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“Then of course, things accelerate rapidly as the singularity’s growth feeds on itself. Ninety-five percent of the Earth won’t be swallowed till the last hour. Ninety percent in the final minute or so.”
Teresa and Pedro shared a bleak look. “My God,” she said.
“That, of course, is what will happen if it continues along the path now marked out for it.” Alex Lustig spread his hands again. “I don’t know about you lot. But personally, I’d rather not leave the thing to do its job unmolested.”
Teresa turned and stared at the physicist. He glanced back with raised eyebrows.
“Do you mean .-…?” she began, and was unable to speak.
He answered with a shrug. “Surely you don’t imagine I agreed to meet with you two just to satisfy my arch nemesis and his craving for headlines, do you? We’ll need your help, if we’re to stand a chance of getting rid of the damned thing.”
Manella panted. “You… have a way?”
“A way, yes, though it doesn’t offer very good odds. And it’s going to take more resources than I or my friends have at hand.”
He looked back and forth between his two stu
“Oh now, don’t take it like that. Look at it this way, Pedro. If we pull this off, you and my friend George can spend many fine years, forever if necessary, arguing how to find and punish the brainy bastards responsible for this thing.”
His expression then turned darker and he looked down. “That is, if this works.”
PART VI
PLANET
World Ocean rolled, stroked by driving winds and tugged by barren Sister Moon.
For millions of years, twin tidal humps of churning water swept round and round, meeting little resistance but the sea floor itself. Only here and there did some lone, steaming volcano thrust high enough to reach open sky, daring to split the driving waves.
Eventually more islands sweated out, then more still. As the crust heaved and shifted, many of those mafic barges collided and merged until newborn continents towered over the waters. Onto those sere platforms ceaseless rains fell, nurturing nothing.
Only sheltered below the waves did life wage its continuing struggle to improve or die. One-celled creatures divided prodigiously, without pla
One lucky family line chanced onto the trick of using sunlight to split water and make carbohydrates. That green patrimony took off, filling half the world’s niches.
The day’s length altered imperceptibly as Earth exchanged momentum with her moon. Eon by eon, the seas grew saltier and then stabilized. The sun brightened, also gradually. Sometimes the rolling waters changed color as some i
Then one tiny organism consumed another, but failed to devour its prey. Instead, the two coexisted and a deal was struck. An accidental sharing of responsibilities. A symbiosis.
One from many, and metazoa — multicellular life — was born.
That i
□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546] special notice to our members.
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This may be it! After so many false leads over so many years. According to LAPL’s chief of engineering, “… clean, efficient, and virtually limitless fusion power may now be only twenty or twenty-five years away…”
Those wanting technical details or to see the raw data from yesterday’s experiment, just press [□ Tech.PDi 23642399 4234.0975 aq], or voice-link “solenoid-fusion five” now.
• HYDROSPHERE
Claire Eng slogged through a pond of mucky water, hauling one end of a nylon net, concentrating hard to keep her footing on the plastic pool liner. She couldn’t afford to make one wrong move in this slimy soup. Not if I don’t want to spend two hours washing gunk out of my hair, she thought. Just beyond the net and its row of floating buoys, a throng of panicky fish protested being herded into this corner of the pond. Their splashing sent ripples lapping too close to the tops of her waders. The fish — and the odorous green gunk they lived in — were ready for harvest. Unfortunately, both smelled awfully ripe, too.
Claire spat greasy, rank droplets. “Come on, Tony!” she complained to the dark-haired boy at the other end of the net. “I still have homework to do, and Daisy’s sure to be a gor-suck pain about chores.”
Tony finished tying his end to a stainless steel grommet and hauled himself out of the pond. On the concrete bank, under a row of potted, overhanging mulberry trees, he used a hose to rinse off his waders before shucking them. “Be right with you, Claire,” he called cheerfully. “Just hold tight another minute!”
Claire tried to be patient, but her hat and sunglasses had come askew while helping drive hordes of hapless fish toward their doom. Now she had to face the relentless Louisiana sun unprotected. The afternoon was muggy, fly smitten, and she almost wished she’d had an excuse not to help her friend harvest this month’s tilapia crop. But, of course, she couldn’t let Tony down. Not with the Mexican megafarms cutting prices these days, driving small-time fish ranchers to the edge.
Angling her head away from the glare, she looked out across the endless flat expanse of Iberville Parish, dotted with cedar groves, rice paddies, and square dark patches of gene-designed quick-cane. And countless fish ponds — chains of low watery ovals, mulberry rimmed and glistening — the cool, efficient protein factories that let chefs in Baton Rouge and New Orleans maintain a spicy culinary tradition long after the Gulf coast fisheries had gone away.
In the distance, she made out a straight, tree-lined hummock, stretching north to south — the East Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee, one of so many mammoth earthworks thrown up by the Army Corps of Engineers over more than a century, to forever stave off the meeting of two great waters. Endless miles of dikes and cha
“Idiots,” she muttered. Now the corps was offering Congress a new plan, one “guaranteed” to keep the Mississippi from doing what it was absolutely bound to do eventually — shift its banks and find a new way to the sea. Logan’s private estimates suggested the new levees would keep Old Man River out of the Atchafalaya Valley for another three decades, maximum. Claire considered her father an optimist. “Ten more years, tops,” she said in a low voice.
She’d miss this land when it all disappeared… its criss-crossing little bayous and streams. The dead-still, humid air, thick with tangy Cajun cooking that bit right back when you put it in your mouth. And the old grempers and gremmers, sitting on benches, telling lies about days when there were still patches of mangrove swamp in these parts, thick with deer and ’gators and even “critters” never catalogued by science.