Out of the Mist
by Ken Staley
“G’day mate,” Archie said, his voice as clear as any Darrell heard over the last month.
Surprisingly clear considering the impossible transmissions of the last week. “How are things in the land
of the giant PX?”
“About the same, Arch,” Darrell replied. “How’re things down under?”
“No change here,” Archie replied. “We’d like to know when you first started noticing the haze.”
“Haze?” It took Darrell a moment. “Oh . . . we call it ‘the mist’ here. Dunno, we’re trying to track
it down now using old television weather reports. First thing anyone noticed here was some rather
spectacular sunsets on a few evenings just over a month ago. Sunsets got brilliant every night now for
the last two weeks, as near as we can determine. Lately, it just gets dark earlier—no real sunset to speak
of.”
“Too right! About the same as we have here then,” Arch nodded in agreement, looking off
screen. “As near as we can tell, about two weeks ago someone here asked if there was a late season fire.
We get some of the same bloody sunsets when the fires in the south kick up every summer. At least we
can measure that bloody smoke! With this—nothing.”
“Sounds about right,” Darrell nodded. “What else do you hear?”
“I just did manage to talk to Wu in Shanghai just yesterday,” Archie said. “Same story there,
although he isn’t sure the mist is the problem. He claims it came from his northwest. No one here is
willing to stick his neck out that far.”
“As much crap as they keep dumping into the air it’s a wonder they can see anything. No one
here is willing to commit to the origin, either,” Darrell said.
“We can’t get any sort of reading on the composition,” Arch nodded, then his image started to
shatter on the screen like a jig saw puzzle. “Looks like our five minutes are about up, mate.” His voice
faded in and out like an old transistor radio too far away from the music source. “Try again later today. If
not see ya tomorrow, with luck!”
“G’day Arch,” Darrell felt his voice raise involuntarily as though his yelling would compensate for
failing electronics.
He disconnected from Skype and scanned the data that danced across several screens. As far as
he could tell, they were still getting real time data from the local weather source, from NOAA and from
NASA. While the data seemed fresh, Darrell felt his frustration rise to new levels every time he matched
what was on the screen with what was happening outside. Peering through his office window was like
looking at a blank monitor—nothing—solid grey. Not fog; water vapor could be measured with some
accuracy. This was nothing else they could finger either—yet.
Like most meteorologists, initially he dismissed the gathering mist as nothing more than
particulates tossed into the upper atmosphere by a forest fire or perhaps a large local fire. Only later,
when news carried no such reports of large fires, did his curiosity begin pricking at the back of his mind.
Finally, when it didn’t dissipate—or even seem to thin much—Darrell started probing.
Several calls later, some colleagues more frustrated than him and more than a few completely
crazy, he found no clearer picture. Whatever the mist was, it settled on land and sea and, as far as he
could discover, now covered the globe. He had contacts through various institutions and universities
across the world. Mumbai, Karachi, Nepal, Kenya, Tokyo, even Greenland and reports from the Ross Ice
Shelf reported the same thing—a lowering ceiling and fading visibility.
Everything had mass. Every substance he knew. Certainly fog—water vapor—had mass, and
weight, and density. Freon, ozone, natural gas, smoke, even hydrogen and light carried measurable
particulate. But this—mist—defied everything. It simply was. He leaned back against his chair, closed his
eyes, and let his mind float. Such mental wanderings occasionally provided clarity in amazing ways.
Al Davis cleared his throat noisily as he sauntered up to Darrell’s desk.
“Well?” Darrell asked without opening his eyes.
“Well, you can try to call Aunt Louise in Atlanta, but you’re just as likely to get Argentina,” Al
said. “Cell phones are spotty at best and have been deteriorating all day. Land lines are no better. Place
a call to NOAA and you could get Nome, Alaska. Text messages will end up in who knows where, and
good luck trying to read the gibberish that comes out the other end.”
“I just talked to Archie in Sydney. We had a good five minutes before musical pixels begin. What
else?” Darrell asked as he swiftly pulled himself back together.
“Looks like email and Internet connections are as tricky as anything else, then. I talked to
Admiral Blake at NOAA. His people are clueless and want answers from us. Not that we can supply them
with much, given the connection problems—that is, even if we had very much. I saw one of their mass
requests for information and it looks like they’re trying every other lab and palm reader they can get in
touch with.”
“NASA?”
