Portent (8 page)

    Distractedly, Rivers replied, 'Slainthero.'

    The gesture seemed to please the other man. He sipped the malt Scotch with relish. 'Initially, I'd like to discuss your experience before the American research aircraft crashed.'

    Rivers stiffened. 'I'm sure you followed the news reports and the various newspaper "insights" afterwards. Didn't they tell you all you need to know?'

    'Superficially, yes. The accident certainly attracted a great deal of media coverage.'

    'Air crashes do. But that's not why I came here. I'm here to find out what you know about Tinkerbell.'

    'All in good time,' said Poggs in an irritatingly benign manner. The girl leaned forward and whispered something in his ear. He patted her cheek, then returned his attention to Rivers. 'Our little dryad tells me you're afraid of us.'

    Rivers almost choked on the whisky. 'Is there any reason I should be?'

    'None at all, although it's only natural that you should be suspicious. After all, you must wonder at our motives. Perhaps that's what gives you fear, and that's something I wish to allay. In most ways, Mr. Rivers, we're a very normal family.'

    'And in others?'

    'Hmn?'

    'You said in most ways you're a normal family.'

    Poggs chuckled. 'May I call you James?'

    'No.'

    'Ah.'

    Rivers finished the Scotch and felt better for it. In this he agreed with his host: whisky was better with its challenge mildly subdued. He balanced the glass tumbler on the arm of his chair, fingers arched over its rim.

    'Another for our visitor, if you will, Diane.'

    Before she could rise, Rivers shook his head. 'Thank you, but no.' A small numbness had set in the centre of his forehead, perhaps as a result of combining pills with alcohol. 'Either we talk privately, or I leave now.'

    Poggs drew a wheezy breath. 'Oh dear, this is not going the way I planned.'

    The plump woman leaned across and squeezed his hand. 'Tact was never one of your strong points, Hugo, and I don't quite understand why you're making such an effort this time. With the way things are in the world today, and given his profession, I'm sure our visitor is a very busy man.' She turned to the climatologist, a no-nonsense expression on her face. 'Firstly though, if only for the sake of good manners, it's time we introduced ourselves to you. Then you and my husband can get on with the business at hand.'

    'There's no need.' He hoped his own expression conveyed impatience to leave.

    'No, there's no need, but as your car is presently stuck nose-first in a ditch, there is time. Now, I'm Barbara Poggs, and as they've nicknamed Hugo Poggsy, I have to suffer Bibby. You can blame that on our grandchildren.' She tapped the boy's head and he grinned up at her. 'Diane you've already met, and sitting by the window over there is Mack-that is his name, not an abbreviation-and without him to help us with our livestock and market garden-we're self-sufficient here, Mr. Rivers-we'd be lost. He's also very good at fixing things, from electric irons to bam roofs and he lives in an apartment above the old stables opposite. You'll have noticed he's a very quiet man.'

    She ruffled the boy's hair and gestured the girl to come over to her. She did so without hesitation, snuggling up tight and reaching round to touch her brother's arm.

    'The children are our little wood nymphs-dryads, you heard Hugo call them-this one is Eva and this one is Josh, although in the great tradition of nicknames, Eva insists on being called Minnie. Heaven knows why, but I suspect a certain cartoon mouse has something to do with it. Fortunately, Josh is quite happy with Josh.'

    She huffed a breath of relief. 'There, done. And now, to break a habit of-oh, a day or so-I shall have something strong too. Diane, a more than average-sized gin and tonic, if you please, and why not join us yourself, dear? I'm sure with the lashing you took in that dreadful storm you're ready for a reviver.'

    Diane rose from the arm of the chair. 'Thank God you took control-Poggsy was making an awful hash of things.' She weaved her slim figure through the furniture to the sideboard again. 'How about you, Mack? Want to forgo your home brew for once and try something civilised?'

    Mack shook his head, his attention averted from Rivers for only a moment. The climatologist was puzzled by the man's attention.

    Bibby gently pushed the two children from her. 'You two go off and play now. Put on your galoshes if you go outside-it'll be very wet and muddy out there.'

