Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  “What about your bits for TV? Contractual obligations?”

  “I’m not under contract. They just call me in on a free-lance basis whenever they need an ‘expert’s’ viewpoint.” Chase spoke casually, with a hint of irony. “As you say, John, everyone has to have a label.”

  “No personal ax-grinding though,” the editor warned him. “Keep it hard and factual and to the point.” He raised his brandy glass. “Here’s to a successful trip and a terrific series.”

  Chase acknowledged the toast and drank. Obviously John Ware, editor in chief of the glossy Sentinel, saw nothing amiss in sealing a bargain such as this with five-star Cognac.

  Chase took a chance that the tube was running and walked up Chancery Lane to Holborn Station. You could never be sure since London went bankrupt which services were operating and when. He was in luck and rode through, changing at Oxford Circus to get on the District Line, to Chiswick Park. The easiest way would have been via Notting Hill Gate, but nobody used that station unless he was black or Asian.

  He walked through the drizzle to his flat in Wellesley Road, passing the lines of derelict cars rusting at the curbside. At Belgrave Court he showed his ID to the armed security guard and was admitted. Every window was wreathed with barbed wire. He had a standing arrangement with a neighbor whose little girl went to the same school as Dan to collect his son and look after him till five. The little girl, Sarah, fussed around Dan like a mother hen, but at least he was safe and off the streets.

  The word processor that served as his desk in the book-lined living room was inches deep in copies of Science, Nature, New Scientist, and Science Review. These supplied background research for a two-thousand-word piece on computer weather modeling, as yet only half-written.

  Meeting Theo Detrick in Geneva eight years ago had changed his life; getting married to Angie and then divorced had changed it even more, Chase suspected.

  For it was actually her leaving him that spurred him on to pursue his new career. While still married he’d been contributing bits and pieces to the scientific press, so it wasn’t a completely new departure when he terminated his ICI Research Fellowship at Durham and came to London to try his hand at free-lance science journalism. It was one hell of a gamble, though, and the first couple of years had been tough, especially with a young child to support and bring up. For a while he was even reduced to graveyard-shift lab work. Then the journalism started to pay, and when television came along he was able to provide an above-average standard of living for Dan and himself. At thirty-five he was beginning to feel established at last, though he still found it a precarious and unsettling occupation, subject to the vagaries of the media and the whims of editors.

  But as John Ware had pointed out at lunch, television had made Gavin Chase’s reputation as a science popularizer. Much to his own surprise he’d made the transition from straight science reporting to the mass media, where the personality selling the message counted for as much, if not more, than the message itself.

  The sight of the work to be finished made him restless, though it was probably pointless until two cups of strong black coffee had cleared the brandy fumes. Besides, there was the ritual of Dan’s bath and bedtime story, which Chase looked forward to. He sometimes grumbled that it disrupted his schedule and derailed his train of thought, but it kept him sane and put things in their proper perspective. The end of the world would have to wait until after Dan’s bedtime story.

  Ironic, really, that he had the women’s movement to thank. With the change in the social-sexual climate of opinion, every custody case was considered on its merits, without bias one way or the other. Angie had forfeited her rights to the child when she left the family home and, in the words of the judgment, “cohabited with another person in a separate dwelling.” The other person was not Archie Grieve (she’d never slept with him, Chase learned) but a tall, balding BBC light-entertainment producer called Derek Chambers, whose name occasionally popped up on variety shows and quiz games for the mentally retarded.

  They were welcome to each other, in spades. Chase had cried few tears. If not Chambers it would have been some other specimen in the television menagerie. A cameraman or a sound recordist or the prop boy.

  He heaved himself up and answered the phone. A features editor wanting to know how much he knew about viruses from outer space. He promised to stop by her office the day after tomorrow. His fingers were hardly off the receiver when it rang again: Could he sit in on a discussion on energy conservation followed by a phone-in for Capital Radio a week from Thursday? He said yes, he could, and it was only when he’d put the phone down that it occurred to him that very soon—by the end of the week—he’d have to refuse all further offers of work. Three weeks from today he’d be on his way to America, and there was a vast amount to sort out in the meantime—not only Dan and who’d look after him, but also planning and fixing up his itinerary for the seven-week trip.

