This is Chapter Ten from my last book, published in 2012. You might infer that my next book is a little overdue, and it would be true, but in the meantime here’s how my heroes from The Aviator - a science fiction comedy satire set in a near future - deal with an encounter with the last climate sceptics. The wonderful cover is by Dylan Horrocks.
We flew east over the Sierra Nevada and down towards Pyramid Lake. I steered us away from roads and stayed low in the valleys with stealth set to maximum. Jenny modulated her skin colours to make us as inconspicuous as a modest little airship can be. Every hour or two we climbed a few thousand metres above the mountain tops to scan for anything interesting. The canyons and desert of northern Nevada were pretty quiet for most of the day, but as dusk deepened Jenny picked up radio noise.
‘Any ideas?’ I asked her.
‘Not much to go on yet, there’s an AI of some sort, at a guess, but nothing very powerful – probably energy and bot management. Do you want to take a look? They’re just over the ridge to starboard.’
‘How close can we get without being seen?’
‘If we backtrack, we can cross over the ridge and drop into the valley downstream, then scan from there,’ she replied.
‘Do it then,’ I said, and went aft to look for Kate.
She was in the stateroom, reading old graphic novels from Croft’s small collection of printed works.
‘I love old-fashioned books,‘ she said. ‘Ink on paper, turning pages, much more satisfying than pixels on a screen.’
‘That’s what the boss thought,’ I said. ‘We have all that stuff in digital form – just about every comic book ever printed, certainly all the classics – but he insisted paper originals were special.’
‘They are, Lemmy, they are.’
I told her about the settlement we were approaching. ‘I think we’ll lie low overnight, fly a bird to take a look and a listen, then decide what to do in the morning. I don’t think it’s likely to be anything the ranch is going to be interested in, but it’s the first place we’ve found.’
She nodded, and followed me up on to the flight deck.
‘Anywhere we can moor for the night Jenny, well out of sight?’
‘There’s a meadow above the road Lemmy, the trees should keep us out of sight.’
‘OK, take us there. And fly a bird.’
‘Do you want to try our shiny new eagle,’ she asked. ‘It has a few special features that might be handy.’
‘What are they?’ I was curious, as I’d been treating it as just another impressive toy.
‘The vision circuits are very high resolution, sensitive from ultraviolet to infrared. It has passive scanning – much better than mine, at this distance – and it’s very effectively stealthed. Power reserves are higher density than our birds as well, so it could fly all night if we wanted.’
‘Sounds good to me, Jenny. Send her up.’ Kate already had the VR helmet on, so I had to be content with the images Jenny put up on the screens.
The eagle began a wide circle across the valley, climbing all the time. The settlement was a couple of kilometres away, set back off the road. A high wooden palisade surrounded a group of old buildings, stone chimneys rising above clapboard walls making thin columns of smoke. Lights gleamed out of a modern low rise complex in the middle, and what looked to be mine heads butted up against the hillside behind.
‘What sort of mine is it?’ I asked Jenny.
‘Coal,’ she replied. ‘And it’s being worked.’ She sent the eagle swooping down towards the buildings. Kate reacted with a soft ‘whee’, clearly enjoying the ride.
‘There are some solar panels on the buildings, but no wind turbines,’ Jenny reported. ‘I’d guess they’re using coal to generate most of their power. Pretty unfashionable these days.’
‘Any idea how many people there are?’ I asked.
‘Difficult to say. Everyone’s indoors at the moment, but I’ll keep an eye open. From the number of buildings though, I’d guess twenty, perhaps thirty.’
It was a warm autumn evening, stars sparkling above the tree tops, the purple remnants of the sunset glowing behind the ridges to the east. I unfolded a low table and a couple of camp chairs and we ate our dinner in the meadow listening to the last of the bird song. Afterwards, we lay on a blanket and looked up at the stars until the moon rose and the dew began to fall.
The eagle maintained its vigil all through the night. As we ate breakfast, Jenny told us what she’d learned.
‘Twenty-five people, no more, unless they’re hiding. All male, all white and all old. The youngest looks to be in his sixties. They have some bots to work the mine, but there’s still a fair amount of manual labour being done. Mainly shovelling coal.’
‘Friendly? Worth talking to?’ I asked.
‘Well, they don’t look aggressive, and the place doesn’t look as though it’s packed with weaponry. I’d guess they have hunting gear, but probably nothing much more.’
‘What do you think, Kate? Should we go and have a chat? Fancy a morning walk?’
Kate shrugged. ‘If you think it’s OK, let’s do it.’
