"What equation?" Boris looked at Theo and back to Chase again.
Everyone was watching Chase intently as if he were about to produce a rabbit out of a hat.
"Okay, you've got it," Cheryl said, with a faint touch of exasperation. "Our undivided attention. Tell us, for Christ's sake, what the hell was it?"
Chase told them.
Afterward it was his turn to listen while Theo Detrick narrated a horror story.
Theo had lived with the knowledge of what a return to the Precam-brian era would mean to the human race, had spent years brooding over it in his tiny island retreat, and now, without emotion, he gave them his scenario for the future.
The first victims would be the very young, the very old, and those
already suffering from cardiac and respiratory conditions. Anoxia--the medical term for a deficiency of oxygen to the tissues--would initially affect these three groups. Mortality statistics would show a gradually steepening rise as they succumbed to the impoverished atmosphere.
This Theo classified as Stage One.
Stage Two would begin when the oxygen level had fallen by several percent. Conditions then would be similar to those on a fifteen-thousand-foot-high mountain. Dizziness, nausea, and blackouts would become commonplace. There would be a sharply increased incidence of infertility. By this time the decrease in oxygen would start to have serious and widespread effects on all animal life-forms.
Stage Three. By now the composition of the atmosphere would be radically altered as the planet reverted to its primordial state. The ozone layer would thin out and disperse, allowing cosmic rays and solar radiation to penetrate to the earth's surface. This would cause severe burns, skin cancer, and leukemia.
Then would come the mutants: weird forms of life whose genetic structure had been warped in the womb. Whether such forms of life could continue to thrive and prosper on a planet going backward to its own past was doubtful; but for a time at least the earth would be inhabited by monsters. These, Theo believed, like the dinosaurs, would eventually die out.
Then what?
"And then," Theo said, "we come to Stage Four. The final act. The earth will have returned to the Precambrian. Defunct of all animal life and denuded of all vegetation. Not even the bacteria will survive. This planet will be biologically dead."
"But it isn't inevitable," Chase protested. "Surely the process can be halted or reversed? It must be possible."
"Must it?" Theo said gently. "As I've made clear, Dr. Chase, we have no God-given right to survive. The biosphere doesn't owe us a living." He gazed around vaguely, not seeing them. "One thing is absolutely certain. It cannot be stopped, and won't be stopped, if the world refuses to listen and take heed."
"Amen to that," Cheryl breathed.
Which struck Chase as a fitting epilogue.
The moon floated serenely in a magenta sky, touching the peaks of the Rockies with a soft ambience like ethereal snow.
Brad Zittel had hardly moved in the past hour, gazing out of his study window, unconscious of time, of it passing or standing still; aware only of the moon's decaying arc across the night sky, looking down with a blandly smiling face on a dying planet.
The China tea had gone cold in the pot. But that was to be expected, Brad thought. The ineluctable law of the universe. Entropy. Everything creeping toward slow death: himself, family, earth, moon, sun, stars. The dying fall. Fall from grace.
As it was in the Beginning, so it shall be in the End . . .
He didn't hear the door open and close, nor detect the presence in the darkened room until it laid warm fingers against his cheek. "Come to bed, darling. Please. You can't go on like this night after night."
Why not? "Entropy," Brad said. "Falling. Dying. End."
His wife's nightgown rustled as she settled herself on the arm of the chair. She cradled his head, holding him close, as one might comfort an ailing child.
"I want to understand you, Brad. Let me help you."
"They don't know. How can they when they've never seen the earth?"
"Who has to see the earth?"
"They must, otherwise how can they know?"
"Who? Know what?" She was scared. Her fingers moved tentatively over his forehead, feeling the lines that lately had become deeper, permanently engraved. What was it, this obsession that had taken over his waking hours? And even while he slept--his nightmares told her that.
She was losing the gentle man she had married, whose children she had borne, whom she loved dearly. She couldn't reach him any longer, and now it had become much worse--that incident on the highway, the police bringing him home, the fuss to keep it quiet, out of the papers, the doctor putting it down to overwork because he didn't know what else to say. Brad hardly slept but spent hour after hour of the night, every night, sitting by the study window and staring, literally, into space.
"Brad, honey, please tell me what it is so I can help you!" There was a plaintive note of fear in her voice. She felt sick. "Honey, please!"
She enfolded him in her arms, but he made no effort to respond to her embrace. He sat indolently and she was reminded of pictures she had seen of mental patients, vacant-eyed, slack-jawed, trapped in mad dreams . . . dear God, no, not him, not Brad. Please, not Brad!
"Brad. Darling," she murmured, holding him, near to tears. "You've got to talk about this. You've got to tell someone. How can you go on carrying this burden all the time? You need help, Brad."
"The world needs help," he contradicted her. He began to tremble violently, his hands shaking in spasm. "I have seen the earth in all its glory, one of the chosen few. There was a purpose in that, don't you see?" His hand fastened on hers, crushing, hurting. "My purpose is clear," Brad said through clenched teeth. "I must do what I can. Let me go, Joyce. Let me go!"
"Go where?" she asked in terror.
"Only a few are chosen, and must obey. They have no choice--"
"Let me call Dr. Hill," Joyce said rapidly. She pried her hand free. "I'll call him now--this minute."
In a moment of lucidity, as if his thoughts had suddenly pierced a bank of fog, he said matter-of-factly, "Doctors can only be of help to the sick or the mentally ill, Joyce. I'm neither. I'm the healthiest, sanest person on this planet."
"Yes, darling," she soothed him, horribly aware that what she was doing was agreeing with a madman in order to calm him. "Of course you are." She massaged the back of his neck, which felt to her ice-cold fingers to be on fire. "But wouldn't it be better to talk to somebody? I mean, this thing that's worrying you, whatever it is, it could drive you" --she was trapped and plunged on dreadfully--"mad."
"You're right, I must do something about it," Brad agreed. Her spirits rose. "Others must know the way. I'll be guided by them. Then I'll know what to do."
"Yes, honey, that's it!" She felt reassured. "Talk to people. Tell them what the problem is--talk to Dr. Hill. There's an answer, I know it." He was coming back to her. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
Brad patted her hand and got up. He was imbued with confidence. "There has to be an answer. I'll find it." He strode purposefully from the darkened study and went up the stairs.
Joyce moved after him, though slowly, feeling uneasily that they were agreeing about different things. She mounted the stairs, her hand gripping the rail tightly.
In the bedroom he was throwing things into a suitcase.
Joyce watched him from the doorway, her knees trembling. "B--Br --" She couldn't articulate. "Brad, what are you doing? Where are you going?"
He was totally involved in what he was doing.
"If there's an answer I'll find it." "Brad!"
Fear. Grief. Panic. Incomprehension. She experienced them all in the next few minutes. By then he had gone. And she knew he had gone forever, that she would never see him again.