Asteroid Wars - The Precipice Part 1

THE PRECIPICE.

BEN BOVA.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

And with special thanks to Jeff Mitch.e.l.l, a real rocket scientist; to Chris Fountain, metallurgist and optimist; and to Lee Modesitt, an economist with imagination; true friends all.

The modern tropics and their fringes support more than half the world's population, numbered in the billions. Many already live at the fringe of survival, dependent on food aid transported from the grain belts of more temperate zones. Even a small climatic shift... would physically compress the geographical limits for cereal cropping.... I leave it to your imagination what such a pace of climate change would entail for most people.

- Stephen Drury.

Stepping Stones: Evolving the Earth and Its Life.

... some men have already embarked on a bold new adventure, the conquest of outer s.p.a.ce. This is a healthy sign, a clear indication that some of us are still feral men, unwilling to domesticate ourselves by any kind of bondage, even that of the spatial limitations of our planet's surface. some men have already embarked on a bold new adventure, the conquest of outer s.p.a.ce. This is a healthy sign, a clear indication that some of us are still feral men, unwilling to domesticate ourselves by any kind of bondage, even that of the spatial limitations of our planet's surface.

-Carleton S. c.o.o.n The Story of Man The Story of Man (Third Edition) (Third Edition) .

MEMPHIS.

"Jesus," the pilot kept murmuring. "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

The helicopter was racing north, bucking, jolting between the shattered land below and the thick dark gray clouds scudding just above, trying to follow Interstate 55 from the Memphis International Airport to what was left of the devastated city. You could not see the highway; it was carpeted from horizon to horizon with refugees, b.u.mper to b.u.mper traffic inching along, an un-ending stream of cars, trucks, vans, busses, people on foot swarming like ants, trudging painfully along the shoulders of the road in the driving, soaking rain, women pushing baby carriages, men and boys hauling carts piled high with whatever they could salvage from their homes. Flood water was lapping along the shoulder embankment, rising, still rising, reaching for the poor miserable people as they fled their homes, their hopes, their world in a a desperate attempt to escape the rising waters. desperate attempt to escape the rising waters.

Dan Randolph felt the straps of his safety harness cutting into his shoulders as he stared grimly out the window from his seat behind the two pilots. His head throbbed painfully and the filter plugs in his nostrils were hurting again. He barely noticed the copter's buffeting and jouncing in the choppy wind as he watched the swollen tide of refugees crawling sluggishly along the highway. It's like a war zone, Dan thought. Except that the enemy is Mother Nature. The flooding was bad enough, but the earthquake broke their backs.

Dan put the electronically-boosted binoculars to his eyes once again, searching, scanning the miserable, soaking wet throng below for one face, line individual, the one woman he had come to save. It was impossible.

There must be half a million people down there, he thought. More.

Finding her will take a miracle.

The chopper bounced and slewed wildly in a sudden gust of wind, banging the binoculars painfully against Dan's brow. He started to yell something to the pilot, then realized that they had run into another bl.u.s.tery squall. Fat, pounding raindrops splattered thickly against the copter's windows, cutting Dan's vision down almost to nothing.

The pilot slid back the transparent sanitary part.i.tion that isolated Dan's compartment. Dan suppressed an angry urge to slam it back. What good are sterile barriers if you open them to the outside air?

"We've got to turn back, sir," the pilot yelled over the thrumming thunder of the engines.

"No!" Dan shouted. "Not till we find her!"

Half turning in his seat to face Dan, the pilot jabbed a finger toward his spattered windscreen. "Mr. Randolph, you can fire me when we land, but I ain't going to fly through that." that."

Looking past the flapping windscreen wipers, Dan saw four deadly slim dark funnels writhing across the other side of the swollen Mississippi, dust and debris flying wherever they touched the ground. They looked like coiling, squirming snakes thrashing across the ground, smashing everything they touched: buildings exploded, trees uprooted, autos tossed into the air like dry leaves, homes shattered into splinters, RV parks, housing developments, shopping malls all destroyed at the flick of the twisters' pitiless, mindless malevolence, blasted as completely and ruthlessly as if they had been struck by an enemy missile attack.

