Last Gasp
A frightening story of ecological disaster set in the near future
TREVOR HOYLE
When British marine biologist Gavin Chase stepped out into the windswept wastes at the Hailey Bay antarctic research station one morning, the last thing he expected to see was a sled team coming out of nowhere carrying a half-mad, half-frozen Russian scientist babbling an incomprehensible warning. But that warning would threaten the future of the human race and force Chase to make some of the hardest decisions of his life.
Months later, at a Geneva environmental conference, Chase meets Cheryl Detrick, the daughter of Theo Detrick, the grand old man of diatom research. Chase, the Detricks, and Soviet scientist Boris Stanovnik theorize that the oxygen-producing microscopic plants of the world’s oceans are dying and the level of atmospheric pollutants has finally exceeded the ability of the planet’s ecology to recycle them. There is also good reason to believe that the superpowers are planning to wage a new type of environmental warfare. Sooner or later there will be nothing left to breathe.
So begins a race against the future. Chase and Cheryl, now lovers, struggle to avert ecological catastrophe as agents of the military-industrial complex hunt them down...and as a growing belt of unbreathable gases spreads outward from the equator, uprooting millions. Their enemies are Lloyd Madden, an insane military mastermind planning to seed the earth with poison and then repopulate it with a race of mutants, and Joseph Earl Gelstrom, a wealthy chemical manufacturer who has Cheryl’s father killed to hide his involvement. But Gelstrom himself falls victim to pollution sickness, and he repents. To raise money to finance a research team, Chase must make an unholy alliance with the dying Gelstrom, but this is too much for Cheryl, who leaves him.
As more and more of the world becomes uninhabitable, as industries and governments collapse and chaos reigns, as the oceans fill up with dioxin, as the climate changes and mutant life-forms encroach upon the last refuges of humankind, Chase leads a last desperate mission to find and rescue Cheryl and to lead his team of scientists to safety.
A thrilling doomsday novel of love and destruction, The Last Gasp carries a powerful warning within its chilling plot.
TREVOR HOYLE is the author of a number of novels, including This Sentient Earth and, pseudonymously, The Man Who Travelled on Motorways. He has worked as an actor and has written screenplays for television. Mr. Hoyle lives in Lancashire, England.
Jacket painting.by Michael Booth
CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.
ONE PARK AVENUE
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10016
Excerpts from the following works have been reprinted with the permission of their publishers:
The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology by Barry Commoner. Copyright © 1971 by Barry Commoner. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc./Random House, Inc. New York.
Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. Copyright © 1970 by Alvin Toffler. Random House, Inc. New York.
Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind by Donella H. Meadows et al. Copyright © 1974 by Universe Publishers, Inc.
Pollute and Be Damned by Arthur Bourne. Copyright © 1972 by Arthur Bourne. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. London.
Copyright © 1983 by TREVOR HOYLE
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Crown Publishers, Inc., One Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016 and simultaneously in Canada by General Publishing Company Limited
Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hoyle, Trevor.
The last gasp.
I. Title.
PS3558.0955L3 1983 813'.54 83-2073
ISBN 0-517-55084-9
Book design by Camilla Filancia
10 987654321
First Edition
For David and Sue Richards
What friends are for
Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the following people and organizations for their invaluable advice and assistance in the research for this book:
Dr. Leslie F. Musk and Dr. David Tout, Geography Department, University of Manchester; Dr. E. Bellinger, Pollution Research Unit, University of Manchester; Dr. F. W. Ratcliffe, librarian and director of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Special thanks to Dr. Phillip Williamson, then of the Wellcomt Marine Laboratory, Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire, for hours of fruitful and enlightening discussion.
The following publications and research papers were extremely useful: Climate Monitor, issued by the Centre for Climatic Research, University of East Anglia; World Meteorological Organisation Bulletin; Yearbook of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, California; “National Climate Program” in Oceanus, vol. 21, no. 4; “Continuous Plankton Records: Changes in the Composition and Abundance of the Phytoplankton of the North-Eastern Atlantic Ocean and North Sea, 1958—1974” by P. C. Reid of the Institute for Marine Environmental Research, Plymouth, in Marine Biology.
Of many other useful sources of information, I should like to acknowledge the following: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S.; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, U.S.; P. P. Shir-shov Institute of Oceanology, Academy of Sciences of USSR, Moscow; Scottish Marine Biological Association, Argyll, Scotland; Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Huntingdon, U.K.; Natural Environmental Research Council, Swindon, U.K.; Marine Biological Association of U.K.; World Meteorological Organization (an agency of the UN); World Climate Research Program (joint venture of the WMO and the International Council of Scientific Unions); World Climate Conference held in Geneva, 1979; Global Weather Experiment; POLYMODE: the MidOcean Dynamics Experiment, U.S. and USSR; NORPAX: the North Pacific Experiment; CLIMAP: Climate and Long-Range Investigation Mapping and Prediction; National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado; World Oceanographic Data Center, Washington, D.C.; U.S. Council on Environmental Quality; Interagency Coordinating Committee of Atmospheric Sciences, U.S.; International Conference on the Environmental Future (Iceland, 1977).
