Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  Ordinarily that would have been no great cause for alarm. It happened once in a while, a river of foul atmospheric bile streaming into the Mountain States and getting whipped right around through the Southwest and back to where it came from. But this time the orbital sensors were showing a line of secondary atmospheric eddy currents along the western edge of the high-pressure zone, currents that had the capacity to peel away the toxic crud as it made its turn southward into Utah and send it drifting toward the Pacific Northwest. Where it would smother Seattle and Portland for a few eye-stinging days, after which the normal north-south winds would catch hold of it and shove it down the coast to torment San Francisco and then Los Angeles and San Diego.

  The coast cities had enough toxins of their own to deal with as it was: if a load of extraneous airborne shit got shipped in from the Midwest it would push things well above the tolerance levels as they were now defined. It would hit like a blast of dragon’s breath. People would be dropping dead in the streets. They would choke on the sulfurous reek The deadly smog would excoriate their nostrils and claw at their lungs and blacken their blood. Warnings to stay indoors would have to be issued; industrial production would need to be shut down, maybe for weeks, as would nonessential ground transportation, to avoid aggravating the situation. The economy of the entire region was bound to suffer a terrific short-run setback, and there would probably be long-term environmental damage too, increased uptakes of arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in the water supply, continued infrastructure degradation, severe havoc done to what was left of the West Coast flora and fauna. Redwood trees couldn’t go indoors when a five-alarm toxic cloud came drifting westward.

  On the other hand, the toxic cloud could still turn around at any minute and go away without doing any harm. Broadcasting premature warning of an oncoming peril that wasn’t actually coming could lead to needless factory closings and panic among the civilians: very likely a massive flight of people from the area, which would choke the highways and have environmental consequences of its own. After which would come a bunch of lawsuits demanding damages because the threatened disaster had failed to materialize. People would want to be paid for emotional stress, unnecessary expenses incurred, interruption of trade, any damned thing. Samurai Industries hated being entangled in lawsuits. They had pretty much the deepest pockets around, and everyone knew it.

  So the whole situation needed to be monitored in the finest possible detail, minute by minute, and everybody in the Spokane Weather Service office had been placed on round-the-clock duty until the emergency was over. Carpenter, who was considered to have an almost psychic knack for predicting large-scale air movements, was particularly on the spot. He had tanked up on hyperdex and spent the night in front of the computer in a welter of sweat and drug-induced intensity of perception, staring at shifting yellow-and-green patterns of bars and dots, internalizing the dancing data as fast as it arrived in the hope that he would arrive at some mystic sense of the cosmic order of events, some wild gestalt insight that would allow him to see into the future. The night went by like the blink of an eye. And he had grasped it: he had. He was peering around the corner of time into the day after tomorrow, and he saw the deadly stream of toxic atmospherics moving— moving—cutting down past Coeur d’Alene—turning ever so slightly southward and eastward—eastward, really?—yes— maybe—yes—

  “Carpenter.”

  —yes, a shift, a definite shift in the air movement, coming on Tuesday a little after three in the afternoon—

  “Carpenter?”

  A voice out of the void: thin, high-pitched, annoying. Carpenter waved his hand angrily without looking around. “Fuck off, will you?” He struggled to hold his concentration.

  “Boss says, Take a break. He wants to talk to you.”

  “I’ve almost got it. I can see—fuck. Fuck!” He banged his fist against the edge of the desk. The intrusion had come like a bucket of icy water hurled in his face. It shattered everything and he was unable to see anything any more. The patterns on the visor became a meaningless dance of jiggling blotches. Carpenter glanced up, every nerve in his body twanging and humming. One of the office gofers was standing placidly at his elbow, a pale flimsy girl, Sandra Wong, Sandra Chen, some Chinese name or other, utterly indifferent to his irritation. “What the hell is it?” he asked her furiously.

  “I told you,” the kid said. “Boss wants you.”

  “What for?”

  “Do I know? Tell Carpenter, Take a break, come over here, that’s all he said.”