The enemy is Mother Nature, Dan repeated silently, numbly, as he stared at the advancing tornadoes. There was nothing he could do about them and he knew it. They couldn't be bought, bribed, flattered, seduced, or threatened into obedience. For the first time since he'd been a child, Daniel Hamilton Randolph felt totally powerless.

As he locked the part.i.tion shut again and fumbled in his pockets for his antiseptic spray, the chopper swung away, heading back toward what was left of the international airport. The Tennessee National Guard had thrown a cordon around the grounds; the airport was the Memphis region's last link with the rest of the country. The floods had knocked out electrical power, smashed bridges, covered roads with thick muddy brown water. Most of the city had been submerged for days.

Then came the earthquake. A solid nine on the Richter scale, so powerful that it flattened buildings from Nashville to Little Rock and as far north as St. Louis. New Orleans had already been under water for years as the rising Gulf of Mexico inexorably reclaimed its sh.o.r.eline from Florida to Texas. The Mississippi was in flood all the way up to Cairo, and still rising.

Now, with communications out, millions homeless in the never-ending rains, aftershocks strong enough to tumble skysc.r.a.pers, Dan Randolph searched for the one person who meant something to him, the only woman he had ever loved.

He let the binoculars drop from his fingers and rested his head on the scat back. It was hopeless. Finding Jane out there among all those other people- The copilot had twisted around in his seat and was tapping on the clear plastic part.i.tion.

"What?" Dan yelled.

Instead of trying to outshout the engines' roar through the part.i.tion, the copilot pointed to the earpiece of his helmet. Dan understood and picked up the headset they had given him from where he'd dumped it on the floor. He had sprayed it when they'd first handed it to him, but now he doused it again with the antiseptic.

As he clamped it over his head, he heard the metallic, static-streaked voice of a news reporter saying,"... definitely identified as Jane Scan-well. The former President was found, by a strange twist of fate, on President's Island, where she was apparently attempting to help a family of refugees escape the rising Mississippi waters. Their boat apparently cap-sized and was swept downstream, but snagged on treetops on the island.

"Jane Scanwell, the fifty-second President of the United States, died living to save others from the ravages of flood and earthquake here in what remains of Memphis, Tennessee."

LA GUAIRA.

It was raining in Venezuela, too, when Dan Randolph finally got back to his headquarters. Another hurricane was tearing through the Caribbean, lashing Barbados and the Windward Islands, dumping twenty-five centimeters of rain on the island of La Guaira and Caracas, on the mainland, with more to come.

Dan sat behind his big, bare desk, still wearing the rumpled slacks and pullover that he had travelled in from the States. His office smelled musty, mildewed from the incessant rain despite its laboring climate control system. He wasn't wearing the protective nose plugs; the air in his office was routinely filtered and run past intense ultraviolet lamps.

Leaning back into the softly yielding caramel brown leather of his swivel chair, Dan gazed out at the windswept launch complex. The rockets had been towed back into the a.s.sembly buildings. In this storm they could not dare to launch even the st.u.r.dy, reliable Clipperships. The launch towers were visibly shaking in the gale-force wind, lashed by horizontal sheets of rain; roofs had already peeled off some of the smaller buildings. Beyond the launch towers, the sea was a wild madhouse of frothing whitecapped waves. The wind howled like a beast of prey, rattling even the thick double-paned windows of Randolph's office.

Third storm to hit us and it's not even the Fourth of July yet. Business isn't lousy enough; we've got these double-d.a.m.ned hurricanes to deal with. At this rate I'll be broke by Labor Day.

We're losing, Dan thought. We're in a war and we're losing it. h.e.l.l, we've already lost it. What's the sense of pretending otherwise?