“Another mystery,” Al said. “Their last pictures from space so far are nil.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that whatever this mist is cannot be seen from space on any spectrum you choose,”
he said.
“That’s impossible.”
“So we told them, but the images they took from space show otherwise,” Al sighed. “They had a
live feed from the space station for almost 10 minutes. Given the strange things happening with
communication, it’s remotely possible that those images came in altered, but who's to say? Oh yeah,
they are no longer able to contact the Space Station. Haven’t been for most of the morning now.”
“Let me see if I get this right,” Darrell said as he leaned forward. He slid his glasses off and put
his forehead in his hand. “That suggests that some sort of intelligence—working through a medium that
so far does not exist and we not only can’t duplicate, but can’t identify. This media can actually
manipulate any type of image taken for identification purposes so that the results are simply—what—
invalid? Nil?”
“Homeland Security declared a high-priority emergency ten minutes ago,” Al said. “All except
military and emergency air flight is grounded. So far they’re keeping the lid on it all, but it won’t take
long before that gets out. I gotta tell you, it’d take real stones to go off the ground in this, even if it’s just
a commuter hop to Boston.”
Darrell swiveled in his chair and stared out the window. As he watched, the mist seemed to ebb
and flow, like a tidal surge, back and forth in front of him. He’d lived in the city all his life. He knew—or
thought he knew—the area between his apartment and the lab intimately. Each shop, each alley, each
pot hole—where friendly faces greeted him—where a taciturn news stand vendor hunkered every
morning—where to avoid walking after dark. On fresh spring mornings, on crisp fall mornings, he
enjoyed the 30 minute stroll from his office home, often stopping to chat with this store owner or
purchase a cup of coffee.
His brisk walk today turned into a nightmarish slow-motion shuffle. Each parking meter suddenly
threatened to intercept him. Shop doors remained closed; those customers who dared to venture out
clustered in small groups at the windows, straining to peer through. His half-hour stroll became a twohour, heart-stopping lurch. At times Darrell understood how a pinball felt in an arcade game.
Overnight, the gentle, sunset-staining haze settled to ground level, thickening as it came. A
complete anomaly that piqued Darrell again and again. It wasn’t mist, though. No dampness, no
measurable water vapor—nothing measurable.
“Did you recalibrate?” He asked as he scanned the results Al handed him, knowing the answer
before Al spoke.
“Each time,” Al said. “Even changed machines after the third test and calibrated that one, too.
There just isn’t anything to measure.”
“Even the cleanest air in the world carries a modicum of measurable water vapor. Most carry
measurable particulate,” Darrell said aloud shaking his head, vocalizing the unnecessary. “Remember
the ‘Heidi Tests’?”
Several years ago, colleagues from several European labs climbed some of the highest peaks in
the world, packing half their labs, just to see what the air quality atop these crags would be. Darrell and
Al smiled. They easily predicted the results without getting cold, relying on sherpas or suffering oxygen
deficiency.
Al understood the science well enough to teach most environmental science classes, from basic
chemistry to advanced molecular biology. Any freshman in his beginning classes knew how to conduct
these basic tests—it really was freshman lab level stuff. He put on his glasses and stared down the
columns of numbers of Al’s latest results. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared in the written results,
nothing they wouldn’t have found on any other normal day.
“One hundred samples gathered from one hundred different sites around this globe will clearly
show something. Where did you take these?”
“We’re kind of limited here,” Al said. “Nobody, including me, wanted to venture too far out into
this ooze until we get some kind of reading. We took the first half dozen from the roof garden. Then we
hung the probe out the lab window for the next six. Those last six came from the parking lot. We got
reports from Singapore, from London, from Madrid, from Sao Palo, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Moscow—
more than 100. As closely as we can tell from scanning just the preliminary data, everyone who
measured found nothing—not one damned thing. Looks like most of them are just like us though,
caught off guard and taking samples nearby rather than roaming too far afield.”
From his seventh floor window, he watched as the world disappeared. Looking up offered no
sky, only light grey.
“Growing denser,” Al noted. “Even ten minutes ago you could see at least half a mile. Now it’s
down to less than a quarter mile.”
“When did you take the last measurement?” Darrell asked.
“Half an hour ago,” Al shrugged. “Maybe a bit more.”
“We’ve got bigger trouble brewing,” Darrell confided. “Remember the imaging package we sent
to the Pentagon?”
Al nodded.
