Last Gasp (7 page)

Then he went into space. As he looked down upon the earth, he thought it was so damned beautiful. He’d been expecting that, of course, having seen with every other person living the color shots of the swirling blue-white planet set against the velvety blackness of space. Still, it was beautiful, no denying it—and vulnerable. That’s what threw him. This incredibly beautiful, peaceful-looking planet floating all alone in the infinite reaches of the cosmos. And although he’d always known this to be true intellectually, now he actually felt the truth of it. He remembered thinking, My God, this is it—and it’s all we’ve got!

In that moment, 130 miles in space, he ceased to be an American citizen and became a citizen of the planet. Every astronaut he knew felt the same. From out there it was all so painfully, horribly obvious that mankind, squabbling and falling out like a pack of ignorant loutish children, was in danger of fouling its own nest. They were mindlessly overpopulating the planet, squandering its resources, filling it with deadly pollution. And all the while demanding more, grabbing more, pushing one another out of the way in a stupid, selfish, greedy scramble.

That experience, that revelation, five years ago, still had the power to make him tremble. It had fueled his determination to do something about it. But what could he do? Wage a one-man crusade against the despoilment of the planet? That was naive and, worse, futile.

A solution of sorts presented itself when, on leaving NASA for the big cruel world outside, he’d been invited by an old friend and classmate from MIT, Bill Inchcape, to join him at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Bill said they needed somebody with his kind of experience to take charge of satellite photography and evaluation. So for the past three years Brad had been head of the department, working in collaboration with the center’s meterologists and atmospheric physicists, people with their heart in the right place, he felt. Yet still it wasn’t enough. In a way he couldn’t explain—even to Binch, who possessed far more technical knowledge and expertise than he did—Brad was gripped by a steadily mounting sense of panic. Time, he was convinced, was rapidly running out.

Years ago he had read somewhere that “we shall be unable to detect any adverse trend on a global scale until it has gone some way in its development.” That’s what really scared him, haunted him—the obsessive fear that the process had already begun, and that by the time it became evident to skeptical scientists and bull-headed politicians, it would be too late.

By then the world would be sliding headlong toward an inescapable ecological doomsday, with nothing for mankind to do but slide helplessly with it.

Brad turned away from the window with its magnificent mountain panorama and sat down at his desk, a small dapper man with a gentle, worried face. He was thirty-four but looked older, and he certainly felt it. He wasn’t eating or sleeping properly, and it upset his wife that he never played with the kids anymore. Gary was seven and Little Pete nearly four and they couldn’t understand why Daddy didn’t respond to their questions and joyful enthusiasms. Joyce blamed him for being forever preoccupied with his work—but it wasn’t that.

Yet how could he explain that he was thinking about them, his own flesh and blood, in the most utterly real way possible? That in his mind’s eye, an image that revolved endlessly like a closed spool of film, he was seeing the heritage his generation was bequeathing theirs.

A dead, polluted, uninhabitable planet.

He looked at his taut, outstretched hands and pressed them to his face, trying to stifle the croaking moan of despair forcing itself from his gut.

Bo Anyango knelt in the baked red earth and fingered the mottled leaves of a coffeebush. The rising sun had just cleared the peaks of a distant mountain range, so the air was still pleasantly cool; yet it was tainted with the sour odor of decaying vegetable matter.

Bo was mystified. Every single bush on his four-acre plot had been ruined. Shriveled discolored leaves were scattered all around, several inches deep in the furrows he had hoed with his own hands, using implements supplied by the Bakura Institute of Agriculture. Like his African neighbors, he had followed instructions and tended his crops just as the mzungu—the European agricultural officer—had shown him. And just like the crops of his neighbors, the coffeebushes had wilted and died. The only means of livelihood for himself, his wife, and five children was now so much rotten, stinking vegetation.

What had gone wrong?

Squatting on his skinny black haunches, Bo looked disconsolately around him. Three years work to prepare the land for the coffee crop he had been assured would fetch a good price totally wasted. He had been told of the miracles the Europeans could bring about with their powders and sprays, and he had been eager to try.
JEG
was the magic word on the side of the canisters. It was an English word, he supposed, though no one had told him its meaning. He had believed in
JEG,
because he had seen the results with his own eyes. Crops that normally would have been stripped bare by hordes of voracious insects, commonplace in this remote region of western Kenya, had flourished and grown to maturity. The valley, once a barren waste, had blossomed. The insects had been defeated—for a while.

Recently, however, some of the pests had reappeared, and in far greater numbers than before. The spider mite—not an insect but a member of the scorpion family—had returned in force, in their millions. Its razor-sharp mouth was specially adapted for piercing and sucking chlorophyll from leaves, and it had a prodigious appetite. In the past the spider mite population had been kept in check by predatory insects and birds, most of which had disappeared since they started using
JEG.
Animals too, he observed, had also gone, some of them found floating belly-up in the streams. Soon the valley would be denuded of vegetation, silent of birdsong, devoid of animal life. Only the vultures and the spider mites would be left.

Bo knew one thing for sure. Without the coffee crop he would be unable to barter for goods, unable to feed himself and his family. He knew also that he was worse off now than he had been before the mzungu came to the valley bringing the miracle of modern science.

Squeezing the rubber bulb between thumb and forefinger, Chase gingerly deposited a globule of fluid on the glass slide and positioned it under the microscope. He adjusted the magnification to a scan of 0.3 mm and the bead of water became a subminiature menagerie of marine life. Sharpening the focus, he concentrated on a particular group and after a few moments identified two subclasses of diatoms called
Centricae
and
Pennatae.
Both types had cases, or frustules, of silica, both were yellowish brown and highly ornamented. The difference lay in the sculptured patterns: In
Centricae
the lines radiated from a central point, whereas in Pennatae they were more or less straight.

