Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  “What are you talking about, Natassya?” Skrote held her shoulders and stared at her, his heart thudding painfully. “Are they sending you back to Russia? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  Natassya freed herself and sat up, slender and pale in the darkness, and leaned against her raised knees. “Cy, dearest, I don’t see how it can last much longer. When the work here is finished we’ll both be sent home, you to America, me to Russia. There isn’t much left to do now that the Primary Plan has been concluded, for either of us. Starbuck will be shut down and that will be the end—for it and for us.”

  What she said was true—in a sense. Now that the work in Zone 2 was winding to a close there would be no need of the Russian presence on the island. But in another sense she was quite wrong. The Primary Plan was indeed finished, whereas the Secondary Plan was in its infancy, with decades of research ahead. In ten or twenty years time he would still be here, Skrote realized bleakly, alone, Natassya gone with the rest of the Russian observers. He breathed in and out slowly, his head whirling with ideas, notions, plans, a chain reaction of thought like a lightning bolt through his brain.

  “Would you be willing to stay here—with me—if it could be arranged?”

  “Yes, of course,” she answered dully. “But how is that possible when the research will be finished in a few months? We shall have to leave. We will be sent home—”

  Skrote smoothed her hair from her forehead and shaped his hands to her face, a pallid oval with rudimentary eyes and lips. “We’re not through here,” he mouthed softly. “The research goes on—and if you’re prepared to defect I can arrange for you to stay here, on Starbuck.”

  “Stay here?” Her voice rose in consternation. “There is more work to be done on the Primary Plan?”

  “No, my darling, not the Primary Plan,” Skrote said with infinite tenderness and undying love.

  The trip from New York had left its mark in the lines of strain around Ruth’s eyes and mouth. Her smile of greeting was perfunctory, her handshake limp. It seemed to Chase as if a vital part of her had been left behind, and this, the dark-haired woman seated across the desk, was a faded facsimile.

  Chase had invited them down to his office, which Prothero viewed with a faint air of disgruntlement. It was austere and windowless, corkboard-lined walls pinned with graphs, data sheets and flow charts. Silver-coated pipes were fixed to the ceiling and colored ribbons fluttered from the air-conditioning vent. It reminded him of being in a submarine.

  “Okay to smoke down here?” he asked, in the act of lighting a cheroot.

  “Go ahead,” Chase said with a smile. “The Pentagon spent billions of dollars on this place and at least half of it must have gone on air conditioning.”

  “Where’s the vessel stationed?” Prothero asked.

  Chase got up and pointed it out on the large wall map crisscrossed with red, blue and green tape. “She’s called the Nierenberg, one of the Scripps’ fleet, at present here, two hundred miles out on latitude thirty-five degrees, roughly midway between San Diego and San Francisco.” He sat down and held up a yellow sheet, a radio message not two hours old. “First report from Hanamura says they’ve been operating the pilot plant for forty-eight hours nonstop. So far no hitches.” Chase tapped the plastic woodgrain desktop for luck. “It’s too soon to know for sure, but at least it looks encouraging.”

  “Just as well,” Prothero said and didn’t trouble to soften the blow. “Gelstrom’s dead. The financial situation is as yet unresolved. I can’t get a straight answer from the JEG Corporation, which I presume to mean there’s a hassle going on.” He gestured with his cheroot at the map. “Does he say what tonnage they’re producing?”

  Chase read from the flimsy. “ ‘Throughput of brine ten thousand gallons an hour. Oxygen yield of ninety-two percent purity at fifteen plus tons an hour.’ ”

  “Fifteen tons an hour?” Prothero was aghast. “Is that all? I understood that the existing industrial plant could produce ten times that amount?”

