Last Gasp (5 page)

“And what’s the answer, mastermind?”

“Nobody yet knows. We do know that since about 1850 there’s been a ten to fifteen percent increase in carbon dioxide in the air, which is where you get your greenhouse effect from. Most people don’t understand that our atmosphere is heated from below, by radiated heat from the earth’s surface. The sun’s rays come through, heat us up, and then because of the added carbon dioxide and water vapor can’t get out again. The heat gets trapped; ergo, we all turn into tomatoes.”

“Wonderful.” Nick raised his can. “I’ll drink to that.”

Chase reached out and pressed his arm. “Before you do, my junkie friend, answer this: Where has all the extra carbon dioxide gone to?” Nick blinked. “Why, don’t they know?” He seemed mildly interested at last.

“Nope. We produce an extra twenty billion tons a year—probably nearer thirty—and less than fifty percent of that increase has been detected in the atmosphere. You could win the Nobel by answering that.”

“Why don’t you try? You’re the marine biologist.”

“But not an atmospheric physicist,” Chase pointed out sensibly. He looked down at the piece of creased paper on his knee, wondering if the Russian had found the answer to that puzzle. Was the extra C0
₂
being absorbed into the polar oceans? They were the usual C0
₂
sinks— Then it struck him with a small chilling shock. Something he’d only this moment realized. For of course the absolutely crucial question was how long could the oceans keep on absorbing the extra carbon dioxide that year by year was increasing due to man’s industrial activities? Surely there must come a time when the oceans reached saturation point. What then? How would that affect the complex interweaving of atmosphere, oceans, and landmass and the life-forms that depended on them?

Watching him, Nick said, “For God’s sake, you look like somebody who’s lost a quid and found a rusty nail. I’ve told you, Gav, stop fretting over it. It isn’t your problem.”

“Perhaps it is my problem,” Chase said quietly.

“You’re too damn serious for your own good.”

“Yours too.”

“Mine?” Nick snorted. “Let me tell you what my only problem is—whether or not Doug Thomas is on that Hercules tomorrow with a little plastic bag.”

“What the hell does Banting think he’s playing at?” Chase said, suddenly angry. “I wouldn’t put him in charge of a piss-up in a brewery.”

Nick tutted. “I do wish you wouldn’t employ these vulgar northern expressions. They lower the tone of this establishment.” He gazed around with feigned rapture at the cramped, muggy room with its decrepit furniture and makeshift bar and the motley collection of scientists, most of them bearded and unkempt. It had all the charm of an East End flophouse.

“Well, thank God I’m leaving soon,” Chase said with genuine feeling. “Back to sanity and civilization.”

“And sex,” said Nick with such lugubrious envy that Chase couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

The four-engined ski-shod C-130 landed the next afternoon right on schedule, taking advantage of the paltry rays cast by a centimeter of sun peeping reluctantly over the horizon. It was a clear calm day with the wind down to 15 knots, the sky a magnificent deep magenta, and everyone not engaged with some pressing duty was on the surface to greet the aircraft. Any diversion brought a welcome break in routine.

With typical thoroughness the Americans had sent a three-man medical team equipped with a special stretcher onto which the injured man was carefully placed, made comfortable, and strapped down. Chase had to admit grudgingly that he was receiving the best possible care and attention.

He stood with Nick Power and several others watching the stretcher being taken on board through the rear drop-hatch. Professor Banting was a little way off with the American in charge of the operation, a young executive officer named Lloyd Madden, who had the alert, eagle-eyed look of a military automaton. Probably brushed his teeth the regulation number of strokes, Chase conjectured sourly, prepared to find fault at the least excuse.

When the stretcher had disappeared into the hold of the Hercules, Chase left the group he was with and wandered across. Banting paused in midsentence and gave him a fisheyed stare. Chase ignored it and stuck out his mittened hand.

“Lieutenant? I’m Gavin Chase.”

“Yes—Dr. Chase. You’re the one who found him on the ice, so Professor Banting informs me.” Soft voice, hard eyes.