An hour later, we walked up to the settlement. Two concrete pillars supported a heavy wooden gate, each carrying an impressive bronze statue of a distinguished old man. One wore a bowler hat and stood with his right hand out, the left tucked into his braces, obviously addressing an audience. The other was studying a thick book, its cover embossed with clouds. I pulled on a rope, and a bell clanged. We waited for a couple of minutes, then I rang again. Eventually the gate began to swing open. An elderly man with receding grey hair stuck his head out.
‘What do you want?’ he said, gruffly.
‘Just passing,’ I said. ‘We saw the settlement. Thought we might say hello.’
The old man was curt. ‘Do you have anything to trade?’
‘Nothing much, just information. A few stories, news from the rest of the world. This is my girlfriend, Kate Keeling.’
At the mention of her name, the man recoiled. ‘Keeling! Oh, infamous name. Are you a relation?’
‘What do you mean, relation?’ Kate looked confused.
‘Dave Keeling. The man who began the whole hoax, by measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide, and noticed it was increasing.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Kate with a smile. ‘No, no relation. Not that I know of, anyway.’
The old man seemed to relax, and pulled the gate open. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘We don’t get many visitors. I expect some of us will be interested in the news you bring.’
He led us up a dirt road towards the main building.
‘What did you mean about Keeling and a hoax?’ I asked.
He snorted. ‘I suppose you’re like all the others, convinced we brought global warming on ourselves. Well, I can tell you it was all a hoax, concocted to bring about socialist world government. Carbon dioxide didn’t cause the climate changes we’ve seen – not that they’re anything like as bad as they’d have you believe – it was natural cycles. Soon the cooling will be obvious, and the world will head into an ice age far worse than anything we’ve seen.’ There was a wild gleam in his eye.
‘That’s news to me. I thought the ice was still melting, and the sea still rising.’
‘Who told you that?’ he spat. ‘Sea level may have risen a little, but there’s been no measurable rise in the last 18 months, certainly nothing since the last NASA satellite failed. Greenland is gaining mass and soon sea levels will fall as the great ice sheets rebuild themselves. It’s all natural cycles!’
We were shown into the main building.
‘I’ll put a call out,’ our host said. ‘See if anyone wants to join us.’
Within ten minutes a dozen or more of the residents had assembled – visitors were obviously a novelty. They would have made good customers for the goat cheese, had there been any to spare. Most were the wrong side of seventy, and a few looked to be well into their eighties. We were introduced to a tall man, one of the younger ones.
‘James Clothier, chief scientist of the Heartland Community,’ he said, offering his hand. I shook it. His grip was strong.
‘Lemmy Newman and Kate Keeling sir,’ I said. He made a little bow in Kate’s direction.
‘So what brings you here, Mr Newman?’ Clothier asked.
‘A little bit of exploration,’ I said. ‘We love the country round here, and it’s a relief to be away from the mess in California.’ I told them about Sacramento and the BRMC. There was much shaking of heads and murmurs of disapproval.
‘But you haven’t walked all the way from California, surely?’ said Clothier.
I laughed. ‘We have a small aircraft moored nearby.’
‘Moored?’ said Clothier. ‘Does that mean you have an airship – you’re an aviator?’
‘Yes, we have use of a small airship. It gets us around,’ I said.
Clothier pressed for information about the blimp, but I wanted to know more about his settlement. ‘Tell me about the Heartland Community. What brought you all together, and why here, in such a remote and beautiful place?’
‘We are all men of like mind,’ said Clothier with obvious relish. ‘United in the belief that global warming is a hoax, a propaganda stunt concocted by socialist scientists and their billionaire green paymasters, designed to hasten world government. They want to crush free enterprise, stamp their jackboots on the faces of downtrodden, freedom-loving Americans, and tell us we cannot burn the fuels of our choice.’ He wiped his mouth, and continued.
‘All of us here at Heartland recognised this scam a long time ago. He gestured at a white-haired man leaning against the bar. ‘Roy was one of the government’s top climate scientists. He proved carbon dioxide couldn’t cause catastrophic warming. In fact he proved it regularly, in many different ways, until conspirators acting as gatekeepers to the scientific journals prevented him from publishing.’
‘Mark was one of the most active promoters of our cause.’ One of the youngest nodded in our direction. ‘He made sure the world knew there were people who would not acquiesce in the greatest academic fraud ever perpetrated – until propagandists in the mainstream media were ordered to fill their pages and programmes with counterfeit pictures of glaciers melting, old stock footage of droughts and floods, all designed to keep people in the freedom-loving democracies of the world in a permanent state of fear. He was reduced to running a blog – and still does. Unfortunately no one reads it.’
