Last Gasp (38 page)

In that same moment Steve realized what their intention was, and he jammed the accelerator to the floor in an act of desperate panic. It was to be his last conscious action, for as the jeep shot through the gap it was engulfed in an inferno.

Taking the shortest and fastest route down the mountain, the jeep sailed through the air like a flaming comet, bits of fiery debris scattering off it. Chuck Brant and Steve Fazioli were flung out like rag torches long before it hit bottom.

An arc of oily black smoke traced its progress and hung lazily in the warm still air. From their vantage point high above, the shrouded black figures watched for a few moments, dark specks against the wrinkled ocher scrub, before turning away and vanishing.

They arrived in Washington, D.C., during what was called a “freak” electrical storm—freak implying uncommon. Yet these storms, spectacularly ferocious, now occurred two or three times a month.

The white cupola of the Capitol, bathed in a purplish glow, resembled a brain from a science-fiction movie. The great thunderheads of cloud were rent by razor-toothed lightning flashes that flickered around the stone spear of the Washington Monument, blackening its beveled tip. The air had the acrid stink of ozone molecules energized by millions of volts.

Thus far no one had come up with a satisfactory explanation for this vicious heavenly onslaught, though a number of quasi-religious groups claimed that it was the wrath of God—in each case their own particular god—and paraded up and down Constitution Avenue bearing banners differently worded but all on the theme of “The Day of Judgment Is Nigh—Repent Before It’s Too Late.”

This was Dan’s first visit to Washington, and as he didn’t want to spend it in a television studio, Cheryl took him on a tour of the Smithsonian Institution and the Air-Space Museum on Jefferson Drive while Chase went along to tape an interview for the CBS news and current affairs program “Mainline.”

The storm clouds were clearing as Chase stepped out of the courtesy car and was taken by armed uniformed guard to the hospitality suite where Claudia Kane, instantly recognizable from her network news broadcasts, came lithely forward to greet him. She had the professional interviewer’s ready smile and relaxed manner, only achieved after years of practice and iron discipline. It was to be a discussion rather than a straight interview, Claudia Kane informed him, leading him forward to meet his fellow guests: Professor Gene Lucas, head of atmospheric physics at Princeton, and Dr. Frank Hanamura of Jonan University, Tokyo.

Chase knew of Lucas, though they’d never met. A small, round-shouldered man with neatly parted gray hair and a neat gray moustache to match, it was Lucas, Chase recalled, who’d abruptly resigned—or been dismissed from, it was never made clear—the position of the president’s senior scientific adviser sometime back in the nineties.

Hanamura, still a young man, had already established a brilliant reputation for his work on the biosphere, with specific reference to the effects of urban and industrial pollution. He was of mixed parentage, having been born in Kyoto of a Japanese father and an American mother. His father had died when Frank was thirteen after collapsing in a Tokyo street, stricken by the pollution that a few years later would make world headlines as the “Tokyo Alert,” when thousands choked to death. It was this that had inspired him to take up his career. Tall and slender, with glossy jet-black hair, he had inherited the best physical attributes of both races, with dark expressive eyes in a strong, intelligent face. He was almost too perfectly handsome.

After outlining the program’s format (“Mainline” always concerned itself with “a major talking point of the day,” they were informed), Claudia Kane led them into the studio and seated them in a cozy circle in comfortable armchairs, with herself in the center on a revolving chair that could be spun around by remote control to face any of the participants. This was “media interrogative debate,” as the jargon had it.

True to her breed, Claudia Kane astutely picked up a point of contention between Lucas and Hanamura, and she zeroed in on it like a shark scenting blood. Gene Lucas was given first crack.

“We’re paying the price for two hundred and fifty years of indiscriminate growth brought about by greed, selfishness, and crass stupidity,” he expounded gloomily. “And the truly frightening thing is, we refuse to learn from past mistakes and mend our ways. You can’t save the world from what I see as inevitable destruction without changing human nature, and let’s face it, you’re never going to change human nature.”

