by Karen Dionne
To her left she saw movement, the usual welcoming committee of dark shapes scurrying low to the ground. She tapped the horn in greeting and congratulated herself for not shuddering. The rats weren’t the only ones capable of adapting.
When she’d first realized she was sharing her summer home with creatures other than penguins and elephant seals, she’d been appalled to think that once again man’s introduction of nonnative species had ruined what was supposed to be a pristine part of the planet. The rats had to have come off the whaling ships, surviving and flourishing by learning to hunt as a pack. Zo postulated they did their hunting at the ice shelf’s leading edge, and while she had no direct evidence to back up her theory, an Internet search supported her conclusion: brown rats had been known to develop pack behavior under extreme circumstances, particularly when they were descended from a single pair. She had no idea how many infested the continent, but suspected the numbers weren’t high; while rats were prolific breeders, conditions weren’t exactly conducive to multiplication.
The rats paced her as she drove, running faster when she sped up, slowing down when she did the same in a cross-species game of follow-the-leader she had actually begun to look forward to. Rats were highly intelligent—it was one of the reasons they were such successful survivors—and lacking more ordinary amusements, Zo got a kick out of playing animal trainer.
Eventually the rats disappeared behind an ice hummock and she turned her attention back to her driving. Off in the distance she could see open water and the speck that was her hut on the pebbled shore. The hut seemed to shimmer against the horizon. She blinked, thinking it was a trick of the distance and the low angle of light, but the effect continued. She checked her watch. No wonder she couldn’t see straight—all those extra unscheduled vomit stops had stretched the five-hour trip out to seven. She massaged her neck, then rolled down the window, preferring the possibility of frostbite over the certainty of falling asleep at the wheel.
Above the Hägglunds’s usual metallic clatter came a low rumbling reminiscent of faraway thunder, or a highway busy with trucks. She cocked an ear, hoping the noise wasn’t coming from the engine. Sam, the maintenance guy, was a fanatic about keeping the vehicles in shape, but the cold was a difficult enemy, and something was always breaking down. The way things had been going for her lately, it would be just her luck for the Hägglunds to quit when she was as far from the station as possible.
The rumbling grew louder, accompanied now by regular, concussive thumps. The vibrations thrummed through the floorboards, making her thermos jump up and down as though it were possessed. She shut off the engine. The Hag clanked to a stop, but the thumping continued. She climbed out onto the track and cupped a hand to her ear, rotating slowly to pinpoint the source, but could see nothing out of the ordinary.
As she reached for her binoculars, there was a sharp crack and a huge crevasse opened directly alongside her. The Hägglunds slewed sideways. Zo scrambled into the driver’s seat and turned the key, wrenching the wheel to the right and away from the flag line. She jammed the pedal to the floor. Earthquakes in Antarctica were as rare as parrots, but whatever seismic activity was brewing, she had to get off the ice shelf, and fast.
Suddenly there was a tremendous jolt, followed by an Armageddon-like boom. Zo gripped the wheel as the Hägglunds spun a full 180 degrees, pointing her back in the direction from which she’d come. Off in the distance, a miles-long spume shot up from the surface like jets in a fountain. The vapor cloud rose high into the air until it had covered the sun and the water turned to ice, the ice crystals refracting the sunlight in a kaleidoscope of rainbows before falling like hoarfrost to the ground. Gradually, the atmosphere cleared. Zo realized the booming had stopped.
Hands shaking, she turned the vehicle around. Things happened differently in the southern hemisphere: Water drained in reverse and the man in the moon dangled upside down, but this was something else. She reached for the gearshift, then hesitated. Something about the ocean didn’t look right. She picked up her binoculars and squinted, then wiped the condensation off the lenses and tried again. The surface was definitely bulging upward, building and swelling like a fast-growing cancer into a huge, tsunami-like wave. As she watched, the wave crested and spilled over in a furious gray froth, heading straight for the shore.
She jammed the Hägglunds into reverse, then stopped again. The crevasse. Certain death behind her; the outcome in front only slightly less so, with seconds to choose. She couldn’t outrun the tsunami any more than had Thailand’s doomed thousands, and with the crevasse yawning behind her, where would she run to? When the wave reached her—if it reached her—at least she’d still have a chance. The Hag was a monster of a truck, solid and heavy, and with luck by the time the wave hit, the worst of its power would be spent.
She closed her eyes and made her decision. Curiously, what came to mind as she waited were not thoughts of her husband or her unborn child, it was her research. Not “who would carry on” if she were to die, but “what did it matter?” She’d been so sure she was making an important contribution by studying the ice shelf, but her altruism had been misplaced before. There were so many things wrong with the world—so many causes, but in the end it wasn’t the cause, it was the people who mattered, the ones who—
She stopped, suddenly realizing that the time of her death had passed. Apparently her name was written in her Maker’s appointment book for another day. She opened her eyes. Aside from a few small ripples, the ocean was calm. There was no more rumbling, no water spraying like geysers into the sky, no ice shelves splitting apart, no monster waves barreling toward the shore. Everything was as before with one exception.
