End of the Dream Read online

  No one was found to replace him, which terminated the project. The Nebraska center was crowded for space, and the research director was relieved to get Schuckebber’s many large rooms. These were cleared and the thousands of glass containers of algae mutants were disposed of.

  Inside the fenced and guarded compound, as well as beyond its boundaries, there were many small “soda lakes,” as alkaline ponds were locally called. These had served Dr. Schuckebber perfectly for the disposal of his myriads of mutant colonies that were unpromising. The caustic waters had speedily killed the plants. So the director simply ordered that the useless strains on hand be dumped in the same manner, along with the unwanted residue of the chemicals which the old man had used to cause mutations.

  What did not occur to the superintendent in charge of the crew clearing out the laboratories and plant-culture chambers was, simply, that one of the several ponds near the buildings differed. A clear and rather deep-looking pool, set in a hollow, it was not alkaline but fresh. Owing to that slight error of judgment, the work of Dr. Schuckebber went on posthumously and untended. When, out of it, came a “slime” that covered the pond and took over the nutrients of other forms so they perished, the fact was called to the attention of the director, who immediately had it sprayed with three different biocides. Afterward the bloom died and sank since it was still almost wholly in its green phase.

  D. D. Wilson was able, however, to recover from the banks of that pond several hundreds of the waterproof, hard, floatable, dead form of the organism. The sprays used at the director’s orders had effectively exterminated the alga. They were not, however, sprays that could be applied to waters people drank, or swam in, or even dunked a hand in.

  Wilson’s reasoning about the transport of the species to Tommyhawk Creek was logical even if not susceptible of proof. The bloom at the secret research center occurred at a time when many species of birds were migrating north, including many kinds of waterfowl. Occasionally, some few such birds would drop down and spend awhile drinking from and feeding in the only fresh-water pond within several miles. So it was entirely probable that one such bird had picked up on its legs or feathers a bit of the “slime” and that, on a next descent in some upper pool of the Tommyhawk, the live matter had been washed off, thus initiating the great surge that came later.

  Wilson accounted for the time gap by proving that the final mutant form of the plague had occurred upstream from Ulla’s farm. He found the ancestral form from which it emerged as the very sort the old biologist doubtless had hoped to develop. By the time Wilson announced his triumph of research and deduction, however, people in general had little interest in how the breed came into being owing to their concern about the way it spread.

  It did them little good—none, really—to know this menace, like many others, had been brought on man by himself.

  11. A Letter, a Document, a Memo, a Transcription

  LAMSON-WORLD PHARMACEUTICALS

  LAMSON-WORLD TOWERS

  DEARBORN PLAZA

  CHICAGO, ILL.

  July 2, 1979

  Office of the President

  Miles S. Smythe, Director

  Foundation for Human Conservancy

  Smythe Building

  Fifth Avenue at 57th St.

  New York, N.Y. 10022

  Dear Miles:

  Bill MacCall will hand you this letter as I don’t know what would happen to me if it were found out in several places that I sent you the enclosed.

  As you know, I’ve spent much of the past fifteen months working on the President’s Special Commission on Water and Waste Futures. Enclosed is a copy of the synopsis of the final report which we are going to turn over to the Big Boy next week. A quite different report will be made public and Congress will get a third version, with some exceptions who’ll see this one.

  I tried to write a minority report and wasn’t permitted to. I’m expected at a big and very quiet conclave of my business peers to discuss this enclosed brilliant plan and I shall try to take some recordings, covertly, sending you the gist of anything that might interest you.

  I know I can trust your discretion. I have betrayed my top-level colleagues and plan to go on doing so. But this filthy and sneaky scheme turned my stomach. I don’t know how to be loyal to treacherous bastards—traitors, really, if this project could be put over, and, it might!

  As ever,

  ROBERT L. LAMSON

  TOP SECRET

  PRESIDENTIAL EYES ONLY

  BY PRESIDENTIAL REQUEST CODE NAME Cataract Whitewater

  TO BE BURNED WHEN READ

  SYNOPSIS

  Herewith. Full report if requested.

