Thanks to the earliness of his awakening, there was not much traffic yet. Even the few barges he passed were half empty, the identical masked faces peering out of them looking as disconsolate as he felt to be up at this hour. At Thirty-Second, a street-sweeper went by him going the other way, sucking into its frontal maw everything that floated except the traffic, and discharging from its almost as capacious anus anything that did not clink, clank or crunch. The theory behind the monster, which had been designed over a decade ago, was that anything that did not make a noise as it passed through its innards could safely be left in the water for the fish and bacteria.

  Actually, of course, there were no fish anywhere near this close to shore any more. There were not many even in the high seas. The Guatemalan canal had resulted in the destruction of about 23,000 Pacific species, through evolutionary competition, but the destruction in the Atlantic had not been that selective. It had begun with the poisoning of the Atlantic phytoplankton, the very beginning of the chain of nutrition for all marine life, by land effluents loaded with insecticides and herbicides. The population of the Atlantic from pole to pole, from brit to whales, was now only 10 percent of what it had been when the streetsweeper had been on the drawing boards. As for the bacteria, the number of species of molecules they could not digest now far outnumbered those that they could.

  Nevertheless Alex waved to the monster as he went by.

  Obsolete or not, it belonged to his own working force. The men piloting it waved back. Though of course they did not recognize him in his mask, it was known that the boss often went to work this way: if somebody in a canoe waved to them, it was safer to wave back. Slllrrrrppp... Spprrrsttt, said the monster.

  The city was waking up now. Outboard-powered car pools of men in wet-suits, painted to look tailored, were beginning to charge along the cross-streets, creating wakes and followed by the muffled obscenities of people in canoes. Most of these came across the Hudson from New Jersey, which had had a beautifully planned new city built north of Newark, on what had been the tidal swamp of the Meadows, only to have its expensively filled and tended lawns become swamps again and then go totally under water. Few of the commuters paid any attention to the traffic semaphores, having learned from experience that the rare police launches were reluctant to chase them—the wakes of the launches upset more canoes and rowboats than the speeding outboards did. Lately, some of the paddlers and rowers had taken to chucking sash weights over the gunwales of speeders when possible. The police were prone to ignore this, too, though they frowned at outright shooting.

  Alex observed all the semaphores scrupulously and reached Forty-Second Street without incident. There, before turning starboard, he took off the homburg, stowed it in its plastic bag, and put on his crash helmet.

  Again, thanks to the relative earliness of the hour, he had been able to thread his way through the jam of barges shipping produce into and out of what had once been Penn Station with considerable speed, but Times Square was another matter. There was no time after dawn when it was not a mass of boats of all sizes, many of them equipped with completely illegal rams and spikes, many locked together willy-nilly in raftlike complexes, the occupants swearing and flailing at each other with oars, paddles, barge poles, whips, boarding hooks, and specialized assegai-like weapons developed by the more ingenious. There was no alternate route to where Alex was going that was any better.

  The police concentrated here as a matter of course, which prevented individual acts of mayhem from fulminating into outright riot, and often managing to keep some sort of narrow canal open in one direction or another. Alex watched for these canals, and those that opened accidentally now and then, with the intensity of a mariner trying to pass through the mythical mazes of the Sargasso. He had learned long ago that picking fights with other boats was a waste of time. The only weapon that he carried was a table-tennis racquet sided with coarse sandpaper, with which he banged the knuckles of people in the water who tried to climb into his canoe. He did this completely impersonally and without malice; he knew, as the strugglers should have known, that it is impossible to get into a canoe from the water without upsetting it.

  He took only two paddle blows elsewhere than directly on the helmet, which he thought must be a record for the course. Past Sixth Avenue, the furtive canals got wider and tempers tended to have cooled a little. By the time he reached the Public Library—whose books were now no more inaccessible to the public than they had been fifty years ago, though the reason had changed—he felt justified in removing the helmet and resuming the homburg. There was remarkably little water in the scuppers and he himself was only moderately splashed—the latter of no moment at all, since his clothing was entirely by Burberry and all he needed to do once he arrived was step into one of the Bell System’s booths, deposit a quarter, and have the random garbage showered off with salt water.

