New Title 1 (4 page)

The President took a leisurely turn through the office, then settled behind the desk, flicked his thumb across the login sensor, and watched the displays mounted beneath the glass-topped surface snap on in his customized orientation. The screens displayed data on the state of the United States at that moment, as well as data on the Verdant satellite that corroborated with Harley’s report, and added information gleaned from other news reports and data collectors by the embassy staff.

Lambert concentrated on the United States reports, which were not good: Besides the nationwide flight cancellations, the ash was beginning to have an effect on the ground, causing abrasive and choking dust-storms in the states surrounding Wyoming. The word “ash,” in this case, was an unfortunate misnomer, suggesting light flakes of carbon, something that drifts out of a campfire, to most of the public… when in fact, it mostly consisted of fine grains of rock, in sizes that ranged from pinprick to golf-ball, spewing out of the caldera, buoyed aloft by the hot gasses, and eventually raining down on everything below it. Local fields and forests were getting stripped down to nothing… it was clear that any crops that were in the path of the advancing ash clouds would be wiped out. The ash was fine enough to be inhaled, and could cause immediate suffocation at worst, or at best, enough of a build-up in the lungs to cause cancer and other ailments in later months or years. The ash was also capable of wearing down surfaces like sandpaper: Clear surfaces like glass would become permanently clouded over; protective finishes would be scraped away, leaving buildings, vehicles, roads, machinery, anything, more exposed to the elements afterward; and wear and replacement schedules would be accelerated for anything exposed to the ash.

Possibly worst of all, the ash cloud would immediately impact the power industry. The cloud itself would most directly block the millions of acres of solar cell installations that depended on the Sun’s light and heat to generate electricity. Once the ash descended from the sky and impacted the cells directly, it would wear away at their surfaces, tearing away or obscuring the multiple chemical layers that did the work of converting solar energy into electricity, and efficiencies would drop severely… essentially all of those solar cells would have to be replaced outright. Windmills would similarly suffer major damage from ash-related wear, worse than any dust-storm, and would also certainly need replacement. Only their tidal systems would be left, but they mostly provided power only to coastal regions… though possibly they would be barely adequate for the major coastal cities, they would certainly not be enough for the entire country.

The United States had come so far from its twentieth century pollution levels, its overly-generous contribution to global warming. It had waited so long, even after pretending to heed the warnings of scientists, that it had finally taken the severe droughts, the three-meter sea level rise (and still rising), and the loss of so much expensive American coastline property, to spur the country into decisive action… and after years of pain, it had actually been working. And now, after over a century of painful but successful national conversion from oil- and coal-based power sources to geothermal, hydro-tidal, solar and wind power sources, their sustainable infrastructure was about to come crashing down upon them.

And the most ironic of all, their geothermal industry would prove to be equally unable to provide power for the rest of the country, even in the face of a volcanic upheaval that was proving to be providing enough power for the entire country to run on every three minutes or so. Their most powerful geothermic plant complex had happened to be the old one at Yellowstone… and the nation had taken a large hit when geologic states were becoming so unstable there that the local area, including the geothermic plant, had had to be shut down and evacuated. Though proposals to restart it and run it purely on automation had been forwarded multiple times, they had never been ratified and acted upon. That left the next-largest mainland plant, at Mount St. Helens, and many smaller plants around the country, but again, none of which provided more than a small fraction of America’s power needs. (And there would surely be those who would claim that the evacuated plant had somehow caused the caldera to finally breach—a claim akin to suggesting a mosquito-bite could cause a human body to detonate.)

Power gone, the nation’s breadbasket literally scoured, nothing running… it was a crisis of biblical proportions. And though it would be a slow process, Lambert guessed that within the month, the United States would be effectively, completely shut down.

