Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Amos tried to think of something comforting to say, and could not. He also loved their home of the past fourteen years, though not with Stephanie’s passion. An only child, as was Amos, she had inherited Merry Weather when her parents died in a high-speed train crash in 2018. The twin girls they had adopted as babies three years earlier needed more room. Selling their small condo and moving to Merry Weather had been an easy choice, helped by the fact her parents’ mortgage insurance had cleared the house of debt. That also meant Interior would reimburse them for the full value of the house. Displaced homeowners typically received their equity share of the house, minus the value of the condemned land.

  They walked back to the car and Amos drove it inside the garage. Stephanie went past him to the unlocked utility room access door. He was getting out of the car when he heard her scream.

  Amos ran for the open door and charged inside to find Stephanie standing at the opposite end of the utility room, staring into the kitchen. He hurried to her. With a shaking hand she pointed across the room to the door that opened into the yard on the south side. It stood open.

  “There was a man in here! Well, maybe a teenager. He was standing in front of the junction box when I opened the door.”

  Amos hurried across the kitchen and out onto the lawn. He was in time to see someone running across the backyard of the first house on the point, the Wilkersons’. The figure vanished around the building. Seconds later he heard the sound of an old gasoline engine starting, and a vehicle driving away.

  No point trying to catch him. Amos walked back inside, to find Stephanie in the utility room, staring at the junction box. Its little metal door hung open. He checked, and all switches were on. He closed and latched it, then turned to see Stephanie staring at him.

  “That—that was a gutter, wasn’t it? My God! Word gets around

  fast!”

  Amos reached for his wife and took her in his arms. He held her trim body—only three inches shorter than his five-foot-eleven—to his chest, and gently patted her back. The open junction box was the clue. Gutters were salvage crews who operated in a legal gray area, stripping a house during the interval between the time the owner moved out and the demolition crew arrived. They would pull out the junction box itself, the copper wires from the walls, the bathroom and kitchen fixtures, the big AC unit in the yard—anything of value that could be resold. They justified their actions under the rationale that the house was going to be demolished anyway. The authorities were not willing to crack down on them, or get into the reclamation business themselves; not enough money recovered to justify the time and manpower.

  Stephanie put her arms around his waist and began crying. Amos let her sob, face against his neck, her short, curly chestnut hair tickling his ear. The teenage appraiser for some local gutter crew—they were springing up everywhere along the coastlines—had forced her to see their home as it would be when they finished; a roof over a concrete block shell, a skeleton with the body gone. Everything that made the house a comfortable home, with lovely views north and south along the Banana River lagoon—gone. Merry Weather had been at the upper limit in price for a middle-class working couple like Stephanie’s parents. They had sacrificed many of life’s other pleasures to afford this place. And the same twist of fate that had cost them their planned retirement here had given the house to Stephanie, free and clear.

  When her sobbing eased, Amos led Stephanie into the kitchen and seated her at the breakfast table. A large picture window in the wall looked south over the water, to the causeway and bridge connecting Merritt Island with Cocoa Beach. He could see Cape Canaveral Hospital, on its man-made island abutting the Highway 520 causeway, and beyond that the tops of the tallest buildings in Cocoa Beach. The launch facilities on Cape Canaveral to the north, built at a cost of billions of dollars, had been adjudged worth saving. So was most of Merritt Island, including the main part west of Hurricane Point. A case of lucky location would save the city of Cape Canaveral, just below the Cape itself, but half of Cocoa Beach to its south would be lost. Private homes and giant condominiums, office towers and supermarkets, all would be torn down, the concrete block walls and pillars salvaged and cut up into manageable pieces, becoming part of the riprap covering the sloping surfaces of twenty-foot-high dikes. Climatologists had firmly stated that the maximum possible rise in sea level would be thirteen feet. Congress had decreed that all dikes must protect for twenty.