  All in all, he thought as he turned the canoe over to an Avis docker, it was a good thing that he hadn’t been able to sleep. The trip had been an out-and-out snap.

  Secretary de Tohil Vaca was a tall, fair, bearded man of almost insufferable elegance of manner. Ringed and ringleted, perfumed and pomaded, fringed and furbelowed, beaded and brocaded, he combined nature and nurture so overpoweringly, in fact in such an absolute assonance of synesthetic alliteration, that it became a positive pleasure to remind one’s self that the underlying essence of his official cachet, like the musk of sex and the ambergris of the most ancient perfumes, was—Alex bit silently but savagely down on the word—garbage.

  His office was on the top floor—in fact, was the top floor—of the old Pan Am building, which was itself one of the principal monuments to the ways junk had been piled up willy-nilly in the heyday of the Age of Waste. The building itself still sat over the vast septic tank which had once been Grand Central Station, a tank over which the tides gurgled semidaily without in any way slowing the accumulation of filth in those deep caverns and subway tubes. Most of the immense, ugly structure, which had always looked like the box some other building had been shipped in, was now occupied only by tax accountants, 3V producers, whores, mosquitoes, anthologists, brokers, blimp-race betting agencies, public-relations firms, travel agents, and other telephone-booth Indians, plus hordes and torrents of plague-bearing brown rats and their starving fleas.

  Secretary de Tohil Vaca, however, reached his office, when he did, by private blimp, much accompanied by hostesses and secretaries rather like Girlie Stonacher; and he had been known, when he was in a rare hurry, to settle down upon the top of it by air-polluting helicopter. Rank had, as it is written, its privileges.

  The office was flooded with sunlight from all sides when the smog let it through, and was hung alternately with Aztec tapestries and with modern collages of what was called the Reconstituted Findings school. The air was cool and almost odorless, and usually carried, as now, a discreet purring of music. In apparent—but only apparent—deference to Alex, the system was now playing a version of four exhaust-flutes of Hector, the Garbage Collector, the eighty-year-old anthem of Local 802.

  It was all very well prepared, but Alex was not going to be seduced. He not only knew what he wanted, but knew that he had to get it; he was, after all, as much a creature of his constituency as de Tohil Vaca was of the administration.

  “Sit down, Alex,” he said affably. “I’m sorry this meeting has been postponed so frequently, but, you’ll understand, I’m sure, there have been other pressing matters....”

  The Secretary waved vaguely and allowed the sentence to trail off. Alex thought he understood well enough: the Secretary had sought to convey the impression that the Administration did not regard the matter as serious and could, if it had to, get along very well without the services of Local 802. They both knew this to be nonsense, but the forms had to be gone through.

  Now that he was actually in the presence, however, Alex found this diagnosis weakening a little. The Secretary’s expression was that of a man rather grimly amused by some private piece of information, like that of a wife accepting flowers from a husband she knows is having an affair with the computer girl. Of course, de Tohil Vaca was a superb actor, but nevertheless Alex found the expression rather disquieting. He tried not to show it.

  “Quite all right,” he said automatically. “Of course you realize that having left so little time for negotiation means that you’ll have to accept our terms as stated.”

  “Not at all, not at all. In the first place, my dear Alex, you know as well as I do that a strike by your men would be illegal. In our present society we could no more allow it than a wooden city could allow a fireman’s strike.”

  “I’m quite prepared to go to jail if I have to. You can’t jail the whole union.” He did not go on to add that winning this strike would also win him de Tohil Vaca’s office in the next administration. The Secretary knew well enough what the stakes were, which was the real reason why no negotiation would have been fruitful; the strike was absolutely inevitable.

