Greenhouse Summer Read Free Page A

since become well basted with her own sweat and Appelbaum was panting like a beached Mississippi manatee, Al Fawzi finally verbalized the point he had long since made, at least as far as she was concerned.
    “So you see, Sheik Appelbaum,” he began as if the bazaar haggling had been going on for some time already, “the notion of re-establishing oases in what the Sahara has become lacks, shall we say, a certain practical cost-effective credibility.”
    “Perhaps if the tunnel system hadn’t already been built,” said Appelbaum. “But as it is, it’s simply a matter of a few cookie-cutter nuclear desalination plants thrown up by the low bidder, pumping stations we can acquire from any number of dried-up oil fields for a song, and a few nukes readily available on the open market.”
    Al Fawzi gave him the look of a Bedouin of old regarding a spavined and scrofulous camel. “By that logic, we would have only to defrost a bit of the polar permafrost and pump the water into a few selected craters to turn the Moon into the Garden of Eden.”
    “The atmosphere out there is perfectly breathable.”
    “Perhaps then you would like us to leave you out there for a few hours to breathe it as an experiment . . . ? With all the water your metabolism might require?”
    Appelbaum’s eyes became carefully hooded. If he weren’t soaked already, he would’ve started sweating. Somehow Monique found herself beginning to enjoy this.
    “Mr. Appelbaum, I remind you that my position requires a certain modest expertise in climatech engineering. While it may be true that you can pump water out here at a rate that could keep up with the evaporation, it would not lower the ambient temperature by a single degree or raise the humidity an iota. You would need to construct thousands of such artificial oases in order to create cloud cover significant enough to make the area even remotely habitable or arable. While you’re at it, why not dam the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bosporus and pump enough of the Mediterranean into the Sahara to reclaim the former shorelines and turn the desert into an African version of the Siberian savanna?”
    “This is a serious proposal, Mr. Al Fawzi,” Appelbaum snapped irritably.
    “Then suppose we get down to serious business.”
    Mervin Appelbaum finally did, and that was when Monique’s enjoyment of the conversational fencing match began to evaporate as swiftly as a dewdrop in the desert sun.
    “Fuller domes with controllable albedo over the lakes and surrounding farmland,” Appelbaum said. “Standard Israeli prefab.”
    “At considerable extra cost.”
    “Our . . . financial backers will absorb the overage.”
    “Will they now? And toward what end?”
    “Agriculture.”
    “Hardly a cost-effective means of growing cucumbers and oranges.”
    “That’s not quite what they had in mind. They would plant crops chosen to maximize the financial yield per acre.”
    “
They
would not happen to be Bad Boys, now would they . . . ?” Al Fawzi ventured.
    “You have a problem with that?” said Appelbaum.
    “Nothing personal,” said Al Fawzi. “But there is a certain humorless conservative point of view here that does not quite comprehend that that which calls itself Bad Boys is a righteous syndic of citizen-shareholders rather than a revenant criminal triad.”
    “They strictly observe the local ordinances of all jurisdictions in which they operate,” Appelbaum pointed out.
    “Or cause them to be modified when inconvenient.”
    “Be that as it may, the cultivation of marijuana
is
legal in this one.”
    “You are saying that no legal adjustments would be required?”
    “Coca
is
an even more lucrative crop in terms of financial yield per acre,” Appelbaum opined. “Strictly for export, of course, and taxed at an attractive rate.”
    “Opium poppies would be even more profitable,” Al Fawzi suggested sardonically.
    “Even Bad Boys draw the line somewhere,” Appelbaum huffed