As reference sources, I made use of the following: Population, Resources, Environment, Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (Freeman, 1970); Planet Earth (Aldus Books, 1975); Journal of Environmental Management; Environmental Pollution; Science; New Scientist; Only One Earth, Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (Andre Deutsch, 1972); The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner (Jonathan Cape, 1972); Pollute and Be Damned, Arthur Bourne (J. M. Dent, 1972); The Doomsday Book, Gordon Rattray Taylor (Thames & Hudson, 1970); The Ultimate Experiment: Man-Made Evolution, Nicholas Wade (Walker & Company, 1977); Colonies in Space, T. A. Heppenheimer (Stackpole Books, 1977).
And finally—last but certainly not least—I should like to record my appreciation of Nick Austin, who five years ago over a bottle of Chivas Regal gently dropped the idea into my mind and waited for something to happen.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
EDMUND BURKE
... Let us strike the keynote, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the pistons of the steam engi
ne worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
CHARLES DICKENS
Hard Times
Half of all the energy consumed by man in the past two thousand years has been consumed in the last one hundred.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock
If the present growth trends in world population, industrial pollution, food production and resources depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.
Limits to Growth
The risk from lung cancer due to breathing New York air is about equivalent to the risk of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
BARRY COMMONER
The Closing Circle
The mystery man arrived just before the five-month antarctic night set in. Two days later and he would never have been found.
Like a mole from its burrow, Gavin Chase emerged that morning from the prefabricated bunker eighteen feet belowground. Six years ago the bunker had been on the surface. Now, shored up with buckled iron ribs and creaking timbers, it was gradually sinking deeper and deeper and being crushed in a clamp of ice. Soon it would be necessary to abandon and build anew.
It was still dark. The spread of stars was etched into the firmament with hard, diamondlike precision. Above the icebound continent of five million square miles—nearly twice the area of Australia—the insulating troposphere was so shallow, half that at the equator, that the marine biologist felt directly exposed to the vacuous cold of outer space. Cold enough to turn gasoline into jelly and make steel as brittle as porcelain.
Chase stepped carefully from the slatted wooden ramp that led below, a bulky figure in outsize red rubber boots, swaddled in waffle-weave thermal underwear, navy-issue fatigues, an orange parka, and, protecting his vulnerable hands, gloves inside thick mittens thrust into gauntlets that extended to his elbows. A thin strip, from eyebrows to bridge of nose, was the only bit of him open to the elements. He moved across the packed wind-scoured surface to the weather-instrument tower, eyes probing the darkness.
Yesterday the temperature had fallen to 52.3 degrees below zero F. Once it dropped past minus 60 degrees there would be no more scuba diving till next summer. But he hoped there was time for at least one more dive. There were specimens of planktonic algae he wanted to collect, in particular a subspecies known as silicoflagellates, which abounded beneath the pack ice of the Weddel Sea, here on the western rim of the Antarctic Plateau. Amazing really—that there should be such an abundance of microscopic life teeming below when up here it was as bleak and sterile as the moon.
With slow, calculated movements he gripped the metal ladder and hauled his six-foot frame twenty feet up to the first platform. Young and fit as he was, honed to a lean 160 pounds after nearly six months at Hailey Bay Station, Chase knew that every calorie of energy had to be budgeted for with a miser’s caution. Inactive, the body used up about one hundred watts of power, which went up tenfold with physical activity. The trick was to keep on the go without overtaxing yourself. That way you kept warm, generating your own heat—but there was another trap if you weren’t careful. At these extreme latitudes the oxygen content was low, the equivalent of living at ten thousand feet on the side of a mountain. With less oxygenated blood reaching the body’s tissues any exertion required double the effort and energy expenditure. Too much exertion and you could black out—without warning, as quickly as a light going out—and that would be that.
Chase knelt down and brushed away the thick coating of furry frost from the gauges with his cumbersome hands.
Windspeed was up to 18 knots, he noted with a frown. Then relaxed slightly and grinned when he saw that the red needle of the temperature gauge was still a few degrees short of sixty. Good. That meant one more day, possibly two, for diving. Nick wouldn’t like it, but he’d have to persuade him; he couldn’t dive without a backup. Serve the bastard right, he thought with a flash of mordant humor.
With only two weeks left to serve at the station, Chase was keen to gather as many marine samples as possible before boarding the C-130 for the 1,850-mile flight across the Pole to the American base at McMurdo Sound, then the 2,400-mile haul to Christchurch, New Zealand. And a week after that he would be home! Wallowing in all the comforts and pleasures of civilization. After all these months of enforced celibacy the young scientist knew quite definitely which pleasure came first.
