Extinction

by Ray Hammond

  ‘Carpe Diem!’ exclaimed Matthew softly.

  ‘I’ve already talked to your Mom about it,’ added Michael. ‘And we’ve arranged for decorators to come in and repaper your room – as soon as you like.’

  Matt pushed himself up from the restaurant floor and seemed about to embrace his father. But he suddenly became self-conscious and merely raised two thumbs in thanks and mute approval. Then he bent and carefully rerolled the electronic wallpaper.

  Both boys returned to sit at the table just as their drinks and snacks arrived.

  ‘And what have you got?’ asked Michael, putting an arm around his younger son’s shoulders.

  Ben took a first slurp of his pink, sugar-free milk-shake and quickly pulled at the wrapping paper on his gift. As the inner layer fell away, the boy saw the flying-saucer frisbee inside its box.

  ‘It’s solar-powered,’ explained his father. ‘When the sun’s shining, it will stay in the air for ever.’

  ‘Lightspeed,’ said the awed Ben, borrowing one of his big brother’s many superlatives.

  ‘And it’s remote-controlled,’ added Michael.

  ‘Hey, Dad,’ announced Matt with a grin. ‘Did you hear that a restaurant full of lawyers was held hostage?’

  ‘Noooo,’ Michael said, shaking his head exaggeratedly, as if he were a wet dog emerging from the sea. ‘OK, tell me what happened?’

  ‘The bad guys threatened that until all their demands were met they would release one lawyer unharmed every hour.’

  Despite himself, Michael couldn’t help laughing, and Ben, although he had clearly endured many rehearsals of the joke, laughed so hard he almost fell off his chair.

  ‘So, tell us about the volcano, Dad?’ asked Matthew. He still held the sheet of celestial wallpaper partly unrolled in his lap.

  ‘Nothing to tell, really,’ said Michael, smiling. ‘I just saw the volcano erupt from my hotel balcony. The hot stuff didn’t come anywhere near me.’

  ‘Look,’ said Ben, pointing his small forefinger across the restaurant towards the empty bar area. ‘The volcano!’

  There was a large screen mounted behind the bar and Michael recognized an image that was all too familiar to him.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ said Matthew, heading towards the bar.

  Michael walked across the restaurant with his two sons – both still carrying their gifts – and the bartender turned up the volume.

  The screen showed a short, attractive woman in a protective hard hat standing on the slopes of a smoking volcano.

  ‘. . . And this unanticipated eruption is continuing to spew lava and ash high into the atmosphere over Samoa. Specially directed winds are now dispersing the airborne debris harmlessly over the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.’

  ‘That’s where you were, Dad,’ said Ben excitedly.

  ‘That’s where the hulk people are forced to live,’ Michael reminded his privileged sons.

  ‘It’s impossible to calculate the economic and social impact of the volcano’s eruption on the people of these islands,’ continued the female presenter in a surprisingly sensual voice. Then a caption appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  Dr Emilia Knight

  Earth scientist, Geohazard Labs

  ‘This was the moment of explosion, caught by our permanent monitoring camera four days ago,’ said the presenter, now gracing her viewers with a mischievous smile.

  Suddenly the screen was filled with an image that was already burned into Michael’s memory. It was shown here from another angle, but he would never forget the awful slowness, the immense scale of the energy released, as the volcano blew its ancient lava cap high into the night sky.

  The scientist-presenter came back on the screen and, with a rueful grin, apologized for her company not having been able to warn about the eruption in advance – A very attractive woman, thought Michael, very attractive indeed.

  Then the image changed to reveal a news presenter in a studio.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ said Michael, turning away. ‘The weather’s clearing. Perhaps we can go out on the deck after all.’

  *

  Dr Emilia Knight leaned her forehead against the tiled wall of the shower cubicle and allowed the powerful jets of hot water to course all over her body.

  She was back at Aggie Gray’s Hotel in the Samoan capital, and she had lost count of the number of showers to which she had already subjected her body.

