End of the Dream

by Wylie, Philip;

  A note follows from the book, Years of the Vibes, by Dr. Candley Mason, an eminent biologist:

  “We did not recognize this animal at first as one with known relatives, however distant. Then it was noted that the two species were somewhat like certain Indian Ocean leeches. It was next announced by various biologists and others that the so-called ‘vibes’ might account for several mysterious events in far places, during the past century or more. Thus, a tiny Amazonian-basin Indian tribe was located by Wilson Kollade, of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1906, people who claimed they had been reduced from a ‘mighty race,’ living on remote tributaries of the Amazon, to we ‘few, poor people’ who lived far inland, in caves. These Indians spoke a language their nearest neighbors understood poorly. They translated the local claim that their great tribe was cut to near nothing by the ‘worms that eat people’—a rendition to which Kollade paid scant attention and mentioned only in a personal letter.

  “Other similar reports of a worm blanket crawling out of the sea and leaving nothing of a village in some remote spot, Tasmania, Ceylon, elsewhere, have been turned up by students of mine, but these were mere paragraphs in newspapers in distant cities and presumed mere fables to feed credulous appetites. Several strange oceanic events may perhaps have had such causes, one of which, the tale of the Mary Celeste, will come to every mind. And the Mary Celeste is by no means the only ocean vessel found abandoned, without a sign of the reason for departure or an explanatory note in the log.

  “But by far the most shocking fact now known about this grisly destroyer is that its explosive multiplication is indirectly man’s fault. The larval form of both N. C. horribilis and boreas was preyed upon by innumerable small fishes and molluscs, by squids, octopi and certain protozoans, in particular. However, not only the widespread reduction of small fishes, squid, and so on, but the total extermination of the protozoans that chiefly kept the ‘leech’ in check was the real cause. Owing to chemical contaminants in the seas which those particular protozoa could not tolerate, the control predators on horribilis and boreas dwindled, while their chief consumers, several protozoa, have been wiped out by man’s sea pollutants.

  “Certain manufacturing processes used world-wide in the making of cheap dyes for paints, enamels and the coloring of plastics generate—army term—thousands of tons of specific wastes that were dumped in rivers and estuaries. They were neither acid nor alkaline; they mixed readily with salty water but were not toxic; they produced no discernible harm to aquatic life, algae included, though not enough protozoa were tested for effect; the materials were inert, apparently harmless to sea life forms of human interest from oysters to fish . . . the conclusion was foregone. Wastes of that elaborately proven ‘harmlessness’ needed no treatment before being let into rivers or the sea.

  “And those compounds, over the decades, spread through the oceans till they reached some fraction of maybe one part per billion of ocean water, or per million. At that concentration, so low we have not yet established it exactly, it was fatal—but only to a dozen or two species of protozoa, protozoa of no great interest to science, it would seem. Out went the species which till then had kept our ultimate nemesis at low numbers, such very low numbers that what we know of them from the past is largely found in hints of strange happenings in alien and remote villages, and in certain legends. So this truly miraculous being, instead of dying in quadrillions in the larval stage, matured. Some hundreds of millions of us became victims of their ‘population explosion’ which we made possible. It was one of fantastic magnitude, even though nature provides staggering abundances in many life forms.

  “Several puzzles relating to the vibes still remain undetermined. One question is: What warm-blooded mammals were the chief foods of these quasi leeches in their prepopulation-explosion past? That one is now quite well understood. In view of their immense larval toll and owing, then, to their scarcity, the vibes preyed on porpoises, seals, possibly even small whales, a single large animal sufficing for a small school of, perhaps, a hundred individuals. Thus in the vastness of the seas, this long uncommon and widely scattered predator may not have been observed at his ghastly feed, or, if so, the sight was misunderstood at any distance.

  “The fact that horribilis and boreas finally took to charging upon centers of dense human occupancy must be in part owing to their sudden and gigantic numbers-increase. Also, in the past decades, man has reduced oceanic mammals greatly, with many whales extinct and porpoises suffering from recent, intense hunting in the period after the Rice Blast. Some marine mammals may not have been acceptable food for this model engine of parasite efficiency. Sea otters, for example, should have been eradicated—and seem untouched. We are using them in hopes of finding they have, or exude, a vibe-repellent.

