by Ben Bova
But Randolph had been in love with Jane Scanwell, once. Perhaps he still was. Perhaps that was what destroyed his marriage, really, and gave the impetus to his philandering ways. How ironic for this womanizer to desire the Ice Queen, the immovable, unobtainable Jane Scanwell! How delicious that Jane Scanwell will be the instrument of Randolph’s destruction.
The meeting ended at last and Malik followed Scanwell to her office. It was a spacious corner room with a view of the Eiffel Tower, no less. Fit trappings for a former head of state.
Instead of going to her desk, Jane sat in an armchair next to one of the windows.
“Fix yourself a drink,” she said, nodding toward the bar built into the far wall.
Malik said, “Thank you. A good idea after such a long and utterly dry meeting. Can I make something for you?”
“Just a glass of filtered water with a twist of lime, please.”
Malik found the bottled water and a dish of fresh limes in the little refrigerator. And vodka in the freezer compartment. When he took the two drinks back toward her, he saw that Jane was eying him carefully, her long legs crossed, the expression on her face unfathomable.
He handed her the water, then touched his glass of vodka to hers. “Zah vahsheh zdahrovyeh,” he murmured.
“Here’s mud in your eye,” Jane replied, with just the ghost of a smile on her lips.
Malik took the armchair on the other side of the window and rolled it next to Jane’s.
“Now what were you telling me about cooking Dan Randolph’s goose?” she asked.
He grinned at her. “You are full of Americanisms this afternoon.”
“I’m an American. What about Randolph?”
“He has just bought out a small competitor of his, a man named Mitchell who owned a mining operation on the Moon.”
“What of it?”
“He bought Mitchell’s company because Mitchell was about to be hit with a stiff fine by the lunar tribunal for exceeding his allotment of ores.”
Jane took another sip of her water, then said, “I see. Dan can afford to pay the fine but Mitchell can’t. So Dan buys him out at a bargain-basement price.”
“Exactly so.”
“So how does that get Dan in trouble?”
Malik’s grin spread into a broad happy smile. “We passed a regulation last spring to the effect that any attempt to subvert or avoid the rulings of the GEC is punishable by confiscation.”
“We did?” She looked surprised.
Malik made an expansive gesture. “Oh, the wording is rather obscure, something about ‘joint and several liability.’ The lawyers worked very hard to phrase it so that no one would notice it. And the regulation was buried among several dozens of other minor changes to existing rules. But the regulation was passed; it exists and it is legally binding.”
Jane’s eyes seemed to focus beyond Malik, as if she were looking at something that was not physically in the room with them.
“Do you mean that you can use that regulation to confiscate Dan’s holdings? All of them? All of Astro Manufacturing and everything else he owns?”
Malik nodded. “He stepped into my trap and I intend to snap it shut on him.”
“Lots of luck.”
“You don’t believe I can do it?”
“I believe that Dan is very resourceful, very powerful, and very stubborn. He won’t give up easily.”
“You can be of great help in this.”
“I can?”
“Yes,” said Malik, pulling his chair even closer to her. “It will be easier to deal with him here on Earth, rather than on the Moon. He has too many friends there, too many places where he can hide himself away while his lawyers try to find loopholes he can escape through.”
“You don’t intend to jail him, do you?” For the first time a hint of emotion showed on Jane’s face. Malik could not decide whether it was fear or anger. Or something else.
“It would be better,” he said slowly, “if he were … under protective custody, let us say. Someplace where he can be held incommunicado—only until the confiscation orders have been processed and carried out, of course.”
“That’s not legal.”
“Not in America, I realize that. But the Global Economic Council’s regulations do not include a Bill of Rights, you know. And there are many nations on Earth where he could be held indefinitely.”
Her face hardened.
“Oh, I don’t mean to put him in a dungeon,” Malik said, smiling easily. “A small island, perhaps. Some tropical paradise where he can have everything he wants: wine, women and song.”
“Everything except his freedom.”
“And his holdings.”
Jane thought a moment, then smiled back at the Russian. “I know just the place: a coral atoll out in the middle of the Pacific. A very romantic spot, as a matter of fact.”
“Excellent!” Malik resisted the urge to rub his hands together gleefully. Instead, he asked, “Is this a place you know from personal experience?”
