Last Gasp Read online

  When the scientist had gone the deputy director of the World Oceanographic Data Center sat at his desk and stared broodingly at twenty years of work between bent and discolored covers, twisting the gold signet ring around and around.

  Kenichi Hanamura fought his way to street level, feeling like a minnow among a pack of barracuda. His spectacles were fogged and he experienced blind helplessness as he was carried bodily along, jammed shoulder to shoulder, in the crush of morning commuters.

  How many more were they going to cram into Tokyo before the city collapsed under the strain? Even the subway system, supposedly the most advanced and sophisticated in the world, was barely able to cope. So what about next year when it was estimated that the city’s population would exceed 23 million?

  On the street it was less congested, but now Hanamura had the fumes to contend with. He debated whether or not to wear his mask. He ought to, of course, because the doctor had advised it after he’d complained of chest pains six months ago. But he hated the damn thing and was reluctant to take it from his briefcase.

  Stupid, really, because as an insurance claims investigator he was well aware of the risks. He’d seen the statistics for himself, the bland gray columns of figures, which to the trained eye made horrifying reading. People suffering from bronchitis and emphysema up one third in the past five years. Death toll increased by 9 percent in the last year alone, directly attributed to toxic pollution in Japan’s major cities and industrial areas. Premiums would have to go up again to cover the escalating risk.

  The thought of those figures nagged him as he passed the sheer glass-and-aluminum facade of the Mitsukoshi department store. Numbers, graphs, charts always seemed more real to him, made a sharper impact somehow, than the evidence of his own eyes. Especially because at forty-four years old, a city-dweller with a sedentary occupation, he was right there in the danger zone. It was small comfort to know that his American wife, Lilian, and their thirteen-year-old son, Frank, were adequately covered in the event of his death by the company’s Blue Star plan, one of the perks of the job.

  From habit Hanamura glanced across the busy street at the huge illuminated sign on the corner of the Kyoto Banking Corporation building. The sign looked anemic in the bright sunlight, yet even so he could clearly read the daily pollution index spelled out in electronic digits in parts per million.

  carbon monoxide:

  310 PPM

  sulfur dioxide:

  0.46 PPM

  The warning was stark enough even for Kenichi Hanamura.

  Moving out of the throng of hurrying people he fumbled in his briefcase for his mask. The straps were entangled with something and he tugged impatiently, losing his temper. And now his glasses were misting over again and he couldn’t see!

  It wasn’t his glasses, he realized, it was his vision. Whenever he tried to focus on a particular object there was a round white blob in the way. His heart jumped in panic. He swayed and thrust out his hand to steady himself against the polished granite base of the building. Even though he knew what was happening to him he couldn’t understand why there wasn’t any pain. He tried to draw breath and couldn’t. His chest was locked tight.

  Where was the nearest oxygen-dispenser point? Somewhere nearby was a row of plastic cowls with masks attached to oxygen lines. For a few yen you could suck in several pure lungfuls to brace yourself against the city-center smog.

  But where? How near? Could he get there?

  A pounding steam engine started up inside his head and whined to a shrill crescendo, blocking out the sound of traffic and scurrying feet. The shimmering white blob swelled like a monstrous balloon, cutting off his vision completely.

  In the instant that he slithered down the granite wall to the pavement, Hanamura’s last conscious thought was tinged with regret that he would never have the opportunity to tell the doctor he was wrong.

  For there was no pain. None at all. It was just like going to sleep in a blizzard next to a steam engine.

  The banks of lights dimmed one by one until the studio became a shadowy twilit cavern. From the angled window of the control gallery Chase looked down, fascinated. He’d caught the last few minutes of the production on the floor and it reminded him of a religious ritual, cameramen, technicians, and stage crew moving silently to commands from above, following a mysterious ceremony with its own inscrutable logic.

  “That wraps it up,” said the director at the console behind him in the narrow booth. He spoke into the microphone. “Thank you, studio.”

