Robert Siverberg: Hot Sky at Midnight

“No. No. Tell me more. Is there grade slope to be had out of this?”

“Of course there’s slope. You put in eighteen months aboard your cramped little boat hauling icebergs and keeping your nasty but capable crew in line and you’ll make Level Ten for sure. Demonstration of managerial skills under adverse conditions. They’ll move you to Europe and stick you on the administrative track and you’ll be sitting pretty from then on, straight up the net to New Tokyo. I thought of you the moment this came across the node.”

“How come there’s a vacancy?” Carpenter asked. Usually any job that held the promise of grade improvement, no matter how disagreeable it might be, was snapped up in-house before it hit any of the general Company nodes. “Why didn’t someone in the trawler division take it right away?”

“Someone did,” Jeanne said. “Yesterday. Then his lottery number came up two hours later and he bugged out for one of the habitats, just like that, caught a shuttle without even stopping to pack. A job on Outback, I think it was, or maybe Commonplace. The company got caught short and Personnel was asked to fill in with an Eleven, fast. Five names surfaced on the first scoop. Yours was one of them. I thought I’d call you before I ran any checks on the other four.”

“Nice.”

“Am I wasting my breath?”

“I love you, Jeanne.”

“I know that. But do you want the gig?”

“Tell me the time frame?”

“You’d have a five-week transition. Enough time to work up the weatherman specs for your successor in Spokane, get down to Frisco for your indoctrination jacking, and maybe even fit in a few days over here in Paris for fine dining and riotous living, if you could stand it.”

Jeanne’s face bore the usual ironic glint but there was, it seemed to Carpenter, some wistfulness in it also. When they worked together in St. Louis they had always been flirtatious with each other, and whenever they were with other people they had liked to play at giving the impression that they were sleeping together. But all it was was play. Someone had done some damage to her, emotional, not physical, long ago— Carpenter had never asked for the details—and so far as he knew she was completely asexual. A pity, because he wasn’t.

He said, “I’d like that. A few days in Paris. The Seine. The Place de la Concorde. The restaurant on the top of the Eiffel Tower. The Louvre on a rainy day.”

“It’s always a rainy day here,” she said.

“All the better. Water falling from the sky, just dropping right down on your head—it seems like a goddamned miracle to me, Jeanne. I would take off my clothes and dance naked in it, right down the Champs-Elysees.”

“Stop showing off. They’d arrest you in two seconds, anyway. There’s a cop on every corner here. Androids, very strict. ‘Mon Dieu, monsieur — s’il vous plait, vos vêtements!’ ”

“I’ll tell him that I don’t speak French. Would you dance with me?”

“No. Not naked down the Champs-Elysees.”

“In the grand ballroom of the Georges Cinq, then.”

“But of course,” she said. “The Georges Cinq.”

“I love you, Jeanne.” He would never see her in Paris, he was sure of that. By the time he was through with the iceberg boat they would have reassigned her to Tierra del Fuego or Hong Kong or Kansas City.

“I love you,” she told him. “Keep dry, Paul.”

“Not a problem, here,” Carpenter said.

The morning that his transfer finally came through—it took about ten days; he was just beginning to doubt that Jeanne had been able to swing it at all—Carpenter had just clocked nineteen straight hours of work at the Samurai Weather Service office in Spokane. Everybody there was working like that these days. A five-alarm toxic emergency had been declared, the worst one in three or four years, and the whole meteorological staff had gone on double overtime, tracking the unusual upper-air movements that might be putting the entire West Coast at risk.

What was going on was that there was a big high-pressure zone sitting over Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. That was not exactly news in itself—there was always a high-pressure zone sitting on those states, which was why it almost never rained there any more—but this time the entire great mass of heavy dead air had developed a powerful counterclockwise rotation and was starting to pull streams of greenhouse gases out of the blighted Midwest. All the vile poisonous airborne goo—methane, nitrous oxides, and other such things— that was normally salted through the atmosphere over Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis was being sucked around the top end of Nebraska and Wyoming and into Idaho.

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—