  New York, New Jersey, Boston, Washington, Denver, the West Coast ... a lot of ground to cover ... MIT, Cornell, Smithsonian, NOAA, Scripps ... the list began to run out of control and he told himself to put it aside until tomorrow when the computer modeling article would be out of the way.

  Shortly after five o’clock Dan appeared, escorted to the door by the conscientious Sarah, taking her role as surrogate mother very seriously.

  “Daniel has been a naughty boy,” she informed Chase primly, standing there in pinafore and pigtails, arms folded. “He won’t do as he’s told!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What’s the matter?”

  “He would not go to the toilet,” Sarah said, frowning through her dimples.

  Father and son silently regarded each other with identical blue-gray eyes. Like Chase’s, the boy’s hair was dead straight and hung over his eyes in a sweeping curve, though it was fair and fine, not thick and black.

  “Oh. Well. Never mind,” Chase said. “Perhaps he didn’t want to go. Thanks for looking after him.”

  Sarah nodded, duty discharged, and trotted off along the corridor.

  “I did want to,” Dan confided as Chase closed the door, and in a burst of scandalized six-year-old indignation, “But her, Bossy Boots, wanted to come with me and pull my pants down!”

  “Pity. That’s probably the best offer you’ll get for at least ten years,” Chase said.

  The odd-colored eyes of Yuri Malankov, officer, third grade, were fixed coldly and disconcertingly on the dead-center of Boris Stanovnik’s forehead.

  It was a trait Boris remembered well from the days when the young Malankov had worked as his lab assistant: his inability, or refusal, to look anyone directly in the eye. Malankov was shut away in the barred and bolted fortress of his narrow, dogmatist head.

  They were sitting facing each other across a plain table in one of the hundreds of anonymous rooms of the seven-story building at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. In prerevolutionary days it had housed the All-Russian Insurance Company; now it was the headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the official nomenclature of the KGB.

  This was typical KGB psychology, Boris knew, to disorient the interviewee by making the surroundings bleakly impersonal. Yet knowing this didn’t make the effect any the less intimidating.

  “You say the letter was to a friend, yet it was addressed to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.” Malankov didn’t relax his remorseless empty gaze.

  “Dr. Detrick is a marine biologist at Scripps. I write to her there, just as she writes to me at the Hydro-Meteorological Service. I don’t see anything strange in that.”

  “The letter contained more than personal news and friendly salutations. It made specific reference to a project that is of vital importance to the people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

  “Why, yes, but of course,” Boris said easily. He blinked in surprise. “We exchange gossip about the work we’re engaged in. All scientists do. But you know that already, Yuri, from the time you spent with the service.” He smiled. “There was noth
ing in the letter of a confidential nature. Certainly nothing that’s classified.”

  Malankov’s eyes went down to the typewritten sheet in front of him, which Boris guessed was a transcript of the letter. Where was the original? After interception had it been sent on? Unlikely. But Malankov had said “letter”—in the singular—which filled Boris with hope.

  “You must be aware how sensitive this project is,” said Malankov. “Particularly at the present time.”

  Statement or question? Boris chose not to respond. Let the KGB weasel take the lead; that was his job.

  Malankov kept his eyes lowered, his sallow face expressionless. “Any information, no matter how innocuous it might seem, could add to the overall intelligence picture compiled by our imperialist enemies,” he said, as if quoting verbatim from the official handbook. “A hint here, a clue there, a careless phrase. We must be eternally vigilant, Professor, about matters that concern national security.”

  Boris nodded agreement, though he was genuinely puzzled. “I’m sorry, but I thought you were referring to Project Arrow, the Ob and Yenisei rivers diversion scheme. I don’t see how that can have anything to do with national security. Its purpose is to provide much needed arable land in western Siberia. It has no military significance at all, so far as I’m aware.”

