Hot Sky at Midnight

Rhodes seemed well known in the restaurant. The place was busy, but the maitre d’, a silky-voiced android of vaguely Oriental appearance, greeted him with a stagy overabundance of warmth and led them at once to what must have been a choice table, high up in the middle dome with a terrific view of the water. “What will you drink?” Rhodes asked, the moment they were seated.

Carpenter, caught by surprise, asked for a beer. Rhodes ordered a whiskey on the rocks. Both drinks came almost at once and Carpenter noticed with interest how quickly Rhodes went to work on it, and how rapidly he proceeded to put it away.

“An iceberg skipper,” Rhodes said, bringing up menus for them both on the table visor. “Whatever gave you the idea of doing that?”

“It was handed to me. Woman I know in Personnel, working out of Paris. She said there was slope in it. Hell, even if there wasn’t, Nick. I hated Spokane. So I move along. I do this, I do that, whatever the Company says. Your basic uncomplaining salaryman. Jack of all trades, master of each, sooner or later.”

“Weather forecaster, weren’t you, this last time?”

Carpenter nodded. Somehow a second round of drinks had arrived. He hadn’t seen Rhodes order them. He still hadn’t finished his first beer.

“What about you, Nick? Continuing to steam away on Project Frankenstein, are you?”

“Easy,” Rhodes said. He looked hurt. “Cuts a little close.”

“Sorry.”

“I hear enough crap from my humanist friends here about the diabolical implications of my research. It gets a little tiresome, being a villain to your friends.”

“I don’t understand,” said Carpenter. “Why a villain?”

Rhodes made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “’Changing the human race into something grotesque and hideous, something that can scarcely be deemed human at all. Creating a new species of sci-fi monsters.’”

Carpenter took a long, reflective pull of the first beer, finishing it, and contemplated the second one. He began to think it would be a good idea to shift to something stronger for the next round.

Carefully he said, “You aren’t doing any such thing, though. You’re simply trying to develop some useful anatomical modifications to meet the really heavy conditions that are waiting for us somewhere down the road. Right?”

“Right.”

“Then why—”

“Do we have to talk about this?” Rhodes said, a little snappishly. “I just want to relax, to get the fuck away from—” He looked up. “I’m sorry. You were just asking questions. And the answer is, no, I’m not actually setting out to create monsters in human form. Or even inhuman form. I’m just trying to use my knowledge for the good of humanity, pretentious as that may sound. The monsters are already here, anyway. Out there.”

He pointed through the curving perspex, toward the bay.

“I don’t get you,” Carpenter said.

“You see those low green humps just offshore? Monster algae, is what they are. Something new, some kind of mutant species, a foot wide and God knows how many yards long. They arrived a couple of years ago, from Monterey. The bay is choked with them. They grow a yard a month. The Bay Environmental Commission has brought in dugongs to feed on them in the hope of clearing the waterway a little.”

“Dugongs?”

“Herbivorous aquatic mammals, from the Indian Ocean. Ugly as shit, but harmless. They’re stupid looking and practically blind. They eat seaweed as if it was candy. You can see them lying around in the algae beds gobbling like pigs in clover. The trouble is that the crocodiles like to eat them a whole lot.”

“Crocodiles,” said Carpenter dully.

“In San Francisco Bay, yes. They finally made it up here from Los Angeles, and they love it.”

“I can’t believe it. Crocodiles up here!”

“You better believe it. They’ll be in Puget Sound next.”

Carpenter stared. He knew that crocodiles had been making a comeback as the global climate warmed. Even when he was a boy they had started crawling up out of Mexico toward San Diego. In a world where most wildlife was on the skids, practically everything desperately sliding toward extinction, there was a sudden bizarre boom in obsolete Mesozoic reptiles.

They were all over sweltering super-tropical Florida, of course—what little had survived of it after the sinking of the shoreline. You couldn’t pee in Florida without seeing a crocodile grinning up at you out of the bowl. But California? Crocs in San Francisco Bay? It had never been that way. It was an abomination.

“And then we get tyrannosaurs?” Carpenter asked.

“I doubt that very much. But what we do have is nutty enough as it is. The bay is full of giant seaweed and giant seaweed-eating dugongs and giant dugong-eating crocodiles, and here they have the gall to tell me that I’m making monsters. With monsters all around us and more arriving every day. Jesus Christ, Paul, it drives me crazy!” Rhodes smiled almost sheepishly, as though to take the impetus out of his outburst. He had always been a very self-effacing man, Carpenter thought. Something must really be eating at him to make him complain like this.

Neither of them had glanced at their menus, yet. “It’s been a shitty day,” Rhodes said, after a moment, in a quieter tone. “A little problem in my department. One of those steely little completely amoral kids who happens to be a genius, got his doctorate at nineteen, that sort of kid, and he’s come up with something how, or says he has, a substitute for hemoglobin that’ll thrive on lethal metallic salts. His scheme as currently set forth is full of huge assumptions and speculative leaps. But if it works, it’ll lead the way to a total redesign of the body that’ll enable us to cope with almost any sort of environmental crap that’s heading our way.”

“And what’s the problem? Isn’t it going to work?”

“The problem is that it just might. I figure the odds against it are ninety-nine to one. But long shots sometimes do come through, don’t they?”

“And if this one does—?”

“If it does,” Rhodes said, “we really will wind up with a world full of sci-fi monsters instead of human beings. You change the hemoglobin, that means changing the basic chemical makeup of the blood, and then the heart-lungs interface has to be modified, and the lungs need to go some other route anyway because of the atmospheric changes, maybe turn them into book-lungs like spiders have, and then too the kidneys will need rearrangement, and that leads to modification of the skeletal structure because of calcium differentials, and then—” Rhodes caught his breath. “Oh, shit, Paul, when it’s all done we have a creature that may be very nicely adapted to the new conditions, but what kind of thing is it, really? Can you still call it human? I’m scared. I’m tempted to have this kid transferred to Siberia to raise cucumbers, before he can fill in the missing pieces in his puzzle and bring his goddamn idea off.”

Carpenter felt confused. But the confusion, he sensed, was really in Nick Rhodes.

“I don’t want to bug you about any of this,” he said. “But you told me five minutes ago that your goal is to work for humanity as the planet changes around us.”

“Yes. But I want us to stay human.”

“Even if the world becomes unfit for human life?”

Rhodes looked away. “I see the contradiction. I can’t help it All this is making me very uneasy. On the one hand I believe that what I’m doing is fundamentally necessary for human survival, and on the other hand I’m frightened of the deeper implications of my own work. So I’m really marching in two directions at once. But I go along like a good soldier, doing my research, winning little victories and trying not to ask the big questions. And then a kid like this Alex Van Vliet breaks through to the next plateau, or seems to, or at any rate claims that he has, and forces me to contemplate the ultimate issues. Shit. Let’s order lunch, Paul.”

Almost at random, Carpenter punched out things on the table computer. A hamburger, some fries, coleslaw, nice antique food, probably all of it synthetic or recycled out of squid and algae, but that didn’t matter to him just now. He wasn’t very hungry.

Rhodes, he observed, had conjured up yet another set of drinks. He seemed to take in alcohol at a steady- state clip, inhaling it like air, without ever showing much effect.