by H. F. Heard
He gave them a moment, sitting back in his chair glaring up at them. Yes, he was right, he knew; the man who has something to suggest, a line to take, however wild that line, always wins against those who have nothing to say except that you can only sit down under it.
“Skelton,” he called, “sit down other side of this desk and figure out what force it would need. You can, can’t you?”
“Yes, that’s pretty simple. The rough figure’s been known, both for power needed and mass to be reduced, for quite a long time. I’ll just check through on it, though. Please give me back Chart Four. I’ve most of the figures on that. Thought you might be wanting them.”
Place handed him the map sheet with the calculations on its other face. He sat totting it over. The others waited, standing on either side of Place’s chair. The tap of the pencil on one side of the desk and of the thumbnail on the other made a miniature tattoo.
In a few moments Skelton handed a half-sheet of paper over the desk. Place looked at it and then held it out to the Chief of Staff:
“There’re your instructions. Figure out at once what force you’ll need. Have ’em posted with sealed orders and a zero hour for taking off when I give the signal.”
His ascendancy was now complete. General Chase bowed.
“Ring me up as soon as your part is ready.” The President nodded him toward the door and then turned to the Secretary of State.
“Now, you, get the Ambassadors together at once, here. I’m going to give ’em all a conference. Be as quick as Chase.”
When the Secretary of State was gone, Place disposed of his third guest.
“Thanks,” he said. “After all, that visit was worth three hundred seconds of my time. Now all you have to do is to keep your mouth shut and forget you were ever here. I’ll get my secretary to get you out.” He buzzed for her and handed over Skelton.
“So that’s politics,” thought the bewildered researcher as the lift sank him to floor level. “As long as he can do something, he’s just as gay as a bird—it doesn’t matter what happens as long as it’s he that’s mattering.”
Left alone, the President yawned, looked down on his huge bulk, and remarked in a whisper, “Weight must be going up still,” then, with a chuckle, “Well, the fatter you are the better you float.” Then he swung himself forward, took a pencil, and began to jot down notes. A few moments later, with his head on one side, he spoke over a passage or two, then nodded, again muttering to himself, “Can’t see it’s worse than the Gettysburg. Maybe, Place my boy, you’ll sink physically, but you’re up for a high place in History. Time’s ever-rolling tide will have to roll quite a bit before it’ll sink you!” He smiled and, when the desk-phone buzzed, said with high spirits, “Let ’em all come. Just my luck that so many would be in D.C. now.”
Shortly after the Secretary of State appeared, the first of their Excellencies began to report. Place had chairs put for them. It was to be quite a little meeting. Evidently they had sensed something big was afoot. All the chairs filled rapidly. Place had told the Secretary of State to make an urgent but general appeal for their presence. Now the Secretary rose and told the meeting that the President had called them because he wished to confide some information which he thought concerned them as much as himself. They regretted that the Ambassador of the U.S.S.R. could not be present but he had been called home just lately. “But we have a quorum.” He smiled and sat down.
Certainly the President’s address interested them—so much so that they probably hardly remembered the peroration, which was the part he prized most, when they got outside. Even their own phrases, in which they had tried with diplomatic correctitude to hide their reaction, now seemed hardly worth putting into their diary-for-memoirs. But they were quite good in their way and characteristic. The British Ambassador, of course, was called on first, as he was the Hyphen leading to the rest. Lord Blasket at the moment thought he was doing pretty well with, “Well, Britannia’s always ruled the waves and, by George, now she’ll do it in earnest.” The Italian owned that he wished he had someone worthy to speak to such a theme. “Ah,” he said, “if only now we could hear Savonarola himself! What a sermon the dread Fratre of San Marco would give us on his favorite text, then only directed against the French”—he looked lightly at his colleague—“‘Behold, I bring a flood of waters on the earth!’” It was a good enough bon mot. But the mot juste belonged, of right, to the Frenchman.
“Well, gentlemen, we have lived to surpass the Bourbons. After all, Louis Quinze’s famous phrase was mainly a phrase of inflation. But now we shall put real water into ‘Après moi le deluge.’”
