Between the Strokes of Night

by Charles Sheffield

  He moved on. The next shots had come from the inside of the Institute itself, down on earth. Preparations were under way for the move to Salter Station. The cameras showed experimental animals being carefully housed in well-ventilated crates for upward shipment. This time Salter Wherry seemed pleased. There was a hint of satisfaction in the blue eyes as he cut to the receiving network for his daily global status report.

  Salter Station’s observing network tapped all open news channels around the globe, plus a number of sources that national governments would have been shocked to see so routinely cracked. Ground reports were supplemented and confirmed by the station’s spy satellite network, the hundred polar-orbiting spacecraft that permitted a constant detailed look at events anywhere on the globe.

  Salter Wherry now began his daily routine, switching with long practice between different data sources. As the mood struck him, he cut back to earlier events of the past year, then moved forward again to the present. Patiently, he tacked his way to and fro across the face of the globe, sometimes a thousand miles above the surface, sometimes through a hand-held camera on an open street, occasionally with video taken inside government buildings or within private homes. The images flooded in.

  . . . East Africa. The four-thousand-mile flow of the Nile northward to the Mediterranean showed a river shrunk and diminished by unremitting drought. The Sudan was parched desert, the great agricultural systems along the river all vanished. Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, was no more than cindered buildings. The cameras swept north, high above the muddy river. Close to the Mediterranean, Cairo was a ghost town where packs of hungry dogs patrolled the dusty streets. The nilometer on Roda island stood far out above the river’s trickling flow. Water supply and sewage systems had failed long since. Now, only the flies were energetic in the monstrous noon heat.… Alaska. The long southern coastline was shrouded in perpetual fogs, marking the meeting of warm and cold currents. Inland, the warming peninsula was suddenly bursting with new life. The permafrost had melted. Rampant vegetation was rising to clog the muskeg swamps, and clouds of mosquito and black fly buzzed and swirled above the soft surface. The population, at first delighted by the warming trend, was now struggling to hold its own against the rising tide of plant and animal life. All day long, aircraft loaded with pesticides sprayed tens of thousands of square kilometers. They enjoyed little success… London. The steadily melting icecaps had been raising the sea level, slowly, inexorably, a few inches a year. The tides were lapping now at the top of the seawalls, pressing inward all the way from Gravesend to Waterloo Bridge. Cameras in the streets caught lines of volunteer workers continuing their long toil with sandbags and concrete buttresses. Wading through ankle-deep water, they fought the daily battle with high tide. The work went on quietly, even cheerfully. Morale was good.

  . . . Java. The chain of volcanoes along the island, as though in sympathy with the globe’s extreme weather, had woken a week earlier to malignant life. Many of the hundred million people packed onto the island had sought flight, north across the shallow waters of the Java Sea. The spaceborne cameras picked out every detail of the frail boats, heavily overloaded, as they headed for Borneo and Sumatra.

  But not only the land was seismically active. When the tsunami struck not a boat remained afloat. The sixty-foot tidal wave that hit Jakarta and the whole northern shore of Java ensured that those who had remained on land fared little better than their seagoing relatives. Today the cameras picked up isolated clusters of survivors as they were gathered by rescue teams and shipped to mountain camps in the central highlands.

  . . . Moscow. Reports from the main agricultural oblasts were coming in to Central Records. A stone-faced calm was being maintained there, as word arrived of wheat and barley crops withered and brown, of rice and rye failure, and of steadily rising winds that ripped away dry topsoil and carried it pulverized high into the atmosphere.

  Salter Wherry crouched motionless over his console, steadily absorbing new information, collating it with old. Only his mouth and eyes seemed alive. After the scenes from Moscow, he finally switched to the interior of the United Nations building. The formal ritual in the crowded chamber could not hide the undercurrents of anger and tension washing in from the stressed world outside. The Chinese ambassador, face stern and intense, was concluding his prepared speech.

  “What we are seeing in the world today is not an accident of nature, not the vicissitudes of planetary weather at work. We are seeing deliberate modification of climate, changes directed against China and our friends by other nations. The time for reticence in naming these nations is past. My country is the victim of economic warfare. We cannot permit — “

  Wherry jabbed impatiently at the keyboard. He was frowning, bright eyes shadowed by heavy eyebrows. After a few seconds Eleanora appeared on the screen in front of him, a silver ovoid against the backdrop of stars and a sunlit earth. He held it there while he called out printed schedules and status reports for construction. The curving lines of geodesic support girders on the outer hull had disappeared, covered by bright exterior panels. Final electrical systems were being installed, together with the power sources and the hydroponic tanks; the vast water cylinder was already full.

  Wherry skipped to views of the other arcologies. The most distant, Amanda, blinked in as a grainy and indistinct image. It was now almost three million miles away from Earth, spiralling slowly outward in the plane of the ecliptic. In eight years, unless some new trajectory were adopted, the colony ship would have wound its way out to the orbit of Mars. Already the scientists on board were talking about the possibility of a small manned station on Phobos, and consulting with Salter Station on the available resources for the project. Salter Wherry flicked off the viewing screen and sat motionless for many minutes. At last he keyed in another sequence. The face of Hans Gibbs, hair tousled, appeared.

