Empire Builders Read Free Page A

do.”

    “Scarlett,” he said. “With that bricktop of yours, your name has to be Scarlett.”

    She went back to frowning.

    “That is your natural hair color, isn’t it?” Before she could answer, Dan added, “Doesn’t matter. It’s gorgeous. Never change it.”

    She cocked an eyebrow as if she were going to retort, but thought better of it and sipped at her drink. Dan went back to scrolling through the messages that had accumulated during the morning. One of them was from Zachary Freiberg, his chief scientist.

    Dan routed all the other messages to the people he hired to get things done. Zach Freiberg he called himself. The scientist’s message was marked Urgent and asked Dan to call immediately, regardless of time zones on Earth. Dan called out Freiberg’s name to the computer and within seconds his face appeared on the screen.

    “Wha’s wrong, Zach?”

    Freiberg was obviously in his office in California. Tawny brown hills showed through the window behind him, with palm trees and cypresses framing the view. From the angle of the sun Dan guessed it was midmorning in Pasadena. He registered all this during the couple of seconds it took for his words to reach Earth and Freiberg’s reply to return the quarter-million miles to the Moon.

    Zachary Freiberg had one of those faces that would look boyish to the day he died: round apple cheeks, round chin, soft features and soft blue eyes. His wiry strawberry-blond hair no longer flopped over his broad forehead, though; in the ten years that Dan had known Zack, the slow recession of his hairline had been the one sign of aging he could see.

    Zack looked troubled. “Can we go to security mode?”

    “I’m on the trolley, moving too fast for a laser link.”

    Freiberg bit his lower lip.

    “We can scramble,” Dan suggested. “Or wait till I’m back in the office and we can use the laser.”

    “Scramble, then,” said Freiberg two and a half seconds later.

    Wondering what could be making him so upset, Dan typed in his private security code. The screen flickered briefly, then steadied once again.

    “What is it?” he asked.

    Unconsciously, Freiberg hunched closer to his screen, like a man about to whisper a secret in a neighborhood bar.

    “I’ve been looking at the long-term climate trends,” he said. “You remember, you wanted to get a better fix on the greenhouse effect?”

    Dan nodded, glancing at Kate Williams. She was staring through the window by her seat, watching the pockmarked Mare Cognitum whiz by. How big are her ears? Dan wondered.

    “I remember asking you about the long-term effects of the greenhouse warming, yeah,” he replied to Freiberg. “If the sea level keeps rising we’ll have to build a dike around the launching center at La Guaira.”

    “Right.” Freiberg’s round face took on an even more anguished look. “Dan—if what I’ve come up with is right, and I think it is, we’re in for big problems. I mean, major catastrophe.”

    “Will we have to abandon the launch center?”

    “It’s worse than that, Dan. A whole lot worse. It’s not just Astro. It’s the whole fucking world!”

    Dan had never heard Freiberg use that expletive before. The guy’s scared!

    Without waiting for Dan to ask, Freiberg went on, “It’s a cliff, Dan. The climate doesn’t change gradually, it all of a sudden shifts and bang! you’ve got the glaciers melting down, Greenland and Antarctica melting down, the sea levels going up thirty meters, rainfall patterns radically shifting, all the coastlines on Earth inundated—it’s a mess, a goddamned catastrophe like out of the Bible!”

    Dan sank back in his chair. Kate Williams saw the expression on his face and stared at him.

    “Nobody’s considered the gas hydrates in the deep-sea sediments,” Freiberg was almost babbling, “and under the tundra all across the Arctic. They release methane when they’re disturbed and the pressure conditions—”

    “When?” Dan asked. “How