Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  “And there really is genuine cooperation between the Americans and the Russians?” Chase asked. “Or is it a race to see who can get the first colony ready as a missile platform?”

  “No, not this time,” Boris told him, shaking his head soberly. “This is their last chance and everyone knows it. There is total cooperation and complete interchange of information and resources.” He noted Chase’s look of skepticism and said, “It is true, Gavin. At Emigrant Junction there are Americans, Russians, Europeans, Asians, Africans all working together for the common good. They know they have to work together or perish together.”

  “And how long have you been here, my Russian friend?” Chase demanded.

  “Less than a year. After my wife died I stayed on in the cabin in Oregon. More and more refugees came up from the south and life became very difficult. I was too old, I couldn’t defend myself, I was forced to move farther north. You know, they would have pushed me right up to the Arctic Circle if a patrol hadn’t come along—” He broke off, seeing the gleam of suspicion in Chase’s narrow stare. “Ah! I understand the reason for your question: How did they find you.”

  “That’s right. I’m still pretty hazy about what happened back there in the hotel, but I distinctly remember one of those people in the silver suits called me by my name. Now how do you suppose that could be, Boris?” Chase said, folding his arms.

  “I asked them—in point of fact, I insisted—that they send a patrol to check out Desert Range. They eventually did so and found it to be crawling with uncles. Some of the survivors—your people, that is— were picked up in the desert and brought in. They told us you had headed south, so we sent out patrols to find you and you were spotted very quickly, within a few days, but the adverse weather conditions prevented us making contact. When we were able to send in a search-and-rescue party they were caught in yet another storm and we lost one of the airborne craft and all its crew. The others managed to reach you, so you were most fortunate.”

  “Where did you first spot us, in the jungle?”

  “No, in the Stardust. There were sheets draped on the balconies, and neither the prims or the mutes, much less the uncles, have the sense to do that, for whatever reason. By the way, what was the reason, Gavin?” Boris asked curiously.

  “We were collecting rainwater.” Chase shook his head and sighed. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Boris turned and gestured toward the misty blue shapes, the domes and towers sparkling in the distance. “The first colonists will be leaving soon. They will set up home on Canton Island and start planting crops.”

  “That’s the name of the island where Theo Detrick carried out his research.”

  “Yes, in his honor,” Boris said smiling. “I suggested it so that we should always remember him. Each colony will be named after an island.”

  “How many people are going there?”

  “Sixty thousand.”

  “In just the one colony?”

  Boris caught Chase’s reaction and went on matter-of-factly. “Canton Island is thirty-seven point six kilometers in total diameter. The first six to be completed will be the same size, the rest larger, up to seventy or eighty kilometers in diameter.”

  “With what kind of population?”

  “You mean in numbers? One hundred to one hundred and twenty thousand to each island. Something like that. And we’re planning to build at least a hundred such islands, more if time allows.”

  Chase sank back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He took in a long deep breath and slowly, luxuriously, let it whisper through his nostrils.

  Ten million people.

  Body smooth and brown, with straight blond hair that shone like a silvery cap in the sunshine, the five-year-old performed a twisting triple somersault from thirty feet and dived cleanly into the sparkling green waters of the lake. Spray lifted and hung and settled slowly like glittering gossamer in the low gravity.

  Watching from the shade of a jacaranda tree and sipping cool drinks, Chase and the boy’s parents applauded. On the other side of the placid water and beyond the terraced tiers of residential gardens they could see the cylindrical core, a polished shaft of fretted aluminum three hundred meters in diameter rising several thousand meters in the air.

  Insects zoomed and ticked in the undergrowth; a butterfly wafted erratically by; somewhere a bird sang, claiming territory or looking for a mate.

  “Did you teach him that?” Chase asked, watching the boy’s bright head break the surface. His grandson leaped and twirled like a lithe brown seal.

