“So what?”
“Martin Humphries has been waiting all day to see you. He’s the man Zack Freiberg wants you to meet.”
Dan grimaced. Zack had been the first one to warn Dan of the impending greenhouse cliff.
“Not today, Teresa,” he said. “I don’t want to see anybody today,” The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, softly, almost timidly, “Do you want me to bring you a dinner tray?”
Dan shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat.”
He looked at her image on his screen, so intent, so young and concerned and worried that the boss was going off the deep end. And he felt anger rising inside him, unreasoning blind blazing rage.
“No, goddammit to hell and back,” he snapped. “You have to eat. I can do any goddamned thing I want to, and if you want to keep drawing your paycheck you’d better leave me the hell alone.”
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing. Dan snapped his fingers and the screen went blank. Another snap and it folded back into its niche in the desk’s gleaming rosewood top.
Leaning back in his chair, Dan closed his eyes. He tried to close his mind against the memories, but that was impossible.
It was all going to be so damned great. Okay, a century or two of global warming would lead to a greenhouse cliff. Not a gradual warmup but a sudden, abrupt change in the world’s climate. All that latent heat stored in the oceans would pour into the atmosphere. Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melting away. Sea levels shooting up over a decade or two. Big storms and lots of them. Climate shifts turning croplands into deserts.
So what? We’ll use the resources of space to solve all those problems. Energy?
We’ll build solar power satellites, beam energy from space to wherever it’s needed. Raw materials? We’ll mine the Moon and the asteroids; there’s more natural resources in space than the whole Earth can provide. Food production? Well, that would be a tough one. We all knew that. But with enough energy and enough raw materials we could irrigate the croplands that were being desiccated by the climate shift.