Ben Bova - The Precipice

“Look, Zack,” he said, as reasonably as he could manage, “you have to eat a meal now and then, don’t you?”

Freiberg nodded warily. He’d been sweet-talked by Dan into doing things he hadn’t wanted to do often enough in the past.

“So I brought you lunch,” Dan said, waving his arm in the direction of the oversized mobile home he’d arrived in. Its roof glittered with solar panels. “When the noon whistle blows, come in and break some bread with me. That’s all I’m asking.”

“You want me to look at this proposal over lunch? You think I can make a technical decision about this in an hour or less?”

Dan shrugged disarmingly. “If you can’t, you can’t. All I’m asking is that you give it a look.”

Freiberg gave Dan a look that was far from happy.

Yet five minutes after noon he climbed up through the open door of Dan’s big mobile home.

“I might have known,” he muttered as he stepped past Big George, standing by the doorway.

The van was luxuriously fitted out. George was Dan’s major domo and bodyguard. An attractive young Japanese woman, petite and silent, was stirring steaming vegetables in an electric wok. Dan was sitting in the faux-leather couch that curved around the fold-down dinner table, a suede jacket draped over his shoulders even though the van felt uncomfortably warm to Freiberg. Zack could see the crease across Dan’s face that the sanitary mask had left. “Drink?” Dan asked, without getting to his feet. A half-empty tumbler of something bubbly sat on the table before him.

“What are you having?” Freiberg asked, sliding into the couch where it angled around the table’s end. The table was already set for two. “Ginger beer,” said Dan. “George turned me on to it. Non-alcoholic and it’s even good for the digestion.”

Freiberg shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Okay, I’ll have the same.” George quickly pulled a brown bottle from the refrigerator, opened it, and poured Freiberg a glass of ginger beer.

“Goes good with brandy, y’know,” he said as he handed the glass to Freiberg. The scientist accepted the glass wordlessly and George went back to his post by the door, folding his heavy arms over his massive chest like a professional bouncer.

After a sip of his drink, Dan asked, “Might have known what?” Freiberg waved a hand around the compartment. “That you’d be living in the lap of luxury, even out here.”

Dan laughed. “If you’ve got to go out into the wilderness, you might as well bring a few creature comforts with you.”

“Kind of warm in here, though,” Freiberg complained mildly. Dan smiled gauntly at him. “You’re accustomed to living in the wild, Zack. I’m not.”

“Yeah, guess so.” Freiberg glanced at the painting above Dan’s head: a little girl standing by a banyan tree. “Is that real?”

“Holoprint,” said Dan. “A Vickrey.”

“Nice.”

“What’re you living in, out here?”

“A tent,” said Freiberg.

Nodding, Dan said, “That’s what I thought.”

“It’s a pretty good tent, as tents go, but it’s nothing like this.” His eyes swept the dining area appreciatively. “How many other rooms in here?”

“Just two: office and bedroom. King-sized bed, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You like it, it’s yours.”

“The holoprint?”

“The van. The whole shebang. I’ll be leaving later this afternoon. If you can find somebody to drive George and me to the airstrip you can keep this for yourself.” Surprised, Freiberg blurted, “Can you afford to give it away? From what I’ve heard—”

“For you, Zack,” Dan interrupted, “my last penny. If it comes to that.” Freiberg made a wry face. “You’re trying to bribe me.”

“Yep. Why not?”

With a resigned sigh, the scientist said, “All right, let me see this proposal you want me to look at.”

“Hey George,” Dan called, “bring me the notebook, will you?” Almost an hour later, Freiberg looked up from the notebook’s screen and said, “Well, I’m no rocket engineer, and what I know about fusion reactors you could put into a thimble, but I can’t find anything obviously wrong with this.”

“Do you think it’ll work?” Dan asked earnestly.

“How the hell should I know?” Freiberg snapped irritably. “Why in hell did you come all the way out here to ask my opinion on something you know is outside my expertise?”

Dan hesitated for several heartbeats, then answered, “Because I can trust you, Zack. This guy Humphries is too slick for me to believe. All the experts I’ve contacted claim that this fusion rocket is workable, but how do I know that he hasn’t bought them off? He’s got something up his sleeve, some hidden agenda, and this fusion rocket idea is just the tip of the iceberg. I think he wants to get his paws on Astro.”

“That’s a helluva mixture of metaphors,” Freiberg said, grinning despite himself.

“Never mind the syntax. I don’t trust Humphries. I do trust you.”

“Dan, my opinion doesn’t mean a damned thing here. You might as well ask George, or your cook.”

Hunching forward over the table, Dan said, “You can talk the talk, Zack. You can contact the experts that Humphries has used and sound them out. You can talk to other people, the real specialists in these areas, and see what they think. They’d talk to you, Zack, and you’d understand what they’re saying. You can—”

“Dan,” Freiberg said icily, “I’m working twenty-six hours a day already.”

“I know,” Dan said. “I know.”

Freiberg had thrown himself totally into the global effort to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions given off by the world’s fossil-fueled power-generating stations, factories, and vehicles.

Faced with disastrous shifts in climate due to the greenhouse warming, the nations of the world were belatedly, begrudgingly, attempting to remedy the cataclysm. Led by the Global Economic Council, manufacturers around the world were desperately trying to convert automobiles and other vehicles to electrical motors. But that meant trebling the global electricity-generating capacity, and fossil-fueled power plants were faster and cheaper to build than nuclear plants. There was still plenty of petroleum available, and the world’s resources of coal dwarfed the petroleum reserves. Fission-based power plants were still anathema because of the public’s fear of nuclear power. The new fusion generators were costly, complex, and also hindered by stubborn public resistance to anything nuclear. So more and more fossil-fueled power plants were being built, especially in the rising industrial nations such as China and South Africa. The GEC insisted that new plants sequester their carbon dioxide emissions, capture the dangerous greenhouse gas and pump it safely deep underground. Zachary Freiberg had devoted his life to the effort to mitigate the greenhouse disaster. He had taken an indefinite leave of absence from his position as chief scientist of Astro Manufacturing and criss-crossed the world, directing massive construction projects. His wife had left him, he had not seen his children in more than a year, his personal life was in tatters, but he was driven to do what he could, what he had to do, to help slow the greenhouse warming. “So how’s it going?” Dan asked him.

Freiberg shook his head. “We’re shoveling shit against the tide. There’s just no way we can reduce greenhouse emissions enough to make a difference.”

“But I thought-”

“We’ve been working our butts off for… how long has it been? Ten years? Not even a dent. When we started, fossil fuel burning pumped six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year. Know how much we’re putting out now?” Dan shook his head.