provides archaeological domestic and foreign-dig grants to various colleges and institutions around the country, giving the agency the grunts-on-the-ground human assets – geologists refer to these scientists as “diggers” – it needs, as a rule, to study remote places where satellite coverage alone is insufficient. 

                Diggers are especially important in understanding what’s under the immensely thick ice covering over the Antarctic, and inside the wide and deep quartz crystal deposits covered by thick vegetation such as those found in western and north-central Brazil, both regions making satellite and high-tech surveillance surveying nearly impossible because of material density and electromagnetic jamming from the crystals.  The USGS also partners with foreign governments who have research facilities at the two poles, and who share the agency’s interest in research and exploration. 

                The Geological Survey also has access to land-based remote sensing, high altitude sensors carried on satellite and manned spacecraft like NASA’s Shuttle Orbiter, and Synthetic Aperture Radar or SAR specially designed for high-altitude geological survey work. 

SAR operates by beaming a signal to Earth and measuring the quality and nature of the signal reflected back to the satellite, with data studied by geologists and experts back at the USGS.  Natural materials such as water, ice, soil, sand, stone, metals, and vegetation absorb different wavelengths of energy and therefore emit or reflect the energy in different ways. 

Once basic norms are established as a knowledge base and this data is fed into high-speed computers, it becomes simple to measure properties found by the SAR.  The International Space Station’s Earth Observation System beams back to Earth vast information on geologic faults and possible locations of mineral-rich deposits, when functioning properly. 

When data transmitted from the satellites is received and processed back on Earth, it’s interpreted by special computer-graphics software to produce three-dimensional images of sub-surface structures, crude oil reserves, or possible gold deposits down to several hundred feet. 

If something looks promising, magnetometers are brought in for further detection studies, which provide a form of remote-sensing that works on the principle that the Earth’s magnetic field is a known constant while other objects, such as gold-rich quartz, generate anomalous tell-tale magnetic fields of their own.

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                Now Dr. Vine stepped forward, after thanking his colleagues, to perform what Cinza was sure to be a wrap-up and finally answer his basic question – how much gold still lies buried beneath the Earth and how quickly can we get to it?

                “Well Dr. Brown, I certainly hope these past few weeks have been an interesting experience for you and that you’ve gained a lot more knowledge about the work done by our wonderful organization,” Vine began.  “In consultation with my colleagues from the Minerals Management Service division, it is our collective opinion,” Vine said as he paused for dramatic effect, “that there was at a minimum 50,000 metric tons of gold still left buried inside the Earth’s crust, and quite possibly fifteen to twenty times that tonnage figure!”

                Cinza could barely believe his ears and his heart began thumping so loudly he was sure everyone in the room could hear it.  “Could these zany bureaucrats have provided him with the answers he needed to complete Operation GERDA and allow him to move on with packaging it for the Studebaker Institute board and government of the United States?” he thought.  Timing couldn’t be better since it was the eleventh hour, and visions of fame and fortune now danced in his head. 

                In what seemed like forever, but probably followed a fraction of a second later, Vine then qualified the gold quantity remark by adding, “And you can tell your Defense Department client, whoever that may be, to be rest assured that enough gold will be mined and processed this century to fulfill the needs of the United States and its allies!” 

                As Vine beamed and all but one of his colleagues looked on with immense pride and accomplishment from a collective sense of a job well done, Cinza grew lightheaded and with feeble voice asked Vine, “Excuse me, but did you say gold mined and processed this century?”

                “Why yes, Dr. Brown, if you think about it, this is quite remarkable.  We’re saying that using the most modern technology, America can work with friendly governments, most notably South Africa and Russia where vast quantities of gold reside deep below ground, and using a 50,000 metric ton figure base figure, to extract almost half as much gold as has been extracted since man first began mining it.” 

                Cinza now realized what had happened.  These guys at USGS were somehow under the impression that SI’s interest had been to confirm the existence of ample gold stock for the long-term, and not the emergency requirement for large quantities of gold to be extracted in the short-term to bail the country out of its current economic mess.  He had not been clear on his 48 to 60 month imperative.

Because he had not conveyed a sense of urgency, the USGS team had assumed the opposite – that the key issue was quantity of gold and not speed of recovery.  So Cinza tried to recover by shooting back at Vine the question, “Understood sir, but suppose the U.S. needed to get its hands on many, many tons of gold within 48 to 60 months, let’s say 900,000 metric tons, what are those chances, best case scenario?”

