He pulled down one of the tattered notebooks and sat mulling through the pages in the lamplight. The pages were sprinkled with quotations he'd copied from books and articles over the years. He was searching for something, but didn't know what exactly. He smoothed a yellowing page and read:
There is a goal, one that has the potential to unite every man, woman and child on this planet, which, if reached, will enable them to build at last that "land fit for heroes." A home which they can be proud they helped to build, one in which they can live in
harmony with the wild things, retaining the beauty of the mountains, the lakes, the rivers, the fields, the vast oceans and the sky.
But this needs effort and requires a genuine desire on the part of every one of us to make this dream reality.
Something like that was needed to set the tone, Chase felt, as a prologue or the opening passage. On reflection, this particular piece might be better at the end, as a summing up, a plea, a warning.
He'd find another to start him off. There was bound to be one. He turned the pages and eventually he found what he was looking for and reached for the mike.
Afterword
By definition a book set in the future must be speculative. I should like the reader to be aware, however, that this speculation is based very firmly on scientific facts and theories current at the time of writing, as well as on actual events. I could give a long list of examples, but will confine myself to just a few to illustrate the point.
The Russian scheme to switch the flow of rivers southward to irrigate agricultural lands in Kazakhstan (given the fictitious name Project Arrow in this book) is scheduled to go ahead in the closing years of this century. By the year 2000, according to the Russian estimate, there will be a reduction in the freshwater discharge into the Arctic Ocean of about 5 percent. Scientists at the University of Washington believe that by diverting the Yenisei and Ob rivers, the ice cover will disappear from a million square kilometers and that the exposed dark surface of the ocean will then absorb the heat of the sun leading to the melting of more ice, and so on and so on, in a runaway positive feedback effect. This will continue until the entire Arctic Ocean is without ice cover. The sea level would then rise all around the world.
The use of dioxin (TCDD) and its indiscriminate dumping is continuing to make headlines. In the small town of Black Creek near Niagara Falls in New York State, the residents of the notorious Love Canal live on top of what has been described as "a stinking chemical sewer." Doctors have found chromosome abnormalities in the local children, women have miscarried well above the national average, and residents suffer from a range of complaints from cancer to unexplained rashes and throat infections. A woman there who has already given birth to a mentally retarded child has been told that her genetic abnormalities greatly increase the risk of birth defects, both mental and physical, in any more children she might have.
The Reagan administration has been pushing the MX missile system, to be deployed in southern Nevada and southwestern Utah. This will pattern these two states with a racetrack grid of 200 missiles, each with an option of 23 silos (like Desert Range). Each missile will weigh 95 tons and will contain ten nuclear warheads with a combined explosive power equivalent to 3 million tons of TNT. (The Hiroshima bomb was 13,000 tons.)
Carbon dioxide continues to build up in the atmosphere. It is now measured at slightly more than 330 parts per million--still only .03 percent by volume--but by the year 2022, if the present trend continues, this amount could be doubled.
Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton has pointed out that in a world in which acres of forest are being felled every minute, nobody seems to be doing any research into oxygen depletion. In fact no reduction in the oxygen content of the atmosphere has been detected anywhere in the world. Yet.
T. H.
Lancashire--Cornwall--
Tunisia--USA