Charles Sheffield - Between the Strokes of Night

Salter Wherry watched their actions calmly in the darkness of the control room. Always, regardless of the couple’s embraces, his attention rested on Judith Niles’ face. At last he leaned forward and pressed another key on the console in front of him. The scene changed to a brilliantly lit interior. Now it was Judith Niles standing alone in Wherry’s office on Spindletop, just next door from the hidden studio, waiting for her first meeting with him. Again his attention was on her face. One minute more, another press of a key, and Wherry was seeing her as she stood after their first meeting. He grunted in dissatisfaction. The hidden cameras were carefully placed, but they could not offer views from all angles, and this time a full-face view was denied him.

He moved on. The next shots had come from the inside of the Institute itself, down on earth. Preparations were under way for the move to Salter Station. The cameras showed experimental animals being carefully housed in well-ventilated crates for upward shipment. This time Salter Wherry seemed pleased. There was a hint of satisfaction in the blue eyes as he cut to the receiving network for his daily global status report.

Salter Station’s observing network tapped all open news channels around the globe, plus a number of sources that national governments would have been shocked to see so routinely cracked. Ground reports were supplemented and confirmed by the station’s spy satellite network, the hundred polar-orbiting spacecraft that permitted a constant detailed look at events anywhere on the globe.

Salter Wherry now began his daily routine, switching with long practice between different data sources. As the mood struck him, he cut back to earlier events of the past year, then moved forward again to the present. Patiently, he tacked his way to and fro across the face of the globe, sometimes a thousand miles above the surface, sometimes through a hand-held camera on an open street, occasionally with video taken inside government buildings or within private homes. The images flooded in.

. . . East Africa. The four-thousand-mile flow of the Nile northward to the Mediterranean showed a river shrunk and diminished by unremitting drought. The Sudan was parched desert, the great agricultural systems along the river all vanished. Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, was no more than cindered buildings. The cameras swept north, high above the muddy river. Close to the Mediterranean, Cairo was a ghost town where packs of hungry dogs patrolled the dusty streets. The nilometer on Roda island stood far out above the river’s trickling flow. Water supply and sewage systems had failed long since. Now, only the flies were energetic in the monstrous noon heat.… Alaska. The long southern coastline was shrouded in perpetual fogs, marking the meeting of warm and cold currents. Inland, the warming peninsula was suddenly bursting with new life. The permafrost had melted. Rampant vegetation was rising to clog the muskeg swamps, and clouds of mosquito and black fly buzzed and swirled above the soft surface. The population, at first delighted by the warming trend, was now struggling to hold its own against the rising tide of plant and animal life. All day long, aircraft loaded with pesticides sprayed tens of thousands of square kilometers. They enjoyed little success… London. The steadily melting icecaps had been raising the sea level, slowly, inexorably, a few inches a year. The tides were lapping now at the top of the seawalls, pressing inward all the way from Gravesend to Waterloo Bridge. Cameras in the streets caught lines of volunteer workers continuing their long toil with sandbags and concrete buttresses. Wading through ankle-deep water, they fought the daily battle with high tide. The work went on quietly, even cheerfully. Morale was good.

. . . Java. The chain of volcanoes along the island, as though in sympathy with the globe’s extreme weather, had woken a week earlier to malignant life. Many of the hundred million people packed onto the island had sought flight, north across the shallow waters of the Java Sea. The spaceborne cameras picked out every detail of the frail boats, heavily overloaded, as they headed for Borneo and Sumatra.

But not only the land was seismically active. When the tsunami struck not a boat remained afloat. The sixty-foot tidal wave that hit Jakarta and the whole northern shore of Java ensured that those who had remained on land fared little better than their seagoing relatives. Today the cameras picked up isolated clusters of survivors as they were gathered by rescue teams and shipped to mountain camps in the central highlands.

. . . Moscow. Reports from the main agricultural oblasts were coming in to Central Records. A stone-faced calm was being maintained there, as word arrived of wheat and barley crops withered and brown, of rice and rye failure, and of steadily rising winds that ripped away dry topsoil and carried it pulverized high into the atmosphere.

Salter Wherry crouched motionless over his console, steadily absorbing new information, collating it with old. Only his mouth and eyes seemed alive. After the scenes from Moscow, he finally switched to the interior of the United Nations building. The formal ritual in the crowded chamber could not hide the undercurrents of anger and tension washing in from the stressed world outside. The Chinese ambassador, face stern and intense, was concluding his prepared speech.

“What we are seeing in the world today is not an accident of nature, not the vicissitudes of planetary weather at work. We are seeing deliberate modification of climate, changes directed against China and our friends by other nations. The time for reticence in naming these nations is past. My country is the victim of economic warfare. We cannot permit — “

Wherry jabbed impatiently at the keyboard. He was frowning, bright eyes shadowed by heavy eyebrows. After a few seconds Eleanora appeared on the screen in front of him, a silver ovoid against the backdrop of stars and a sunlit earth. He held it there while he called out printed schedules and status reports for construction. The curving lines of geodesic support girders on the outer hull had disappeared, covered by bright exterior panels. Final electrical systems were being installed, together with the power sources and the hydroponic tanks; the vast water cylinder was already full.

Wherry skipped to views of the other arcologies. The most distant, Amanda, blinked in as a grainy and indistinct image. It was now almost three million miles away from Earth, spiralling slowly outward in the plane of the ecliptic. In eight years, unless some new trajectory were adopted, the colony ship would have wound its way out to the orbit of Mars. Already the scientists on board were talking about the possibility of a small manned station on Phobos, and consulting with Salter Station on the available resources for the project. Salter Wherry flicked off the viewing screen and sat motionless for many minutes. At last he keyed in another sequence. The face of Hans Gibbs, hair tousled, appeared.

“Hans, do you have the schedule for shipping the Neurological Institute staff there with you?”

“Not in front of me. Hold on a minute and I’ll get it.”

“No need for that. I’ll tell you what I want you to do. The schedule calls for everything to be up here seventy-seven days from now.”

“Right. Judith Niles grumbled at that, but we’re on time so far.” “Hans, it won’t do. I don’t think we have that long. It’s going to hell, and it’s skidding fast. I understand international politics pretty well, but today I couldn’t even guess which country will go crazy first. They’re all candidates. I want you to work up a revised schedule that will have everything from the Institute — people, animals, and equipment — here inside thirty days. Tell Muncie I want him to do the same thing for anything we need to finish Eleanora, in the same timetable.”