  “That’s right, it does,” Chase said. “The Linde double-fractioning process extracts oxygen from the atmosphere and compresses it to ninety-eight percent purity. But there isn’t much point in taking oxygen from the depleted atmosphere only to put it back again. Splitting seawater is a totally different technical proposition. You’ve got to keep the gases separated so that they don’t mingle and form an explosive vapor inside the cell. You’ve got to watch for corrosion and the buildup of hydrogen film on the anode, which can give off poisonous fumes. Don’t forget, Pro, that this is an experimental plant. Output isn’t significant. If Hanamura can overcome these problems we can scale up to a hundred times the size with a thousand times the tonnage for every plant we build.”

  “How many plants will be needed?” Ruth asked. It was the first time she’d shown any interest.

  “We estimate between fifty and sixty thousand spread around the world, but with a greater number in the equatorial regions. Computer studies have shown that the oxygen shortfall in the atmosphere is currently running at about five hundred trillion tons. That’s going to take a lot of making up.”

  “How many’s a trillion?” Prothero asked.

  “A million million.”

  Prother’s lined pouchy face looked glum.

  Ruth said, “Surely sixty thousand plants that size will take years to build. Decades.” She sounded skeptical, yet prepared, even desperate, to be convinced.

  “Five years,” Chase said. He saw the look of disbelief in her eyes and went on. “We could do it, Ruth. Once we have the basic proved design there’s no technical reason why we couldn’t meet that deadline, given the resources.”

  “You mean the money.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you get it?”

  Chase tugged at his beard. “We have to get it. Five years from now, by 2018—2021 at the latest—we’re going to be running out of time. If we haven’t achieved at least seventy percent of our construction program by then we might as well crawl away and curl up and count the seconds till our final breath.”

  Ruth was watching him intently. “If you get the money and you build enough of these oxygen plants by the deadline, will it be enough? What I’m asking is, can it actually be done? Will it work?”

  She reminded Chase of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of driftwood who, having given himself up for dead, sights a desert island and can’t accept the evidence of his own eyes.

  “I believe it will. If we can replenish the atmosphere with oxygen instead of depleting it, we can restore the balance. That’s what we’ve spent the past five years at Desert Range trying to achieve. If Hanamura is successful, then it’s possible and it can be done.” Chase smiled, seeing the faint gleam of renewed hope in her eyes. After the foul, miasmic canyons she had left behind, this must have seemed like a breath of fresh air.

  There was a knock at the door and a messenger came in with a yellow flimsy from the communications shack. Another message from the Nierenberg, Chase thought, scanning the three lines. Prothero and Ruth saw the color drain from his face. They waited silently, watching his dazed expression, and finally he said, “It’s from Goose Lake,” which meant nothing to either of them.

  Part of Chase’s mind registered their incomprehension. “That’s one of the Earth Foundation settlements in Oregon where Cheryl and Dan are living,” he told them. “Cheryl is ill. They think she’s dying. They want me to go right away.”

  Drew had provisioned the jeep for a trip lasting five days, which was three more than Chase planned to take. The most direct route to Goose Lake—due west across Nevada and cutting through a corner of California—was about eight hundred miles, and that was assuming that the roads over mountains, through forests, and across deserts were passable, without the need for detours.

  He was reluctant to ask Ruth to accompany him. Yet with her years of experience in treating anoxia and pollution victims, her knowledge might prove crucial. When asked, she readily agreed. Fro
m New York she had brought with her a quantity of drugs used to treat anoxia patients, though as she was at pains to point out, “I can’t promise anything, Gavin. A lot depends on how long she’s been suffering from oxygen deficiency—if that’s what it is.”

  “I understand that. What I don’t understand is how this could have happened to Cheryl when for the past five years she’s been in Oregon. Dammit, there’s hardly any pollution there and the oxygen level is only a fraction below normal. It doesn’t make sense!”

  “It doesn’t make sense that people who’ve smoked for forty years don’t get lung cancer, while some who’ve never smoked a cigarette in their life do. Some people are more susceptible to certain diseases, that’s all we can say.”

  “Is anoxia always fatal?”

