“Terry, we’ve already considered the best possible scenario. If we got all the right breaks we could shorten it to eight or nine months.”
He winced. “It’s too long. By then the air everywhere will be too toxic to breathe.”
She stared at him in shocked silence. Seconds ticked by.
He lifted his hands in a small, helpless gesture. “We’re going to run out of time.”
She continued to look at him, lips slightly parted. She blinked once, twice. Then her jaw tightened.
“That’s it, then – it’s over. All that work, all our efforts to get the problem recognized and dealt with – it was doomed from the start, wasn’t it?” She gestured at the lap top. “There’s the truth, right there on your screen! Two-and-a-half years ago that stuff was so well established the effects were visible from space, for God’s sake! Two-and-a-half years, and it’s had all that time to grow and spread…” She faltered, then her shoulders went slack and the tension in her face and throat slipped away. Her voice descended to something like a sob. “We tried, Terry. We tried so very hard. We were just… too… late.”
He hesitated, then reached out and she fell into his arms. They sank back into the sofa and he felt the weight of her head against his chest. He closed his eyes and rested his cheek against her hair. They stayed that way for a long time and eventually fell asleep in each other’s arms.
CHAPTER 25
High in the stratosphere, crystals of ammonium salts scattered away the sunlight and the countryside beneath was bathed in an eerie orange glow. Snow fell thickly and never melted. With each passing day the air became more difficult to breathe.
They walked out into the snow until their leaden limbs could carry them no further and then folded to the ground, freezing and exhausted. She reached for him and he took her in his arms.
Their words escaped in small plumes of frozen breath.
“This is it, Terry. The end of the world.”
“Of our world, yes. Earth will go on. Who knows? Maybe in time... intelligent life... will evolve here again.”
He could feel her body weakening, sagging within his embrace. Her voice was faint.
“I keep wondering... Could we have done more to stop it?”
“It had gone too far. We needed more time.”
Her eyes closed.
“Goodbye, Terry darling.”
“Maggie...”
Their cold lips met for the last time and he held her until she stopped shivering. Snow continued to fall, the pretty crystals lodging in her thick eyelashes and in the curls of black hair that had escaped from her hood. He cradled her head in his hands, pressed his cheek to hers, feeling its softness against his skin, and his body erupted into great wracking sobs…
Terry jerked up in bed, breathing hard.
“Terry, what’s the matter? It’s all right. You’ve been dreaming…”
He wiped tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand and looked wildly at her.
“I’ve got it” he said hoarsely. “Jesus Christ, I’ve got it!”
CHAPTER 26
Only a week ago, Terry had found it hard to believe that they were actually meeting in the Oval Office with the heads of the NSF and NIH, several Secretaries of State, and the President of the United States. Now, those feelings had been replaced by a grim foreboding. The Vice-President was still abroad but they were joined this time by the Director of NASA and Herbert Kramer. Kramer was tall and cadaverously thin, so much so that his clothes – white shirt, grey tie, dark grey suit – appeared too large for him. His straight grey hair was neatly parted, his pallid features a mass of hollows. Without acknowledging either Terry or Maggie he took the matching armchair which had been placed next to the two four-seat sofas. As before, a computer and flat-screen monitor had been set up at the end of the room.
“Well,” the President said. “I apologise for bringing you all here again so soon. Dr. Walmesley tells me there are important new developments and he assures me these are serious enough to warrant another meeting. I must say I’m keen to know what these new developments are. Who’s going to start?”
Chris gestured towards Maggie. “I think Dr. Ferris should start, sir.”
She cleared her throat. “Sir, following the last meeting we recruited our experts, accommodated them, and equipped a lab for them, just as we’d agreed. Every one of these people is at the forefront of their field. They’re focused, they’re motivated, and it’s safe to say we couldn’t have brought together a better qualified team. But this is a complex problem. We’re dealing with an unknown plasmid and organisms that are largely uncharacterized, particularly in terms of genome sequence, so we’re venturing into new territory. That means the existing body of scientific knowledge won’t necessarily help us and there’s limited scope for short cuts. At our last meeting Dr. Zanuck said it wouldn’t be easy. She was absolutely right. We have to find out what’s in the plasmid, find some way of neutralizing its effect, select an organism to deliver it, manufacture enough to be effective, and spread it around the world. Even that won’t work unless it can compete successfully with the ammonia-generating organisms, which are already well established. I won’t go into detail about how we propose to deal with that one, but it complicates things still further. We’ve now mapped out a timescale, which Dr. Zanuck and Mr. Cabot have seen during their visit. It can all be done, but it’s going to take longer than we thought.”
“How much longer?” the President demanded.
“A realistic estimate is one year. If we’re optimistic, eight or nine months. And that’s just to reach a solution in the laboratory.”
Several seconds passed.
“The way I understood it,” Richard Pevensey said slowly, “we only had six months.”
Bob Cabot raised a hand and spoke at the same time. “Yes, but we were going to get an extension to that, something to do with mixing in the atmosphere. Am I right?”