“My husband and I honeymooned there, a thousand years ago,” said Jane.
That took Malik aback. But only for a moment. “I see. Do you think that you could somehow get him to meet you there?”
She nodded. “I’m sure he’d come if I asked him to.”
Yes, Malik thought. Dan Randolph would come flying to this woman. What hatred she must have for him! To turn the site of her honeymoon into a prison for her former lover. Ah, women! They are far fiercer than men.
“There is no sense getting angry at me,” said Napoleon Bazain, over the muted roar of the plane’s engines. “I am merely a messenger. A middleman.”
Sergio Alvarez stared down his patrician nose at the Frenchman. “You are a parasite.”
Bazain smiled blandly. “No, I work for a parasite.”
“It is all the same to me,” Alvarez muttered.
The twin-engine plane was cruising high above the Madeira River, an hour out of Manaus. Below them, where there had once been pristine forest there now stretched long ugly brown gashes of bare ground, scars left by the timber companies and the landowners who had chased away the native Indians in the vain hope of turning the area into grazing land for cattle.
Up front in the cockpit sat the pilot and the ecologist, a young university graduate who still had stars in his eyes. Back here, sitting on bare bucket seats amid the big tanks of seed and fertilizer, Alvarez faced reality.
“Why be angry?” asked the Frenchman. His smile was still showing, but his eyes looked uneasy, as if he were worried that this hot-blooded Castilian might toss him out of the plane in a fit of righteous anger.
Bazain was small, light of frame, almost delicate. His face, though, was fleshy with the beginnings of jowls. His thinning hair was slicked back as if he were about to go out on a date. He wore a custom-tailored silk business suit. As far as Alvarez could tell, he was unarmed.
Sergio Alvarez, regional director of the GEC’s reforestation program, looked every inch the grandee from Madrid. Thin aristocratic nose, sculpted cheekbones, hair as silver as a newly minted coin. Yet he wore a faded windbreaker and chinos that had lost their crease years ago.
“Listen to reason,” Bazain said, almost pleading. “The very fact that I’m on this plane with you proves that we have no intention of doing harm.”
“Not yet.”
“Not at all—if you simply divert the funds as you’ve been asked to do.”
Alvarez felt his blood seething. “That money is for the reforesting of this jungle! How dare you and your … your thugs—how dare you demand extortion money from this program?”
Bazain hunched forward in the bucket seat, rubbing his palms on the knees of his expensive trousers. “It’s not, me. I only work for them.”
“The Mafia.” Alvarez spat the word.
“That’s an old-time phrase. Nobody uses that term anymore.”
“Whoever they are, they are crooks.”
“They are businessmen.”
> “Who want to steal money that is needed to bring this rain forest back to health!”
Bazain sighed deeply. Then, with obviously strained patience, he explained once again, “What does it matter if we get a share of the program’s money? The money comes from the Global Economic Council, doesn’t it? And where do they get it? From taxes. They take it from all the national governments in the world, and from the big multinational corporations.”
“It doesn’t matter where the funding comes from.”
“Certainly it matters! They collect billions, hundreds of billions. Every year! So you siphon some of the money they give you to us. All you have to do is go back and tell them that you need more funding.
Tell them that the program is more expensive than you had thought it would be. That’s what everybody else does.”
“I will not?’ Alvarez snapped. “Every centavo given to this program will be spent on reforesting the jungle.”
Bazain shook his head sadly.
“Don’t you understand?” said Alvarez. “The world is being choked to death by the greenhouse effect. The best way to reverse the greenhouse is to plant trees. Billions of trees! Replace what has been cut down and then go on to plant still more. Others are seeding the oceans to grow more algae; they take up carbon dioxide and . . .”
“Spare me!” Bazain raised his hands.
“You don’t want to understand, is that it? You don’t want to know.”
“You must understand something,” said Bazain, his voice taking on a hard edge. “Unless we get our share of your money, you will be killed. That is the message I was told to give you. My superiors have been very patient, but their patience is finished. You pay or you die. This plane will be blown out of the
air. Your young scientist up there will be killed. Maybe your wife and children, too. They are capable of it.”
