Last Gasp

Nick laughed. 'The next POGO in orbit will be me.'

Polar-Orbiting Geophysical satellites passed directly overhead every hour and a half, transmitting photographs of the weather situation and data on magnetic disturbances in the upper atmosphere. A satellite was being launched every three days, and at the present time there were more than three thousand spacecraft in orbit. Three quarters of all

expenditure on space development was military--China, India, and, more recently, Chile adding to the clutter in outer space.

Chase sipped the last of his lukewarm coffee. 'What section of the core are you working on?' he asked Nick.

'Oh, pretty recent. About five hundred b.c.'

'It always amazes me how you can date it so accurately.'

'Well, it's really an estimate, give or take two or three hundred years. But in the total span of fifty thousand years, what's a couple of centuries between friends?'

'Any surprises?'

'No, not anymore. I came across a dark band the other day, which is probably the residue of volcanic ash. We dated it by carbon fourteen at about two and a half thousand years, so there must have been a huge eruption about that time.'

'And the ash got this far?' Chase said curiously.

'Most airborne pollution does,' Nick told him. 'We can trace contamination of the atmosphere caused by the early Industrial Revolution. There's a marked darkening of the ice core from about two hundred and fifty years ago. Every year ten to twenty inches of snow falls on Antarctica, which with the accumulated pressure gets squeezed down into four to eight inches of pure ice. Trapped in it is a permanent record of the climate at any given moment, plus prevailing conditions in the atmosphere, space dust, and so on. We've even detected traces of leaded petroleum.' Nick gave a bark of a laugh and shook his head, bemused. 'Here am I, shut away in this bloody ice-hole on the arse-end of the globe, studying the effects of the Los Angeles freeway system.'

Chase said, 'And it's supposed to be the cleanest, purest air anywhere in the world down here.' He locked his fingers together and rested his chin on them. In the poor light his hair had a blue-black sheen, and the whites of his eyes stood out beneath the dark bar of his eyebrows. Someone had once described his looks as 'satyric,' which had flattered him until he looked up the precise meaning and found that it meant a Greek wood-demon with a tail and long pointed ears. 'I wonder if he is a scientist.'

'Possible.'

'What field?'

'Professor Boris reading Pornography.'

'Highly amusing.'

'Contact Mirnyy Station and ask if anyone's missing.'

'Are you serious?'

'That's one way to find out.'

Chase gnawed his lip. 'I reckon not.' He looked at Nick. 'I mean, what if he was trying to get away from them? He'd hardly thank me for blowing the gaff.'

'What the hell, I don't see that it matters. He'll be in the tender loving care of the Yanks soon. Let them worry about his pedigree.' Nick swung his boots down, stood up, and flexed his shoulders. 'Let's go to the rec room. It's Donna Summer in cabaret tonight.'

They went in single file along the narrow wooden corridor, which was lined with silver-clad pipes and lit by caged bulbs. Faintly they could hear the wind howling, twenty feet above them. On the surface it was 90 degrees below, with a windspeed of 62 knots. Chase smiled as he recalled an expression of his mother's. 'Not fit to turn a dog out,' she'd say when the wind and rain swirled around their little terraced house in Bolton. He missed her, found himself remembering silly inconsequential things about her with each passing year, like sediment building up. His father, Cyril, was still alive, retired from his job with British Rail, now living with his sister Emily, Chase's Auntie Em, in Little Lever.

It all seemed to belong to another century. A lost age. His boyhood self had vanished into the dead past, never to return. Was this what it was like to grow old, to experience this poignant pain? How did old people stand it? The weight of memory must cripple.

Nick went to the bar, a wooden plank resting on two crates, and brought back two cans of Newcastle brown ale. Settled in a sagging armchair, Chase accepted one, peeled back the tab, and took a mouthful. A group in the corner was watching a VTR of an old Woody Allen film; Woody was walking down the street with Mariel Hemingway; that would make it Manhattan, Chase thought.

He took another swig of beer and fished out the crumpled piece of paper and smoothed it flat on his knee with one hand. He continued to sip his drink while he studied it. What had he missed? This simple equation must mean something. The fact that it was so simple disturbed him most, in fact.

With little else to divert him, Nick was willing to listen. Really, Chase supposed, he wanted to talk to clarify his own thoughts, using Nick as a sounding board.

'The absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater is a commonplace chemical interaction. They first measured it early in the century by shaking a sample of seawater in a closed jar with a given amount of air.

Later they used a paddle-wheel device, and nowadays they keep a continuous record of the partial pressure of carbon dioxide--that's pC0₂ --over huge tracts of ocean by using an infrared analyzer. The normal thing is to obtain high values in equatorial regions, while north and south of the fifty-degree latitudes, toward the poles, the values for pC0₂ are low. The reason for that is--'

'Because gases are less soluble in warm water than in cold.'

'Right. So, what you get is an outgassing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere near the equator--because the warmer water can't hold it --and a corresponding sink for carbon dioxide at higher latitudes. This keeps everything nicely balanced. In fact the oceans are an extremely efficient exchange machine, maintaining a constant level of atmospheric C0₂ of about 0.03 percent. That's been the case for thousands, millions of years.'

'What about the increase in carbon dioxide?' Nick said. 'We're all going to fry in the greenhouse, aren't we?'

'We've known about that since the thirties,' Chase said, nodding. 'It was a British engineer, G. S. Callendar, who published some calculations in the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society that showed that in the fifty years up to 1936, man's industrial activities had added one hundred fifty billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Since then, of course, industrial expansion has zoomed off the graph, so that now it's estimated that over twenty billion tons are released into the atmosphere each year. The real point isn't the actual amount--it's still very small compared to the huge fluxes of gases that take place in the forests and the oceans--but how would a carefully balanced ecosystem cope with all this extra C0₂ floating around?'

'And what's the answer, mastermind?'

'Nobody yet knows. We do know that since about 1850 there's been a ten to fifteen percent increase in carbon dioxide in the air, which is where you get your greenhouse effect from. Most people don't understand that our atmosphere is heated from below, by radiated heat from the earth's surface. The sun's rays come through, heat us up, and then because of the added carbon dioxide and water vapor can't get out again. The heat gets trapped; ergo, we all turn into tomatoes.'

'Wonderful.' Nick raised his can. 'I'll drink to that.'

Chase reached out and pressed his arm. 'Before you do, my junkie friend, answer this: Where has all the extra carbon dioxide gone to?'

Nick blinked. 'Why, don't they know?' He seemed mildly interested at last.

'Nope. We produce an extra twenty billion tons a year--probably nearer thirty--and less than fifty percent of that increase has been detected in the atmosphere. You could win the Nobel by answering that.'

'Why don't you try? You're the marine biologist.'

'But not an atmospheric physicist,' Chase pointed out sensibly. He looked down at the piece of creased paper on his knee, wondering if the Russian had found the answer to that puzzle. Was the extra C0₂ being absorbed into the polar oceans? They were the usual C0₂ sinks--