Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  Chase wouldn’t be lured. “I’d have thought that you, Binch, and DELFI could answer that better than I,” he said easily.

  “DELFI predicts that conditions will change and the probable extent of those changes; it doesn’t foretell the end of the world. I don’t see any need to get steamed up about it.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right and I’m wrong,” Chase said. “I’d hate to say good-bye to all this.” With his glass he indicated the five of them, the lawn and flowering bushes fading away into darkness. Above them the sky was an ocean of stars.

  “We had a guy who used to work at the center,” Binch said, lighting a cigarette. “Had the same feeling as you, Gavin. An exastronaut called Brad Zittel. That was a very strange thing; he just took off—disappeared—leaving his wife, family, home, everything.” He shook his head reflectively, wreathed in gray smoke. “Never heard a word to this day. Weird.”

  “His kind usually are,” Frank Kollar said, not looking at Chase, though the faint smile was back.

  Stella Inchcape frowned, remembering. “That was really awful. Joyce—Brad’s wife—did everything she could to trace him. Called in the police, the FBI, the State Department, but they never found him.”

  “Perhaps he had some kind of nervous breakdown,” Ruth said.

  “I think he did,” Binch agreed. “Brad used to get all wrought up over the weather anomalies. He’d sit reading the print-out like it was the Doomsday Book, gray in the face, hands shaking. You couldn’t shake him out of it. He kept insisting we had to do something before it was too late.”

  “Isn’t it just possible that he was right?” Chase said, and from the corner of his eye noticed that Binch was staring moodily into his glass, lower lip jutting out. It was bloody infuriating not to know what DELFI was predicting. If a hardened skeptic like Bill Inchcape was starting to have doubts, then the data must be pretty hair-raising. He’d have given a lot for just one peek at the DELFI files.

  “Who else are you seeing?” Ruth asked, trying to steer the conversation into less choppy waters.

  “Some people on the West Coast at UCLA and Scripps. And if there’s time I’d like to go up to Oregon. They have an enlightened attitude toward environmental issues up there, I believe.”

  “Do you have a contact at Scripps?” Binch asked.

  “Dr. Cheryl Detrick, Theo Detrick’s daughter.”

  “Right,” Binch nodded. “Read some of her stuff in, what was it, Science Review, I think. Very outspoken. Keeps making waves in Washington and getting up the noses of the administration.” He craned his head around. “Did you know her when you were there, Frank?” Frank Kollar nursed his drink, shoulders hunched forward. He laughed suddenly, for no apparent reason. “Yeah, knew her pretty well, as a matter of fact. We did some work together and other things.” He cocked an eyebrow in Chase’s direction. “Cheryl’s another environmental freak.”

  Ruth glanced at him disapprovingly, and as if in apology, said to Chase, “Frank thinks all environmentalists are anti-science, that they want to turn the clock back and return civilization to the Stone Age, and he doesn’t believe that’s possible or practicable.”

  “Frank is right,” Chase said. “But on the contrary I want to use science to solve our problems. The way I see it, science is ethically neutral; it’s scientists who have ethics—or lack them. Science should be used for the benefit of mankind, not its detriment.”

  “I bet you were a boy scout too,” Frank Kollar said, grinning. Chase didn’t respond. He’d argued and discussed the subject with better exponents than Frank Kollar, and he wasn’t going to lay himself on the line merely to provide entertainment value.

  Binch examined the glowing tip of his cigarette. “I honestly don’t think scientists should get involved in that area. I do my job and let somebody else worry about the ethical rights and wrongs.”

  “Maybe you should worry about it,” his wife put in quietly.

  “And wind up like Brad Zittel? Not for me, no thanks.” Binch stubbed out his cigarette and helped himself to more brandy.

  Some remark or other had sent Ruth off on a private line of thought, and now she voiced it. “My fear is that while we’re disposing of many of the old diseases we might be creating a stack of new ones. We’ve got a case at the hospital at the moment that’s very disturbing from a clinical point of view. It could be environmentally related, though we can’t figure out how.”