  Amos had earned a degree in mechanical engineering, then specialized in hydraulics. He hadn’t said so aloud to Stephanie, but he agreed with the dike route planners. Hurricane Point was simply too expensive to save. So were the homes near the ends of the two long, narrow southern extensions of Merritt Island. The dike would run from about three miles below the Highway 520 Causeway and bridge, across Sykes Creek and the shallow Indian River lagoon, to the mainland. All homesites east and south of that line would be lost to the rising Atlantic.

  And that was just the local area, admittedly one of the most vulnerable in Florida. All the islands off the west coast—Sanibel, Long Boat Key, Santa Rosa—had been condemned, their inhabitants among the first to be told they must move. The Florida Keys were being sacrificed in their entirety. There were no winners here, only some losing less than others. The largest civil works and relocation project in history was well under way, and would last for forty years.

  Amos felt the warm air as the front door opened and Jada and Janine hurried across the living room and into the kitchen. The fraternal twins, now seventeen, had grown into pretty, brown-skinned young women. Stephanie had wanted to adopt, not bring more children into a crowded world. They had found the twin babies in an orphanage in Guatemala. Now they were juniors, with only a week to go before the end of the school year.

  Jada seated herself opposite her parents while Janine opened the refrigerator and got out their afternoon maintenance snacks. “Dad, Mom—how did the appeal go?”

  “Your father was right,” said Stephanie. She seemed to be holding herself under tight control. “It was basically a waste of time.”

  “So now what?” asked Janine, seating herself in the vacant chair and handing Jada a diet power drink.

  “Our appeal will be denied within ten days,” said Amos. “Interior will credit our account with the appraised equity value, house minus land, within sixty days. And we have sixty days after the money arrives to move out.”

  “We’ll try to find an apartment in your school district,” said Stephanie. The girls had hated the idea of changing schools for their senior year.

  The girls left for their rooms. “Are you going to work tomorrow?” asked Amos.

  Stephanie nodded. “I want to keep busy.”

  “Me too, then.” It was Thursday, and Amos had asked for two days off. But it was too early to start packing, and he wanted to save what little leave he had. Last year he had left his job as a facilities engineer for Boeing at the Launch Pad 17 complex and joined the Holland Corps, the new Interior Department group formed to dam the nation’s rivers. The Corps of Engineers had the largest single job, building the dikes, but even that storied old organization had been transferred from the U.S. Army to Interior.

  In bed later that night Stephanie became unusually demanding, reaching for Amos as soon as he joined her after a late shower. She made love to him with an intensity that left him breathing heavily, and ready for sleep. But Stephanie cuddled close and kept him awake, their foreheads almost touching on the firm pillow, her body shaking with muffled sobs. He held her, petting and soothing, until she finally drifted off into a troubled sleep.

  Early next morning Amos drove their hybrid the twelve miles to his new office in the old Kennedy Space Center complex. Stephanie kept the electric for the much longer drive to the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne. She had been teaching at the College of Marine Sciences for the past nine years. The sea turtle nesting season began in May, and the local beaches had been heavily used by loggerheads for centuries. Stephanie had told Amos that she
and her three marine biology summer classes were working on a coordinated effort to tag and rope off each new nest in the county. The rubbery, ping-pong-ball-size eggs would later be removed and transferred, under carefully controlled conditions, to higher beaches throughout Florida; one of a million such efforts to preserve threatened sea life.

  Amos parked in the large lot behind what had been the huge Kennedy Space Center Headquarters, a six-wing office building, lightly occupied since the demise of the Manned Space Flight Program. Interior had recently claimed the building and it now served as regional headquarters. They had also taken over most of the other KSC office and support buildings. All launches were now from the pads on Cape Canaveral.

  In his shared office Amos said hello to the group coordinator at her central desk, got a cup of coffee, and settled in at his cubicle. His group of three engineers had been assigned the task of designing and installing the pumps that would lift the largely fresh water of Sykes Creek, the island’s primary south-flowing drainage system, over the southern dike. The pumps not only had to be reliable beyond the possibility of failure, they had to be supported by independent backup power systems of equal reliability.

