Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  BONES KIDNEYS

  LUNGS HEART

  SKIN MIND

  Sweet of her. Considering that Isabelle fundamentally despised his work, that she inwardly hoped that it would fail. Rhodes picked it up and turned it over and over in his hand like a giant worry bead. BONES. LUNGS. SKIN. Yes. KIDNEYS. HEART. MIND. He stared for a moment or two at mind. Ah, that was the real problem, he thought, the true killer. MIND.

  The annunciator flashed again and this time the voice said, “Meshoram Enron, calling on Line Two.”

  “Who?”

  “Meshoram Enron,” the automaton said again, with great precision. “The Israeli journalist. You’ve agreed to have lunch with him today.”

  “Oh. Right.” Rhodes hesitated. He wasn’t ready for Enron either, just this moment—not, at any rate, one-on-one. “Tell him I can’t make lunch, how about dinner?” Rhodes reached without thinking for Van Vliet’s virtuals, put them back, pulled them toward him again, stared at them as though they had only just arrived at his office. “And if he says yes, call Ms. Martine for me and put her through when you have her. I’ll want her to be joining us.”

  Back from the android, a few moments later, came the report: Mr. Enron would be happy to make it a dinner meeting. Would Dr. Rhodes care to pick him up at his hotel in San Francisco at half past seven? As for Ms. Martine, she was away from her phone, but a seek-message had been attached to her number. And there was another message from Dr. Van Vliet, who was very much looking forward to the opportunity to discuss his proposals in person with Dr. Rhodes as soon as possible, blah blah, hoping for an early response, blah blah blah—

  Yes. Blah blah blah. A busy day, suddenly. Rhodes was starting to feel outnumbered. Van Vliet, turning the pressure on. This Enron, sniffing around wanting to find out God knows what. A spy, no doubt. All Israelis were spies, in one way or another, Rhodes thought. What next? And only ten in the morning. Time for the first drink yet?

  No, Rhodes decided crisply. It is not time for a drink yet.

  But if it was too soon to have a drink and too soon to deal with Van Vliet’s report, then he was making procrastination the order of the day, and that didn’t feel good either. With sudden manic decisiveness Rhodes overruled himself on everything he had just been telling himself. Total shift of direction, that was the ticket. Reaching under the desk, he deftly disarmed the privacy lock on the liquor drawer, brought forth the cognac, knocked back a quick shot. Pondered a moment, had another, a smaller nip. Then, as the glow began to spread, he picked up Van Vliet’s proposal again and clicked it into the playback slot.

  Instantly a virtual Alex Van Vliet stood before him, small as life: trim, wiry little guy, chilly blue eyes, tiny close-clinging goatee, square-shouldered defiant stance that maximized his flimsy frame. Rhodes, a big shambling burly man, mistrusted little agile ones. They made him feel like a beleaguered gorilla surrounded by yapping monkeys. And gorillas were extinct, essentially. Monkeys thrived like mosquitoes in the world’s new jungles.

  Behind Van Vliet, reaching its arms forward to surround his image like a sort of open-ended nimbus, was a snaking three-dimensional pattern of colored dots which Rhodes recognized almost instantly as a beta-chain hemoglobin molecule. Van Vliet was saying, “They are conjugated proteins and consist of four heme groups and the globin molecule. The heme component is a porphyrin in which the metal ion that is coordinated is iron in the ferrous state, that is, Fe+2. The globin component consists of four polypeptide chains, which are designated alpha, beta, gamma, and so forth, according to their amino-acid makeup.”

  It was the middle of an elementary lecture on the function of hemoglobin. Rhodes realized that he had somehow activated the visual incorrectly and had missed Van Vliet’s introductory remarks. But that was all right. He could pretty well imagine what they were. Best to glide into them in a roundabout fashion.

