Well, she thought, if they try to get physical I’ll just have to introduce them to Elly.
CHENGDU, SICHUAN PROVINCE
Dan had to shout through his sanitary mask to make himself heard over the din of construction. “All I’m asking, Zack, is can he do it or can’t he?” He’d known Zack Freiberg for more than twenty years, since Zack had been an earnest young planetary geochemist intent on exploring asteroids and Dan had hired him away from his university post. Freiberg had taken flak from his friends in academia for joining big, bad Dan Randolph, the greedy capitalist founder and head of Astro Manufacturing. But over the years a mutual respect had slowly developed into a trusting friendship. It had been Zack who’d first warned Dan about the looming greenhouse cliff, and what it would do to the Earth’s climate. The greenhouse cliff had arrived, and the Earth’s politicians and business leaders had sailed blindly over its edge as the planet plunged into catastrophic warming. Zack was no longer the chubby, apple-cheeked kid Dan had first met. His strawberry hair had gone iron gray, although it was still thick and tightly curled. The past few years had toughened him, made him leaner, harder, boiled away the baby fat in his body. His face had hardened, too, as he watched his equations and graphs turn into massive human suffering.
The two men were standing on the edge of a denuded ridge, looking out across a barren coal-black valley where thousands of Chinese workers toiled unceasingly. By all the gods, Dan thought, they really do look like an army of ants scurrying around. In the middle of the valley four enormously tall smokestacks of a huge electricity-generating plant belched dark gray fumes into the hazy sky. Mountainous piles of coal lay by the railroad track that ran alongside the power plant. Off on the horizon, beyond the farther stripped-bare ridge, the Yangzi River glittered in the hazy morning sunshine like a deadly boa constrictor slowly creeping up on its prey. A sluggish warm breeze smelled of raw coal and diesel fumes.
Dan shuddered inwardly, wondering how many billions of microbes were worming their way through his sanitary mask and nose plugs, eager to chew past his weakened immune system and set up homes for themselves inside his body.
“Dan, I really don’t have time for this,” Freiberg hollered over the roar of a huge truck carrying twenty tons of dirt and rubble down into the valley on wheels that dwarfed both men.
“I just need a few hours of your time,” Dan said, feeling his throat going hoarse from his shouting. “Jeez, I came all the way out here to get your opinion on this.”
It was a sign of the Chinese government’s belated realization that the greenhouse warming would decimate China as well as the rest of the world that they had asked Freiberg to personally direct their massive construction program. At one end of the valley, Chinese engineers and laborers were building a dam to protect the electrical power-generating station from the encroaching Yangzi. At the other end, a crew from Yamagata Industries was constructing a complex pumping station to remove the carbon dioxide emitted by the power station’s stacks and store it deep underground, in the played-out seams of the coal bed that provided fuel for the generators.
With an exasperated frown, Freiberg said, “Listen, I know I still get my paycheck from Astro, but that doesn’t mean I can jump whenever you blow the whistle.”
Dan looked into the other man’s light blue eyes and saw pain there, disappointment and outright fear. Zack blames himself for this catastrophe, Dan knew. He discovered the greenhouse cliff and he acts as if it’s all his fault. Instead of some fathead king shooting the messenger, the messenger wants to shoot himself.
“Look, Zack,” he said, as reasonably as he could manage, “you have to eat a meal now and then, don’t you?”
Freiberg nodded warily. He’d been sweet-talked by Dan into doing things he hadn’t wanted to do often enough in the past.
“So I brought you lunch,” Dan said, waving his arm in the direction of the oversized mobile home he’d arrived in. Its roof glittered with solar panels. “When the noon whistle blows, come in and break some bread with me. That’s all I’m asking.”