Last Gasp (39 page)

“Ah,” said Hanamura, nodding sagely. “But Britain has reverted to cottage industry.”

Whether he regarded this as being to Japan’s advantage or not, Chase couldn’t tell. “You mean souvenir rubbish suppliers to the world— cardboard Big Bens and plastic busts of the king and queen. It’s turning into a bargain-basement historical joke shop.”

Lucas was interested to know what Frank Hanamura was working on, and the tall elegant Japanese gave an enigmatic smile. “A pet project of mine. I’ve been trying to get it funded for the last five years, but I suspect they think it’s crazy, an impossible scheme. I want to give the world its oxygen back, that’s all.”

“How do you propose to do that?” asked Lucas with a half-smile, half-frown.

“By using a process that every schoolboy learns in the first grade. The electrolysis of seawater.”

“On what kind of scale?” Chase asked.

“Well, yes, that really is the crux of the problem,” Hanamura admitted wryly. “As you know it’s easy enough in the laboratory and the process has been used to a limited extent for industrial purposes. But producing the large tonnages of oxygen that would make any appreciable difference to the biosphere is one hell of a problem. So far unresolved.” He seemed quite cheerful about it.

“My first-grade science isn’t all that hot,” Claudia Kane said. “What process is that again?”

Chase said, “Electrolysis of seawater. You split H
₂
0 into its component parts of hydrogen and oxygen by passing an electrical current through brine. As Frank says, nothing is easier in theory, and we’ve been doing it for years on a small scale. But for the amounts he’s talking about there are problems of corrosion and—” He stopped, realizing it was getting technical, and said, “Well, there are problems, and pretty daunting ones.”

“It’s the obvious solution when you think about it,” Hanamura enthused. “Seven tenths of the earth’s surface is seawater. There’s a virtually unlimited supply from which we can obtain the oxygen we need to replenish the atmosphere. It’s never been done before because we’ve never needed to do it. And also, of course, because electrolysis has one major drawback.” He glanced keenly at the two men.

“Power,” Lucas said.

Hanamura nodded briskly, his sallow face with its delicate cheekbones becoming more animated. “I’ve done some preliminary computer studies and I’m convinced it’s technically feasible, given—”

There was a distracting flurry of movement as a bald-headed man in a bow tie came in. He was flushed and agitated. He spoke to a group near the door, whose faces registered numbed, open-mouthed disbelief. The word spread. AP had filed a report that Carl Redman, director of the World Meteorological Organization, had been the victim of pyro-assassination while on a visit to New Mexico. He was the fourth government official to have been killed by the gruesome method of being doused in gasoline and set alight. As with the previous cases, the assassins and their motives were unknown.

Claudia Kane thanked her guests for coming and excused herself. She had to check with the news editor; she might be needed. The shark scenting fresh blood, Chase thought, watching her leave.

“I worked with Carl,” Gene Lucas recalled sadly. “We served together on a World Climate Research committee two or three years ago. What in God’s name is happening? Why? What’s the purpose?” He shook his head, mystified.

It was time for Chase to get back to the hotel. Cheryl and Dan should have returned from their sightseeing trip by now. He was looking forward to a relaxed family dinner at a restaurant and hearing Dan’s opinions of the capital.

As they were shaking hands Lucas said, “Give my regards to Cheryl.”

“I didn’t know you knew her.”

“I don’t, not personally,” Lucas said, a secretive smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. “But I once sent her some information, which, I should add, she made excellent use of.” He was smiling broadly now, tickled pink by something that left Chase with a mystified frown.

“What information was that?”

“About a certain project called DEPARTMENT STORE. I think you’ve probably heard of it.”

After a stunned moment Chase grasped Lucas’s hand and shook it again, this time more warmly than ever.

After a hard day’s work there was nothing the secretary-general of the United Nations liked better than to linger in a sumptuous hot bath liberally sprinkled with Esprit de Lavande from Penhaligon’s of Covent Garden, London. The small round bottle with the ground-glass stopper traveled in the UN transatlantic diplomatic pouch, a little privilege that Ingrid Van Dorn allowed herself.

