The Precipice
by Ben Bova
The modern tropics and their fringes support more than half the world’s population, numbered in the billions. Many already live at the fringe of survival, dependent on food aid transported from the grain belts of more temperate zones. Even a small climatic shift… would physically compress the geographical limits for cereal cropping… I leave it to your imagination what such a pace of climate change would entail for most people.
…some men have already embarked on a bold new adventure, the conquest of outer space. This is a healthy sign, a clear indication that some of us are still feral men, unwilling to domesticate ourselves by any kind of bondage, even that of the spatial limitations of our planet’s surface.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Irving Levitt, a rare jewel among men.
To Barbara, who adorns my life with beauty.
And with special thanks to Jeff Mitchell, a real rocket scientist; to Chris Fountain, metallurgist and optimist; and to Lee Modesitt, an economist with imagination; true friends all.
MEMPHIS
“Jesus,” the pilot kept murmuring. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” The helicopter was racing north, bucking, jolting between the shattered land below and the thick dark gray clouds scudding just above, trying to follow Interstate 55 from the Memphis International Airport to what was left of the devastated city. You could not see the highway; it was carpeted from horizon to horizon with refugees, bumper to bumper traffic inching along, an un-ending stream of cars, trucks, vans, busses, people on foot swarming like ants, trudging painfully along the shoulders of the road in the driving, soaking rain, women pushing baby carriages, men and boys hauling carts piled high with whatever they could salvage from their homes.