Perhaps we’ll show wisdom this time, as well. There’s always a chance.
Hours later Stan was still hard at work, predicting beam-exit points so that Spivey’s teams could get there in advance to study the effects, when he found himself blinking at his work screen with a weird picture still planted in his brain. It came and went before he could focus clearly, and now the display showed nothing abnormal. Perhaps it was just a figment of fatigue. Nevertheless, he retained a distinct afterimage… of a glittering smile set in a lizard’s face, and behind that a whipping, barbed and jeweled tail.
In 1828 Benjamin Morrell discovered, off Namibia, a treasure island covered with guano. A layer more than twenty-five-feet thick had been deposited by generations of cormorants, cape gannets, and penguins. Morrell called it “the richest manure pile in the world.” By 1844 up to five hundred ships at a time crowded round Ichaboe Isle. Eight thousand men carted off tons of “white gold” to make the gardens of England grow. A lucrative if messy business.
Then the guano was gone. The ships departed Ichaboe for Chile, the Falklands, anywhere birds nested near rich fishing grounds. Like Nauru, whose king sold half his tiny nation’s surface area to fund his people’s buying spree, each newfound deposit lasted a little while, made a few men rich, then vanished as if it had never been.
Many other ecological crises came and went. Shoals of fishes vanished. Vast swarms of birds died. Later, some fisheries recovered. And protected nesting grounds pulled some cormorants and gannets back from the verge of extinction.
Then, one day, someone noticed the birds were again doing what birds do… right out there on the rocks. Nor did they seem to mind much when men with shovels came — carefully this time, not to disturb the nestlings — and carried off in bags what the birds no longer had any use for.
It was a renewable resource after all. Or it could be, if managed properly.
Let the fish swarm and the currents flow and the sun shine upon the stony coasts. The birds rewarded those with patience.
• IONOSPHERE
Mark Randall could almost feel all the telescopes aimed at him. The sense of being watched caused a prickle on his neck as he maneuvered Intrepid, toward the strobing flash of the instrument package. Naturally, the great powers were observing his ship.
And the ninety-two news agencies and the Big 900 corporations and probably thousands of amateur astronomers whose instruments were within line of sight.
Some probably have a better idea what I’m chasing than I do, he contemplated.
“That thing wasn’t put there by any rocket,” Elaine Castro told him as she peered over his shoulder at the spinning cylinder caught in the shuttle’s spotlight. “This orbit is too weird, And look. The thing doesn’t even have standard attachment points!”
“I don’t think it was launched… normally,” Mark answered. Neither of them was saying anything new. “Need any help prepping for EVA?” he asked his new partner. “You’ve updated your inertial units?”
The stately black woman laid a space-gloved hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Yes, Mommy. And I promise, I’ll call if I need anything.”
Mark blinked with a sudden wave of deja vu, as if someone else were reading his lines in a play. Since when was he the worrywart, the double-checker, the fanatic for detail?
Since his last partner had been taken from him by something unfathomable, of course. “Well, give me a suit integrity readout from the airlock anyway, before pumping down.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n.” She saluted, primly and sarcastically. Elaine fastened her helmet and left to fetch the beeping mystery they’d been sent chasing round the world to claim.
How did you get there? he silently asked the spinning object. There were laws of dynamics that had to be bent just to reach this bizarre trajectory. No record showed any rocket launch during the last month that might have sent that thing on such a path.
But there are other records than those released by NORAD and SERA… records of inverted tornadoes and columns of vacuum at sea level… of vanishing aircraft and rainbows tied in half hitches.
His panels shone green. Happy green also lit where Elaine’s suit proclaimed itself in working order. Still, his eyes roved, scanning telemetry, attitude, life support, and especially navigation. Mark whistled softly between his teeth. He sang, half consciously, in a toneless whisper.
“I yam where I yam, and that’s all where I yam…”
His crewmate emerged into sight, waving cheerfully as she jetted toward the shining cylinder. Mark watched like a mother bear as she lassoed the spinning object and reeled it behind her to Intrepid’s stowage bay. Even as Elaine cycled back inside, Mark kept alert, watching not only his instruments, but also the Earth… which had once seemed such a reliable place, but of late had seemed much more twitchy, and prone even to sudden fits of wrath.
□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546],
Special Sub-Forum 562: Crackpot-Iconoclast Social Theories.
Do hidden influences control human affairs? Forget superstitions like astrology. I mean serious proposals, like Kondratieff waves, which seem to track technology boom-bust cycles, though no one knows why.
Another idea’s called “conservation of crises.” It contends that during any given century there’s just so much panic to go around.
Oh, surely there are ups and downs, like the Helvetian disaster and the second cancer plague. Still, from lifetime to lifetime you might say it all balances out so the average person remains just as worried about the future as her grandmother was.
Take the great peace-rush of the nineties. People were astonished how swiftly world statesmen started acting reasonably. Under the Emory Accords, leaders of India and Pakistan smoothed over their fathers’ mutual loathing. Russ and Han buried the hatchet, and the superpowers themselves agreed to the first inspection treaties. Earth’s people had been bankrupting themselves paying for armaments nobody dared use, so it seemed peace had come just in time.
But what if the timing was no coincidence? Imagine if, by some magic, Stalin and Mao had been replaced in 1949 by leaders just brimming with reason and integrity. Or all the paranoid twits had been given sanity pills, back when the world held just two billion humans, when the rain forests still bloomed, when the ozone was intact and Earth’s resources were still barely tapped?
It would have been too easy, then, to solve every crisis known or imagined! Without the arms race or those wasteful surrogate wars, per capita wealth would have skyrocketed. By now we’d be launching starships.
If you accept the bizarre notion that humanity somehow thrives on crisis, then it’s clear we had to have the cold war from 1950 to 1990, to keep tensions high until the surplus ran out.
Only then, with ecological collapse looming, was it okay to turn away from missile threats and ideologies. Because by then we all faced real problems.