She turned to Terry. “I think Dr. McKinley should answer that.”
Terry picked up the remote control and went to stand next to the blank monitor screen.
“As Mr. Cabot just said, we were hoping that mixing in the atmosphere would dilute ammonia from its present levels and give us more time. Since then we’ve made an unpleasant discovery. Let me just remind you of the satellite views I showed you last time. The data for these came from NASA.”
He nodded to acknowledge Noel Harrison, Director of NASA, then activated the monitor screen.
“On the left you’ll recognize a conventional view of the Eastern seaboard as seen from space. On the right is the same view taken in the ammonia spectrum. These rings,” he pointed to the concentric rings of purple, blue, green, and yellow, “show the density of ammonia at that time, two-and-a-half years ago. What I did not know was that barely two months later we also had this.”
He showed a similar pair of satellite views for north-east India.
“Where is that?” the President asked.
“This is north-east India, sir. And this,” he changed the slide, “is central Thailand. And this,” he changed the slide again, “is northern China.”
A murmur went around the table.
“How the hell – ?” Cabot started to say.
“Please don’t ask me how the organisms got into all these places – I don’t know. But the fact of the matter is, ammonia is rising as fast as ever and we can’t expect it to decline or even level off because it’s just as bad on the other side of the planet as it is on this. If we needed further proof, Bangkok has just suffered a white smog.”
They all began to speak at once and the President had to hold up a hand.
“Let me get this absolutely clear. Dr. Ferris, you are saying your group needs more time to develop the solution?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you, Dr. McKinley, are saying we haven’t got it?”
“That’s right, sir.” He sighed and gestured at the screen. “Two years ago these ammonia-generating organisms were
already well established right around the world. They’ve been releasing ammonia into the atmosphere ever since – enriching their own environment at the same time – so they’ve grown more and more rapidly and spread more and more effectively. Now we can understand why the atmospheric levels are increasing so rapidly. The conclusion is inescapable. Over the coming months, in cities here and elsewhere, white smogs will become more frequent, more widespread, and longer-lasting. Outside the cities, raw, uncombined ammonia will make the air just as unbreathable. I’m sorry.”
He used the remote control to return the screen to black.
The President had paled visibly. He wagged a finger back and forth between Maggie and Terry. “You’re not giving up, are you?”
“No, sir. But we wanted you all to know we’re in a race we can’t win. Unfortunately we entered it about two years too late.”
The others watched Terry return to his seat next to Maggie.
Pevensey rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t believe this!”
“Dammitall,” Cabot growled. “Does this mean we have to let these mutant bacteria wipe out all of humankind?”
“Dr. Ferris,” Elaine Zanuck said. “Are you sure you can’t identify some short cuts, or tighten up that schedule somewhat – anything to shorten that timeline?”
“We’ll try, Dr. Zanuck, of course we will. But right now it’s difficult to see where the short cuts could come from. As I said before, every member of the group is an international expert in their research area, and all of them were involved in generating that chart. Even if things go absolutely according to plan, eight or nine months looks like the bare minimum.”
The President took a deep breath. “Ideas? Suggestions? Anyone?” He looked around the table, and his voice rose. “Anything? Anything at all?”
Chris Walmesley and Noel Harrison exchanged grim looks. James Brierley chewed his lip. Richard Pevensey frowned and continued to rub the back of his neck. Herbert Kramer’s face was a grey mask. Elaine Zanuck’s lips had set tightly. Robert Cabot was bent forward, his head in his hands. No one spoke. An ornate clock on the mantelshelf behind the screen struck the hour. They listened to every chime.
“Mr. President?”
“Yes, Dr. McKinley?”
Terry knew he was about to tread a tightrope. If he sounded too shrill, what he was about to say would be treated as the ravings of a lunatic; if he failed to push hard enough, their last chance would fade away. He did his best to keep his voice quiet and controlled.
“Sir, if Dr. Ferris and her colleagues continue to pursue the biological approach they’ll succeed in the long run – I don’t doubt that. The big problem is the timescale. A year is too long – even eight months is too long – we’ll all be dead by then. What we need is a way of delaying the build-up of ammonia. If we could do that, it would give us the time to develop the biological solution and implement it.”
“Yes, well, all right, I see that. Do you have something in mind, something to slow it down?”
“Yes, sir, I have. I’ve thought about this over and over and I believe we have only one possible course of action. I’m afraid it will shock you, all of you. But the situation is desperate, and desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“Come on, then, out with it.”
“The organisms are distributed over our entire planet. Any measure we take has to be on the same, planetary scale.” He paused and looked around the room. “I want you to wake up the Yellowstone Supervolcano.”
CHAPTER 27
There was a long silence, then everyone started to talk at once. The President held up his hand. His eyes were squeezed tight shut.
“Let me understand this. You want to trigger a massive volcanic eruption. And just how do you propose to do that?”
