“What is your mission, exactly?”
She paused, then flared up. “Our mission is to explore and learn! Have you no better questions to ask than this?”
“Have you no better pictures than this?” an astronomer demanded. “These are just optical-band photographs! Don’t you have infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma ray observations to go with them?”
“It is not our custom,” Polly said sharply. She was obviously beginning to get angry. “Are not any of you going to ask questions about the magnetic launchers?”
There was a pause, then Hamilton Boyle leaned forward to the microphone. “I have one,” he said. “These plans you’re going to give us. Have you ever built a launcher from them?”
“I myself? Of course not.”
“Or anyone on your ship?”
“Not recently, no,” she conceded.
“So how do you know they’ll work?”
She glared at him, divided between astonishment and anger. “They are Hakh’hli plans,” she explained. “They have been approved by the Major Seniors! Of course they’ll work. Aren’t there any sensible questions?”
When it appeared there were not, Polly stormed off to her midday meal, refusing Hamilton Boyle’s offer to accompany her. As the meeting broke up, Boyle caught up with Marguery and Sandy. “Got any plans for lunch?” he asked amiably.
Marguery answered for both them. “We’re going to explore New York,” she said. “I think we’ll just get some sandwiches and eat them on the way.”
Boyle nodded, gazing shrewdly at Sandy. “Your friend wasn’t happy with us, I’m afraid,” he offered.
Sandy decided not to mention that Polly was seldom happy. “I think she was surprised that no one seemed to want to talk about the railgun offer.”
“Oh?” Boyle said, raising his eyebrows. “Was that what it was, an offer? It sounded like marching orders to me.”
“That’s just her way, probably,” Sandy said.
Boyle nodded. “Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asked.
Sandy looked at him in surprise. “Of course it’s a good idea. The Major Seniors wouldn’t approve it if it wasn’t. You can put thousands of capsules into orbit, very cheaply. And what about kicking some of that garbage out of orbit in safe areas? Don’t you want to save your cities from the kind of thing that almost happened to Perth?”
Boyle sighed. “Yes,” he said meditatively. “That certainly sounds very good, shoving the trash around so that it will miss cities. It’s the other side of that coin I’m thinking about.”
“I don’t understand,” Sandy said.
Boyle shrugged. “Well, if you can make an object deorbit to miss a city,” he said, “don’t you think it would be just as easy to make it hit one?”
Chapter 16
The four lasting legacies of the twentieth century are radionuclides, atmospheric gases, toxic chemicals, and plastics—and plastics is the greatest of these. Ten billion transitory hamburgers are long since digested, excreted, and gone; but they have left ten billion immortal Styrofoam boxes behind. Plastics are generally light enough to float in water. So when nylon fishing nets are lost overboard by trawlers they drift eternally through the seas and kill fish as long as they hold together, which is forever. Coca-Cola jugs and shampoo bottles wind up in the oceans and bob onto all the beaches of the world. The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, but a plastic six-pack container will never die. Like diamonds, plastics are forever. For some members of the animal kingdom, this is good news. Jellyfish, for instance, benefit from the situation. The animals that feed on jellyfish are likely to eat a drifting sandwich bag by mistake and die of it, so the jellyfish survive uneaten and prosper. But it is bad news for seals, diving birds, turtles, fish . . . and people.
On the trip across the wide Hudson River to old New York Marguery was curiously silent and detached. Sandy hardly noticed. He was thinking hard himself—not, for a wonder, about whether he would get seasick again, although the river was rough at first, the river current flowing south to collide with the tide sweeping in to the north, but about what Hamilton Boyle had said.
“Would you like another sandwich?” Marguery asked, delving into the box she had brought.
Sandy saw that he still had almost all of the first one in his hand. “Not right now. Marguery? Do you think the Hakh’hli would do anything like that?”
“Blast our cities? I don’t know, Sandy. Do you?”
“No! It’s totally against all their principles, I’m almost certain.”
She nodded, but all she said was, “Finish your sandwich.”
Once they were out of the currents of the Hudson it was more like the pleasure trip it was supposed to be. The little inertial-drive motor purred reassuringly as they glided to a landing on what Marguery said was West 34th Street.
There wasn’t a “shore” to land on. The old shore was underwater. Buildings were on every side, and with them breaking the force of waves and current the water was placid. Often it was even so clear that, peering over the side, Sandy could see the bottom—streets, with abandoned cars and trucks and huge things Marguery told him were city buses.
They beached the little boat between two tall buildings, and the two of them pulled it up past the high tide mark. The sidewalk was littered with brightly colored scraps of plastic brought up by waves. When Marguery explained casually that they were leftover garbage from the old days, Sandy looked back at the water with distaste. “Do you actually ‘swim’ in garbage?” he asked.
“Oh, the biological stuff is gone long ago,” she assured him. “There’s nothing in the water that’ll make you sick. Not here, anyway. If you went a little farther south there are real problems—when the old nuclear power plants went underwater all sorts of nasty stuff soaked out—but that’s there. Now, do you want to go up to the top of that building?”
Sandy squinted at what she was pointing at, shrugging out of the funny orange “life preserver” Marguery had made him wear. “What is it?”
“It’s the Empire State Building,” she said shortly. “From the top of it you can see all around. Well?”
He stepped back as a gentle wave from the river came close to his shoes. “Oh, sure,” he said sourly. “We’re having fun, right.”
It was almost true. If it hadn’t been for his injured feelings it would have been wholly true, because certainly what they were doing and seeing was exactly the sort of thing he had dreamed of all his young life. He was right in the heart of the Big Apple! It wasn’t at all the way he had expected it to be, to be sure, but there it was, all around him. Overhead were blue sky and towering white clouds; all around them were the windows and facades of the buildings that had made Manhattan the first skyscraper city.
They were not alone. Back on the river, just a block away, other little boats, inertial driven like their own or puffing steam from their purring little hydrogen motors, were skittering about, filled with people on errands he could not guess. There was a great barge moored stem and stern between two buildings at the river’s edge, and cranes were lowering masses of objects into it: spaghetti strands of cable, office machines, lighting fixtures.
“They’re mining,” Marguery said briefly. “These buildings are full of useful things, and it’s all going to go to waste here if the water gets any higher. Which it probably will . . . The amount of copper those old people used! So we just take what we want while we can.”
“It looks dangerous,” Sandy offered, watching two men in a building far over his head leaning out to guide a descending bundle of what seemed to be metal rods.
“Well, it is, a little,” Marguery said. “A lot of those buildings are rotten at their foundations—the water has eaten them away. Every once in a while one falls. But you don’t have to worry about the Empire State. It was built for the ages!”
Staring up at it, with his head thrown back until his neck hurt, Sandy wasn’t as much concerned about the building’s falling down as he was about getting up to the top of it. He didn’t think it was much of a worry for himself; the muscles that had grown up on the Hakh’hli ship were ready enough to lift him a mere thousand feet or so. He wondered if Marguery could make it. When they entered there were water stains in the lobby. When he pointed them out Marguery nodded somberly. “When there’s bad weather you can get storm surges all the way in here,” she told him. “They’re getting worse, too; I guess we haven’t finished with the warmup. Come on!”
It turned out they didn’t have to climb all the way to the top of the Empire State Building. From the lobby they had four flights of stairs to go, passing stories filled with stacked materials and a whole floor of buzzing, whining electrical generators, hydrogen fueled and providing power to the floors above. There wasn’t any external electrical power in most of the city, Marguery explained, because the underground mains were now also underwater. But because of the generators they were able to ride in a comfortable elevator to the observation platform eighty-odd stories up.