The Precipice (2 page)

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 Tennessee National Guard had thrown a cordon around the grounds;
the airport was the Memphis region's last link with the rest of the country. The floods had knocked out electrical power,
smashed bridges, covered roads with thick muddy brown water. Most of the city had been submerged for days.

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 seat 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 Scanwell. 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 capsized and was swept
downstream, but snagged on treetops on the island.

“Jane Scanwell, the fifty-second President of the United States, died trying to save others from the ravages of flood and
earthquake here in what remains of Memphis, Tennessee.”

I
t was raining in Venezuela, too, when Dan Randolph finally got back to his headquarters. Another hurricane was tearing through
the Caribbean, lashing Barbados and the Windward Islands, dumping twenty-five centimeters of rain on the island of La Guaira
and Caracas, on the mainland, with more to come.

Dan sat behind his big, bare desk, still wearing the rumpled slacks and pullover that he had travelled in from the States.
His office smelled musty, mildewed from the incessant rain despite its laboring climate control system. He wasn't wearing
the protective nose plugs; the air in his office was routinely filtered and run past intense ultraviolet lamps.

Leaning back into the softly yielding caramel brown leather of his swivel chair, Dan gazed out at the windswept launch complex.
The rockets had been towed back into the assembly buildings. In this storm they could not dare to launch even the sturdy,
reliable Clipperships. The launch towers were visibly shaking in the gale-force wind, lashed
by horizontal sheets of rain; roofs had already peeled off some of the smaller buildings. Beyond the launch towers, the sea
was a wild madhouse of frothing whitecapped waves. The wind howled like a beast of prey, rattling even the thick double-paned
windows of Randolph's office.

Third storm to hit us and it's not even the Fourth of July yet Business isn't lousy enough, we've got these double-damned
hurricanes to deal with. At this rate I'll be broke by Labor Day.

We're losing, Dan thought. We're in a war and we're losing it. Hell, we've already lost it. What's the sense of pretending
otherwise?

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 slowly, 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.

So what? We'll use the resources of space to solve all those problems. Energy? We'll build solar power satellites, beam energy
from space to wherever it's needed. Raw materials? We'll mine the Moon and the asteroids; there's more natural resources in
space than the whole Earth can provide. Food production?

Well, that would be a tough one. We all knew that But with enough energy and enough raw materials we could irrigate the croplands
that were being desiccated by the climate shift.

Yeah, sure. And when half the world's major cities got
flooded out, what did we do? What could we do? When the electrical power grid got shattered, what did we do? When earthquakes
and tsunamis wiped out the heart of Japan's industrial capacity, what did we do? Diddley-squat. When this quake flattened
the midwest, what did we do? We tried to help the survivors and Jane got herself killed in the attempt.

The office door banged open and a huge, red-bearded man pushed in, carrying an ornately-carved teak tray laden with steaming
dishes. In his massive hands the tray looked like a little child's toy.

“Teresa says you've got to eat,” he announced in a high, sweet tenor as he set the tray on Dan's desk.

“I told her I'm not hungry.”

“You can't fookin' starve yourself. Eat something.”

Dan glanced at the tray. A steaming bowl of soup, a salad, a main course hidden under a stainless steel dome, a carafe of
coffee. No wine. Nothing alcoholic.

He pushed the tray toward the red-haired giant. “You eat it, George.”

Pulling one of the upholstered chairs up close to the desk, Big George looked his boss in the eye and pushed the tray back
toward Randolph.

“Eat,” he said. “It's good for ya.”

Dan stared back at George Ambrose. He'd known Big George since he'd been a fugitive on the Moon, hiding out from the Selene
City authorities with a handful of other free souls who styled themselves the Lunar Underground. Big George was Dan's personal
bodyguard now; he wore custom-tailored suits instead of patched coveralls. But he still looked like a barely-tamed frontiersman:
big, shaggy, the kind of man who could gleefully pound your head down into your ribcage with no personal malice at all.

“Tell you what,” Dan said, feeling a reluctant smile bend his lips a little. “I'll split it with you.”

George grinned back at him. “Good thinking, boss.”

They ate in silence for several minutes, George gobbling
the entire main course, which turned out to be a thick slab of prime rib. Dan took a few spoonfuls of soup and nibbled at
the salad.

“Better than the old days, huh?” George said, still chewing prime rib. “Fookin' soyburgers and recycled piss for water.”

Dan ignored the younger man's attempt to jolly him. “Has Teresa gone home?” he asked.

“Nope.”

Nettled, Dan glanced at his wristwatch. “She's not my nursemaid, double-damn it. I don't want her hovering over me like—”

“That Humphries bloke is still waitin' to see you,” George said.

“Now? He's out there now? It's almost nine o'clock, for chrissakes. What's wrong with him? Is he stuck here because of the
storm? Doesn't Teresa have the smarts to put him up in one of the guest suites?”

George shook his shaggy head. “He said he'll wait until you're ready to see ‘im. He did have an appointment, y'know.”

Dan let his breath out in a weary sigh. I just got back from the funeral and they expect me to stick to a schedule made out
weeks ago.

“Teresa says he's makin' her nervous.”

“Nervous?”

“He's comin' on to her. I can see it meself.”

Frowning, Dan muttered, ‘Teresa can take care of herself.”

“The voice of experience?” George grinned.

“He's been hitting on her all the time he's been waiting for me?”

“Want me to shoo ‘im off?” George asked.

For a moment Dan relished the image of George hustling his visitor out of the building. But then he realized that the man
would simply come back tomorrow. I'll have to get back to business, he told himself. Can't avoid it forever.

“Take the tray out,” he said to Big George, “and show this Humphries guy in.”

George smacked his lips. “I can bring in dessert and coffee.”

“Fine,” Dan said, unwilling to argue. “Do that.”

Grinning, George scooped up the crumb-littered tray in one hand and started for the door. Dan saw that the desktop was sprinkled
with crumbs, too. Annoyed, he brushed them to the carpet.

Teresa appeared at the door. “Mr. Martin Humphries,” she announced. She looked tense, Dan thought. Humphries must have really
rattled her.

Martin Humphries looked quite young. He was on the small side, a couple of centimeters shorter than Teresa, and he seemed
soft, with rounded shoulders and a waistline that was already getting thick, despite the careful drape of his burgundy blazer.
He seemed to radiate energy, though, as he strode confidently across the office toward Dan's desk.

Dan got to his feet and extended his hand across the desk.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, making himself smile.

Humphries took Dan's hand in a firm grip. “I understand,” he replied. “I'm sorry to intrude on your grief.”

His eyes told Dan that the words were nothing more than an expected ritual. Martin Humphries's face was round, almost boyish.
But his eyes were diamond-hard, cold and gray as the storm-lashed sea outside the window.

As they sat down, George re-entered the office bearing a tray of pastries and the same carafe of coffee, with a pair of china
cups and saucers alongside it. For all his size, Big George walked with the lightfooted step of a dancer—or a cat burglar.
Neither Dan nor Humphries said a word as George deftly deposited the tray on the desk and swiftly, silently left the office.