  Carpenter nodded and stood up. All around the room, people speeding as he had been on hyperdex were staring into their visors with lunatic fixity and babbling back at the computers as torrents of weather data flooded in from space. He wondered why they were so entranced. Their fanatical dedication to their task seemed alien and repugnant to him now. Two minutes ago nothing had mattered more in the universe to him than tracking that vicious cloud of atmospheric crud, but now he was completely out of it, utterly detached, wholly lacking in concern for the fate of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego.

  He realized that he had passed into some outer realm of exhaustion without even noticing it. He was no longer speeded up. The hyperdex must have burned out hours ago and he had continued his vigil on sheer mental momentum, doing who knew what damage to his nervous system.

  He went into the other room, to the big horseshoe-shaped desk of the department administrator.

  “You wanted me?” Carpenter asked.

  The office was run by a bleak-souled Salaryman Ten named Ross McCarthy, who despite his name had some slight tincture of Japanese blood in his veins. That had done McCarthy no good whatever in his quest for upward slope, perhaps even had contributed to his stymieing: he had been stuck at the tenth level for years and plainly was going no higher, and he was bitter about it. He was a stocky, flat-faced man with faintly greenish skin and straight, glossy black hair that was starting to thin out across the top.

  There was a dispatch printout in his hands. McCarthy fingered it gingerly, as though it were radioactive.

  “Carpenter, what the hell is this?” he said.

  “How would I know?”

  McCarthy made no attempt to let him see it. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the finish of your career that I have right here in my hands. It’s a transfer to some goddamn stupid iceberg ship, that’s what it is. Have you taken leave of your senses, Carpenter?”

  “I don’t think that I have, no.” Carpenter reached for the printout. McCarthy held it back from him.

  “This ship,” McCarthy said, “it’s an absolute dead end for you. You’ll go out into the middle of the Pacific for a couple of years and fry your ass doing stupid manual labor and when you come back you’ll find that everybody on your grade level has skipped on past you. Out of sight, off the charts, Carpenter, that’s the way things work. Do you follow me? Don’t do this to yourself. Take my advice. What you’ll do if you’re smart is stay right here. You’re needed here.”

  “Apparently the Company thinks it needs me somewhere else,” Carpenter said. He was getting annoyed now.

  “You stay here, you’re bound to move up slope in no time. I’ll be going on to a Nine pretty soon now. The word will come down from Yoshida-san any day, that’s what I hear. And when I do, you’ll slide right into my slot. Isn’t that better than hauling fucking icebergs around the ocean?”

  McCarthy wasn’t going anywhere, Carpenter knew. He had committed some obscure breach of etiquette along the way, perhaps had tried unwisely to pressure some distant and barely acknowledged Japanese fifth cousin of his for promotion, and he was going to rot in Level Ten forever and ever. McCarthy knew that too. And wanted to keep everybody who worked for him trapped here in the same perpetual stasis that enfolded him.

  “I think I’ve achieved as much as I can in weather forecasting,” Carpenter told him, controlling himself tautly. “Now I want to try something else.”

  “An iceberg trawler.
Shit, Carpenter. Shit! Turn it down.”

  “I don’t think I will.” He took the transfer order from McCarthy and pocketed it without looking at it. “Oh, and you can start to call off your five-alarmer, by the way. The poison cloud is about to break up.”

  McCarthy’s black-button eyes took on sudden feverish brightness.

  “You sure of that?”

  “Absolutely,” Carpenter said, amazed at his own audacity. “The entire system will be heading back east by Tuesday afternoon.” If he was wrong, the whole Spokane office would be taken out and shot as soon as the lawsuits began. To hell with them all, Carpenter thought. He would be a thousand miles from here before any trouble could start.

  And in any case his forecast was right. He felt it in his bones.

  “Show me on the charts,” McCarthy said, beginning to look a little suspicious.

