Last Gasp

of nature arrested in time and space.

His first sight of the earth from the region of the moon had evoked the same response in him.

It had also changed his life.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, a graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he had enlisted in the navy and continued his studies at MIT, emerging with a degree in aeronautics and astronautics. Then came four years with NASA during which he took part in three missions, the longest being an eighty-one-day stint in Skylab. It was to have a profound effect on his whole philosophy.

Up to that point, aged twenty-nine, he had thought no more or less about the environment and matters of ecology than it was fashionable to do. In fact he was rather weary of hearing people refer to the earth as 'a spaceship with finite resources.' Like a danger signal too often repeated, it was dismissed as alarmist propaganda. Of course the planet had to be protected, its resources conserved. He understood that. But why keep harping on about it and rehashing the same old stale arguments? Anyway, you couldn't walk more than a couple of yards without stumbling over a conservationist; there were ecology nuts everywhere. Surely the government was taking the necessary steps, acting on all this free advice.

Then he went into space. As he looked down upon the earth, he thought it was so damned beautiful. He'd been expecting that, of course, having seen with every other person living the color shots of the swirling blue-white planet set against the velvety blackness of space. Still, it was beautiful, no denying it-- and vulnerable. That's what threw him. This incredibly beautiful, peaceful-looking planet floating all alone in the infinite reaches of the cosmos. And although he'd always known this to be true intellectually, now he actually felt the truth of it. He remembered thinking, My God, this is it--and it's all we've got!

In that moment, 130 miles in space, he ceased to be an American citizen and became a citizen of the planet. Every astronaut he knew felt the same. From out there it was all so painfully, horribly obvious that mankind, squabbling and falling out like a pack of ignorant loutish children, was in danger of fouling its own nest. They were mindlessly overpopulating the planet, squandering its resources, filling it with deadly pollution. And all the while demanding more, grabbing more, pushing one another out of the way in a stupid, selfish, greedy scramble.

That experience, that revelation, five years ago, still had the power to make him tremble. It had fueled his determination to do something about it. But what could he do? Wage a one-man crusade against the despoilment of the planet? That was naive and, worse, futile.

A solution of sorts presented itself when, on leaving NASA for the big cruel world outside, he'd been invited by an old friend and classmate from MIT, Bill Inchcape, to join him at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Bill said they needed somebody with his kind of experience to take charge of satellite photography and evaluation. So for the past three years Brad had been head of the department, working in collaboration with the center's meterologists and atmospheric physicists, people with their heart in the right place, he felt. Yet still it wasn't enough. In a way he couldn't explain--even to Binch, who possessed far more technical knowledge and expertise than he did--

Brad was gripped by a steadily mounting sense of panic. Time, he was convinced, was rapidly running out.

Years ago he had read somewhere that 'we shall be unable to detect any adverse trend on a global scale until it has gone some way in its development.' That's what really scared him, haunted him--the obsessive fear that the process had already begun, and that by the time it became evident to skeptical scientists and bull-headed politicians, it would be too late.

By then the world would be sliding headlong toward an inescapable ecological doomsday, with nothing for mankind to do but slide helplessly with it.

Brad turned away from the window with its magnificent mountain panorama and sat down at his desk, a small dapper man with a gentle, worried face. He was thirty-four but looked older, and he certainly felt it. He wasn't eating or sleeping properly, and it upset his wife that he never played with the kids anymore. Gary was seven and Little Pete nearly four and they couldn't understand why Daddy didn't respond to their questions and joyful enthusiasms. Joyce blamed him for being forever preoccupied with his work--but it wasn't that.

Yet how could he explain that he was thinking about them, his own flesh and blood, in the most utterly real way possible? That in his mind's eye, an image that revolved endlessly like a closed spool of film, he was seeing the heritage his generation was bequeathing theirs.

A dead, polluted, uninhabitable planet.

He looked at his taut, outstretched hands and pressed them to his face, trying to stifle the croaking moan of despair forcing itself from his gut.

Bo Anyango knelt in the baked red earth and fingered the mottled leaves of a coffeebush. The rising sun had just cleared the peaks of a distant mountain range, so the air was still pleasantly cool; yet it was tainted with the sour odor of decaying vegetable matter.

Bo was mystified. Every single bush on his four-acre plot had been ruined. Shriveled discolored leaves were scattered all around, several inches deep in the furrows he had hoed with his own hands, using implements supplied by the Bakura Institute of Agriculture. Like his African neighbors, he had followed instructions and tended his crops just as the mzungu--the European agricultural officer--had shown him. And just like the crops of his neighbors, the coffeebushes had wilted and died. The only means of livelihood for himself, his wife, and five children was now so much rotten, stinking vegetation.

What had gone wrong?

Squatting on his skinny black haunches, Bo looked disconsolately around him. Three years work to prepare the land for the coffee crop he had been assured would fetch a good price totally wasted. He had been told of the miracles the Europeans could bring about with their powders and sprays, and he had been eager to try. /EG was the magic word on the side of the canisters. It was an English word, he supposed, though no one had told him its meaning. He had believed in JEG, because he had seen the results with his own eyes. Crops that normally would have been stripped bare by hordes of voracious insects, commonplace in this remote region of western Kenya, had flourished and grown to maturity. The valley, once a barren waste, had blossomed. The insects had been defeated--for a while.

Recently, however, some of the pests had reappeared, and in far greater numbers than before. The spider mite--not an insect but a member of the scorpion family--had returned in force, in their millions. Its razor-sharp mouth was specially adapted for piercing and sucking chlorophyll from leaves, and it had a prodigious appetite. In the past the spider mite population had been kept in check by predatory insects and birds, most of which had disappeared since they started using /EG. Animals too, he observed, had also gone, some of them found floating belly-up in the streams. Soon the valley would be denuded of vegetation, silent of birdsong, devoid of animal life. Only the vultures and the spider mites would be left.

Bo knew one thing for sure. Without the coffee crop he would be unable to barter for goods, unable to feed himself and his family. He knew also that he was worse off now than he had been before the mzungu came to the valley bringing the miracle of modern science.

3

Squeezing the rubber bulb between thumb and forefinger, Chase gingerly deposited a globule of fluid on the glass slide and positioned it under the microscope. He adjusted the magnification to a scan of 0.3 mm and the bead of water became a subminiature menagerie of marine life. Sharpening the focus, he concentrated on a particular group and after a few moments identified two subclasses of diatoms called Centri-cae and Pennatae. Both types had cases, or frustules, of silica, both were yellowish brown and highly ornamented. The difference lay in the sculptured patterns: In Centricae the lines radiated from a central point, whereas in Pennatae they were more or less straight.

Why such diversity in such tiny organisms, less than one millimeter in length? Obviously each was suited to a specific purpose and mode of life, fitted perfectly into its 'niche,' yet he couldn't help but marvel at the seemingly endless proliferation of design and the incredibly minute adaptations to environment.

By his right elbow lay his notebook and several sheets of graph paper, and next to those on the bench his heavily annotated copy of the standard work, Detrick's Diatom Growth and Development. Taking up the book and opening it at one of the sections marked with slips of paper, he refreshed his memory. Another distinguishing feature of the Pennatae variety was that they had a narrow slit-- the raphe--running along one or both valves, which enabled them to move independently along the ocean floor.