Nova 2 Read online

  “It is the end, I love you, it is the end.”

  END

  “East Wind, West Wind”

  by Frank M. Robinson

  The first time I experienced a Los Angeles super smog I simply would not believe it. People could not go on living in this kind of poisonous soup without doing everything possible to change it. I was wrong. Just how wrong and why is explained by Frank M. Robinson in this singularly chilling story.

  It wasn’t going to be just another bad day, it was going to be a terrible one. The inversion layer had slipped over the city four days before and it had been like putting a lid on a kettle; the air was building up to a real Donora, turning into a chemical soup so foul I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been trying to breathe the stuff. Besides sticking in my throat, it made my eyes feel like they were being bathed in acid. You could hardly see the sun—it was a pale, sickly disc floating in a mustard-colored sky—but even so, the streets were an oven and the humidity was so high you could have wrung the water out of the air with your bare hands . . . dirty water, naturally.

  On the bus a red-faced salesman with denture breath recognized my Air Central badge and got pushy. I growled that we didn’t make the air—not yet, at any rate—and finally I took off the badge and put it in my pocket and tried to shut out the coughing and the complaints around me by concentrating on the faint, cheery sound of the “com poppers” laundering the bus’s exhaust. Five would have gotten you ten, of course, that their effect was strictly psychological, that they had seen more than twenty thousand miles of service and were now absolutely worthless . . .

  At work I hung up my plastic sportscoat, slipped off the white surgeon’s mask (black where my nose and mouth had been) and filled my lungs with good machine-pure air that smelled only faintly of oil and electric motors; one of the advantages of working for Air Central was that our office air was the best in the city. I dropped a quarter in the coffee vendor, dialed it black, and inhaled the fumes for a second while I shook the sleep from my eyes and speculated about what Wanda would have for me at the Investigator’s Desk. There were thirty-nine other Investigators besides myself but I was junior and my daily assignment card was usually just a listing of minor complaints and violations that had to be checked out.

  Wanda was young and pretty and redhaired and easy to spot even in a secretarial pool full of pretty girls. I offered her some of my coffee and looked over her shoulder while she flipped through the assignment cards. “That stuff out there is easier to swim through than to breathe,” I said. “What’s the index?”

  “Eighty-four point five,” she said quietly. “And rising.”

  I just stared at her. I had thought it was bad, but hardly that bad, and for the first time that day I felt a sudden flash of panic. “And no alert? When it hits seventy-five this city’s supposed to close up like a clam!”

  She nodded down the hall to the Director’s office. “Lawyers from Sanitary Pick-Up, Oberhausen Steel, and City Light and Power got an injunction—they were here to break the news to Monte at eight sharp. Impractical, unnecessary, money-wasting, and fifteen thousand employees would be thrown out of work if they had to shut down the furnaces and incinerators. They got an okay right from the top of Air Shed Number Three.”

  My jaw dropped. “How could they? Monte’s supposed to have the last word!”

  “So go argue with the politicians—if you can stand the hot air.” She suddenly looked very fragile and I wanted to run out and slay a dragon or two for her. “The chicken-hearts took the easy way out, Jim. Independent Weather’s predicting a cold front for early this evening and rising winds and rain for tomorrow.”

  The rain would clean up the air, I thought. But Independent Weather could be bought and as a result it had a habit of turning in cheery predictions that frequently didn’t come true. Air Central had tried for years to get IW outlawed but money talks and their lobbyist in the capital was quite a talker. Unfortunately, if they were wrong this time, it would be as if they had pulled a plastic bag over the city’s head.

  I started to say something, then shut up. If you let it get to you, you wouldn’t last long on the job. “Where’s my list of small-fry?”

  She gave me an assignment card. It was blank except for See Me written across its face. “Humor him, Jim, he’s not feeling well.” This worried me a little because Monte was the father of us all—a really sweet old guy, which hardly covers it all because he could be hard as nails when he had to. There wasn’t anyone who knew more about air control than he.