  Through the adjacent glass walls Chase could see people stirring and stretching. Jill beckoned to him and he followed her into the brightly lit, carpeted corridor. She was wearing a baggy, vivid pink T-shirt with UCLA across her loose breasts and tight, green cord trousers that showed off her rump. And in place of the ubiquitous training shoes, brown brogue shoes, he was surprised to see.

  “Have you told him I’m here?”

  Jill nodded as they went down the stairs. “He remembered you straight off.” She gave him a sneaky sideways grin. “Told me you once tried to hoax him with a fake specimen and he nearly fell for it.”

  Chase stopped dead on the bottom step and cringed. He’d completely forgotten about the spoof. Three of them had soaked some blue-green algae in a beaker of Guinness and taken it along to Sir Fred, with carefully arranged and rehearsed expressions of bafflement. Could he identify this mutant bloom? How come it had such a peculiar smell? The professor had carried out a series of tests with his usual thoroughness before catching on, and then issued a formal lab report with “Brown Ale Algae” under the species classification.

  The professor had had the last laugh too. He’d taken his revenge on the three culprits by setting them the long and laborious task of identifying the percentage carbon yields of the marine food chain, all the way from phytoplankton to third-stage carnivores. They didn’t pull any more tricks.

  “You seem nervous.”

  “Does it show?”

  “You don’t hide your feelings too well, or don’t bother to. Why were you so belligerent the other night?”

  “Was I?” He was quite genuinely surprised; he thought he’d been successful at the party in putting up a front of meek, mild-mannered marine biologist. Either he was a poor actor or Jill was particularly astute. He guessed it was the former.

  After bringing coffee she left them to chat in one of the small reception rooms used to entertain VIP guests. Chase had been wondering how to broach the subject (what the hell was the subject?), but his trepidation melted away in the warmth of Sir Frederick Cole’s welcome.

  Chase remembered him as a sloppy dresser. Though today, wearing the suit Jill had mentioned, he was positively smart—even though the material was stiff, enclosing his chest in a kind of blue shell, and there was an excess of it in the sleeves and trouser legs. He had an untidy thatch of mousy-colored hair, graying at the temples, and lively brown eyes peering out from beneath bushy gray eyebrows.

  “Enjoy yourself in the Antarctic?” he asked in his flat Yorkshire voice when they’d shaken hands.

  “You know about that?”

  “Oh, I keep in touch. I saw your name mentioned in Geographical magazine, in a list of personnel at Hailey Bay.” Sir Fred’s eyes twinkled. “And I could hardly forget one of the perpetrators of the Brown Ale incident. Nearly ruined my reputation.”

  Chase grinned weakly. “Actually, sir, it was Guinness.”

  “Was it? I never knew that. There you are, none of us can be right all the time.” He began stuffing black twist tobacco into a meerschaum pipe. “What is it, career problem? Advice you want?”

  Chase went over it briefly, mentioning the Russian found on the ice, the scrawled chemical equation, his death at the McMurdo Station, all the while conscious that he was wasting Sir Fred’s time. Here and now, in this comfortable lounge with its easy chairs and potted shrubbery, the whole thing seemed preposterous. He cursed himself for being so stupid. Then nearly forgot to add the bit about the
Russian scientist who was to be one of the speakers at the conference in Geneva.

  Sir Fred didn’t see the connection, and Chase went on to explain: “The Russian—that is, the man we found on the ice—kept repeating something that sounded like Stanovnik. We thought it was a word, or words, but it could have been a name. Maybe of the man who’s going to be in Geneva. Have you heard of him?”

  “I’ve met him, two or three times. Boris Stanovnik. He’s a microbiologist with the Hydro-Meteorological Service in Moscow. Good chap.” Sir Fred sucked on his pipe and observed Chase through the billowing smoke. “Have you still got the paper with the equation on it?”

  Chase took the slip of paper from his diary and handed it over. After a minute’s scrutiny Sir Fred raised his eyes and gave Chase a skeptical stare.

  “Is this another leg-pull?” he asked bluntly.

  “No—no, sir, really. This time it’s genuine.”

