“Actually, yeah. I’m taking care of his plants for him.”
And also actually, the African violets were not doing so hot.
“I see,” Laura said touching one of them, “you’ve got quite the green thumb.”
Uncool again, totally uncool. Sam got a damn glass of water from the kitchen and soaked them. Their dead bodies, that is.
“Uh, I think you’re overwatering them,” Brian said.
“You think?”
They were floating, actually, dead sticks in muddy goop. It was not pretty. “Uh, Sam, my boy, where are we supposed to sit?”
The living room was a trifle messy. Sam swept a pile of National Geographies off the sofa and cleared some space. If you wanted National Geographic, this was the place to come. His dad had every National Geographic that had ever been printed, and possibly a few more. They were interesting, though. Sam had been looking for pictures of Antarctica. He wanted to see where his dad was. Truth be told, his dad was incredibly cool.
Not many fathers, like, dared the edge. Brian’s dad worked somewhere deep in the Agriculture Department. He looked like a big fat loaf of bread in a suit.
“I think we should start with English lit,” Laura said, “and then tackle art. We need to—Sam?”
Sam had turned on The Simpsons, in part to actually watch the show, in part to display the incredibly cool gas-plasma TV that was hanging on the wall like some painting or something. It was like Dad to sort of automatically buy the coolest thing in the world and then forget he even had it. Dad was neat that way. There was something about knowing what the best stuff was and having it and also being uncaring about it that just made him—well, fact was, Sam was a teenager who really liked his father. So call him crazy.
“Sam, you can’t study and watch TV at the same time!”
“I’m multitasking, Laura, my dear. It’s great mental exercise.”
Brian muttered, “My dear …”
Laura said, “New York is in four days!”
“You make it sound like the real, actual Olympics. It’s the Scholastic Decathlon.”
“Decathlon sounds like the Olympics.”
“It’s a ridiculous name, Brian.”
“My mom always calls it the Quiz Bowl,” Brian said. “I hate that.”
“What they ought to call it is glorified Trivial Pursuit,” Sam muttered. It was a good episode. He wanted to watch this. Homer was going to save Marge from a destruction derby by drinking beer. Sort of.
“If it’s so meaningless, why’d you join the team, Sam?”
“What can I say? Because it was there. Life is essentially meaningless.”
“Existential philosophers for five hundred,” Brian yelled. “Who is Jean-Paul Sartre?”
“Don’t encourage him.” Laura picked up the remote and muted the TV.
“Stop that.”
“No. You want to watch TV or you want to get ready?”
Sam snatched the remote back and she fought him for it, which was kind of nice while it lasted. But it didn’t last long.
“Do not turn on that sound.”
Instead, he turned off the TV entirely. “It’s off. See?”
“Okay.”
Now she would find out the grim truth. “So quiz me.”
He’d almost said “kiss.” What would that have done? Nothing good, probably.
TWO
It was a strange day in New Delhi, even a bizarre one, and it worried Jack Hall, who had begun, as he raced around the world from conference to colloquium to conference, to make note of weather anomalies that he was finding on his stops. What he was finding was worrying him. It was worrying him a lot. And this snow—sure, it was November, but this was New Delhi, for God’s sake.
That there were snow flurries in a city that averaged 77 degrees Fahrenheit in November wasn’t going to show up on Fox or CNN—unless it was to laugh a little at the irony of anti-U.S. protesters at the UN Conference on Global Warming freezing in a subtropical climate. In a city where January brought the occasional day in the fifties, the irony of snow flurries during a global warming conference probably wouldn’t be lost on the media.
As Jack sipped a Royal Challenge lager, a smooth Indian beer, in the lobby bar of the hotel where he was shortly going to get himself into some serious political hot water, he watched the protesters on the other side of the large plate-glass windows and wondered if, in this wild city, somebody might decide to make their point by, say, driving a truck through. Hopefully not loaded with plastique. In the background on the TV, a CNN International reporter droned on about how global warming is largely caused by human-generated emissions, and the U.S. is the biggest offender.
A glance at his watch told Jack to put down the rest of the beer, which he did. He walked to the back of the lobby and strolled into a room full of conferees, who, quite frankly, looked scared. He tried to decide if it was the violence of the protest or the strangeness of the weather. Probably both. He took his seat. There were greetings, muttered, no introductions. The meeting had been going on all day. Jack had taken a break, extended it a bit in hopes of getting rid of his usual conference headache, or at least tamping it down.
He had not. The Saudi delegate looked balefully at him. Probably jealous about the beer. Not to be blamed. Now there was a stir. A real stir. The reporter who had been visible on the bar TV was in the balcony overlooking this conference area. He said, “Delegates from all around the world have gathered to hear evidence from leading experts in climate research… .” And then huge TV lights transformed the conference room into a stage and the vice president of the United States took his place behind the placard marked United States of America.