  I took the card and started up the hall and then Wanda called after me. She had stretched out her long legs and hiked up her skirt. I looked startled and she grinned. “Something new—sulfur-proof nylons.” Which meant they wouldn’t dissolve on a day like today when a measurable fraction of the air we were trying to breathe was actually dilute sulfuric acid. . .

  When I walked into his office, old Monte was leaning out the window, the fly ash clinging to his busy gray eyebrows like cinnamon to toast, trying to taste the air and predict how it would go today. We had eighty Sniffers scattered throughout the city, all computerized and delivering their data in neat, graph-like form, but Monte still insisted on breaking internal air security and seeing for himself how his city was doing.

  I closed the door. Monte pulled back inside, then suddenly broke into one of his coughing fits.

  “Sit down, Jim,” he wheezed, his voice sounding as if it were being wrung out of him, “be with you in a minute.” I pretended not to notice while his coughing shuddered to a halt and he rummaged through the desk for his little bottle of pills. It was a plain office, as executive offices went, except for Monte’s own paintings on the wall—the type I liked to call Twentieth Century Romantic. A mountain scene with a crystal clear lake in the foreground and anglers battling huge trout, a city scene with palm trees lining the boulevards, and finally, one of a man standing by an old automobile on a winding mountain road while he looked off at a valley in the distance.

  Occasionally Monte would talk to me about his boyhood around the Great Lakes and how he actually used to go swimming in them. Once he tried to tell me that orange trees used to grow within the city limits of Santalosdiego and that the oranges were as big as tennis balls. It irritated me and I think he knew it; I was the youngest Investigator for Air Central but that didn’t necessarily make me naive.

  When Monte stopped coughing I said hopefully, “IW claims a cold front is coming in.”

  He huddled in his chair and dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief, his thin chest working desperately trying to pump his lungs full of air. “IW’s a liar,” he finally rasped. “There’s no cold front coming in, it’s going to be a scorcher for three more days.”

  I felt uneasy again. “Wanda told me what happened,” I said.

  He fought a moment longer for his breath, caught it, then gave a resigned shrug. “The bastards are right, to an extent. Stop garbage pick-ups in a city this size and within hours the rats will be fighting us in the streets. Shut down the power plants and you knock out all the air conditioners and purifiers—right during the hottest spell of the year. Then try telling the yokels that the air on the outside will be a whole lot cleaner if only they let the air on the inside get a whole lot dirtier.”

  He hunched behind his desk and drummed his fingers on the top while his face slowly turned to concrete. “But if they don’t let me announce an alert by tomorrow morning,” he said quietly, “I’ll call in the newspapers and . . .” The coughing started again and he stood up, a gnomelike little man slightly less alive with every passing day. He leaned against the windowsill while he fought the spasm. “And we think this is bad,” he choked, half to himself. “What happens when the air coming in is as dirty as the air already here? When the Chinese and the Indonesians and the Hottentots get toasters and ice-boxes and all the other goodies?”

  “Asia’s not that industrialized yet,” I said uncomfortably.

  “Isn’t it?” He turned and s
agged back into his chair, hardly making a dent in the cushion. I was bleeding for the old man but I couldn’t let him know it. I said in a low voice, “You wanted to see me,” and handed him the assignment card.

  He stared at it for a moment, his mind still on the Chinese, then came out of it and croaked, “That’s right, give you something to chew on.” He pressed a button on his desk and the wall opposite faded into a map of the city and the surrounding area, from the ocean on the west to the low-lying mountains on the east. He waved at the section of the city that straggled off into the canyons of the foothills. “Internal combustion engine—someplace back there.” His voice was stronger now, his eyes more alert. “It isn’t a donkey engine for a still or for electricity, it’s a private automobile.”

