“And any other parts of your anatomy he can lay his hands on.”
“Have you seen him yet, may I ask, sir?”
“You may, and I have. He’s right here.”
“In that case, would you please put this call on the speakerphone?”
President Turnbull shrugged and flicked the switch that made Forte’s call audible to the Soviet Premier.
“Welcome to the Land of the Free, Mr. Premier,” said Forte. “My informants tell me you’d like to see me.”
“Preferably dead,” replied Premier Evgeniy Luchenko. “But not until you order your minions to stop their criminal dumping of hot waters into the oceans.”
“Why the concern?” Forte said innocently. “The emissions are merely heating up the atmosphere-like your Siberian lignite fires. We-”
“The renegades who committed that crime against the Soviet Union have been rounded up and shot. The fires have been extinguished and further harm to the world environment averted. If, that is, you can be made to see reason and instruct your cohorts to cease the flow of hot water.”
“I see,” said Forte. “You’ve come to Washington to plead for the world environment.”
“That is correct. I must admit, to be perfectly candid, that injurious consequences to our national interests may result if these emissions are not halted.”
“Such as?”
“Mainly the killing of marine life on which our nutrition heavily depends, the drastic alteration of rain patterns-making deserts of our wheatlands and seas of our deserts, and the heating of tropical lands to the point where tens of millions will die from heat exhaustion.”
“Is that all?”
“Is that all? My God, man, isn’t that enough?”
Forte didn’t answer for a moment. Finally he said: “How about snowblitz?”
Premier Luchenko glanced at President Turnbull out of the corner of his eye. His brow had wrinkled interrogatively. Unless he was a better actor than Luchenko thought he was, Turnbull was completely in the dark. “Showbiz?”
“Nice try, Mr. Premier. In your discussion with President Turnbull about the main consequences of the hot-water emissions, did you happen to mention snowblitz?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, what the hell are you talking about, Forte?” Turnbull broke in angrily.
“The weather, what people always talk about, but never do anything about-until the Russians came along with their fires in Siberia. That injection of particulate matter and carbon dioxide into the air, as you are well aware, disrupted the earth’s temperature balance. It produced the greenhouse effect, heating the atmosphere, which caused melting of the snowcap and a rise in the sea level. But the Russians, in possession of the calculations of our seventeen missing scientists, knew they could stoke the fires only so long. If you recall, Mr. President, they finally desisted on what turned out to be very easy terms. That was uncharacteristic: Russians never offer easy terms.”
“I’ve already explained that, Mr. President,” Luchenko said hastily. “It was a conspiracy. We shot the conspirators. We want only good relations with the United States.”
President Turnbull smiled. “Sure you do, Evgeniy. Anything else, Forte?”
“So why did they stop? Because they had already wrung all the concessions out of you they were able to get. Also, their principal aim had been achieved: the imminent implementation of a plan to relocate coastal populations and dike the major American seaports. That was their real objective, for it would bankrupt the United States and make its conquest by Russia a mere formality.”
“I see what you’re driving at, Forte, but why should they stop at all? Why didn’t they keep the home fires burning, turn up the heat a notch, hurry us into making mistakes?”
“They didn’t dare. They feared the snowblitz.”
A snowblitz, Forte explained, paradoxically was the end result of too much global heating, and the Russians had to quench their fires before they reached that point, or the Soviet Union would be submerged beneath the advancing glaciers of a sudden new ice age.
The heating of the atmosphere did indeed melt the ice cap, raising the ocean’s levels. The hotter air over the oceans also caused greater evaporation from the sea and denser cloud cover. The ice cap’s weight kept enormous quantities of ice submerged below sea level; when the ice cap melted, raising the sea level, that submerged ice would also surge into the open sea, cooling it.
At the same time, the clouds of water vapor would provide an albedo effect, reflecting the sun’s warming rays back into the sky. The earth would cool rapidly. Precipitation from the clouds would, even in temperate climates, come down as snow. The white ground covering would reflect much of the sunlight that did penetrate the cloud cover back into the sky, and the earth’s surface would grow still colder. The combination of albedo from clouds and from increased snow cover and ice-surge cooling could, his scientists calculated, snowball and trigger an instantaneous ice age-“instantaneous” in the geologic sense. It might take a hundred or even a thousand years, as it did during a similar abrupt cooling 89,000 years ago, as the result of volcanic eruptions that enveloped the earth in clouds of dense ash. Europe suffered a brief but severe snowblitz 75,000 years ago when Indonesia’s Mount Toba blew its top, dispersing up to 480 cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere. Even such recent and minor volcanic eruptions as Tambora in 1815, Krakatoa in 1883, and Agung in 1963 had led to large-scale, though not catastrophic, cooling.
President Horatio Francis Turnbull felt a warming surge of relief. Ripley Forte was no traitor, after all. He had somehow duplicated the researches of the seventeen missing scientists, saw through the Russian’s schemes, and turned the tables on them. If they persisted in their enmity and their subversive attacks on the United States, he threatened Russia with a new ice age. Since Russia was much farther north than the United States, it would be the first to be covered with ice along, unfortunately, with Canada and Alaska. But Forte knew they wouldn’t allow that to happen. They’d bargain furiously, they’d bluff and storm, but in the end the Soviets would have to capitulate.
Turnbull could see it now: the complete dissolution of the Red Army, Navy, and Air Force. The extirpation of the KGB. The liberation of all the lands that had fallen under Russian subjection. A new, revivified Europe. A world under the humane guidance of the United States. A world in which American democracy would be universal.
“Forte,” intoned Turnbull, “the free world is in your debt. But the contest is not entirely won yet. You’ll have to keep control of those nuclear plants and their hot-water emissions until we can disarm the Soviet Union and put a U.S. army of occupation in place. Once our democratic institutions are firmly established, then you and your men can reap the rewards of a grateful world.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to adopt a slightly different scenario, sir.”
“Well,” Turnbull said grandly. “I leave it to you to work out the details. The main thing is, we have won.”
“No, sir,” said Forte, “nobody’s won anything yet. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what was going on between you and Premier Luchenko before I called.”
“We were discussing our differences, of course.”
“Discussing your differences, or threatening to wipe each other out because of them?”
“I believe Premier Luchenko did advocate certain typically barbarous measures to ensure that the Soviet Union got its way. I, on behalf of the American national interest, naturally had to point out that, if he even thought about implementing any such horrors, we’d reluctantly but certainly wipe his nose, but good.”
“Premier Luchenko?” Forte said softly.
“Yes,” Luchenko agreed, “there were intimations of violence. On our side, of course, they were only suggested as purely defensive measures to counter American aggression.”
“Sure,” said Forte. “Now, gentlemen, I’ll tell you the way we’re going to resolve this situation, without firing a shot, without dropping a single bomb or bacillus. We’re going to have us a little congress.”
Turnbull and Luchenko regarded each other uneasily.
“As you recall,” Forte went on, “Europe was in a hell of a mess after a generation of Napoleon’s adventures- just as the world is in a hell of a mess today because of sixty years of conflict between Russian ambitions to rule it all and American attempts to have everybody become nice little Americans. Europe resolved its problems for almost a hundred years at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. We’re going to solve the world’s problems starting next week at a congress between the only two powers that can make binding decisions: the United States and the Soviet Union. And just to make sure that you conferees take the matter seriously, I’m going to keep the hot water flowing until agreement is reached.”
Premier Luchenko’s heart bounded. The very thing! Once the conference began in Kiev, the KGB could keep track of the secret deliberations of the Americans and by means of indirection, subversion, blackmail, and threats manage events that would make the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, finally, the only remaining world power.