Greenhouse Summer Read Free

the sell been sex rather than an irrigation project, would have had his hand in his pants. If he had been wearing pants.
    “Very entertaining . . .” he said, as he came blinking out of it. A certain edge returned to his demeanor. “Quite a little . . . magical mystery tour,” he drawled, as if to let them know he was no raghead bumpkin.
    Appelbaum slid a chip and a printout from his briefcase and handed them over to him. “The plans and the financial details,” he said. “As you’ll see, there’s no magic, it’s all simple off-the-shelf technology. And no mystery about the financing, you put up forty percent and we have interests who will pick up the rest.” He flashed Al Fawzi a winning foxy grandpa smile, seemed almost about to wink. “Not a loan bearing interest, but for a percentage of the real estate proceeds, in the approved Islamic manner.”
    “Indeed?” said Al Fawzi. “No magic to the technology? No mystery to the financing? Then shall we proceed to the tour of the real estate?”
    This turned out to be a long, slow, broiling, gut-wrenching cruisesoutheast across the Sahara in a Libyan blimp. The gasbag was in the form of an enormous wing, the better to maximize the surface area of the solar-cell array that powered the propellers, at the cost of a certain increased susceptibility to the roller-coaster dips of the up-and-down drafts, of which there were plenty. Whether the Water Authority had sprung for helium, or whether the balloon-wing was filled with cheap but explosive hydrogen, was something Monique did not care to contemplate.
    The landscape below, however, was something she could hardly avoid contemplating, and the more she did, the more harebrained the “Gardens of Allah” scheme seemed.
    The deep Sahara had been a largely uninhabitable waste long before the hand of man had sent its borders creeping south and its temperature soaring upward. Now the moaning air conditioner of the gondola was hard put to maintain an interior temperature below forty degrees centigrade as the blimp flapped like an overweight manta ray through an ocean of air at least twenty degrees hotter than that at a humidity of approximately zero.
    Dunes of sand and rocky wastes searing under a pitiless and cloudless sky bleached to near-whiteness by a sadistic sun. No mirages from this aerial vantage, but the sun, and the whited-out sky, and the heat waves pulsing up off the shadeless surface into the superheated atmosphere, turned the horizon into a silvery microwave shimmer, abstracted the landscape below into an unreal and unearthly glare.
    If the Earth ever really succumbed to Condition Venus, surely the runaway effect would begin here, in the Sahara, a vast deadland stretching from the drowned littoral of the Mediterranean shore deep into the withering heart of Africa, which, as far as supporting the life-forms of the Gaian biosphere was concerned, was no longer part of this world already.
    Pump water into craters here and it would steam into the atmosphere like soup boiling on a stove. It was so hot and dry that not even local cloud cover would form. It would be like opening the windows of this gondola so the air conditioner could attempt to cool down the whole planet.
    Oases? Palm trees? Crops? Gardens? People?
    Water or not, nothing could live in that heat, under that sun.
    Surely Advanced Projects Associates had to know that.
    Nor did Muammar Al Fawzi impress Monique as a world-class idiot.
    So what was APA really up to?
    And why had Al Fawzi dragooned them into this torturous inspection of the brutally obvious?
    The answer to the second question turned out to be that Muammar Al Fawzi’s local version of a Bread & Circuses S&L sell, or rather anti-sell, was his sardonic way of getting down to the down and dirty of extracting a straight answer to the first.
    At length, at considerably more length than Monique would have liked, after hours of this grand tour of the lifeless broiling void, after she had long