Caliban

“Don’t forget that I have stopped the program,” Grieg said. “But yes, all this, wecould survive, even if we ignore the great and terrible crime of allowing the planet to die.” The Governor regarded the globe thoughtfully. “Even the ice overwhelming the city is not an insurmountable problem, viewed on a global scale. We could dome over the town, or burrow underground, as the Settlers do. Butthis is not the end of the story.”

The Governor turned and stepped back into the darkness. Alvar heard the Governor tapping new commands into the console, and found himself struck by the random thought that buttons and switches were a typically Settler way to do things. Why not voice commands, or an interface to allow a robot to handle 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 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 onceboth poles are landlocked, the planet’s ocean currents shift violently. Water no longer flows througheither 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 wasbefore 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.