When the Secretary of State had ushered them out to make their reports to their Governments he came back for a moment with his Chief.
“They take it quietly?”
“Well, there’s time. People’ll get used to anything, if you give ’em time and something to do in the spell between. I’ve given them the time-table for the upper line on those Skelton charts. Europeans are getting used to being bossed around and milled this way and dumped that way. It’ll only be one more population shift.”
Place, though, was restless, and when the desk-phone buzzed through again he took it hastily. “Yes, Chase?… Yes, everything’s set here. Now give the zero hour at nine P.M. tonight. Weather’s all right at the further objective? Good, good, just my luck again. And good enough in the other direction? Good, good—that’s all.” He hung up and turned to the Secretary of State. “Now get me a world-wide hookup and network distribution. I’ll have what I want to say ready in twenty minutes. Isn’t much to say. Just want to polish a period or two—this won’t be forgotten readily. Better leave something worth writing into the record!”
If he had felt misgiving the cloud had gone, and already he was jotting down some fresh phrases as the Secretary of State left the room. He stopped only when the mikes and their attendants entered. The full T.A.V.—Tel.Aud.Vis.—set-up was deployed round him. The flashes had been going out for the best part of twenty minutes now, calling to the radio-netted world to Listen, urgent, Listen, urgent, Washington has a key message, President’s going to speak to the world.
His speech was short: “Peoples of the earth, this is an earth proposition. I’m speaking not for one people but for all, for mankind. This isn’t a time for comments but for information—not for rumor or recrimination but for facts. I’m speaking to you right across frontiers, not because I’m President of the United States but because I know what you’ve got to know—and now. I’m speaking over all frontiers because the frontiers are going, are melting, are being sunk. The very geography you’ve known, that mankind’s always known, is just being wiped off like old lines on a slate. We can’t recall anything. No use trying to put things back. All that’s gone for good. We’ve got to go on. Don’t look back.”
He then told the world briefly that the Arctic icefield was melting, the huge tundra of the Obi subarctic land-mass had already been thawed. The tides would gradually inundate all the Atlantic seaboards for a depth of eighty feet and probably one hundred, and this process would spread then into the Pacific. These new sea-level heights would be permanent. Every country therefore would shrink, and men must move gradually onto the higher land. Their ports would all be submerged.
“The U.S.S.R.,” he went on, “has pointed the way. They have prepared against a rainy day. They have built fine harbors in places that till now were far inland. We must do the same. We must follow suit.”
So far he had spoken with the quietness of a man demonstrating a proposition about which there is no controversy. Now his tone changed.
“We must follow suit. I have to report to you that, though we have been slow, now we have followed, and I believe I can assure you that we have made”—he paused—“a reply which puts us once more ahead. When I have ceased speaking, look at your maps. You are now involved in a world proposition and must think as Mankind Unlimited, unlimited at least in a common Liability.” His voice became strident. “L
ook at your maps.” He picked up Skelton’s, his Fourth Exhibit, held it against him so that on his chest the world could see the world outline. “See, the U.S.S.R. will have now a vast tableland on which to rest while you of the coast lines must flee and shelter on mere spines of countryside, standing out above interminable lagoons.
“I am determined, I have determined, that this shall not happen. We will adjust, we have already adjusted, the balance of the old world in the new. Our planes have already blasted the Greenland icecap. More, far more, the atom bombs have hit the huge icecap that covers the hidden continent, rich with ores, the one continent yet unclaimed by man, that of Antarctica. I claim it in the names of the free peoples for whom I, as President of the United States, stand as Trustee and Sponsor.”
His voice swelled. “As a second Moses I will lead you to a new Promised Land, a land which this very day I have ordered to be unveiled. It rides proudly above the flooding oceans, and, like Moses smiting the rock, I have ordered our atom bombs to beat upon its precipices of ice and to turn them into water which will fertilize that vast land-mass. This land, so long preserved in ice, unexhausted, rich in minerals, waiting to yield its plenty, I name as the new Territory of the United States, the central homeland of the democratic peoples of the Earth.”