    It had been a long time since he had heard the word 'galoshes' and somehow the word relaxed Rivers a little. It was hard to imagine anything sinister about anyone who would use such a bygone term. Or maybe the malt Scotch and the pills were mellowing as well as numbing his brain.

    'If you'll give Mack your car keys he'll haul it out of the ditch with a towrope,' she went on. 'As for me, I shall take my
g-and-t
into the kitchen and prepare lunch. I'd like you to stay for lunch, Mr. Rivers, but the decision is yours.' She rose to take her drink from her daughter-in-law. 'If you believe nothing else, please believe that we are not your enemies.' With that she strode to the door, followed by her small troupe of children and handyman.

    Her last words had startled Rivers. Enemies? Why should they be? Why should they suppose he thought they were? Unease stirred again.

    'Are you sure you won't have that refill?'

    He looked up at Diane, who had brought the Macallan over. There was amusement in her eyes, but it was not mocking. 'Not such a bad idea,' he said, handing her the glass.

    She poured, then left the whisky bottle beside her father-in-law. Poggs took a wheezy breath. 'I suppose there's no gentle way of leading you into this,' he said to Rivers. 'Perhaps that was my mistake in the first place. I really only wanted you to feel comfortable with us, but it seems I've achieved the opposite. If I may, I'd like to take you next door to my study. Perhaps there I can begin to explain why it was so important that we meet.'

    Rivers sipped the Scotch, looking thoughtfully at the other man. Again he tried to remember where he had heard Poggs' name before, but infuriatingly, it wouldn't come to him. 'Okay,' he agreed, rising from the chair. 'Since I've come all this way, and since I'm more than a little intrigued, I'm willing to hear you out.' Poggs rose too, an odd mixture of relief and anxiety on his face. 'Please bring your drink through,' he said, leading the climatologist to the door. 'I've a feeling you might need it.'

    Diane followed them along the hall, and past the stairway; as they stopped outside a closed door and Poggs fumbled in his pockets for a key, she gave Rivers a fleeting smile, perhaps of encouragement.

    'I didn't get a chance to thank you properly,' he said.

    'Like I said at the time, it was fun,' she replied. 'I wouldn't really want to do it again though.'

    Poggs opened the door and went through, but Rivers lingered a moment. 'Are you part of this?' he said to the woman.

    'I'm sorry?'

    'Part of this game Poggs is playing. This petty mystery.'

    Her jawline hardened. 'Oh, it's no game, I can assure you of that. But it is a mystery.' She pushed by him and entered.

    He hesitated before going through himself.

    

    

    The room, like the sitting room they had just left, was light and airy, but this one was untidy with books, papers, stacked journals, and files. A long trestle table stood near its centre, barely a square centimetre of its surface clear of paper debris, while on a comer desk stood a word processor and fax machine. A sizeable beaten-leather chair was positioned at the trestle table, its back to a high French window, outside of which were sun-scorched lawns and vegetable patches. Shelves stocked with files and reference books filled two walls, while a third was covered in cork squares that served as a floor-to-ceiling notice board. This was almost entirely overlaid with press cuttings, clipped magazine articles and typed sheets of paper. Some of the cuttings were marked with red felt-tip. By the window on the fourth wall was a large map of the world, which was studded with coloured pins.

    Poggs was waving a hand at the paper-littered cork wall. 'Take time to look through these if you will, Mr. Rivers. You needn't study them-I'm sure you're more than familiar with most of the reports and articles. I feel it might be useful if you, uh, digest them en masse, as it were, perhaps gain a global perspective.'

    Rivers turned quizzically to Diane. 'Please,' she said.

    By now it wasn't a question of humouring the old boy-Rivers was genuinely curious-but something deep inside him was reluctant to get involved. Apart from the fact that these people were complete strangers to him, his own professional code of conduct could allow no collusion with them. Was Poggs aware of that? Did he realize that Rivers was a member of one of the British working groups specifically set up to investigate the climate phenomena of the past decade? Maybe not, otherwise he wouldn't be suggesting these cuttings might provide a 'global perspective'-he'd know he already had such a view. Still, a quick revision, courtesy of Hugo Poggs, wouldn't do any harm. Placing his glass on a comer of the trestle table, he walked over to the wall-size press collage.