  Once again, she worked up a rich lather with the hotel’s perfumed soap and carefully washed every inch of her body. She used a wet towel to reach the small of her back, where she knew a small graze had been made when she had fallen on her oxygen cylinder.

  Could radioactivity just be washed away? That was what the manual said, anyway. Logically, she knew that her biohazard suit should have prevented radioactive material reaching her skin, but she felt an overwhelming desire to scrub herself repeatedly.

  Emilia turned the mixer tap off again, dried herself and stepped out of the cubicle.

  Picking up one of the hand-held Geiger counters supplied by Geohazard, she placed it on her stomach, her chest, her neck and her pelvic region. She was testing how much radiation exposure she had suffered from her foolhardy handling of the strange rock sample up on Mount Māriota.

  From each site on her body the reading said, ‘Borderline-Dangerous.’

  She put her arm behind her back and held the sensor to her spine: 2.767. Where her skin was broken the reading was above borderline. Emilia didn’t know enough about radiation sickness to know whether that meant her blood had been affected.

  With a shake of her dark, wet curls, she stepped back into the shower cubicle and turned on the water once again.

  *

  As the ship carefully maintained its position, six and a half miles above the seabed of the North-East Pacific Basin, at the third deepest spot in the whole Pacific Ocean, Chief Oceanographer Valerie Cummings triggered a very loud noise, the first in what would be a series of such acoustic explosions.

  At its source, the sound was so deafening that it exceeded the decibel level of a sonic boom. But neither Val Cummings, nor any of the other thirty-four crew members on board the US Navy Research Vessel Orlando, heard a thing. The noise was emitted from huge concrete-cased underwater loudspeakers positioned on the seabed 231 miles to the north.

  The system clock had been reset to zero, as always when such an acoustic test was triggered, and the underwater microphones now waited, ready for the sound waves from the first test in the series to arrive.

  The US Orlando was in the North Central Pacific, at 22.5N, 147.2W, 430 miles north-east of Hawaii. Below the ship lay a sufficient depth of water to cover the peak of a submerged Mount Everest and still leave a half-mile clearance.

  The research vessel was one of a fleet operated by the San Diego Naval Academy of Oceanography, and Valerie Cummings was creating an accurate and up-to-date deep-water temperature map of the water strata covering the floor of the Central Pacific ocean.

  A muted roar over the speakers in the floating lab told her that the sound she had triggered had reached the microphones. The system would verify its data, then calculate the speed at which the sound had travelled through the water. The technique was known as Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate – ATOC – and had proved to be a cost-effective and reliable way of measuring deep-sea temperatures. Sound travels faster through warm water than it does through cold, and a simple calculation would provide an accurate measurement.

  Jesus, that couldn’t be right. She scanned the data display on her main screen, then replayed the entire experiment from start to finish. The temperature seemed to have risen by 1.3721 degrees Celsius since the last check was made! Impossible.

  Valerie filed the data, reset the system, then repeated the experiment. Now the increase was shown as 1.8911 degrees C! The temperature of the water at the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean appeared to have soared by almost two degrees in a single year. If that was correct, the ocean’s entire hea
t budget would be wrecked.

  She instructed her system to continue the planned series of ATOC measurements, moved to her communications keyboard, and started to write a short emergency report to the Oceanography Academy in San Diego. Just before she was about to transmit it, she recalled the recent eruption on Samoa and she added a second recipient to the circulation list – Stefano Bardini, Geohazard Laboratories, Inc., Pacific Region, Oakland, California – before hitting ‘Send’.

  Then she used her personal communicator to send a private, unauthorized and highly encrypted message to certain recipients in San Diego and Berkeley, California.

  *

  ‘How do you feel, Em?’ asked Steve Bardini anxiously. It seemed like the hundredth time he had asked her the same question in the past three hours.