                Except for one other man in the room, everyone else broke out into almost hysterical laughter, thinking Cinza had made some lame-assed humorous comment.  “My dear sir,” Vine remarked, “what you’re asking is a geologic impossibility. 

First of all, within the borders of the United States are perhaps only as much as ten-percent of the world’s total gold stock still below ground, and just working our own stocks – what with EPA red tape and those rather pesky privately-organized environmental groups blocking you every step of the way – just the delay in obtaining deep-mining approval certification to dig on federal lands, notably in Alaska, would take that long, if you’re lucky. 

Excluding the United States altogether, how would we as a country get foreign sovereign nations to allow us to deep-mine or strip-mine gold in their countries – including third-world countries – without paying millions in foreign aid, bribes, and kickbacks?  Why would they give us their gold? 

The reaction by central bankers of the world’s monetary system to us hoarding gold, the United Nations reaction to America’s new yellow metal imperialism, the political fallout, the potential for large-scale potassium cyanide and mercury poisoning, legal implications, and I could go on and on – are insurmountable obstacles.

 Negotiations with all involved parties here and abroad might drag on for ten years and still not provide any measurable increase in the U.S. gold supply.  What you’re asking, begging your pardon and with all due respect sir, is slightly absurd.”

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                Sensing now that Cinza was crestfallen upon hearing the bluntness of Vine’s sharp tone, the crowd once again became more subdued, and after a long, awkward pause, Vine said, “I take it our news did not produce the desired effect we had hoped it would.  Unfortunately, Dr. Brown, there is no way on Earth the U.S. can get its hands on the quantity of the gold you’re talking about within the incredibly short window you need it to, and please excuse me if my words seemed a bit harsh.”

                At that exact moment, the first few notes from the classic rock song In-A-Godda-Da-Vida could be heard wafting through the room, adding to what Cinza sensed was an increasingly surreal scene, and interrupted his reverie of misery.  Never before in his life had he felt so beaten down, and a remark Buddy Peoples jokingly made right after the Sam Noble and Archie Jefferson affair came to light, now replayed in his head, “Dr. Brown, that loud flushing sound you hear is your career going down the toilet.” 

The music had emanated from the far end of the conference table, and Dr. Benjamin “Pig” Lemkau took his own sweet time in shutting off his cellular phone, which was the source of the racket.  Glares from his colleagues produced no embarrassment whatsoever but instead, only seemed to embolden his revulsion of the total proceedings, signaled overtly for the first time by a loud sarcastic chuckle.

                Dr. Vine felt compelled to challenge the usurper and asked, “Dr. Lemkau, if there’s anything you wish to add to this meeting please speak up – I’m sure we’d all like to hear from you given your lack of participation thus far.” 

                It didn’t take long for Lemkau to come back with a witty retort, which he succinctly packaged into just one neat little word – “Horseshit,” he said. 

                A startled Vine asked, “I beg your pardon sir?”

                “You heard me, horseshit!  You guys don’t know anymore about how much gold there is inside the Earth than does the man in the Moon.  The only way to really know would be to blast deep below ground, I mean really deep inside the Earth’s crust to take core samples, and no one has the balls to do that even though we have the technology for it. 

For all we know there may be only 10,000 metric tons or as much as 10 million metric tons of gold still out there, buried deep somewhere, but you guys still cling to your ancient fucking theories and politically correct horseshit.”  It was obvious Lemkau had been bottling up his frustration for some time and his spoken words now gushed forward.

                Dr. Vine shot back, “Dr. Lemkau, I’m sure at this juncture that Dr. Brown has heard all he needs to know and there’s nothing to be gained from pursuing a line of idle speculation about an infinite set of permutations and combinations.  The entire scientific community, in the majority, agrees with everything we’ve outlined for Dr. Brown so let’s not waste his time with far out theories.  And let’s watch the profanity please.”

                “Most of the scientific community are a bunch of retards and fucking idiots, Vine, and you know who I’m talking about,” Lemkau retorted. 

                Turning beet red, Vine answered with pressed lips and crisp British accent, “I refuse to take the low road and mud wrestle with you – your reputation precedes you sir and I think you know what I’m talking about!” 

                It was Lemkau’s three hundred pounds of hulk versus Vine’s one-fifty and to save the Brit’s life, Dr. Cinza Brown spoke up, “Actually Dr. Vine, if you don’t mind, I’d like to hear what Dr. Lemkau has to say – after all, what do I have to lose at this point?”