  “I was using the term in its widest sense, of course,” Malankov said, a fraction too hurriedly, and for a fleeting moment actually looked into Boris’s eyes, as if anxious about something. “We must never forget that national security embraces all aspects of political and economic activity. We are defending our heritage and culture, our way of life, against Western subversion. Plentiful food for our people is a powerful weapon of war. Men cannot fight on empty bellies.”

  Boris smelled a very large rat. This chunk of party dogma was Malankov’s clumsy attempt at a cover-up. In his haste and ignorance he’s exposed precisely that which he was striving to conceal. Yet Boris was still puzzled: How did Project Arrow fit into a military context? In what way exactly?

  “I understand that,” he said gravely, his mind working furiously. “But I should point out that my letter contained nothing that the Americans don’t already know. The Western press has reported the scheme since its inception in the mid-seventies.”

  “Speculation, Professor—not technical detail,” Malankov said sternly. “They’re certainly not aware how near we are to achieving our goal. Your letter hinted that your work on the project will soon be over.”

  “And so it will. In a month’s time I shall be sixty-four, and I intend to retire from the service next year. Hence the reference to my work coming to an end.”

  Malankov was plainly stumped. He cleared his throat in several stages, eyes focused on the safe middle distance. “I see. Yes, well, that would explain it. I understand now.”

  “Good, I’m glad that you do, comrade,” Boris murmured, loading the last word with half-a-dozen shades of meaning: condescending, impatient, threatening—as if to say “I am Professor Boris Vladimir Stanovnik, one of this country’s leading experts in microbiology, and you, Malankov, whatever status you might have attained, remain the incompetent, shifty, sniveling lab assistant with bitten nails and bad breath.” It was a psychological technique that Malankov himself might have used, given the opportunity, and it worked to good effect.

  Boris rose to his feet, looming large in the tiny bare room, and it seemed that Malankov shrank perceptibly, a petty government official behind a cheap desk.

  “Was there anything else? I realize you have to make these tedious and time-wasting inquiries.”

  Malankov was staring straight ahead at the third button on Boris’s overcoat. “No, nothing. Thank you for coming in to see me, comrade.” The satisfaction Boris felt didn’t last long. As he left the gray granite building in Dzerzhinsky Square he was thinking how wise it had been to send two letters, one to Scripps, the other to Cheryl’s home address. It appeared to have worked: The KGB had intercepted one and missed the other. Unless they were cleverer than he gave them credit for and had withheld the information, hoping to trap him.

  In any case, both had been cryptically worded—he had casually inquired how Cheryl was progressing with her father’s work and expressed the hope that “there haven’t been any new factors, such as the warming of polar currents, to exacerbate the Precambrian condition.” By this he wished to alert her to a possibility that had been worrying him for some time. The rather terrifying hypothesis that diverting the Ob and Yenisei rivers away from the Arctic Basin would bring about a general warming of the polar ocean. As phytoplankton thrived best in colder waters, this new factor could accelerate the effect caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide, killing off the phytoplankton more rapidly than predicted—possibly within a decade of the scheme being implemented.

  Now these fears had been given a perplexing twist by what Malankov had let slip. Boris might have overlooked the reference to “national security” had not the weasel been at such pains to explain it away ... but explain what away exactly? The diversion scheme as a strategic weapon? How would it work? By deliberately tampering with the global climate?

  That didn’t make sense—not that Boris could see, anyway—because its effects would be felt in Russia just as much as in the hated, feared, subversive West. So what did make sense?

  Secretary of Defense Thomas J. Lebasse was dying of cancer of the stomach, and he knew it. At best the doctors had given him two years, which was a year longer than he had given himself. His body disgusted him; it stank of putrefaction, the sweetish sickly odor of death.

  He was sixty-one years old, a small round-shouldered man with a bald head that seemed too big for his body. Superficially he looked healthy, having just returned from ten days in Florida, yet observed closely his tan had a gray pallor and the skin of his face sagged in flaccid folds underneath his dull eyes.

