Last Gasp (50 page)

The pump churned and sighed
aaaaaahhhh
.

Chase gripped the microphone, which felt cold and slippery. He couldn’t think straight. The past was all mixed up with the present. And the future.

When he didn’t answer, Sturges said over his shoulder, “A few months ago Mr. Gelstrom suffered an attack that left him dependent on drugs and this respirator lung. The condition was diagnosed as acute anoxia. Mr. Gelstrom is prepared to back the project with all the resources, personal, financial and corporate, at his disposal.”

Chase bent forward, his shoulders shaking. Spittle hung on his beard. He was laughing so hard he nearly choked. Gelstrom caught in his own trap. He’d helped inflict the damage and now he was trying to buy his way out. Ten million dollars for the promise of salvation. No, make that fifty million. Or better still, a hundred million. Two hundred. Whatever it takes. As much as you need. Just name your price.

But there was a fatal flaw and Chase exulted in it. With a deep gloating satisfaction he spelled it out, as plainly as the words on the screen.

“It won’t work, it’s too late,” he said, wiping his mouth. Hysterical laughter quivered in his throat. “You’ve reaped the profits from all this and you’ve reaped your own destruction in the bargain. What did you think, Gelstrom? That if we succeeded you’d get your life back? Is that it?” Chase shook his head. His triumph was exhilarating, like a surge of adrenaline through his bloodstream, and it also disgusted him. “Your disease is terminal. You’re going to die, Gelstrom, and there’s nothing you can do about it—not even if you spent every last cent you possess.”

The big blond man at his shoulder said, “That isn’t what—”

But Chase cut him short. “It’s too late, too fucking late! This project, even if it succeeds, is a lifetime too late for him! Don’t you understand? He’s got years and this will take decades, perhaps centuries.”

He stood over the transparent shell, fists clenched, staring down into two sightless eye sockets in the shriveled face. The hand moved, felt for the keyboard, tapped. The dot raced across the screen.

I KNOW ALL THIS. I EXPECT NOTHING FOR MYSELF. LIKE YOU, DR. CHASE, I HAVE A SON. NINE YEARS OLD. I WANT HIM TO LIVE, TO HAVE SOMEWHERE TO LIVE. YOU WANT YOUR SON TO LIVE. I HAVE MONEY. YOU HAVE KNOWLEDGE. TOGETHER WE CAN SAVE THEM. PERHAPS.

Chase said nothing. The silence in the trailer was broken only by the rhythmic churning sound of the pump and its sighing aaaaaahhhhh.

It happened just as Prothero got out of the car, on the steps leading up to the entrance, inside the bulletproof screens. There must have been fifty of them, milling around in their black robes and chanting one of their meaningless repetitive dirges.

For a few moments Prothero was completely surrounded, almost submerged. He struggled through them, jostled from side to side, not making much headway until three UN security guards pushed forward, casting bodies aside, clearing a path.

Prothero had been an atheist since the age of fourteen. He never had and never could understand how rational and supposedly intelligent people could fall for such claptrap. It was a spiritual crutch, that was his opinion. But what depressed him more was the fact that most of these were kids, in their teens and early twenties. As for what they believed in—or what crank sect they belonged to—he hadn’t the faintest notion. There were so many quasi-religious groups about these days that he couldn’t be bothered to differentiate between them.

That’s supposing there was any difference.

The green overalls hid his robes. The face mask and respirator (nonfunctioning) gave him the appearance of any other member of the maintenance staff. He carried the cylinder in plain sight across his shoulder so that the guard in his glass cubicle at the subbasement entrance hardly spared him a glance before returning to his glossy porn magazine.

In a deserted locker room Mara threw off the mask and respirator and stripped off the overalls. He fitted the cylinder into its harness and arranged his robes to cover it. He attached the hose and nozzle to his right arm with tape and made sure the butane lighter was in the small leather pouch at his waist.

