Last Gasp by Trevor Hoyle Page B

running out.
    Years ago he had read somewhere that “we shall be unable to detect any adverse trend on a global scale until it has gone some way in its development.” That’s what really scared him, haunted him—the obsessive fear that the process had already begun, and that by the time it became evident to skeptical scientists and bull-headed politicians, it would be too late.
    By then the world would be sliding headlong toward an inescapable ecological doomsday, with nothing for mankind to do but slide helplessly with it.
    Brad turned away from the window with its magnificent mountain panorama and sat down at his desk, a small dapper man with a gentle, worried face. He was thirty-four but looked older, and he certainly felt it. He wasn’t eating or sleeping properly, and it upset his wife that he never played with the kids anymore. Gary was seven and Little Pete nearly four and they couldn’t understand why Daddy didn’t respond to their questions and joyful enthusiasms. Joyce blamed him for being forever preoccupied with his work—but it wasn’t that.
    Yet how could he explain that he was thinking about them, his own flesh and blood, in the most utterly real way possible? That in his mind’s eye, an image that revolved endlessly like a closed spool of film, he was seeing the heritage his generation was bequeathing theirs.
    A dead, polluted, uninhabitable planet.
    He looked at his taut, outstretched hands and pressed them to his face, trying to stifle the croaking moan of despair forcing itself from his gut.
     
    Bo Anyango knelt in the baked red earth and fingered the mottled leaves of a coffeebush. The rising sun had just cleared the peaks of a distant mountain range, so the air was still pleasantly cool; yet it was tainted with the sour odor of decaying vegetable matter.
    Bo was mystified. Every single bush on his four-acre plot had been ruined. Shriveled discolored leaves were scattered all around, several inches deep in the furrows he had hoed with his own hands, using implements supplied by the Bakura Institute of Agriculture. Like his African neighbors, he had followed instructions and tended his crops just as the mzungu—the European agricultural officer—had shown him. And just like the crops of his neighbors, the coffeebushes had wilted and died. The only means of livelihood for himself, his wife, and five children was now so much rotten, stinking vegetation.
    What had gone wrong?
    Squatting on his skinny black haunches, Bo looked disconsolately around him. Three years work to prepare the land for the coffee crop he had been assured would fetch a good price totally wasted. He had been told of the miracles the Europeans could bring about with their powders and sprays, and he had been eager to try. JEG was the magic word on the side of the canisters. It was an English word, he supposed, though no one had told him its meaning. He had believed in JEG, because he had seen the results with his own eyes. Crops that normally would have been stripped bare by hordes of voracious insects, commonplace in this remote region of western Kenya, had flourished and grown to maturity. The valley, once a barren waste, had blossomed. The insects had been defeated—for a while.
    Recently, however, some of the pests had reappeared, and in far greater numbers than before. The spider mite—not an insect but a member of the scorpion family—had returned in force, in their millions. Its razor-sharp mouth was specially adapted for piercing and sucking chlorophyll from leaves, and it had a prodigious appetite. In the past the spider mite population had been kept in check by predatory insects and birds, most of which had disappeared since they started using JEG. Animals too, he observed, had also gone, some of them found floating belly-up in the streams. Soon the valley would be denuded of vegetation, silent of birdsong, devoid of animal life. Only the vultures and the spider mites would be left.
    Bo knew one thing for sure.