Galactic Storm, page 2
For a second I was afraid his blue beady eyes were going to turn sour, but he smiled and shook my hand warmly. "Sure," he said heartily, "my nephew's always talking of you. Quite a young genius, he tells me you are." It was young Christopher Hayling's ambition to discover a poet, and he chose me as the first subject for experiment.
"That's very generous of him, sir," I said, "but that's nothing to what I'd like to say about a friend of mine who's using the brain at the moment." At this moment also, Masters hove up. I spotted him out of the corner of my eye, said, "Professor Masters tells me you want the californium bomb problem solved right now."
"That's correct," agreed Hayling, his eyes switching frostily from one of us to the other.
"One of my more irresponsible students," said Masters hurriedly, "to whom in a moment of carelessness I said you were not arriving till three o'clock, is still—"
"Irresponsible be damned," I said explosively—I didn't want to stay on another year anyway. "Look here, Mr. Hayling," I went on, turning to the stout man "I should know. When is this californium bomb information wanted?"
"Now," said' Hayling. "Tomorrow if possible."
"And when will it be used?" I said, pressing my point.
"Maybe when the Oakridge piles have enough californium to make a bomb," Hayling said, beginning to take my meaning.
I spread my hands in a gesture of appeal. "Sir, I put it to you that this fellow Sharp, a genius if ever there was one, has here only another two days. This is his first and last opportunity to use the brain. So he's seized the chance with both hands and fed it the biggest problem he could work up—we spent ten hours at least codifying it—"
"Ten hours!" Masters boiled over at that point. "Why, the young fool will burst the valves if he feeds a problem that size. How many factors? I'll wager not one less than seven hundred fifty!"
Hayling held up one pudgy hand at this point for silence. "I'm beginning to like the sound of the boy," he mused. "Get in." He waved expansively at his vast Buddleigh.
So we got in. It was as vast as the man himself, that car, and drove with a sort of jovial buoyancy that exactly fitted the appearance of its owner. We slewed around three corners and pulled up with a wallop directly in front of the kennel.
Hayling bounced out and we followed, me a bad second and Masters nowhere. I was close enough behind Hayling, though, to hear the conversation—if you can call it that.
"Who're you?" said Sharp, the moment he realized it was neither me nor Masters. He put down the tome on geology he was reading and shut it with a snap.
Hayling looked him acidly up and down, and in a voice that ought to have made Sharp cringe into a corner, said as if announcing the Pope or Stalin, "I am Honey Hayling!"
"Yeah?" said Sharp, and I could imagine his upper lip curling in derision. "You're the qualified so-and-so from the Government, eh?" He had, as I found out afterwards, had a cup of black coffee and spent two hours at the library instead of going to bed, and his temper was thin as paper.
Hayling's back stiffened. I could see over his shoulder by this time. "Sir," he said, "you're being damn' rude!" He cultivated a sort of explosive politeness, old Hayling.
"Maybe I am," said Sharp, getting to his feet. "What d'you want, anyhow?"
Hayling's back got more like a ramrod every second. "I want this calculator! I've been sent all the way here from New Mexico to put in a problem about a californium bomb, and I arrive to find you, quite unauthorisedly, still using this and apparently set for the day!"
The peculiar thing was that the electrically charged atmosphere had set Hayling dead against Sharp the moment the pair set eyes on each other. Sharp settled his hands on his hips, tilted back his head and looked cynically down his nose at the small stout man. He said, "I've come from Oregon. I've waited three years to use the brain. Now I have it I don't intend to let up easily."
"Listen, my young friend," said Hayling, "I didn't come here to argue. I want you to take this problem out of circuit so that I can get down to work." He felt in his pocket and produced a spool of paper, similar to the one I had helped Sharp prepare for Charlie last night, but by no means so big. Sharp looked at it and grinned.
"So that's your nasty little californium bomb, is it?" he said. "That's interesting. What's this bomb going to do, Mr. Hayling?"
"I don't know yet," snapped the fat man irritably. I felt my dislike for him go up a notch suddenly "That's why I want to use the computer."