  “What’s that?” Chase asked.

  “A case of cloracne.”

  Chase stared at her. He couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. “You mean dioxin poisoning?”

  Ruth nodded. The light from the patio doors cast spiky shadows from her eyelashes across her cheekbones. Her lower lip was underlined with sensuous shadow. “In actual fact,” she went on reluctantly, “we’ve had three cases. Nobody suspected dioxin poisoning at first, naturally, and it wasn’t until we’d eliminated everything else that we hit on it. But the tests confirm it. There’s no mistake.”

  Chase was sitting up in the lounge. “To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a single case of dioxin poisoning for the last seven years. Have you been able to trace the source?”

  “No. The general consensus is that it’s most likely agricultural. All three cases come from southeast of here, beyond Denver, which is mainly—in fact exclusively—farmland.”

  The others had been listening intently to this, and Binch said, “How serious is this, Ruth? Is it likely to spread, become an epidemic?”

  “We’re not sure yet. It depends how many other cases turn up over the next two to three weeks.”

  Chase begged to differ. “Ruth, that’s one hell of an understatement,” he protested. “Dioxin is the most toxic substance known. One tablet the size of an aspirin can kill 350 people. If there’s even the most minute leakage of a dioxin compound the risk is serious for everybody within a hundred miles.”

  “You mean we could all be poisoned by this stuff?” Stella said, aghast. “Why make something that’s so highly dangerous? What on earth is it used for?”

  “It isn’t used for anything, that’s the irony,” Chase said. “Dioxin is simply a by-product in the manufacture of the herbicide 2,4,5-T. Its proper chemical name is tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, or TCDD. There are seventy different dioxins but TCDD is the deadliest. One of the first symptoms of dioxin poisoning is cloracne, which is a particularly nasty skin complaint.” He looked at Ruth, his eyes clouding. “What I can’t understand is how you come to have three cases of cloracne when there’s been a worldwide ban on the manufacture of 2,4,5-T since 1989. They can’t still be using it on farmland around here.”

  “The big combines aren’t, because we’ve checked up on them.” Ruth told him. “But there are hundreds of smaller farms and thousands of people with plots of land, and it’s going to take months to carry out a complete investigation and pinpoint the source.”

  There was something that didn’t quite fit, an inconsistency that Chase couldn’t put his finger on. Cloracne was a symptom of dioxin poisoning, which in turn pointed to 2,4,5-T. That part made sense. What didn’t?

  “Could be a leak from a chemical plant,” Frank Kollar suggested. “No, we thought of that,” Ruth said. “The nearest chemical plant is two hundred and fifty miles away, and it processes oil-based products, not herbicides.”

  “Isn’t that the stuff they used in Vietnam to defoliate the jungle?” Binch asked Chase. “A lot of the guys who served out there developed symptoms of dioxin poisoning.”

  “That’s what led to the ban. There was a whole range of genetic disorders caused by—” Chase stopped abruptly, realizing what Binch had just said. Of course! 2,4,5-T was used as a defoliant in Vietnam because it checked the growth of broad-leaved plants in jungles and forests; it had little effect on the narrow-leaved grasses such as were found in croplands. Hence, farmers in this part of the country wouldn’t use 2,4,5-T anyway; it would be worse than useless for inhibiting weed growths. “Are there any milita
ry bases in the area?”

  Binch was thrown by the question, and it took him a moment to think. He scratched his ear. “Well, there’s NORAD—that’s the North American Air Defense Command—at Colorado Springs, underground inside Cheyenne Mountain. But it’s the combat operations center, which is nonoperational in military terms.”

  “Don’t forget the space center near Cheyenne,” Ruth put in. “That controls all the spy satellites and military shuttles launched from the Vandenberg Spaceport in California.”

  Chase recalled that ever since the Reagan administration in the early eighties the United States had been spending billions of dollars developing space platforms for beam weapons and killer-satellite launch pads. The Vandenberg Spaceport north of Santa Barbara on the Californian coast was a miniature city with its own schools, shops, and housing projects, costing three billion dollars to set up and around one billion a year to operate. How far they’d actually got with their beam-weapon program was a matter of speculation, though it was rumored that shuttle launches were now running once every seventeen days.

