Belatedly, Crat realized his knife was gone for good, probably even now tumbling down to Davy Jones’s lost and found. So he did the only thing he could. Gathering a cluster of float buoys under one arm, he stretched across the intervening tangle to grab the dying man’s hair, hauling him up for a sobbing gasp of air. Each following breath came as a shrill whistle then… until the poor sod’s eyes cleared enough of threatening coma to fill instead with hysteria. Good thing the victim’s arms were still caught then, or in panic he’d have clawed Crat into the trap as well.
Crat’s own breathing came in shuddering sobs as he kicked in reserves he never knew he had before. Just keeping his own head above the lapping water was hard enough. He also had to tune out the fading splashes of other dying men nearby. I can’t help ’em. Really can’t… Got my hands full.
Nearby, Crat felt another form approach to look at him. That dolphin again. I wish someone’d shoot the damned…
Then he recalled that shove to the seat of his pants. The push that had saved his life.
His mind was too slow, too blurry to think of anything much beyond that. Certainly he formed no clear idea to thank the one responsible. But that eye seemed to sense something — his realization perhaps. Again it winked at him. Then the dolphin lifted its head, chattered quickly, and vanished.
Crat was still blinking at strange, unexpected thoughts when rescuers arrived at last to relieve him of his burden and haul his exhausted carcass out of the blood-warm sea.
A new type of pollution was first noticed way back in the nine-teen-seventies. Given the priorities of those times, it didn’t get as much attention as, say, tainted rivers or the choking stench over major cities. Nevertheless, a vocal opposition began to rise up in protest.
Trees. In certain places trees were decried as the latest symbols of human greed and villainy against nature.
“Oh, certainly trees are good things in general,” those voices proclaimed. “Each makes up a miniature ecosystem, sheltering and supporting a myriad of living things. Their roots hold down and aerate topsoil. They draw carbon from the air and give back sweet oxygen. From their breathing leaves transpires moisture, so one patch of forest passes on to the next each rainstorm’s bounty.”
Food, pulp, beauty, diversity… there was no counting the array of treasures lost in those tropical lands where hardwood forests fell daily in the hundreds, thousands of acres. And yet, take North America in 1990, where there actually were more trees than had stood a century before — many planted by law to replace ancient “harvested” stands of oak and beech and redwood. Or take Britain, where meadows once cropped close by herds of grazing sheep were now planted — under generous tax incentives — with hectare after hectare of specially bred pine.
Trash forests, they were called by some. Endless stands of uniformity, stretching in geometric lattice rows as far as the eye could see. Absolutely uniform, they had been gene spliced for quick growth. And grow they did.
“But these forests are dead zones,” said the complainers. “A floor covered with only pine needles or bitter eucalyptus leaves shelters few deer, feeds few otters, hears the songs of hardly any birds.”
Even much later, as the Great Campaign for the Trillion Trees got under way — losing in some places, but elsewhere helping hold fast against the spreading deserts — many new forests were still silent places. An emptiness seemed to whisper, echoing among the still branches.
It’s not the same, said this troubled quiet. Some things, once gone, cannot be easily restored.
• MESOSPHERE
The most pleasant thing about the new routine was that it finally gave Stan Goldman a chance to take some time off and go argue with old friends. The next several Gazer runs would be ordinary.
The program was on schedule, slowly nudging Beta, beat by beat, into its higher orbit. At last Stan felt he could leave his assistant in charge of the resonator and take an hour or so off to relax.
In fact, it was really part of his job — helping maintain their cover. After all, wouldn’t their hosts get suspicious if he didn’t stay in character? The paleontologists at the Hammer site would find it odd if old Stan Goldman didn’t come by on occasion to talk and kibitz. So it was with a relatively clear conscience that he made for the nearby encampment to partake of some beer and friendly conversation.
All in the line of duty of course.
“We ought to have an answer in a few years,” said Wyn Nielsen, the tall, blond director of the dig and an old friend of many years. “We’ll know when the Han finally launch that big interferometer of theirs. Until then talk is pointless.”
They had been disputing whether any nearby stellar systems might have Earthlike planets, and the elderly but still athletic Dane kept to his pragmatic, hard-nosed reputation. “If you have the means to experiment, do it! If not, then wait till experiments are possible. Theory by itself is only masturbation.”
The small club erupted in laughter. Still, Wyn was no spoilsport. And as everyone else seemed to want to speculate, he merely grumbled good-naturedly and went along.
“We’ll see about that Han interferometer,” said a woman geologist named Gorshkov, whom Stan had met off and on at conferences for decades. “The Chinese have been talking about it forever. Why can’t we answer the question with facilities in orbit right now?”
Stan shrugged. “The Euro-Russian and American telescopes are quite old by now, Elena. Yes, they’ve detected planets around nearby stars, but only giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Little rocky worlds like Earth are harder to find… like picking out the reflected glint of a needle next to a burning haystack, I should think.”
“But don’t most astrophysical models predict that sun-like stars will have planets?”
This time it was a younger Dane, Teresa’s husky friend Lars. The fellow might look like an overbuilt mechanic or an American football hero, but he obviously read a lot.
“Yes and no,” Stan replied. “G-type stars like our sun must shed angular momentum in their infancy, and since ours gave nearly all its spin momentum to her retinue of planets, most astronomers think other stars that rotate like the sun must have planets too.
“Furthermore, astronomers think early protostars give off fierce particle winds, which drive away volatile elements. That’s why there’s so much hydrogen in the outer solar system, while Mercury and Venus, sitting close in, have been stripped of theirs.”
“But Earth came out just right,” Wyn nodded. “In the middle of a zone where water can stay liquid, right?”
“The Goldilocks effect.” Stan nodded. “Life could never have started, or kept going for long, without lots of water.
“But as for Earth being ‘in the middle’ of the solar system’s life zone, well, astronomers have argued over that for more than a century. Some used to think that if our world was only five percent closer to the sun we would have fallen into the Venus trap… heat death by runaway greenhouse warming. And if we’d been just five percent farther, Earth’s seas would have frozen forever.”
“So? What’s the modern estimate?”
“Currently? The best models show our sun’s life zone is probably very broad indeed, stretching from just under one astronomical unit all the way out past three or more.”
Someone whistled. Elena Gorshkov closed her eyes momentarily. “Wait a minute. That extends past Mars! So why isn’t Mars a living world?”
“Good question. There’s evidence Mars once did have liquid water, carving great canyons we have yet to visit, alas.” To that there was a general murmur of agreement. Several raised their glasses to opportunities lost. “Perhaps there were even seas there for a while, where early life-forms made a brave start before all the water froze into the sands. The problem with old man Mars wasn’t that he spun too far from the sun. The real difficulty was that the Romans named their war god after a pygmy. A midget world, too small to hold onto the necessary greenhouse gases. Too small to keep those famous shield volcanoes smoking. Too small, by half, for life.”