"No, guess," said Sharp, suddenly calm. "I mean—would it do as much as a plutonium bomb?"
"It wouldn't cause as much damage," Hayling said brusquely. "But it might be easier to carry or quicker to assemble. I don't know."
"So that it would devastate—perhaps a square mile?"
"Possibly," snapped Hayling. "Stop prevaricating."
I snatched a glance at Masters over my shoulder. He was slowly purpling, but the argument was so obviously confined to these two that he had perforce to keep silent.
Sharp clicked his tongue. "Dear, dear," he observed deprecatingly. "You are pestering me for the solution of a problem that may help in the devastation of a square mile, the death of a thousand people, if strategically placed. Why, you poor boob," he exploded suddenly, "in fifty years there may not be a thousand people left to kill in the entire world."
Hayling's back suddenly relaxed. He slackened his shoulders as he stared keenly for signs of frivolity in Sharp's face. My intense dislike of him went down the drain. I must have been absorbing telepathic phenomena like a sponge. There was the shadow of a doubt on his mind now, as Masters finally broke in.
"Mr. Hayling, I can't allow one of my students to insult you like this!" he said, though with some difficulty.
"Shut up!" said Hayling, "What's your name, young man?"
"Sharp," said the other. There was a moment's intense silence, except for the rich warm hum of Charlie at work, while Hayling thought.
He said abruptly, eagerly, "Sharp ... Sharp ... 'Some Observations on Weather Prediction', in Popular Science a year ago?"
"That's right," nodded Sharp. "Now perhaps you understand. Put yourself in my position, Mr. Hayling." The note of hot anger had gone from his voice. He passed a very weary hand across his forehead. "I've been fascinated by weather for years, but I've been barred and banned from using the only calculator near which could ever solve my most urgent problem. I have the opportunity I've been praying for to-day. I concocted the mammoth problem that's been worrying me for months, and there are so many facts to be taken into account that even Charlie here—" he indicated the brain—"has taken twelve hours over it. I thought it was thirteen I would need. Now I'm sure it'll require at least an extra half, because it's going slower than I hoped." He was obviously very tired. His speech was normally a model of lucidity—I'd seen to that.
He cleared his throat, indicated the bank of lights. "When ninety of those yellows are on, you can have the brain. Not until then. Because my problem is much more important than yours. Much more."
Hayling looked puzzled now, even from behind. He must have raised his eyebrows, for his parbald scalp stretched interrogatively. Sharp broke into an impassioned torrent of words. He indicated the books on the floor.
"Mr. Hayling, as you no doubt know, the world is getting warmer. It has been for a hundred years or more. And, as a meteorologist. I've been interested by this. Now, I've put into Charlie the information it has taken me years to collect, literally years and years. I've fed in temperature and rainfall and sea level and a hundred other climatic factors, and I've added things to do with ultra-violet and things to do with carbon dioxide and things to do with a hundred other matters of that order. I've invented new equations and new correlations, and I spent ten hours codifying the result with Paul Shay here to help me, and I'm damned if I'm going to give in now. When, at about four this afternoon, we wind up the problem, we'll know humanity's chance of survival. Digested into symbols on a reel of paper tape."
"Mr. Hayling, do you know what would happen if the icepacks at the poles melted? London would be fifty feet under water! The oceans would rise colossally! We'd be reduced to living on the slopes of mountains! The immense increase in the wet surface of the globe would cover the sky with perpetual clouds! And at first, at any rate, the rain!
"Further to that! The world is already getting warmer—I've evolved a theory to account for that already, but that comes after this—and the effect of the clouds forever surrounding us would be to prevent the radiation of any of this surplus heat into space. Therefore the whole atmosphere would soon be like the inside of an orchidarium or a tropical swamp. When there is more than a certain amount of water around after the liberation of the icecaps, there won't be rain much anymore because the air just won't cool enough to precipitate it.