  Carpenter led him back to the data room. As never before it looked to him like a gaming center in a lunatic asylum, all the hyperdex-zonked crazies grinning fixedly into the bright streams of whorls and loops that were dancing across the faces of their visors. He stood in front of his own computer and pointed to the gaudy yellow-and-green patterns. They made no sense whatsoever to him now. Chimpanzee finger paintings, nothing more. “Here,” he told McCarthy, “these isobars here, they indicate the changing gradients.” He tapped the screen. “You see, here, along the Idaho border? Definite incipient weakening of the toxic flow. And a clear indication of a retro push coming from Canada, you see, like a giant hand shoving the whole mass the right way.” It was all bullshit, every syllable of it He had unquestionably seen something new taking shapebefore the girl broke in on him, but whatever it might have been was impossible for him to fathom, now.

  McCarthy was staring thoughtfully at the computer visor.

  He said, “It’ll be a fucking miracle if the damned thing just goes away, won’t it?”

  “Won’t it be, though. But look, Ross—” Carpenter rarely presumed to use McCarthy’s first name. “Look here, here, here. And especially here. I know it looks locked tight as a constipated whale’s gut right this moment, but when I was clicked into the map a little while ago I could distinctly feel the whole flow shifting, shifting in our favor; definite indications of gradient transform all along the periphery. Look at this. And this.”

  “Mmm.” McCarthy nodded. “Yes. Mmm.” He was faking it, Carpenter knew. On Level Ten you didn’t need technical ability except of the most superficial kind; you needed managerial skill. Which perhaps McCarthy might have had, once.

  “You see?” Carpenter said. “I was flying on intuition, sure. But the substantiating data’s already beginning to turn up positive. That toxic mass is as good as out of here. You see that, don’t you, Ross?”

  McCarthy was still nodding.

  “Right. I like it. Right, right, right.” And then, abruptly: “Listen, Paul, turn down this transfer, won’t you? Stay here with us. We need your kind of mind.”

  Carpenter had never heard McCarthy plead before. But the pleasure he drew from it was followed immediately by a desolate feeling of contempt.

  “I can’t, Ross. I’ve got to move along. Surely you understand that.”

  “But skipper of an iceberg ship—”

  “Whatever. I take what I can get.” Carpenter felt dizzy, suddenly. His eyeballs were aching. “Hey, Ross, is it okay if I go home, now? I’m dead on my feet and not worth a damn any more here today. And the crisis is over. I swear to you, it’s over. Let me go, okay?”

  “Yeah,” McCarthy said, absently. “Go on home, if you need to. But if things turn back the wrong way, we’ll have to call you back in, no matter what.”

  “They won’t turn back, believe me. Believe me.”

  “And come in tomorrow. We’ve got to start setting things up for your replacement. Whoever that is.”

  “Right. Sure.”

  Carpenter staggered out of the building, masking up in the vestibule, carefully fastening his face-lung in place to shield his throat and respiratory system from the customary ambient atmospheric garbage. The sky was green and black with broad sickening stripes of dismal crud surrounding the great ugly staring eye of the sun, and the air, hot and moist, clung to the streets like a heavy furry blanket. Even through the mask, Carpenter could feel the pungent atmosphere tickling his nostrils like a fine wire probing upward. He was relieved to see a bubble-bus pull up almost immediately. Quickly Carpenter jumped aboard, shouldering in hard among the other masked figures to make a place for himself, and in ten minutes he was back in his hotel room.

  He tossed his face-lung aside and threw himself down fully clothed on his bed, too wound up to go to sleep.

  Some world out there, he thought. A kitchen sink full of ecological disasters falling on us for a hundred years, falling and falling and falling. Eutrophication. Red tide. Spontaneous diebacks. Outbursts of mutagenesis, just as spontaneous. Drowned coastlines. Mysterious whirlwinds and thermal upheavals. Fermenting acres of dead vegetation, killed by heatstroke and pickling now under the merciless sun. Insect hordes on the march across whole continents, gobbling everything in their way, leaving great scars across the land as the mark of their passage. A host of random environmental effects popping out all over the globe, effects whose causes were not immediately apparent any more, were in fact essentially discontinuities. The underlying damage had been well and thoroughly done a long time ago. The seeds of a continuing and constantly exfoliating disaster had been planted. And now the crop was coming up everywhere.