“That’s right. I thought he’d pissed on his chips.”

The young lieutenant frowned, making his hatchet face inside the red parka hood sharper still. “Excuse me?”

“Dead. Zilch,” Chase said. “Nearly but not quite.”

Lieutenant Madden raised his smooth chin and brought it down in a swift, decisive nod. Chase sniffed rosewater on the wind. “Right,” the lieutenant said, as if having deciphered a garbled message over a faulty land-line.

“Who is he? Any idea?”

“Not yet. We’re hoping to find out.”

“I’ll bet you are,” Chase muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

Chase wasn’t good at placing American accents but this one sounded to him to be cultured New England, very gentle, polite, with hardly any inflection. The gentle politeness, he suspected, was an exceedingly thin veneer.

“He’s Russian, isn’t he?”

Lieutenant Madden’s eyes shifted in Banting’s general direction, then snapped back. “Yes ... that is, we believe so.”

It would take a stick of dynamite in every orifice to make the American offer a candid opinion, Chase felt. He said, “You seem very anxious to get hold of him, considering you’ve no idea who he is.”

“Anxious? In what way?”

“You’ve sent an aircraft two thousand miles on a special flight. You’ve come personally to oversee the operation. And you’re moving somebody in a serious condition who ought not to be moved at all.”

“Are you a medical doctor, Dr. Chase? I understood you were a marine biologist.” Still the soft voice and gentle tone, but the demarcation between Chase’s personal concern and professional standing had been clearly drawn. In other words, butt out, buster.

Professor Banting, ever the pedant, closed ranks. “I don’t have to remind you, Dr. Chase, that we’ve had this discussion once before. This matter has nothing whatsoever to do with you. Both Lieutenant Madden and myself are acting on instructions from a higher authority. Please understand that we are simply doing our best to carry them out. ” Chase said stubbornly, “Even if it kills the patient.”

“Dr. Chase, we have a full range of medical facilities at McMurdo. This is for the best, believe me. He’ll be well treated and looked after, you have my word.” Lieutenant Madden’s eyes thawed a little. “I’ll even have the medic send you a progress report, how’s that?”

They must think him stupid. He didn’t like being soft-soaped. He stared levelly at the American. “You can’t seriously believe he’s a security risk, not with a broken back.”

“This isn’t a security matter, Dr. Chase. Leastwise, not military security.” Lieutenant Madden lowered his voice as if taking Chase into his confidence. “Between us, we do have some information. We think—we’re not sure yet—that he’s a member of a Soviet oil prospecting team. We’ve known for some time that they’ve been secretly exploring the continent for oil deposits, which as you may know is in contravention of the Antarctic Treaty, ratified by sixteen nations. We’ve no hard evidence to support this, but if we can come up with dates, locations, even some of their findings from an eyewitness, then it might persuade the USSR to pull out before the whole thing blows up into a major international incident. Naturally we don’t want the Soviets looking for oil behind our backs, but even less are we seeking an energy confrontation with them on what until now has been neutral ground.”

“I see.” Chase breathed twin plumes of steam into the blisteringly cold air. Banting stamped his feet, looking almost relieved.

Lieutenant Madden leaned forward. “I’d appreciate it, Dr. Chase, if this didn’t go any further.” One intelligent man appealing to the integrity and good sense of another. “You understand.”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Fine.” The American’s thin lips twitched into something resembling a smile. “I knew I could rely on you.”

He shook hands with them both, gave a courtesy salute, and walked briskly across the packed snow to the waiting aircraft, whose engines had been kept idling all the time it was on the ground. At 65 degrees below zero F. the fuel in its tanks would have frozen solid.

The C-130 taxied into the wind and took off, snow spurting from its skis in a billowing cloud, and in seconds the wing and fuselage lights were bright winking stars against a sky already darkening into the twenty-two-hour night.

