by Karen Dionne
“All right then.” He forked another mouthful of fish.
There was a cardboard box beside the sofa with a pair of boards over the top so it could double as an end table. One of the lawyers was drumming his fingers on it as he waited. Ben wondered if Derek’s Antarctica plans were inside. He didn’t see any other evidence of an office or a desk.
The concept was pure genius, born from a small feature item in the newspaper. Last year when Derek called Soldyne to consult, he told Ben that as soon as he read about the 1,250-square-mile, 650-foot-high section of the Larson Ice Shelf that had broken off the previous November, inspiration struck. While the average iceberg floating past the Grand Banks was about the size of a fifteen-story building, the Antarctic berg the scientists had named Larson B contained an incredible 700 billion gallons of pure, fresh drinking water—enough to supply the water needs of 4.6 million families for an entire year.
Environmentalists saw the breakup of the Antarctic ice shelves as evidence of global warming, but Derek saw dollar signs. He dreamed of a freshwater factory set up on the iceberg itself. Forget the dangerous towing; there were twenty-four beautiful hours of daylight during the long Antarctic summer—plenty of available solar power to melt the ice into drinking water. The trick was to focus all that energy somehow—geostationary satellites and microwaves and mirrors eventually became the backbone of his process—and melt a lake in the middle of the berg. Pump the water into waiting tankers, send it out to thirsty cities, and make a fortune.
As soon as he heard about Derek’s microwave concept, Ben had to have it. Every day, 1.1 billion people in underdeveloped areas around the world had no choice but to consume contaminated water. Every year, between 40 and 60 million of them died—5 million children under the age of five. Derek’s project embodied a happy conflux of two disparate concepts that was so rare, Ben couldn’t think of a single other instance in which a commercial venture had the potential to make money and benefit humans and the environment.
Unfortunately, thanks to Patent #4,686,605, “Method and Apparatus for Melting Antarctic Icebergs into Drinking Water,” the concept was wholly Derek’s. Ben looked at the MacCallister family gathered around their kitchen table, at the worn Formica countertop, the doorless cupboards, the woodstove in the corner, the stained plywood floor. If Derek had any sense, he’d take Soldyne’s buyout and use the money to keep his bottled water business afloat—though considering the day’s near-disaster, he’d probably be better off cashing the check and moving the family to the Bahamas.
At last Derek pushed back his chair and strode into the living room. Ben and the lawyers scrambled stiffly to their feet.
“Good evening, Mr. MacCallister,” the taller one said as if Derek had only just now arrived. “I’m Trevor Johnston, and this is my associate, James Everett. You already know Ben. We represent the Soldyne Corporation.”
Derek shook the two proffered hands, pulled up a chair, and motioned them to sit.
“No doubt you’re tired after a hard day on the water,” Johnston went on, “so I’ll get right to the point. We’re here because we’ve heard great things about your water business. Great things. It’s not every man who can come up with a business as unique as yours and turn a profit. And your process for melting Antarctic bergs is absolutely inspired. But we’re not the only ones who think so. Soldyne’s engineers, and more important, our investors, are eager to be a part of this, too. That’s why they’ve authorized us to offer you a buyout. Right here, right now.”
Everett opened his briefcase and handed Derek a folded cashier’s check.
Derek opened it, read the amount, and whistled. Ben tried not to grin as Derek gaped at the men waiting for his answer, and again at the check.
“One point two million dollars?” he finally said, and Aimee’s face blanched. “This isn’t a joke?”
“It’s no joke,” Ben said. “We want that process. Our accountants have determined this is a fair price. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”
Derek didn’t answer. Maybe he was praying—maybe he was reciting the alphabet backward or the names of the provinces or counting slowly to ten—anything to keep from saying yes too quickly.
At last he refolded the check, tucked it into Everett’s breast pocket, and sat back with his arms over his chest.
“Two million.”
Aimee gasped.
Derek sent her a look.
Ben’s expression didn’t falter. Everett returned the check to his briefcase and replaced it with another. As Derek verified the preprinted amount, he looked dismayed. Probably wondering what would have happened if he’d said three.
They exchanged the check for the box and shook hands all around with a promise to meet Derek at his lawyer’s in the morning. As Ben shut the door, the MacCallisters’ voices carried clearly through the single-pane window.
“Now what will I use for a table?” Aimee asked as she looked at the empty spot next to the sofa.
“Sweetheart, I’ll buy you a table!” Derek crowed as he danced her around the room.
Chapter 3
Los Angeles, California—Three Years Later
Ben leaned back in his office chair and laced his fingers behind his head. Every square inch of his desk was covered with printouts: geodetic data, syntax tables, temperature gradient graphs, stress differential scatter plots, line plots, elevations—an impressive disarray that amounted to nothing but another nail in his career coffin. When Adam called to say that another batch of ICESat scans had finally come in, Ben had known right away that the results weren’t going to be good. He took a deep breath. Devising a plan of action that would allow him to keep his job without having to sell his firstborn or make some similar pact with the devil was going to take all the extra oxygenated thinking power he could get.