The dampness made him ache deep in his bones, an arthritic-like reminder of his age and the dose of radiation sickness he'd contracted years earlier. I ought to get back to Selene, he told himself. A man with a broken-down immune system shouldn't stay on Earth if he doesn't have to.

Yet for hours he simply sat there, staring out at the pounding storm, seeing only the face of Jane Scanwell, remembering the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers, the soft silkiness of her skin, the scent of her, the way she brightened a room, they way she had filled his life even though they were never really together, not more than a few quick hours now and then before they fell into bitter argument. There was so much separating them. After she had left the White House, they had managed to spend a couple of days together on a tropical atoll. Even that had ended in a quarrel.

But for once they had seen things the same way, had the same goal, fought the same fight on the same side. The greenhouse cliff meant war, a war pitting humankind's global civilization against the blind forces of nature. Jane understood that as well as Dan did. They were going to fight this war together.

And it killed her.

Should I go on? Dan asked himself. What's the use of it? What's the sense of it? He wanted to cry, but the tears would not come.

Dan Randolph had always seemed larger than his actual physical size. He was a solidly-built welterweight, still in trim physical shape, although now, in his sixties, it took grueling hours in the gym to maintain his condition. His once-sandy hair was almost completely gray now; his staff people called him "the Silver Fox" behind his back. He had a fighter's face, with a strong stubborn jaw and a nose that had been flattened years ago by a fist, when he'd been a construction worker in s.p.a.ce. Despite all the wealth he'd ama.s.sed since those early days, he'd never had his nose fixed. Some said it was a perverse sense of machismo. His light gray eyes, which had often glinted in amus.e.m.e.nt at the foolishness of men, were bleak and saddened now.

A chime sounded, and the sleek display screen of his computer rose lowly, silently out of the desktop surface.

Dan swiveled his chair to see the screen. His administrative a.s.sistant's young, somber face looked out at him. Teresa was a native of Caracas, tall, leggy, cocoa-cream complexion, deep brown almond eyes and thick l.u.s.trous midnight dark hair. Years earlier Dan would have tried to bed her and probably succeeded. Now he was simply annoyed at her intrusion into his memories.

"It's almost dinnertime," she said.

"So what?"

"Martin Humphries has been waiting all day to see you. He's the man Zack Freiberg wants you to meet."

Dan grimaced. Zack had been the first one to warn Dan of the impending greenhouse cliff.

"Not today, Teresa," he said. "I don't want to see anybody today,"

The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, softly, almost timidly, "Do you want me to bring you a dinner tray?"

Dan shook his head. "I'm not hungry."

"You have to eat."

He looked at her image on his screen, so intent, so young and concerned and worried that the boss was going off the deep end. And he felt anger rising inside him, unreasoning blind blazing rage.

"No, G.o.ddammit to h.e.l.l and back," he snapped. "You have to eat. I can do any G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing I want to, and if you want to keep drawing your paycheck you'd better leave me the h.e.l.l alone."

Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing. Dan snapped his fingers and the screen went blank. Another snap and it folded back into its niche in the desk's gleaming rosewood top.

Leaning back in his chair, Dan closed his eyes. He tried to close his mind against the memories, but that was impossible.

It was all going to be so d.a.m.ned great. Okay, a century or two of global warming would lead to a greenhouse cliff. Not a gradual warmup but a sudden, abrupt change in the world's climate. All that latent heat stored in the oceans would pour into the atmosphere. Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melting away. Sea levels shooting up over a decade or two. Big storms and lots of them. Climate shifts turning croplands into deserts.

So what? We'll use the resources of s.p.a.ce to solve all those problems. Energy? We'll build solar power satellites, beam energy from s.p.a.ce to wherever it's needed. Raw materials? We'll mine the Moon and the asteroids; there's more natural resources in s.p.a.ce than the whole Earth can provide. Food production?

