Forte tried organizing the scientists by discipline, putting all the biological scientists, for instance, into one study group, allowing them to elect their own chairman who would suggest lines of inquiry. Four days were spent in rancorous politicking for the top job, the chairman elected being a relative nonentity from Columbia University whose inoffensiveness was the one qualification upon which all could agree. His suggestions for lines of research for biological warfare were similarly inoffensive, and weeks were lost before Forte summarily deposed him.
Simultaneously, Forte disbanded the study groups. He observed that they spent most of their time drinking coffee, talking about women, boasting of their previous scientific achievements, buttering up each other against the time when one academic hand could wash the other, dozing, and playing practical jokes like connecting the chairman’s chair to the nearest electrical outlet and dosing each other’s drinks with exotic bacteria that produced what came to be called the Saldanha Samba.
By September each savant was confined to an individual carrel for at least four hours each day. Forte made it clear that unless a scientist produced, he would be invited to leave. As they were all being paid handsomely on a daily basis, the pace of research picked up. By the middle of the month, the spate of papers turned into a torrent; by the end, to a trickle. At that point, Forte shut off the faucet and told his sixty-two savants to relax and enjoy the beach while he, Joe Mansour and Jennifer Red Cloud examined their contributions to the art of war.
“Here’s a cute one,” said Mansour, picking up a thin sheaf from the stack of papers on the desk in his study overlooking the sea. “The abstract says that it would be practical to destroy the western hemisphere’s oxygen supply, and notes that even without the deleterious effects of the blanket of smoke covering it, the oxygen-carbon dioxide ratio is already out of balance. As an example, he notes that as early as the 1970s, California was consuming six percent more oxygen than it produced through the respiratory processes of green vegetation. Most of the deficit was due to combustion of hydrocarbons in automobiles, for industrial power, and essentials like air conditioning and heating swimming pools.”
“That explains why I was breathless all those years I’ve been living in San Francisco,” said Red Cloud. “I always knew it couldn’t be the men.”
“Maybe it was,” Ripley Forte said sourly. “Maybe they used it all up running away from your hostile takeover bids.” He was still seething from Red Cloud’s continuing refusal to allow him to see then” son. Ripley Jr. was almost six months old, and Forte had seen him exactly once. He had pleaded, he had threatened, he had sulked, and he had bargained, all to no avail. He had tried everything but threatening her bodily harm, and by now even that prospect had emerged from the shadows, beckoning.
“Maybe,” Red Cloud conceded. “Or maybe you used it all up yourself, huffing and puffing when I kicked you out of the company with such childish ease.”
“You’re both wrong,” Mansour said equably. He had been in the middle of too many exchanges like this during the past two months to take them seriously. “As a matter of fact, the author of this little gem says that the deficit, now nearer twenty percent, is compensated by winds off the Pacific.”
“Then how are the Russians going to destroy our oxygen supply?” Red Cloud asked.
“Well, you see, the Pacific supplies only a fraction of total American needs. Most comes from our own trees and grasses and other green plants. But not all. A substantial proportion is brought from the southern hemisphere by means of atmospheric mixing. And the oxygen in the southern hemisphere is largely produced by the Amazon forests.”
“Is he suggesting that the Russians, who already control Brazil, are going to cut down a couple of million square miles of trees in order to asphyxiate us?” Red Cloud said, unbelieving.
“That he is. At least, that is one of the substrategies. The Russians could shut down investment in Brazil’s troubled industries, causing them to collapse completely. Its 180 million people would be forced, willy-nilly, back to the land, of which not nearly enough already under agricultural production exists. In order to survive, they’d have to cut down the Amazon to plant their crops. With the Amazon greenery gone, they’d get a crop or two out of the thin lateritic soil and the next growing season die by the tens of millions. And the consequent loss of Brazil’s oxygen would so reduce that of the United States that our people-your people, that is-would suffer progressive breathing difficulty, asthma, respiratory infections, heart trouble, lowered productivity due to diminished energy, diminished mental capacity due to a lack of oxygen on which the brain depends. The United States would become a nation of zombies.
