Last Gasp (80 page)

Actually, the sad part was, there was nothing to see. A muddy ball wreathed in haze. No brilliant blue oceans or dazzling white clouds. No landmasses or islands or polar caps. Just gray nothingness masking every feature, like a once-beautiful woman shamefully hiding her aged crumbling face behind a soiled veil.

Chase had often speculated about the forms of life that had taken possession of the planet. The mutants would continue to breed, of course, and evolve perhaps into a completely different and unrecognizable species, in much the same way that man had been transformed from fish to mammal, a fluke of evolutionary engineering. And there were the new breeds to take into account—the uncles—cross matches of plant and animal with a genetic blueprint quite unknown before. Would they become the new lords of Creation?

He could foresee wars between the rival groups. Small-scale tribal conflicts with primitive weaponry fought in stinking jungles and belching bogs. Straight out of a science-fiction writer’s nightmare. With an atmosphere so thick you couldn’t spit through it.

There would be victors and vanquished. The eternal law of survival of the fittest would still apply, though now the fittest would be those best able to thrive in an atmosphere with only the merest trace of oxygen. They would be methane-breathers perhaps, with a physiology as alien to the human as the earthworm’s. Or they might feed off dioxin, the deadliest poison known to man, and produce offspring that drank sulfuric acid and breathed in sulfurous smog as if it were an invigorating sea breeze. There would be forms of life so bizarre—grotesque and horrific to human eyes—that it was beyond the wit of man to conjure them up, even in his most demented imaginings.

And all the while, as this was taking place, the species that had failed the course in planetary management would be gazing down at what had been theirs and was now lost, at what they had willfully thrown away, perhaps forever. The earth wouldn’t care. Nature was amoral, impersonal, quite indifferent to the fate of a single species. The brute thrust of growth went on, unconcerned, in other directions, explored other avenues. As far as the planet was concerned, mankind was only one more to add to the long list of failed experiments.

True, mankind might have made a greater impact than all the rest, created more havoc, interfered like a spoiled ignorant brat in things he didn’t understand, and yet the earth abided.

He switched on the desk lamp, the sudden glare making him blink, and rubbed his eyes wearily. He was tired and yet his brain refused to rest. Ruth must have fallen asleep, otherwise she would have been in before now, chiding him for disobeying Weinbaum’s strict instruction to get “plenty of rest and fresh air.” Ye gods, doctors never changed.

It was the conversation with Nick several months ago at the fish farm that had stirred the accumulated sludge of memories and started him thinking about a journal or an account of some sort. They’d been standing on the walkways where you could look down into huge shallow tanks and see thousands of fish, some of them, like the white amur, a Chinese delicacy, that could grow to over a foot in length in less than a year. They were cultivating other varieties that would grow to edible size in three months.

In the warm shallow water, fed with precisely the right amounts of phosphates and other nutrients, diatoms bloomed. Living on minerals, sunlight, and carbon dioxide, these microscopic one-celled plants provided food for the fish—just as they had on earth.

But on earth, as Chase had pointed out to his grandson, the diatoms had performed another, more important, function.

“They gave us oxygen, Nick, which is in the air all around us. We breathe it in and it keeps us alive. Without it we die.”

Nick had a good look around. “I can’t see it.”

“No, but it’s there. If it weren’t we wouldn’t be here.”

“Would we be dead?”

“Stone-cold dead in the market.”

Nick pressed his chin into the plastic mesh, eyes swiveled down as far as they would go, watching the streaking fish.

“Mummy said you and Grandad, my other grandad, the one who’s dead, used to swim under the ice.” Nick frowned up at him, the gridded imprint on his chin. “Ice is little. I have some in my orange. Did you swim in the freezer?”

“You’ve seen snow and ice on TV, haven’t you, Nick? Well, on earth some parts of the land and ocean were once covered in deep snow and thick ice. Your grandad and I used to dive in the sea, underneath the ice. It was colder than in the freezer, so we had to wear rubber suits to keep us warm.”

“Was it dark?”

“Yes,” Chase smiled. “We had to take very big, very bright lights to see with.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Those tiny green plants down there.”

“Is that all?”

Chase nodded.

“What for?”

That was a tough one. How to explain marine biology to a five-year-old in a few simple sentences? At the time it was research for its own sake, without any specific purpose. It was only later—was it months or years later?—that the work he’d been doing at Hailey Bay Station took on dramatic significance.

He’d never been able to give young Nick a proper answer, but the sludge had been disturbed and the memories began to float to the surface. About diving underneath the ice, for instance. Funny how he could recall every detail as vividly as if it were yesterday, when more recent events, even things that had happened here in the colony, had been forgotten.