“They’re reporting system wide failure, and they want answers,” Darrell said. “Seems that they
can’t see a damned thing, either. Problem is, they’re closer to it and less able to deal with it on a rational
basis.”
Carol Walker poked her head in, and Darrell chopped off Al’s reply. Some projects they still kept
close to the vest, and she wasn’t privy to the DoD contracts.
“I’m leaving now. I want to get home while I still can,” she said, “before the trains and cabs stop
running altogether.”
“A bit early in the day isn’t it?” Darrell asked. “We could use your help here.”
“Oh, I can’t add anything to this,” she waved him away. “I suspect nothing you or anyone else in
the world can do will identify this, much less change it.”
She set down her things on an empty chair and walked closer to the window, reaching out as
though she might touch the mist through the glass. A short woman, she jingled as she walked; a series of
thin gold bracelets marched up and down both arms. A fear of a more primal nature seeped into the
room—fear that no one was willing to vocalize or even recognize aloud.
“You have an idea?” Darrell asked lightly as he raised an eyebrow to Al. Carol was the resident
high priestess of nature, constantly armed with doom and gloom pamphlets from one crackpot
environmental group or another. If she wasn’t one of the leading environmental chemists in the world,
he’d have canned her long ago. Recently, she’d worked far too close to radical fringe elements for his
comfort, and he wondered if she hadn’t slipped her moorings a bit.
“A theory you’d care to share?”
“None,” she said. She stood staring the window. Her copper-red hair looked to Darrell like
someone ran a crayon through a pencil sharpener. “None necessary. Mother is simply calling a halt.”
“Come again? Calling a halt to what?”
“Everything, of course,” she replied without turning from the window. “It really is quite lovely.”
“Who is calling a halt to what?”
“Mother Nature,” she said without embarrassment. “C’mon, Darrell, you’ve been at this for
what? Twenty years? More?”
Somewhere down below sirens rose from the street, their harsh wails muffled by the mist. Even
the powerful strobes from emergency vehicles didn’t penetrate.
“You know the science better than almost anyone alive,” she continued. “You’ve tried to
convince our government for the last decade that its environmental policies were nothing more than a
really feeble joke. What drove you?”
“You’re serious?” Darrell asked. “What drove me?” What drives us all?”
“This really shouldn’t come as any surprise to you,” she sounded reproving, accusatory almost,
as though he knew the answer but was afraid to vocalize it. “You told the United Nations conference not
long ago that the planet wouldn’t sit still for our abuses much longer. They laughed at you. Do you
remember the newspapers? The editorials? I think this mist is the planet answering.” She waved a
sweeping arm at the window, as though to reach out and embrace all of the mist.
“Think about it. I know you’ve considered the possibilities before this, but how many naturally
occurring phenomena do you know—in the last 3,000 years—that encompass the entire globe like this?”
“Volcano,” Al said without hesitation. “St. Helens.”
“Northern hemisphere,” she dismissed his reply just as quickly. “And limited at that.”
“Krakatoa—ash circled the entire globe. Dropped temperatures around the world by
measurable amounts even for those times. The blast could be heard for thousands of miles,” Al said
again. “1816, Mt. Tambora eruption—year without a summer.”
Carol shook her head, evidently feeling any comment was beneath her.
“Looks like mother is ringing down the final curtain,” Carol said.
“You can’t be serious,” Darrell wanted to wave away her nonsense as clearly a delusional theory
of one of her out-there groups. Somehow, deep inside, he couldn’t dismiss Carol completely. She was
too intelligent to fall for any real fable.
“Explain it away then,” Carol said as she crossed to the chair and gathered her stuff.
“You’ll try, I know you. Just don’t get trapped here. Within a few days, going outside for
anything is going to be very difficult.” She nodded toward the window as a fresh series of sirens broke
the hushed quiet the mist imposed.
“Light rail is suspended,” Al said as he hung up his cell phone. “Too many people using the tracks
as a guide marker. Local police report over 200 traffic collisions in the last hour. The mayor wants to
shut down the city.”
“He might save his breath,” Carol said from the door. “Mother is taking care of that.”
“How long you figure?” Al asked.
“As long as it takes Mother to recover,” Carol said. “A year? Five? A decade?”
“But…”
“Everything will stop,” Carol predicted. “Transportation, shipping—all of it—just stop. Anything
that pollutes. Mother needs a rest, a break from the tortures of mankind.”