  But Vandenberg was nearly half a continent away. He said, “Do they launch anything around here, say within fifty miles?”

  Ruth glanced uncertainly at Binch. “I believe they carry out test firings of experimental prototypes from the Martin Marietta Space Center.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Near Denver. Look, I don’t follow this,” Ruth said perplexedly. “What’s it got to do with 2,4,5-T and dioxin poisoning?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Chase said, which was what he devoutly hoped was true.

  He lay quite still, though from the sound of his breathing, shallow and irregular, Nina knew that her husband was awake. She moved her hand underneath the blankets, found and gripped his.

  “There’s nothing anyone can do,” she murmured in the darkness. “Even if there was, it isn’t up to you.”

  “Then who?”

  “Somebody else. Somebody younger.”

  Boris laughed, a rumble deep in his chest. “The younger people are committed to party and progress,” he told her emptily. “And those who aren’t are either powerless or afraid.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why?”

  His hand returned the pressure. “Nina, dearest, I’ve worked on the project for over ten years now. The work I’ve done has contributed to the development of a weapon of environmental warfare.”

  “Which you didn’t know about. You were ignorant of its—”

  “It’s there, it exists, and I helped. I didn’t know about it because I chose not to think about it, to open my eyes, to ask questions.” He turned his head on the pillow. “Why do you suppose they planted Malankov in my laboratory all those years ago? It was to find out what I knew and if I suspected anything.”

  “You did the work in good faith.”

  “No,” Boris said bitterly. “In blind faith.”

  “It isn’t your fault!” she insisted.

  “You talk about fault? What does that matter? Don’t you see? This madness, this barbarity, exists, it’s real. It’s no longer a question of apportioning blame.”

  “But you blame yourself.”

  “I shall blame myself if I do nothing.”

  “You did something—you wrote to Theo’s daughter.”

  “No, no, that was different.” His head moved back and forth, restlessly. “It was only a vague fear then, a speculation. It hadn’t occurred to me that the project would be used deliberately as a global threat. But that’s exactly what it is and what they intended it to be all along— global blackmail.”

  “Malankov didn’t say that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how do you know? How can you be sure? Just because he happened to mention something about ‘national security’? Boris, he could have meant any one of a dozen things—you know how their minds work.”

  “It’s because I know how their minds work that I know what he meant,” Boris said. “It isn’t that he used those words, it was how he reacted. He knew at once he’d gone too far, let something slip.”

  Nina was silent for a while, thinking, yet hardly daring to think. Then she said, “It will—would be very dangerous sending this information to the West. Especially with Malankov watching you.”

  “Too dangerous,” Boris agreed. “For both of us.”

  She was instantly relieved, thinking he’d changed his mind, and an instant later knew she was a fool. There was something in his voice that made her body tense itself. Her hand gripped his tightly.

  “What are you going to do?” Heart in her mouth.

  “Get out.”

  “Defect?” The word was like the taste of iron on her tongue.

  “Yes.”

  “It can’t be done,” she whispered.

  “Yes, it can,” Boris said very calmly. “I’ve already begun to make the arrangements. Within a few days I’ll know the date and what I have to do.”

  Fear lapped in, shrinking her mind to nothing. She became numb. Tears leaked out of her eyes and ran down the sides of her head onto the pillow.

  “Boris, I don’t want to lose you,” she sobbed. “Oh, please no, God no!”

  He gathered her body in his arms and held her close, feeling her mad heart shuddering in her chest. “Woman. Woman! You’re not losing me. Did you think after all these years I’d leave you behind? We stay together, whatever happens. I’d rather lose my life than lose you, stupid woman.”

