Carbide Tipped Pens

by Ben Bova

  Dylan hid a smile as backs straightened, chair legs scraped along the roughened ice of the floor, and gazes fastened on McGurie.

  “White coal,” Kubota said, his eyes narrowing.

  “Enough to power whole new cities, yes.”

  “The gaps between the hills are huge,” the Scandinavian woman noted.

  “All the more work for us. If this is sold as a way to control water outflow, we can get government money to help with the construction. And we can start with the smallest outlets, the ones that will cost least to plug and will be all the more profitable.”

  “So then, assuming there is money to be made, I think we would like to be a part of it,” Kubota said slowly. “We can talk about the technical issues later. Plenty of time for that. What I would like to know is how you intend to tackle the political side. Sea levels have risen a meter since the beginning of the century, but most governments haven’t budged or tried seriously to slow the warming. So then, why would they act now?”

  “Floods.”

  “As in glacial lake outburst floods?” the Scandinavian woman asked. “Those can be cataclysmic!”

  Dylan had researched the Missoula floods that had devastated eastern Washington state at the end of the last glacial period. The lake had been gigantic. The collapse of an ice dam had unleashed a flood with more water than all of the planet’s rivers put together, flowing with a speed rivaling that of a car on a highway. The flood had scoured riverbanks down to bedrock and carried chunks of glacier for kilometers downstream. He expected to answer questions later, but it was still McGuire’s show for now.

  “Precisely,” the Consortium manager confirmed. “Take Niviarsiat Lake in Kujalleq. Fifty years ago, there was a glacier half a kilometer high in the same spot. Now, it’s a meltwater lake dammed by leftover ice. If the dam broke, the water would rush down Ikersuaq Fjord and destroy everything within reach.”

  “Is this what you’re proposing to do?” the Canadian asked.

  Some of the attendees glanced at the icy walls and ceiling, as if to reassure themselves they were as safe from espionage as could be.

  “Does anybody live in Ikersuaq Fjord?” Toluca asked, who was squinting again.

  “Most of the valley near the lake actually belongs to a Consortium company and access is forbidden. Once you reach the actual fjord, there’s a small settlement at Niaqornaq and the town of Narssaq is found on the next fjord over, though it is connected to Ikersuaq by a strait. Many buildings have already been moved to higher grounds, but the docks would certainly be swamped. Let’s be frank, people. Casualties would help us make our case to the government.”

  “Is this a hypothetical discussion?” the Canadian insisted.

  McGuire held the eyes of the owners and executives around the table. Dylan noticed some of the assistants closer to his own age looked uneasy, but they weren’t involved. McGuire challenged his peers when he answered, his voice dropping to a lower tone.

  “Last winter, one of our best men set off explosives underneath the glaciers feeding the lake. There were no visible effects, and the blasts could be confused with an ice quake, but the ice beneath the glaciers was turned into Swiss cheese. Throughout the summer, the glaciers calved several times, shedding huge chunks of ice that melted in the sun. The lake level has risen so far and so fast that pressure near the bottom should have pushed the freezing point below the temperature of the ice. The water should already be eating away at the base of the dam.”

  “When will it break?”

  “Two weeks from now. Mid-September.”

  Nobody asked how he could be so certain of the timing. Faces closed while minds readied to grapple with technical details as a way of forgetting what had just been discussed. Dylan suspected that all they cared about now was that the meeting room be blown up as promised after they left, tons of ice crushing the furniture and burying the very memory of the dangerous words they had heard.

  Niviarsiat Lake, Southern Greenland

  Old Man Hall had slipped just as he was launching the drone into the air, banging his leg hard on a boulder in the wrong place at the wrong time. He said drily that he’d known right away that it was a break, not just a bruise. Paul didn’t ask how. Unable to put any weight on it, he’d managed to hop and crawl back to his tent, where he’d waited for the return of the drone.