  “Finally, the curious but truly wondrous (to a biologist) being seems formerly to have made his land incursions for food at dawn or dusk. There’s a wealth of little-sifted yet maybe relevant material from the coasts of Africa. Tales of lions, various antelope, hyenas, even some elephants, come upon by natives freshly dead, yet ‘boiling with great maggots’ and with sorts never seen on animal or human bodies. Again, how many natives have vanished, without the fact reaching ears outside the tribe? How many white men, for that matter, hunters, explorers, biologists, have become ‘lost’ and never found, in areas not too far from the seashore or a riverbank?

  “Once such rare and scientifically missed species grew to be near numberless, cubic miles of sea ranges packed with them, how long would it take them to readjust and make shore forays in brighter daylight? No time at all, as other species indicate to be possible! We have now enjoyed a full year in which their depredations have been virtually nil. And our many expeditions at sea are not finding them in such vast masses as they did only months ago. Why is that? Very recent evidence tends to confirm early speculations. The first assumption must be that, for whatever reason, they died off almost as explosively as they multiplied.

  “Why should they die off, without controls—their normal predators being extinct? New methods of biochemical analysis point to the probable cause. Once their numbers became astronomical, and also, perhaps, mutants in a slight way but enough to alter their prey-animal target somewhat, and to stimulate their land invasions a little more, they consumed man in hundreds of millions, along with man’s domestic animals and pets. But in all such prey they consumed the pesticides stored in those beings at levels far higher even than those in oceanic mammals. Whatever the reason, it is quite sure that Negeedulatia Cornuta, horribilis and boreas, are perishing in quintillions, or whatever the ordering number may be, and that they are not reproducing either.

  “Man’s industrial wastes brought this super-biblical plague into being. But eating man, and his pets and domestic animals, was a dismal solution for the two species. For an individual human being, or even rat, is far more toxic, by weight, than porpoises are. That being the case, the horror story of the vibes has a double moral.” Theirs and ours.

  VII

  The Search for Energy

  One problem that faced technical man as early as the middle of the last century was where to find adequate sources of energy. This problem was complicated by the fact that such sources as were drawn on up to the middle of that century were often remote from where their products were in demand. As long as coal provided the major fuel for industry it was largely the home demand (for gas, electricity) that presented difficulties of long haul or piping. For industry tended to establish itself in places where both iron ore and coal were nearby.

  Soon, however, that situation changed. Petroleum for vehicles meant that oil or its refined products had to be moved by rail, by truck or in pipes to its places of use, and these were all places in civilization. The soaring need or demand for electricity also meant that generating plants would rise in every area, whether near a fossil fuel source or not. Transcontinental railways and pipelines multiplied. Natural gas was carried to generators a thousand miles and more from the wells.
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br />   Ships built to carry petroleum, “tankers,” moved that fuel from one corner of the earth to another. During the Second World War the Fascist powers actually sank by submarine so many tankers bringing oil from the Gulf of Mexico and South America to the American east coast that gasoline had to be severely rationed.

  It was expected after the war’s end that nuclear power would be rapidly developed and end the growing fuel dearth. In fact it took many years to develop the earliest and most primitive reactors, and these were more costly to operate (as well as to construct) than the optimistic scientist-engineers had predicted.

  By 1970, it will be remembered, enormous tracts of forest and woodland were being “strip-mined” for coal. “Known petroleum reserves” were estimated as adequate for some decades. Oil sands were being worked and a huge store of petroleum in oil shales was looked on as an eventual source.

  Another untapped wealth in coal was known to exist in Antarctica. Seams visible in cliff faces were reported and some of these were nearly thirty feet wide! But Antarctica was largely buried beneath mile-deep glacial ice. It was thousands of miles from the places where the energy demand was greatest and floating ice made it difficult to reach.