Alvarez said nothing. He was panting, his nostrils flaring like a thoroughbred racehorse’s.
“And if such violence happens,” Bazain went on smoothly, “what will come of your precious program then? Even if the GEC presses on with it, it will cost much more, won’t it? Dealing with us is far cheaper. And safer.”
Alvarez had no answer.
FIVE
DAN RANDOLPH STOOD at the long, sweeping glassteel observation window that curved across the far end ofAlphonsusCity ’s main dome. Away from the GEC tribunal and the need to be dressed respectably, he wore his usual sky blue coveralls, faded from long use, wrinkled and comfortable. No name patch on its breast; merely the sturdy simple logo of Astro Manufacturing. He had no need to be recognized. “The people who know who I am don’t need to be reminded,” he often said. “The ones who don’t, don’t need to know.” The great ringed plain of Alphonsus was so wide that Dan could not see its far side from the observation port where he stood. The Moon’s abrupt horizon cut across the tired old ringwall mountains like the brink of eternity, nothing but utterly black sky and solemn unblinking stars hanging beyond its edge. The floor of the plain was dotted with lunar factories, open to vacuum of course, tended by sterile robots under remote control by sweaty, breathing humans sitting safely underground in their offices inside Alphonsus City . Each factory was protected from the occasional meteoroid by a gracefully curved roof of light honeycomb metal. Most of the roofs bore the flying-heron symbol of Yamagata Industries. A few were marked with the more prosaic STRO logo of Dan’s company. On the other side of the ringwall, Dan’s company ran a fleet of automated vehicles patiently plying the Mare Nubium, scooping up the top layers of the lunar regolith the way a herd of cows grazes a field. There was oxygen in the powdery upper layers of the lunar soil, and aluminum, titanium, plenty of silicon and even some iron. But the most precious element in the regolith was an isotope of helium—helium-three—born in the Sun and carried across interplanetary space on the solar wind to be imbedded in the porous regolith over long eons. Helium-three made fusion power practical on Earth. Lunar fuel was beginning to light the overcrowded cities of Earth, cleanly, cheaply, with minuscule pollution and radioactive waste. It was making Dan Randolph a new fortune. If he had thought about it, he would have grinned at the cosmic justice of it. Helium-three was created in the Sun by the fusion processes that made Earth’s daystar shine. Some of it was wafted off into space; a scant fraction of that found its way to the Moon. Humans mined the stuff and shipped it to their home world, where it was used to power fusion generators: man-made artificial suns that generated the electrical power to run an overpopulated world. It was elegantly beautiful. And profitable. But Dan was thinking of other things as he waited for the shuttle to land. In the hip pocket of his coveralls was a message from Jane Scanwell inviting him to meet her at Tetiaroa. No reason given. Just a one-line note, as impersonal as a bill of lading: IMPERATIVE WE MEET AT TETIAROA AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. JANE.
Imperative, Dan repeated to himself. What could be so imperative? Why Tetiaroa, way out in the middle of the Pacific? Why won’t she answer my calls to her? What’s happening down there that she has to see me as soon as possible? A flicker of light caught his eye. Craning his neck, Dan could just make out the angular ungainly shape of the shuttle falling like a rock in slow motion. Another puff of its retros, the cold gas glittering briefly in the sunlight, and the spraddle-legged vehicle slowed. It seemed to rock slightly, then squirted several brief jets of retro fire as it steadied and settled down softly on the landing pad, a full kilometer out on the floor of the plain from the edge of the dome where Dan was standing. Half an hour later, Zach Freiberg lay sprawled across the couch in Dan’s office, a morose expression on his boyish face. In the ten years Dan had known Freiberg , it still surprised him to realize how tall the scientist really was. Zach gave the impression of being a small, soft pooh-bear of a guy. But when they stood face-to-face, he was several inches taller than Dan. “It’s real, boss,” he was saying mournfully, his head resting on one arm of the couch, his booted feet on the other. “I’ve had the best people in the business check out the numbers.” Dan, seated tensely behind his desk, said, “Now let me get this straight. You’re saying that the greenhouse effect is going to hit