  The silver helicopter clattered in low over the trees and shimmied down onto the yellow criss-crossed landing pad. Sunlight flared off the clear plastic canopy and glinted goldenly on the conch-shell motif aft of the starboard door. The door swung open, a pair of white shoes emerged, a pair of white-clad legs, and even before the helicopter had properly settled the man in the white linen suit was striding across the pad. He went down the steps to where the lawns swept like a rolling green billow up to the house, passing through the ring of plainclothes guards standing idly with curled hands and hard immobile faces.

  Two more guards stood aside as he entered the glass-walled elevator, which took him smoothly to the rooftop. A covered area extended to a sun deck, supported on concrete stilts, which overlooked the orderly ranks of firs descending to the blue haze of the Pacific. To the south, just visible beyond the ridge, the white ramparts and Gothic follies of San Simeon gleamed like bleached bone.

  This stretch of Californian coastline still ranked—despite the motorcycle gangs, the religious fanatics, the cult anarchists—among the highest-priced real estate in the world.

  A white-coated Javanese manservant stood near the mirror-tiled recess that reflected row upon row of bottles, glasses, silver shakers, ice buckets, and numberless, identical Javanese manservants, left arms bent at the elbows forming rails for spotless white napkins. The myriad sallow-reflected faces remained blank though attentive as the man in white passed quickly through and out into the raw sunlight.

  Cars hummed distantly on U.S. 1 below, and a light aircraft droned somewhere over the placid ocean.

  The man in white stood looking down, wraparound sunglasses masking his eyes, arms hanging by his sides, hands loosely flexed. “The Lebasse situation checks out, Mr. Gelstrom. It’s as we thought. The condition is terminal.”

  “How terminal?”

  “One year. Maybe longer.”

  “You’ve seen the medical records?”

  The man in white nodded.

  “The doctor?”

  “Receptionist.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  Joseph Earl Gelstrom opened his vivid blue eyes for the first time and squinted up. The man in white watched him. The same thought hovered in the hot motionless air between them; they understood each other so well that words were superfluous.

  Gelstrom nodded once and looked along the length of his lean bronzed body and suddenly tautened his abdominal muscles into a se
t of symmetrical hard brown pebbles. Head thrust forward with the effort, his long sun-streaked hair hung back, gathered thickly at the nape of his neck. He was forty-four years old and possessed the looks and physique a man twenty years younger would have envied. He didn’t drink or smoke, and exercised obsessively. Nothing could touch him.

  Just as suddenly he relaxed, lay back, and sucked in three deep breaths and slowly expired through flared nostrils. The man in white waited, casually watching the topless sun-basking girl, apparently asleep. Her flattened brown breasts lapped her armpits. The other man, with the narrow bald head, he ignored completely.

  Gelstrom rose lithely and went to the white wooden rail. He was barefoot, even though the tiles were scorching. Exactly six feet tall, he seemed smaller and slighter when the man in white moved to stand alongside him. The two men stood looking out into the distance, not speaking.

  It had never been calculated, and would have been difficult to prove, but Joseph Earl Gelstrom possibly had more power and wealth than any other private individual in the United States. He was head of a corporation whose subsidiary and associated companies dealt in chemicals, petroleum refining, plastics, electronics, armaments, aerospace, computers, timber, ranching, transport, the TV and movie industry, as well as substantial holdings in numerous diverse enterprises, from newspapers to motel chains, car hire to fast-food franchises.

  His empire had been founded at the age of nineteen, started on the basis of his father’s New Jersey interior-decorating business, which at the time employed nine people. Few people knew about his beginnings. Gelstrom had erected a barrier around his past that was as effective, and deadening, as the lead shielding surrounding a radioactive core. Nothing was known about him publicly prior to his takeover, at the age of twenty-three, of a small run-down chemical company that had a contract for the supply of detergents to the U.S. Army. The contract amounted to a paltry ninety thousand dollars a year until Gelstrom came up with a proposition to rationalize the army’s vehicle-cleaning program, thereby saving them several million dollars annually. What he omitted to mention was that he had costed the new contract on the number of vehicles to be cleaned rather than the quantity of detergent to be supplied. In fact he had achieved the promised saving simply by halving the recommended amount of detergent per vehicle. His only expense was in relabeling the drums to that effect.