The cold in the Antarctic—he could feel it now! Cold enough to freeze gasoline and make steel as brittle as porcelain. How you had to stop breathing when adjusting instruments with your mittens off so that your fingers wouldn’t become frozen to the metal parts. One guy had lost so many layers of skin that his fingerprints had peeled off.

Chase leaned back and looked at the medal, made out of moon gold and sealed in a block of crystal, on the shelf above the desk. The inscription read: “The Confederation Premier Order of Merit. Awarded to Dr. Gavin Chase in recognition of his unceasing efforts in the field of planetary ecology and for his contribution to mankind’s understanding of the problems that confronted it during the past quarter-century.
AD
2026
.”

The presentation had been made at a rather grand ceremony the year after his arrival at Canton Island. Standing before the assembled throng of representatives from all the colonies, Chase had given a brief address, recognizing a few (not many) faces from the old days, including Frank Hanamura, now senior lecturer in closed-cycle ecosystems at the university on Okinawa Island. It had been a very emotional occasion.

Always amused by it, Chase thought it sensible and discreet that the citation spoke of “unceasing efforts” and omitted any reference to “outstanding achievement,” which was the usual time-honored phrase. Because of course there hadn’t been any achievement, outstanding or otherwise.

Yes, he really ought to do something about it while there was still time. Who did Weinbaum think he was fooling with his “new” treatment? Chase looked along the shelf to the cassettes, notebooks, and files of clippings, spines buckled and torn, corners dog-eared, colors faded. He’d given up hope of ever seeing them again after they evacuated and destroyed the Tomb. A patrol had gone in a year later and found the place wrecked and this stuff miraculously moldering in his office just as he’d left it.

He pulled down one of the tattered notebooks and sat mulling through the pages in the lamplight. The pages were sprinkled with quotations he’d copied from books and articles over the years. He was searching for something, but didn’t know what exactly. He smoothed a yellowing page and read:

There is a goal, one that has the potential to unite every man, woman and child on this planet, which, if reached, will enable them to build at last that “land fit for heroes.” A home which they can be proud they helped to build, one in which they can live in harmony with the wild things, retaining the beauty of the mountains, the lakes, the rivers, the fields, the vast oceans and the sky.

But this needs effort and requires a genuine desire on the part of every one of us to make this dream reality.

Something like that was needed to set the tone, Chase felt, as a prologue or the opening passage. On reflection, this particular piece might be better at the end, as a summing up, a plea, a warning.

He’d find another to start him off. There was bound to be one. He turned the pages and eventually he found what he was looking for and reached for the mike.

By definition a book set in the future must be speculative. I should like the reader to be aware, however, that this speculation is based very firmly on scientific facts and theories current at the time of writing, as well as on actual events. I could give a long list of examples, but will confine myself to just a few to illustrate the point.

The Russian scheme to switch the flow of rivers southward to irrigate agricultural lands in Kazakhstan (given the fictitious name Project Arrow in this book) is scheduled to go ahead in the closing years of this century. By the year 2000, according to the Russian estimate, there will be a reduction in the freshwater discharge into the Arctic Ocean of about 5 percent. Scientists at the University of Washington believe that by diverting the Yenisei and Ob rivers, the ice cover will disappear from a million square kilometers and that the exposed dark surface of the ocean will then absorb the heat of the sun leading to the melting of more ice, and so on and so on, in a runaway positive feedback effect. This will continue until the entire Arctic Ocean is without ice cover. The sea level would then rise all around the world.

The use of dioxin (TCDD) and its indiscriminate dumping is continuing to make headlines. In the small town of Black Creek near Niagara Falls in New York State, the residents of the notorious Love Canal live on top of what has been described as “a stinking chemical sewer.” Doctors have found chromosome abnormalities in the local children, women have miscarried well above the national average, and residents suffer from a range of complaints from cancer to unexplained rashes and throat infections. A woman there who has already given birth to a mentally retarded child has been told that her genetic abnormalities greatly increase the risk of birth defects, both mental and physical, in any more children she might have.

The Reagan administration has been pushing the MX missile system, to be deployed in southern Nevada and southwestern Utah. This will pattern these two states with a racetrack grid of 200 missiles, each with an option of 23 silos (like Desert Range). Each missile will weigh 95 tons and will contain ten nuclear warheads with a combined explosive power equivalent to 3 million tons of TNT. (The Hiroshima bomb was 13,000 tons.)

Carbon dioxide continues to build up in the atmosphere. It is now measured at slightly more than 330 parts per million—still only .03 percent by volume—but by the year 2022, if the present trend continues, this amount could be doubled.

Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton has pointed out that in a world in which acres of forest are being felled every minute, nobody seems to be doing any research into oxygen depletion. In fact no reduction in the oxygen content of the atmosphere has been detected anywhere in the world. Yet.

T. H.

Lancashire—Cornwall—

Tunisia—USA