Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  Banting pointedly stood aside. “Please leave at once. You shouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?” Chase wanted to know.

  Banting breathed out slowly, controlling his annoyance. “They’re sending a Hercules from McMurdo Sound. So now you know. All right?”

  “The Americans?” Chase said. “Why inform them?”

  “Because they have the facilities and we haven’t,” said Banting shortly. Professor Ivor Banting was project leader at the station and head of the British Section Antarctic Research Program. More administrator than serious scientist, he commanded little respect from the British contingent. He seemed to be more interested in keeping an eye on the stores’ inventory than in conducting research experiments and collecting important data. Chase thought him a typical careerist petty-minded bureaucrat, but just as long as Banting kept out of his way and didn’t interfere he was prepared to tolerate the man.

  Banting cleared his throat, as he might have done before commencing to lecture to a group of rather obtuse students. “There’s also the matter of security, which I doubt would have occurred to you. The Americans want to know what he was doing here.”

  “They don’t think he’s a spy,” Chase said incredulously, not sure whether he ought to laugh or not. “We find a man with a broken back on the ice, two thousand miles from nowhere, and the Americans regard him as a security risk!”

  But Professor Banting was clearly not in the mood to debate the point. He said crisply, “As head of the station, Dr. Chase, this is my responsibility. And my decision. The Americans are the right people to deal with it.” He stuck both hands into the pockets of his shapeless tweed jacket in the pose of someone whose patience was rapidly evaporating. “Now, if you and Dr. Power would be so good as to leave.” At the door Chase paused and glanced back at the figure on the bed, the black beard enclosing the soundlessly miming lips. Even now a reflex part of his brain was striving to communicate ... what? What could be so vitally important to him? A simple chemical equation? Chase curled his hand around the piece of paper in his pocket.

  “I just hope you know what you’re doing, Professor.” His jaw hardened. “This man is gravely ill. Moving him could be a fatal mistake.”

  “Quite so.” Banting turned his back. “But if so it will be mine and not yours, Dr. Chase.”

  Wearing only ragged shorts and a pair of canvas shoes with holes in them, Theo Detrick sat in the stern of a small wooden rowboat in the middle of a placid lagoon, surrounded by a bracelet of dazzling pink coral. He was a shortish, robust man with a boxer’s torso and shoulders burned a deep mahogany, and whereas many men his age had thickened and grown slothful, Theo kept to a strict regimen: The discipline of his scientific calling extended into every area of his hermetic life. Beneath a spiky crew cut of snow-white hair his face was grizzled and etched with lines, his eyes of transparent blue screwed up against the brilliant mirror of the lagoon.

  Canton Island is the tiniest of a loosely scattered group, the Phoenix Islands, fractionally below the equator, which seem no more than flyblown specks in the vast blue expanse of the tropical Pacific. For Theo Detrick, Canton Island was important precisely because of its location. Nearly twenty years before, at the age of forty, he had come to the island and stayed here, its sole inhabitant. What had begun as a routine research project in marine biology, sponsored by a two-year Scripps Fellowship, had turned into his life work.

  Behind the boat trailed a surface-skimming net. Its fine silk mesh had captured a kind of greenish goo, which he was careful not to disturb as he hauled the net over the stern. Later, in his laboratory in the single-story clapboard house, Theo would cut the silk into ten-centimeter squares and examine each one patiently and painstakingly under the microscope. But even with the naked eye the evidence was plain enough—to his practiced eye at any rate. The phytoplankton index was in decline. It was a trend that had been noted in all the oceans of the world, but never plotted so carefully, so thoroughly, over such a long period of time.

  The scientist shielded his eyes and looked beyond the coral reef to the open sea, a thousand glittering facets in the unbroken arc of blue.

  It was out there, in the narrow belt along the equator, that the upwelling of colder water brought with it a rich soup of microorganisms from the ocean depths. These were the countless billions of minute unicellular planktonic algae that formed the staple diet of most fish. Important too in that a significant proportion of the world’s constantly replenished oxygen supply came from these tiny free-floating plants. Like all green plants they absorbed the energy of the sun and by means of photosynthesis converted water into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen they used to produce carbohydrates for their own needs, dumping the oxygen as a waste product into the atmosphere.