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Darrell said from his desk. “Where the need is greatest,
mankind has always found a way to adapt and survive. The indomitable spirit of mankind will not be
denied. Life will not be denied.”
“Until now,” Carol said as she turned to leave. “Just remember, ‘There are more things in
heaven and earth, Darrell, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' I’d get home as soon as I could,” she
called. “You’re much more likely to survive there. Just don’t forget to say good night to your Mother
tonight.”
They stared at the door when she left, the merry jingle of her bangles fading, the mist growing
thicker behind them.
Comp ice
by Thomas Canfield
Sometimes, in hindsight, it’s difficult to see how certain things get overlooked. Like when NASA
sent one of its Martian probes hurtling into the planet’s surface. Afterwards, when they analyzed what
went wrong, they discovered that they had failed to convert feet and inches into their metric
equivalents. And you wondered how they missed something so blindingly obvious, so elementary. Then
there was the library built in the form of an inverted pyramid, a structurally flawless design except . . .
they failed to take into account the weight of the books. Empty, the building was a masterpiece. But
when they began to bring in the books, they realized that the structure was pushed beyond its capacity.
The engineers had failed to factor in the additional weight. I mean, a library, books—who would have
made the connection?
What I’m trying to say, in a roundabout way, is that things are not always so simple or obvious
as they seem. It’s almost impossible to take into account every variable in an equation. Almost always
something gets overlooked. You only hope that it’s nothing too terribly important or critical.
That was what happened with Comp Ice. The idea had come to me one evening while driving
along the city’s side streets. I hit a particularly jarring pothole that threw the alignment out of whack
and played hell with the steering and handling performance of my car. It was an event that happened
altogether too often. Drive along any city street and it was the equivalent of picking your way through a
war zone. The roads were a mess. And, just like that, the thought struck me—Comp Ice. You could throw
all the money in the world at the problem, exhaust the entire city budget, and still you wouldn’t be able
to keep the roads free of potholes. So I thought: why not attack the problem at its root, why not
confront it head on? Rather than just slapping a band-aid over it.
The difficulty, simply put, was water. Water could work its way into any crack or crevice in the
pavement, could penetrate the most minute breach or fracture. When it froze, it expanded. Freeze,
thaw, freeze, thaw and, in no time, you had a pothole. Asphalt, concrete; it made no difference. Water
could reduce them both to rubble. The solution was to fundamentally alter the nature of water.
That just happens to lie right up my alley. I’m a nano-engineer. Specialists in my line of work
look for ways to alter or enhance molecular structures. Such improvements benefit a wide range of
applications, from industry to farming to healthcare. I started with the basic chemical formula for water,
H2O, and looked for ways to ‘tweak’ it. When water freezes, it expands. With most substances the
reverse is true. Cold causes matter to contract. So I delved into the inner structure of the water
molecule searching for ways to trick it, to force it to comply with a different set of standards.
What I discovered was a ‘compression window’ in the existing hydrogen/oxygen bond. Properly
treated, the bond could be compressed, just as a spring could be, and the resulting solid, the ice, proved
more compact and dense. The ice was still ice; it acted fundamentally the same, but it no longer
expanded when it froze. The freeze-thaw cycle was neutralized, and potholes, and all their attendant ills,
were effectively rendered obsolete.
I secured a patent on the process. Comp Ice, as I named it, was my baby, and I was as proud as
any father. Once the Federal Highway Administration signed off on it, it was greenlighted for testing on
a few select projects. Add my formula to any asphalt or concrete mix and the finished product, the
highway, would be virtually maintenance free. It may not have been the most glamorous
accomplishment in the march of human progress, but I have to say I felt pretty good about it. It was a
neat piece of science. Even though the recognition I received wasn’t all that I expected, once the royalty
checks started rolling in, it no longer mattered quite so much. I was going to be a very wealthy man.
Only later did anyone discover the flaw in my logic. By then, of course, it was too late.
***
Brent Whitbeck stood on the banks of the lake, hands thrust deep in his pockets. He had
forgotten his gloves in the truck and did not want to walk back to retrieve them. He stamped his feet
against the frozen earth, hunched his shoulders. An icy wind blew in over the lake. The water was dark
and sullen, as bleak and uninviting as the grey December sky above. Whitbeck shivered. But it was not
the cold that was the source of his misery. It was the lake.