There was no need to rehearse. Mara had practiced the sacred ritual many times in dummy runs. In his mind the sequence was sharp and exact, the operational manual’s instructions etched into his memory as if he had the page in front of him.

1.    Left hand/grasp/flick—ignition

2.    Right hand/extend/twist—jet

3.    Left hand/apply/withdraw—flame

4.    Right hand/advance/aim—target

5.    Right hand/aim/sweep—burn

6.    Right hand/sweep/approach—conflagration

7.    Right hand/retract/end—death

Mara came out of the locker room and moved hunchbacked to the elevators. There he paused, his finger hovering over the panel of buttons. Direct route to the assembly hall unwise. Guards. Official passes. Access points under surveillance. Corridors patrolled.

His crouching shadow slid along the wall. He turned a corner and eventually came to an illuminated sign:
EMERGENCY EXIT.

Underneath it a printed notice, red capitals on white.

CAUTION!

SEALED ENCLOSURE ENDS HERE.

OXYGEN LEVEL IN STAIRWELL.

BELOW TOLERABLE LIMIT.

RESPIRATORS REQUIRED.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Mara closed his eyes. His awareness shrank to a single glowing point. His breathing slowed. His heartbeat became like the slow ponderous beat of a drum. Gradually the world became distant and faded away. Everything was quiescent.

He had to use both hands to release the door from its thick rubber seal and to overcome the pressurized air inside the building. The stairwell was lit by caged red globes. The door hissed and thumped solidly shut behind him, and Mara began to climb the steps in the red gloom.

“You don’t feel sick or dizzy or anything? Sure?”

“I’m all right now. Honestly.”

Cheryl ruffled Dan’s hair and he squirmed away, embarrassed.

“Don’t! I’m all right.”

“I certainly hope so.” Cheryl frowned at Chase accusingly.

Nick said, “He was perfectly okay in Princeton. Jen said he ate like a horse.” He winked at Dan. “Must have been all that female cosseting.”

The four of them were in Chase’s hotel room on Broadway, which overlooked what had once been the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts. Since the city’s bankruptcy the center had drifted downward, from recording studio to supermarket to discount furniture store. Now it was a squatters’ refuge, charity clothing shop and soup kitchen combined. In a sense it had come full circle—the land it occupied from West Sixty-second to Sixty-sixth streets fifty years ago had been the notorious West Side slum area, celebrated in a stage and screen musical.

Chase stood looking out at the murk; even if there’d been something to see he wouldn’t have seen it. He felt restless and nervy, and guilty too. What in hell did he have to feel guilty about? Don’t answer that question. He knew damn well—and it had nothing to do with Dan being sick.

“Is Madam Van Dorn expecting you?” Cheryl asked him, the “Madam” sounding distinctly chilly.

“Yes, but she’s got a heavy schedule today. It’s her annual address to the General Assembly.”

“I still don’t understand, Gavin.” Cheryl wished he’d turn around to face her; he’d been staring out at nothing for the last ten minutes. “You’ve always insisted that we have to change people’s attitudes first, that real progress is impossible politically or scientifically. That was the whole idea behind Earth Foundation, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you’ve agreed to this.” Cheryl shook her head, puzzled and resigned. She couldn’t understand his decision, nor his reluctance to discuss it. This wasn’t a bit like him. “We’ve got our hands full already with Earth Foundation. We can’t do both.”

“There’s no reason why Earth Foundation shouldn’t continue,” Chase said. “But I happen to believe that a project like this has a chance of succeeding. It could make a real and positive contribution.”

“You mean find a practical solution? But you’ve always said that until and unless we can change
people
, change the way they think, nothing else is worth a damn. Don’t you believe that anymore?”

“Yes, but I also believe that as scientists we have a duty to sort out this mess—if it can be sorted out.” At last he turned to her. “Why do you think your father spent years of his life on a lump of rock in the middle of the Pacific? Not for wealth or personal glory, but because he wanted to use his gifts, his talents, whatever, in the service of mankind. That’s what he was best fitted for. So was he wrong? Was his life wasted?”

