Beyond the Black Stump [antikvár]

One A NUMBER of substances that are trapped in the earth's crust will influence a Geiger counter sufficiently to set it clicking, and one of the feeblest of these influences is oil imprisoned in a sait dome or an anticline. Stanton Laird sat in an office of the Topeka Exploration Company Inc., on the eighteenth floor of the Topex Building in Ceaar Street in downtown New York City,' and explained his work again to Mr. Sam Johnson. He believed that the work that he had done upon his own initiative in analysing the radioactive indications at the bottom of the pilot drillings at Abu Quaiyah had shortened the seismic observation programme by some weeks and had brought the No. 3 well to production so mueh sooner, and this was the first bore on that site to produce oil in commercial quantifies. He had explained this previously to Mr. Johnson in a fairly lengthy report that he had typea with sweating, gritty hands in the nut beside the oil rig where he had lived with the drilling crew, and he had known as he typed that Mr. Johnson would either be too busv to read it at ali or, at best, he would skim it through ana merely study the conclusions at the end. In fact, he had done the latter, and he had forgottén all the detail. Only a vague impression on his mind remained, that Stanton Laird was a good youngster who didn't sit around complaining of the heat but got on with his job. Mr. Johnson didn't say much while the young man talked, for the simple reasón that he couldn't trust himself. Like ail oil executives he had a general knowledge of petrology, but he had never himself been a geologist. He had come into the oil industry forty years before as an organic chemist, but he had been on the executive of Topex now for many years and his organic chemistry was thirty years out of date, and half forgottén. In dealing with the young technicians who worked under his control he had developea a technique of making them do the talking while he sat back and lis-tened, encouraging them on with phrases such as "Surely", or "That sounds reasonable to me", or "Dr. Streeter was working on this last fall. I'd like you to have a talk with i