                “Very well Dr. Brown,” Vine said, “I respect your professional opinion, but may I suggest we take a fifteen-minute break before giving our esteemed colleague the floor?  This will allow us all to cool down a bit.”  As those present rose to refill coffee mugs or head for the restroom, including the suddenly frisky Lemkau, Vine gave Brown a head-nod indicating he wished to speak one-on-one in private.  Dr. Vine then gave Brown the lowdown on Pig Lemkau.

#

                Seems Lemkau graduated from the California Institute of Technology and joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at twenty-four.  With brand new Ph.D. diploma in hand, he was assigned to work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team in Pasadena. 

Like many young and brilliant aeronautical engineers working at NASA from Caltech, he was an enfant terrible, but soon found that there were many other boy-geniuses also working at NASA that were just as smart and were better politicians.  He was assigned to work on the Apollo 17 project that went to the Moon only a few months after he started his professional career, in December 1972.  By then, NASA had only been around for fourteen years and a young Ben had followed America’s space program since its early days as a child in Spokane.

Over half a million people from NASA and 20,000 companies built the spacecrafts for America – the mammoth Saturn V carrier rockets, landing modules, and launch facilities, employing the same Yankee ingenuity and work ethic that built the country’s other marvels like the Hoover Dam, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System, and the Panama Canal.

                A total of twelve men in the history of the world have walked on the Moon, all Americans, beginning with the Apollo 11 Moon Landing in 1969 and Neil Armstrong.  Apollo 17 in 1972 was the final mission and the Chicagoan Eugene Cernan was the last human to leave footprints on the surface of the Moon. President Nixon, facing his own set of problems with Watergate, Vietnam, and huge federal budget deficits, decided to cancel the Apollo program and expressing the sentiment of many of the old hands still left at NASA, according to Lemkau, “Our space program has been in the shitter ever since.” 

But unlike most of his colleagues, Pig could not contain his cynicism but rather became a vociferous critic, both in spoken and written forms, regarding the decay in America’s space program and the incompetence coming from NASA’s leadership who after Apollo “had lost their way.”  As the years passed and as he thought things got even worse, he urged anyone who would listen to take action.

                While with NASA, Pig criticized the Skylab Space Station, which used surplus Apollo hardware and cost taxpayers billions of dollars, achieving nothing.  He called the Space Shuttle program a genuine taxpayer-funded boondoggle and predicted, accurately as it turned out, that repeated use of spacecraft would cause wear and tear on skin and components leading to catastrophic failure while in flight. 

 Disciplinary actions and continued warnings from supervisors did not quiet Lemkau’s criticisms and as the years passed, he received mediocre performance reviews and no promotions, embittering him even further – but criticism of the Space Exploration Initiative in 1991 under President Bush was the last straw. 

                Lemkau was unceremoniously “detailed” to the Interior Department’s Geological Survey bureau to serve out the remainder of his federal employee career, today still stuck at the GS-12 rank after thirty-seven years of government service, and branded a crank and pariah by colleagues.  In government parlance “detailed” meant banishment to some other position outside your mother agency because the employee was somewhat of a problem child and loser. 

This way the employee got to keep his or her job and retirement pension and the mother agency could wash their hands of them, all legal like – to be dismissed from federal government service due to incompetence takes an act of God, pedophilia, or murder to get oneself fired.  The receiving agency knows they’re getting inferior stock but they have a chit they can cash in later when they need a reciprocating favor, so they play the shell game of “hide the whacko.” 

However, a fine line needed to be walked here – there could be no overt discrimination or acknowledgement by management as to the employee’s shortcomings lest an affirmative action, civil rights, age or gender discrimination, or equal employment opportunity lawsuit arise.  For that reason, Dr. Vine had allowed Pig to participate in meetings such as the one with Dr. Brown of the Studebaker Institute, which seemed to be harmless enough since it appeared to be a public relations stunt helping a well-connected private sector think tank and nothing more.

#

As far as Pig was concerned, there should be but only one objective of the U.S. space program, and that was to make it pay for itself, and to do that American taxpayers needed a return on investment in the commercialization of outer space.  Any profit motive meant having to go to Mars as soon as possible.  But instead of a commitment to go to the Red Planet, the American public just got reheated pabulum of the same old bullshit, and it was science for science’s sake and government for government’s sake – we had lost our way after Apollo and now we had no rational space program.