"So what? Most people would say that, implying après moi le deluge, in a very literal sense. The icecaps won't melt for a very long time yet. I'm not so sure. If my theory which accounts for the increased heat of the world is correct, then it may be a matter of centuries only, and possibly even decades, before the ice melts. I repeat—I'm not so sure."
He held us all three, Masters included, spellbound. His red-rimmed tired eyes seemed not to see us, but to look at something more important, more momentous to the whole of humanity and not to one kind of humanity, as the californium bomb was of value to only Americans. Hayling had forgotten the way he had been insulted and stared fascinated at him.
"That's what I meant when I said that the fate of mankind was on its way out of Charlie. What the solution will be I daren't guess. But one of the things I shall know will be the number of years before the icecaps are reduced to half their present size. That will be enough. Besides that, I should receive information on the layers of carbon dioxide which are going to replace the oxygen and ozone in the stratosphere, the prevalence of earthquakes over the next few years and a fairly accurate forecast of temperature rises, in yearly steps, over the next century.
"You want my theory on the increasing heat of the earth." He tapped the work on geology he had been reading, and went on. "I found it here. You know how the earth was once a ball of gas, flaming like the star which gave it birth. It cooled. But it was spinning very rapidly, and after a while it acquired a moon; the combined effects of centrifugal force and moon's tides drew the crust in the polar areas, while it was still more or less floating on liquid or gaseous matter, towards the equator. Thus, if you blew the earth like an egg, so that the still liquid interior ran out, the resultant hollow ball of perfectly cooled matter would be far far thicker at the equator than at the poles. You follow me?
"In the past few hundred years, in spite of the nearly settled condition of the shell and crust, the moon had still been dragging it apart at the poles. And thus the big Pacific fault is now matched by polar faults, more especially at the south. Witness the volcanoes Erebus and Terror. Heretofore the ice has held its own, except when on one occasion the North Pole became a coal-bearing area of tropical swamp, owing entirely to an outbreak of hot lava from the center of the earth, which took thousands of years to cool.
"Now, the reason that the earth is warming up is that, to the south, the hot interior is approaching the ice from underneath. Instead of the seabed being very cold, the rocks are getting hot. Therefore—and here is why we are getting het up too—the sea currents are not as cold as they were. Instead they are heating the seas south and north of the north and south icepacks."
He was getting around to repeating himself again. But we weren't complaining.
"That's a bit tedious," he said, after a pause. "But I think it covers all my points. Except one. You know what I said earlier. I mentioned the ozone layers in the upper atmosphere. Well, you know that that ozone is the only barrier between us and the sun's more harmful ultra-violet. Now one of the upsetting facts about those volcanoes down there is that they're shooting loads of raw carbon into the stratosphere—the hot air rising over the poles goes up all the faster because of the cold surroundings. And they love each other but definitely, and become stable carbon compounds like CO2.
"Here comes the ultra-violet. And we die. Now perhaps you see what I mean."
He finished with a tired sweep of hand across brow. I was practically stranded, not having taken much of it in, and Masters was too angry to credit it. Hayling, however, was different. He seemed to be convinced of the validity and good sense of Sharp's arguments, and about-faced vigorously.
"Out of my way!" he snapped.
"But—but the brain," stammered Masters. "The californium bomb!"
"To hell with the bomb," said Hayling forcibly. "I've got to get on the phone to my central bureau in Washington and take this theory up. My God, man, don't you see how splendid it is? It fits all the available facts—and we had to wait for a mere boy to evolve it. Move!"
Chapter Three
"Ross Island"
WE MOVED ALL right. So did Honey Hayling, He always belied the fatness of his body by the speed of his movements. He pushed between us and examined the control board. He punched for a sample sheet, read the incomprehensible symbols with what looked like a new respect for Sharp. Then he glanced up and said, "This is a very competent set-up of yours, young fellow. I must say I hadn't expected this. Masters gave me to understand you were an irresponsible young scoundrel who didn't know a thing about this."
Masters fumed silently.
"Now then," said Hayling. "You'd better start back at the beginning and run over that idea of yours again."