  I could feel the hairs stiffen on the back of my neck. Usually I drew minor offenses, like trash burning or secret cigarette smoking, but owning or operating a gasoline-powered automobile was a felony, one that was sometimes worth your life.

  “The Sniffer in the area confirms it,” Monte continued in a tired voice, “but can’t pinpoint it.”

  “Any other leads?”

  “No, just this one report. But—we haven’t had an internal combustion engine in more than three years.” He paused. “Have fun with it, you’ll probably have a new boss in the morning.” That was something I didn’t even want to think about. I had my hand on the doorknob when he said quietly, “The trouble with being boss is that you have to play Caesar and his Legions all the time.”

  It was as close as he came to saying good-bye and good luck. I didn’t know what to say in return, or how to say it, and found myself staring at one of his canvases and babbling, “You sure used a helluva lot of blue.”

  “It was a fairly common color back then,” he growled. “The sky was full of it.”

  And then he started coughing again and I closed the door in a hurry; in five minutes I had gotten so I couldn’t stand the sound.

  I had to stop in at the lab to pick up some gear from my locker and ran into Dave Ice, the researcher in charge of the Sniffers. He was a chubby, middle-aged little man with small, almost feminine hands; it was a pleasure to watch him work around delicate machinery. He was our top-rated man, after Monte, and I think if there was anybody whose shoes I wanted to step into someday, it would have been Dave Ice. He knew it, liked me for it, and usually went out of his way to help.

  When I walked in he was changing a sheet of paper in one of the smoke shade detectors that hung just outside the lab windows. The sheet he was taking out looked as if it had been coated with lampblack.

  “How long an exposure?”

  He looked up, squinting over his bifocals. “Hi, Jim—a little more than four hours. It looks like it’s getting pretty fierce out there.”

  “You haven’t been out?”

  “No, Monte and I stayed here all night. We were going to call an alert at nine this morning but I guess you know what happened.”

  I opened my locker and took out half a dozen new masks and a small canister of oxygen; if you were going to be out in traffic for any great length of time, you had to go prepared. Allowable vehicles were buses, trucks, delivery vans, police electrics and the like. Not all exhaust control devices worked very well and even the electrics gave off a few acid fumes. And if you were stalled in a tunnel, the carbon monoxide ratings really zoomed. I hesitated at the bottom of the locker and then took out my small Mark II gyrojet and shoulder holster. It was pretty deadly stuff: no recoil and the tiny rocket pellet had twice the punch of a .45.

  Dave heard the clink of metal and without looking up asked quietly, “Trouble?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Somebody’s got a private automobile—gasoline—and I don’t suppose they’ll want to turn it in.”

  “You’re right,” he said, sounding concerned, “they won’t.” And then: “I heard something about it; if it’s the same report, it’s three days old.”

  “Monte’s got his mind on other things,” I said. I slipped the masks into my pocket and belted on the holster. “Did you know he’s still on his marching Chinese kick?”

  Dave was concentrating on one of the Sniffer drums slowly rolling beneath its scribing pens, logging a minute-by-minute record of the hydrocarbons and the oxides of nitrogen and sulfur that were sickening the atmosphere. “I don’t blame him,” he said, absently running a hand over his glistening scalp. “They’ve started tagging chimney exhausts in Shanghai, Djakarta and Mukden with radioactives—we should get the first results in another day or so.”

  The dragon’s breath, I thought. When it finally circled the globe it would mean earth’s air sink had lost the ability to cleanse itself and all of us would start strangling a little faster.

  I got the rest of my gear and just before I hit the door, Dave said: “Jim?” I turned. He was wiping his hands on a paper towel and frowning at me over his glasses. “Look, take care of yourself, huh, kid?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. If Monte was my professional father, then Dave was my uncle. Sometimes it was embarrassing but right then it felt good. I nodded good-bye, adjusted my mask, and left.

