Last Gasp Read Online Free PDF Page B

marked darkening of the ice core from about two hundred and fifty years ago. Every year ten to twenty inches of snow falls on Antarctica, which with the accumulated pressure gets squeezed down into four to eight inches of pure ice. Trapped in it is a permanent record of the climate at any given moment, plus prevailing conditions in the atmosphere, space dust, and so on. We’ve even detected traces of leaded petroleum.” Nick gave a bark of a laugh and shook his head, bemused. “Here am I, shut away in this bloody ice-hole on the arse-end of the globe, studying the effects of the Los Angeles freeway system.” Chase said, “And it’s supposed to be the cleanest, purest air anywhere in the world down here.” He locked his fingers together and rested his chin on them. In the poor light his hair had a blue-black sheen, and the whites of his eyes stood out beneath the dark bar of his eyebrows. Someone had once described his looks as “satyric,” which had flattered him until he looked up the precise meaning and found that it meant a Greek wood-demon with a tail and long pointed ears. “I wonder if he is a scientist.”
    “Possible.”
    “What field?”
    “Professor Boris reading Pornography.”
    “Highly amusing.”
    “Contact Mirnyy Station and ask if anyone’s missing.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “That’s one way to find out.”
    Chase gnawed his lip. “I reckon not.” He looked at Nick. “I mean, what if he was trying to get away from them? He’d hardly thank me for blowing the gaff.”
    “What the hell, I don’t see that it matters. He’ll be in the tender loving care of the Yanks soon. Let them worry about his pedigree.” Nick swung his boots down, stood up, and flexed his shoulders. “Let’s go to the rec room. It’s Donna Summer in cabaret tonight.”
    They went in single file along the narrow wooden corridor, which was lined with silver-clad pipes and lit by caged bulbs. Faintly they could hear the wind howling, twenty feet above them. On the surface it was 90 degrees below, with a windspeed of 62 knots. Chase smiled as he recalled an expression of his mother’s. “Not fit to turn a dog out,” she’d say when the wind and rain swirled around their little terraced house in Bolton. He missed her, found himself remembering silly inconsequential things about her with each passing year, like sediment building up. His father, Cyril, was still alive, retired from his job with British Rail, now living with his sister Emily, Chase’s Auntie Em, in Little Lever.
    It all seemed to belong to another century. A lost age. His boyhood self had vanished into the dead past, never to return. Was this what it was like to grow old, to experience this poignant pain? How did old people stand it? The weight of memory must cripple.
    Nick went to the bar, a wooden plank resting on two crates, and brought back two cans of Newcastle brown ale. Settled in a sagging armchair, Chase accepted one, peeled back the tab, and took a mouthful. A group in the corner was watching a VTR of an old Woody Allen film; Woody was walking down the street with Mariel Hemingway; that would make it Manhattan, Chase thought.
    He took another swig of beer and fished out the crumpled piece of paper and smoothed it flat on his knee with one hand. He continued to sip his drink while he studied it. What had he missed? This simple equation must mean something. The fact that it was so simple disturbed him most, in fact.
    With little else to divert him, Nick was willing to listen. Really, Chase supposed, he wanted to talk to clarify his own thoughts, using Nick as a sounding board.
    “The absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater is a commonplace  chemical interaction. They first measured it early in the century by shaking a sample of seawater in a closed jar with a given amount of air. Later they used a paddle-wheel device, and nowadays they keep a continuous record of the partial pressure of carbon dioxide—that’s pC0 2 —over huge tracts