Last Gasp

about five hundred trillion tons. That's going to take a lot of making up.'

'How many's a trillion?' Prothero asked.

'A million million.'

Prothero's lined pouchy face looked glum.

Ruth said, 'Surely sixty thousand plants that size will take years to build. Decades.' She sounded skeptical, yet prepared, even desperate, to be convinced.

'Five years,' Chase said. He saw the look of disbelief in her eyes and went on. 'We could do it, Ruth. Once we have the basic proved design there's no technical reason why we couldn't meet that deadline, given the resources.'

'You mean the money.'

'Yes.'

'Will you get it?'

Chase tugged at his beard. 'We have to get it. Five years from now, by 2018--2021 at the latest--we're going to be running out of time. If we haven't achieved at least seventy percent of our construction program by then we might as well crawl away and curl up and count the seconds till our final breath.'

Ruth was watching him intently. 'If you get the money and you build enough of these oxygen plants by the deadline, will it be enough? What I'm asking is, can it actually be done? Will it work! ¹'

She reminded Chase of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of driftwood who, having given himself up for dead, sights a desert island and can't accept the evidence of his own eyes.

'I believe it will. If we can replenish the atmosphere with oxygen instead of depleting it, we can restore the balance. That's what we've spent the past five years at Desert Range trying to achieve. If Hanamura is successful, then it's possible and it can be done.' Chase smiled, seeing the faint gleam of renewed hope in her eyes. After the foul, miasmic canyons she had left behind, this must have seemed like a breath of fresh air.

There was a knock at the door and a messenger came in with a yellow flimsy from the communications shack. Another message from the Nierenherg, Chase thought, scanning the three lines. Prothero and Ruth saw the color drain from his face. They waited silently, watching his dazed expression, and finally he said, 'It's from Goose Lake,' which meant nothing to either of them.

Part of Chase's mind registered their incomprehension. 'That's one of the Earth Foundation settlements in Oregon where Cheryl and Dan are living,' he told them. 'Cheryl is ill. They think she's dying. They want me to go right away.'

Drew had provisioned the jeep for a trip lasting five days, which was three more than Chase planned to take. The most direct route to Goose Lake--due west across Nevada and cutting through a corner of California--was about eight hundred miles, and that was assuming that the roads over mountains, through forests, and across deserts were passable, without the need for detours.

He was reluctant to ask Ruth to accompany him. Yet with her years of experience in treating anoxia and pollution victims, her knowledge might prove crucial. When asked, she readily agreed. From New York she had brought with her a quantity of drugs used to treat anoxia patients, though as she was at pains to point out, 'I can't promise anything, Gavin. A lot depends on how long she's been suffering from oxygen deficiency--if that's what it is.'

'I understand that. What I don't understand is how this could have happened to Cheryl when for the past five years she's been in Oregon.

Dammit, there's hardly any pollution there and the oxygen level is only a fraction below normal. It doesn't make sense!'

'It doesn't make sense that people who've smoked for forty years don't get lung cancer, while some who've never smoked a cigarette in their life do. Some people are more susceptible to certain diseases, that's all we can say.'

'Is anoxia always fatal?'

'I won't pretend that the death rate isn't high, Gavin. But I have treated patients who would have died and managed to keep them alive. Drugs can help.'

They departed an hour after dawn the following day. Chase had asked the meteorology section for a detailed forecast for the northwestern sector of the country. Conditions at the moment were so unstable that it was about as reliable as consulting a mystic on the precise time and date of his death. Nonetheless it was reassurance of a sort to be told that no major climatic anomalies were expected. The temperature medians, however, weren't so comforting. For this time of year, late September, they averaged an increase across the United States of 9 degrees F.--the result of the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect here at last, with a vengeance.

By eight o'clock they had crossed the border into Nevada on highway 73. The two-lane blacktop zigzagged up through Sacramento Pass, skirting the flanks of Wheeler Peak to their left, its thirteen-thousand-feet summit outlined raggedly against the bottomless blue of the sky. There wasn't a trace of snow up there, Chase saw, and no hint of any to come. The snow line was retreating northward as the tropical belt widened. How soon before it reached the polar latitudes and started melting the pack ice? If average temperatures were rising it must already be having an effect, he realized. Billions of gallons of water were locked up in the ice caps, which when released would raise the mean sea level by anything up to three hundred feet. If mankind escaped being fried or asphyxiated, there was always drowning.

Ruth sat with a bolt-action hunting rifle across her knees, her black curly hair ruffled by the warm slipstream. She wore a loose plaid shirt, faded blue denims, and green leather ankle boots with white socks folded over the tops. The rifle was not merely a precaution; it was absolutely essential. Chase himself carried a Browning .32 in the zip-pered pocket of his Windbreaker. The jeep was stocked with food, water, cooking equipment, sleeping bags, and a large canvas sheet for temporary shelter. They also carried three twelve-gallon jerry cans of gasoline, sufficient, he hoped, to get them to Goose Lake. Ruth's medical supplies were in an aluminum case, stowed away underneath the other stuff. Those drugs were worth a small fortune.

There was still a blankness behind Ruth's eyes, as if she were somewhere else, reliving a bad dream. Chase asked her about it, hoping perhaps to purge the memory. When she spoke her lips were curved in a smile that was almost a snarl. 'You can't imagine what it was like. In some ways it was a relief, getting out, knowing it had to finish. No, the really hard part was in having failed, in having at last to admit defeat.'

'The situation was hopeless and you did the best you could,' Chase said ineffectually. 'Christ, you did more than that, much more. You chose to stay when it would have been so easy to have got out.'

'I can't forget the children; they were the worst,' Ruth said, unraveling a thread that trailed endlessly through her mind. 'At least the older ones had lived some sort of life before it ended. But those kids never stood a chance from the day they were born. From before they were born because they were damaged in the womb.' She looked across at him. 'Have you ever seen a child suffering from pollution sickness?'

'Photographs and on film, that's all.'

'Pray to God you never see one in the flesh,' Ruth said. 'The symptoms are most evident in children under five--sore throat, slight temperature, nausea--what you'd think of as the usual children's complaints, nothing too serious. In the early days in fact many doctors diagnosed scarlet fever because the symptoms are very similar. Then it was found that the kids didn't respond to penicillin, which is the standard treatment for scarlet fever.

'In the next stage their temperature shoots up to one hundred and six and the lymph glands in the child's neck swell to the size of golf balls. The lips and tongue turn bright scarlet and red blotches appear on the chest and back and buttocks. After about a week, during which the high fever persists, the blood vessels in the eyes become congested and burst, rashes break out all over the body, and the skin starts to peel from the fingers and toes.

'The damage isn't only external. They develop aneurysms--that's an irregular thickening of the coronary arteries, which weakens them-- which leads to abnormalities in the heart rhythm and the rupture of the coronary artery itself. When that happens it's invariably fatal.'

'Is there no treatment?'

'We can lower the fever. That reduces inflammation and prevents the blood from clotting, but there's no real cure. The death rate is between fifty and sixty percent, most of them under five.'

'And the cause is pollution in one form or another?'