Chase strolled back with Nick to the entrance ramp, not hearing his lament that Doug Thomas hadn’t materialized with the little plastic bag. He was thinking instead of the perfectly sincere expression on the sharp young face of Lt. Lloyd Madden, and of his equally sincere explanation, so confidential, so plausible, so well rehearsed.

Three days later, during the changeover at McMurdo Station, Chase learned from a U.S. Army doctor that the Russian had died of a brain hemorrhage on the operating table. He wasn’t a bit surprised. The poor bastard had never stood a chance. From a bucket seat forward of the cargo compartment in the smooth silver belly of a C-121 Lockheed Super Constellation, Chase gazed down on the swathes of blue and green that marked the varying depths and different currents in the ocean. They were six hours out from Antarctica, with another four to go before landing at Christchurch.

As the aircraft droned on he thought about the dead man, about the piece of paper carefully folded in his diary, about the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater. But none of it seemed to get him anywhere at all.

The research vessel
Melville,
two days out from San Diego, steamed at quarter speed through the gently rolling Pacific swell. On a towline one hundred yards astern, the RMT (Rectangular Mid-Water Trawl) scooped surface water to a precisely calibrated depth of two meters, capturing the tiny mesopelagic creatures on their upward migration from the middle depths.

Part of the fleet belonging to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the
Melville
was on a shakedown cruise for the Marine Biology Research Division, testing a new type of opening-closing release gear. It was operated from the afterdeck on instructions from the monitoring room amidships, and it was Cheryl Detrick’s and Gordon Mudie’s task to watch and report on the trawl’s performance. After nearly two hours Cheryl was bored to tears. Not so much with deck duty as with Gordon and the fact that despite nil encouragement, he kept coming on strong. He was tall, skinny, with lank mousy hair that straggled in the breeze, and a gaping loose-lipped grin that reminded her of Pluto’s. She thought him unattractive and charmless, while he thought he was making a first-rate impression.

Gordon stood by the winch, happy in his ignorance, while Cheryl kept lookout through Zeiss binoculars. Both were graduate students working on a research project for Dr. Margaret Delors, who for ten years or more had been gathering data on the eastern subequatorial Pacific.

“Jeez, it’s hot,” Gordon complained, fanning himself and stating the obvious. “Don’t you think so, Sherry?”

Cheryl continued watching the RMT. She hated being called Sherry. “Release gear open,” she reported into the button mike and received the monitoring room’s acknowledgment over the headset. Now another fifteen minutes of Gordon’s witty repartee and inane grin. Lord deliver us ...

Moving to the rail she did a slow sweep of the placid ocean. After a moment she removed the headset and dangled it on a metal stanchion. The breeze ruffled her cropped sun-bleached hair. All through university she’d never cut it once, until it reached her waist, and then a friend had advised her that she really ought to style it to suit her height and figure. Which Cheryl interpreted as meaning that girls of medium stature with big tits looked dumpy with waist-length hair.

Gordon leaned his bony forearms on the rail and beamed at her, full of bright, sincere, lecherous interest. She might have liked him if he hadn’t been so damned obvious. He was probably too honest, she reflected. The guys she fancied were devious bastards, some of them real chauvinist pigs at that, which was a trait she didn’t admire in herself. But there had to be a physical turn-on, no matter who it was, and Gordon didn’t qualify.

“It was your dad, wasn’t it, who wrote the book? You’re the same Detrick, aren’t you?” He was trying manfully to keep the conversation rolling, and Cheryl felt a slight twinge of compassion.

“That’s me.” Cheryl smiled. “The nutty professor’s daughter.”

“Somebody told me he could have been really big at Scripps—even the director if he’d wanted—and he just went off into the blue.” Gordon waved his hand. “An island a zillion miles from nowhere. What made him do it?”

“He hates people,” Cheryl said flippantly. She was tempted to add, “It runs in the family,” but didn’t. Gordon was a pain in the ass, but she didn’t want to make a cheap remark for the sake of it.

“Is that right? Does he hate people?” Gordon was giving her his intense moony stare, perhaps hoping he’d discovered a topic of mutual interest.