  “All the kids can dive like that,” Dan said. “They don’t need teaching. There’s a kid in Nick’s tutor group who can stay in the air so long you’d swear he was actually flying. I tried it once and went arse-over-tip and landed flat on my back. You need natural low-g coordination, which youngsters have and we don’t. I’ll stick to hang-gliding; at least there your earthbound conceptions and reflexes aren’t violated.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Jo said archly, prodding him with her bare foot under the table. “Your other earthbound reflexes adapted quite well.”

  “Pure instinct,” Dan grinned. “And of course the trampolinists’ revised edition of the Kamasutra was a great help.”

  Jo kicked him again, harder.

  It was late afternoon and the mirrors were angled by computers to throw slanting rays that mimicked the setting sun. Three light planar mirrors, each ten kilometers by three, beamed the sunlight into the revolving island colony through huge transparent panels tinted blue to give the impression of a blue sky. As the day wore on the mirrors were tilted fractionally to give an approximation of the sun’s path through a 180-degree arc and were then turned away for the eight-hour night. It seemed that human beings needed darkness.

  Seen from a distance the colony had the appearance of a large silvery globe attached by tubular spokes to a doughnut. Here, inside the central globe, were the recreational areas, parklands, and, because of its reduced gravitational stress, the homes of the older residents. Its proper name was Globe City, though of course it was known to everyone as the Geriatric Gardens. Chase and Ruth had a five-room apartment here, just a few hundred yards from the lake. Being ten years younger than he, Ruth objected with a few well-chosen phrases to the popular description.

  Five spokes, or thruways, connected the globe to the outlying torus: the encircling tube that housed the main population as well as the multilevel crop beds and animal farms.

  At the topmost level in enclosed chambers, fishponds stocked with a wide variety of edible species filtered down and irrigated the lower levels, supplying waste effluent to the wheat, soybeans, vegetables, and forage below. Given the near-perfect conditions of sunlight, temperature, humidity, and nutrients—and a controlled supply of carbon dioxide—each of the seven-hundred-acre fields could produce seventeen hundred pounds of grain crops and forage a day, enough to feed a population of ninety-thousand people. The half-a-million fish stocks provided everyone with a ten-ounce fillet once a week.

  Canton Island had originally comprised just the central globe, with living space for ten thousand people—the first settlers, who were scientists, technicians, engineers, and construction workers. The torus and connecting thruways had been added later, and indeed work was still going on to complete the external radiation shielding.

  Nick ran up the shelving beach of white sand and jumped, wet and dripping, into Chase’s lap.

  “Take me to the flying fish. Take me, Grandad, please!”

  “Nick, now stop that!” Jo reprimanded him sharply. She reached for her son and flashed a look at Dan, who gave a slight shrug.

  “I think we’re too late today, Nick,” said Chase with a rueful smile. “They don’t allow visitors after four o’clock. Some other time, okay?”

  The experimental fish farms within the cylindrical core were a favorite and endlessly fascinating attraction for children and adults alike. There in zero-g, freed of gravity, which made their gills c
ollapse, fish swam weightlessly through an atmosphere of 100 percent humidity, which kept them moist. To see them was almost dreamlike: fish “flying” through the air.

  They returned to the apartment, where Ruth and Jen were preparing a meal. Chase rode in his electric wheelchair, which the medics had insisted he use when traveling any distance. He detested the contraption, which made him feel old and senile, but reluctantly obeyed the decree because of his “condition.” What that condition was precisely, nobody could agree on. Chase thought it might be anoxia, a legacy from the past that was only now rearing its ugly head; if so, nobody was prepared to admit it. One of the medical specialists, Dr. Weinbaum, was coming tomorrow to carry out more tests, and probably, Chase thought resignedly, to start him on yet another course of treatment.

  Nick settled down to watch “Psychic Space Cats” on TV, one of his favorite programs about a race of highly intelligent telepathic cats that had adventures on exotic worlds in distant galaxies. Chase hadn’t yet figured out whether the cats were puppets, animated models, or the real thing, they were so amazingly lifelike.