He straightened up and gazed out over the featureless wasteland toward the heart of the polar interior. His breath plumed the air like smoke. On the barely discernible line of the horizon a very faint smudge of the most delicate crimson indicated the advent of the sun. They would see it for a couple of hours today—a flattened reddish ball resting on the rim of their world—and then once more it would be night. Soon it would be night until September.
That’s how much we depend on you, Chase communed with the rising sun. Without your warmth and light the planet would be sheathed in ice twenty feet thick. Or was it fifty? Not that it mattered, he thought wryly. Ten feet of ice over the surface of the earth would be enough to make the human race as extinct as the dinosaur.
Directly below him elongated slivers of deep purple shadow edged out from the weather gantry and radio mast—the “bird’s nest” as it was called by everyone on the station. The shadows crept slowly across the smooth humps that were the only visible sign of the warren of living quarters and labs and the thirty-six men beneath.
The arc of red tipped the rim of the world.
Chase held his breath. It was awesome, no matter how many times you witnessed the miracle.
From dingy gray to misty pearl and then to blinding white the landscape was illuminated like a film set. Chase shielded his eyes against the reflected glare. Even though the horizontal rays were weak, the albedo effect of the white blanket of snow and ice threw back every photon of light in a fierce hazy dazzle that seared the eyeballs. Under certain conditions this caused a whiteout: land and sky melting together, with no horizon to align the senses to, all contours and topographical features lost in a blank white dream.
Chase watched, marveled, and became alert.
Something was moving. Out there on the ice. Hell, no, he was surely mistaken. He was gazing toward the Pole. Nothing could be coming from that direction, from the barren heart of all that emptiness. Impossible!
In the next instant he was scrambling down the ladder, rubber boots slithering on the ice-coated rungs. In his haste he forgot about the thinness of the atmosphere, about energy budgets. He hadn’t gone more than a dozen yards before his chest was heaving. Sweat ran from his armpits; always a danger signal, because damp clothing lost its insulation properties and you froze in your own perspiration.
Steady now, take it easy, he warned himself. Whatever it is that’s out there—if anything’s out there—it’s survived till now. Steadying himself, he sucked in long deep gulps of air. He’d look bloody foolish if he were found dead within fifty feet of the entry ramp.
A little over ten minutes later, pacing himself, he came in sight of the sled after skirting an outcrop of sheer glistening ice, thrust upward by the immense pressure. The team of eight dogs was, quite literally, on its last legs. That explained why he hadn’t heard them barking. They were too exhausted to do anything except sag in their harness straps and pant weakly.
Chase leaned over the sled and with an effort pulled back the stiffened canvas sheet. It cracked like breaking timber. A shapeless mound of ice-encrusted furs concealed the body of a man. His head was sunk deep in a cavity of fur. He was heavily bearded and blackened by the sun. Dark gogg
les, the old-fashioned type, with tiny circular lenses, covered the eyesockets.
Dead—must be, Chase reckoned and then saw the blistered lips move. That was incredible. The man had come out of nowhere, appeared from a thousand miles of icy wilderness, and incredibly he was alive.
The wedge of light sliced through it as if the blackness itself were a tangible substance. Wielding the heavy battery of arc lamps, Chase swam deeper. He was the searcher, Nick the collector. Above them the lid of ice, forty feet thick, sealed them in, with just one tiny aperture between them and a freezing watery tomb.
No wonder Nick had grumbled and cursed. “For Christ’s sake, are you a masochist or what, Gav? No, I get it, a bloody sadist, that’s what you are. Nick Power thinks the tour’s over, no more work to be done, so I’ll show the bastard. Make him suffer.”
Except that Chase didn’t think of it as suffering. He rather enjoyed it, as a matter of fact. He saw himself suspended, a tiny fragment of warm life, on top of the world (top, bottom—in an astronomical context they were interchangeable), with everyone and everything else beneath him. All the continents and oceans and cities and the whole of mankind way down there. It was a wonderful feeling; it quickened his pulse just imagining it.
At 130 feet he swung the battery of lamps around. Nick hadn’t a clue what to catch; he merely followed the wedge of light and swooped when Chase gave the signal. It could look a bit ridiculous, swooping at nothing, and Chase grinned behind the full-face mask at Nick’s apparently pointless pantomime. They were after microscopic plants and it was good luck more than judgment if they happened to snare the ones Chase wanted. He chose what seemed a likely spot, just above the ocean floor, and hoped for the best.
Nick turned toward him, his faceplate flashing like a golden coin in the milky light. The net trailed after him, a long swirling cocoon. He’d closed the neck, Chase saw, and was gesturing upward. He’d had enough. Probably the cold was starting to seep through his insulated suit. Chase could feel a creeping numbness in his own feet. If you ignored it—it wasn’t painful—you felt fine until you got back to the surface and began to thaw out. Then you were racked with the most excruciating agony and you might find all your toes had dropped off. So any kind of pain was preferable to a lack of sensation, especially in the extremities.