  The drone’s video was much clearer than the phone pictures. The small plane seen earlier had found a smooth stretch of gravel by the fan of rivulets streaming out of the ice dam base. Paul would have liked to freeze the frame, but the professor was still holding his phone. The gravel looked suspiciously smooth and uniform, devoid of any larger rocks or significant dips. A previously used landing strip, perhaps?

  “This is where it gets interesting,” the Old Man whispered.

  The plane had come to a quick stop close to the foot of the ice dam. A man stepped out, looked around, but did not look up. He opened a cargo compartment, took out a heavy rucksack, and walked over to the dam, bent under the weight of his load. He was using what looked like a ski pole as a walking stick. He took his time climbing up the bumpy outward surface of the dam. When he was about two-thirds of the way to the top, the man knelt by a narrow crevasse and probed with his pole. He got up and tried another crevasse a few meters away. It took him two more tries to find what he was looking for.

  This time, he pulled out of his bag four, long boxlike objects linked by cables. He lowered them inside the crevasse, using a rope clipped to one of the boxes, and then rose to his feet. The rucksack was much lighter now. The man checked his phone, walked down a few meters, checked it again, walked back to the plane, and checked it one last time before taking off.

  “Any chance those wouldn’t be high explosives?” Paul asked hollowly.

  “A very small one. I’ve been in the field for decades, I’ve seen geologists at work, glaciologists, bacteriologists, paleontologists … I can’t say why exactly, but the man’s behavior just doesn’t fit. He was too hasty, didn’t take any measurements … perhaps he was dropping off an instrument package for somebody else, but I don’t buy it. It’s a good thing I didn’t look at the video for a couple of hours. Too busy trying to take care of my leg, so it was already dark when I watched it.”

  “And that’s when you called base camp.”

  “Right away. And I didn’t sleep much that night.”

  “Why do you think they would want to blow it up?”

  “Unsure. The lake behind it is not that big, but the flood would rush down to the fjord and threaten Narssaq. I think Narsarsuaq would be safe from any kind of backwash. If it’s some sort of terrorist plot, I fail to see the logic of it.”

  “What about the Loaves and Fishes people?”

  “They’re into radical adaptation. New heat-tolerant crops. New marine life forms engineered to withstand the acidic seas. If they can thrive on a plastic-enriched diet, even better, since the oceans aren’t going to run out of plastic for centuries … But terrorism on this scale? I know they’ve sabotaged some bottom trawlers to make a point about disappearing fish stocks. And they’ve been strident about highlighting the shifting land and ocean conditions due to climate change. Still, why would they be behind this?”

  Paul shook his head, unable to offer a rationale. The Old Man had been thinking it over for hours, after all.

  “How about the Sunscreen Lobby? They’ve been looking for a way to convince governments to fund their orbital shield for years.”

  The professor shrugged. “Sure, extreme environmentalists of all stripes might go for it as a reminder of the dangers of global warming, but casualties are going to be low even if they blow it at night. And there’s so much happening elsewhere that I doubt it would grab the world’s attention.”

  “If it’s that unlikely, it might not be a bomb. I should go and check before we panic.”

  “Now? It’s dark and you won’t see anything.”

  “I’ve got a good lamp. I watched the video carefully. I think
I can find the right crevasse.”

  “How will you fish the package out? It looks like he picked the deepest crevasse he could find.”

  “But he didn’t recover the rope he used to lower the package. With a bit of luck, I can use the rope to pull it back up.”

  The professor half rose up, stretching out his arm as far as he could.

  “Don’t go. If the dam blows while you’re out there, I won’t have a chance. The flash flood will just roll over me.”

  “And I’ll be dead. In that case, you might as well tell me now why you came to be here.”

  “What I do on my own time is none of your business.”

  Paul stood and zipped up his coat.

