But in the early 1970s the Malaysian plantations of the giant Gunung Jerai rubber conglomerate were having troubles of their own; their trees were being decimated by a vicious disease that was known as South American leaf blight but was capable of attacking Hevea anywhere in the world. As it happened, Arden and Theo, who followed such things, had heard from one of their professors about an isolated region near the junction of the Huitoto River and the Amazon, only about thirty miles upriver from Iquitos, where rubber trees grew that were remarkably resistant to the blight. Arden, the quickest-minded and most decisive of the three, had contacted Gunung Jerai to determine if they were interested in seeing some of the seeds from these trees, the location of which he sensibly kept to himself.

They were interested all right, enough to cover the costs of a three-week expedition to the Amazon for Arden and Theo, who would pick up Theo’s brother Frank in Iquitos. Gunung Jerai would pay two thousand dollars for a viable sample of one thousand seeds. If they proved on testing to be truly blight resistant, there would be another ten thousand dollars. And in five years, when the young trees were tapped for the first time, they would pay an additional one hundred dollars for every surviving, productive tree. The money was to be paid to Arden, who volunteered to split it evenly with his two partners.

The likely total was upward of a hundred thousand dollars, and it was as good as in their bank accounts right now. In Arden’s backpack was a net bag layered with gauze, in which nestled twelve hundred blight-resistant Hevea brasiliensis seeds. Collecting them had not been easy. In the Amazon, as almost nowhere else, trees did not grow in stands, but rather in widely scattered ones and twos, often miles apart. It had taken the three Tikuna Indians they had hired five days to harvest them. The Indians had been paid the equivalent of two American dollars a day per man, and had chuckled among themselves at the foolhardiness of the white men, who paid good money for things that anybody could go out and find just by walking around the jungle and keeping his eyes open.