                Even after being detailed to the USGS, Pig kept up his criticism and defended himself against admonishments from NASA’s hierarchy for his eccentric opinions – his career died from a thousand self-inflicted cuts.  The last thing NASA wanted to see was private industry intrude on its turf, because that could mean its own demise – if there’s one immutable fact in Washington, it’s that federal agencies have at the top of their list the objective of perpetuating the species, meaning spend, do, or say whatever it takes to guarantee its place in the bureaucratic pecking order and long-term survival. 

                Dr. Brown got the picture from Dr. Vine’s background briefing on Pig – he had dealt with many a disgruntled ex-federal employees, mostly higher-ups, while working at the Studebaker Institute and knew how cynical and bitter they could become after working only a few years in Washington, let alone the many years Dr. Lemkau had been trodden down by the system. 

Not that a few employees didn’t deserve the nut-job treatment, some were pretty weird in fact, but overall, the men and women in the trenches had much more to offer than the system permitted and just got frustrated, then bored, and ultimately resigned to just wait out their years until retirement and pensions kicked in.  Lemkau might be a slob, and speak in a coarse manner, but let him have his day in the Sun.  Cinza was right after all, what had he to lose?

                “Dr. Vine, if it’s all the same to you, I would like to hear from Dr. Lemkau on what he has to say about harvesting gold,” Cinza said to Vine in hushed tone as the group began filing back into the conference room.  Slightly chagrined by this show of support for Pig, Vine replied rather curtly, “Well, fine.”

                Pig was the last one to re-enter the conference room and before he had a chance to take his seat, Vine spurted out, “Oh Dr. Lemkau, would you mind very much taking over the briefing for Dr. Brown and espouse your opinions in greater detail.  I’m sure everyone here would once again like to hear your unusual theories.” 

                Vine’s sarcasm and the condescending looks by his colleagues did not go unnoticed by Pig, but did not deter him.  He had developed a thick skin long ago and simply replied, “Thanks Dr. Vine.”

                “Let me start, Dr. Brown, by saying that the presentations thus far, despite my colleague’s petulance, are not necessarily wrong.  In my opinion, the problem is that the conventional theories regarding the creation of gold inside the Earth, and geological forces which percolate it to the surface, exclude the most obvious consideration – that at least some of the gold inside the Earth’s crust was actually seeded there by thousands of asteroid or meteor strikes over the eons, and that gold exists in great quantity elsewhere in the solar system and galaxy,” and with these remarks by Pig, a simultaneous groan of frustration arose from all those present except Cinza. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you geniuses have all heard this before but tough shit, you’re about to hear it again,” Pig shot back.

                “Morris, may I assume you briefed Dr. Brown on the Asteroid Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the geological history of Earth?” Pig said addressing Dr. Vine directly.  He knew the good doctor disliked the use of his first name in formal settings, preferring to hear acknowledgement of his having a Ph.D. as much as possible, but he liked to piss off his pompous colleague. 

                “Indubitably.  Dr. Brown has been sufficiently briefed on areas I felt important, and to the extent I thought reasonably necessary.  We talked about the Asteroid Belt and other subjects related to Earth’s geology, but I really think that the Oort Cloud is irrelevant to the discussion of gold,” Vine retorted.

#

                “Well then gents, it would appear that we’re in for a rather long session this afternoon so get comfortable,” Pig said as others tried to stifle yet another collective outburst of groans. 

                Personal animosities Pig had with the federal establishment aside, Cinza instinctively knew he had to hear out Lemkau, rebel that he was; perhaps Cinza’s approach in trying to find a tier-two solution to finalize Operation GERDA had all along been too restrictive, too narrow minded of a thought process.  Gold mined outside and beyond planet Earth?  Why not? 

This alternative had never even dawned on him as a possible solution.  But would it be technologically and scientifically feasible in the very short-run?  Talk about a paradigm shift!  This wasn’t just some conspiracy theory nut you ran across everyday on the Internet – Pig was an almost forty-year veteran of the federal government, working half his career at NASA and the other half at the USGS – with his experience and academic credentials, surely his ideas, although slightly loony, could be capitalized on if push came to shove.

                “Dr. Lemkau, I can’t speak for the others assembled around the table, but I can tell you that I and the Studebaker Institute would very much like to hear what you have to say.”  Cinza’s rather stern comment had a twofold impact – first, it squelched any further annoying group groans coming forward, and secondly, it seemed to inject adrenaline directly into Pig’s blood stream because his face lit up like a Christmas tree and he began speaking a mile a minute.  “Amazing what a few words of encouragement can do for a kicked down old dog,” Cinza thought.  And so, the golden chapter of Dr. Brown’s quest unfolded before him.