  Right now his body wasn’t the only thing that disgusted him; this meeting, and in particular these people, he found utterly distasteful.

  “You keep insisting we have no choice but to implement this plan, Major Madden. As I see it, that’s precisely what we do have—a choice. We still have our nuclear capability, which is superior to anything the Soviets can muster.”

  From his position at the head of the table Lebasse looked along the two rows of faces, all turned attentively toward him. Three members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An admiral who had made a special study of deep-draft cargo vessels. Two high-ranking air force officers, experts in missile deployment. A civilian scientist named Farrer whose function here today Lebasse wasn’t entirely clear about.

  Plus the two prime movers of DEPARTMENT STORE: Gen. George (“Blindeye”) Wolfe and his henchman, Maj. Lloyd F. Madden. They had nursed their baby with tender loving care, Lebasse knew, not to say ruthless opportunism, and they put him in mind of ambitious, hardeyed parents who would stop at nothing to protect their offspring.

  “Mr. Secretary, with respect,” Major Madden was saying in his cultured New England voice, “we are faced with a radical new situation.”

  Appearance matched voice perfectly: neat dark hair, carefully parted, smooth sharp-featured face, tailored uniform with lapel badges burnished to winking brightness. His was the kind of face that became more youthful with the passing years, in contrast with General Wolfe, who at sixty-two could have passed for a man of seventy. Two things had contributed to this: high blood pressure, which had forced him to lose weight and made his neck scrawny, and his early years spent under foreign suns, which had imprinted a crazed mosaic on what had once been a strong, rugged face.

  “The use of nuclear weapons is becoming an outdated concept in terms of global strategy.” Madden spoke with the smug knowingness of a schoolboy who thinks himself brighter than his teacher but isn’t smart enough not to show it. “The MX missile system will be obsolete even before it’s fully operational, and already the budget is way off the graph. Now, we know from intelligence reports and satellite photoreconnaissance that th
e Soviets are well advanced in their scheme to divert the Ob and Yenisei rivers; that within three years maximum the scheme will be completed. With respect, Mr. Secretary—”

  “Forget the respect,” Lebasse snapped. “Say what you have to say.”

  “Simply that we have to be ready to meet this new threat, sir. The balance of power must be maintained if we’re to safeguard the nation. After all, that is our prime responsibility.”

  “Thank you, Major Madden,” said Lebasse icily. “I don’t need you to remind me of my—our—responsibility to the nation. What you’re telling me is that we’re entering a new phase in which nuclear weapons are only of minor, or at least secondary, importance. Instead, the confrontation is potentially of the kind that you term ‘environmental war.’ Have I got it right?”

  “Yes, Mr. Secretary. That is correct.” Lloyd Madden doodled on the blank pad in front of him, holding himself tight inside. He’d been too forthright; too damn obvious in fact. Better not to further arouse this sick old man, who should have stayed in Florida with the rest of the senile geriatrics. So he would wait, bide his time, let somebody else take the lead, he decided, drawing a cock and pair of balls.

  That somebody else was U.S. Air Force Gen. Walter Stafford of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose support was crucial because he was known to take a moderate line (dubbed by the media as a “dawk”—midway between dove and hawk) and, more important, because he had known Lebasse since they were students together at Columbia in the early fifties.

  “I share your misgivings, Tom, but I’m afraid Major Madden is right. We have no real alternative but to bring DEPARTMENT STORE to full operational status as quickly as possible. Nothing else will contain the Soviets, that’s a dead certainty.”

  “‘Dead’ being the operative word,” Lebasse remarked stonily. He was thinking of his four grandchildren, whose ages ranged from seventeen to five. This was a fine legacy to bequeath them—global death. He wondered bleakly if it had been any different since 5:30 on the morning of July 16,1945, when the atomic bomb stopped being a row of symbols in a physicist’s notebook and was transformed into a five-thousand-degree fireball above the Trinity site in Arizona. That had happened two days before his ninth birthday.