Jack took the reporter’s introduction as a cue. Why not? It was as good as any. “What we’ve found locked in these ice cores is evidence of a cataclysmic climate shift that occurred ten thousand years ago.”
He got up as he talked and walked toward the formal dais. This needed to be a sound bite. He tried not to think that half a billion people might see him in their evening or morning or noon news, from Sydney to London to Washington by way of Singapore and Rio.
He looked out over the assembly. “The concentration of natural greenhouse gases in the ice cores indicates that runaway warming pushed the planet into an ice age for two centuries.”
Now the Saudi delegate leaned into his microphone. Jack put on his earphones for the translation: “I am confused. I thought you were talking about global warming, not an ice age.”
“It’s a paradox, but global warming could trigger a cooling trend.” Jack then explained what had become his pet theory and the main advocacy of his scientific career—that global warming could flood the northern oceans with freshwater, which would disrupt ocean currents and cause the parts of the planet nearest the poles to become suddenly much colder, which included places like Australia, Canada, Europe, and the northern half of the United States. In other words, all the richest, most developed countries in the world.
He thought again of those mammoths, dying of the cold so fast that the food they were eating had remained frozen in their mouths ever since. He looked out across the room. None of these people could imagine the violence of such a calamity. None of them.
The Brazilian delegate asked the ace question: “When might this happen?”
“Maybe in a hundred years, maybe in a thousand. Maybe next week, for all we know.”
All of a sudden, Raymond Becker’s throat worked. Jack sensed the old political water starting to boil.
“Who’s going to pay the price of the Kyoto Agreement?” Becker said in his choked, nervous voice. “It’d cost the world’s biggest economies hundreds of billions of dollars.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Vice President.” Jack paused, waiting for the cameras to complete their sweeps back to the podium. He thought: Every time you start out with that “due respect” stuff, fella, you get your ass in a sling. “With all due respect, sir; the cost of doing nothing could be even higher. Ou
r climate is fragile.” He thought of that collapsing ice shelf, remembered his leap out of the cold arms of death. “The ice caps are disappearing at a dangerous rate.”
Becker had finally realized that he was in a debate, and with a member of his own delegation. He was frantically shuffling papers, obviously trying to find a name. An aide whispered to him.
“Dr. Hall,” he said, “our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment. Perhaps you should keep that in mind before making sensationalistic claims.”
How dare he! What a grandstanding jerk! Sensationalistic, indeed! “Well,” Jack said, outwardly as calm as a tropical lagoon, “the last chunk of ice that broke off was about the size of Rhode Island. Some folks’d say that was pretty sensational.”
A ripple of applause, some appreciative laughter, but not from the vice president of the United States. No, indeed, not from him.
Being a stockbroker was not like being a mugger, not to Gary Turner. He didn’t put the squeeze on his clients, browbeat them, grab their orders then churn their accounts dry. No, he took their money another way, by getting them to buy what a friend of his in distant Tokyo was selling, or to sell what he was buying. And then when the unexpectedly bad (oh, my!) or unexpectedly good (oh, my, again) news came in, he and good old Taka split the profits in their separate Cook Islands accounts.
Beauty of the Cook Islands account: it’s illegal, in the good ole Cooks, even to ask who owns one, let alone find out what’s in it. Money that moved from Tokyo to Rarotonga did not become visible to the IRS, the SEC, or anybody. It was just so damn pretty, was his and Taka’s little system.
Too bad it was blowing up in their faces. Gary said into his headset, “Those shares are gonna triple. Three months, max. Six. Hold on a sec.” He yelled out into the bullpen, “Does anybody here know why the goddamn AC isn’t on? I’m sweating like a pig.”
A moron called Tony, with enough meat on his forehead to feed a football team, said, “It’s November, they shut it off.”
Gary’s other line rang. He knew who it was, wished he didn’t. He pulled off the headset, killed it, grabbed the phone. “Hello?”
“We’ve got a problem, Gary.”
Go ahead, play your part, buddy. “What kind of a problem?”
“Call me back on your ceil…”
Uh-oh. The worst had happened. He held up the headset. “I got Partridge holding, Paulie. Cover me?”
The other broker took his client. Gary got the hell out of the office, went out into the sweltering Manhattan street. What was this, some kind of heat wave? Was the sun broken or what? A panhandler with a dog that looked like a scruffy old lion tried to get something. “Die,” Gary muttered as he dialed.
He knew Taka was jammed into a crowded noodle shop a block or so from his own office building. He didn’t want anybody to hear this, not any of it. He had a horror of small, enclosed spaces, and prison cells in Japan were exactly that. Steel doors. Little peepholes. Six feet by four. God help you if you were taller than average, which Taka was.
Gary listened as Taka’s phone rang. He only hoped that the myth that digital cellular was secure from being tapped was not a myth.
Then the damn panhandler jostled him from behind. “Fifty’s my opening position. I’m willing to entertain a counteroffer.”