  NOTE

  Final from Com. W W F

  Copy Number One. Copies extant, XXX 23. No date, no signatures, one abstention, unanimous.

  Urgent.

  Confirmation for Meeting as Suggested, Requested.

  1. In spite of federal, state, city and private funds employed for the improvement of the polluted condition of all but a very few minor rivers, lakes and watersheds in the nation, the levels of pollution are rising universally and in degrees everywhere far greater than the control efforts.

  2. By 1985 or 1986 it will not be possible for some eighteen major urban regions to continue to draw on current sources for municipal water supplies. Different aspects of water use in different areas affect this situation. However, the basic and most common factor is this:

  By the date noted the chlorine levels for purifying river and lake waters for drinking and other uses will have reached that point where additional chlorine will make the water not merely unpalatable but undrinkable, that is, medically and physically harmful. No economically feasible means to purify polluted water after that point is reached has been found or is likely to be, in the visible future.

  In effect, by 1986 or earlier, an estimated 135,000,000 Americans will have to be provided with water from other sources or by some currently not envisaged method of treating the extant sources.

  3. The Canadian watershed could furnish very pure water to middle USA if agreements were made and boring and other facilities were commenced in the very near future and urgently rushed to completion before the deadline.

  4. Desalination by nuclear power is already effectively supplying potable water to coastal populations. Inland communities cannot be so supplied at a competitive cost.

  5. In view of this situation, it is suggested that current federal, state and other policies be changed. Funds now being expended on or appropriated or budgeted for anti-pollution and water recovery might better be diverted to the enterprises suggested here, the massive diversion of Canadian waters with the additional development of facilities for conveying such added supplies into USA to areas now endangered.

  6. Since the drainage basins of USA will be polluted to the point of non-usability in the short period here stated, it is suggested that the public be gradually acclimatized to the idea of using the natural drainage systems entirely for waste and effluent removal. While such use would gradually destroy certain riparian values, many of those could be reconstituted when adequate fresh water from other sources was available.

  7. A vital point here concerns industry as well as big-city, urban and other threatened persons. Were these various entities able to terminate current and demanded procedures for the purpose of water-source protection, sewage treatment, the costly disposal of toxic and other industrial wastes and affluents, the result would be a major tax cut and a major lowering of manufacturing costs of the Gross National Product.

  8. It is the informed opinion of many of the most knowledgeable scientists in these fields that fully vented industrial waste would lessen or even destroy raw-sewage pollution in most areas. Where it did not, cheap chemical treatment would serve to inhibit bacterial growth and the like.

  In effect, if the river systems of USA were to be made mass-effluent conveyers of all wastes and if other fresh-water sources were developed, channeled and expanded, a net saving
to the nation would follow on a huge scale.

  9. This change-over would, of course, be accompanied by many local and perhaps large-scale objections and other difficulties. These should be foreseen and planned for, prior to their occurrence.

  OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT:

  MEMO

  FROM: Him

  TO: Miles

  RE: . . . . . . . . .

  Miles!

  The damned gadget I carried at this meeting made a spotty recording so I have had the tape transcribed, taken out a lot of repetitive stuff, and send you the gist, verbatim or as near to it as the recording plus my recall makes possible.

  A few of the boys hadn’t gotten inklings of what the secret confab was all about, and I thought nobody was going to make any important counterclaim till the wee hours when, as I note, the opposition really got busy. Not much of a dent made by them, tho. Most of us tycoons think always and only in terms of money and cannot think usefully by any other value system.

  Your favorite antagonist, General Ranklin Snare Gode of the Army Engineer Corps, was present in mufti while reported in the press to be touring Brazil. Everybody at Saratoga had a cover story, except those who are regulars, baths or ponies.

  Hope you can do something about this very secret but well-advanced piece of non-think cum lust by big industry. Hope you can also keep my part between us two. These colleagues are as serious as unprincipled.

  I’m not any more keen to be the corpse in some “accident” than the next big shot.

