Samantha Smart Read Online Free PDF Page B

of this
timeline, security seemed to be leaving them alone in their obscure corner of the building’s basement.
    In the last thirty-six or so hours, they had read their one surviving newspaper from front to back, and had ventured out once in another taxi-boat to purchase several more. It appeared that Professor Smythe’s ATM bank card still worked in this timeline–apparently he had not been bankrupted or indeed snuffed out of existence altogether by the dramatic changes the world had gone through. “A fortuitous thing” The Professor had called it, though it had seemed quite unlikely to Samantha.
    The Professor had also expressed continued fascination with the forest of antennae that seemed to dominate the entire skyline, and they had made a plan that today they would investigate this phenomenon. It didn’t take long for The Professor to discover something about them just by re-reading the newspaper.
    “Suffering Cephalopods!” he exclaimed. “Trees! Trees, Samantha!”
    The Professor shoved the newspaper in front of her, pointing to a marginal advertisement for some sort of tree maintenance company.
    “Look at the picture,” The Professor indicated a tall, slender, antenna-like photo at one side of the ad. It was indisputably one of the things they had observed on almost every city rooftop, though it could be seen in much greater detail in the photograph. Its bottom base, which they could never see from street level, was a roughly trapezoidal shape with what looked like computer controls and a digital readout on it. The advertisement talked about regulation of CO2 intake and oxygen output, which clearly intrigued The Professor to no end.
    “Artificial trees, Samantha,” he began in a hurried voice. “Thousands upon thousands of them. Artificially processing carbon dioxide and outputting oxygen. Amazing! I must see one. But–” Samantha could almost see smoke coming out of The Professor’s ears as she watched him thinking steps ahead of her, “That would mean–
could
mean–” he looked again at the newspaper, then grabbed it and began marching towards his laboratory.
    “Come on, Samantha, I definitely would love to see one of these amazing devices, but first we need to run a quick test on this newspaper. If my hypothesis is correct, we may have the answer to our question of how this global warming sprang so suddenly on this alternate timeline.” Samantha shrugged and followed, closing Polly in the office behind her.
    The Professor’s lab was a pretty impressive place. Samantha had been in it many times before but still only understood what half of the hi-tech machines were for. The machine they were currently at was scanning the newspaper The Professor had placed in it, with lasers, x-rays and other invisible forms of light or energy, according to him. The results, which appeared in columns on a computer screen, were in abbreviations and percentages that made little sense to Samantha, though she had seen this spectral analysis performed once or twice before by her erstwhile mentor.
    “Cotton, hemp. Alfalfa! Atrophied Aztecs! There’s not one speck!”
    “One speck of what?” Samantha asked, trying to understand the numbers on the screen.
    “Look,” The Professor pointed to the abbreviations, explaining them, “Cotton, 62.5 percent. Hemp, 27.83 percent, Alfalfa, 9.64 percent–there’s no wood, Samantha. Not one iota. This newspaper is made entirely without wood pulp.”
    Samantha looked and began to understand. Artificial trees, newspapers made purely of cotton and hemp, massive global warming. It was beginning to add up to a somewhat sickening conclusion.
    “Professor,” she said quietly, “Does this mean what I think it means?”
    “It certainly seems so,” he replied, shaking his head sadly. “Samantha, I think it is quite possible, in fact likely, that in this alternate timeline
there are no trees.
At least not in this part of the world.”
    “The floating plastic sidewalks,” she