He paused and then, in tones quieter, more informative, but, he felt, still sufficiently prophetic, he added: “Here we shall find a climate suited for us, prepared for us, when all the temperate lands in which we the freer peoples flourish have become tropical and enervating. Here we will have a foothold and fortress from which we can never be flooded out. My friends, I ask you, is not this providential? Is not this the hand of Manifest Destiny? I appeal to you—have I not acted as the finger of that August Hand, am I not placing before you”—he stressed his “place-name”—“a new and glorious future? Have I not snatched out of the jaws of defeat and the dragon of the flood waters the victory whereby you shall enter on a new earth?”
He paused to let his questions have their proper reaction, watching the small fluctuating green line in the liquid-filled disk-dial that showed, with its climbing vibrating miniature staircase, the piling-up number of radio sets that were listening to him. Yes, he had the ear of his half of the world. He swung easily into his peroration:
“In the name of the Pilgrim Fathers, I call upon you to rise and harness yourselves to go forth on this new and greater pilgrimage. In the immortal words which henceforward will have a still higher overtone of triumph, I say, Let us go forward in our great task that Government of the people and by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth!”
III. THE FINAL FLOOD
So mankind set about its last and biggest trek. They had time. The flood rose insistently, remorselessly, but so slowly that there was time to make plans. Some people were sure that it would pass—“Merely a climatic accident aggravated by a foolish experiment,” they said; “mark my words, the balance of nature will put it right.” But they overlooked the fact that the balance might find another adjustment than that which they had known and taken as eternal. Finally even the dug-in die-hards had to clear off South. And by the time they went they had plenty of warning that it was time to have migrated. The stratoplanes looked down on ever more widely spreading arms, hands, and fingers of silver sea, spreading over and pulling under the green expanses of earth. Visibly, month by month and year by year, the old continents were changing their outlines and the big islands such as Britain shrinking to spines and ribs of land, skeletons of countryside emerging from an ever widening ocean, floating like the clean-picked carcasses of whales.
Indeed, the flood surpassed the scientists’ calculation, which had been, as they said in their curious language of understatement, “Conservative, yes, quite on the conservative side!” The Greenland icecap had, when sounded fifty years before—when echo sounding was new—surprised the world by its thickness, six thousand feet of solid ice, layer on layer of epochs of snows packed and laid down as ice. And Antarctica had gone one better. It was even colder, and it had heaped up an even greater mound of ice-cake. Before the new atom bomb, boring its way through it and spreading scalding water and exploding steam in every direction, had melted it, it had discharged into the seas in liquid form, never to freeze again, what had been on the average a twelve-thousand-foot thickness of ice. The great rising slope of Antarctica up which explorers had toiled was nothing but a monstrous ice mountain the size of a continent, a pear-shaped icicle on the south end of the earth. Thus, when the floods came to first pause, the old coast lines lay sunken nearer 300 than 250 feet under the new seas.
Of all the spectacular sights of those foundered shores, New York was considered the best. The skyscrapers stood out like a grotesque gargantuan sepulchral Venice. The tide races swirled and rushed round these great deserted posts of stone. For a few generations a queer mob of fisherfolk lived on the middle floors, netting the narrow, surging straits at the bottom of which had once roared the city streets and carrying on feuds with each other, each building an island community that quarreled with the rest. But the fishing was not good, and life in these great columbaria was squalid and hard. Some tried to raise a few crops on the roofs, but the climate was too stormy and bringing soil to these small summits not worth the effort. Finally the whole place was deserted by man. Flocks of seabirds then took over, and the guano-crowned towers stood in gaunt ruin, with the tides eroding at their bases and rushing with bellowing fury through the office suites. The glass went, and the landsmen said the place was haunted, for far inland on wild nights you might hear in the roar of the gale the great pierced-shaft buildings moaning and shrilling—not Memnon saluting the dawn with song but monstrous monuments of a defeated creed, now played on by the tempest like giant flutes and organ pipes and giving out to the gathering darkness and ruin a demonic music of despair.
