"You rattle your bushes. I'll rattle mine."
"Right."
CHAPTER 17
Pete now had six friends in the treatment center. Only two of the subjects felt well enough now to remain in the open bay with the TV cartoons and the whiskey, and Killgore figured they'd be in here by the end of the week, so full was their blood with Shiva antibodies. It was odd how the disease attacked different people in such different ways, but everyone had a different immune system. That was why some people got cancer, and others did not despite smoking and other methods of self-abuse.
Aside from that, it was going easier than he'd expected. He supposed it was due to the high doses of morphine that had all of them pretty well zonked out. It was a relatively new discovery in medicine that there really wasn't a maximum safe dosage of painkillers. If the patient still felt pain, you could give more until it went away. Dose levels that would cause respiratory arrest in healthy people were perfectly safe for those in great pain, and that made his job far easier. Every drug-dispensing machine had a button the subjects could hit if they needed it, and so they were medicating themselves into peaceful oblivion, which also made things safer for the staffs, who didn't have to do all that many sticks. They hung nutrients on the trees, checked to make sure the IVs were secure, and avoided touching the subjects as much as possible. Later today, they'd all get injected with Vaccine-B, which was supposed to safeguard them against Shiva with a high degree of reliability-Steve Berg said 98 to 99 percent. They all knew that wasn't the same as 100 percent, though, and so the protective measures would be continued.
Agreeably, there was little sympathy for the subjects. Picking winos off the street had been a good call. The next set of test subjects would appear more sympathetic, but everyone in this side of the building had been fully briefed Much of what they did might be distasteful, but it would still be done.
"You know, sometimes I think the Earth First people are right," Kevin Mayflower said in the Palm restaurant.
"Oh? How so?" Carol Brightling asked.
The president of the Sierra Club looked into his wine. "We destroy everything we touch. The shores, the tidal wetlands, the forests-look at what `civilization' has done to them all. Oh, sure, we preserve some areas-and that's what? A hot three percent, maybe? Big fucking deal. We're poisoning everything, including ourselves. The ozone problem is really getting worse, according to the new NASA study."
"Yeah, but did you hear about the proposed fix?" the President's science advisor asked.
"Fix? How?"
She grimaced. "Well, you get a bunch of jumbo jets, fill them up with ozone, fly them out of Australia, and release ozone at high altitude to patch it up. I have that proposal on my desk right now."
"And?"
"And it's like doing abortions at half-time in a football game, with instant replay and color commentary. No way it can possibly work. We have to let the planet heal herself - but we won't, of course."
"Any more good news?"
"Oh, yeah, the CO, issue. There's a guy up at Harvard who says if we dump iron filings into the Indian Ocean, we can encourage the growth of phytoplankton, and that will fix the CID, problem almost overnight. The math looks pretty good. All these geniuses who say they can fix the planet, like she needs fixing instead of leaving her the hell alone."
"And the President says what?" Mayflower asked.
"He says for me to tell him if it'll work or not, and if it looks like it's going to work, then test it to make sure, then try it for real. He hasn't got a clue, and he doesn't listen." She didn't add that she had to follow his orders whether she liked them or not.
"Well, maybe our friends at Earth First are right, Carol. Maybe we are a parasitic species on the face of the earth, and maybe we're going to destroy the whole damned planet before we're done."
"Rachel Carson come to life, eh?" she asked.
"Look, you know the science as well as I do - maybe better. We're doing things like-like the Alvarez Event that took the dinosaurs out, except we're doing it willfully. It took how long for the planet to recover from that?"
"Alvarez? The planet didn't recover, Kevin," Carol Brightling pointed out. "It jump-started mammals-us, remember? The preexisting ecological order never returned. Something new happened, and that took a couple of million years just to stabilize." Must have been something to see, she told herself. To watch something like that in progress, what a scientific and personal blessing it must have been, but there'd probably been nobody back then to appreciate it. Unlike today.
"Well, in a few more years we'll get to see the first part of it, won't we? How many more species will we kill of this year, and if the ozone situation keeps getting worse - my God, Carol, why don't people get it? Don't they see what's happening? Don't they care?"
"Kevin, no, they don't see, and, no, they don't care. Look around." The restaurant was filled with important people wearing important-looking clothes, doubtless discussing important things over their important dinners, none of which had a thing to do with the planetary crisis that hung quite literally over all their heads. If the ozone layer really evaporated, as it might, well, they'd start using sunblock just to walk the streets, and maybe that would protect them enough… but what of the natural species. the birds, the lizards, all the creatures on the planet who had no such option? The studies suggested that their eyes would be seared by the unblocked ultraviolet radiation, which would kill them off, and so the entire global ecosystem would rapidly come apart. "Do you think any of these people know about it-or give a damn if they do?"
"I suppose not." He sipped down some more of his white wine. "Well, we keep plugging away, don't we?"
"It's funny," she went on. "Not too long ago we fought wars, which kept the population down enough that we couldn't damage the planet all that much- but now peace is breaking out all over, and we're advancing our industrial capacity, and so, peace is destroying us a lot more efficiently than war ever did. Ironic, isn't it?"
"And modern medicine. The anopheles mosquito was pretty good at keeping the numbers down-you know that Washington was once a malarial swamp, diplomats deemed it a hazardous-duty post! So then we invented DDT. Good for controlling mosquitoes, but tough on the peregrine falcon. We never get it right. Never," Mayflower concluded.
"What if?…" she asked wistfully.
"What if what, Carol?"
"What if nature came up with something to knock the human population back?T-"
"The Gaea Hypothesis?" That made him smile. The idea was that the earth was itself a thinking, self-correcting organism that found ways to regulate the numerous living species that populated the planet. "Even if that's valid-and I hope it is, really - I'm afraid that we humans move too fast for Gaea to deal with us and our work. No, Carol, we've created a suicide pact, and we're going to take down everything else with us, and a hundred years from now, when the human population worldwide is down to a million or so people, they'll know what went wrong and read the books and look at the videotapes of the paradise we once had, and they'll curse our names-and maybe, if they're lucky, they'll learn from it when they crawl back up from the slime. Maybe. I doubt it. Even if they try to learn, they'll worry more about building nuclear power reactors so they can use their electric toothbrushes. Rachel was right. There will be a Silent Spring someday, but then it'll be too late." He picked at his salad, wondering what chemicals were in the lettuce and tomatoes. Some, he was sure. This time of year, the lettuce came up from Mexico, where farmers did all sorts of things to their crops, and maybe the kitchen help had washed it off, but maybe not, and so here he was, eating an expensive lunch and poisoning himself as surely as he was watching the whole planet being poisoned. His quietly despairing look told the tale. He was ready to be recruited, Carol Brightling thought.