Why such diversity in such tiny organisms, less than one millimeter in length? Obviously each was suited to a specific purpose and mode of life, fitted perfectly into its “niche,” yet he couldn’t help but marvel at the seemingly endless proliferation of design and the incredibly minute adaptations to environment.

By his right elbow lay his notebook and several sheets of graph paper, and next to those on the bench his heavily annotated copy of the standard work, Detrick’s
Diatom Growth and Development.
Taking up the book and opening it at one of the sections marked with slips of paper, he refreshed his memory. Another distinguishing feature of the Pennatae variety was that they had a narrow slit—the raphe—running along one or both valves, which enabled them to move independently along the ocean floor. Most species of diatoms were widely distributed throughout the world, and were probably, Detrick had said, the most abundant and adaptable creatures in the oceans, if not on earth.

Chase wrote up his notes, frequently going back to the eyepiece to check a detail, and made rough sketches of the various subclasses to complement his descriptions. He found the ordered routine of lab work deeply satisfying. The slow, painstaking accumulation of observed data, the classifying and cross-referencing, the fragmentary picture slowly emerging—though after four months of steady work he was still a long way away from reaching any kind of conclusion. He shook his head in mute wonder at the amount of work Detrick must have put in to write his monumental study, surely a lifetime’s dedication. Did he have that kind of perseverance? He doubted it; for instance, that specimen of brine he’d examined yesterday. He’d spent damn near three hours distilling it and setting up the test, and he might have been looking at tap water. The sample had obviously been spoiled, contaminated somewhere between collection and the lab. It had come from his last dive, he recalled, when Nick was handling the net. Maybe that explained why it had been low on what one would have normally expected to find in the ocean under the Antarctic Ice Shelf—low on phytoplankton, diatoms, and Ceratium.

Anyway, he’d written off the sample as a botched job and thrown the whole bloody lot down the sink. So much for the objective, dispassionate scientist. No, he thought wryly, a 378-page treatise on marine biology wouldn’t be appearing under the name of Dr. Gavin Chase.

Still, he should have logged it. Supposing it
hadn't
been spoiled and he’d actually destroyed a perfectly valid specimen? But no, that was ridiculous; it would have been a freak result, against all the prevailing evidence and general consensus.

Chase stretched and yawned and glanced at his watch: twenty past four. This being Friday he didn’t have any qualms of conscience about packing up early. George Pelham, his research colleague, had left at three. Off on another weekend hike, Chase supposed. God, that guy must walk ten thousand miles a year. There probably wasn’t a square inch of the British Isles he hadn’t tramped over in his size-ten boots.

It took him only a few minutes to clear away and return the specimen jars to the freezer.

He hung up his white coat and shrugged into his jacket. Then in the mirror next to the wall telephone, he caught sight of his bulging shirtfront. Soft living was catching up to him, that and English beer. He must have put ten pounds on since he got back. He didn’t mind not winning the Nobel, but being overweight was just too much. Bike or pool? He didn’t relish the idea of cycling now that the damp autumn nights were here, so it was down to the baths and twenty-five lengths of slow crawl. Sunday morning, definitely.

He walked up the three flights of bleak concrete stairways to the flat and let himself in, feeling smugly pleased. He was only slightly out of breath.

Normally Angie didn’t finish at the studio till six-thirty, and then went for a drink or two—usually three—with her colleagues from the newsroom, but today she was sitting in an armchair with her feet propped up, clasping a large gin and tonic.

“Like to go to a party, darling?”

“When?” Chase said as if inquiring about the date of his execution.

“Tonight.”

“Where?”

“Archie’s. Somebody’s leaving do and Archie kindly offered. You were specifically invited, nay, commanded to attend. I said yes for both of us.”

Chase draped his jacket over a chair, taking his time and doing it carefully to show he wasn’t annoyed, which he was. He didn’t like Archie Grieve, Angie’s boss, and liked even less her accepting the invitation before asking him. Archie Grieve was one of the breed of tough young Scottish journalists who had infiltrated the media south of the border. They all had pedigrees as spot-welders in the Clydeside shipyards or as Labour party activists, though to judge by Archie, whom Chase had met only once and had nothing in common with, he’d been no nearer to an oxyacetylene torch than Chase had.

For the sake of peace and harmony, however, and because it wasn’t fair to curtail Angie’s social life because of his personal prejudices, he shrugged and nodded and even managed a smile. But she had some gall. What if he’d accepted an invitation without consulting her? Ah-ha! Different story.

“It isn’t a dinner party, I hope?” Chase said, sitting down on the couch and brushing black strands of hair from his eyes.

“No, darling.” Angie gave him her sweetest smile, all dimples, with a slightly muzzy look in her large gray eyes. That was her second large one, he’d bet. “Just a few friends and a buffet and drinkies.”

“Of course, drinkies. Where would your lot be without drinkies? I suppose they’ll all be your media chums in T-shirts, earrings, and Adidas training shoes.”

Angie pouted. “You speak of them as if they weren’t people. They do a job, you know, just like you. I think you’re jealous.”

“Yes, I’m green with it. Or is that envy?”

“They’d like to meet you. I’m sure they’d be fascinated to hear what it’s like in the Antarctic. It’s not everyone who’s had—”

“They know about that?”

“Of course.” Angie took a deep swallow, wiped the residue from her lips, and licked her fingertips. “I didn’t think I was giving away a state secret.”

Chase groaned. It was going to be worse than he feared. A lot of frightfully interesting questions about penguins and polar bears and was it true that Eskimos went around grinning with their gums?