    Every report concerned environmental or climatic disasters of some kind or other, from floods in Bangladesh to drought in America's Midwest. He read the headlines mostly, occasionally glancing at photographs and their captions, or skipping through a paragraph or two included in a typed account. There were stories of hailstones and chronic frosts in southern Australia that destroyed the continent's finest vineyards, starvation in the Horn of Africa, devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean, the Pacific Basin, and even in England. There were earthquakes in Armenia, San Francisco, Italy, Japan and more recently the second great Alaskan earthquake, this one having flattened the city of Anchorage and its neighbours Portage and Whittier.

    Two volcanic eruptions were clipped together: the first was the massive explosion of a broken fissure in Heimaey, a member of the group of small islands just off the coast of Iceland, which had exceeded the damage a similar eruption had caused in 1973 by obliterating the port town completely and turning the harbour into a solid mass of frozen lava; the second was the eruption of Mount Merapi in densely populated central Java, its disgorged superheated gases and ash descending on villages for miles around. Beside these there was a smaller report of an undersea eruption on the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's north-east coastline, a baffling catastrophe that had killed 128 tourists and holidaymakers.

    He skimmed through a lengthy typewritten study on Poland's industrial pollution problem, where in Upper Silesia acid snow had ruined streams and rendered pine forests into slopes and valleys of blackened skeletal stumps, where immense poisonous clouds had formed over towns such as Zabrze, Chorzow, Katowice, to drift and join, staining the very air with their effluent filth-sulphur dioxide, bituminous substances, lead, zinc, magnesium, an endless list of destructive emissions-corrupting the atmosphere, inflicting diseases, turning cities like Krakow into ecological disaster zones. The land itself was spoilt, its waters made toxic. Even though the facts were familiar to him, Rivers could not prevent his anger rising.

    Next to this was a feature cut from a magazine, its grim colour photographs a testament in themselves to the folly of the human greed or perhaps desperation, which had turned the Aral Basin, the once fertile heartland of what had been the Central Asian republics of the USSR, into one vast waste, where a whole sea had vanished, where the soil was so full of salt that nothing would grow on it, where the air itself degenerated everything it touched, from human tissue to buildings, where mothers' milk was too poisonous for their infants to drink, where physical deformity and mental retardation were commonplace.

    Rivers moved on to the next yellowed news item, no longer conscious of Poggs and Diane, who waited patiently, allowing him to read without interruption. Diane eventually moved to the tall window and stared out at the dampened lawns and hedges. Steam was rising, creating a low grey mist, as the sun warmed the earth once more.

    The climatologist read of the deadly morbilli virus that had spread throughout the Mediterranean and even to the coastal shores of England, attacking the brain and nervous systems of the seal and dolphin, so that their corpses drifted in packs on the seas finally to be washed up on to the beaches and rocks. Scientific opinion differed on whether manmade pollution had caused the sickness or had merely weakened the creatures' immune systems to such an extent that they were susceptible to it. One thing was certain, however: the warming of the seas and oceans had enabled the epidemic to spread more easily. Species like the blue whale, the right whale, and the humpback were now down to between one and two per cent of their previous population despite the grave warnings of conservationists in the late '80s, and all sea mammals and sea birds, even those in Arctic and Antarctic regions where men rarely set foot, had accumulated large doses of pesticides, mercury and other polluting elements in their systems.

    He came upon a relatively small item concerning the mass suicide of thousands of penguins at the beginning of the decade. A report next to this dealt with the relocation of endangered species such as the elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, to new game parks in the more favourable climes of Spain, Italy, southern France and North America.

    His anger was fading to a bitter kind of depression as he read on. The warnings had been there for years, but few governments, if any at all, had listened. Eventually they had been forced to take heed because of the increasing disasters and adversities that had befallen virtually every continent and country, and even then they listened only grudgingly.