  “I won’t pretend that the death rate isn’t high, Gavin. But I have treated patients who would have died and managed to keep them alive. Drugs can help.”

  They departed an hour after dawn the following day. Chase had asked the meteorology section for a detailed forecast for the northwestern sector of the country. Conditions at the moment were so unstable that it was about as reliable as consulting a mystic on the precise time and date of his death. Nonetheless it was reassurance of a sort to be told that no major climatic anomalies were expected. The temperature medians, however, weren’t so comforting. For this time of year, late September, they averaged an increase across the United States of 9 degrees F.—the result of the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

  The greenhouse effect here at last, with a vengeance.

  By eight o’clock they had crossed the border into Nevada on highway 73. The two-lane blacktop zigzagged up through Sacramento Pass, skirting the flanks of Wheeler Peak to their left, its thirteen-thousand-feet summit outlined raggedly against the bottomless blue of the sky. There wasn’t a trace of snow up there, Chase saw, and no hint of any to come. The snow line was retreating northward as the tropical belt widened. How soon before it reached the polar latitudes and started melting the pack ice? If average temperatures were rising it must already be having an effect, he realized. Billions of gallons of water were locked up in the ice caps, which when released would raise the mean sea level by anything up to three hundred feet. If mankind escaped being fried or asphyxiated, there was always drowning.

  Ruth sat with a bolt-action hunting rifle across her knees, her black curly hair ruffled by the warm slipstream. She wore a loose plaid shirt, faded blue denims, and green leather ankle boots with white socks folded over the tops. The rifle was not merely a precaution; it was absolutely essential. Chase himself carried a Browning .32 in the zippered pocket of his Windbreaker. The jeep was stocked with food, water, cooking equipment, sleeping bags, and a large canvas sheet for temporary shelter. They also carried three twelve-gallon jerry cans of gasoline, sufficient, he hoped, to get them to Goose Lake. Ruth’s medical supplies were in an aluminum case, stowed away underneath the other stuff. Those drugs were worth a small fortune.

  There was still a blankness behind Ruth’s eyes, as if she were somewhere else, reliving a bad dream. Chase asked her about it, hoping perhaps to purge the memory. When she spoke her lips were curved in a smile that was almost a snarl. “You can’t imagine what it was like. In some ways it was a relief, getting out, knowing it had to finish. No, the really hard part was in having failed, in having at last to admit defeat.”

  “The situation was hopeless and you did the best you could,” Chase said ineffectually. “Christ, you did more than that, much more. You chose to stay when it would have been so easy to have got out.”

  “I can’t forget the children; they were the worst,” Ruth said, unraveling a thread that trailed endlessly through her mind. “At least the older ones had lived some sort of life before it ended. But those kids never stood a chance from the day they were born. From before they were born because they were damaged in the womb.” She looked across at him. “Have you ever seen a child suffering from pollution sickness?”

  “Photographs and on film, that’s all.”

  “Pray to God you never see one in the flesh,” Ruth said. “The symptoms are most evident in children under five—sore throat, slight temperature, nausea—what you’d think of as the usual children’s complaints, nothing too serious. In the early days in fact many doctors diagnosed scarlet fever because the symptoms are very similar. Then it was found that the kids didn’t respond to penicillin, which is the standard treatment for scarlet fever.

  “In the next stage their temperature shoots up to one hundred and six and the lymph glands in the child’s neck swell to the size of golf balls. The lips and tongue turn bright scarlet and red blotches appear on the chest and back and buttocks. After about a week, during which the high fever persists, the blood vessels in the eyes become congested and burst, rashes break out all over the body, and the skin starts to peel from the fingers and toes.

  “The damage isn’t only external. They develop aneurysms—that’s an irregular thickening of the coronary arteries, which weakens them— which leads to abnormalities in the heart rhythm and the rupture of the coronary artery itself. When that happens it’s invariably fatal.”

  “Is there no treatment?”