                “With all due respect to my colleagues at this bureau, there have been hundreds and hundreds of papers written about where gold comes from over many decades, yet no consensus has ever been reached by geologists and scientists as to its origin – despite the enormous geopolitical and religious significance this metal has played in shaping world history,” said Pig Lemkau as he began his discourse. 

He dismissed the establishment’s theory that the way gold reached the Earth’s surface was via hydrothermal fluids, which are similar to hot springs in the upper continental crust.  Pig’s own analysis showed that gold eroded out of mountains and was transported by streams into younger basins, and then explaining why gold three billion years old was found in rock much younger, he had a startling explanation. 

He was of the opinion that three billion years ago, about the time massive bombardments of asteroids seemingly stopped falling on the young planet, that another very large bombardment of meteors occurred, somehow getting by Jupiter’s protective shield. 

Asteroids and meteors that managed to get through the Earth’s atmosphere without burning up contained composites of rock, iron, and other metal such as gold, and the nuclear-force blasts of their impacts forced the metal deep into the Earth’s softer, younger crust.  The space rocks of precious metal fell during centuries of bombardments and coated Earth with a veneer rich in gold that has been mined ever since.

                Pig supported his theory by saying there was a problem with the amount of gold in the Earth’s crust.  Running mathematical and scientific calculations for the formation of the planet 4.6 billion years ago from the cloud of cosmic material still present in our solar system, gold present during Earth’s formation should have gone, along with the heavier iron, to the core.  The fact that not much gold, compared to other metals, has been mined from the Earth’s crust is explained by the geological sequence of the planet’s formation. 

#

After the Earth had differentiated into distinct core, mantle, and crust, there had to have been a large bombardment of space objects containing gold that enriched the crust.  Gold seeded into the Earth’s crust from these objects must have originated from cosmic material called solar nebulae which created not only Earth, but our entire solar system at about the same time – 4.6 billion years ago, meaning for Pig that our planet is but one source of gold in the solar system.

                Dr. Lemkau determined the age of Earth’s gold by studying microscopic traces of two very rare metallic chemical elements found in gold atoms called rhenium and osmium, which have radioactive signatures called rhenium-187 and osmium-187, the latter being the decayed form of the former.  Rhenium in its pure state is a very rare, heavy metallic element resembling manganese, and osmium is a metallic element of the platinum group – and is the heaviest metal known.  Minute traces are found in gold. 

He once used a device called the Negative Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer to date gold samples from South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin, a land area about the size of South Carolina, a gold field that has been the source of 40-percent of all gold mined so far in human history and still contains about 35-percent of the planet’s gold deposits below ground.  Strangely, rhenium-187 has a half-life of 45 billion years, or about ten times the age of our solar system, and by determining the ratio of radioactive rhenium atoms to its cousin osmium, scientists can calculate when gold and surrounding minerals were formed. 

Pig concluded that South Africa’s gold deposits originated from a bombardment of gold-laden meteors about three billion years ago that penetrated the Earth’s crust, lodging in molten material which then hardened into rock and quartz over many millennia.

                “Excuse me Dr. Lemkau, if I may interrupt for a moment,” Dr. Berigarg, a mild-mannered naturalized American citizen from India, injected suddenly, “but I see an obvious conflict here.  The universe is estimated to be approximately 13 billion years old according to the ‘Big Bang’ theory.  How, then, can an element of the universe such as rhenium have a half-life of 45 billion years?”

                Pig replied in uncharacteristically polite fashion, “That’s actually a very good point doctor, but I can tell you that the Age Paradox of the universe is something expert physicists and scientists have been grappling with for years.”  Lemkau went on to explain the paradox in more detail. 

When the Hubble Space Telescope was first deployed in outer space, scientists were able to see deep into the universe for the first time and observed individual Cepheid Variable stars in the M-100 spiral galaxy estimated to be a distance of 51 million light years from Earth.  This was a startling discovery because the previous estimate had been over 60 million light years, which taken together with star distance in other galaxies lead to the 13 billion year estimate as to the age of the universe.