‘We all have similar stories. I used to run a think tank and advocate for investment in fossil sunshine. When the great Republican sceptic SantAngelo was elected president, I thought our job was done, that the world was finally safe from the evils of green hegemony. We celebrated with a great coal bonfire on the White House lawn. We kept it burning through that first year, shovelling coal in winter slush and summer heat. But we were betrayed, when the rest of the world ganged up on America, imposed crippling tariffs on our exports, and the Chinese demanded we cut carbon emissions or they would call in their loans to us.’
I nodded. I remembered the political nightmare that had made headlines throughout my teenage years, and my parents complaining about the economic troubles.
‘When SantAngelo made his fatal U-turn,’ Clothier continued, ‘our world – the world of all principled sceptics – changed forever. From being the intellectual heroes of all right-thinking people we became pariahs. Whenever anyone died in a flood, people starved in Asia or were made homeless by a high tide in Bangladesh, we were blamed. There were calls for trials, charges were laid at the International Court of Human Rights. We were accused of creating the conditions for climate genocide, and the people who had funded our campaigns, those brave defenders of the free market and liberty, the Cock and Scarf Foundations, saw their companies crippled and their good names trashed. When the collapse came – and it had nothing to do with climate change, it was caused by the failure of big government and the over-taxation of the American people – a group of us decided to keep the flame of principled scepticism alive. We came here and reopened this old mine with the last of the Cock money. We dig the coal that fires our community’s purpose. We burn it in order to reject the namby-pamby nonsense of the politically correct majority. The torch that burns outside this building is a symbol of our commitment to a great cause, and a demonstration that burning fossil fuels cannot possibly change the climate.’
‘But you do it here in Nevada, where nobody can see you,’ I said. ‘How does that help your cause.’
‘It’s symbolic,’ said Clothier. ‘Even in these troubled times, there are fanatical Greens who would like nothing better than to see us dead. Up here we are secure, and can still work. Roy and John are exploring ways to restore accuracy to global temperature measurements, when they can access their satellites. Mark has a marketing plan. And our bloggers are waiting for the net to start working again. We will relaunch our great campaign. This time, we will not be ignored!’
Kate looked at me, an eyebrow elegantly arched in disbelief. Clothier’s grasp of reality was obviously sketchy, but the group seemed harmless. Totally out of touch with the times, and obsessed with an unhealthy persecution complex, but deluded rather than dangerous.
‘What about the statues at the gate?’ asked Kate. ‘Who are they?’
Clothier beamed. ‘Aren’t they wonderful? Monckton and Lindzen, the two great ones who have passed on, who carried the flame of liberty and scepticism into the halls of academe and the pubs of Australia. Truly great men. Surely you’ve heard of them?’
Kate shook her head. ‘They mean nothing to me. I’ve seen the monument to the hockey stick, though, and the tomb of the unknown dendrochronologist. There was a statue of a bloke called Mann, I recall.’
A hush descended on the room. Eyes narrowed, and frowns puckered in the faces of the Heartlanders. ‘Don’t mention that name,’ Clothier hissed. ‘Or that sporting implement. It was irretrievably broken a very long time ago. It is a symbol of everything we oppose, a lie writ large.’ He stopped, as if aware he’d gone too far.
Clothier forced himself to smile as he attempted to change the subject. ‘So, Miss Keeling, tell us more about your airship.’
Kate glanced at me before answering. ‘It’s nothing very special. Just a runabout from before the collapse. Solar-powered, with biofuel back-up. Gets us around.’ she said.
‘And where do you plan to go next?’
‘We’re heading north and west,’ I replied. ‘But we’ll end up back in California.’
Clothier nodded, but I wasn’t sure he believed us. Post-collapse tourism isn’t exactly a growth industry, and two people sightseeing in an airship sounded pretty implausible, even to me.
‘Lemmy, sorry to interrupt,’ It was Jenny, on my earpiece. ‘We have something of a situation developing. There are six men with rifles standing just inside the trees on the edge of the clearing. They appear to be taking an unhealthy interest in Thunderbird.’
‘Mr Clothier,’ I said sharply. ‘Armed men are approaching my airship. Could you explain what they’re doing?’
‘Just taking a look at your transport arrangements.’
A man stepped up and whispered in Clothier’s ear.
‘It appears your aircraft is a more than just a runabout. I’m told it’s large and sophisticated. Perhaps you could explain why you weren’t entirely honest?’
‘Easy enough,’ I said. ‘We find people try to steal it. Ask your men to withdraw, or the ship may decide to take action. Your friends wouldn’t like the results. Thunderbird,’ I said out loud, ‘prepare for defensive action. Fire if attacked, or your security is threatened. Make 200 metres, and proceed until you have line of sight with my location.’