  “We can lower the fever. That reduces inflammation and prevents the blood from clotting, but there’s no real cure. The death rate is between fifty and sixty percent, most of them under five.”

  “And the cause is pollution in one form or another?”

  Ruth nodded, watching the blur of road through the windshield. “We still don’t know precisely how or why. It could be a hereditary factor, some weakness or deficiency that’s triggered by the deterioration in the environment. It’s probable that these kids were genetically damaged to begin with and lacked the normal defense mechanisms to withstand pollutants in the air and water. We know from studies as far back as the eighties that environmental factors can cause abnormalities—the white blood cells contain broken fragments of chromosomes that jumble up the genetic message. This can cause cancer, spontaneous abortions, miscarriages and birth defects. The miscarriage rate over the past fifteen years has jumped from a national average of eight and a half percent to over thirty percent. The women who don’t abort or miscarry produce offspring who are ripe candidates for pollution sickness. The poor little bastards can’t win,” Ruth added without emotion. “They’re either aborted or born damaged.”

  “What about anoxia?” Chase asked, thinking of Cheryl. “Is it as common as pollution sickness?”

  “Less so in people below the age of twenty-five.” Ruth propped the rifle between her knees and eased back in the bucket seat. “It tends to affect the older age groups, presumably because they’ve been exposed to oxygen deficiency over a longer period and their tissues aren’t as flexible and can’t cope with the additional strain. It’s a far more complex problem than pollution sickness and the medical background is sketchy. For one thing we don’t have any reliable figures on the number of people affected and how many survive.” Her mouth twisted sourly. “That’s what I’ve devoted the last seven years of my life to finding out. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say wasted the last seven years.”

  “You did all you could. You’re not to blame.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t blame myself,” Ruth corrected him. “I just feel so fucking angry. How could we do this to ourselves? How could we have been so stupid and shortsighted?” She shook her head, gripped by a kind of impotent amazement. “You know, it was all in your book, every last damn word of it? Not just the stuff about environmental war, as if that weren’t bad enough, but how we’ve crapped in our own nest, polluted the air we breathe with chemicals and turned the oceans into toxic soup. And Christ, we’ve known for at least half a century what we were doing and we kept right on doing it! What kind of species are we, for God’s sake? Are we crazy or just plain stupid?”

  “There are no votes in sewage,” Chase muttered.

  “What?”

  “Something Theo Detrick once sai
d. He meant you can’t blame the politicians, because they’d never get elected to office on an ecology ticket. Cleaning up the environment, much less protecting it, doesn’t have the instant easy appeal the public demands. More production, more growth, more cash in the pocket, more goodies—those are what people vote for. Certainly not for some earnest do-gooder preaching the doctrine that consumption is bad and will lead to ruin.”

  “So who is to blame? Is it us, each one of us individually? Is that what you’re going to say?”

  Chase looked across at her grim pale face. He smiled and shrugged. “Hey, don’t get angry with me, Ruth. I’ve done my share of consuming—and preaching if it comes to that. If I knew the answer I’d have spit it out long ago. But I don’t.”

  Wheeler Peak was behind them now, the road curling downward in a series of spirals to Connors Pass. Forest stretched on either side, lush and thick and green. At certain points along the road were shaded recreation areas with wooden tables and benches set in concrete.

  On a day such as this, not many years ago, Chase reflected, cars would have been parked between the diagonal yellow lines and families would be eating at the tables and kids pitching baseball and chasing one another on the neat smooth grass. No families today. No kids. No baseball. The scene was eerily empty, like a vast, lavishly expensive sound stage complete with cyclorama of mountains and forests and sky waiting for shooting to begin. But Equity was on strike. There were no actors. All this beautiful setting had been built for no purpose, a complete and utter waste.

  Was this how the future would be? Empty? A deserted planet?

  In dreams he’d had visions of what the end would be like (it was how he imagined New York had become: steel and glass towers poking out of shit-colored murk), but this was worse, infinitely worse, because the beauty remained like a mocking taunt.