“A bunker-penetrating missile with a nuclear warhead. It needs to be big – you have to get this right first time. As you know, there’s a colossal magma chamber under Yellowstone Park and it’s full of dissolved gas under pressure. You deliver your missile to the point where the Earth’s crust overlying the magma is thinnest. Offhand, I believe that’s the area around Norris. You breach the crust and in the decompression that follows the magma boils. Nothing will withstand that pressure. The supervolcano will blow.”
Again there was a babble of voices and the President had to raise his voice to restore order. He turned back to Terry.
“Dr. McKinley. You and Dr. Ferris have shown a good deal of resourcefulness since you’ve been with us, otherwise I wouldn’t even dignify this idea with a discussion. I’m not entirely ignorant of what that supervolcano could do. I understand it would blanket much of the United States in ash, kill tens of thousands of Americans, and bring our economy down to the level of a third world country. Now why in God’s name would I want to trigger a catastrophe like that?”
“Hear me out, sir. If it erupts, the supervolcano will eject hundreds of cubic miles of ash and lava into the air. It will also fill the upper atmosphere with sulphuric acid, about two thousand million tonnes of it. In a matter of weeks that will travel all around the planet, combining with the ammonia that’s already up there to form tiny crystals of ammonium sulphate. The crystals and the ash will filter down to lower levels where they’ll act as nucleation sites. That will generate torrential rain, which will wash a lot of the remaining ammonia out of the atmosphere. These two things on their own – the chemical combination and the rain – will purge our atmosphere of much of the free ammonia that’s up there at the moment.”
Terry looked at the faces around the table. They were completely focused on him. Maggie, sitting by his side, was very still; he could sense the tension in her. He opened his hands.
“Now you have the time.”
Everyone seemed too shocked to speak. Then the Secretary of Defense leaned forward.
“You can’t be serious about using a nuclear weapon. You could trigger a war.”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Pevensey. A hit on your own soil isn’t going to prompt a retaliatory strike. You’d have to make sure your own military didn’t respond, of course. But I’m not sure if any seismometer could distinguish the initial nuclear explosion from the eruption itself.”
The Secretary for Homeland Security tentatively raised a hand. “Does it really have to be the supervolcano?” he asked. “Couldn’t we trigger a smaller one, maybe in South America or Indonesia?”
“No, Mr. Brierley,” Terry said. “You can’t catch an elephant with a mouse trap. It’s got to be on that scale.”
“All right,” Brierley persisted, “it has to be a supervolcano. Aren’t there others besides Yellowstone?”
“There are suspected sites elsewhere in the world but they’re hard to pinpoint. And if you hit one and it doesn’t go up, then it’s like Mr. Pevensey says – you’ll probably trigger a nuclear war. Yellowstone’s the only option.”
Elaine Zanuck ran her fingers through her short grey hair. “Maybe Dr. Ferris’s group is being too conservative. After all, they’re right at the beginning of this project; things could look more hopeful in a month or two. Then we wouldn’t have to think about this.”
“Even if they could cut the development time to six months, Dr. Zanuck,” Terry replied, “you’re still left with the problem of delivery. You’ve got to produce it in quantity, then you’ve got to distribute it around the world, load it onto aircraft, and spray it on large bodies of water all over the planet. You can’t do those things overnight.”
Pevensey shook his head. “We’d have a major problem persuading every country in the world that it has to be overflown and sprayed by low-level aircraft. Can you imagine Russia agreeing to that, or China or Iran or North Korea? It would make getting agreement on nuclear arms or climate change look like child’s play.”
“We’d just supply the stuff, Bob,” the President responded. “Let them do their own damned spraying. But they’ll still accuse us of a Western plot to poison their water and make the population infertile, or some other suc
h nonsense. We couldn’t force them to accept it. It would be one hell of a job to get world coverage.”
“Excuse me, sir, I didn’t mean to imply that we need comprehensive world coverage,” Terry put in. “So long as the neutralizing organism is widely established it’ll do the rest of the distribution itself. If we’ve built in a selective advantage – such as Dr. Ferris is planning to do – it’ll continue to replace the ammonia organisms until they finally disappear. But we’re never going to reach that stage unless we buy more time. And I can’t think of any way of doing it other than the one I’ve suggested.”
“An eruption like that would bring the country to its knees!” Zanuck exclaimed. “How are our experts supposed to develop a high-tech solution under those conditions?”
Terry said, “You’d have to set up a facility outside the main ash fallout area, as far south as possible. There isn’t time to build one; you’d need to take over an existing centre, a university or commercial laboratory. Move the experts there in good time.”
The President frowned. “What about the centre of government and the key institutions? Would they have to move too?”
“Almost certainly, sir; Washington could well be in the zone of ash fall. There will, of course, be other consequences. The ash and ammonium crystals in the atmosphere will reflect sunlight so there’ll be a global drop in temperature. It would be advisable to cancel exports of foodstuffs like grain because you’ll miss at least one harvest. We can get more accurate predictions by studying the computer models people have prepared for this scenario.”
President Kinghorn rested his head in one hand, passing the fingers over his forehead. Then he looked up. “I can’t believe we’re still talking about this. Suppose you people are wrong? This whole ammonia thing could be a gigantic mistake.”
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