Ben Bova - The Precipice

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 assembly buildings. In this storm they could not dare to launch even the sturdy, 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-damned 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. Hell, 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 space. Despite all the wealth he’d amassed 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 amusement 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 assistant’s young, somber face looked out at him. Teresa was a native of Caracas, tall, leggy, cocoacream complexion, deep brown almond eyes and thick lustrous 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, goddammit to hell and back,” he snapped. “You have to eat. I can do any goddamned thing I want to, and if you want to keep drawing your paycheck you’d better leave me the hell 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 damned 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 space to solve all those problems. Energy?

We’ll build solar power satellites, beam energy from space to wherever it’s needed. Raw materials? We’ll mine the Moon and the asteroids; there’s more natural resources in space 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 Japan’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 massive 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 fookin’ 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, shaggy, 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.”

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.