  “I’m not threatening you, I assure you. No, really, that issue has in reality become quite irrelevant. You see, Alex, there have been new developments of which you’re not aware. They are of sufficient importance so that we no longer care if your men quit work and never go back.”

  “That,” Alex said, “is pure nonsense. The only justification you could have for such a statement would be the development of machinery which made all my men obsolete. I know the technology at least as well as you do, and no such advance has occurred. And if such machines exist in theory, you can’t possibly get them into production and on the job fast enough to prevent a disaster if we strike—not even if in theory they’re capable of solving the entire problem.”

  “I imply no such thing,” de Tohil Vaca said, with a calmness that seemed to conceal a certain relish. “We have not solved the problem. Quite the opposite. The problem has solved us.”

  “All right,” Alex said. “You’ve produced your effect. Now, just what are we talking about?”

  The Secretary leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. “Just this,” he said. “We cannot ‘dispose’ of our wastes any longer. They have tipped the geological scales against us. The planet is breaking up. The process has already started, and the world will be effectively uninhabitable before the next ten years have passed.”

  The Secretary was watching Alex narrowly, and actor or no actor, could not prevent a faint shadow of disappointment from flitting over his face; Alex had only smiled.

  “Good heavens, man,” the Secretary said. “Do you hear an announcement like that every day? Or are you utterly without imagination?”

  “Neither,” Alex said. “But as it happens, I did hear a very similar statement less than twenty-four hours ago. It didn’t come from quite so august a source, but I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.”

  “What,” de Tohil Vaca said, “would you think I stood to gain by making it?”

  “I can’t imagine. If you were another man, you might be hoping I’d carry this story back to the union and get the strike called off. Then, when the end of the world didn’t come through on schedule, I’d be destroyed politically. But you know I’m not that credulous, and I know that you know you wouldn’t dare to use such means; it’d destroy you, too.”

  “Well, at least we are now out in the open,” de Tohil Vaca said. “But the fact is that I mean every word I say, and furthermore, I’m prepared to offer you a proposition, though not at all of the kind you thought you came here to discuss. To begin with, though, I had better offer you my documentation. You have, no doubt, noticed the Brooklyn earthquakes.”

  “Yes, and I know what caused them,” Alex said, feeling suddenly, unexpectedly grateful for Fan’s passionate lecture of the preceding day. “It’s a residuum of deep-well disposal.”

  The Secretary looked openly astonished. “What on earth is that?” he said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “I’m not surprised. It hasn’t been widely used in a long time. But back around 1950, some private firms began disposing of liquid wastes by injection into deep wells—mostly chemical companies and refineries. Most of the wells didn’t go down more than six thousand feet and the drillers went to a lot of trouble not to get them involved with the water table. Everybody liked the idea at the time because it was an alternative to dumping into rivers and so on.

  “But then the Army drilled one twelve thousand feet down, near Denver. They started pumping in 1962 and a month later, after only about four million gallons had gone down, Denver had its first earthquake in eighty years. After that, the tremors increased or decreased exactly in phase with the pumping volume. There’s even a geological principle to explain it, called the Hubbert-Rubey Effect.”

  “My word,” de Tohil Vaca said, taking notes rapidly. “What happened?”

  “Well, nothing for a while. More than a hundred such wells were in operation by 1970, mostly in Louisiana and Texas. But by 1966 somebody had noticed the correlation—which was pretty sharp because the Denver area had never been subject to quakes before, and the quake zone was right underneath the Army’s arsenal—so the Army stopped pumping. The quakes went on for another eighteen months—in fact, the biggest one of all was in 1970—but then they began to die back.