Her hut was gone.
Chapter 7
Los Angeles, California
Ben buttoned his shirt and knotted his tie as he stood outside his bathroom door, waiting. Built back in the sixties, the house was an anachronism; one of the few left in the neighborhood that had been constructed in the era before two or more baths were de rigueur. Predictably, the lack of multiple facilities hadn’t been a problem until Sarah hit her teens. Now he shifted from foot to foot like a two-year-old and wondered if he could get away with sneaking a leak in the laundry tub.
“Sarah!” he shouted for the third time and rapped his knuckles against the door. “That’s long enough!”
“You know she can’t hear you,” Paula said as she squeezed past him carrying a basket full of dirty clothes.
“She’s been in there for . . .” He checked his watch. “Eleven minutes! Sarah! Turn off that water this instant!”
Silence followed. Then the toilet flushed and Sarah emerged, steam billowing around her like dry ice on the set of a low-budget space movie.
He shook his finger. “Eleven minutes, Sarah! You had that water blasting for eleven full minutes. You should know better. Think how many gallons you just wasted. Your mother could have done another load of laundry. I could have watered the yard.” He paused to catch his breath and search her face for signs of repentance.
She knotted her robe tighter around her waist. Her face was pink. “I’m sick of talking about water!” she shouted, and flounced off down the hall. “Why don’t you just go make some more!”
“She’s only thirteen,” Paula said as she sprinkled a handful of fat-free cheese over the scrambled-egg substitute sizzling on the stove.
“Exactly.” Ben popped two slices of whole wheat out of the toaster and reached for the tub of soy spread. “Old enough to know better.”
“All she knows is that she wants to wash her hair.”
“Well, she can’t go on wasting water like that. One day she’s going to turn on the tap and nothing will come out.”
“Yeah, and she should think about all the poor people in other parts of the world who don’t have it as good as she does,” Sarah said as she clomped into the kitchen wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and bell-bottom blue jeans, teetering like a stilt-walker on three-inch platform heels. Ben bit back his usu
al comment. Paula had promised him Sarah’s pseudo-hippie look was just a phase, but he hated to see the clothes his parents’ generation had worn as a symbol of their idealism mutated into a fashion statement. Sarah had adopted their music as well: the Stones, the Doors, Joe Cocker. Ben sometimes felt as though he were living in a time warp. He couldn’t get used to Joplin’s harsh, sexy vocals leaking out from under his daughter’s bedroom door. And just the other day he’d caught her downloading pictures of Jimi Hendrix off the Internet. A part of him was proud that his parents’ music had stood the test of time, but as her father, he felt obliged to point out that both Jimi and Janis had died young of drug and alcohol abuse.
“Yeah, and what about the girls my age who can’t even go to school because they have to spend hours and hours every day walking miles to fetch the family’s water?” Sarah folded a napkin around the raspberry Pop-Tart her mother had toasted for her and took a bite. “Oh yeah, and don’t forget to tell me how heavy the jugs are and how hot the sun is!”
Ben opened his mouth to reply, but Sarah was quicker. Grabbing her lunch sack from the counter, she escaped out the door.
Ben spent the next hour trapped behind the wheel of his white Toyota Prius, inching along with the other commuters in the bottleneck that passed for L.A.’s morning rush hour. Rush hour. What a misnomer. When he’d first come to Los Angeles, Ben had been outraged at the smog, the congestion, the pollution. Growing up in Michigan’s far north, all he had known were towering pine trees, and vast blue Great Lakes, and the glorious red of swamp maples in the fall. The air was pure, the water clean. In his hometown, a half dozen cars waiting to pull onto Main Street constituted a traffic jam, and started the locals arguing about the need for a traffic signal.
At UCLA, it hadn’t taken long to find his niche. He and a handful of other engineering students formed a loosely knit group that had strong sympathies to Greenpeace. After a year of sit-ins and protests, their glory moment had come when a select twelve chained themselves to the gates of a nuclear power plant to mark the anniversary of the date on which twelve brave others sailed a small boat into the U.S. atomic test zone off Amchitka Island. Ben kept a folder of newspaper clippings detailing his group’s exploits in the bottom drawer of his desk. He had always intended to show them to Sarah when she was old enough to grasp the fine line that differentiated lawlessness and conviction. Now, recalling the morning’s argument, he wondered if he ever would.
