"It isn't anything serious?" he asked when they had tucked Dan in and closed the bedroom door.
"Most out-of-towners feel the effects. Streaming eyes, nausea, dizziness, and so forth. You can't help breathing in some of the foul stuff that passes for air in this city." Ruth poured out two glasses of bourbon. "Were you outside for any length of time today?"
"For minutes at a time, that's all, between cars and enclosures. What did you call it?. 'Manhattan Lung?' "
Ruth nodded. "Some people are more allergic than others. Don't worry, Gavin, he'll be fine in the morning. He's young and strong." She gave him a reassuring smile and sat back in the square chunky armchair. The living room was furnished with period pieces and bric-a-brac in the style known as mid-century kitsch. There was a half-moon coffee table inlaid with tiles of antique cars. The three-pronged tubular light fitting had inverted pink plastic shades. In an alcove were a circular dining table and four chairs in matching blond wood.
"Why does anyone stay here?" Chase asked with genuine consternation. "Why do you, for God's sake?"
"I guess people just come to accept things. Conditions get worse year by year and you learn to live with them." Ruth shrugged, the green velvety material of her dress, pinned by a dark green brooch at the gathered neckline, emphasizing the pale rounded smoothness of her neck and shoulders. "Think of the really terrible conditions people have endured in the past. New York isn't the first city to choke its inhabitants to death. It's been going on for centuries."
"Is it safe for Dan to travel? The sooner I get him out of this place, the better."
"Let him rest for a couple of days, then it should be okay. Are you ready to leave right away? What about your business at the UN?"
"Good question." Chase sipped his drink. "Wish I knew the answer."
"The answer to what?"
Chase told her about his meeting with the secretary-general and Senator Prothero. It wasn't so much, he felt, that he needed Ruth's advice as to air his own feelings, examine his own doubts out loud. She was a receptive audience and could be trusted.
As he spoke he could see Ruth becoming absorbed in the proposal as put to him by Ingrid Van Dorn and Prothero. Finally she said, "Quite honestly I don't see the dilemma. If it's technically possible, then you've got to do it."
"But don't you see, Ruth, that
"What is?"
"I don't know if it can be done--nobody does. Take any ten scientists and you'll get three who'll say yes, three who'll say no, and the other four wouldn't care to express an opinion either way."
"Then suppose we leave the environment alone," Ruth said. "Does it have the ability to restore the natural balance without our interfering? Perhaps in a few years time the biosphere will revert back to normal."
"There's no such thing as a 'normal' biosphere," Chase explained.
"Life creates the conditions for its own existence. Before life appeared this planet was incapable of supporting life. What's happened now is that we've come full circle and the converse is true: Life has created the conditions for its own extinction."
"Does that mean those conditions will get steadily worse and there's nothing we can do about them?"
Chase shook his head wearily. "I don't know. Nature has no ethics; it's not bound by moral considerations. It simply obeys the fundamental laws of cause and effect, of supply and demand. It doesn't concern itself with whether conditions are suitable for life or not. Species are created and become extinct while nature looks on indifferently."
"Ingrid Van Dorn and Senator Prothero seem to think we can alter things positively."
"They're not scientists. It's hope, blind faith, nothing more."
Ruth watched him closely. "And you think it's futile."
"Oh, no. If I thought it were futile I wouldn't need to think twice." Chase pressed his fingertips to his eyelids, rubbing the tiredness away. He raised his head, blinking. "You think I'm making excuses?"
"Yes, I do," Ruth said bluntly.
"But why me, for Christ's sake? I'm not a climatologist or an atmospheric physicist--"
"One minute you're saying that none of the so-called experts can agree, the next you're saying you're not fit for the job. But just think what someone with your reputation and influence could achieve! That's why they approached you, why they need you--you must see that!"
A siren wailed somewhere in the city, sounding like a bird crying mournfully in the wilderness.
Ruth went to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. She came back and knelt down next to the half-moon table to pour. Chase tried not to stare but couldn't stop his eyes following the luminously pale contours of her shoulders and the upper parts of her breasts above the green swathe of material. He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. What ought he to do? Leave Dan here and come back for him in the morning? There was another option, which at the moment he couldn't bring himself to consider too closely.
