The dampness made him ache deep in his bones, an arthritic-like reminder of his age and the dose of radiation sickness he’d contracted years earlier. I ought to get back to Selene, he told himself. A man with a broken-down immune system shouldn’t stay on Earth if he doesn’t have to.
Yet for hours he simply sat there, staring out at the pounding storm, seeing only the face of Jane Scanwell, remembering the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers, the soft silkiness of her skin, the scent of her, the way she brightened a room, they way she had filled his life even though they were never really together, not more than a few quick hours now and then before they fell into bitter argument. There was so much separating them. After she had left the White House, they had managed to spend a couple of days together on a tropical atoll. Even that had ended in a quarrel.
But for once they had seen things the same way, had the same goal, fought the same fight on the same side. The greenhouse cliff meant war, a war pitting humankind’s global civilization against the blind forces of nature. Jane understood that as well as Dan did. They were going to fight this war together.
And it killed her.
Should I go on? Dan asked himself. What’s the use of it? What’s the sense of it? He wanted to cry, but the tears would not come.
Dan Randolph had always seemed larger than his actual physical size. He was a solidly-built welterweight, still in trim physical shape, although now, in his sixties, it took grueling hours in the gym to maintain his condition. His once-sandy hair was almost completely gray now; his staff people called him “the Silver Fox” behind his back. He had a fighter’s face, with a strong stubborn jaw and a nose that had been flattened years ago by a fist, when he’d been a construction worker in space. Despite all the wealth he’d amassed since those early days, he’d never had his nose fixed. Some said it was a perverse sense of machismo. His light gray eyes, which had often glinted in amusement at the foolishness of men, were bleak and saddened now.
A chime sounded, and the sleek display screen of his computer rose lowly, silently out of the desktop surface.
Dan swiveled his chair to see the screen. His administrative assistant’s young, somber face looked out at him. Teresa was a native of Caracas, tall, leggy, cocoa-cream complexion, deep brown almond eyes and thick lustrous midnight dark hair. Years earlier Dan would have tried to bed her and probably succeeded. Now he was simply annoyed at her intrusion into his memories.
“It’s almost dinnertime,” she said.
“So what?”
“Martin Humphries has been waiting all day to see you. He’s the man Zack Freiberg wants you to meet.”
Dan grimaced. Zack had been the first one to warn Dan of the impending greenhouse cliff.
“Not today, Teresa,” he said. “I don’t want to see anybody today,”
The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, softly, almost timidly, “Do you want me to bring you a dinner tray?”
Dan shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat.”
He looked at her image on his screen, so intent, so young and concerned and worried that the boss was going off the deep end. And he felt anger rising inside him, unreasoning blind blazing rage.
“No, goddammit to hell and back,” he snapped. “You have to eat. I can do any goddamned thing I want to, and if you want to keep drawing your paycheck you’d better leave me the hell alone.”
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing. Dan snapped his fingers and the screen went blank. Another snap and it folded back into its niche in the desk’s gleaming rosewood top.
Leaning back in his chair, Dan closed his eyes. He tried to close his mind against the memories, but that was impossible.
It was all going to be so damned great. Okay, a century or two of global warming would lead to a greenhouse cliff. Not a gradual warmup but a sudden, abrupt change in the world’s climate. All that latent heat stored in the oceans would pour into the atmosphere. Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melting away. Sea levels shooting up over a decade or two. Big storms and lots of them. Climate shifts turning croplands into deserts.