Robert Siverberg: Hot Sky at Midnight

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?”

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?”

“I can handle it,” Carpenter said.

A few weeks of paid idleness in San Francisco? Why not? He had grown up in Los Angeles, but he had always been fond of the cooler, smaller northern city. The sea breezes, the fog, the bridges, the lovely little old buildings, the glittering blue bay—sure. Sure. He’d be glad to. Especially after Spokane. There were people he knew in Frisco, old friends, good old friends. It would be great to see them again.