Lambert reflected briefly on the thinking of the late-twentieth century regarding what was referred to as the Great Extinction Event of the late Cretaceous period… at the time, it was believed that a rogue asteroid impact had served to wipe out the dinosaurs. But by the mid-twenty-first century, scientists had come to a new conclusion: That runaway climate change had devastated the environment, ruining the food chain from plants-up and leaving the dinosaurs with nothing to live on, and that before the actual impact, they were already dying off and almost gone. If anything, the asteroid may have been the final nail on the coffin, but without the impact, there would have been the same result. And in this new scenario, the trigger had been volcanic activity: Specifically, the volcanic ranges west of India that had started the runaway global warming event. Man had been watching for its expected death-knell in the wrong direction—the Extinction Event had not been triggered from without, but from within. And the likelihood of future such events were statistically more likely to happen than any potential asteroid collision.

Scientists and reporters were already picking up on the parallels, and the ironies, of the two eras: Many of them were stating that there was, at this point, nothing that could be done; that Man’s time on the planet was as done as the dinosaur’s. Geologic history was repeating itself, and for the human race, the fat lady had sung.

And it was happening on Lambert’s watch. All the good he had accomplished, all the positive improvements he’d made to his country during his term, would be wiped out, both literally and historically, by this one event. He had been damned by unfortunate circumstance.

President Lambert looked up. He realized Thompson was standing there, silently watching him. He managed a weak smile and said, “I’m all right. Let’s talk about our meeting with the Ceo.”

~

The satellite-wide ambient lighting had begun to dim hours earlier, in sync with Greenwich Mean Time, the official time on-board all of the satellites. That meant that it was not that late to Lambert and Thompson, at about the time most people on-board Verdant were already in bed.

Nonetheless, Lambert felt exhausted, mostly from the mental stress, the deep-down feeling that everything he had accomplished in life had all gone down the drain in one day. So, when he and Thompson finally knocked off for the day, he felt he only had enough energy to take the elevator, the one meant to be used only for those visitors who were of limited ambulatory means, to get to the penthouse suite of the building, the Presidential Suite, two floors up.

Lambert entered the suite, barely nodding to the agent posted in the landing’s lobby, and started to strip off his jacket the moment he closed the door behind him. “Good evening, sir,” PJ, the house butler, greeted him as he entered. “Nice to see you back.”

“Hello, P.J.,” Lambert replied. Electronic house butlers could, of course, be named anything. Many of them were simply addressed as “Butler” by their owners. But it had been decided at some point, decades ago, that the official butler of the Presidential Suite needed a proper name of some sort, to distinguish it from the rest. By unofficial decree, the name was often only referred to by its initials—some historians suspected it had had something to do with past use of the system for clandestine affairs, and that using initials, full names, or other derivations, was a private way to keep official and unofficial affairs separate… a suspicion that had, of course, never been proven—“PJ” was short for “President’s Jeeves.”

As Lambert trudged towards the bedrooms on the north end of the suite, PJ asked, “Can I get you anything, sir?”

“Send my usual evening drink to the bedroom,” Lambert replied. “Any messages?”

“Just one,” PJ replied, “as follows: ‘Miss Vaughn is here.’”

PJ made that statement, just as Lambert was opening the bedroom double-doors. He paused as the doors swung open, and took in the view of the room from there, allowing his eyes to stop, not on the bed, but at the coffee table and divan beside the balcony. A woman reclined across the divan, facing the balcony and the view, and upon hearing the doors open, shifted leisurely to a seated position, the side slit on her silk skirt shifting as she turned to reveal almost everything south of her hips. She smiled at Lambert, and held up a tumbler that was identical to one that waited on the coffee table.

“And so she is,” Lambert smiled tiredly. “You can cancel that drink order.” He walked inside, allowing the doors to close silently behind him. He crossed over to the divan, and sat down. “Hello, Shay.”

“Hello, Gaston,” she smiled, using one slender hand to brush her shoulder-length auburn hair away from her face. She used the other hand to reach down to the coffee table, and hand him the glass. “You’ve had quite a day.”

“I’d like to say, ‘you don’t know the half of it’,” Lambert nodded, and took a swig from the tumbler. “But I’m pretty sure that you, and everybody else, know
exactly
the day I’ve had.”

