Last Gasp (6 page)

Cheryl shrugged, scanning the ocean through the binoculars. “I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t know him all that well. I get a Christmas card every February and there isn’t much room for a life story between the holly and the snow-covered turtles.”

“Jeez, Sherry, you’re his daughter.”

“So you keep reminding me, Gordy.”

Gordon mused on this and then came up unaided with the thought for the day. “They do say that geniuses are very weird people. Not like the rest of us. You know—kinda inhuman, cold, no emotions.”

“I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear that.”

Gordon was immune to irony. “Jeez, I’d love to meet somebody like that, Sherry. I bet he’s a fascinating guy. I mean to say, the
dedication
it takes to go off like that, leaving civilization and all that stuff behind, living purely and simply for your work. That’s terrific.”

“Is it?” Cheryl lowered the binoculars and stared at him, her tone sharper than she intended. “It’s terrific to live with relatives for most of your life, being shipped around like a package. To be an orphan when one of your parents is still alive. That really is terrific, Gordy.”

The resentment, the hurt, so long buried, still had a raw edge to it. Especially when dredged up by a casual or thoughtless remark; and Gordon Mudie was an expert in that department.

The bass throb of the engines faltered, missed a beat, and then resumed its pounding rhythm. Cheryl felt the vibrations through her rope-soled sandals. The ship seemed to be laboring. She leaned right over, holding the binoculars aside on their leather strap, and peered down into the churning water.

Normally it was a cream froth. Now it was red, the color of blood. “Gordon, look at that!”

“
Jeez-uz
!”

“What have we hit?”

“Must be a seal. Or a shark, maybe.”

It was neither. Cheryl looked around and discovered that the Melville was afloat on a red ocean. She looked again over the stern and realized that the vessel was struggling to make headway through a thick spongy mass of minute planktonic organisms, which was giving the sea its reddish hue.

There’d been several outbreaks in recent years: vast blooms of the microcellular organism
Gymodinium breve
had appeared without warning off the coasts of America, India, and Africa. Nobody knew what caused the growth, nor why it suddenly came and went. But the “red tide” was deadly poisonous, to both fish and man. Millions of dead and decaying fish and other sea creatures had been found off Florida’s eastern coast and in the Gulf of Mexico.

She clamped the headset back on and spoke into the mike. “Monitoring room? We’d better wind in the RMT. We’re in the middle of an algae bloom—red stuff, acres of it. I think it’s the poisonous variety.”

The headset squawked a reply and Cheryl said, “We’re to close the release gear and bring the trawl in.” When Gordon didn’t immediately respond, she snapped, “What are you waiting for? If we pick up any of this crap it’ll take days to clean out.”

Gordon backed away from the rail, his high forehead creased in a perplexed frown. “Where’s it come from? There must be tons and tons of the stuff.” Still frowning, he went over to the winch and began winding.

The girl gazed down at the water, mesmerized a little, lost in the illusion that she was on a bridge with a river flowing underneath. Her snub nose with its sprinkle of freckles (the one that Gordon thought was real cute) wrinkled as she caught a whiff of something rotten, and in the churning red wake she saw the white upturned bellies of hundreds of fish. A shoal of poisoned sea bass.

In spite of the warmth of the sun she felt a shiver ripple down her spine. What had caused it? What had gone wrong? A natural ecological foul-up or man-made thermal pollution?

And just imagine, she thought, shuddering, if the bloom kept right on multiplying and spreading and poisoning all the fish. It would eventually take over, filling all the oceans of the world with a stinking red poisonous mess. Every sea creature would die, and the bloom might not stop there—when it had conquered the oceans it would infiltrate the river systems and lakes and streams. It might even gain a roothold on the land....

Cheryl shook herself out of the nightmare. Thank God it was only imagination.

Bill Inchcape—Binch as everyone called him—in short-sleeved shirt and check trousers was seated at the keyboard of the computer terminal in the cavernous air-conditioned basement where DELFI was housed behind hermetically sealed three-inch steel doors. This precaution was less for security reasons than to protect the germanium circuitry and memory disks against changes in temperature and humidity. The predominantly male staff had decided that DELFI was female, and thus any temperamental outbursts or fits of electronic pique were put down to premenstrual tension.

Data from all parts of the world were received at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, and fed into the computer, and it was the physicist’s job to extract the climatic anomalies and prepare a summary, which was circulated to various government agencies. What purpose this information served nobody knew—it was Binch’s hunch, as he confided to Brad Zittel, that it merely served to justify Washington’s funding of the center, made them feel they were getting sufficient “drudge for their dollar.”

At the moment he was up to his ears in print-out, his stubby, hairy arms paddling through it like a swimmer breasting a wave. Down here it was quite cool, though Binch still sweated—with his girth he could afford to—the garish strip-lighting reflecting on his damp scalp through baby-fine rapidly thinning hair.

“You wouldn’t think it could get any worse, but it always seems to,” Binch complained in his reedy voice. “Just look at all this stuff!” Brad Zittel settled himself on a gray metal console. Reels spun in the shadowy background; relays chattered discreetly. He wasn’t at his best this morning. Dark circles ringed his eyes. For two months or more he’d been waking at 4:00
A.M.
, making a pot of China tea, and watching the sky slowly brighten from his study window. Sometimes he didn’t expect the sun to perform its daily miracle.

“Worse in what sense?” he asked dully. “The anomalies are getting worse or there are more of them?”