  Meanwhile, nuclear reactors using both “enriched uranium” and then “enriched plutonium” breeders multiplied as their cost of construction and fuel became competitive and soon cheaper than any fossil fuel used for generating electric power. In Part II of this book we have seen the result of that reactor proliferation. Radioactive krypton and argon as well as tritium appeared in massive amounts in stack and coolant effluents. The necessity of storing “hot” plant wastes and the radiated metal of such plants created an ever greater congregation of “tank farms” where the material boiled constantly and had to be kept cool by condensing systems and other expensive machinery. Also, no long-lived material for these storage vessels could be discovered or invented so that every huge, cooled and closed-system container had to be abandoned and its vast contents transferred, by remote-controlled machines, to new vessels.

  By 1970 “small leaks” had been found in many such tanks. In the years to follow, bigger leaks occurred. Earthquakes, on several occasions, split open the tanks on entire “farms” with terrifying results. Several rivers received the hot deluge from shattered tanks, killing thousands in nighttime flushings and forcing the removal of all persons from riverbank areas for periods of years.

  Before these major accidents had occurred, there had been a rising protest against the amount and rate of radioactive nuclides being added to the air, seas, fresh waters and land. Medicine had for some years warned that existing “hot” isotypes were affecting humanity. Local effects of specific sorts in large areas around places where nuclear accidents had occurred were, admittedly, sometimes caused by radiation. But for years the nations supporting reactors, with industry and other interests related to the reactor programs, had convinced the masses that the danger was nil, or nearly so, save in those few and rare instances of known sorts which, the civilized world was officially promised, would be avoided by new procedures.

  When such propaganda, such outright lying, was shown to be just that, the “atomic crisis” followed, as has been told. By then, the incidence of stillbirths, of the births of “monsters” or deformed babies, along with the evidence of a world drop in life expectancy, together with literally hundreds of illnesses and especially of cancers attributable to no other possible cause, brought on the period of atom panic.

  The world, at that time, had lost about two billion five hundred millions of human beings owing to the direct result of the Rice Blast, the vibes and the disease and conflicts caused by these disasters. But the victims were in general the people who used the smallest amount of electricity so that their erasure did not greatly relieve the ever growing demand for more and more energy.

  Meanwhile, several technical advances made it feasible to begin to draw on Antarctic coal. Superconductors in inert gases or vacuums, heavily shielded gases, alloys, were run along the sea bottoms to bring massive kilowattage from the ice-clad continent to demand-areas. First, huge plants using the coal for fuel rose in that distant region. Soon, however, methods were developed by which coal was burned where it lay, underground, and under the ice, which was melted for water to raise steam; electricity thus generated was borne by the efficient, new, submarine “pipes” to the rest of the world.

  When petroleum was also discovered in Antarctica it, too, was exploited swiftly, and for a short time the “advanced” nations truly believed their energy requirements would be served indefinitely, even at their ever escalated rate.

  The exploitation of these new resources was the work of many nations, each claiming or trying to claim a slice of the icy continent for its own use. Moreover, the way men rushed to exploit both the coal and the oil was reminiscent of the many past plunderings of natural resources by other generations. No effective international controls could be established. And, fairly soon, events predicted by many knowledgeable experts occurred. The “fire-mining” process, the burning of coal in situ to raise steam, led to “runaway” fires. And the fires of one nation’s seams of coal encountered the fires of others.

  By the middle nineties, considerable alarm over “industrial abuse in Antarctica” was being expressed. How vast the coal and petroleum reserves might be had never been estimated. Most of the continent carried such a load of ice that its land surface had been depressed as much as five thousand feet. Only the outer rim of that great bowl was being exploited for fuel and no adequate means for determining the petroleum and coal masses in the greatest area, that under a mile of ice, had been developed. Geologists differed greatly and often violently in their appraisals, some claiming the oil-coal “lodes” were peripheral entirely, while others stated the continent had gone through the past eons in which coal and oil were deposited before being ice-covered and then depressed so enormously by that glaciation and icing.