  “If that’s how you feel, professor, we’ll have to discuss this when I come back. I’ve come over the mountain to help you, and that was hard enough. But I’ve spent years working on the identification of bacteria preserved in the ice, or beneath the ice. I’ve examined I don’t know how many samples taken out of tunnels dug with hot water hoses or brought back by icebots from the deepest layers of the ice sheet. I’ve helped to isolate bacteria able to repair their DNA in freezing conditions for over a million years. I’ve found two new strains that synthesize methane in brutally cold conditions to help the Martian Underground plan for the global warming of Mars. And I’ve … So, if you think I don’t care that my work may benefit somebody who didn’t pay for it, you need more time to rethink your assumptions.”

  “All work that I taught you how to do.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I had other professors. But I did look up to you for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Ethics.”

  The Old Man grabbed for the stool and tried to lever himself upright without using his leg. Paul shouldered his backpack again, wincing slightly, and opened the tent slit.

  “No, Paul, wait. It’s not what you think. I was freelancing, but it had nothing to with the Martian Underground, or with your work.”

  “What, then?”

  “I had a contract with the Pliocene Park Foundation. I was supposed to sample Niviarsiat Lake, or the glaciers upstream ideally, for ancient DNA.”

  Paul turned around.

  “The Pliocene Park project? I’ve heard of it. Doesn’t it involve buying land for a nature preserve that will re-create the environment of the Pliocene?”

  “More than that. It will be stocked not only with surviving species of the Pliocene, but with ones we’ve been able to resurrect from past extinction. In Siberia, the melting permafrost has released carcasses from the last interglacial. Reviving mammoths was only a start. The Russians are working on mastodons and stegodons and chalicotheres. But one of the best places for finding relics is underneath the Greenland ice sheet. There may be fossils once we access the underlying rocks. And there are certainly DNA remains in the lowest strata of the ice, some of which should date back to the Pliocene. Mostly plants, we expect, but also some northern animals.”

  “So, you were working for a zoo. I guess we can all sleep easier.”

  “There’s more to it than that. Global warming is a time machine back to the Pliocene. The whole project is about reminding people of that.”

  Paul sighed. “Your generation is still trying, isn’t it?”

  “And yours has given up.”

  “Perhaps because we saw how far you got. The sins of our fathers passed down to us, but we don’t have to repeat the errors of our fathers.”

  “At least, we tried to slow down the warming. Our generation threw everything at the problem. Finally cut back on total emissions even as the population kept rising to ten billion. But the seas got warmer and no longer absorbed as much carbon dioxide. So, we seeded the ocean deserts with iron dust and made them bloom with phytoplankton. Carbon dioxide uptake increased, but ocean acidification too. The coral reefs died and fisheries declined. People starved and turned to coastal fish and shrimp farms. Without the mangroves they cut down and the sandbars drowned by rising seas, hurricanes swept in and tidal surges wiped out many of the farms … More people starved. In the end, we went back to farming where the rains still came, even if forests had to be cleared, even if synthetic fertilizers were needed, and even if transportation costs ballooned as such farms got too far from the mouths to feed. But pulping the forests returned carbon to the atmosphere and transportation still burned up too much carbon, although far less than in the days of gas-guzzlers.”

  Paul had let him speak, thinking of the world beyond the small tent, beyond the deserted valley in southern Greenland. Drowned cities, burning forests, shifting sand dunes in Iowa, and the poor dying of thirst in India. What could a guy from Northern Ontario do about it all? He’d stopped loving the snow when he’d realized it was an illusion. It only covered up the same landscape as before. In the end, it changed nothing. “And, in the end,” Paul said quietly, “every route took you back to your starting point, leaving us to live in a warming world or die.”

  “So, what did you do?”

  “We faced reality. My generation intends to live. On this world or another.”

  Paul stalked out, leaving his mentor speechless. He stood in darkness for a moment, listening for any sound other than his quickened breathing. If there was a bomb, it could be set off by a signal sent from a satellite passing overhead. The man in the plane wouldn’t come back. There would be no warning.

  He went back inside the tent and took out from his bag another earbud as well as the medikit. He displayed the exolegs, which looked like pieces of bulky black hose connected to shapeless shoes.

