Last Gasp полностью

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the pistons of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

CHARLES DICKENS

Hard Times

Half of all the energy consumed by man in the past two thousand years has been consumed in the last one hundred.

ALVIN TOFFLER

Future Shock

If the present growth trends in world population, industrial pollution, food production and resources depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.

Limits to Growth

The risk from lung cancer due to breathing New York air is about equivalent to the risk of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

BARRY COMMONER

The Closing Circle

1990

1

The mystery man arrived just before the five-month antarctic night set in. Two days later and he would never have been found.

Like a mole from its burrow, Gavin Chase emerged that morning from the prefabricated bunker eighteen feet belowground. Six years ago the bunker had been on the surface. Now, shored up with buckled iron ribs and creaking timbers, it was gradually sinking deeper and deeper and being crushed in a clamp of ice. Soon it would be necessary to abandon and build anew.

It was still dark. The spread of stars was etched into the firmament with hard, diamondlike precision. Above the icebound continent of five million square miles--nearly twice the area of Australia--the insulating troposphere was so shallow, half that at the equator, that the marine biologist felt directly exposed to the vacuous cold of outer space. Cold enough to turn gasoline into jelly and make steel as brittle as porcelain.

Chase stepped carefully from the slatted wooden ramp that led below, a bulky figure in outsize red rubber boots, swaddled in waffle-weave thermal underwear, navy-issue fatigues, an orange parka, and, protecting his vulnerable hands, gloves inside thick mittens thrust into gauntlets that extended to his elbows. A thin strip, from eyebrows to bridge of nose, was the only bit of him open to the elements. He moved across the packed wind-scoured surface to the weather-instrument tower, eyes probing the darkness.