“But you speak as though we’re helpless, Professor.” Claudia Kane whirled around to take in Frank Hanamura’s contribution. “I don’t think we are. I also think, with respect, that you are underestimating the regenerative capacity of our planet. There have been literally
thousands
of catastrophic natural disasters—volcanic eruptions, earthquakes on a colossal scale, floods, meteor strikes, ice ages— all of which make what man has done look puny in comparison.”

“But you do believe there is a problem?” Claudia Kane pressed him. The handsome Japanese spread lean brown hands. “Sure I do, most definitely. Everyone can see that the biosphere is undergoing a fundamental change. Where I part company with Professor Lucas is in believing that we can do something about it.”

The camera picked up Lucas’s gentle smile. He was hearing an echo of his former self. At sixty-three he didn’t consider himself old, but he wondered that with hardening of the arteries, did advancing age also stiffen hope into despair?

“And what about you, Dr. Chase?” Claudia Kane spun around, flashing him her wide bright smile. Frank Hanamura might be conventionally handsome, but Chase’s saturnine looks, set off by a close beard streaked with gray, had a far stronger appeal to a woman of her age. The shape of his lips entranced her. “Which side are you on?”

“Is it a contest?” Chase inquired mildly.

“The two views we’ve heard expressed are diametrically opposed, I would have thought.”

The camera featured Chase full frame in close-up as he said, “It’s easy to score points and engage in a slugging match. The three of us could do that all night because no one knows for certain what the future holds. But if you want a serious debate—”

“Yes, of course I do,” said Claudia Kane, completely unruffled. She flicked back a stray lock of silver-tinted hair with a red-clawed hand. “So what I’d like to ask you, Dr. Chase, is what you see as the prime motivation behind the Earth Foundation movement. Is it basically a plea to common sense?”

Chase smiled. “We don’t aim for the impossible. No, the idea originally was to unite those people who share a common belief, a common hope. Perhaps ‘unite’ is too forceful a word, because the movement doesn’t exist in any formal or organized sense. It’s more a commitment to a philosophy—to the feeling, the emotion if you like, of what it is to be just one form of life coexisting peacefully and in harmony with all the other forms of life that share this planet with us.”

Claudia Kane nodded, watching his mouth. “That has almost the sound of a religious belief.”

Chase said lightly, “If it is, it’s pantheistic.”

“In the sense that you identify God with the universe, as one and the same thing,” said Claudia Kane, quick to demonstrate that she hadn’t got the job on the strength of her pearly smile and chest measurement.

“Though we don’t visit Stonehenge in robes and sandals at the summer solstice, predict the future from chicken entrails, or read fortunes in teacups.”

“Is it true that the movement has over two million followers throughout the world?”

“Not followers,” Chase corrected her. “Two million people who subscribe to the beliefs I’ve just mentioned.”

“Over a hundred thousand of them in Japan,” said Hanamura. “My country has sound historical reasons for wishing to foster those ideals.”

“So anyone and everyone is free to join,” Claudia Kane said, keeping the focus on Chase.

“Yes. If they share our beliefs.”

“I think a great many people do. And I’m sure many more will in the future.”

The recording lasted an hour. It would be edited down to twenty-three minutes for transmission. Chase had lost count of the TV and radio shows he’d taken part in. Sometimes it seemed like a mad, mindless merry-go-round; endless talk and very little action. Not that he undervalued the concern shown by people wherever he went— Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, South America, the United States—not at all. Yet more and more he was beginning to wonder what good it did for “experts” like Lucas, Hanamura and himself to sit around endlessly discussing the environmental crisis. The form was always the same. They agreed that things were getting worse. They disagreed about what could, should, be done to put them right. They agreed that something ought to be done, because in five, ten, twenty, or fifty years from now it would be too late.

There were many times when he brooded about what, ultimately, his book had achieved. When it was published there had been extravagant claims that it had actually averted an all-out environmental war. Chase didn’t think so, not for an instant. No, he’d merely blown the whistle when the game was already over. By the time the book appeared it was transparently clear to everyone—even the American and Russian military—that the atmosphere and oceans were already rapidly deteriorating, and that for the superpowers to continue with their environmental war plans was akin to putting a pillow over a sick man’s face when he was gasping for breath and didn’t have long to live anyway.