  “The earbud, you know to use. If you haven’t used exolegs before, pay attention to our doctor’s instructions. The main thing is not to try to pull them on. Even with the painkiller, you’d feel the bones grinding together. If you do it right, they will split lengthwise so that you can wrap the covering around your leg. The smart material will exert the right amount of pressure to set and immobilize the bones. Afterward, if you lead with your good leg, the artificial muscles will also walk your legs for you. The exoskeleton will take up most of the pounding, but you’ll feel it when the painkiller wears off. It will hurt like hell.”

  He grinned evilly, thinking of his own battered flesh, then pointed in the general direction he’d come from.

  “Head south, up the valley flank. The summit repeater will act as your beacon. But stop when you’ve reached an altitude one hundred meters above sea level. There’s a terrace Francine can land the chopper on to take us out. If you don’t run across it, stay put, and I’ll find you later. Or Francine will find you in the morning.”

  “Paul, wait, please. Come with me. You don’t need to go.”

  “I still think it might not be a bomb. And if it’s a bomb, there might be clues as to its maker.”

  “If it’s a bomb, there’s a good chance that it will blow tonight.”

  “It’s still early. I’m betting that they’ll wait till midnight, whoever they are.”

  This time, when he stepped outside, he kept going. Clouds hid most of the stars, so he turned on a flashlight. Gravel crunched under his boots and he thought of his old dream of walking on Mars. Nobody could work for the Martian Underground and not think of the possibilities.

  Colonizing Mars was another long shot, like the orbital sunscreen intended to cool Earth. The methanogenic bacteria found in cold, lightless, microscopic pockets at the base of ancient Earth glaciers might serve to hasten the terraformation of Mars. They might even prove to be of Martian origin. On Earth, they were part of a slow-paced, long-lived subglacial ecosystem still dining off leftover biomass from earlier thaws.

  Sown across the Martian surface, they would belch, under the right conditions, enough methane to start creating a future haven for humanity. Within the Martian Underground, fans of the idea sometimes called themselves the Young Farts of Mars, if only to make it clear they wouldn’t be happy with just going to Mars, like previous generations. Francine’s voice suddenly blared into his ear.
r />   “Paul Weingart, what are you doing?”

  “What a guy from Northern Ontario can do. No more no less.”

  “We heard everything. We think it’s a bomb and that you should get the hell out of the way. Both of you.”

  “I won’t be long. Just keep track of Professor Hall for me.”

  “Paul, please, wait!”

  “Too late. Now, please give me some quiet, I need to concentrate.”

  He had reached the foot of the dam. The flashlight’s beam played over the icy slope. He hadn’t been boasting. He had a good memory for weird surfaces, trained perhaps by his work in the lab, and it only took him a quarter of an hour to find the spot where the man had left the package.

  He swore when he discovered that the rope had slipped, falling into the crevasse. However, the beam picked up the yellow nylon rope only a meter or so below the lip of the crevasse. Paul threw himself flat on the ice, extended his arm, and grabbed the end of the rope.

  And swore again when he realized he could do nothing with it. The load at the far end of the rope was too heavy. With one arm fully outstretched and the other braced at an angle against an ice boulder to keep himself from slipping forward, he lacked the leverage needed to pull up the package.

  He pondered his next move for a moment, fully aware of the ticking minutes that brought midnight closer. He finally took his other hand away from its hold and gently teased one of his snowshoes out of his pack. The friction between the main mass of his body and the snow-dusted ice was all that was keeping him in place. He lowered the snowshoe within reach of his right hand, using it to thread the rope between the frame and the decking before tying a quick lasso knot. He pulled back his free hand and groped for a hold.

  Paul thought of Francine before trying to rise. She’d sounded worried about him. Was she still listening in? Trying to guess what was happening to him from his breathing?

  Exhaling sharply, he pulled himself back from the brink in one go. He stayed in a crouch for a moment, his heart pounding, and then pulled out the snowshoe as slowly as possible. He was afraid that the knot might slip when placed under tension, but all he did was pick up the slack in the rope.