  It was worst in the middle latitudes, the temperate zone, once so fertile. Rain almost never fell at all there now. The dying forests, the new grasslands taking over, deserts where even the grass couldn’t make it, the polar ice packs crumbling, the washed-out bright white hazy sky striped with the gaudy stains of the greenhouse pollutants, the lowlands drowning everywhere, crumbling dead buildings sticking up out of the sea. And of course there were other places where the problem was too much rain instead of not enough. Carpenter thought of that as the revenge of the rain forest: the conquest of places that once had had pleasant warm climates by unending rainfall and stifling wet heat that turned them into humidity-choked jungles, vines sprouting on freeways, monkeys and alligators migrating northward, weird tropical diseases getting loose in the cities.

  It occurred to him that if he had been kidding himself about the upcoming movements of the toxic cloud and Seattle and Portland wound up getting trashed next week, McCarthy would have his neck in the noose in two minutes. A scapegoat would be needed and he would be it. And instead of moving up to the iceberg job he’d be sliding downward to some sort of menial crap in a part of the world so dreary it would make Spokane seem like a paradise.

  The Company offered you lifetime employment if you toed the line, but any hint of irresponsibility, of nihilistic deviation from proper practice, and you were done for. You didn’t get fired, no: firings were very, very rare. But you lost your upward momentum, and once you did that you almost never regained it. So he had gone out on a limb a little, here. A smart slope-seeker would never have been so definite about proclaiming that a favorable shift in air patterns was in the cards: he had completely neglected to cover his ass, he realized.

  But what the hell. He had faith in his prediction. You just had to go with your intuitions, sometimes.

  Even so, when Carpenter turned up at the office the next day, after lying atop the bed like an off-duty zombie for twelve hours, it was with a certain apocalyptic feeling that he was going to find everybody gathered grim-faced in the doorway, waiting to truss and bind him for execution the moment he walked in. He was wrong. McCarthy was beaming from ear to ear. His eyes were aglow. He absolutely radiated warmth and pride.

  “So?” Carpenter asked.

  “All’s well! You were right on the target, Paul. A direct hit. A genius is what you are, man. A fucking genius, you old son of a whore! Christ, we’re going to miss you around here, aren’t we, guys? Aren’t we?”

&nbs
p; It seemed that the weather charts had confirmed Carpenter’s intuitive conclusions. Normal cyclonic processes had finally reasserted themselves during the night and all the diabolical Midwestern sky-garbage that had been poisoning the air over the Mountain States was about to be swept back across the Continental Divide to its point of origin. McCarthy couldn’t have been happier. He said so in five or six different ways.

  But there was no celebration, no champagne. McCarthy wasn’t capable of a lot of benevolence; and all too obviously he had had to work himself up with significant effort in order to manage this hearty little display of quasi-paternal delight. Almost at once the warmth drained out of him and Carpenter could see the cold anger that lay just behind it. Was it the envious anger of a stalemated and fucked-up failure over the triumphant achievement of a brilliant underling? Or just his annoyance over the defection of a valuable employee? Whatever it was, McCarthy switched modes quickly, turning chilly and brusque, and the party was over before it had begun.

  Time to get back to business as usual, now.

  A replacement for him, Carpenter was told, was coming in next week from Australia. Carpenter would have to do up a complete outplacement document, fully outlining the parameters of his official responsibilities here, before he would be free to make the changeover to his new job.

  Fine. Fine. One outplacement document, coming right up. He set to work.

  Later in the day, when McCarthy was on his lunch break, Carpenter made his first contact with the trawler-division people who were taking him on. A woman named Sanborn, Salaryman Nine at the Samurai Headquarters Pyramid in Manitoba. She had the calm, easy voice of a home-office roundeyes who knew that she had it made: quite a contrast to Ross McCarthy’s sour bilious gloom, Carpenter thought.

  “You’ll have an outstanding crew,” Sanborn told him. “And the Tonopah Maru’s a fine ship, really up-to-date. She’s down in Los Angeles right now undergoing refitting at the San Pedro yards, but they’ll be bringing her up the coast around ten days from now, two weeks at the latest. What we want you to do is go down to San Francisco as soon as you’ve wrapped up everything in Spokane, do your indoctrination course, and then just hang out down there until the ship turns up. Is that all right with you?”