  “—all-important role of the hemoglobin pigment in mammalian respiration is to combine loosely with molecular oxygen, so that it is capable of transporting oxygen from the organism’s intake point to the point of utilization. However, hemoglobin has an affinity for many other molecules: for example, it readily unites with carbon monoxide, with disastrous effects to the body. It bonds easily with nitric oxide as well. Sulfhemoglobin, which is hemoglobin plus hydrogen sulfide gas, is another significant pathological form of the pigment. Hematin, which is the hydroxyl compound of heme—”

  While he was speaking, Van Vliet moved briskly around the virtual stage, adjusting the molecular patterns behind his simulated figure with quick confident motions of his hands, like a magician rearranging his props. At his deft touch the bright patterns underwent instant metamorphosis to demonstrate each altered form of hemoglobin Van Vliet summoned forth. The colors were very pretty. Rhodes allowed himself another small drink. It took the edge off. Gradually Rhodes’ attentiveness diminished, not so much on account of the cognac as simply out of boredom and irritation.

  Van Vliet went right on, cruising remorselessly through basic biochemical information. This visual was obviously intended for people on higher managerial levels than Rhodes’, where technical expertise was more tenuous. “Ferrous salts— insufficient oxygen supply to the tissues—affinity for carbon, phosphorus, manganese, vanadium, tungsten—iron will form dihalides with all four of the common halogens—”

  Yes. Yes. It certainly will.

  With a diabolical grin Van Vliet said suddenly, “But of course that will soon be obsolete, so far as the human race is concerned. Since, as I have already indicated, our consensus projections of the makeup of the Earth’s atmosphere circa A.D. 2350 indicate significant replacement of oxygen and nitrogen by complex hydrocarbons and sulfur compounds, as well as a continuing increase in the already critical percentage of carbon dioxide, we will need to adjust the body’s respiration capacity accordingly. The risks of continuing to use the iron-based pigment hemoglobin as the respiratory system’s vital transport protein are manifest. We will have to shatter the human race’s dependence on oxygen. A hydrogen-to-methane cycle is one possible alternative, employing a transport protein that utilizes the locking and unlocking of a double sulfur bond, as can be seen in this diagram.”

  The pattern now was that of a tightly coiled serpent in angry reds and slashing violets, head hovering above the tip of its own tail as though getting ready to strike.

  Rhodes put Van Vliet’s presentation on hold and backed it up ninety seconds or so.

  The risks of continuing to use the iron-based pigment hemoglobin as the respiratory system’s vital transport protein are manifest. We will have to shatter the human race’s dependence on oxygen.

  He’s lost his mind, Rhodes thought.

  A transport protein that utilizes the locking and unlocking of a double sulfur bond—

  Right. Right. The visual, rolling onward, had reached the point where Rhodes had reversed it. Once again Van Vliet, like a capering demigod, built his red-and-purple serpent in midair in front of Rhodes’ desk with quick, delicate movements of his hands. Rhodes hunched forward with his chin propped on his fists and watched Van Vliet cruise on to the end of the first capsule, offering more apocalyptic news about the human respiratory system in the coming age of oxygen-deficient air. The second capsule, Van Vliet said by way of teaser, contained the actual technical specifications for the corrective work he proposed to undertake. Rhodes picked up the second capsule but did not insert it for playback.

  The backstairs scuttlebutt was true, then.

  We will have to shatter the human race’s dependence on oxygen—

  The little guy was suggesting nothing less than to rearrange the body’s whole respiratory-circulatory works to make human beings capable of breathing a sulfur-dioxide/ methane/carbon-dioxide mix, and to hell with any need for oxygen. Of all the adapto proposals that had been kicked around the Santachiara labs in the past year and a half, this was by far the most radical. By far, by far, by far. No one had ever envisioned attempting such a total transformation. Rhod
es doubted, even after having looked through some of Van Vliet’s specs, that the thing could ever be managed. It was wildly out of line with Rhodes’ sense of the possible.

  Rhodes felt a muscle pulling itself tight in his cheek, like a tiny acrobat getting itself ready for a long-distance leap, and he pressed the tips of two fingers into it, hard, to discharge the tension that was building up there.

  Another drink?

  No, Rhodes decided. Not just yet.

  Could Van Vliet’s gimmick work?

