A plump, sallow man on the right side of the table snorted. “It’s snowing today in Los Angeles.”
Nathaniel nodded and pointed to him. “Exactly. That snow is directly linked to the Meteor. The dust and smoke that got kicked into the atmosphere are going to cool the Earth for the next several years. We’ll probably lose crops this year, not just in the United States, but globally.”
President Brannan, bless him, raised his hand before speaking. “How much will the temperature drop?”
“Elma?” Nathaniel half-turned toward me.
My stomach lurched into my throat, and I flipped through the papers in my portfolio to find the one I wanted. “Seventy to one hundred degrees globally.”
Toward the back of the room, someone said, “Couldn’t hear.”
Swallowing, I lifted my head from the papers and faced the room. This was no different from shouting over the engine of an airplane. “Seventy to one hundred degrees.”
“That doesn’t seem possible.” The man at the back crossed his arms over his chest.
“That’s just for the first few months.” They were focusing on the wrong thing. The temperature drop would be unpleasant, but was short-term. “Then we’ll have three to four years of a global climate that’s 2.2 degrees cooler than average, before the temperature begins to rise.”
“2.2? Huh. So what’s the big tizzy over?”
President Brannan said, “That’s more than enough to severely affect crops. Growing seasons will shorten by ten to thirty days, so we’ll have to convince farmers to plant different crops and at different times of year. That’s not going to be easy.”
As the former secretary of agriculture, it wasn’t surprising that he intuitively understood the trouble with a change in climate. But he was still focused on the wrong thing. Yes, we had a mini–Ice Age to get through, but none of them were considering the eventual rise in temperature.
“Farm subsidies.” Another man, maybe the one who’d said he couldn’t hear, leaned across the table. “It got farmers to change their crops during the Great Depression.”
“All of our resources are going to be tied up in rebuilding.”
As they argued, Nathaniel stepped back to me and murmured, “Will you chart the temperature rise?”
I nodded and turned to the board, grateful to have something concrete to do. The chalk slid across the surface, shedding shivers of dust with my upstrokes. The notes in my portfolio were there, in case I lost my place, but I’d stared at this chart so much over the past couple of weeks that it was etched on the inside of my eyelids.
Unseasonable cold for the next several years, then a return to “normal” and then … then the temperature kept rising. The line was slow at first, until it reached the tipping point, and suddenly spiked upward.
When I hit that on the board, Nathaniel stepped forward, to the end of the conference table, and stood with his hands clasped in front of him. The conversation quieted.
“In 1824, Joseph Fourier described an effect that Alexander Bell later called ‘the greenhouse effect.’ In it, particles in the air cause the atmosphere to retain heat. If the Meteor had struck land, the winter would have been longer. The fireball would have been larger. We thought it was fortunate that it struck water, but it’s worse. The Earth is going to come out of winter and get hotter. In fifty years, there will be no snow in North America.”
The pudgy man who had complained about snow in California laughed. “Coming from Chicago, I gotta say this doesn’t strike me as a problem.”
“How do you feel about one hundred percent humidity and summers with a low of one hundred and twenty degrees?”
“Still. Weathermen can’t predict if it’s going to rain tomorrow. Fifty years is a long time out.”
President Brannan raised his hand again. He was staring at me. No. At the board. I stepped to the side so he could see it better. “Dr. York. What does the upturn on that chart represent?”
“That … that is when the oceans begin to boil.”
It was as if a jet engine had sucked the air out of the room. Someone said, “You can’t be serious. That’s—”
President Brannan slapped his hand on the table. “I hope you’ll grant that I know something about the planet and how it behaves. We’re having this meeting because I’ve already looked over Dr. York’s figures and consider the problem serious. We’re not here, gentlemen, to debate the matter. We’re here to decide what to do about it.”
Thank God. Brannan was only the acting president, until Congress could confirm him, which required a Congress, which required elections. But still … all the powers of the president were currently invested in him.
He surveyed the room and then gestured to M. Scherzinger. “Will you take the floor?”
“Certainly.” He stood and came to stand by Nathaniel. “Gentlemen. Mrs. York. There is a saying in Switzerland, ‘Ne pas mettre tous ses œufs dans le même panier,’ which you will know in English as, ‘Do not put all your eggs in one basket.’ The United Nations feels that, in addition to reducing the damage here on Earth, we must also look beyond our planet. It is time, gentlemen, to colonize outer space.”
PART II
TEN
UN URGED TO AID THE UKRAINE
Special to The National Times.
ROME, Feb. 20, 1956—The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization today urged all member governments to consider immediately what assistance they could give to the Ukraine, part of the former Soviet Union, which is threatened with famine after the failure of its crops during the Meteor winters. The UN instructed its director general to continue to give, upon request of the Ukrainian Government, all appropriate assistance, technical or other, that lies within his authority and competence.
Do you remember where you were when we put a man into space? I was one of two computer girls sitting in the International Aerospace Coalition’s “dark room” at Sunflower Mission Control in Kansas, with graph paper and my mechanical pencils. We used to launch from Florida, but that was before the Meteor, and before the NACA became part of the IAC. Sunflower already had a rocket facility from the war, so it made sense to relocate inland, away from the wrecked coast. Three miles away, the fruit of our labor sat on the launchpad: a Jupiter rocket with Stetson Parker strapped into a tiny pod atop 113 metric tons of propellant.
Charming when he wanted to be, even I had to admit that he was a damn fine pilot. Unless we had really screwed up, he was going to be the first human into space. And if we screwed up, he’d be dead. Of the Artemis Seven astronauts, he was my least favorite, but I wanted him to survive this.
The banks of instrument panels gave a soft glow to the room, and the sound-dampening panels they’d added to the walls kept voices low. Or as low as possible, given a room filled with 123 technicians. The air crackled with electricity. Men paced at the edges of the room. As lead engineer, poor Nathaniel was stuck in the New White House, waiting with President Brannan to talk to the press. They had two speeches written. Just in case.
Across the small light-table from me, Huilang “Helen” Liu played chess with Reynard Carmouche, one of the French engineers, while we waited. Helen, the other computer girl, had joined the International Aerospace Coalition as part of the Taiwanese contingent. Apparently, she’d been a chess champion back home, which Mr. Carmouche hadn’t quite grasped yet.
After liftoff, she’d be in charge of extracting the numbers from the Teletype and feeding them to me while I did the calculations to confirm that orbit had been attained. We’d been awake for sixteen hours, but I couldn’t have slept if you paid me. I really did need something to do with my hands. Myrtle had been trying to teach me to knit, but it hadn’t taken.