This time, because Sharp wasn't frantic with indignation, his theory came out clearer than before and more detailed. When he'd gotten as far as the carbon that was shooting into the stratosphere, Hayling interrupted him and said, "That may have some relation to the plant blight that's going on."
"Plant blight?" said Sharp, pausing. "What plant blight?"
"Secret," said Hayling, his little eyes bright with worry. "About two years ago, perhaps, the report came in that in the central regions of the Congo and Amazon jungles, the trees were wilting. There was a continual thick fog over that section of the forest. It doesn't seem like a disease. We can't get in to get samples—we've sent dozens of men into the Amazon belts, and lost the lot. The forests have gone mad. It may be a peculiar result of the radiation that's leaking through the stratosphere."
"Oh? Yes," said Sharp, not very interested. He completed his run-through of the theory. By then I was feeling hungry, so I took time out to drop around to Barty's grill for a mid-afternoon snack for all of us. By the time I came back, even Masters was becoming convinced that Sharp knew his onions. I dished out the food silently. While we were eating, a bell clanged, and Sharp looked up.
"But the problem can't be through yet!" he said through a faceful of hamburger.
"It is, dammit," declared Hayling. He scrambled to his feet and threw the rest of his meal on the floor.
There certainly were ninety little lights shining on the board. Hayling was punching for the answers. Through they came, sheets of them. Symbol after symbol, and one graph that went up in a curve like a rocket. Sharp looked at it and swore under his breath. Hayling and he consulted in low tones. Masters gave up in despair and trudged away. So there we were. Two human beings who knew all about the bad state of the world, and one who didn't know it all but sure wasn't happy about what he did know. And we were to get to grips with it damn soon.
I tried to finish my Wells, but it didn't work, and I wasn't going to follow Masters and walk off. I wanted in on whatever was going to happen, so I turned to the tomes of geology and kindred subjects, including Velikowsky's "Worlds in Collision"—some nut had written on the flyleaf: "This book is the greatest science fiction work of all time!"—which Sharp had scattered all over the floor, and found some fascinating theories about manna being a condensation of airborne carbohydrate.
I was interrupted by a startled exclamation from Sharp. He was white-faced as he looked at the results of the calculation. Hayling glanced up from his selection of solutions.
"What's up?" I demanded. Something told me it wasn't a time to be joking.
"If the present rate of increase in the world's heat goes on," said Sharp solemnly, keeping himself under control with an effort, "the icepacks will be half gone in fifty years."
I dropped my book, and my jaw must have dropped, too. I looked at the other two as if they had gone mad. "Charlie must have made a mistake," I asserted stupidly. Hayling glared at me.
"Charlie doesn't make mistakes," he asserted. "Sharp—are you sure you haven't dropped a digit in decoding or something?"
They checked it twice. It tied in.
"Fifty years," said Sharp, in a hushed voice, for all mankind. Honey Hayling continued to stare dumbly at the result. I just swallowed and wondered how long it would be before the planet became uninhabitable.
"What do we do about it?" I asked, feeling foolish. The great forces of Nature are unstoppable.
"Do?" echoed Hayling, coming out of a dream. "Young man, we're going to Washington in a hurry. This is a matter for the President!" He shut his sliderule and blasted the way to his big Buddleigh.
Coming atop the shattering declaration I had just heard, the hurried plane trip came as an anticlimax. I don't remember much of it, and if I did, it would be just plain boring, but I have Sharp's original solution to the problems he propounded to Charlie. Here is a copy of them, as he wrote them down in a bucking Lodestar, riding one of the wildest journeys ever made in an airplane.
Duration till the icepacks reach half the present size
50 years
Duration before the carbon-oxygen reaction in the stratosphere goes to extinction
120-150 years
Extent of coastal erosion: in ten years
Doubled
Extent of coastal erosion: in a century
Seven times
The graph I had seen was temperature rises. I said it went up like a rocket. Inside a century no place on earth would be less than eighty centigrade, and wet, muggy heat at that.
