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the machinery?
But he knew his mind was just finding ways to avoid facing the reality of what
Grieg was showing him. What does all this have to do with me ? he wondered,
more than a bit uncomfortably. I m just a cop chasing crooks. I m not running
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the planet. But even as he told himself those things, Alvar knew there was a
larger reality here. And all this might well have a great deal to do with him.
Chanto Grieg set the simglobe controls to move forward in time. The ice caps
grew larger, the seas receded farther. This is the crisis point, Grieg said,
eighty-five standard years from now. The seas recede enough to expose the
south polar highlands. The simglobe tilted its south polar region toward
Alvar, and he could see the polar landmass emerging from the water, instantly
forming its own ice cap. The polar lands have been hidden under the seas, but
they are at significantly higher elevations than the surrounding lowlands.
When the sea level shrinks enough, the polar continent emerges.
And that is what will doom us. There has been ice over the southern polar
ocean all along, but the water beneath the ice has always been able to flow
freely. The circulation patterns are complex, but the effect of the currents
is that the Antarctic waters have been able to blend with the temperate-zone
and equatorial waters. The warm water cools down and the cold water warms up.
But once both poles are landlocked, the planet s ocean currents shift
violently. Water no longer flows through either polar region, and thus the
oceans currents will no longer be available to moderate the temperature
differential between the south pole and the equatorial region. The oceans no
longer have any place to dump their heat. What that means is that temperatures
in the south polar regions drop precipitously--and equatorial and
temperate-zone temperatures go through the roof. The absolute volume of water
in the oceans is greatly reduced as well, which means the oceans simply are
not able to hold as much heat energy.
Air temperatures rise. Storms become more and more violent. The water in the
oceans boils off while the poles descend into ever-greater cold. Within
120 years of today, the last of the free water on this planet will be locked
up in massive ice caps at the north and south poles. It will get cold enough
at the poles to form lakes of liquid nitrogen. But the temperate regions and
the equator will simply be baked alive.
Normal daytime temperatures at Hades s location will be about 20
degrees below zero on the Celsius scale. Daytime temperatures on the equator
will reach 140 degrees without any trouble at all. Without water, with
temperatures that high, the last of the plant life will die. Without that
plant life to put oxygen back into the air, the atmosphere will lose all its
breathable oxygen as various chemical reactions cause the oxygen to bind to
the rocks and soils of the surface. Other chemical reactions will bind up
whatever nitrogen doesn t freeze out onto the polar regions. The atmospheric
pressure will drop drastically. Without the thermal insulation of a thick
atmosphere, the planet s ability to retain heat at the equator will decline.
Equatorial temperatures will drop, until the entire planet is a frigid,
airless wasteland, far more hostile to life than it was before humans reached
it. That is the current prognosis for the planet Inferno.
Alvar Kresh stared in horror at the image of a frozen, wizened, dead world
that hung in front of him. The greens and blues were all gone. The planet was
a dun-colored desert, both its poles buried under huge, gleaming-
white ice caps. He discovered that his fingers were clenched into the arms of
his chair and that his heart was racing. He forced his fingers to relax,
inhaled deeply in an effort to calm himself. All right, he said, though it
was clear things were anything but. All right. I knew there were problems,
even if I did not know they were this bad. But what does all this have to do
with me? he asked, his voice quiet.
The Governor brought the lights back out and stepped out from behind his
console. That is perfectly simple, Sheriff Kresh. Politics. It comes down to
a question of politics and the qualities of human nature. I could make a
frontal attack, try and get the public behind me, get all Infernals to come
together and save the planet. To do that, I would have to put on the show you
have just seen, for the benefit of the entire planet. Broadcast it by every
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means available. Some people would accept the facts. But not all of them.
Probably not even most of them.
What would the rest of them do? Kresh asked.
No. No. You think about that for a minute. Think about it, and you tell me
what they would do.
Alvar Kresh looked up again, at the dry, wizened corpse of a world that hung
in space before him. What would they do? How would they react? The musty old
traditionalists who yearned for the glories of the past; the Ironheads;
the less radical people--such as himself--who saw a Settler scheme under every
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