  “Hans, do you have the schedule for shipping the Neurological Institute staff there with you?”

  “Not in front of me. Hold on a minute and I’ll get it.”

  “No need for that. I’ll tell you what I want you to do. The schedule calls for everything to be up here seventy-seven days from now.”

  “Right. Judith Niles grumbled at that, but we’re on time so far.” “Hans, it won’t do. I don’t think we have that long. It’s going to hell, and it’s skidding fast. I understand international politics pretty well, but today I couldn’t even guess which country will go crazy first. They’re all candidates. I want you to work up a revised schedule that will have everything from the Institute — people, animals, and equipment — here inside thirty days. Tell Muncie I want him to do the same thing for anything we need to finish Eleanora, in the same timetable.”

  Hans Gibbs suddenly looked much more awake. “Thirty days! No way, the permits alone will take us that long.”

  “Don’t worry about permits. Let me take care of those. You start working the shipping arrangements. Fast. Cost is irrelevant. You hear me?” Salter Wherry smiled. “Irrelevant. Now, Hans, when have you ever heard me say that about the cost of anything? Thirty days. You have thirty days.”

  Hans Gibbs shrugged. “I’ll try. But apart from permits, we have to worry about launch availability. If that goes sour — “

  He paused, and swore. The connection was gone. Hans was talking to a blank screen.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wolfgang Gibbs closed his eyes and leaned his head forward to touch the cool metal of the console. His face was white, and shone with sweat. After a few seconds he swallowed hard, sat upright, took a deep breath, and made another try. He hit the key sequence for a coded message, waiting until the unit in front of him signalled acceptance.

  “Well, Charlene” — he had to clear his throat again — “I promised you a report as soon as I could get round to it. I’ve just screwed up the transmission sequence three times in a row, so if this one doesn’t work I’ll call it a day. I originally thought I’d be sending to you right after I
got here — shows what an optimist I am! Still, here we go, one more time. If you hear puking noises in the middle of the recording, don’t worry. That’s just me, losing my liver and lungs again.”

  He coughed harshly. “Hans says that only one person in fifty has as bad a reaction to freefall as I do, so with luck you’ll be all right. And they say even I should feel better in a couple more days. I can’t wait. Anyway, that’s enough moaning, let me get to work.

  “Most of the trip up was a breeze. We had everything tied down tight, so nothing could shake loose, and Cameron had all the animals souped up to their eyebrows with sedatives. Pity he couldn’t do the same for me. When we hit freefall everything was all right at first, though my stomach felt as if it had moved about a foot upward. But I was coping with it, not too bad. Then we began moving the animals into their permanent quarters here. They didn’t like it, and they showed their annoyance the only way they could. I’m telling you, we’d better not move again in a hurry. They don’t pay enough for me to wallow along through a cloud of free-floating animal puke and animal crap every day of the week. Wall-to-wall yucky. It was about then that I started to feel I was going to lose my breakfast. And then I did lose it — then the previous day’s lunch and dinner, and I still feel as though I’ll never eat again.

  “Okay. I guess that’s not what you want to hear. Let me get back to the real stuff. I’ll dress it up properly for the lab reports, but here’s where we stand.”

  Wolfgang paused for a moment as another wave of nausea swept over him. He had made his way to the outermost corridor of Spindletop, where the effective gravity was highest, and a quarter gee was almost enough to bring his stomach in line; but if he allowed himself to look down, he was gazing out at infinity, standing on a rotating sea of stars that swirled beneath his feet. And that was enough to start him off again.

  He looked straight ahead, steadfastly refusing to allow his glance to stray toward any of the ports. The turning knot in his stomach slowly loosened. “I guess the cats came through in worst shape,” he said at last. “They’re all alive, but we’ll have a hell of a time sorting out how much of their troubles are caused by the trip up here, and how much is progressive deterioration in their experimental condition. We lost a couple of sloths — don’t know why yet, but looks like it may be a drug-induced cardiac arrest. Cannon warned about that before we started, but nobody had any bright ideas how to prevent it. The other small mammals all seem in pretty good shape, and we had no real trouble moving them to their quarters. That wasn’t true with the Kodiaks, though.” He managed to smile into the camera. “They’re big mothers. Thank God we don’t have any experiments going on with elephants. You had to be here to see what a job we had with old Jinx. Great fat monster. We’d tug and heave on him for a while, and feel he wasn’t moving, then after we finally got him drifting in the right direction we’d find we couldn’t stop him. I was nearly flattened against one of the walls. It’s a good thing the people on the station are used to handling big masses in space, or I never would have made it.

  “I’ll cut out the tales of woe. We finally got him in place, ’nuff said, up near the hub of Workwheel. It’s a horrible place — no gravity to speak of. I don’t know how low, but less than a hundredth of a gee for sure. Hans says that in a month or two I’ll enjoy it there, but now just thinking about it makes me sick. I’ll say one thing for the crews here, they know how to build. All the tanks and the supporting equipment we asked for were ready and in place — and it all worked. A couple of hours ago I gave Jinx the treatment, and I have him stabilized now in Mode Two hibernation pattern. You’ll get the detailed logs with the official transmission, and all the video, too. But I thought you’d like to see something at once, so I’m going to run a clip for you right in with this. Here, see what you think of Jinx.”