“Quality and quantity both up. This is supposed to be a two-day job and it’s going to take a week. Listen to this.” Binch snatched a print-out at random and read: ‘“Sweden: Rainfall increased by two hundred percent with some areas recording average monthly amounts in one day.’ And this: ‘Finland: Coldest December on record in Helsinki since measurements began in 1829.’”

He lifted a thick sheaf of print-out and thrust it toward Brad. “Here, look for yourself,” he mumbled, sitting back in the swivel chair and lighting a cigarette.

Brad took a breath, trying to quell the too-familiar panic rising in his chest, trying to tell himself not to be such a prick. He breathed out and fixed his eyes on the neat blocks of electric type.

Brad discovered that his hands were shaking. He couldn’t read any more. He attempted to fold the print-out, made a hash of it, and dropped it on the pile.

“What’s the matter?” asked Binch alertly. “Are you okay?”

Brad Zittel smiled diffidently and smoothed back his brown wavy hair. A NASA pin flared in the lapel of his cotton jacket. “I haven’t been sleeping too well, I guess. Joyce keeps telling me I need a vacation. Could be she’s right.”

“You do look kinda beat.” Binch exhaled smoke through his broad nostrils, which had hairs growing out of them. He eyed Brad shrewdly. “Have you still got that pollution bee in your bonnet? Is that it? Come on, Brad, buddy, you’re taking it far too seriously. This old ball of mud isn’t gonna peg out just yet.”

Brad gestured. “These anomalies ... every month more of them ...”

“We’ve always had them, for Christ’s sake, ever since records were kept. In fact we’re probably finding more freak conditions today precisely because every Tom, Dick, and Harry is monitoring the climate more closely. Ever think of that?”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“But you’re not convinced.”

Brad kneaded his palms, his eyes downcast. “Do you remember the preface you wrote to the last summary?” he said quietly. “I can’t get one line out of my head. ‘Reports of long-standing records being broken were received almost daily from all seven continents.’ Those are your words, Binch, not mine.”

The corpulent physicist squirmed a little in his chair. “Yeah, all right,” he conceded, “so the weather isn’t behaving normally just now. But what in hell is normal? You’ve got to see it over the long term, Brad. What we consider ‘average weather’ for the first half of this century needn’t necessarily be ‘average’ for the latter half. Most of the records we use for comparison stretch from 1900 to 1970—but maybe
that
period was abnormal and the climatic pattern today is the normal one.” He stubbed out his cigarette and shrugged elaborately. “Plain fact is, we simply don’t know.”

“And what about DELFI? What does she have to say?”

“DELFI’s like most females. Keeps changing her mind. Anyway, she can only come up with a prediction based on existing data; it’s merely an extrapolation of present trends.” It sounded like an evasive reply, which it was. If the computer’s forecasts weren’t worth a row of beans, why bother with it in the first place? The truth was that Binch didn’t want to admit that the computer was a washout (he needed those Washington dollars), while at the same time he was unhappy with its pronouncements.

In the manner of such beasts it was named after the rather forced acronym for Determining Environmental Logistics for Future Interpretation. In plain English its function was to analyze and correlate changes in global weather and to predict climatic patterns in the future. To this end it was directly linked with NORPAX (North Pacific Experiment) and CLIMAP (Climate Long-Range Investigation Mapping and Prediction). Taken together, these three should have provided the most accurate forecasts of what would happen to the global climate over the next fifty years. So far, however, the conclusions had been contradictory, which was what upset Binch. The computer was his brainchild, but it was showing itself a somewhat recalictrant offspring.

He turned back to the keyboard and punched keys. The terminal chattered and jerked out more paper. Binch scanned it in silence, wiped his moist fingertips on the front of his shirt, and pressed more keys.

Against his will, Brad felt his attention wrenched to what DELFI was spewing out.

He began to hum a tune, repeating the same fragment of melody over and over again. Something about “a marbled bowling ball.”

Binch stopped typing and glanced up uneasily. Brad was staring into space, oblivious, humming his tune.

One of Maj. Bradley T. Zittel’s keenest pleasures was to stand at the wide window of his third-floor office and lose himself in contemplation of the picture-postcard scenery. The view warmed his soul and calmed his mind: the icy backbone of the Rockies thrusting sharply against the translucent blue of a cloudless sky; sunlight, so pure and clean, reflecting from the snowy peaks with an intensity that hurt the eyes.

For 80 million years the mountains had stood thus, aloof and daunting, indifferent to what went on around them. They didn’t seek to be admired. Their grandeur and awesome beauty were sufficient unto themselves. His eye beheld them and they didn’t give a damn whether he looked or not, but remained uncompromising, a savage act of nature arrested in time and space.

His first sight of the earth from the region of the moon had evoked the same response in him.

It had also changed his life.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, a graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he had enlisted in the navy and continued his studies at MIT, emerging with a degree in aeronautics and astronautics. Then came four years with NASA during which he took part in three missions, the longest being an eighty-one-day stint in Skylab. It was to have a profound effect on his whole philosophy.

Up to that point, aged twenty-nine, he had thought no more or less about the environment and matters of ecology than it was fashionable to do. In fact he was rather weary of hearing people refer to the earth as “a spaceship with finite resources.” Like a danger signal too often repeated, it was dismissed as alarmist propaganda. Of course the planet had to be protected, its resources conserved. He understood that. But why keep harping on about it and rehashing the same old stale arguments? Anyway, you couldn’t walk more than a couple of yards without stumbling over a conservationist; there were ecology nuts everywhere. Surely the government was taking the necessary steps, acting on all this free advice.