  “When’s your next lunar trip?” Chase asked Dan as they were eating.

  “Six weeks from now, October tenth,” Dan said. “We’re flying out to Censorinus where the new mass-driver is being installed. They’re planning to lift seven thousand tons of graded ore for aluminum smelting. Hey—” he suddenly remembered “—the whole .thing will be televised, so you’ll have a chance to see it in operation.”

  “Where’s the ore being processed?” Ruth asked.

  “The construction shack off Long Island.” Dan picked at a chicken leg. “You know, we get enough oxygen as a by-product of the smelting process to sustain all the islands and to use as rocket propellant. About forty percent of lunar rocks are oxidized.”

  The bulk of the building materials for the colonies had come from the moon: It was easier and cheaper to transport vast quantities of ore with the low-energy mass-driver from the lunar surface and process it in one of the four construction shacks that were reorbited in the vicinity of the island being built.

  Each construction shack weighed over 10,000 tons, with a power plant of 3,000 tons, and housed 2,300 workers in 36 modules.

  Currently a million tons a year were being mined, then launched into space and brought to the ring of colonies for processing. The mass-driver accelerated pods bearing forty-pound payloads of ore along a superconducting magnetic track—no wheels—on the lunar surface, traveling two miles in 3.4 seconds, at which speed the pods dropped away and the payloads achieved lunar escape velocity. For nearly two hundred miles, or two minutes of flight time, the payloads weren’t high enough to clear the mountain ranges, which meant that the mass-driver had to be located in one of the broad flat plains, such as Censorinus, filled with lava three billion years ago.

  Once in free flight the payloads continued to a target point 40,000 miles out in space. Two days after launch they arrived at the catcher, a storage craft 300 feet wide and a quarter of a mile long. There the payloads were caught in a rotating conical bag of nine-ply Kevlar fabric, the material used to make bulletproof vests that could stop a .44 magnum shell fired point-blank. Once full the catcher became an ore transporter and, like the huge supertankers on earth, began the long slow haul to the colonies 240,000 miles away.

  Mercifully Dan didn’t have to endure the weeks of tedium suffered by the crew of five. As one of the transport coordinators he was able to fly in, do his job, and return by fast passenger craft. The round trip usually took about three weeks.

  Jen helped herself to more salad. “Did any of you see the newscast last week of the shuttle from Emigrant Junction?” She shook her head, pensive and sad. “Those poor people ...”

  Jo said, “I thought conditions were so bad that no one outside an enclosure could remain alive, yet they keep coming. It has to end sometime.”

  “It isn’t the same everywhere,” Ruth said. Her smooth tan and the sweep of graying hair over her forehead successfully camouflaged the disfiguring scar. “Some places have survived almost untouched. There was that story about the isolated village in the Philippines where the way of life had hardly changed.”

  “Yes, I remember that,” Dan said sardonically. “They were living off giant frogs. I wouldn’t call that ‘normal,’ would you?”

  “Oh—you,” Ruth snorted. “It might have been normal for them. How do we know?”

  “Sure it was,” Dan said, straight-faced. “Frog quiche. Frog a la mode. Frog on toast. Frog Supreme. Frog—”

  Ruth held up a stick of celery threateningly.

  “Maryland. Ouch!” Dan fell back laughing as the celery hit him on the chin.

  “Is Daddy being silly again?” Nick inquired gravely. Like most five-year-olds he had a severely disapproving view of adult humor, finding it not only incomprehensible but also totally unfunny.

  While they were drinking coffee on the small flagged terrace, the shadows lengthening all around them, a golden thread of sunlight on the lake, Chase decided to tell them about the last shuttle. He’d been on the verge of mentioning it earlier and hadn’t because it wasn’t yet official. But this was his family, and anyway it would be released any day now. “They’re already evacuating the colonization bases and bringing the service personnel up.”

  “How do you know?” Jen asked him.

  Dan was slightly put out. “I haven’t heard a whisper about that.”