  But this work wouldn’t save Merry Weather, his own home. Before Amos had finished his first cup of coffee, he was again thinking of Stephanie and her heartbreak over the coming loss. And this was not something they could put off. In many ways Interior had become horribly efficient, especially for a government agency growing in size and responsibility each month. The seizure and demolition of condemned buildings was moving rapidly ahead. The first dikes were going up in Florida and California. Buildings were coming down along the Manhattan shoreline, while the owners complained bitterly about inadequate compensation. A withhold-your-taxes movement was growing, led by people living safely away from the coasts. In short, the federal government was for once acting decisively, and the country was in turmoil.

  All Interior employees were working ten-hour days, often six days a week. Not surprisingly, Amos received his reward for coming in that afternoon (after getting the day off). The branch supervisor asked him to report again on Saturday—though only for an eight-hour day.

  Just before leaving Amos pulled out the threatening letter and read it again. He considered turning it over to Interior security, but decided against it. Whoever had sent it was smart enough not to leave fingerprints. The typeface was Times New Roman, probably impossible to identify as from a specific printer. He started a new paper file, labeled “Odd,” and put it away.

  At 5:30 Amos followed a crowd of other vehicles to the south entrance gate, exiting the controlled access area onto Florida Road 3—and into chaos. A long flatbed truck stood parked across both lanes of the southbound road, a few hundred yards from the gate. Forced to stop, Amos got out of his car and looked ahead, over two rows of shiny car tops. A man holding a microphone, dressed all in green, paced back and forth on the truck bed, haranguing the few people who had gotten out of their cars to listen. A powerful sound system amplified his voice. A three-piece band sat by the truck cab, occasionally emphasizing his words with drumbeats and fanfares, or playing short riffs. A sheriff’s car had pulled up behind the truck, but a wall of people, also dressed in green, refused to move aside for the two deputies. Amos could see over the low truck body, and watched as the officers gave up on trying to force their way through, instead starting to arrest the people passively resisting them. But they quickly ran out of plastic restraints, and the backseat of their vehicle held only three.

  The deputies had still not reached the truck when two more sheriff’s cars arrived, followed a few minutes later by a large prisoner transport van. As they began arresting the protesters en masse, someone in a lead car in front of the truck managed to back up slightly, and turned his vehicle to the east. He crossed the soft dirt median to the northbound lanes without getting stuck and triumphantly fled, continually blowing his horn. But it was a thin, weak sound, immediately drowned out by the small band.

  Other cars jockeyed to follow the leader across the median. Some of the green-clad men and women left their defense of the truck and tried to put their bodies across the escape route, but the deputies shifted their focus and arrested them first. One deputy took up traffic control duties, urging the Interior workers on their way. After only a short distance Amos followed the car ahead back across the median into the southbound lanes, and was home in another fifteen minutes.

  “The Greenies? That’s the group that says the ocean rise is natural, and we shouldn’t have built houses near the beaches in the first place?” said Janine at dinner, after Amos told them about the incident.

  “Officially ‘Green Earth.’ One of the largest and best-organized protest groups,” said Stephanie. “There are others.”

  “But don’t they have a point?” asked Jada. “Didn’t we do this to ourselves?”

  “A lot of climatologists don’t think so,” said Amos. “We know sea levels fluctuated long before humans started putting man-made gases into the atmosphere. But we probably caused the extreme speed-up in melting the ice packs, and this really fast rise in ocean levels.”

  Both girls gave Amos a look that told him they thought this well-worn topic boring, so he stopped and listened to accounts of their day instead. After dinner the girls went to their rooms to study for two remaining finals, and Amos and Stephanie watched an old movie. He looked over at her frequently and realized that her eyes were on the screen, but she wasn’t seeing or hearing the movie at all.