Could this be real? A panhandler with a damn sense of humor? “Buddha, work,” the panhandler said to his mutt. The dog did a begging routine. So cute.
The phone started yammering in Jap. The call hadn’t gone through. “Why don’t you try a job,” Gary snapped at the panhandler as he redialed.
“I had a job. Just like you, shiny shoes, big office, secretaries, all that shit. I’ll tell you, it’s the secretaries did me in … and the elevators. …”
Gary hurried away. The guy had a horrible scent of the future about him—his own future as a broke broker, his license to steal a memory in the SEC’s ever-vigilant computer banks.
Finally, Taka heard his phone ring. He grabbed it out of his pocket, flipped it open. “I think they know what we’re up to.”
“Oh, God.”
In Japan, Taka noticed—barely—that the street had suddenly gone into shadow. He also noticed—even less— i hat a gust of wind suddenly came out of nowhere, bringing with it dust and street dirt, gum wrappers and i rushed cigarette packs. “The SEC called me—”
“Called you,? The American SEC?”
“They want to know about Voridium. The options.”
“I knew it. I’ve sensed this damn thing coming. I swear, I knew this one was gonna go south on us.”
A police car stopped beside a small truck, which a lamily of shop owners were frantically loading with ilieir precious fruits and vegetables. Unlike Americans, Japanese took their produce very, very seriously. The least good of those melons would sell for fifteen American dollars and be worth every penny. But why were they loading up like that, in the middle of the clay? The cop sure as hell wanted them to get that truck out of there.
“Sell them. Sell them now,” Gary yelled.
“It’ll be a red flag.”
“They can’t nail us if we don’t make any money. Sell it all now!”
Taka heard a loud sound behind him, a thud. The cop and the shop owners all looked. So did Taka. There was a dent, a huge one, in the hood of the police
car.
What the hell?
Gary’s tiny voice shouted, “Taka, did you hear me?” Taka was looking at the same impossibly huge hailstone that was rolling at the feet of the shop family. It was bigger than one of their damn melons—a good melon. “Taka!”
A horn blared, a woman screamed, Taka heard glass shatter, realized that it was the windshield of the shop owners’ truck. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He just stared, frozen.
A drum roll came thundering down out of the sky, and with it a bombardment of huge hailstones. They slammed into cars, blasted against walls, shattered windows. The street became a maelstrom of falling glass and hail. A sign shattered, spraying Taka with bits of neon dragon.
Then the cop got hit. He dropped like a bag of rice and lay there with blood pumping out of his head. Taka leaped toward the truck, hoping to shelter under it with the shop family.
Gary held his phone away from his ear. “What the hell’s going on? Taka?”
But Taka did not answer. He lay in the street, dimly aware that the blood flowing away and down the drain was not only the cop’s, it was also his. Then another huge hailstone exploded in his face, and he thought: This is a wonder of nature. Then another hit him, and darkness came. The next one took his life, and then more came, and more, and like so many others in the streets of this stricken city, he ceased even to be recognizable.
Nature’s wonders can be very, very hard.
The Hedland Climate Research Center overlooked a broad expanse of the Scottish highlands, and on this day, speeding black clouds, low and mean. Only two cars were in the car park, and inside, the years of budget cuts and official inattention had taken their toll. Exactly two technicians were on duty, one watching Arsenal defeat Tottenham and the other dead asleep with an old Derek Robinson novel open in his lap.
Far to the north, in the angry waters above Scotland, waters that had once killed the Spanish Armada, that claimed many a U-boat in their cold, gray jaws, a buoy sounded, its whistle joining the screams of gulls, its rusty chain clanking as it was swept by wave after wave. Lightning flashes revealed its rust, its age … but not the dire message that it was sending to Hedland, to the two terminally bored guardians of mankind.
“Simon,” Dennis said, “you’re snoring.” He wondered just how deeply Simon was asleep, and the statement was a test of that. What he really wanted to do was to take out his flask of Bushmills and consume about half of it in three delicious swallows. But not if Simon was conscious enough to know. Simon would like to get his pal George Holloman up here. Simon would like to see Dennis transferred, and being damned good and drunk on the job might be enough
to do it. Assuming that the inspector was not himself drunk while taking the report.
Dennis watched the bastard. Was he asleep? Maybe he was the one who needed a bloody transfer. He reached over and picked up the book, held it between his two hands for a moment, then slapped it shut in Simon’s fat-filled face.
Simon jerked awake, shook his head. “I just closed my eyes for a moment.” He smiled. “The baby kept us up all night.”
Dennis said nothing. What was there to say? He went hack to his game. Neither man saw the yellow warning signal on their control panel, which linked to radio telemetry from the “study buoys,” which had been deployed by the British Meteorological Office five years ago to record water temperatures, as a way of determining what no satellite could really see, not moment to moment, which was how the Gulf Stream was actually functioning at its crucial northenmost extent.
Day After Tomorrow Page 2