  “This is the formula for the dissolution of C02 in seawater.” Chase nodded. “Why go to the trouble of writing it down? A perfectly ordinary chemical interaction? He couldn’t speak a word of English, either, and yet he was able to use our chemical symbols.”

  Sir Fred wafted smoke away. “That’s not unusual. Many foreign scientists use them. No, the odd thing, as you say, is why bother in the first place? He must have been trying to tell you something.” Sir Fred thoughtfully folded the paper and gave it back. “You didn’t get to find out his name then?”

  “No. Perhaps the Americans did.”

  “Didn’t you ask them?”

  “It didn’t occur to me,” Chase confessed. “But he should never have been moved. They could have flown a medical team in—or even waited till he was stronger. I got the impression that Professor Banting was afraid of offending the Americans by refusing.”

  “Professor Banting is afraid of offending his own shadow,” Sir Fred commented dryly.

  Chase wondered whether Ivor Banting and Sir Fred Cole had ever crossed swords. It would have made for an interesting contest. Banting, an establishment drone down to his black woolen socks, versus Firebrand Fred, maverick of the British scientific cabal. It must have really peeved Banting when Fred Cole got his knighthood. All that toadying and nothing to show for it!

  “Can you make anything of it?” Chase said.

  Sir Fred rubbed the side of his nose with a stubby forefinger. “The last time I met Stanovnik—when would it be?—about two years ago— he was working on a climatic project. He wouldn’t say what exactly, but that’s the Russians for you.”

  “I thought you said he was a microbiologist?” Chase frowned.

  “He was investigating the effects of pollutants and chemical runoff on the microorganisms in seawater. You’re familiar with eutrophication, I take it?”

  Chase nodded. When a river or lake received an overabundance of nutrients—usually caused by the runoff of farm fertilizers with a high nitrogen content—it encouraged the growth of algae blooms, which as they decayed and died consumed all the oxygen in the water. Deprived of oxygen, other plants and animals also died, with the result that the water became biologically dead. That was the process of eutrophication; quite simply, overfertilization. It had the effect of speeding up the natural evolutionary cycle. Lake Erie in the United States and the land-locked Mediterranean were often-cited examples, where the natural organic processes had been accelerated by some two hundred years.

  “We had a long chat about it. His main interest was how eutrophication on a large scale might affect the climate. When a lake dies and becomes stagnant and eventually turns into swampland, it alters the local weather in the same way that clearing a forest can either increase or decrease rainfall. The Russians are keen to find out everything they can about what affects the climate because of their grandiose geoengineering schemes. They imagine they can move mountains in more than just the metaphorical sense.”

  “That doesn’t seem to have much connection with carbon dioxide and seawater,” Chase pointed out.

  “No, not directly. Though it might have something to do with the climate. Indirectly.”

  “You mean the greenhouse effect?” Chase said. “I’d already thought about that myself, but I don’t see how.”

  “If you like I’ll mention this to Banting next time I see him,” said Sir Fred, getting up. He seemed to inhabit the blue suit rather than wear it. “The Americans could have confided in him.”

  “Are you likely to see Professor Banting?”

  “We serve on half-a-dozen committees together.” Sir Fred gave Chase a long-suffering look over his meerschaum. “Professor Banting and the committee might have been made for each other.”

  Chase went ahead and held the door open.

  “If you’re all that curious you could find out yourself,” Sir Fred told him. “See Boris Stanovnik and ask him. He’ll be in Geneva and he speaks good English.” He chuckled, started to cough, and spat something into his handkerchief. “Better accent than mine,” he wheezed.

  “Thank you for taking the time to see me, sir. I’ll watch for your program. I’m glad we met again.”

  They shook hands and Sir Fred wandered off down the maze of corridors, apparently knowing where he was bound. The thought in Chase’s mind was not Boris Stanovnik or Geneva, but Angie. But after all, he reasoned, it was connected with his work. In a sort of roundabout way. And it would only be for a few days ... Christ, and they’d been getting along so well.

  He had the car radio on, but wasn’t really listening. It was a meaningless babble.

  Fragments caught and snagged at this mind.