  But what was “waste” to the plants was vital to all animal life on the planet.

  There wasn’t any man living who knew as much about this microscopic form of marine life as he did. His book on the subject, nine years in the writing and published a decade ago, was now regarded as the standard text. From the royalties and the grant he still received from Scripps, he was able to continue his research—though he guessed that at the institute he existed merely as an entry on the accounts department balance sheet. “Old Theo? Thought he was dead.” He visited the mainland once, at the most twice, a year, so he couldn’t blame them. His wife had died fourteen years ago. His daughter, Cheryl, herself a postgraduate at the institute, must have felt she was corresponding with a distant relative—a stranger even—when they exchanged their brief, polite letters.

  He rowed back to the jetty, the oars smooth in his leathery palms. The years of isolation had bred in him a fear and distrust of the outside world. By choice he would have preferred to be left alone on his island. He wanted nothing more than to work at what he knew best, at the subject to which he had devoted the greater part of his working life.

  But—the question—what good was that work, that research, all that dedication, if not used for the benefit of mankind? He had a duty not only to himself. He was a forgotten man, wouldn’t have had it any other way, but the time had come to consider other things. For the past two years, he realized, he had tried to deny the truth. Yet daily he saw the truth, and it was inescapable. It was building up, sheet after written sheet, graph after graph, in the mass of notes lying between mildewed green covers on his workbench. He couldn’t afford to ignore it any longer.

  Who would pay heed to a forgotten man? Theo wondered, holding the skimming net in one hand while he pulled himself up with the other. Especially the apocalyptic warning of a lone scientist, long vanished from civilization? A crank? Deranged? Old Theo? Thought he was dead.

  He went up the beaten path to the house, knowing what had to be done. Like a fire-and-brimstone prophet of ancient times, he was about to preach death and destruction. His sermon concerned nothing less than the end of the world.

  Nick Power lounged back in the canvas chair, his calf-length combat boots with the thick-ridged soles propped on the corner of the trestle table. “The guy’s off his rocker, Gav, we both know that.”

  “No, we don’t. Feverish, yes, and in pain, probably drugged up to the eyeballs, but he was definitely trying to tell us something.”

  “Okay,” Nick agreed charitably. “What, for instance?”

  “I don’t know,” Chase said.

  “Because it didn’t mean anything. An elementary equation that can be found in any third-year chemistry textbook. He was deluded, babbling nonsense. Something he’d learned as a peasant back in Vladivostok.”

  Chase gazed thoughtfully across the small cluttered messroom with its half-dozen late diners idling over coffee. The others had retired to the rec room along the corridor to play cards or chess, or have a game of table tennis on the battered table supported by packing cases. Some would be straining to hear whatever English-language broadcast they could pick up on shortwave—if the ionospher
ic storms didn’t give total radio blackout, likely with the approaching winter.

  It was the comfortable hour of the evening, the station battened down against the searing wind and cold and dark. Primeval man seeking the shelter of the cave, the warmth of companionship in a hostile environment.

  “When are they transferring him to McMurdo?” asked Nick, hands behind his head.

  “Tomorrow. The Hercules is due in at fourteen hundred hours.” Nick perked up. “Wowie! If Doug Thomas is flying her we could have a fresh supply of Red. That’s made my day,” he said happily.

  “I won’t be around to smoke it with you,” Chase reminded him. “You can blast off into outer space all on your own.”

  Nick laughed. “The next POGO in orbit will be me.”

  Polar-Orbiting Geophysical satellites passed directly overhead every hour and a half, transmitting photographs of the weather situation and data on magnetic disturbances in the upper atmosphere. A satellite was being launched every three days, and at the present time there were more than three thousand spacecraft in orbit. Three quarters of all expenditure on space development was military—China, India, and, more recently, Chile adding to the clutter in outer space.

