"Is it possible to do that?" Liz asked, scooping up a forkful of scrambled eggs. She chewed and swallowed. "Could they affect the oxygen in that way?"
Lucas nodded wearily. "Yes." Was she being obtuse or had he failed to explain it properly? "Yes, they can do it. Given sufficient quantities of herbicides over a period of time. Months or years, it's hard to know for sure how long it would take." He leaned over the table, a lock of graying hair falling across his puffy eyelids. "Liz, we depend on the plants and once they're gone our supply of oxygen is gone too--forever. Without oxygen we're finished, and every other living creature with us. Not just in one country or on one continent but everywhere, all over the world."
The motion of her jaws slowed, became mechanical. "But that would be committing suicide."
"That's
"You mean they're really planning to do that?"
Lucas sipped his coffee and looked at her over the rim of the cup, haunted. "They can do it--and will--now that Lebasse is out of the way."
Liz swallowed and dabbed her lips. "What do you mean, out of the way?" she said slowly.
Lucas put his cup down very gently. "Lebasse stood in the way of DEPARTMENT STORE. He wanted it stopped. So they had to find a way of shutting him up, getting rid of him. It wasn't an accident, Liz. It wasn't suicide. He was murdered."
"But on TV it said he--"
"What did you expect them to say? The fact that he was dying of cancer made it all very convenient for them. He had a motive, or if that didn't quite fit they could say 'while the balance of mind was disturbed.' Everything neatly tidied away and no awkward questions asked."
"Gene, if they know that you have the dossier . . ." His wife's voice trailed away into silence. She sat staring at him, the neatly brushed hair like two apostrophes on either side of her plain shiny face. "Do they know? Did Lebasse tell them?"
"They. Them. Who are we talking about?" Lucas said, a ragged edge to his soft Texan drawl. "Somebody in the Defense Department? One of the Joint Chiefs? Somebody in the White House?" His small hands curled into fists on the tabletop. "I don't know whom I can trust and whom I can't. I don't know who 'they' are!"
A splash of morning sunlight made a bright rectangle on the wall. In the center of it a Norman Rockwell calendar showed a small boy sitting alongside a huge policeman at a drugstore counter; at the boy's feet lay a red-spotted bundle tied to a stick.
Liz got up silently and poured fresh coffee. When she sat down her face was paler, her eyes clouded. "Gene, you must go to the president. You're his scientific adviser; he'll have to listen to you."
"It isn't that easy to arrange. It could take weeks."
"Not if you tell them it's urgent, a matter of--of--"
"National security," said Lucas dully.
"Yes, you must, you have to!" she insisted.
Lucas pushed his untouched breakfast aside. "If only I could get to him directly, not through intermediaries. But you're right, I have to try." He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. "You know something? Seven or eight years ago when I was on the Presidential Advisory Committee a marine biologist called Theo Detrick submitted some research he'd spent years working on. According to him the phytoplankton in the oceans was declining, and he'd reached the conclusion that within a few years, perhaps by the end of the century, the world would be gasping for breath. Well, I did a terrific demolition job on him and his report. Ridiculous. Impossible. Science fiction. And you want to know something? He could have been right all along. Detrick could have been right, damn him."
"Would it help if you talked to him now?"
"He died a few years ago. Nobody took him seriously. His daughter is still pushing his work. She's on television now and then and writes a lot of stuff on the environment." Lucas was gazing at the calendar in the bright rectangle. "You know, that might not be a bad idea. She's at Scripps in California. I could send her the dossier. Sharon or something. No, Cheryl. She's well-respected by a lot of people, scientists, people active in the environmental lobby."
He looked up at his wife, who was stacking the dishes and carrying them to the sink. She suddenly looked much older, her face cruelly caught in the shaft of sunlight.
"That's what I'll do," Lucas said, trying to sound cheerful and decisive. Liz was hunched over the sink, her shoulders shaking. Damn, why had he told her? Why hadn't he kept it to himself?
Joseph Earl Gelstrom took the call in his office suite in the JEG Tower, which was situated next to the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange on the corner of Pine and Green; like most of downtown San Francisco the building had miraculously escaped damage in the 1989 earthquake, and nearly all the major corporations had stayed put.