 But the closeness of the Cepheid stars meant to some scientists that the universe’s age had to be revised downward, to say 8 billion years, while other scientists said this was technically impossible because this meant that stars from other galaxies had to be older than the universe – hence the paradox.  To avoid a long, drawn out controversy, the scientific community reached a compromise and agreed that the universe was between 10-15 billion years old, and the oldest stars in the universe were slightly younger.  But in some circles, doubt still remains so the paradox is still out there.

                “Doctor,” Pig said to Berigarg, “All I can say is I think what we have here is a Gold Paradox, by that I mean that gold is still a very much unknown, mysterious substance, and researchers may one day find that it was present at the ‘Big Bang’ long before the conventional wisdom of the scientific community contemplates today.  Suffice it to say, gold had been around much longer than Earth, much longer than our solar system, and probably much longer than our very own Milky Way Galaxy.”

                Dr. Brown couldn’t contain his excitement upon hearing these fascinating new facts about gold, things he had never heard about or even thought about before.  He asked the question, “Dr. Lemkau, taking all this into consideration, how much gold is out there?  By that I mean, what quantities of gold are we talking about in our own solar system and beyond?  Taken all together is there some way the volume of gold beyond planet Earth could be quantified, say in troy ounces or better yet, in metric tons?” Cinza queried impatiently. 

                Pig posed a question with a question before continuing, “Dr. Brown, have you ever heard the name Edward Kasner?” to which Cinza responded, “No, I have not.” 

                Pig then continued, “In 1920, this American mathematician invented the term ‘duotrigintillion’ to represent a number with a bunch of zeroes after it, then decided to multiply that number by ten. 

Since he now needed a new name for the bigger number, he asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, what he thought the name should be, and little Milton replied, ‘googol.’  A googol is the figure 1 followed by 100 zeroes.  Dr. Brown, to quantify your question, there’s googol gold somewhere out there in space, measured in troy ounces or in metric tons, just take your pick!”

#

                Sure his porky nemesis was stealing the limelight, Dr. Vine decided to jump in and slow Pig’s momentum, “All well and good, Dr. Lemkau, but as Dr. Brown explained earlier and we somehow misunderstood, he is looking for short-term ideas for locating large quantities of gold for the sake of what it appears to me anyway to be national security.  What you’re talking about is some science fiction Star Wars scenario, totally out of the realm of current technological capabilities of the United States to capitalize on for many decades if not centuries to come.  Or do you have a plan you can share with us?” 

Vine’s comments brought a bustle of nervous movement and a few chuckles, cut short by Pig’s rebuttal seconds later, which drew a wince or two.  Meanwhile, Cinza was thinking about Vine’s big mouth and wondering how he could get his hands on one of those gizmos the Men in Black used to flash people, the neuralyzer, making them forget everything they had just heard.  “Did everyone sitting around this table have a top secret security clearance?” he pondered and decided to check it out later.

                “Fuckin’-a bubba, I sure as shit do,” Pig shot back to Vine, “and if you’ll hold your water, I’ll lay it out for you.  If you want to find gold and suck it out of the ground fast then go to Mars right now, but make no mistake, a commitment to go after the yellow shit should be a no holds barred, all-out balls-to-the-wall wartime footing exploitation mission.  Fuck looking for signs of life or water or terraforming Mars for human habitation decades from now – this project is about spreading America’s Manifest Destiny just like our forefathers did, except now we’re reaching a little further out, that’s all. 

And just like what motivated them, we should be about making money – after all, early settlers coming to America didn’t come looking to enjoy nature, they came looking to prosper the best they could in a strange and harsh environment.  Also fuck our so-called ‘allies’ and those tree-hugging bastards worried about the environment.  Mars is already a dead planet and you can’t kill something already dead.  We should have been harvesting gold on Mars yesterday!” 

                It dawned on Dr. Vine just then that madman Pig may had finally gone over the edge with the adrenaline rush from his new-found confidence, or at a minimum, was a closet right-wing extremist bent on a personal crusade to save America from the world.  He wondered if things were starting to get a little out of control.

                “And I’ll tell you another thing, we’re a lot further along to go to Mars today then where we were when we first decided to go to the Moon – light years ahead technologically speaking.  Hell, this is déjà vu all over again, we looked at Mars landing feasibility twenty years ago when I was still at NASA,” Pig said as he seemed to sadden a bit remembering his golden young years working there.  But he recovered his composure quickly and after allowing a short coffee and potty break for the group, he moved right along with his monologue.

(This is a work of fiction.  Although some real-world names, organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.  This is the second edition abridged version 2019.  First edition Copyright © 2006.  All rights reserved)