He lifted his foot off the brake, idled forward, braked, then crept forward again, keeping an eye on the taillights in front of him as he reached for the bottle of water in the cup holder and smiled at the rainbow-colored label in his hand. Charlie MacLean. Now there was a man with big ideas. While everyone in his hometown knew theirs was the best-tasting water on earth, only Charlie had taken the initiative to bottle and sell it. His business was reasonably successful, too, though in Ben’s opinion, Charlie’s could never be more than a regional product. Consumers liked their water packaged with trendy names like Virgin Kiwi or Bad Frog Pond Water, not something as obscure and unpronounceable as Tahquamenon. In fact, he sometimes wondered if Charlie’s business would have gone under without his support. Ben had the water shipped out to L.A. by the caseload. It was all he drank. A small indulgence, it reminded him of home.
He took a swallow. Water. Without it, there would be no life. Every animal and plant on earth needed it. Viewed from space, the globe was an ocean of blue, 70 percent of it covered with water. Most of it was saltwater and therefore undrinkable, but even if the 1 percent that was fresh and accessible was evenly distributed, it would still be enough to sustain two or even three times the world’s population. And there was the irony. Despite the abundance, the earth was in crisis. Uneven distribution, pollution, abuse of the aquifer—it all amounted to a global water shortage that had scientists and politicians around the world on the verge of panic. The Ogallala Aquifer was being depleted fourteen times faster than nature could replenish it; Silicon Valley had more water-polluting EPA Superfund sites than anywhere in the United States. Thirty percent of the groundwater beneath Phoenix was similarly contaminated, and the Colorado River was so oversubscribed that by the time it passed though the seven states tapping into it, there was virtually nothing left to go out to sea. Even Ben’s beloved Great Lakes were down twenty-two inches.
And yet on a global scale, the situation was even worse. The world’s population was exploding, and the demand for water was increasing along with it—only at twice the rate. The average American used 130,000 gallons every year; industry claimed another 100,000 to make his car. The cropland that was paved over to make the highways he drove on and the lots he parked in resulted in the continents losing an astounding 6,400 billion cubic feet in run-off every year. Joni Mitchell had gotten it right when she sang the warning decades earlier, but no one was listening. Admittedly, Ben’s iceberg water project was only a stop-gap measure, but like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, he had to do something to forestall disaster.
He recapped the bottle and returned it to the cup holder. Paula always said he tried too hard to carry the world’s problems on his shoulders, and it was true he had enough trouble right here at home. That argument this morning with Sarah. He hated being at odds with his only daughter. She used to worship him; now he’d gladly settle for a little respect. Not that he was so unworthy. He worked hard to be the cool dad: He took her to karate class every Saturday morning, and last Christmas, he’d included Cassie when the family went snowboarding at Vail. At thirty-nine, he had a full head of thick, Finnish-blond hair, and while he was short, he was fit—even if he was a myopic engineer who spent his days behind a desk.
“Make more water,” Sarah had said. The remark had stung at the time, but now he smiled. It was actually rather clever. She was so smart. He wanted to tell her that you couldn’t really make water, that the total amount of water on earth neither increased nor decreased. It was finite. It just circulated endlessly, from the oceans, to the atmosphere, to the land, to the rivers, and back to the oceans again.
Maybe he could have gotten her attention if he’d told her the water she wasted in her shower that morning had once quenched the thirst of a dinosaur.
“Congratulations!” Adam burst into Ben’s office moments after Ben’s arrival, brandishing a sheet of paper and an unlit cigar. He victory-danced across the room, pumped Ben’s hand like a politician, stuffed the cigar into Ben’s shirt pocket, and handed him a fax.
“One thousand square miles?” Ben dropped into his chair. “This is incredible! The biggest one yet!” He grabbed his calculator and started pushing buttons.“Seven hundred billion gallons?”
Adam grinned.
“Okay.” Ben traded the calculator for a legal pad. “Now we get busy. Call Eugene down in Chile and give him the coordinates. Tell him to drop whatever he’s doing and take his team right out. Then call Atlantic Transport. Tell them we need their tankers to begin hauling water in two weeks. No—make that ten days. And if they’re already scheduled, make sure they know it’ll be worth their while.” He looked up. “Does Gillette know?”
“Not yet. I figured you should be the one to do the honors.”
Adam had that right. After all the guff Ben had taken over the past few months, it was about time he got to deliver good news. “What about Quentin?” Quentin Fair-banks was Ben’s on-site operations director. A fellow University of Michigan graduate (engineering; aerospace science), Quentin would have been Ben’s first choice for the job even if he hadn’t been Gillette’s brother-in-law.
“No one knows,” Adam said. “Just you, me, and that little piece of paper there.”
“Good. In that case, bring Quentin up to speed as soon as you get through to Eugene. Tell him to notify his team, and I’ll have Janice call with the details as soon as she’s booked their flight.” He put down his pen. “That should do it for now. Meanwhile, make sure everyone understands we need to keep a tight lid on this. We don’t want word to get out unt
il we’re actually making water.”
“Uh, sorry, boss. No can do.” Adam indicated the fax. “That came in over the wires.”