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The Precipice
by Ben Bova
The modern tropics and their fringes support more than half the world’s population, numbered in the billions. Many already live at the fringe of survival, dependent on food aid transported from the grain belts of more temperate zones. Even a small climatic shift… would physically compress the geographical limits for cereal cropping… I leave it to your imagination what such a pace of climate change would entail for most people.
…some men have already embarked on a bold new adventure, the conquest of outer space. This is a healthy sign, a clear indication that some of us are still feral men, unwilling to domesticate ourselves by any kind of bondage, even that of the spatial limitations of our planet’s surface.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Irving Levitt, a rare jewel among men.
To Barbara, who adorns my life with beauty.
And with special thanks to Jeff Mitchell, a real rocket scientist; to Chris Fountain, metallurgist and optimist; and to Lee Modesitt, an economist with imagination; true friends all.
MEMPHIS
“Jesus,” the pilot kept murmuring. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” The helicopter was racing north, bucking, jolting between the shattered land below and the thick dark gray clouds scudding just above, trying to follow Interstate 55 from the Memphis International Airport to what was left of the devastated city. You could not see the highway; it was carpeted from horizon to horizon with refugees, bumper to bumper traffic inching along, an un-ending stream of cars, trucks, vans, busses, people on foot swarming like ants, trudging painfully along the shoulders of the road in the driving, soaking rain, women pushing baby carriages, men and boys hauling carts piled high with whatever they could salvage from their homes. Flood water was lapping along the shoulder embankment, rising, still rising, reaching for the poor miserable people as they fled their homes, their hopes, their world in a desperate attempt to escape the rising waters. Dan Randolph felt the straps of his safety harness cutting into his shoulders as he stared grimly out the window from his seat behind the two pilots. His head throbbed painfully and the filter plugs in his nostrils were hurting again. He barely noticed the copter’s buffeting and jouncing in the choppy wind as he watched the swollen tide of refugees crawling sluggishly along the highway. It’s like a war zone, Dan thought. Except that the enemy is Mother Nature. The flooding was bad enough, but the earthquake broke their backs.
Dan put the electronically-boosted binoculars to his eyes once again, searching, sca
There must be half a million people down there, he thought. More.
Finding her will take a miracle.
The chopper bounced and slewed wildly in a sudden gust of wind, banging the binoculars painfully against Dan’s brow. He started to yell something to the pilot, then realized that they had run into another blustery squall. Fat, pounding raindrops splattered thickly against the copter’s windows, cutting Dan’s vision down almost to nothing.
The pilot slid back the transparent sanitary partition that isolated Dan’s compartment. Dan suppressed an angry urge to slam it back. What good are sterile barriers if you open them to the outside air?
“We’ve got to turn back, sir,” the pilot yelled over the thrumming thunder of the engines.
“No!” Dan shouted. “Not till we find her!”
Half turning in his seat to face Dan, the pilot jabbed a finger toward his spattered windscreen. “Mr. Randolph, you can fire me when we land, but I ain’t going to fly through that.”
Looking past the flapping windscreen wipers, Dan saw four deadly slim dark fu
As he locked the partition shut again and fumbled in his pockets for his antiseptic spray, the chopper swung away, heading back toward what was left of the international airport. The Te
Then came the earthquake. A solid nine on the Richter scale, so powerful that it flattened buildings from Nashville to Little Rock and as far north as St. Louis. New Orleans had already been under water for years as the rising Gulf of Mexico inexorably reclaimed its shoreline from Florida to Texas. The Mississippi was in flood all the way up to Cairo, and still rising.
Now, with communications out, millions homeless in the never-ending rains, aftershocks strong enough to tumble skyscrapers, Dan Randolph searched for the one person who meant something to him, the only woman he had ever loved. He let the binoculars drop from his fingers and rested his head on the scat back. It was hopeless. Finding Jane out there among all those other people—
The copilot had twisted around in his seat and was tapping on the clear plastic partition.
“What?” Dan yelled.
Instead of trying to outshout the engines’ roar through the partition, the copilot pointed to the earpiece of his helmet. Dan understood and picked up the headset they had given him from where he’d dumped it on the floor. He had sprayed it when they’d first handed it to him, but now he doused it again with the antiseptic. As he clamped it over his head, he heard the metallic, static-streaked voice of a news reporter saying,”… definitely identified as Jane Scan-well. The former President was found, by a strange twist of fate, on President’s Island, where she was apparently attempting to help a family of refugees escape the rising Mississippi waters. Their boat apparently cap-sized and was swept downstream, but snagged on treetops on the island.
“Jane Scanwell, the fifty-second President of the United States, died living to save others from the ravages of flood and earthquake here in what remains of Memphis, Te