  “And that’s my point. The injection system was outlawed in most states, but there are still eight of them in operation in Pennsylvania, pumping into a strata system only marginally suited for them, and another right out here in Brookhaven, which is totally unsuited for it. That brackets Brooklyn neatly—and unlike Denver, Brooklyn always has been subject to slight temblors. So there’s your answer: cap those wells, and as soon as they get back into equilibrium again—which will take as long as it takes, eighteen months only applied to Denver—then, no earthquakes.”

  The Secretary dropped his stylus and stared at Alex in frank admiration.

  “My word,” he said again. “That’s the most ingenious theory I’ve heard in years. I do seem to have underestimated you, after all.”

  “Well, it isn’t entirely mine,” Alex admitted. “The man I talked to yesterday thinks that once you trigger an earthquake, you can’t untrigger it. But the Colorado experience shows you can.”

  “Even if you can,” said de Tohil Vaca, “I regret to say that the theory, while elegant, is also irrelevant. The real process is something quite different, and absolutely irreversible. It’s the greenhouse effect that’s responsible—and I hope you’ll pardon me if I read from notes here and there; I am no scientist.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The Secretary opened a folder. “You know the Arctic ice cap is gone. But that’s minor; it was only pack ice. The real problem is down south. There are unthinkable billions of tons of ice over the Antarctic continent—which is volcanic, as Mount Erebus shows. Now the first effect of letting up the pressure of all that ice is that it changes the isostatic balance of the Earth’s crust, which would be bad enough, but there’s worse to follow.

  “There’s a thing called precession of the equinoxes, which means that not only does the Earth rotate on its axis, but the axis of rotation also moves around its own center, like the secondary motion of a top when it’s slowing down.”

  “I know about that. It means the poles describe a small circle, so we don’t always have the same pole star. But I also know just one of those circles takes twenty-five thousand years.”

  “Yes, but that’s geologically a pretty short time. And bear in mind that swinging all that concentrated ice around and around represents an enormous amount of energy—of momentum. If you melt the ice and distribute its mass as water evenly all over the globe, where does the energy go?”

  “I’m not a scientist either,” Alex said. “But as an engineer, I’d predict that it’d show up as heat.”

  “And so some of it will—in lots of heat. Good-bye, fish, just for a starter. And the sea-level rise will total thirty-three feet when all the ice is gone. But there’s still more, Alex. Besides the precession, the top wobbles. It used to be called the Drayson Effect, but I gather that everybody sneered so hard at poor old Drayson, whoever he was, for proposing it, that when they discovered the wobble was real, they gave it another name; it’s called Chalmer’s Wobble now. It shows up in a cyclical disturbance of the polar path, the equinoctial path.”

  “And how long is the cycle?”

  “Fourteen months.”

  “Fourteen months! Are you sure you’ve got that right?”

  “That’s what it says here,” de Tohil Vaca said grimly. “And it’s been known for twenty years that any major variation in the cycle is a signal that a very large strain release is about to occur somewhere in the crust. Lately, my dear fellow, the polar path has been wobbling irregularly all over northern Canada.

  “The outcome is going to be vulcanism on a scale never seen before in the lifetime of man. I’m told that we are in for a new era of mountain-building, the first since the Rockies were thrust up. That will bury all our old cans and bottles and junked cars very nicely—but there’ll be nobody left around to rejoice.”

  “My God,” Alex said slowly. “And obviously it’s irreversible—we can’t take the carbon dioxide and the other heavy gases out of the air. We’ve changed the climate, and that’s that. The ice is going to go right on melting. Faster and faster, in fact, as more energy’s released.”

  “Precisely.”

  Irrationally, Alex felt a momentary flash of pleasure at being now able to tell Fan of a disaster that made Fan’s hypothesis look like a mild attack of hiccups. The moment’s elation vanished in a horrible nightmarish sinking of every recognizable human emotion except terror. He could not doubt his erstwhile antagonist; the whole sequence, even he could see, flowed inevitably from as fundamental a law as the conservation of energy. Trying to keep his voice from shaking, he said, “And yet you said you had a proposition.”