Their eyes met and locked, yet it seemed to Cheryl that for the very first time she couldn’t see inside him. It was as if a fine gauze separated them, impeding direct communication. It was Chase who broke away, turning back to the shrouded mausoleum of Lincoln Center, and Cheryl said:

“What do you think about this, Nick?”

“About the project? I’m not really sure.” Nick leaned back, hands clasped behind his balding head, gnawing his lip above the frizzy fringe of beard. “In theory there’s no reason why we couldn’t undo the harm we’ve done. That’s point number one. Point number two is how. Point number three—assuming we find the answer to point number two—is do we have the urge and the will to change things for the better?”

“What do you mean, the urge?” Dan asked. He was hunched forward on the arm of the couch, chin propped in his hand.

“I mean that the human race seems to have a collective death wish, like somebody who accepts that cigarettes cause lung cancer and still carries on smoking. Bloody hell, we’ve known for
decades
that we were damaging the environment, perhaps irrevocably, and what’s been our response—the response of a supposedly intelligent species?” His elbows lifted in a shrug. “Just to keep right on doing it.”

“But you think there’s a chance, do you?” Cheryl said.

“What, of finding a scientific solution? Yeah, I think there is, providing the thing’s organized properly and the funds are available.” Cheryl was studying the back of Chase’s head. “Well, they’ve got the organizer, haven’t they?” she said, a small frown on her lightly freckled face. “That only leaves the money.”

There was a silence, and then Chase said, “The money’s there. Ingrid Van Dorn and Prothero have fixed it.”

“The UN is funding it?” Cheryl said in plain disbelief.

Chase turned and leaned on the sill and met her gaze. “No,” he said calmly. “They’ve arranged private sources. Companies. Trusts. Wealthy private individuals. That’s one of the things I want to discuss with them.” He looked at his watch. “In fact I’d better go. Try and catch her before her speech.”

Cheryl didn’t say anything. There was an expression on her face that Chase couldn’t read, and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

At the UN his mood wasn’t helped by a young security officer who looked him up and down as if to imply that Chase was displaying quite remarkable effrontery in asking to see the secretary-general in person. Covering the mouthpiece with a white-gloved hand he smirked sideways at Chase. “I don’t expect you have an appointment, do you?”

There was a blank at the end of the sentence, the “sir” conspicuously missing.

“No, I don’t have an appointment,” Chase replied, his tight smile costing him great effort. “But I think the secretary-general will see me all the same.”

The officer nodded, humoring this imbecile. Then the smirk became fixed and wooden and his eyes glassy as he listened to the voice on the phone. He put the receiver down slowly, made a jerky gesture over his shoulder, and a white-helmeted guard marched forward, stamping to attention.

“Dr. Chase, the secretary-general asks if you wouldn’t mind waiting in the Kurt Waldheim hospitality suite until after the General Assembly. Senator Prothero will join you there shortly.”

Several minutes later, after a ride in the elevator and then a trek behind the guard through a maze of identical corridors, Chase was shown into a large elegantly furnished room with gilt chairs, silken drapes, and chandelier. There was a bar in one corner, and in another, set at an angle, a back-projection movie-size television screen.

Chase helped himself to a whiskey and soda. He switched on the giant TV from the remote-control device on the bar and sat down in a nearby armchair, thinking it an odd time—one-thirty in the afternoon—to be addressing the General Assembly. Then he recalled that the speech was being transmitted live. In Europe it would be timed just right for the early-evening newscast, while on the West Coast it was midmorning. Obviously, Ingrid Van Dorn was hoping to capture the biggest possible worldwide audience.

A huge brown face on the screen was mouthing introductory platitudes. Chase couldn’t decide whether he was a fawning delegate or an unctuous TV anchorman until a four-foot-wide caption came up: Senor
Jose J. Messina, UN Representative, El Salvador.