  ‘I’m OK, OK – for the last time,’ snapped Emilia Knight irritably. During this trip she had made it quite clear that she had no intention of resuming their romantic relationship, but his over-solicitousness now left her feeling both annoyed and guilty. Then she suddenly wondered whether her current bad temper might itself be a symptom of radiation sickness.

  ‘Sorry, Steve,’ she added, ‘I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep very well.’

  They were in a passenger jet flying 28,000 feet above the Pacific, and once again Emilia saw her assistant surreptitiously slide the thin silver cylinder out of his trouser pocket and hold it tight against the left-hand side of her body.

  She heard the treble note rising and increasing in frequency as it pinged, then Steve pressed a button and raised the Geiger counter so they could both read its built-in display.

  ‘Two-point-one,’ he said. ‘Still the same.’

  Before leaving the hotel that morning she had taken a dozen more showers, each time scrubbing herself hard with a stiff-bristled brush, while taking exceptional care never to scratch or break the surface of her sore skin.

  The team at base camp monitoring her descent from the mountainside had quickly realized that the unusual rock fragment was far more radioactive than any geological sample they normally encountered in the field. Steve had even urged her to abandon the hot rock, to leave it behind on the mountainside, but Emilia had argued the importance of carrying out a proper analysis in the lab.

  ‘This suit is radiation-resistant,’ she had reminded them as she placed the rock into one of the shielded sample cases in the back of her four-wheel-drive vehicle. ‘Don’t worry so much.’

  Now Emilia Knight took the small radiation gauge from her assistant and quickly scanned the supplementary data that it had captured.

  They had already called ahead, had warned their colleagues in Geohazard that they were bringing home an unusually radioactive sample that needed urgent analysis – the sample that was now inside a double-shielded flight case in the aircraft’s hold. They had also informed Human Resources that Emilia herself would need to see a doctor.

  The Geiger counter’s read-out still suggested that she was borderline OK. She felt no physical symptoms of discomfort although she had once or twice imagined she could feel a burning deep inside her, near where the heavy rock had slapped against her waist and thigh. As a geologist she knew of only one natural element that was both radioactive and heavier than lead and she didn’t at all like the idea that she might have been close to it, still worse that she’d actually picked it up.

  ‘Emilia!’ cried Steve suddenly, staring now at the screen of his personal communicator. ‘Vesuvius is getting ready to blow again! Look at these long-period events.’

  She took the unit from him and scanned the seismic data he had just received from Geohazard’s European HQ in Athens.

  ‘You’re right,’ she exclaimed, all worries about her own health suddenly banished. ‘And it’s going to be big. I’m going to fly straight on to Italy.’

  London Times

  Tuesday, 6 June 2055

  VESUVIUS ERUPTS

  Third Time this Century

  Naples:

  Mount Vesuvius erupted again last night for the third time this century. The main crater was reopened at 10.37p.m. local time by a blast of magma which propelled debris over 30 kilometres into the atmosphere.

  Villages at the foot of the mountain had remained uninhabited since the last eruption in 2039, so there is thought to have been little or no loss of life.

  In Naples, residents were urged to stay inside with doors and windows shut. In the streets many citizens are choosing to wear smog masks to protect themselves from ash particles.

  All air traffic is being routed away from southern Italy.

  Chapter Six

  Perdita Curtis remembered nothing of her rescue from the damaged ERGIA Space Station, nor of her subsequent return to Earth. She had woken to find herself in a hospital bed in Florida.

  ‘You’re very lucky,’ the doctor explained as he showed her the scans. ‘You were quite severely concussed, but there’s no internal bleeding and no lesions. Rest and observation for another three days. Then, if everything is well, you can go home.’

  The headache had lasted a week, a headache whose severity forced Perdy to reclassify as rapture all headaches she had suffered previously.

  The BBC’s insurers had paid for her repatriation to the UK in a supersonic business-class jet, and, eight days later than she had originally planned, she had rescued her marmalade cat from her neighbour and resumed her bachelor girl’s life in Shepherds Bush, West London.

