J. Ballard – Hello America (страница 11)
In the years that followed, widespread measures of climatic control were carried out by the world government to feed the increased populations of Europe and Asia. These impressive feats of geo-engineering steadily transformed the landscape of the American continent. Chief among them was the damming of the shallow waters of the Bering Straits between Siberia and Alaska. By pumping the cold Arctic water south into the Pacific, so that warmer Atlantic currents would flow into the Arctic Circle through the Greenland Gap, the entire climates of northern Europe and Siberia were revitalised. For the first time, winter temperatures rose above freezing-point, permafrost melted, and millions of acres of wilderness were reclaimed for agriculture and coal-mining, summer wheat-crops were harvested well within the Arctic Circle.
Unfortunately, the consequences for the United States were calamitous. The northward flow of hot equatorial Atlantic water drawn up into the Greenland Gap soon transformed the climate of the eastern seaboard. As the last emigrants struggled aboard the converted troopships in Boston and New York harbours, a blistering heat lay over the parched coastline, dust-clouds hung above the abandoned cities. As they looked back over the stern-rails of the convoy ships bound for Europe, the departing Americans could already see the desert moving in to take over their towns and suburbs.
Meanwhile, the Pacific coast of the American continent was ravaged by an equally extreme climatic change. The cold Arctic waters pumped southwards over the Bering Dam cut through the warm Pacific deeps like a series of icy guillotines. By the middle of the twenty-first century Japan had become a frozen wilderness, an archipelago of glaciers that turned the once fertile hillsides into terraced ice-rinks. Hundreds of cubic miles of cold water plunged south to the Equator, turning the sunny atolls and lagoons of the Marshall Islands into the freezing fishing grounds of a few hardy whale-hunters living in igloos and snow-capped cabins.
Displaced by this frozen tide, the Equatorial waters were driven towards the American coast. A hot Polynesian Current replaced the cold Humboldt and struck the beaches of California from the south. The warm, moisture-laden air blowing over the coastal mountains produced torrential rainstorms and flash-floods. The departing Americans from the sometime sunshine state who set off across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand looked back to see the harbours of Long Beach and San Diego shrouded by immense thunderstorms that struck inland as far as the Rockies. The last reports from Las Vegas described the abandoned gambling capital sitting half-submerged in a lake of rain-lashed water, its wheels stilled, the dying lights of its hotels reflected in the meadows of the drowned desert, a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America.
Ten days after the arrival of the
For Wayne, sitting up on the supply wagon, the reins of the mule team gripped firmly in his hands, these first miles immediately brought back all the excitement he had felt when the
Although they had come across no trace of the previous Fleming expedition, Wayne felt a surge of confidence, the certainty that they would find the El Dorado he had dreamed of for so long – not the literal golden city sought by McNair, but that vision of the United States enshrined in the pages of
Almost three hundred yards away now, Steiner rode his black mare at the head of the expedition, his dark figure shimmering in the haze that rose from the metalled road. At times the Captain would seem to disappear, leaving a leaky question mark on the quivering air, as if he were slipping away into a parallel continuum. Behind him came the baggage train of twenty horses, loaded with supplies, camping equipment and the scientific instruments – half the laboratory from the
‘Orlowski, can you call Steiner back? He’s leading his own separate expedition again…’ Dr Ricci had dismounted, and was setting up the seismographic tripods and radiation counters, ready to carry out the latest in the series of five-mile measurements. Anne Summers, meanwhile, was unstrapping the radio receiver tuned to the transmitter of a gamma-ray detector mounted on the roof of the Pan Am Building in Manhattan. On the last day Wayne and a young sailor had made the heroic climb up the endless stairways to the helicopter pad, where they had set up the machine, recompensed by a breath-taking view of the American desert stretching to the Appalachians.
As usual, Ricci seemed tired and fractious, slapping the dust from his elegant leather jacket – clearly the American wilderness was not glamorous enough for him. However Anne Summers, Wayne was glad to note, looked trim and self-possessed, and worked the radio in a business-like way. Three days after their arrival in New York she had suddenly pulled the pin from the bun behind her neck, and there had emerged, like a flare of light from a grenade, the long blonde hair that now shielded her from the sun. Already, in Wayne’s eyes, this white mane made her resemble some beautiful nomadic widow, endlessly crossing the desert in search of a young husband.
The baggage horses plodded along, heads down in the heat, nervous of the cactus-dotted terrain to the east of the Turnpike. As Wayne had discovered, the animals needed to be watched all the time, and the expedition was undermanned. Orlowski had assigned two reluctant seamen to join the party, but within an hour of leaving New York they had defected, slipping away among the cars and trucks that littered the wadi of the Hudson. Naturally they preferred to stay behind in Manhattan with the rest of the
Wayne had fully expected to be left behind with the ship, especially after Steiner’s surprise insistence on joining the expedition and leaving his command in the hands of McNair. But after the defection of the sailors a bad-tempered Ricci had galloped back to collect Wayne, and he found himself in charge of the supply wagon. Fortunately, the mules responded to Wayne, though as he snapped at their ambling flanks with the dusty reins he wondered how to keep up with the rest of the party. The surface of the six-lane highway was littered with the husks of rotting suitcases and jerricans. At least, they were moving south along a relatively empty road. The north-bound lanes, towards New York and the Jersey harbour, were lined with the rusting hulks of cars and buses, bizarre charcoal-burning vehicles with gas cylinders on their roofs, left behind here when they ran out of fuel and their passengers stepped down to walk the last miles to the evacuation points.
Reassuring himself, Wayne listened to the splash and murmur in the metal tanks behind him. No one was going to leave him here, he realised, they were all dependent on the supply wagon, both for the thousand gallons of fresh water in the steel casks, and for the distillation apparatus that would supplement their rations from any damp salt pans or freshwater springs they might come across. In an emergency they could always head for the sea, fuel the still with driftwood and dried kelp and sit it out on the beach until the
‘Professor Summers! Would you join me? Dr Ricci!’
Wayne sat up with a guilty frown. Had Steiner read his thoughts? The Captain had stopped in the shade of a route indicator that overtopped even the giant cactus beside it. He was calling to the two scientists as they finished packing their equipment and remounted. Steiner still wore his mariner’s cap, but under the narrow peak his face already had the expressionless yet wary look of the solitary sheriff or gunfighter. But Wyatt Earp, Wayne thought idiotically, had never worn sunglasses…