  But from the early nineties other factors caused unease. The pit-firing means of generating high-pressure, superheated steam and so electricity for the power-avid Northern Hemisphere created masses of soot, sulphur oxides and other impurities, especially particulate matter of a very fine size but containing heavy metals, and this unchecked air pollution was not, as had originally been promised, confined by circulating in the circumpolar currents but entered the world-wide atmosphere. Soot, to be sure, was then blackening the ice of the continent. But pollutants from the inefficient, rude procedures in use were also measurably entering the global atmosphere.

  Between 1992 and 1996 “runaway fires” increased in numbers and reached awesome magnitudes. Then, in May and June of 1996, Antarctica entered a period of vulcanism. Erebug, an active volcano, had been discovered by early expeditions. The great furnace under the ice created a madness among scientists, that dwindling brotherhood restricted to nations with sufficient coherence, government, educational systems and funds for the maintenance of science and scientists. These, in the mid-nineties, still numbered more than twenty, and though their efforts were then largely confined to searching for means to undo the major and more general harms of past years, more and more of them turned to study the Antarctic Gehenna, a fire mixed with lavas and ice that would have satisfied Dante.

  The program was of too great a magnitude and too complex for the experts. It involved too many unknowns and reliance on declared “knowns” that weren’t completely understood. Increased mixing of the heavy polluted polar air mass with the air to the north, in all directions, occurred quite soon after the bigger installations began to operate. Public alarm was considerable. True, the power flow was prodigious; the whole world—that is, the surviving parts with adequate technologies—used electricity like something almost free and infinite, too. The inhabited portions glowed at night as if chunks of the sun lay on them. Vast engineering undertakings were made simple by the quantity of power available and, of course, by the rapidly refined and gigantically enlarged engines fabricated for all p
urposes.

  Very fast submarines began to bring incredible amounts of ice to Temperate Zone cities, and these cubic miles of pure, fresh-water bergs, when cleansed of their soot coatings, were melted into upland riverheads and renewed whole watersheds, filling creeks, then little and large rivers with clean clear water, and allowing massive restorations of fish and other aquatic populations. Forests began to grow in these areas, and game to return.

  But the world-wide joy over these blessings was short-lived. The atmosphere below the Equator commenced to darken seriously. In a few years this dismal pollution crossed the Equator and reached north to the Arctic Circle, then beyond. In any three-month period the increased murk could be noted. Cloud formations changed. The jet streams went haywire. Before the end of the nineties USA, like all nations in that latitude, lay under a perpetual roof, a smoky air mass from which soot and fly ash steadily fell.

  Then, in 2003, the great quakes began in Antarctica and these spread around the Pacific. Cities collapsed and hundred-million death tolls recurred. Starvation followed as sea transport broke down, owing to unpredictable but devastating counterwaves that rebounded from shores hit by titanic tsunamis.

  In the winter of 2004 (summer, at the South Polar region) the satellites reported what was at first but suspected (and anxiously though covertly told northern governments): the polar smoke had taken a new ring formation, possibly a vortex configuration. Smoke from inland, from mines generating power, from runaway fires, smokes caused by volcanic eruption and by numerous lava flows, were being sucked away from land into the rapidly spinning ring, offshore. That soon led to the exposure of the subcontinental surface to sunshine round the clock, save where smoke trailing outward caused shadows. The ice was now largely free of cloud or cover of any kind.

  This phenomenon had never been recorded or anticipated, though there had been periods of brief sunshine on Antarctica’s ice fields, here and there. These ice fields were now sunbathed—and now uniformly covered with black soot. The result was that heat from the sun was absorbed at a rate never conceived of, and, in fact, regarded as impossible, since it was supposed the smoke dome would forever keep the sun from reaching the surface. The enormous melt of that summer raised the seas seventeen inches. But, as autumn came in the Southern Hemisphere, the melt strangely continued. The giant smoke ring had dissipated in that autumn, dissipated almost explosively, and its outflung contents, concentrated and heavily burdened with contaminants, descended on lands below the Equator, suffocating or poisoning unknown myriads there. The residue crossed the Equator and invaded the Northern Hemisphere with the coming of summer, attenuated but still unpredictably hazardous. Worse effects gave more concern to those in the Northern Hemisphere.