The Precipice

CHENGDU, SICHUAN PROVINCE

Dan had to shout through his sanitary mask to make himself heard over the din of construction. “All I’m asking, Zack, is can he do it or can’t he?” He’d known Zack Freiberg for more than twenty years, since Zack had been an earnest young planetary geochemist intent on exploring asteroids and Dan had hired him away from his university post. Freiberg had taken flak from his friends in academia for joining big, bad Dan Randolph, the greedy capitalist founder and head of Astro Manufacturing. But over the years a mutual respect had slowly developed into a trusting friendship. It had been Zack who’d first warned Dan about the looming greenhouse cliff, and what it would do to the Earth’s climate. The greenhouse cliff had arrived, and the Earth’s politicians and business leaders had sailed blindly over its edge as the planet plunged into catastrophic warming. Zack was no longer the chubby, apple-cheeked kid Dan had first met. His strawberry hair had gone iron gray, although it was still thick and tightly curled. The past few years had toughened him, made him leaner, harder, boiled away the baby fat in his body. His face had hardened, too, as he watched his equations and graphs turn into massive human suffering.

The two men were standing on the edge of a denuded ridge, looking out across a barren coal-black valley where thousands of Chinese workers toiled unceasingly. By all the gods, Dan thought, they really do look like an army of ants scurrying around. In the middle of the valley four enormously tall smokestacks of a huge electricity-generating plant belched dark gray fumes into the hazy sky. Mountainous piles of coal lay by the railroad track that ran alongside the power plant. Off on the horizon, beyond the farther stripped-bare ridge, the Yangzi River glittered in the hazy morning sunshine like a deadly boa constrictor slowly creeping up on its prey. A sluggish warm breeze smelled of raw coal and diesel fumes.

Dan shuddered inwardly, wondering how many billions of microbes were worming their way through his sanitary mask and nose plugs, eager to chew past his weakened immune system and set up homes for themselves inside his body. “Dan, I really don’t have time for this,” Freiberg hollered over the roar of a huge truck carrying twenty tons of dirt and rubble down into the valley on wheels that dwarfed both men.

“I just need a few hours of your time,” Dan said, feeling his throat going hoarse from his shouting. “Jeez, I came all the way out here to get your opinion on this.” It was a sign of the Chinese government’s belated realization that the greenhouse warming would decimate China as well as the rest of the world that they had asked Freiberg to personally direct their massive construction program. At one end of the valley, Chinese engineers and laborers were building a dam to protect the electrical power-generating station from the encroaching Yangzi. At the other end, a crew from Yamagata Industries was constructing a complex pumping station to remove the carbon dioxide emitted by the power station’s stacks and store it deep underground, in the played-out seams of the coal bed that provided fuel for the generators.

With an exasperated frown, Freiberg said, “Listen, I know I still get my paycheck from Astro, but that doesn’t mean I can jump whenever you blow the whistle.” Dan looked into the other man’s light blue eyes and saw pain there, disappointment and outright fear. Zack blames himself for this catastrophe, Dan knew. He discovered the greenhouse cliff and he acts as if it’s all his fault. Instead of some fathead king shooting the messenger, the messenger wants to shoot himself.

“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.

“Five point three billion tons,” Freiberg said, almost angrily.

Dan grunted.

Pointing through the van’s window to the massive trucks rumbling by, Freiberg grumbled, “Yamagata’s trying to convert their whole fleet of trucks to electricity, but the Chinese are still using diesels. Some people just don’t give a damn! The Russians are starting to talk about cultivating what they call the Virgin lands’ in Siberia, where the permafrost is melting. They think they can turn the region into a new grain belt, like the Ukraine.”

“So something good might come out of all this,” Dan murmured. “My ass,” Freiberg snapped. “The oceans are still warming up, Dan. The clathrates are going to break down if we can’t stop the ocean temperature rise. Once they start releasing the methane that’s frozen in them…” Dan opened his mouth to reply, but Freiberg kept right on agonizing. “You know how much methane is locked up in the clathrates? Two limes ten to the sixteenth tons. Twenty quadrillion tons! Enough to produce a greenhouse that’ll melt all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Every glacier in the world. We’ll all drown.”

“All the more reason,” Dan said, “for pushing out to the Asteroid Belt. We can bring in all the metals and minerals the Earth needs, Zack! We can move the world’s industrial operations into space, where they won’t screw up the Earth’s environment.”

Freiberg gave Dan a disbelieving look.

“We can do it!” Dan insisted. “If this fusion rocket can be made to work. That’s the key to the whole damned thing: efficient propulsion can bring the cost of asteroid mining down to where it’s economically viable.” For a long moment Freiberg said nothing. He merely glared at Dan, half angry, half sullen.

At last he mumbled, “I’ll make a few calls for you, Dan. That’s all I can do.”

“That’s all I ask,” Dan replied, forcing a smile. Then he added, “Plus a ride to the airstrip for George and me.”

“What about your cook?”

With a laugh, Dan said, “She goes with the van, old buddy. She only speaks Japanese, but she’s terrific in the kitchen. And the bedroom.” Freiberg flushed deep red. But he did not refuse Dan’s gift.