  Chase sipped the last of his lukewarm coffee. “What section of the core are you working on?” he asked Nick.

  “Oh, pretty recent. About five hundred B.C.”

  “It always amazes me how you can date it so accurately.”

  “Well, it’s really an estimate, give or take two or three hundred years. But in the total span of fifty thousand years, what’s a couple of centuries between friends?”

  “Any surprises?”

  “No, not anymore. I came across a dark band the other day, which is probably the residue of volcanic ash. We dated it by carbon fourteen at about two and a half thousand years, so there must have been a huge eruption about that time.”

  “And the ash got this far?” Chase said curiously.

  “Most airborne pollution does,” Nick told him. “We can trace contamination of the atmosphere caused by the early Industrial Revolution. There’s a marked darkening of the ice core from about two hundred and fifty years ago. Every year ten to twenty inches of snow falls on Antarctica, which with the accumulated pressure gets squeezed down into four to eight inches of pure ice. Trapped in it is a permanent record of the climate at any given moment, plus prevailing conditions in the atmosphere, space dust, and so on. We’ve even detected traces of leaded petroleum.” Nick gave a bark of a laugh and shook his head, bemused. “Here am I, shut away in this bloody ice-hole on the arse-end of the globe, studying the effects of the Los Angeles freeway system.” Chase said, “And it’s supposed to be the cleanest, purest air anywhere in the world down here.” He locked his fingers together and rested his chin on them. In the poor light his hair had a blue-black sheen, and the whites of his eyes stood out beneath the dark bar of his eyebrows. Someone had once described his looks as “satyric,” which had flattered him until he looked up the precise meaning and found that it meant a Greek wood-demon with a tail and long pointed ears. “I wonder if he is a scientist.”

  “Possible.”

  “What field?”

  “Professor Boris reading Pornography.”

  “Highly amusing.”

  “Contact Mirnyy Station and ask if anyone’s missing.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “That’s one way to find out.”

  Chase gnawed his lip. “I reckon not.” He looked at Nick. “I mean, what if he was trying to get away from them? He’d hardly thank me for blowing the gaff.”

  “What the hell, I don’t see that it matters. He’ll be in the tender loving care of the Yanks soon. Let them worry about his pedigree.” Nick swung his boots down, stood up, and flexed his shoulders. “Let’s go to the rec room. It’s Donna Summer in cabaret tonight.”

  They went in single file along the narrow wooden corridor, which was lined with silver-clad pipes and lit by caged bulbs. Faintly they could hear the wind howling, twenty feet above them. On the surface it was 90 degrees below, with a windspeed of 62 knots. Chase smiled as he recalled an expression of his mother’s. “Not fit to turn a dog out,” she’d say when the wind and rain swirled around their little terraced house in Bolton. He missed her, found himself remembering silly inconsequential things about her with each passing year, like sediment building up. His father, Cyril, was still alive, retired from his job with British Rail, now living with his sister Emily, Chase’s Auntie Em, in Little Lever.

  It all seemed to belong to another century. A lost age. His boyhood self had vanished into the dead past, never to return. Was this what it was like to grow old, to experience this poignant pain? How did old people stand it? The weight of memory must cripple.

  Nick went to the bar, a wooden plank resting on two crates, and brought back two cans of Newcastle brown ale. Settled in a sagging armchair, Chase accepted one, peeled back the tab, and took a mouthful. A group in the corner was watching a VTR of an old Woody Allen film; Woody was walking down the street with Mariel Hemingway; that would make it Manhattan, Chase thought.

  He took another swig of beer and fished out the crumpled piece of paper and smoothed it flat on his knee with one hand. He continued to sip his drink while he studied it. What had he missed? This simple equation must mean something. The fact that it was so simple disturbed him most, in fact.

  With little else to divert him, Nick was willing to listen. Really, Chase supposed, he wanted to talk to clarify his own thoughts, using Nick as a sounding board.