“And that’s only the long-range scenario. The Russians could make it come to pass within a single year by spraying defoliants over the rain forest. Or they could start fires in their coal and oil reserves to consume the oxygen that is now exported north on the winds. Or they could-”
“Spare us,” said Forte. “We get the idea. And so, apparently, does the author of this paper, one Stanislaus Pec. He has come up with the same idea, but his is even more sneaky. Noting that chlorophyll a-C55H72O5N4Mg- the most abundant form of the pigment-contains a single atom of magnesium, he has come up with a cheaply manufactured chemical that, if sprayed across the forest, will combine with that magnesium atom, breaking down the chlorophyll. The result will be instant death for all foliage so affected, for the chlorophyll is the engine that runs photosynthesis. Without it, the plants themselves will be unable to breathe, metabolism will cease, and good-bye Brazil.”
“Good-bye Brazil, hello Russia,” said Red Cloud, plucking a study from the stack before her. “Chaim Rosenberg here believes in youth. In fact, he believes in it so fervently that he suggests every Russian get a piece of it.”
“Youth?” queried Mansour.
“Sort of. He suggests we sow the atmosphere with an aerosol the length and breadth of Russia. The aerosol would contain a human analogue of the juvenile hormone used in pesticides to promote rapid growth of the young in such species as grasshoppers. The growth of their soft tissues is so rapid that the insect is compressed in the shell or carapace that normally it would moult at the end of each stage. Its accelerated growth causes the juvenile hopper to be crushed by its own shell.”
“Humans don’t have shells,” Forte pointed out.
“I can think of some old crabs that do,” she said archly. “Anyway, shells aren’t the operative mechanism with humans. Dropping human juvenile hormone on Russia would cause early maturation. The six-month-old baby would have the body of a six-year-old, but its mental powers would naturally not progress at the same rate. Ten-month-old babies eating like twenty-year-olds, while not providing any productive capacity to the national economy, would soon bankrupt the nation. Furthermore, the hormone would accelerate the aging of adults. The ten-year-old would have the body of a centenarian. Russia would become a nation of instant geriatrics. No soldier would be up to the task of so much as lifting a rifle or doing a single push-up. What do you think?”
“Jolly as all get-out,” Forte said. “And what happens if the wind blows the aerosol back on the U.S.?”
“Well,” she replied, “in your case-not a thing. You’ve never acted your age anyway….”
There were more than a hundred other papers representing the fruits of brilliant scientific minds turned to barbarous mischief. Magnetic forces of ley lines could react with the sperm of humans who drank water contaminated with the extract of the spikes of the forking larkspur, so that the weakest instead of the strongest sperm fertilized the egg. This reproductive misadventure would produce a race of monsters.
One such monster must have thought of culturing a H2S-producing variant of the microorganism that causes red tides, then releasing them from cargo submarines by the ton. Prevailing winds would blow the organisms toward American beaches on both coasts, and the hydrogen sulphide-permeated atmosphere would depopulate both East and West coasts.
Enzymes, viruses, mutants, inorganic catalysts, deeds in the night and other unpleasantness chemical, biological, nuclear, and psychological filled the three stacks of studies that Joe Mansour had procured at such cost. But they didn’t tell Ripley Forte what the Russians were going to do next.
“Well, Joe,” he said when they had made a comprehensive review of the possibilities, “where’s that ‘tree of probability’ you told us about?”
Mansour looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know about the tree, but there’s certainly plenty of manure here to make it grow. I hate to admit it, but maybe science isn’t the answer.”
“It’s not the science but the scientists,” Red Cloud put in, “who are the problem. It seems that dear David’s man Dr. Oswaldo Edwards picked off the seventeen most competent of them and left us only the culls.”