  The first loggerheads were arriving. Stephanie spent seven evenings over the next two weeks rescuing turtle eggs. At home she remained quiet and withdrawn as they waited for the inevitable final rejection of their appeal. It came, with the two official deadlines. Now it was time to start looking for an apartment. Neither wanted to buy another house on the island, even if one could be found.

  Three weeks after the first threatening letter, Amos received a second; physically identical, again mailed from Orlando. Only the message had changed.

  Amos Byers. You disregarded my first warning. Repent of doing the devil’s work, or God will soon strike you down, and you will burn in hell forever.

  Whoever this was, he—and Amos felt almost certain this was a man— knew Amos had not quit his job. Someone was watching him, or at least checking his job status; not hard to do with a government employee. But the threat of death had grown more immediate. He would be struck down “soon.”

  Amos placed the letter in his “Odd” file, and again did not tell anyone of the threat.

  Over the next eight weeks Amos watched Stephanie slowly but steadily deteriorate, as ferment seethed in the world around them. Under hastily passed legislation, the nation’s prison population was cut by more than half, when inmates serving terms for minor offenses received paroles for agreeing to work ten years in the Save America program. The crime rate fell to its lowest point since national records were kept. Factories sometimes quiet for decades roared back to life, to produce the needed machinery. The most massive mobilization of national resources since the end of that war was well under way, with labor shortages everywhere. The unemployment rate fell close to zero, because the Labor Department counted as employed the millions receiving government stipends for returning to school, to learn the skills needed for Save America jobs. The country had not been so unified or busy since World War II, a hundred years ago. Congress had just passed a series of new taxes and surcharges to pay the huge bill, with little protest from anyone.

  On his Sunday morning Newsreader one day in July, Amos saw a notice that the Green Earth organization had dissolved. With considerable amusement, he read that the national president had somehow appropriated most of the available funds for himself, and absconded with them. The board of directors had given up their charter as a charitable organization and issued a statement that it had become too difficult to get members to rallies because everyone was working such long hours.

  Amos received a third note. It said judgm
ent had been passed; since he had not repented, his life was forfeit. He finally took all three to the Interior security officer, who admonished Amos for not bringing them to him sooner. After comparing it with letters that other employees had received and finding no matches, he promised an immediate investigation and said Amos shouldn’t worry too much. The air of national crisis gripping the country had brought squirrels down out of the trees everywhere.

  “How tired are you?” Stephanie asked after dinner the next Saturday. They had spent the day packing.

  “Not too bad,” said Amos. “Why?”

  “Our monitors indicate the first nest we moved will break out tonight. Two of my students will be there, to keep away the predators. I’d like to see it too.”

  Stephanie’s tone was wistful, but she seemed to have more life and animation than Amos had seen recently. He realized this hatching of the baby turtles was very important to her. She had told him of growing up in Cocoa Beach, and visits with her parents to turtle nests when the eggs were due to hatch. This was always at night, when the sand had cooled and the fragile baby turtles could avoid the heat of the sun. This early exposure had been one of the drivers causing her to select marine biology as a career.

  Jada and Janine were spending the night at a friend’s house. “Sure. Let’s go,” said Amos.

  Stephanie made coffee and sandwiches, and they left at ten for the beach. She had called one of her students, already there, and learned the sound monitor indicated the breakout would be within two hours. All hundred or so eggs always hatched at the same time. The baby turtles scrambled toward the water in a crowd, increasing the number who would survive to reach it.

  They drove south, east over the 520 causeway, and south again on State Road A1A along the beaches. Stephanie pulled into a small local park, where wooden walkways over the fragile, grass-covered sand dunes provided access to the beach. One other vehicle sat in the parking area. Stephanie carried the hamper of sandwiches, Amos the large thermos jug of coffee. A three-quarter moon provided enough light for safe walking as they crossed over the dunes to the beach. Stephanie headed south for another hundred yards, to where the dunes, well east of the almost flat beach, gradually reared up to become more than ten feet high. The two students, one male and one female, were waiting for them.