#
The Heartlanders weren’t subtle, and they weren’t moving easily. They were no special forces team, sneaking stealthily through the trees to take me by surprise. They were old men with hunting rifles and store-bought camouflage gear, and they stumbled over every branch and stepped on every twig. If they relied on hunting for their meat, they must be permanently protein deficient. I closed the companionway, changed skin colour to a normal commercial airship livery, and prepared to give them a bit of a shock.
One of Thunderbird’s many accomplishments is an ability to project very directional audio beams around the ship. Croft specified the system because he wanted to be able to listen to music while lazing on a beach, without deafening an entire neighbourhood, but it has other applications. I can make any sound appear to come from any spot I choose – anywhere I can make two ultrasonic beams intersect.
As the gunmen appeared on the edge of the woods, I made the sound of branches snapping come from behind them. They jumped, looked into the trees, and unshouldered their rifles. The man at the front spoke.
‘Probably deer,’ he said. ‘Ignore it, fan out round the ship. When I give the signal, we’ll move in and have a closer look.’
A wolf howled plaintively.
‘Jesus,‘ said one of the men. ‘The wolves are back.’ The men were backing themselves into a circle, guns pointing outwards.
‘Why do you hurt the forest?’ I whispered to the leader. His eyes widened, and he looked at the man next to him. ‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing,’ said his neighbour. ‘Why?’
‘The heat is killing me,’ I whispered into his other ear. ‘My leaves are burning, my bark is peeling.’ He gave a frightened gasp, dropped his rifle and put his hands over his ears.
‘The trees are talking,’ he said, looking at the others.
‘No they’re not,’ one replied. ‘Are you hearing things? Have you changed your meds?’
‘Or been drinking...’ muttered one of the others.
I made an eagle scream over their heads, and watched them scatter in fright. Time to head towards the compound.
#
Clothier turned, and began a whispered conversation with a couple of the others. One was talking into an old smartphone. I took Kate by the arm and headed for the door. We didn’t get far. Four of the younger men blocked our escape.
‘Mr Newman,’ said Clothier, ‘don’t be in such a hurry.’
‘I think we’ll be on our way. Kate?’ I turned to her, and began to push between the two men in front of me. They grabbed my arms.
‘Don’t test my patience,’ I said evenly. ‘Please allow us to leave peacefully.’
Clothier smiled. ‘It would be rude to leave so soon.’
‘I don’t think you appreciate what you’re dealing with. Thunderbird, do you have line of sight?’
‘I do,’ said Jenny. ‘How can I help?’
‘Deploy laser. Choose a suitable target, and fire at will.’
‘Christ, Jim, look at this!’ One of the Heartlanders was pointing out the window. Thunderbird hovered outside the entrance gate, a thin beam of red light stabbing from her nose to play on one of the statues. A couple of seconds later a bowler-hatted head fell backwards into the compound. Monckton had been beheaded. The laser flicked over to Lindzen.
‘Stop it!’ Clothier screamed.
‘Cease fire, Thunderbird.’ The laser beam flicked off, and the airship’s skin began to change to pastel pink, a bizarre portcullis badge blazoned on its nose.
‘I take it we can leave now?’ I asked. Clothier nodded towards the door. We walked out, a dispirited group of old men trailing behind. Jenny brought the blimp down outside the gate, and we boarded in silence. Clothier had picked up Monckton’s head and was cradling it in his arms. I could have sworn he was weeping.
‘Bloody lunatics,‘ said Kate as we sat on the flight deck. ‘Certifiable. What do they think’s been going on in the world for the last thirty years?’
‘Interesting question, but I’m no psychologist. Jenny, take us up.’
‘One moment, Lemmy. May I have your permission to leave them a little present?’
‘Go for it.’
The laser lit up again, and a narrow beam began to trace a complicated pattern of light on the wooden gate. Smoke began to rise. The Heartlanders shouted and waved angrily.
‘OK, Lemmy, all done.’ Etched into the wood of the left-hand gate was an ice hockey stick, stretched out below the face of a smiling man with a receding hairline.
‘I think I can guess who that is,’ I said. ‘Professor Michael Mann, right? The hockey stick Mann.’
Kate burst into laughter. ‘Jenny, you’re a genius.’
‘No, just very, very bright.’
You may note that the cover says “book one”. I have plots for books two and three, but I doubt they’d sell well enough to justify the time and effort put into them. I do intend to finish a book on truffles in the near future (for various and variable definitions of “near”). Watch this space.