“Okay,” he said as he eyed the latest addition to the mound. “What’ve we got?”
Adam Washburn, a crew-cut blond ten years Ben’s junior, leaned forward to rescue a stack of transparencies threatening to spill off the desktop and handed the summary page to his boss. He dismissed the question with a wave. “Same as yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Nada. Zip, zilch, zero. Nothing’s moving.”
“What about this?” Ben traced a thin blue diagonal line across one page.
“Nope.” Adam overlaid a handful of transparencies on top of the graph he’d charted from the latest ICESat composite. “Look here. You see? The scans are identical, every blessed one, and yet look at the dates. October 7 . . . November 23 . . . December 29 . . . all the way up to today. Three freaking months with no change.”
“All right.” Ben took off his glasses and dragged a hand over his head. The information on his desk was stolen, though he preferred not to think of it that way. The scans came from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and as a nonscientific interest, Soldyne had no right to this information. Ben didn’t know how Adam had arranged to get his hands on the printouts; all Adam had told him was that he’d struck a deal with a scientist working out of Antarctica’s Raney Station. Ben presumed the debt must have been considerable for a scientist to assume the risk, but he wasn’t about to press for details, and Adam didn’t offer. Besides, it wasn’t as though Soldyne was misusing the reports. They were only monitoring the ice shelves, exactly as the scientists were doing, and short of sending up their own observation satellite, this was the most practical way to go about it.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “There’s no change.”
“Of course there isn’t.” Adam practically spat out the words. “I just wish I knew what’s going on. Scientists have been predicting the collapse of the ice shelves for decades: ‘The ice caps are melting; sea levels will rise; Florida will disappear.’ Yet now that we actually want a piece to break off—nothing. I feel like we’re the butt of some great cosmic joke.”
“Then how come I’m not laughing?” Ben stuffed the summary page into his briefcase, snapped the case shut, and crossed the room, then
stopped at the door. “You know,” he remarked over his shoulder, “there’s only one thing worse than having no iceberg.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Having to break the news to Gillette.”
Donald Gillette was a big man. At six-feet-four he towered over Ben, forcing Ben to tip his head back to look up at his boss whenever they were standing together as though Ben were a child. Everything about the man was large. Gillette’s ’77 Eldorado had been restored at an appropriately exorbitant cost; his neighbors in the San Bernardino foot-hills pointed to his sixteen-thousand-square-foot mansion with jaw-dropping awe; even the Hermès watch encompassing his left wrist was as big as a silver dollar. The pair of Pollocks on the opposite wall were each easily ten-by-ten, and the floor-to-ceiling windows behind a desk the size of a Ping-Pong table framed a view of Los Angeles expansive enough for a man who conducted his business on a cosmic scale.
“No change?” he repeated after Ben broke the news.
“No change,” Ben parroted from the other side of the desk. Unlike the rest of the furnishings, his chair was of normal size, perhaps even shorter than regular seat height; a trick of perspective Ben was convinced was designed to make even the most esteemed visitor feel inferior to the office’s owner. Not that the ploy was necessary in his case. The only time he’d come out ahead of his boss during the six years they’d been working together was when the executive board had selected his microwave method over Donald’s H.A.A.R.P. technology. But after three years of R&D and enough dollars to have fed several African nations several times over, even that victory had turned hollow. As long as they continued without an iceberg, there was no way to put the board’s decision to the test.
“You promised come November we’d see something big break off.” Gillette turned his desk calendar around to face Ben and pointed to the condemnatory “Jan. 6.” “I believe we’ve gone just a bit beyond that.”
Ben gripped the arms of his diminutive chair and forced his heart rate to slow. Was he expected to conjure up an iceberg like pulling a rabbit out of a hat? They were working with forces of nature; climate change and global warming—not fluffy pigeons or furry rodents.
“Something could break loose any day,” he heard himself saying, mouthing words even he had long since given up believing. “Last month we flew a helicopter over the Larson and dropped a man down. Fournier is a climber and an Antarctic expert. He said he’d never seen so many cracks in the surface of an ice shelf. And he was surprised at the number of lakes. Some of them are bigger than a football field. He predicts the whole thing will collapse within two years.”
“Two years is a little long to wait.” Gillette flicked a finger at the report. “How good is your data?”
“It’s solid. Straight off the ICESat feed.”
Gillette leaned back in his chair. “The investors are getting anxious,” he said, rocking slowly to give his words weight, “and frankly, I don’t blame them. They want results. All you’ve given them to date is a list of expenditures.”