Well, that would be a tough one. We all knew that. But with enough energy and enough raw materials we could irrigate the croplands that were being desiccated by the climate shift.

Yeah, sure. And when half the world's major cities got flooded out, what did we do? What could we do? When the electrical power grid got shattered, what did we do? When earthquakes and tsunamis wiped out the heart of j.a.pan's industrial capacity, what did we do? Diddley-squat. When this quake flattened the midwest, what did we do? We tried to help the survivors and Jane got herself killed in the attempt.

The office door banged open and a huge, red-bearded man pushed in, carrying an ornately-carved teak tray laden with steaming dishes. In his ma.s.sive hands the tray looked like a little child's toy.

"Teresa says you've got to eat," he announced in a high, sweet tenor as he set the tray on Dan's desk.

"I told her I'm not hungry."

"You can't f.o.o.kin' starve yourself. Eat something."

Dan glanced at the tray. A steaming bowl of soup, a salad, a main course hidden under a stainless steel dome, a carafe of coffee. No wine. Nothing alcoholic.

He pushed the tray toward the red-haired giant. "You eat it, George."

Pulling one of the upholstered chairs up close to the desk, Big George looked his boss in the eye and pushed the tray back toward Randolph.

"Eat," he said. "It's good for ya."

Dan stared back at George Ambrose. He'd known Big George since he'd been a fugitive on the Moon, hiding out from the Selene City authorities with a handful of other free souls who styled themselves the Lunar Underground. Big George was Dan's personal bodyguard now; he wore custom-tailored suits instead of patched coveralls. But he still looked like a barely-tamed frontiersman: big, s.h.a.ggy, the kind of man who could gleefully pound your head down into your ribcage with no personal malice at all.

"Tell you what," Dan said, feeling a reluctant smile bend his lips a little 'I'll split it with you." 'I'll split it with you."

George grinned back at him. "Good thinking, boss."

They ate in silence for several minutes, George gobbling the entire main course, which turned out to be a thick slab of prime rib. Dan took a few spoonfuls of soup and nibbled at the salad.

"Better than the old days, huh?" George said, still chewing prime rib. f.o.o.kin' soyburgers and recycled p.i.s.s for water."

Dan ignored the younger man's attempt to jolly him. "Has Teresa gone home?" he asked.

"Nope."

Nettled, Dan glanced at his wrist.w.a.tch. "She's not my nursemaid, double-d.a.m.n it. I don't want her hovering over me like-"

"That Humphries bloke is still waitin' to see you," George said.

"Now? He's out there now? It's almost nine o'clock, for chrissakes. What's wrong with him? Is he stuck here because of the storm? Doesn't Teresa have the smarts to put him up in one of the guest suites?"

George shook his s.h.a.ggy head. "He said he'll wait until you're ready to see 'im. He did have an appointment, y'know."

Dan let his breath out in a weary sigh. I just got back from the funeral and they expect me to stick to a schedule made out weeks ago.

"Teresa says he's makin' her nervous."

"Nervous?"

"He's comin' on to her. I can see it meself."

Frowning, Dan muttered, "Teresa can take care of herself."

"The voice of experience?" George grinned.

"He's been hitting on her all the time he's been waiting for me?"

"Want me to shoo 'im off?" George asked.

For a moment Dan relished the image of George hustling his visitor out of the building. But then he realized that the man would simply come back tomorrow. I'll have to get back to business, he told himself. Can't avoid it forever.

"Take the tray out," he said to Big George," and show this Humphries guy in."

George smacked his lips. "I can bring in dessert and coffee."

"Fine," Dan said, unwilling to argue. "Do that."

Grinning, George scooped up the crumb-littered tray in one hand and started for the door. Dan saw that the desktop was sprinkled with crumbs, too. Annoyed, he brushed them to the carpet.

Teresa appeared at the door. "Mr. Martin Humphries," she announced. She looked tense, Dan thought. Humphries must have really rattled her.