  “John Shelby called me a few days ago—he used to be a member of Earth Foundation and now works in Immigration Control. It’s supposed to be confidential at the moment. Actually, from what I can gather, there’s been a wrangle going on behind the scenes. It was finally carried at the Confederation by thirty-one to fifteen, with one abstention. There’s to be an announcement soon.”

  “And that’s it?” Jo gazed at him, resting her head on her hand. “No more people from earth?”

  “No. No more.” Chase set his cup down carefully. After a moment he said, “The last one will lift off from Narken in Sweden and after that the bases will be closed down. It was a tough decision, but apparently the people applying now are genetically damaged in some way. No medical clearance, no transit visa. Simple as that.”

  There was a longer silence, which no one seemed anxious to break. Sooner or later it had to come, they all knew that, had been prepared for it ... and yet. The final severance with earth, their home planet.

  “It’s very nearly three years to the day since we came up,” Jo said reflectively. “September fifth, 2025.”

  “Was that when we came to Canton?” Nick piped up. “Our leaving day?”

  His mother nodded and smiled. “You’ll have to remember that date always, Nick. You were too little to remember the shuttle ride, but never forget the date.”

  “Bryn says he can remember his leaving day, but Bryn tells fibs. He said he went for a fly with the flying fish. Can I fly with them, Mummy?”

  “You’re right, Bryn does tell fibs,” Dan said. “But he was a year older than you when he came to Canton, so maybe he’s telling the truth about remembering it.”

  “What’s the final tally?” Ruth asked Chase.

  “John says it’s not far short of five million. It should have been more but the program didn’t go ahead as quickly as planned. I remember Boris telling me that they were hoping to build one hundred islands with an average population of one hundred thousand per colony. So far they’ve completed forty-seven, with three more being built. There’s no doubt we’ll need more as the population increases.”

  “Thank God for the moon,” Dan said fervently. “Our handy neighborhood minerals resource. We’d have been sunk without it.”

  “I was thinking of Boris only today,” Ruth said. She reached out and squeezed Chase’s hand. “Would they have allowed him to come, do you think?”

  “You mean because of his age?” Jo said.

  “I don’t see why not,” Chase said. “No one was rejected, whatever his age, if he rece
ived clearance and was fit enough to travel. Boris would have been ninety-one the year we came up. Perhaps he didn’t want to leave earth after all.”

  The mirrors were tilting, the sun was nearly gone. Way off in the distance, beyond the ranks of terraced gardens, the core gleamed with a dull rich light like a pillar of fire. And farther still, beyond it, the terraces on the far inner side of the globe rose into a purple misty twilight.

  “Will we ever go back?” Jen said wistfully. She was thinking of her husband. Never a day went by when she didn’t think about him. She had a daughter and a grandchild and friends to be grateful for, but there was a hollow ache in her heart that would always be with her. Saying farewell to earth wouldn’t have bothered her one bit if Nick had been here. There were times when she could have gladly murdered him, but she felt desolate.

  Chase had read her mind because his thoughts had followed the same track. More and more these days he dwelt on the past. He said, “I think about him too.” He chuckled and started to cough, his throat tight and dry. “I used to think he was crazy.”

  “He was,” Jen said. “Bonkers. Never took anything seriously.”

  “No, I was always the serious one. You know, I sometimes wonder how come we liked each other or even became friends. I saw the world as tragic and Nick saw beyond the tragedy and thought it a comedy, a farce. What is it they say? The person who thinks sees the world as a tragedy, while the person who feels sees it as a farce.’ ”

  “What’s farce?” Nick said.

  Chase patted his knee and Nick clambered up. Ruth made as if to protest, but Chase waved her aside. Dammit, he was sixty-five, not ninety. The hell with anoxia. “Don’t pay any attention to us, young Nick. We’re old and past it and we’ve made a fine mess of things. But you’ll do better. Much better. Much, much better. You’ll show us how it ought to be done, won’t you? Promise?”

  “Will you take me to the flying fish?”