  Burtley B. Kelley chaired the President’s Commission on Waste and Water Futures where I’ve been a nettle, as you know from my first letter. He got up this meeting with White House knowledge, again as I think I wrote. Everybody knows he’s board chairman of the world’s second biggest oil combine, D.D.M.E. and Solar. But he’s also the quiet but main stockholder in the East-West Conglomerate, news to me! And that’s about it. Best to all—Bob.

  Here’s Burtley Kelley’s windup of a damned effective speech and presentation.

  “. . . and though I have seen a good deal of consternation on some of your faces, men, I think, to whom this concept is unfamiliar, I have also realized that even those whom it first disturbed rapidly began to see its urban and industrial advantages. I’d like comments.”

  WHITE. Big Steel. “Something of the sort has been whispered around in my bailiwick. Not quite in the bold and extensive terms you set out, Burt. But I had a hunch about the aim of this gathering. So I made some rough estimates. My own company, allowed unrestricted use of river facilities for waste disposal, would save forty millions in new hardware. On our next four-year program. It would cut roughly eighty million a year from operating costs. And that is only for us. It would save the industry as a whole well above an annual billion. So, Burt, in my view, you have something.”

  BILLINGS. Coal. “I hardly need say what it would mean to us. The God damned states, federal authorities and Congress pass new laws regulating us every week, seems like. If you strip-mine here, you have to cover and beautify, for Christ’s sake, the tailings! Yonder, acids have to be kept out of creeks and where do you dump them? So you haul millions of tons of wastes, that means for a hundred miles, from some mine heads. But how you going to sell the public on any such program? Not these days! Your industry threatens a duck, today, a sea gull, a damned violet—and you’re dead!”

  RANSON. Copper, Silver, etc. “Burt mentioned that our aggregate wastes would sterilize germs. Put all our mine, reduction-plant and smelter effluents into waterways and I can name five or six major rivers that wouldn’t have a live germ for hundreds of miles.”

  WHITE. “Same for steel.”

  BLAKE. Grain: Growers, Storage, Transport. “It sounds fine to us for just us. Suppose it’s done? Imagine every river and most major brooks and creeks loaded with industrial effluents added, raw, plus the sewage, untreated, of maybe two thirds of the population. Maybe more. All of us, I should think, can envisage the rivers at that point No fish. No aquatic life at all. Brown. Slow-flowing. Not stinking if we can assume that end could be dealt with. But—chemical-smelling, say. Long stretches practically forbidden even for boating—too dangerous to fall into. All right. My question is, what happens if the nation does go for the scheme and then, once the money is spent, people reject the result? What then? We’ve got a national mess we made and we’ll be expected to unmake. And how about side effects? I mean, suppose the grain belt rivers—and this is my territory—get to carry a load of industrial junk that’ll evaporate, fog up the air, ruin crops along riverbanks for ‘x’ miles?”

  COOPER. Bulk Chemicals (to the group). “Jeff Blake’s assuming there won’t be any prior studies of such potential hazards. He isn’t assuming that any such potentials would be special, and subject to treatment. He doesn’t realize that, in general, acids and alkalis will cancel out. Or think, by golly, of the fact that nearly every single acre-foot of such moving water will be oil-scummed, if not from industrial effluence, then from city wastes. Storm sewers. Such scums will tend to hold down evaporation of the—well, the messes—beneath. In fact, I’d nearly guarantee that this total-use idea would result in oil cover for so much of the water involved that we’d have almost no such problems as Jake has dreamed up.”

  (An hour later.)

  WILLIS. Electric Power. “I haven’t entered the utilities case because it is obvious. Several sides to it. I’ve been doodling some figures. One item. Some of the rivers will be caustic, or acid, chemically abrasive, anyway, to a degree that’ll erode turbines and so on. Hydroelectric plants will suffer more—and we’re already changing the alloys in some water-exposed machinery, at considerable cost.

  Second item. Where this scheme concerns us, I assume we could dump in hotter water any place? What, though, about coastal water? Where all this would end up?”