  Not in a million years, Rhodes thought. You’d have to redesign everything, top to bottom, the entire array of organs— lungs and liver and lights too, whatever the hell lights might be, and right on down to the osmotic capacity of the cell walls—a total makeover, in effect a second creation of humanity. It was an absurdly overambitious scheme that was beyond any imaginable technical capacity Santachiara might be able to develop and which would, if carried somehow to a successful conclusion despite the apparent difficulties, transform the human race beyond all recognition.

  Which is exactly the thing, Rhodes thought, that we have been brought together here to come up with, is it not? Which I am paid, and paid well, to achieve. Which I have hired young Alex Van Vliet to help me bring about.

  And if Van Vliet is right about the feasibility of his proposal, and I am wrong—

  He looked at his hands. They were trembling a little. He spread the fingers wide to regain control over them. Then he hit the button and started Van Vliet over, this time from the actual beginning.

  Van Vliet, cocky, self-possessed, grinning at him like an old pal. Twenty-four years old, wasn’t he? Young enough to be Rhodes’ son, almost. Rhodes, at forty, had never before felt the thunder of the oncoming generation, and he didn’t like it.

  “What I propose to do in this initial presentation,” Van Vliet said, “is to offer a fundamental reevaluation of our adapto efforts thus far, working from the premise that when we are given an extreme situation to deal with, extreme measures are the only appropriate response.”

  Van Vliet disappeared and was replaced by the virtual image of a lovely female figure in airy robes, a fragile girl, tripping through a forest against a backdrop of bilious green sky thick as soup. She was dainty, elegantly slender, Pre-Raphaelitely Caucasian, with a stunning complexion: the archetypical generic lovely little girl. And all around her the ghastly air was closing in, fetid, clotted, pockmarked with clusters of what looked like aerial turds. She didn’t seem to care a damn about that. It didn’t trouble her at all. Rhodes saw her precious little nostrils daintily inputting lungful after lungful of muckosphere as she danced playfully about, happily singing some sweet little song.

  This was, Rhodes knew, by way of being an advertisement for the New Human Race that Van Vliet meant to create. Would the new and loathsome Earth to come really be populated by a race of beautiful faery-maidens like this?

  “There can be no significant disagreement with our projection,” Van Vliet continued, “that within four to five generations, six as a maximally favorable estimate, the air of this planet will become unbreathable for the human race as it is presently constituted. Despite all corrective measures it is clear that the buildup of greenhouse gases reached a condition of irreversibility some time ago and that it is inevitable now that as outgassing of previously stored pollutants continues we will pass below the oxygenation threshold within the lifetime of the grandchildren of the children now being born.

  “Since we do not have the capability of macro-managing our atmosphere to return it to its pre-industrial-age mix, in view of the unavoidable ongoing release into the atmosphere of hydrocarbons that were locked up in the Earth’s oceans and solid matter during the irresponsible nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have chosen instead, here at Santachi-ara, to attempt to micro-manage the human genome to meet the coming changes. Various adapto schemes of differing degrees of complexity are being studied, but it is my considered opinion, after a thoroughgoing analysis of the entire Santachiara program as it is presently conceived, that we have allowed ourselves to settle for a program of half measures which are inevitably doomed to failure and—”

  Jesus Christ, Rhodes thought. He says it right to my face, and grins!

  Rhodes had had about all that he could take, for the moment. He hit the button. Van Vliet disappeared.

  “Ms. Martine calling on Line One,” the annunciator said instantly.

  Grateful for the interruption, Rhodes brought her on visor. Isabelle—head-and-shoulders image—hovered before him, a slim, intense woman with oddly complex and conflicting features. Fierce glittering gray-violet eyes; a delicate, finely structured nose; soft, full lips: nothing quite went with anything else. Last spring Isabelle had had her hair turned a volcanic red and Rhodes still was not used to it.

  She started right in, her usual brusque headlong approach: “What’s this about dinner with some Israeli tonight, Nick? I thought we were going to go to Sausalito and—” Isabelle paused abruptly. “Nick? You look so funny, Nick!”

  “Do I? Funny how?”

  “Your face is unusually tight. Your pupils are dilated. There’s trouble, isn’t there?”