She regarded him levelly, her eyes dancing in the light. “Are you all right?”

Lambert regarded her critically, though calculating more about himself than her. As for her, Shay was one of the most gorgeous creatures he’d ever laid eyes on, a nigh-elemental force. Her skin was a rich, deep, almost reddish-brown that was uncommon of most African-American women. She had an expressive almond-shaped face, dominated by prominent round cheekbones; her eyes were a dark brown with sparkling highlights, so striking that they operated much like miniature black holes, sucking you into their influence whether you liked it or not. She had a strong, lush figure and the legs of a singularly athletic goddess. As for himself, he would’ve given anything to be able to forget his troubles and just hold her,
ride
her, all day long. But unfortunately, it had already been a long, long day. Momentarily, he gave a small wince and a shrug. “Tired, mostly.”

“Can I—”

“Can you do me a favor?” Lambert interrupted her, and drained the tumbler. “Can we just not talk about it for a few minutes?”

Shay Vaughn regarded him sympathetically, and nodded. “I understand.” She put her tumbler on the coffee table, next to his, and shifted around to drape an exquisitely-toned arm over his shoulder. Lambert allowed himself to slump into the divan, and Shay rested her head lightly against his, gently caressing his temple with her hand as she held his hand with the other.

“Daddy, help me! I can’t find my ledlight!”

“Oh, Erin,” Calvin sighed the universal sigh of barely-tolerant parental frustration, “every time we have to go through this…”

“It was
right here
!” his daughter retorted as she dug through her desk drawers haphazardly, shoving things around in one drawer with one hand while pulling items from another drawer out onto the floor with the other. Her eyes always seemed to be engaged with the hand that was doing the least at any one time. “I just had it last week!”

“Keep looking,” Maria called from the kitchen. “Let your father finish his work.”

“Or it won’t matter whether you find your ledlight,” Calvin added from his office. He tried to tune out his daughter’s continued pleas for her mother to help her look, while he bent over his workstation. He was finishing his last report for
On High
, the Verdant news agency that regularly commissioned him for science-related commentary and consultation, and officially the last thing he had to do before he and his family could go on their camping trip. He was intent on finishing it quickly, because he suspected if he waited too long, he would be dragged into the mess going on down on Earth, and although he would not have said so aloud—because it would be bad for his reputation—he hoped to avoid it, at least for a few days.

The sudden cessation of commotion, and desperate voices, from Erin’s room indicated that she had found her ledlight, as Cal knew she would… crisis-of-the-minute over.
Good: Just need a good wrap-up
…

“Honey, should we bring the large jar of sauce for the barbeque, or will the small one be enough?”

Cal managed to avoid jumping at his wife’s sudden appearance at the office doorway, but he could not hide the fact that his train of thought was broken by the interruption. Doing his best to mask his irritation, he looked at his wife, and the two jars she held in her hands. “Bring the large one, dear,” he said quickly.

“Oh.” Maria bit her lower lip. “I broke your concentration… sorry, honey!” She elevated the large jar and smiled. “Large jar it is.” Then she hurried back to the kitchen.

“Sauce…” Cal muttered, as he tried to get his concentration back. “Ingredients… secret ingredient…” After a moment, his fingers flew across the keyboard. His muse appropriately piqued, his words came faster and faster, until he was audibly humming in an increasing crescendo as he neared the end. Abruptly, he stopped typing, and humming, and he leaned forward to examine the words he’d just deposited on the workstation screen. Then he lifted a hand as he said, “Aaannndd…” he quickly brought the hand down and struck the key to send the report off. “Done!”

“Good for you, Cal,” Maria was saying, but Calvin was already out of his chair and heading for the bedroom. He noted that his wife’s voice did not sound as enthusiastic as he would have liked… he hoped he was over-reacting. But as he passed by his daughter’s room, he caught Erin’s eye, and she gave him a look that spoke volumes.
It was going to be another one of
those
camping trips
.