  BULLEN. Heavy Machinery and Land-moving Equipment. “Good question. But—wouldn’t the coastal seas be so charged with junk that added heat wouldn’t matter? And won’t the as-is situation wind up wrecking those salt-water deltas, estuaries, the like, in ten years?”

  WILLIS. “Dr. Bullen’s right. When you look ahead you see that river-mouth ocean areas will be ruined anyhow, no matter what’s done. That is, if the ten-year waste-disposal projection is correct.”

  GENERAL GODE. “It’s correct, all right.”

  WILLIS. “Can you expand on that, General?”

  GODE (after a pause). “Well-l-l-l, not officially. Off the record, amongst this distinguished company, I might say that—well-l-l-l—the White House has our figures that set the 1985–86 river-collapse point. Nobody on the inside would admit such a study has been made. They’d deny it. Politics. The public isn’t ready to face this fact—by a long shot.”

  DOMININI. Banking. “Have the Engineers made any survey of the Canadian potentials?”

  GODE. “Of course. This project has been suggested since the sixties. Maybe the fifties. Over-all and specific studies, if any exist, would, of course, be top secret.” (Pause.) “If, however, you will agree to keeping the matter confidential—your eyes and ears only—gentlemen—”

  (Murmurs of agreement.)

  “I can give you some quite fascinating data—”

  General Gode then hung up a large relief map of North America. State and national borders had been traced on it. For half an hour he outlined the “theoretical potentials and engineering requirements” involved in damming north-flowing rivers in Canada to reverse their flow, pump, where flow reversal would cost more or be impossible, and then send, by enormous conduits and tunnels, that vast water supply into USA. The Red River would help. Immense pumping would be needed. But General Gode showed how and where it would flow inland to cities, industry and for irrigation. His audience gave him rapt attention. Even such men, accustomed to vast operations, were awed by this proposal.

  When he finished there was a long silence.

  Somebody, finally, voice unidentified, asked, almost in a whisper, “How much, General?”


  “Over ten years, a hundred billions.”

  “Jesus!” (Etc. Voices unidentified.)

  KELLEY. “It’s now past one o’clock. I think we should take a break. If you agree, I’ll buzz and we’ll have a bar brought in. Coffee. Anything in the way of food you gentlemen would like.”

  Discussion resumed in some forty-five minutes.

  For about an hour, Miles, it was the most bloodthirsty money talk I ever heard. Finally, and to my surprise, Sturdevant Alomon of the business machine Alomons got the floor. Here’s how he started talking, loud, fast and mad:

  “I want to be heard here and now! Otherwise, I am leaving! I’ve listened nearly all night to you bastards discussing something that would really sweeten the pot for yourselves and your stockholders. Something you say would bring a great economic boom, and so on. The whole thing’s shit, gentlemen, and you know it, or should. Probably Canada would let us take their surplus water, at a price, I am sure the Engineers could move it to any points desired—at about three times the cost given here. Okay, gentlemen. But listen to this! You cannot use the river systems for sewers as you think because that would ruin any ground water still usable. And you can’t let the garbage from your industries travel to the sea. The seas are in trouble as you know and maybe that already means mankind is in trouble. If our government didn’t stop your sick scheme, all the others on earth would.”

  Sturdey was plenty sore and plenty vehement, Miles.

  Rebuttals were weak. Mainly, they said the coastal waters were already so bad, and doomed to get so much worse, that, in ten years, nothing anybody added would matter.

  Then came the Niobrara thing, which had been touched on a few times, before. People in your Foundation, maybe you, yourself, know more about this than I do—did, rather. A number of new items came up in this night session, new to me, anyhow. They stopped the Kansas spread of the green slime by diverting some minor rivers into land areas they then flooded. Treated every infested river, creek or spring, even those suspect of developing slime, with a lot of deadly junk and won the battle, there—though I didn’t realize how much and what miles of waterways were now poisoned. I had no idea how many tens of thousands of people had to get out. Or that the treated water left what it covered dangerous even to walk on and for years. Did you?