  ... you won’t find a better deal this side of the Rockies ... buy three and get the fourth free! ... we’re offering discounts on the discounts at J. C. Broughton’s ... looking for the little gift to please her? ... ten-ninety-five and you get a chrome set for the price of ...

  Instead he tuned in to the thoughts inside his head. People everywhere were dying of cancer, others were suffering from nerve and respiratory defects, from liver and kidney disorders, women were miscarrying, children being born with genetic damage. It was a never-ending catalog of the dead and dying, victims of toxic waste and industrial pollution.

  The world was manifestly mad; to Brad Zittel it was perfectly clear. In fact it was screaming for attention, for action. The world was mad not only because these things were happening but because nothing was being done to prevent them from happening. Nobody cared. The planet was drowning in its own excrement and nobody gave a damn....

  Take that car in front. He’d been unseeingly watching it pumping out poisonous fumes for the last ten minutes. What the hell did the driver care? The air was still clear and breathable, wasn’t it? Nobody had actually dropped dead on the highway. Not yet.

  Without a moment’s further consideration Brad pulled over and ran the small red Datsun onto the sloping grass shoulder. The traffic behind honked and swerved. Somebody shook a fist. Brad switched off the engine and slumped back in the seat, all the strength leaking from his fingertips.

  His head felt curiously tight and his temples throbbed.

  ... at the Temple of Divine Worship this coming Sunday ...

  It was too big a mess for one man to sort out. And why should he bother? Let them sink in their own sewage. His stomach tightened in a spasm of virulent rage. It seemed to swell inside him like a growth until he felt that he must burst.

  Still the endless stream of cars and trucks blurred past, filling the air with a soft-blue haze.

  Brad got out and faced the oncoming surge. Oxygen-breathing monsters spewing out poison. Movable instruments of death, like the Nazi gas ovens on wheels. He stumbled onto the concrete lip of the highway and began to walk toward them. This, it seemed to him, was the only logical thing to do. He felt very calm.

  Traffic streamed past on either side, incredulous faces and gaping mouths. He walked diagonally across the highway, angry and yet calm, impotent and yet defiant.

  A huge truck bore down, silver exhaust pipe
burnished by the sun, the driver wrenching at the wheel and cutting across the path of a car, which braked sharply, setting up a cacophony of horns.

  Miraculously the traffic continued to flow all around him, a river of hurtling murderous metal, the warm breeze and pungent fumes wafting against his face and filling his nostrils. A long-haired motorcyclist went by, shouting something that was snatched away, and then a car with a trailer rocking crazily as the driver tried to avoid him.

  Brad walked on.

  The cars and trucks had malevolent eyes and snarling mouths. He could smell their stinking breath. Another sound insinuated itself above the steady roar, a thin high-pitched braying. He didn’t see the patrol car, lights flashing, slue to a stop on swaying springs. Something yanked him and he was being carried and thrust facedown onto dimpled plastic that smelled strongly of stale sweat.

  A hand held the back of his neck in a choking grip and a long-suffering voice said, “Why the fuck can’t you take an overdose like the rest of them and get it over with quietly?”

  Winthrop had expected skepticism from the other members of the subcommittee whose brief was to vet the agenda for the next monthly session of PSAC, when the president himself would be in attendance. He had expected incredulity from some of them, even scornful laughter—but not the open hostility he now faced.

  The attack had been led by Gen. George N. Wolfe of the Department of Defense, who wasted no time and little breath in calling the proposal alarmist and unscientific. Winthrop had actually flushed and only just stopped himself blurting out that the general should stick to military matters and leave others better qualified to decide what was “unscientific” and what wasn’t. But this would have opened an old wound, he knew—the presence of a Defense Department spokesman on the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee—and would have served no useful purpose. It wouldn’t help his career any either. If word got back to the Pentagon that the deputy director of the World Oceanographic Data Center was an awkward son of a bitch ... well, anyway, better to ease off a little and not get excited. He wanted to see his name on the director’s door, not on a list of has-beens circulating Washington for the post of washroom attendant.