Van Vliet went right on, cruising remorselessly through basic biochemical information. This visual was obviously intended for people on higher managerial levels than Rhodes’, where technical expertise was more tenuous. “Ferrous salts— insufficient oxygen supply to the tissues—affinity for carbon, phosphorus, manganese, vanadium, tungsten—iron will form dihalides with all four of the common halogens—”
Yes. Yes. It certainly will.
With a diabolical grin Van Vliet said suddenly, “But of course that will soon be obsolete, so far as the human race is concerned. Since, as I have already indicated, our consensus projections of the makeup of the Earth’s atmosphere circa A.D. 2350 indicate significant replacement of oxygen and nitrogen by complex hydrocarbons and sulfur compounds, as well as a continuing increase in the already critical percentage of carbon dioxide, we will need to adjust the body’s respiration capacity accordingly. The risks of continuing to use the iron-based pigment hemoglobin as the respiratory system’s vital transport protein are manifest. We will have to shatter the human race’s dependence on oxygen. A hydrogen-to-methane cycle is one possible alternative, employing a transport protein that utilizes the locking and unlocking of a double sulfur bond, as can be seen in this diagram.”
The pattern now was that of a tightly coiled serpent in angry reds and slashing violets, head hovering above the tip of its own tail as though getting ready to strike.
Rhodes put Van Vliet’s presentation on hold and backed it up ninety seconds or so.
The risks of continuing to use the iron-based pigment hemoglobin as the respiratory system’s vital transport protein are manifest. We will have to shatter the human race’s dependence on oxygen.
He’s lost his mind, Rhodes thought.
A transport protein that utilizes the locking and unlocking of a double sulfur bond—
Right. Right. The visual, rolling onward, had reached the point where Rhodes had reversed it. Once again Van Vliet, like a capering demigod, built his red-and-purple serpent in midair in front of Rhodes’ desk with quick, delicate movements of his hands. Rhodes hunched forward with his chin propped on his fists and watched Van Vliet cruise on to the end of the first capsule, offering more apocalyptic news about the human respiratory system in the coming age of oxygen-deficient air. The second capsule, Van Vliet said by way of teaser, contained the actual technical specifications for the corrective work he proposed to undertake. Rhodes picked up the second capsule but did not insert it for playback.
The backstairs scuttlebutt was true, then.
We will have to shatter the human race’s dependence on oxygen—
The little guy was suggesting nothing less than to rearrange the body’s whole respiratory-circulatory works to make human beings capable of breathing a sulfur-dioxide/ methane/carbon-dioxide mix, and to hell with any need for oxygen. Of all the adapto proposals that had been kicked around the Santachiara labs in the past year and a half, this was by far the most radical. By far, by far, by far. No one had ever envisioned attempting such a total transformation. Rhodes doubted, even after having looked through some of Van Vliet’s specs, that the thing could ever be managed. It was wildly out of line with Rhodes’ sense of the possible.
Rhodes felt a muscle pulling itself tight in his cheek, like a tiny acrobat getting itself ready for a long-distance leap, and he pressed the tips of two fingers into it, hard, to discharge the tension that was building up there.
Another drink?
No, Rhodes decided. Not just yet.
Could Van Vliet’s gimmick work?
Not in a million years, Rhodes thought. You’d have to redesign everything, top to bottom, the entire array of organs— lungs and liver and lights too, whatever the hell lights might be, and right on down to the osmotic capacity of the cell walls—a total makeover, in effect a second creation of humanity. It was an absurdly overambitious scheme that was beyond any imaginable technical capacity Santachiara might be able to develop and which would, if carried somehow to a successful conclusion despite the apparent difficulties, transform the human race beyond all recognition.
Which is exactly the thing, Rhodes thought, that we have been brought together here to come up with, is it not? Which I am paid, and paid well, to achieve. Which I have hired young Alex Van Vliet to help me bring about.
And if Van Vliet is right about the feasibility of his proposal, and I am wrong—
He looked at his hands. They were trembling a little. He spread the fingers wide to regain control over them. Then he hit the button and started Van Vliet over, this time from the actual beginning.
Van Vliet, cocky, self-possessed, grinning at him like an old pal. Twenty-four years old, wasn’t he? Young enough to be Rhodes’ son, almost. Rhodes, at forty, had never before felt the thunder of the oncoming generation, and he didn’t like it.
“What I propose to do in this initial presentation,” Van Vliet said, “is to offer a fundamental reevaluation of our adapto efforts thus far, working from the premise that when we are given an extreme situation to deal with, extreme measures are the only appropriate response.”
Van Vliet disappeared and was replaced by the virtual image of a lovely female figure in airy robes, a fragile girl, tripping through a forest against a backdrop of bilious green sky thick as soup. She was dainty, elegantly slender, Pre-Raphaelitely Caucasian, with a stunning complexion: the archetypical generic lovely little girl. And all around her the ghastly air was closing in, fetid, clotted, pockmarked with clusters of what looked like aerial turds. She didn’t seem to care a damn about that. It didn’t trouble her at all. Rhodes saw her precious little nostrils daintily inputting lungful after lungful of muckosphere as she danced playfully about, happily singing some sweet little song.
This was, Rhodes knew, by way of being an advertisement for the New Human Race that Van Vliet meant to create. Would the new and loathsome Earth to come really be populated by a race of beautiful faery-maidens like this?
“There can be no significant disagreement with our projection,” Van Vliet continued, “that within four to five generations, six as a maximally favorable estimate, the air of this planet will become unbreathable for the human race as it is presently constituted. Despite all corrective measures it is clear that the buildup of greenhouse gases reached a condition of irreversibility some time ago and that it is inevitable now that as outgassing of previously stored pollutants continues we will pass below the oxygenation threshold within the lifetime of the grandchildren of the children now being born.
“Since we do not have the capability of macro-managing our atmosphere to return it to its pre-industrial-age mix, in view of the unavoidable ongoing release into the atmosphere of hydrocarbons that were locked up in the Earth’s oceans and solid matter during the irresponsible nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have chosen instead, here at Santachi-ara, to attempt to micro-manage the human genome to meet the coming changes. Various adapto schemes of differing degrees of complexity are being studied, but it is my considered opinion, after a thoroughgoing analysis of the entire Santachiara program as it is presently conceived, that we have allowed ourselves to settle for a program of half measures which are inevitably doomed to failure and—”