One River by Wade Davis

Author:Wade Davis [Davis, Wade]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-11T04:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN White Blood of the Forest, 1943

ON NOVEMBER 20, 1942, a tall, thin, strikingly handsome man entered the Washington; D.C., headquarters of the Rubber Investigations Division of the Bureau of Plant Industry U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dressed in a dark suit, he cut an impressive figure, quite unlike the rough-and-tumble rubber explorers the secretaries had grown accustomed to. Handing his card to Miss Price, the receptionist, he asked to see Robert Rands, senior pathologist and head of the Hevea rubber project. The card read simply: RICHARD EVANS SCHULTES, BOTANIST, HARVARD UNIVERSITY. Miss Price passed the visitor along to Mrs. Bedard, Rands’s personal secretary, who ushered Schultes into a small waiting area. Returning once more to her desk, Mrs. Bedard telephoned Rands.

“Sir,” she said, “there is a young botanist to see you. He’s from Harvard, but I think he’s English.”

“Is the name Schultes’s?”

“Yes.”

“Show him in right away.”

Mrs. Bedard found Schultes where she had left him. “Dr. Rands will see you now.”

“Thank you.”

The office was located at the end of a long, narrow corridor hung with old photographs of plantations and coolies and colonial officials in pith helmets and white linen suits. Rands, who was waiting at the door, greeted Schultes affably and led him into the corner office. The room was basic government issue: wooden desk and chairs, metal filing cabinets, a large dark fan, and windows shaded by dusty Venetian blinds. A map of the world covered most of one wall. From another hung a Javanese shadow puppet, the only memento of Rands’s many years working in the rubber industry of the Dutch East Indies.

“Please, do sit down,” Rands said. He was a middle-aged man, fit and of average height, with a bald head and thin fringe of gray hair that made him appear older than he was. He wore rimless bifocals, which he adjusted several times as he leafed through a file on his desk.

“I understand from our people in Bogotá that you’re a good field man. That’s what we need.”

“Sir, I’d rather not work for the government. At least not as a civil servant.”

Rands looked up from his notes.

“Son, you’re already hired. That happened before you even walked out of the jungle in Colombia. And now that you’re here, I’m going to let you in on something those boys back at Harvard know nothing about. Fact is, no one out there does, or we’d have a serious problem.”

Rands stood up, took off his jacket, and hung it on a corner coat rack. Then, returning to his desk, he reached into a drawer and flung a handful of photographs across the desk.

“Take a look,” he said. Schultes thumbed through the images: mobile artillery, army trucks, a tank battalion in action, barrage balloons over London, a pair of GIs manning a sentry post in a rainstorm.

“What do you make of them?” Rands looked directly at Schultes.

“Rubber,” Schultes said.

“Right. Everything in this war depends on it. Those Sherman tanks have twenty tons of steel and half a ton of rubber. Five hundred pounds are in that Dodge truck.

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