Dan actually blushed under his tan. Jo didn't miss much, though he hadn't realized it was common knowledge what Baz--Tom Brannigan's son--and the rest of them got up to; and not only on Saturday nights. He felt hot and cold at what Cheryl would say if she found out. In truth he didn't know how to take Baz--whether he liked him or even secretly despised him. Baz was assertive, cocky, a natural leader (or bully), and the focal point for the other young men at the settlement with high spirits to vent and wild oats to sow.
No, Dan decided, turning his feelings around to examine them, he didn't really like Baz at all. Yet there was something about him, an intense and almost mesmerizing quality, that was hard to resist. Sometimes Dan actually thought that Baz was mad--the way he'd suddenly switch from being passive to hyperactive for no apparent reason. Almost as if his brain had blown a circuit. Maybe the pill-popping did that.
"What's the matter?" Jo asked him as he jerked the straps on his saddlebag with unnecessary force.
He answered with a shrug, willing his hands to move slowly and methodically as he pulled out the food wrapped in silver foil, the plastic mugs, and the Thermos of chilled white wine and laid them on the sun-dappled cloth Jo had spread on the ground.
What was it, this irritation flaring suddenly into anger? Why did he feel this way? Was it the hot blood of youth, something he'd grow out of? He just felt that he wanted to reach out and seize hold of life, and that somehow the impulse was being stifled and thwarted. No, no, no, his mind kept insisting, he wasn't like Baz; the feeling was different, not the same at all. Baz really
And then he thought, stress from
He had to admit the stupidity of it, even while he was doing it, but there and then without thinking, while Jo's back was turned, he slipped the white pill into his mouth and washed it down with a quick swig of wine.
Propped on one elbow, tearing off strips from a chicken leg, Jo gazed around at the dense proliferation of vegetation. Even in her two years at the settlement she'd noticed a change in the local flora. She was under the impression that greenery was decaying and dying in the new atmosphere, not flourishing like mad. She asked Dan about it.
"Cheryl says it's to do with the abundance of carbon dioxide, which plants breathe in. They're being hyperventilated or something and it's speeding up their metabolic rate. There's a friend of Cheryl's who lives north of here, Boris Stanovnik, who's been studying the problem, and he says it's going to accelerate the growth as the carbon dioxide builds up."
Jo tossed the chicken leg aside and licked her fingers. She looked puzzled. "Then how come the oxygen isn't increasing? If the plants are growing faster and becoming lusher, they ought to be giving off more oxygen. It's a two-way process."
"Hereabouts that's true, though it's not happening uniformly throughout the world. We wiped out most of the equatorial forests in the last century, which drastically reduced the oxygen supply. Only the stuff that's left"--he waved his hand at the encroaching greenery--"is flourishing. And there isn't enough of it to make much difference. What we've got now are huge tracts of desert and small areas with superabundant growth. The balance has been upset, so the whole thing's out of kilter."
He reached for his mug of wine and clumsily spilled most of it down his T-shirt. The seeping wetness reminded him of a woman in heat, a potent sexual image.
"So what's going to happen, do you think?" Jo asked, nibbling a slice of cucumber. The shape of her bite made a serrated half-moon in the pale fleshy translucence.
"Do you mean globally?" Dan said, watching her mouth. "Or just here, to us?"
"Isn't it the same thing? If the global situation gets worse I don't see how we're going to survive in our little Garden of Eden. Or are we somehow immune from what's happening to the rest of the planet?"
"You know something," Dan said, his eyes fixed intently on her. "You're a precocious little brat for a seventeen-year-old."
"Well, you can't be old
"What do you think I am, middle-aged?" His eyes lingered on the jut of her young breasts under the check shirt. Above the third button there was a vee of smooth tanned skin. He picked up the Thermos, fumbled and nearly dropped it, and sloshed more wine into his mug.
"You're way over the hill," Jo informed him, shaking her head. "You can't even take your liquor."
Dan set the mug down on the white cloth with studied care. "I could take you," he said, his voice ragged.
"What? Don't be silly."
"I mean it."
She went still, looking at him, guarded, a little less sure. "Don't say things like that, Dan-You're just trying to scare me."