  Wolfgang took a long, deep breath and pressed the calling sequence. He did it slowly and painfully, with the fragile and exaggerated care of an old, old man. His fingers stumbled several times, but at last he had a correct pattern entered. He leaned back and massaged his midriff as a copy of the recorded video was displayed before him and simultaneously sent down as a signal to Earth. Jinx was shown at center screen. The bear was sitting upright on a bed of soft shavings, sniffing curiously at a massive chunk of fish protein held in his front paws. His long black tongue came out and licked tentatively at the flaky surface. The bear’s movements were a little jerky, but well-controlled and accurate. Wolfgang watched with approval as Jinx took a neat bite, chewed thoughtfully, then placed the rest of the protein block down on the shavings. When the mouthful was swallowed Jinx yawned and scratched peacefully at a fur-free patch on his left side. The implanted sensors there lay close to the surface of the skin, and it was still a little sensitive. After a few seconds more he picked up the fishy slab and the monstrous jaws began to nibble around it contentedly.

  “Looks good, eh?” said Wolfgang. “You’ll see more when you get the full coverage later, but let me give you the bottom line now. We saw the first signs of this in those last experiments in Christchurch, and what JN had been predicting all along seems to hold up exactly. We hit the correct drug protocols right away this time. Jinx’s body temperature was seven degrees above freezing in that segment of video. His heart rate was one beat per minute — and still is. I estimate that his metabolic rate is down by a factor of about eighty. He’s slow, but he’s sure as hell not hibernating — look at him chew on that slab. What you’re seeing is speeded up, by a factor of sixty-eight over real time. The trickiest piece so far was finding something that Jinx is willing to eat. You know how picky he is. Seems like things feel different to him now, and he doesn’t like it. We got the consistency right after about twenty tries, and he seems to be feeding normally.”

  Wolfgang rubbed ruefully at his midsection. “Lucky old Jinx. That’s more than I can say for myself. Best of all, his condition seems to be completely stable. I checked all the indicators a few minutes ago. I think we could hold him there for a month if we had to, maybe more.”

  He cut back from the picture of the bear to real-time transmission. “That’s the report from this end, Charlene. Now I can relax. But I can’t wait for you and the others to get up here. I don’t know how biased the news coverage is that comes here to Salter Station, but we hear of trouble everywhere back on Earth. Cold wars, hot wars, and mouthing off in all directions. Did you know it hit sixty-two Celsius yesterday in Baluchistan — that’s nearly a hundred and forty-four Fahrenheit. They must be dying in droves. And did you get the reports from the U.N. Security Council? There’s talk of closing all national air space, and Hans is having real problems scheduling flights up — not just the usual red tape, either. He’s meeting blank walls. He’s been told there will be an indefinite suspension of all flights, from all spaceports, until the Earth situation normalizes again. And who knows when that will be? Wherry’s experts say the changes are here to stay — we’ve caused them ourselves with the fossil fuel programs.”

  His hand moved toward the key that would end transmission, then paused. He looked uncertainly at the screen. “Hey, Hans told me one other thing I really didn’t want to hear. Dammit, I wish I knew just how secure this line is, but I’ll say it anyway. If it’s not common knowledge down at the Institute, Charlene, please keep it to yourself. It’s about JN. Did you know that she’s been taking a whole battery of neurological tests over at Christchurch Central? CAT scans, radioisotope tracers, air bubble tracers, the works. They’ve been probing her brain sixteen different ways. I hope she didn’t do something crazy back there, like using herself as a test subject for Institute experiments. Maybe you can check it out? I’d like to be sure she’s all right. Don’t ask me how Hans knew all this — the information they have up here about Earthside doings amazes me. I guess that’s all for now.”

  Wolfgang pressed the key carefully and leaned back. Transmission terminated, and the circuit was broken.

  He closed his eyes. That hadn’t been as bad as he exp
ected. It definitely helped to have something good to concentrate on, to take your thoughts away from feeling nauseated. Think of something good. A sudden and startling memory of Charlene came to his mind, her long limbs and willowy body bending above him, and her dark hair falling loosely about her forehead. He grunted. Christ! If he could have thoughts like that, he must definitely be on the mend. Next thing you know he’d be able to face food again.

  Maybe it was time for another test.

  Wolfgang slowly steeled himself, then turned his head and looked out of the port. Now Spindletop was pointing down toward Earth, and he was facing an endless drop to the sunlit hemisphere beneath. Salter Station was flying over the brown wedge of the Indian subcontinent, with the greener oval of Sri Lanka just visible at its foot.

  He gasped. As he watched the scene seemed to spin and warp beneath him, twisting through a strange and surrealistic mapping. He gritted his teeth and held on tight to the console edge. After thirty unpleasant seconds he could force himself to a different perspective. It was earth’s blue-and-white surface, mottled with brown-green markings, that was airy and insubstantial; Salter Station was real, tangible, solid. That was it. Cling to that thought. He was slowly able to relax his grip on the table in front of him.