  Outside it seemed like dusk; trucks and buses had turned on their lights and almost all pedestrians were wearing masks. In a lot across the street some kids were playing tag and the thought suddenly struck me that nowadays most kids seemed small for their age; but I envied them . . . the air never seemed to bother kids. I watched for a moment, then started up the walk. A few doors down I passed an apartment building, half hidden in the growing darkness, that had received a “political influence” exemption a month before. Its incinerator was going full blast now, only instead of floating upward over the city the small charred bits of paper and garbage were falling straight down the front of the building like a kind of oily black snow.

  I suddenly felt I was suffocating and stepped out into the street and hailed a passing electricab. Forest Hills, the part of the city that Monte had pointed out, was wealthy and the homes were large, though not so large that some of them couldn’t be hidden away in the canyons and gullies of the foothills. If you lived on a side road or at the end of one of the canyons it might even be possible to hide a car out there and drive it only at night. And if any of your neighbors found out . . . well, the people who lived up in the relatively pure air of the highlands had a different view of things than those who lived down in the atmospheric sewage of the flats. But where would a man get a gasoline automobile in the first place?

  And did it all really matter? I thought, looking out the window of the cab at the deepening dusk and feeling depressed. Then I shook my head and leaned forward to give the driver instructions. Some places could be checked out relatively easily.

  The Carriage Museum was elegant—and crowded, considering that it was a weekday. The main hall was a vast cave of black marble housing a parade of ancient internal combustion vehicles shining under the subdued lights; most of them were painted a lustrous black though there was an occasional gray and burst of red and a few sparkles of old gold from polished brass head lamps and fittings.

  I felt like I was in St. Peter’s, walking on a vast sea of marble while all about me the crowds shuffled along in respectful silence. I kept my eyes to the floor, reading off the names on the small bronze plaques: Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, Mercer Raceabout, Isotta-Fraschini, Packard Runabout, Hispano-Suiza, Model J Duesenberg, Flying Cloud Reo, Cadillac Imperial VI6, Pierce Arrow, the first of the Ford V8s, Lincoln Zephyr, Chrysler Windsor Club Coup . . . And in small halls off to the side, the lesser breeds: Hudson Terra-plane, Henry J., Willys Knight, something called a Jeepster, the Mustang, Knudsen, the 1986 Volkswagen, the last Chevrolet. . . .

  The other visitors to the museum were all middle-aged or older; the look on their faces was something I had never seen before—something that was not quite love and not quite lust. It flowed across their features like ripples of water whenever they brushed a fender or stopped at a hood that had been opened so they could stare at the engine, a
ll neatly chromed or painted. They were like my father, I thought. They had owned cars when they were young, before Turn-In Day and the same date a year later when even most private steam and electrics were banned because of congestion. For a moment I wondered what it had been like to own one, then canceled the thought. The old man had tried to tell me often enough, before I had stormed out of the house for good, shouting how could he love the damned things so much when he was coughing his lungs out . . .

  The main hall was nothing but bad memories. I left it and looked up the office of the curator. His secretary was on a coffee break so I rapped sharply and entered without waiting for an answer. On the door it had said “C. Pearson,” who turned out to be a thin, overdressed type, all regal nose and pencil moustache, in his mid-forties. “Air Central,” I said politely, flashing my wallet ID at him.

  He wasn’t impressed. “May I?” I gave it to him and he reached for the phone. When he hung up he didn’t bother apologizing for the double check, which I figured made us even. “I have nothing to do with the heating system or the air-conditioning,” he said easily, “but if you’ll wait a minute I’ll—”

  “I only want information,” I said.

  He made a small tent of his hands and stared at me over his fingertips. He looked bored. “Oh?”

  I sat down and he leaned toward me briefly, then thought better of it and settled back in his chair. “How easy would it be,” I asked casually, “to steal one of your displays?”

  His moustache quivered slightly. “It wouldn’t be easy at all—they’re bolted down, there’s no gasoline in their tanks, and the batteries are dummies.”