“That’s true, Senator,” shot back Bussek, “and what about your alma mater when the Charles River tops its banks and makes a wading pool of Harvard Yard?”
“It’ll need more than sixteen feet of water to drown Harvard, sonny.”
“The hell with Harvard,” Traynor said testily. “What about the rest of the world?”
“The outlook is far from rosy, Mr. President,” Bussek said somberly. “A five-meter rise will inundate a tremendous amount of territory and, in some instances, whole countries. Bangladesh will be drowned, as will most of Holland, much of Cyprus, Greece, the Sinai Peninsula, and Egypt, for example. Whole chains of Pacific islands will be obliterated. All major Australian cities, being on the coast, will be threatened. The water will be lapping at the foundations of the very building we’re meeting in. Conservatively, five and a half trillion dollars’ worth of land, buildings, and facilities will be wiped out. The human loss, of course, will be incalculable.”
A leaden silence fell as the politicians tried to cope with the enormity of the coming catastrophe. The gentleman from Massachusetts was particularly perturbed. Inasmuch as the bulk of his support came from port cities and coastal towns, unless he could vote the graveyard, he just might not be reelected.
“And that, as the players of gin rummy say,” Bussek went on, “is just for openers. There’s nothing magical about the five-meter-melt mark. Depending on how long the Siberian fires burn, we can expect a sea-level rise of something on the order of fifty feet if there is an East Antarctic ice surge. Good-bye Boston, New York City, Albany, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Miami, San Diego, Savannah, New Orleans, Galveston, Austin, and Houston. And if those fires are allowed to burn long enough, conceivably-and, gentlemen, when I say conceivably I mean certainly-the entire Antarctic ice cap will melt, raising the sea level 165 feet.
“When that happens, kiss the northern European plains bordering the Baltic Sea good-bye. Say a fond farewell to the Loire, Seine, Rhine, Elbe, Oder, Vistula, Dvina, Rhone, Tiber, and Po valleys, where modern civilization was born-and say it quick, because by then we’ll all be dead, or scrambling to get to Denver.”
“Maybe,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Moe Sill, “but while we’re trekking to the Rockies, the Russians will be heading for the Urals. After all, if the Rhine and Vistula get flooded, the waters will be high enough to inundate the better part of Russia and Eastern Europe, too, flooding the Dniepr, Don, Dniestr, and Danube basins.”
Dr. Bussek shook his head. “Not will flood-would flood.”
“What do you mean?”
“Simply that those Eastern European rivers will be spared flooding.”
“Impossible! As the Atlantic’s level rises, it will raise the level of the Mediterranean, which in turn will reverse the flow through the Bosphorus. Instead of emptying the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus will serve as a funnel to fill up the Black Sea, and the overflow will flood the Dniepr, Don, Dniestr and Danube basins.”
“Only if we’re prepared to drop a very large bomb.”
“On what?”
“On the barrage the Russians started constructing two days ago across the Dardanelles, the narrow choke point between the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean. The fact that they started construction proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, incidentally, that they do intend to drown the low-lying areas of the world, that those lignite fires are part of a greater, sinister purpose.”
On that happy note, President Turnbull adjourned for lunch. They would meet again at 1500 to consider the science staff’s suggestions on how to cope with this new development, short of all-out war.
The next day, 11 August, scientists, engineers, economists, and administrators began to converge on Houston from every state in the Union. President Tom Traynor had volunteered the facilities of SD-1, belonging to the late Ripley Forte, as the nerve center of what would become the largest and most hurried construction project in the history of mankind. SD-1, the workshops of Sunshine Industries, 1,450 meters below the surface in Houston, offered exceptional advantages as the focus of the binational effort. It had the unparalleled computer power of a Brown-Ash Mark IX computer, a whole constellation of engineering testing equipment, laboratories and offices big enough to house a small city, invulnerability to even a direct strike by a multimegaton hydrogen bomb, and internal security so strict that, to prevent leakage of plans, all but the most senior staff had to agree to remain in the inaccessible but comfortable underground chamber until all plans were complete and their implementation begun.
Dr. Bussek assured Presidents Turnbull and Traynor that it would probably require from three to four months, even at forced draft, for the staff of Project P (for polder) to work out all the details. His own White House staff were optimistic that the work could be completed before the big meltdown occurred, but Bussek himself was not so sanguine.
The Americans and Texans, working under the direction of experienced polder engineers from the Netherlands-refugees from Soviet occupation-contemplated building dikes of earth and concrete around the major threatened cities in time to prevent their being engulfed by the rising ocean waters. According to their calculations, it would take at least ten months to build the dikes to fifty feet, and five years or more to the height that the oceans would rise if both polar ice caps were fully melted.
Agonizing choices had to be made-a form of urban triage. Politicians in Washington were already waging all-out war to have smaller coastal cities in their constituencies put on the must-save list. But Turnbull was adamant: only those cities over one million in population could be so listed; all others must take their turn in what would be a long, long line. The unlucky residents of those cities had two choices: to remain and hope the inevitable would never happen, or to start thinking immediately about relocating to the higher-altitude interior. Immense dislocations were bound to occur. Families would be sundered, jobs lost, savings spent, companies bankrupted, national priorities rearranged.
One imponderable was where all the enormous quantities of building material would come from; another, how to transport it. All domestic construction was, of course, ordered to cease immediately, so that cement and other materials could be stockpiled against the time when planning was completed and actual polder construction began.
The economists worried about where the money would come from to build these immense dikes around America’s cities. The manpower experts worried not only about the money to train and pay the millions of workers who would be required, but where the bodies themselves would come from and what stringencies the two nations would face when they were seconded from their present jobs. Administrators grappled with finding transportation, accommodations, food, clothing, and jobs for the millions of people who would be displaced. The environmentalists worried about defacement of the landscape, the amplified ugliness of cities surrounded by bunds taller than twelve-story buildings. Psychologists were concerned about the consequences of making every coastal city a prison, in which the inmates would vent their frustrations on each other in random violence and bloodshed. Transportation experts wondered how they could preserve the flow of traffic in and out of cities without building highways on roadbeds as high as the bunds, far into interior America. Port authorities wrestled with the problem of constructing facilities that would have to be relocated on a higher level as each stage of the bund was completed.
Nobody had yet had the guts to address the biggest question of all: would it work? The Dutch engineers, who had reclaimed their country from the ocean, were convinced it would. They had done it before, and they could do it again. But the couple hundred miles of Low Country coastline hardly compared with the 12,400 miles of coastline of the United States and Texas, let alone the 88,600 miles of shoreline on which a dike would have to be built to protect the two countries completely. What the politicians and experts contemplated was a remaking of the face of America. Was it worth the struggle, when the nations’ leaders knew that this was merely the opening salvo in a war-without-weaponry the Russians had launched to conquer the pitiful remainder of the world they did not yet possess?
Or should the U.S. drop the bomb-now-and get it the hell over with?
25. A STROLL IN THE SUN
3 OCTOBER 2009
“How do I micturate?” said the Vice-President.
“How do you what?” a puzzled Captain Stanley Poldz replied.
“How do I piss?”
“Oh… Well, sir, you don’t,” said Poldz, commander of the supply ship James Madison, “unless you’re looking to get a shoe full of it. Actually, of course, since there’s no gravity up here, it’s liable to migrate up through your suit and slosh around in your helmet.”
“Why the hell wasn’t I told before I suited up?”