Ben didn’t answer. Once they started making water, the months of waiting would be forgotten and the investors would go to bed with dollar signs in their eyes. He thought about the Canadian, Derek MacCallister. For a while he’d felt bad about the way he’d taken the guy’s idea and run with it, but considering everything Soldyne had invested to date, there was no way MacCallister could have put it into practice. At any rate, he’d cashed Soldyne’s check readily enough. Ben hadn’t heard from him since last Christmas, when the card he’d sent came back with no forwarding address. Maybe he really did move his family to the Bahamas.
Abruptly, Gillette stopped rocking. “The board’s made a decision. This isn’t for general knowledge, but I wanted you to know. We’ve decided who’s going to get first water.” He gestured magnanimously toward the windows. “It’s us, Ben. L.A. Sixteen million Californians are draining the Colorado dry. As soon as they heard about our Antarctic project, the Metro Water District was more than happy to sign up for ours. Forty-seven trillion gallons to be delivered to the city’s system as soon as we can make them, with a standing order for more.”
“Wonderful.” It was the expected answer, but Ben realized he actually meant it. He’d been hoping the first recipient would be a needy Third World country, but California was undergoing its worst drought in decades, and it would be great to have plenty of water again. Naturally the water had to go to the highest bidder. Soldyne wasn’t a nonprofit or a charitable trust, they were a business, and right now, they were in the business of making water.
Or rather, they were supposed to be.
Chapter 4
That evening, Ben ran the hose over the pocket-sized lawn of his three-bedroom ranch in a thin stream, training the trickle back and forth, back and forth, a human lawn sprinkler, holding the nozzle as close to the blades as possible to minimize evaporation. The diminishing sun turned his skin as golden as a Buddha’s, suffusing the brick houses and asphalt driveways with a warm yellow glow. A hot breeze ruffled his hair, bringing the distant odor of smoke from the fires in the Santa Ana Mountains.
His neighbors had given up on grass years ago, opting for Zen-like yards of black lava rock or raked brown gravel, artfully accented with boulders and saguaro. Ben could never get used to them. A house wasn’t a home without a real lawn, he insisted, though in truth he needed the green, just as he needed the slice of Pacific blue barely visible between the houses across the street.
Behind him, the screen door banged. Ben turned off the water as Paula crossed the lawn carrying two glasses of iced tea. She handed one to him and linked her arm through his.
“Smell the fires?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. How close do you think they’ll get?”
“It’s going to be a while before they put them out, but they’re not supposed to come this way. Is supper ready?”
“Just about.”
“Where’s Sarah?”
“She’s at Cassandra’s. They’re supposed to be studying, but they probably snuck off to the mall.”
“I thought we agreed to eat as a family.”
“I know; I’m sorry. It’s just that she makes such a scene when she doesn’t get her way.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Anyway,” Paula laid her head on his shoulder. “Is it really so bad, us eating alone?”
Half an hour later the front door slammed, followed by the rustle of shopping bags and the scurry of footsteps down the hall. Ben stabbed another meatball. Apparently the threat of a 50 percent cut in her allowance wasn’t sufficient motivation for his daughter to deign to join them promptly at the table. What was next? Withhold her allowance entirely? Take away her computer? Lock her in her room until she was eighteen? He sighed. Someone should have warned him when he became a father that the job included the role of Gestapo.
When Sarah finally padded barefoot into the dining room, she slid into her chair and helped herself to a serving of spaghetti without looking at him. Her cheeks were flushed, but whether it was due to remorse or a session at the makeup counter was hard to say. Ben watched her wind noodles onto her fork as if nothing could possibly interest her more and wondered if there was anyone more willful than a thirteen-year-old.
For ten minutes the clink of silverware against china was the only sound. From across the table, Paula sent him a do something look.
“How was school today?” he asked brightly. Paula rolled her eyes, but to their surprise, Sarah answered.
“It was cool. We got a new assignment from Mr. McMurtry’s brother-in-law, you know, the scientist down in Antarctica.” She took a folded piece of paper from her back pocket and smoothed it open on the table. “ ‘Scientists say that within fifty years, Saudi Arabia’s groundwater will dry up,’ ” she read. “ ‘Some people have suggested that Antarctic icebergs could be towed to the Middle East to relieve the problem. Is this crazy? What do you think? How would you get an iceberg to the Middle East? Think about it, and then try this
: Take some ice cubes and float them in a tub of warm water to see how fast they melt, then see if you can figure out a way to protect your iceberg as it gets closer to the equator.’ ” She grinned. “Isn’t that awe-some? Cassie and I already tried it, and wow, the ice cubes melted fast. We can send him questions too, and he answers them. This one’s mine.” She turned the paper over and handed it to her father.