At his end of the world Yang and his successor were evidently content—or nonplussed. They had enough of population problems themselves to leave the other side alone. The oceans had begun again their priestly task of making a cordon sanitaire round the two groups who otherwise seemed fated to fight each other for the mastery of the earth and leave the world with no man living. Yang’s empire was moving north as Place’s pilgrimage moved south. Inevitably they were being drifted out of each other’s way. The U.S.S.R. was entering upon its new territories that ringed round the Arctic Ocean, now smiling like the central Atlantic, a new Mediterranean, a sea rich in food with a circular coast line rich in minerals and industry.
Further went the change. The U.S. moved its capital to Antarctica. Already that country had revealed its noble outlines. Mountains and great valleys, fiords and tablelands. Volcanic ranges that poured rich fertilizers on the already rich, unexploited soil. Minerals of all sorts, stores of radioactive lodes. But, above all, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls—“A land of streams.” And it was like the Lotos Land in another respect: The amount of cosmic radiation coming in at the Poles made plants and animals mutate far more rapidly there than elsewhere. New varieties of crops and farm beasts were always being bred. Living was easy and, at first, stimulating and interesting.
Gradually, though, the high stimulation of the cosmic radiation—which had always caused a certain percentage of “Arctic Hysteria” in those men who lived far north or south—began to tell. The higher nervous type—the “cerebrotonic,” as Sheldon christened them—began to fret and break down into nervous irritation at everything. The type that could stand this stimulant and not become neurotic was a passive type, rather Mongolian in its stolidity and its power to let things pass. They were not inventive, this type that dominated now. They were not explorers. They liked to stick to their productive farms, small and intensively managed, with great skill and endurance, but with no wish to become more productive or to expand. Man was stabilizing at last with his environment.
And it was well he was, for what had been begun with a gentle hint to move away to less easily swamped land had now become an
order to stay away from the old homelands forever. For as the oceans increased in area these vast shallow seas stepped up the temperature, already raised a number of degrees by the disappearance of both polar caps and all giant ice- and snowfields. The lagoon, marsh, and swamp areas gave footing to semiaquatic plants. The conditions of the Amazon Valley and the mouth of the Congo River spread and became general round the whole equatorial belt of the earth. A vast belt of impenetrable jungle wove itself round the earth’s middle. It put out from the shores into the oceans, and Sargasso seas—hundreds-long miles of floating wrack—began to weave themselves out over the waves. These giant “sud” islands, monstrous developments of those floating packs and islands of vegetation that block the Nile, began to rear thickets and trees. They were tentacular semilands, putting out feelers to make contacts with each vegetation-crowded island, linking these up with one another, and finding anchorage between them. Then they would block the sea-passages in between, let down their roots, and so become fixtures.
In these thick-woven jungles no light came save a green glow, and the ground was but a swamp yards deep in rotting fruit, leaf, and wood. Above the matted treetops an almost incessant warm rain poured down, feeding this spinning coil of vegetable life. In that green darkness not only another flora began to appear but another fauna. The great increase in carbon dioxide which the vast multiplication of vegetable life gave off made these jungles increasingly difficult for mammals. They became sluggish and stupefied. The giant insects of the Mesozoic began to appear and then swarm. Something like the dragonfly, but twenty-four inches across the wing, began to dart and swoop through the green dusk, gleaming like a ruby as it shot through a shaft of heavy golden sunlight. The mosquitoes were smaller, but a stinging fly only two inches across the wings could pierce through any coat of felt or hide. Animals then began to appear, who, with their warted armor-skins, could suffer such attacks, and these animals also were those who could stand much carbon dioxide and little oxygen. In short, in this equatorial belt the history of life was now being put into reverse. As the Mesozoic ended, the shallow warm seas went, grass appeared, the vast swamp forests went, the carbon dioxide fell, the oxygen increased, the Saurians therefore failed, and the mammals came forward. Now it was the turn of the Saurians to be offered a comeback and for man to be ordered into the wings.