Whitbeck watched as Deputy Commissioner J. Allan Collingsworth paced back and forth along
the edge of the water. Collingsworth was the number two man with the Department, a high-ranking
bureaucrat whose voice carried considerable authority and weight. Whitbeck was a lowly field engineer.
He had had to pull every string he knew, had had to call in every favor, to get Collingsworth to come out
to the site. Whitbeck had put his career on the line and could only pray that Collingsworth would
recognize the problem for himself and acknowledge the urgent, compelling need for action.
“O.K. I’ve seen the lake,” Collingsworth said, scowling. “Now suppose you tell me why I’m here.”
Whitbeck wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He could feel the cold all the way through
him, all the way to the bone. “It’s open water.” Whitbeck gestured at the lake. “We’ve had a hard freeze
going on two weeks now. The other lakes and ponds are all frozen over.” Whitbeck waited, hoping
against hope.
“So?” Collingsworth demanded.
“There’s ice here, all right,” Whitbeck explained. “I did a survey, covered the lake from one
shore to the other. Even took samples.” Whitbeck paused. “But the ice is at the bottom of the lake.”
“The bottom?” Collingsworth looked bewildered. “What’s it doing at the bottom of the lake?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. I took the samples into the lab, did some tests.” Whitbeck
chewed on his lower lip. “It’s Comp Ice, C-ice.”
Collingsworth absorbed this revelation with his usual calm. “The road north to Buckland,” he
commented, “they paved it over the summer. Some of the runoff must have made its way here to the
lake.” Collingsworth’s expression turned thoughtful. “That’s unfortunate, now that I stop and consider
it. Anything that impacts the environment is red meat for the Save the Whale crowd. This is not going to
go over well. When the press gets hold of it, they’ll have a field day. They’ll use it like a stick to beat up
on the Administration. Lax oversight, insufficient regulation: I can see the headlines now. We’ll have to
go into damage control mode.” Collingsworth shot a quick look at Whitbeck, a look of shrewd appraisal
and cunning.
“You did the right thing in notifying me, Whitbeck. You did the smart thing.”
Whitbeck sighed. Collingsworth still did not see the problem. He imagined it was some sort of
public relations issue, something they needed to contain and smooth over. He had no broader vision
than that. Whitbeck looked at Collingsworth with an edge of malice. He gave it to him straight up.
“The Comp Ice is heavier and denser than regular ice. That’s why it sinks to the bottom. That
means the water at the surface is exposed to the cold and will freeze as well. There’s no longer any
insulating effect. The process will go on repeating itself until the lake is frozen solid through, top to
bottom.” Collingsworth shifted on his feet uneasily. He turned up the collar of his jacket. He was trying
not to see where Whitbeck was leading, trying not to recognize the magnitude of the catastrophe.
“Every living thing in this lake will be killed, Commissioner. The fish population will be wiped out.
Up and down the food chain the entire ecosystem will be decimated. Everything is connected to, and
dependent upon, everything else. And this is only one lake! We have to prevent the others from being
infected as well.”
The color had drained out of Collingsworth’s face. Only the tips of his ears were a bright pink.
His eyes wore the distant look of a man who had just absorbed a punishing blow and was waiting to
evaluate how badly hurt he was. He opened his mouth to say something—and there was only silence,
only the thin, sharp punctuation of the wind.
***
I don’t know how many times I’ve said that I was sorry. I’ve almost made a separate career of it,
these past couple of weeks. Only no one seems to care. People want to believe that I set out
deliberately to wreak havoc on the environment. It’s not just the tree huggers who are up in arms,
either. Ordinary people—you wouldn’t believe how angry they are. I try and explain, but nobody’s
listening.
Well, I got news for these people. I’m a nano-engineer, and I know what’s in the pipeline. I know
what’s about to hit the streets. You think Comp Ice is bad, wait’ll you see what we’ve got in store for you
next. I won’t ruin the surprise, but hey, car owners, don’t like paying top dollar for a gallon of gasoline?
Try our substitute. We’ve got a lovely little supplement that will ease the strain on your budget. Only
problem is, the ozone layer, that thing that protects you from the sun, you can about kiss it goodbye.
Once we’re up and running, I give it ten years at the outside. By then, hopefully, we’ll have discovered a
solution that will eliminate the side effects and everything will be just ducky. The way I see it, as long as
we keep solving problems faster than we create them, things will work out just fine.
Trust me.