suddenly, within ten years. Right?” Freiberg stared up at the paneled ceiling. “It’s already hitting, Dan. You know that. Droughts in the middle latitudes; floods in the tropics. Killer storms getting worse every year.” “Yeah, but you were saying that the ice caps-“ “Will melt suddenly, right. Not gradually. Ten years from now the Antarctic and Greenland caps will start to melt down. Ten years after that, sea levels all around the world will be five-ten meters higher than they are now.” “Fifteen to thirty feet?” Dan’s voice sounded hollow, even to himself. Freiberg nodded. “What can we do about it?” “Not a helluva lot,”Freiberg said. “There must be something!” Freiberg pulled himself up to a sitting position and faced Dan. He had been a planetary geochemist ten years earlier, when Dan had hired him. Since then he had been forced to dabble in so many disciplines that now Dan thought of him as Astro’s resident genius: a man who understood what made planets work. “Dan,” he said slowly, “it’s taken a couple of hundred years for the greenhouse effect to make itself felt. It’s an accelerating phenomenon. Every year it goes faster. It builds and builds. And then it hits a discontinuity. In ten years it’ll reach the point where the ice caps start to go.” “But I thought the greenhouse was mostly due to industrial pollution: carbon dioxide and other crap that we pour into the atmosphere.” Freiberg nodded. “Then, if we stop polluting the atmosphere,” Dan said, “won’t the greenhouse effect stop, too?” The nod turned into a weary shake of his head. “Nice try, boss. But there are two problems with it: One, the greenhouse effect is already here. Global temperatures are already high enough to cause disastrous changes in climate, worldwide.” “Yeah, I know,” said Dan impatiently. “But if we stop” Pulling himself up to a sitting position,Freiberg said, “That’s the second problem.” His round-cheeked face went tense, grim. “How the fuck are you going to stop twelve billion people from shitting up the atmos
phere? In ten years or less.” Dan leaned back in his chair, shocked at the younger man’s sudden fury. “I’ve done my homework, boss,”Freiberg said. “I’ve gone through the numbers. You know what we’re up against? We’d have to cut down on the cee-oh-two we put into the atmosphere by ninety percent. Ninety percent! For starters?’ “Well,” Dan said weakly, “I didn’t say it would be easy.” Freiberg’s anger dissipated. He went back to being melancholy. “It can’t be done, Dan. There’s nothing that you or I or anybody can do. Mother Nature’s going to solve the problem for us—by killing several billion people.” But Dan said, “Goddammit to hell and back, I’m not going to sit here and watch the world drown! There must be something we can do!” “Like what?” “Shut down all the goddamned factories. Move ‘em into orbit. Stop burning fossil fuels. Convert every motor on the planet to electricity. Use fusion and solar power. We’ve got the technology, for god’s sake!” “How’re you going to get the whole flipping world to change over in ten years?” “The Global Economic Council,” Dan said. Then he snorted with disdain. “The GEC? Don’t make me laugh.” “They’re the only organization in the whole world that has anywhere near the clout to get the job done. You’ve got to show findings to them.” “I already have.” “Huh? What’d they say?” “They laughed in my face,”Freiberg said. “What?” “I said they laughed at me. Their scientists told me I’m crazy.” Dan felt the breath rush out of him. “Son of a bitch,” he said slowly. Freiberg inhaled. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am crazy.” Dan shook his head. “If I have to choose between them and you, I’d say they’re the ones who’ve nuts.” “I did have all this checked out by the best people I know,”Freiberg said. Dan rapped nervously on his desktop with his knuckles. “No. If the GEC refuses to listen to you, it’s for some reason.” “They can’t want half the world to drown!” Dan said nothing; he was thinking furiously. “Can they?”Freiberg asked plaintively. “We’ll find out,” said Dan. Leaning across his desk, he said to his computerized communicator, “Get me on the next flight to Sydney . Book it under the name of Maxwell E. Rutherford.” “Maxwell E. Rutherford?”Freiberg asked. Dan grinned at him. “Never let the authorities know what you’re doing, if you can avoid it. I want to see what’s going on down there before I meet with Jane or anybody else.” “Does the ‘E’ stand for Einstein, maybe?” “Could be.” Freiberg almost smiled. There’s nothing that Dan or anyone else on Earth can do, he realized. But still he felt an illogical glimmer of hope that Dan was gearing up for battle.