  Isabelle was always quick to pick up his somatic changes. But that was her business, after all: she was a kinetic therapist. She spoke body language like a native. There was never any sense trying to hide things from her. She and Rhodes had been seeing each other for two and a half years. People were starting to ask him when they would be getting married.

  She gave him one of her sensitive, caring therapist looks: Mama Isabelle, eager to relieve him of his anguish. Talk to me, sweet. Tell me about it and you’ll feel better.

  Rhodes said, “It’s been a bad morning, lady. Couple of days ago one of the kids here handed me the goddamnedest far-reaching adapto proposal I’ve ever seen. A really revolutionary idea. Today’s the first chance I’ve had to play the virtuals he gave me, and I’m halfway through and too upset to go on.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Partly because it’s so radical. It would mean the sort of extreme measures you’ve always been worried about, human somatic adaptation right from the bottom up, not just some kind of quick fix. And partly because his approach is so snotty. He opens it by saying, essentially, that the rest of us are all so hopelessly conservative here that we might as well just quit and let him take over the lab.”

  “You? Conservative?”

  “Around here, yes. Anyway, I’m not yet ready to hear a kid half my age telling me in just about so many words that it’s time for old farts like me to step aside and stop obstructing the solution of the problem.”

  “A solution which he can provide?”

  “I didn’t get that far. Maybe he can, maybe he can’t. I’m inclined to believe that he can’t, because what he’s proposing is so far out that I don’t think it’s achievable. There are some built-in technical problems that seem inherently unsolvable to me. But what do I know? I’m only an old fart. He wants us to try a sulfur-based hemoglobin instead of iron-based, so that we can get along without oxygen when push comes to shove a couple of hundred years from now.”

  “Would that be possible, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it very much. But if it turns out that it is, he’ll own this whole lab inside of a year and I’ll be out on my ear.” Rhodes managed an uneasy smile. “Maybe I ought to have him killed right now, just on the off chance that he’s really onto something.”

  Her expression darkened as he spoke. Her eyes grew steely. The therapist was gone and the face on the screen now was that of the dedicated political activist. Rhodes began to worry. He dreaded that look.

  “Is that all you can think about, Nick? That this kid will push you out of your job? What about the human race, for God’s sake? Transformation from the bottom up? What does that mean, anyway? Is he going to turn us all into some kind of science-fiction monsters?”

  “Isabelle—”

  “Sulfur in the blood? It sound
s disgusting.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. It makes me want to puke, just thinking about it.” Rhodes wished he hadn’t gone into such detail with her: he had no business sharing company business with anyone on the outside, especially not Isabelle. She had connections to half a dozen reactionary San Francisco humanist groups. She could, if she chose, make real trouble for him. “Listen, let’s not get into all that now, okay? Especially over the phone. I’m aware that this is not a proposal you’re likely to think highly of. But we can discuss it some other time, all right? About this evening—”

  “The Israeli.”

  “Right.” Thinking of the upcoming meeting with Enron, Rhodes regretted more and more having opened up to Isabelle, now. “He’s a journalist, he says. Doing one of those uplifting features on the future of the human race, more or less—you know, the Frightening Challenges That We Face, and What Our Finest Minds Mean to Do About Them—for some big slick magazine that has about a billion readers in the Israeli-Arab world, and he wants to quiz me on the current state of American gene-splicing research. I think he’s a spy.”

  “Of course he is. They all are, those Israelis. Everybody knows that. I’m surprised you’ve agreed to talk to him.”

  “I have to. He cleared it with New Tokyo. I’m not supposed to tell him anything that has any substance, naturally, but Samurai wants the PR exposure. It’s a very big magazine. And the Fertile Crescent is a huge market for Samurai products. We are supposed to position ourselves for their readers as the last best hope for the salvation of humanity. I was supposed to have lunch with him, but I’d rather make it dinner. I want you along to kick me under the table whenever I start veering into classified areas.”

  “Sure,” she said, smiling.

  “But—please, Isabelle. No political stuff. No diatribes. You and I have our philosophical differences, and so be it, but tonight, in front of this Enron, is not the time to ventilate them.”