  Perdy returned to work at BBC Network Headquarters on the following Monday morning to be greeted as a heroine by everybody she met as she made her way to her office. There were flowers from her boss waiting for her, and a large and expensively gift-wrapped box had been placed precisely in the centre of her glass-topped desk.

  First she admired the flowers, then she undid the ribbon-bow on the box and folded back its spangled giftwrap. Inside she saw a plasti-glass cube, about half a metre square.

  In the centre of this transparent case, seemingly suspended within it and turning slowly, was a perfect scale model of the Earth, complete with floating clouds and swirling weather patterns.

  Ringed all around the tilted planet was a network of solar-reflecting satellites, some orbiting, some stationary, and a large space station. Powered by some unseen source, they were beaming light down onto the slowly revolving planet.

  Perdy bent and examined the model through the glass. How did it all remain in place? She could see no wires or supports. The degree of the tilt at which the planet revolved surprised her; she presumed it to be accurate, but very few of the ubiquitous TV or video images of the globe made the tilt this apparent – and you certainly didn’t notice it from space either!

  ‘Hi, Perdy, how are you feeling . . .?’

  Narinda Damle, her executive producer, had arrived in the doorway but the greeting died in his mouth as he noticed the model that sat on her desk. He too bent over and stared through the glass.

  ‘How wonderful! It’s a sort of orrery,’ he observed. ‘A moving model of the Earth and its satellites.’

  Perdy slit open the ivory-white envelope that had been placed beside the box.

  from the desk of nicholas negromonte

  Dear Perdy,

  On behalf of us all at the ERGIA Corporation, please accept my apologies for the injuries you suffered during your visit to our Control Center. I understand that the FBI have already detained one suspect in the case and that further arrests are expected in the near future.

  I will be in England myself for the next couple of weeks and if it would be of help for your documentary I would be pleased to welcome you to Langland Park, my residence in Lincolnshire. I would also like the opportunity to apologize in person for the injury and shock you experienced when we last met.

  Sincerely,

  Nicholas Negromonte

  Perdy smiled ruefully as she finished reading the handwritten invitation. Then she handed it to Damle.

  ‘They all think they can buy us, don’t they?’ he said, snorting indigna
ntly as he finished reading. ‘As if we’ve never been invited to a stately home before.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t,’ said Perdy, shrugging. ‘And I think I ought to go anyway. If I can persuade Negromonte to talk on camera, we’ll get a prime-time transmission slot.’

  *

  ‘I want to go straight for the jugular,’ Michael Fairfax announced to his executive board. ‘Slapping a writ on Nick Negromonte will make a big splash in the media.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on,’ grunted Saul Levinson, the firm’s senior partner, dismissively. ‘How many lawyers do you think ERGIA keeps on permanent retainer?’

  Why was Levinson suddenly being so negative? Like the rest of the board, he’d known about this case for months. But Michael just happened to know the precise answer for his colleague.

  ‘Eight hundred and eleven Bar-recognized attorneys, Saul,’ he conceded. ‘And that’s just in the USA. They use outside law firms throughout the rest of the world.’

  ‘And we would be taking on one of the world’s richest corporations in what is, after all, a new and wholly untested legal jurisdiction,’ observed Marjory Hinterscoombe gloomily. She was the senior finance partner of Gravitz, Lee and Kraus. It was her job to keep speculative litigation within manageable bounds.

  ‘Come on, Marjory,’ said Michael disbelievingly. ‘You’re not getting last-minute jitters, are you?’

  The lawyer was on his feet, facing his partners in the main boardroom on the sixty-second floor of the recently completed Embarcadero Space Needle in downtown San Francisco. He had just spent an hour outlining the case he wanted to launch against the world’s major energy companies.

  ‘If you go for the jugular, as you put it,’ said Saul Levinson, ‘are you really ready for the weight that’s going to descend on you – on all of us? It won’t be just legal opposition. They’ll do anything to stop us, to delay this action, to discredit you, to prevent you hurting their share price. It could get very nasty – and very personal.’