She was tall and straight-limbed with long silvery-blond hair and classic Nordic features, clearly evident in her wide pale forehead and icy blue eyes. Rather angular perhaps, though she measured the same now as she had twenty-five years ago when a strikingly beautiful twenty-two-year-old girl from Orebro in Sweden. That had been before two marriages, two divorces, and two children, both girls, now at boarding school in Vermont.

Floating in the sunken oval bath and breathing in the perfumed mist, Ingrid Van Dorn watched the large flat TV screen inset into the wall. A crystal carafe of iced sangria was within reach of her slender white arm, and a tall glass, beaded with condensation, was on the tiled shelf by her elbow.

“In the studio tonight,” Claudia Kane was saying, making the introductions, “we’re delighted to welcome Dr. Gavin Chase, a British marine biologist, better known to us as the author of that hugely successful and influential book One Minute to
Midnight,
which several years after publication still sells over one hundred thousand copies a year. Also with us we have Professor Gene Lucas of the Geophysical...”

“When was this recorded?” asked Ingrid Van Dorn. Her husky voice still had a trace of accent, though not as pronounced as when she gave interviews; the media loved it.

The man seated in the upholstered recess took off his horn-rimmed glasses and wiped away the steam with the hem of his bathrobe. “Last week sometime. Friday, I think. I thought of asking for a tape, but with transmission so near it didn’t seem worthwhile.” Kenneth J. Prothero—“Pro” to his friends and some of his close enemies—senator for North Carolina, slipped his glasses back on and leaned forward, hands clasped above his long, tanned, hairy legs. “You know, this guy has a lot to—”

“Sssshhhh!” Ingrid Van Dorn held up a slender finger. She glanced toward him, looking like a goddess with her gleaming hair coiled on top of her head. “Are we recording this?”

Prothero nodded and topped up his glass with a sangria. He chewed on a piece of orange peel, cursing under his breath. Bathtime for Ingrid was a sacred ritual, but with this damned steam he had to keep wiping his specs every two minutes.

Remaining obediently silent until the program was over, he got up and switched the set off. There was the gentle swish of water as Ingrid moved languorously in the tub and the creak of ice melting in the carafe. Prothero stood looking down at her. He couldn’t look enough at this fabulous woman: that she was his seemed like a stroke of wondrous good fortune.

“Well, what do you think?”

Ingrid Van Dorn soaped her breasts thoughtfully. “Yes, I’m impressed. What do we know about him, Pro?”

“Quite a lot.” Prothero settled himself on the step next to the bathtub, feasting his eyes on the swirl of silver hair, the perfect white arch of her neck, the damp hollows formed by her collarbones. “I’ve had him checked out, every last detail. In my opinion we’ll never find anyone better qualified.”

“But if he’s as committed to Earth Foundation as he makes out, perhaps he won’t want to.”

“All the more reason for him to accept, I’d say.”

“Why? Because of the ‘challenge’?” Ingrid Van Dorn used the word with scorn. “A man like Chase has more challenges than he can cope with already.”

Prothero reached into the water and took her hand. It was like a pale water lily in his broad palm. “If Chase is the kind of guy I think he is, he’ll want to do it. An opportunity like this? Sure, he’ll jump at it.” She gave him a quick sideways smile. “I guess I’m scared.” An uncharacteristic admission for her. “We’ve talked about it for so long, thought about it, and now we have to make the decision. We’re burning our bridges ... or at least you are. If your government finds out...” Prothero’s face tightened. “My government is up to its neck in bacteriological herbicides. The old, old games. Like a kid fooling around with matches in a house that’s burning to the ground.” Then it spilled out of him like venom. “I’ve had all that, Ingrid. ASP can go screw itself, and the generals,
and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff! They all have a vested interest in keeping the billions of dollars flooding in to perpetuate global conflict, and they’ll never change. They can’t. It’s like asking a blind man to paint a sunset. We have to do it without them—against them. It’s the only way.”