In the section of the book entitled “The Suicide Pact,” Chase had revealed these secret war plans, based on the DEPARTMENT STORE dossier and the information supplied by Boris Stanovnik. It had been this revelation, rather than the broader (and, to Chase, the more important) theme of global decline that had assured
One Minute to Midnight
of its international best-seller status.

For the truth was that most people still had a naive and misplaced faith in mankind’s immortality. They refused to accept that during the earth’s 4.6-billion-year evolution something like 80 percent of the species had been wiped out, and that man had no God-given right to survive when so many other life-forms had failed. There was now a distinct possibility that man would become just one more failed biological experiment to add to the list.

This realization, and the despair that went with it, had led to the idea of the movement that became known as Earth Foundation.

Chase traveled everywhere, as founder and nominal head of the movement, giving what advice, support, and encouragement he could. Because there were no guidelines laid down, each group had its own conception of its role and objectives. Some groups—like the one he had recently visited in Griffin, Georgia—had formed themselves into self-sufficient communes. Other groups worked at developing an alternative technology, using sun, sea, and wind power in place of fossil fuels. Groups had sprung up in universities and colleges—Stanford, CalTech, John Hopkins, MIT among many others—with the aim of finding solutions to the difficult and complex problems confronting a highly developed technological society that was attempting to slow down rather than speed up its rate of growth.

There were even some groups with a religious, mystical tinge to them, which Chase saw no reason to discourage. They were free to choose, to aspire to the shared ideal in whatever way they thought appropriate.

During the last eight years that he and Cheryl had devoted themselves to Earth Foundation, the movement had grown, had become a respected voice in the ecological debate ... and yet, what were its achievements? Or more to the point, its failings? Official Devastated Areas girdled the equator, widening, spreading outward like a poisonous belt choking the planet. Large areas of the ocean were crusted over or choked with weed. Starvation had wiped out millions in India, Africa, Asia, and South America. And perhaps more ominously, measurements with sensitive instruments were beginning to show a fall in the oxygen content of the atmosphere. Only fractionally, and in isolated instances, but a fall nonetheless.

Yes, Chase thought, a great record. Bravo! Give the man a Nobel Prize.

And while all this was going on, what was he doing? Sitting in an air-conditioned television studio in Washington, D.C. Talking. Talking. Talking.

Endlessly Talking.

Afterward, in the bar, Claudia Kane, said, “I think it went splendidly, don’t you?”

Splendidly
seemed such an odd choice of word that Chase wondered if she’d used it as a concession to his being English. He’d done the same thing himself with
swell
and
sure
when talking to Americans. What was it, a desire to merge with the local fauna, a wish to be accepted?    '

Lucas turned to him. “I read your piece on Calcutta in the
Herald-
Tribune. Five hundred suicides a day. That’s terrible.”

“The situation’s even worse in Bangkok,” Chase said. “Twenty-five million people, more than half of them living without water or adequate sanitation. It’s one huge refugee camp.”

“No sealed enclosures?” Hanamura said.

“Government buildings and the business sector are sealed, but the streets are open to the air. People drop down on the pavement and literally choke to death.”

Claudia Kane shuddered and swirled the whiskey in her glass. “That’s my idea of hell on earth.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Chase said gravely. “If you can imagine an updated version of Dante’s Inferno, that’s it all right.”

“Do you have any plans to visit Japan?” Hanamura asked.

“Not at the moment. I was there last year for six weeks on a lecture tour. Those new measures you’ve introduced seem to be having an effect. It’s an encouraging sign.”

Hanamura nodded agreement. “At long last our politicians are waking up. They’ve passed legislation to limit population and the decentralization policy is being implemented. The big stumbling block is industry. Trying to break down the tradition of paternalism is very difficult.”

“At least you’ve got sixty percent nuclear power, which is a real achievement in curbing atmospheric pollution,” Chase said. “In Britain it’s less than twenty percent.”