  “The absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater is a commonplace chemical interaction. They first measured it early in the century by shaking a sample of seawater in a closed jar with a given amount of air. Later they used a paddle-wheel device, and nowadays they keep a continuous record of the partial pressure of carbon dioxide—that’s pC02—over huge tracts of ocean by using an infrared analyzer. The normal thing is to obtain high values in equatorial regions, while north and south of the fifty-degree latitudes, toward the poles, the values for pC02 are low. The reason for that is—”

  “Because gases are less soluble in warm water than in cold.”

  “Right. So, what you get is an outgassing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere near the equator—because the warmer water can’t hold it—and a corresponding sink for carbon dioxide at higher latitudes. This keeps everything nicely balanced. In fact the oceans are an extremely efficient exchange machine, maintaining a constant level of atmospheric C02 of about 0.03 percent. That’s been the case for thousands, millions of years.”

  “What about the increase in carbon dioxide?” Nick said. “We’re all going to fry in the greenhouse, aren’t we?”

  “We’ve known about that since the thirties,” Chase said, nodding. “It was a British engineer, G. S. Callendar, who published some calculations in the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society that showed that in the fifty years up to 1936, man’s industrial activities had added one hundred fifty billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Since then, of course, industrial expansion has zoomed off the graph, so that now it’s estimated that over twenty billion tons are released into the atmosphere each year. The real point isn’t the actual amount—it’s still very small compared to the huge fluxes of gases that take place in the forests and the oceans—but how would a carefully balanced ecosystem cope with all this extra C02 floating around?”

  “And what’s the answer, mastermind?”

  “Nobody yet knows. We do know that since about 1850 there’s been a ten to fifteen percent increase in carbon dioxide in the air, which is where you get your greenhouse effect from. Most people don’t understand that our atmosphere is heated from below, by radiated heat from the earth’s surface. The sun’s rays come through, heat us up, and then because of the added carbon dioxide and water vapor can’t get out again. The heat gets trapped; ergo, we all turn into tomatoes.”

  “Wonderful.” Nick raised his can. “I’ll drink to that.�
��

  Chase reached out and pressed his arm. “Before you do, my junkie friend, answer this: Where has all the extra carbon dioxide gone to?” Nick blinked. “Why, don’t they know?” He seemed mildly interested at last.

  “Nope. We produce an extra twenty billion tons a year—probably nearer thirty—and less than fifty percent of that increase has been detected in the atmosphere. You could win the Nobel by answering that.”

  “Why don’t you try? You’re the marine biologist.”

  “But not an atmospheric physicist,” Chase pointed out sensibly. He looked down at the piece of creased paper on his knee, wondering if the Russian had found the answer to that puzzle. Was the extra C02 being absorbed into the polar oceans? They were the usual C02 sinks— Then it struck him with a small chilling shock. Something he’d only this moment realized. For of course the absolutely crucial question was how long could the oceans keep on absorbing the extra carbon dioxide that year by year was increasing due to man’s industrial activities? Surely there must come a time when the oceans reached saturation point. What then? How would that affect the complex interweaving of atmosphere, oceans, and landmass and the life-forms that depended on them?

  Watching him, Nick said, “For God’s sake, you look like somebody who’s lost a quid and found a rusty nail. I’ve told you, Gav, stop fretting over it. It isn’t your problem.”

  “Perhaps it is my problem,” Chase said quietly.

  “You’re too damn serious for your own good.”

  “Yours too.”

  “Mine?” Nick snorted. “Let me tell you what my only problem is—whether or not Doug Thomas is on that Hercules tomorrow with a little plastic bag.”

  “What the hell does Banting think he’s playing at?” Chase said, suddenly angry. “I wouldn’t put him in charge of a piss-up in a brewery.”

  Nick tutted. “I do wish you wouldn’t employ these vulgar northern expressions. They lower the tone of this establishment.” He gazed around with feigned rapture at the cramped, muggy room with its decrepit furniture and makeshift bar and the motley collection of scientists, most of them bearded and unkempt. It had all the charm of an East End flophouse.