“Screw them before they screw up the world,” Ingrid said. She pouted at him through the rising steam. “What are you smiling at?” Prothero couldn’t stop grinning. “It sounds funny, an expression like ‘screw up,’ in a Swedish accent.”

“So! You think I’m funny, huh?” She pulled her hand free with ladylike hauteur and slid down until the water lapped her chin.

“That’s right, madam, I do,” Prothero said, eyeing her narrowly. “Not to mention incredibly sexy. Come here.”

With both hands he scooped into the water, wetting the sleeves of his bathrobe up to the elbows, and pulled her up under the arms until they were both standing, his bathrobe open, her wet breasts pressing spongily against his hairy chest. He stooped and picked her up in his arms, a hot wet desirable woman, faintly steaming.

Prothero frowned. “Just one logistical handicap.”

“Oh?”

“Glasses. Fogged. Can’t see my way to the bedroom.”

“No logistical handicap at all,” said the UN secretary-general huskily. She unhooked his glasses and flipped them over her shoulder. They landed in the lavender-scented water with a plop.

For a reason Dr. Ruth Patton had never been able to figure out, from 6:00
P.M.
onward was the busiest admissions period of the twenty-four-hour schedule. People collapsed on the streets and were ferried in by ambulance or staggered in themselves to receive treatment at the Manhattan Emergency Hospital in the dilapidated eight-story building on East Sixty-eighth Street that had once housed the Cornell School of Medicine.

The admissions department resembled a battlefield casualty clearing station. Anoxia and pollution cases were sprawled on chairs or laid out on stretchers on the floor, so tightly packed that there was barely enough room to move among them. There was little more she could do except make an instant diagnosis, classifying them as terminal—requiring hospitalization—or short stay. In the latter case they were given a whiff of oxygen, drugs to clear their bronchial tubes, and sent on their way. Orderlies followed her, sorting out the patients according to the red or blue stickers on the soles of their shoes.

Then it was on to the wards.

The unwritten policy of the hospital was not to give anyone over the age of fifty-five a bed. Better to save the life of a younger person than waste bed space on someone whose life expectancy was only a few years at best. Ruth hated the policy. More than once she had been reprimanded for admitting a patient above the “death line.” She had even falsified the records, subtracting five and sometimes ten years from the patient’s age and slipping him through the net.

Fred Walsh, aged sixty-three, had slipped through. He lay shrouded in a plastic oxygen tent, a small wiry man with spiky gray hair and watery brown eyes, who from the day he arrived had not uttered one word of complaint. He had the native New Yorker’s caustically laconic wit, honed to a fine art by a lifetime spent as a cutter in the Manhattan rag trade. Ruth didn’t know why she had admitted Fred when she had rejected hundreds of others—some just as bad as he, some younger. Yet a week ago she had written “Walsh, Frederick Charles; Male; Caucasian; age 52” on the pink admissions sheet after an examination lasting no more than a minute.

In her heart of hearts she suspected a reason. Fred reminded her of Grandpa Patton, the same slight body that was nevertheless as tough as old boots. She remembered her grandfather with much affection; he had taught her to ride in the summer vacations back in Columbus, Ohio, a million years ago.

Ethically it was wrong, of course, she knew that. But was it any less ethical than turning people out onto the streets on the basis of an arbitrary death line? Didn’t Fred Walsh deserve at least the same chance as the thousands of others who sought refuge and help in these hopelessly overcrowded wards staffed by doctors and nurses working ceaselessly to save as many lives as possible, be they black, white, yellow, brown, young, or old?

“Hey, you’re looking better today,” she told him brightly, which wasn’t an outright lie. Indeed there was a spot of color in his sagging cheeks and his lips were noticeably less blue. “How’re you feeling, Fred?”

“Reminds ... me ... of... my... honey... moon.” Even with oxygen he had to draw a deep breath between each word.