Chiun retired to his room while Remo stayed awake, examining the pebble of faith and wondering, exactly, where it was supposed to go.
Chapter 31
Smith was a scientist, but not the right kind of scientist for this kind of work. He wasn’t even sure what the right kind of scientist was.
He needed somebody to tell him that his own calculations were wrong. They must be wrong.
The Folcroft Four, which spent twenty-four hours a day watching television, alerted Smith when an interesting guest appeared on one of the news networks. The giant mainframes watched and listened for certain keywords and phrases in a hundred languages.
The guest was interviewed by the feature anchor, who wore a perpetually amused smile and often reported on the ridiculous behavior of Hollywood celebrities. When he interviewed a scientist, it was a guaranteed nutjob.
The nutjob today had come to the same conclusion as Harold Smith, and Mark Howard, and Master Chiun.
“How much ice will build up, Dr. Dell?”
“I don’t know. It’s impossible to predict the amount of pressure behind the steam vents. The ice is building in a cone shape, which is structurally strong, but the hollow steam vent in the center will eventually collapse and plug the vent.”
“Problem solved,” said the features host with a smile.
“If the steam vent is powerful enough, it will simply build up pressure and heat until it opens a new release vent. It’s already burned through a four-mile-thick ice covering in the Antarctic Plain. There’s no reason to think—”
“But what will stop it, Dr. Dell?” The host looked at the audience and gave them a get-a-load-of-this smile. Time for the punch line.
“Nothing that I know of. The ice will continue collecting on the Antarctic continent indefinitely. The world’s oceans will be depleted. Eventually, Antarctica could become so heavily weighted that it will interfere with the gravity of the planet.”
“Really? But Antarctica is already at the bottom. Wouldn’t the extra weight just keep it at the bottom?”
The scientist explained that there was no “bottom” in space. “I don’t know what the displacement of mass would do to the gravitational behavior of Earth, and we might not be around to see it. The shrinking of the oceans on that scale is going to create climactic extremes—”
“Hey, now, don’t start talking dirty!” the host interrupted, and he played a boing sound effect.
Mark Howard was in his seat well before dawn, trying to find a channel through the activity at various think tanks around the world. It was apparent that CURE wasn’t the only organization taking seriously the buildup of South Pole ice.
“They’re acting like they don’t even care about their own security systems. They’re e-mailing data. They’re using insecure file-sharing sites. They’re going crazy.”
“They’re scared,” Smith said. “So far, there seems to be a high level of concurrence with Dr. Dell.” Smith frowned at his desktop. “Are we missing something? Nature is a system of checks and balances, Mark. Something like this upsets the way the world works. The earth would react to it.”
It was almost a poetic sentiment from the dry Dr. Smith, but he was speaking in scientific terms and Mark Howard knew it. “Eventually, yes. The gravitational pull might cause the buildup of Antarctic mass to shift toward the sun. The Antarctic would then heat up and the ice would melt.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t even get that far,” Smith said. “The climatologists are generating reams of hypotheses about the effects of oceanic depletion on the weather. There are a number of predictions of uncontrolled global warming.”
Mark Howard thought about that. “Enough to raise the temperature in Antarctica above freezing, to control the buildup of the cones? It would get pretty hot around here.”
Smith nodded. “It would.”
Howard said, “You’re right, Dr. Smith. No matter what’s making this happen, elder god or not, Mother Nature will probably find a way to balance itself out.”
“But mankind won’t necessarily survive the balancing act,” Smith concluded.
“Remember what Chiun said. If people only knew how inconsequential the human race was in the universe …” Howard shrugged.
Smith considered that. It wasn’t exactly what Chiun had said, but close enough.
It took an amazingly short amount of time for scientific lunacy to become accepted scientific fact. By five in the morning, a group of the world’s most respected climatologists and geologists was on the news making a dire prediction.
The features host wasn’t on the set anymore. It was one of the most senior anchors interviewing a panel of scientists around the world.
“Which one of you is right, gentlemen?” the anchor asked.
“It doesn’t matter which one of us is right,” shot back a Dutch geologist. “What matters is we must act now to save this planet.”
The anchor nodded. “What’s your view, Dr. Marteen?”
“Exactly the same as that of my colleague. We must act immediately.”
The anchor considered that. “Dr. Benton, your view differed—”
“My theories don’t matter because nobody will be alive to prove them,” Dr. Benton shot back. “Let us forget the theories and concentrate on the problem of survival. We all agree on that.”
“Not everyone here agreed, as I recall,” the host insisted, getting nervous. Conflict was the name of his game.
“Yes, we all agree. Have you not been listening?” Soon the anchor was drowned out by every voice on his distinguished panel.
“We need to deliver one message and one message only—we have to make this stop now,” the Dutch geologist shouted finally.
The interview ended when all the panelist feeds were killed.
“Clearly, a contentious issue,” the unsettled host said.
Sarah sat up to the sound of the bird talking to itself. It had insisted on sleeping in her room the night before, and now it was mumbling.
“Dee-ya dee-ya dee-ya.”
She wondered what Mark was doing. What was there to do? She really ought to watch the news, see what had happened overnight.
“Do not feed it, Sarah.”
She stiffened.
“The more it eats the more it grows. The more minds it consumes, the more powerful becomes its mind.”
The words were clear and sensible and unmistakable.
“Hear us, Sarah. Hear us speak and hear us dream and heed our words. Delay the coming of Mboi Aku. Delay him. Delay him. Dee-ya dee-ya dee-ya.”
Chapter 32
When Remo answered the door he found Sarah Slate in a translucent white T-shirt that must qualify as pajamas. The Snoopy decal was almost entirely washed off. She was barefoot, her hair mussed and her face flushed. She couldn’t have been more appealing.
She took one look at Remo and her body temperature shot up. Her breathing speeded up noticeably. She parted her lips to speak and got stuck.
Remo didn’t mean for this to happen. He just affected women this way and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t seem to turn it off the way Chiun did—not indefinitely. It made for some awkward situations—especially when it came to Sarah Slate. She was affected by his Sinanju male charms, and he was affected by her, too.
She was also gratingly smart and Mark Howard’s significant other. Much as Junior annoyed him, Remo actually, almost, liked Mark. He wasn’t about to stab the guy in the back just to get a stab at his girlfriend.
It was amazing how easily a crude and off-putting comment came to mind.
“You know I can see all your goodies through that thing?”