Everybody, but Nialie, knew Henry was crazy. “Mind your own business,” Isaac hollered.
“Just asking, kid, because it looks like rain.”
Each mail plane would bring Henry elegant packages from boatbuilders. C. vanLent & Zonen Kaag, Abeking & Rasmussen, S.E. Ward & Co., Hitachi Zosen. Each package came with encomiums from satisfied sheiks and international arms dealers and Hollywood moguls. There were colour photographs, elaborate deck plans, and, invariably, a personal letter from the designer.
None of them understood. Henry was not unreasonable. He didn’t expect a boat built of gopher-wood, or that the length would be three hundred cubits, the breadth fifty cubits, and the height thirty cubits. But he was not interested in Twin MTU main engines or U25 HP Caterpillar D-353s. When the time came he was not so foolish as to think his descendants would send forth a dove—or, more appropriate to the generations of Ephraim, a raven—but neither would a pad for a Bell Jet Ranger III helicopter be required. The likelihood was that there would be no fuel and they would be dependent on the wind in their sails for power. So Henry was thinking of a three-masted ship modelled on turn-of-the-century schooners or possibly a windjammer or the sort of square-rigger that had once been built in the Maritimes.
“Please don’t do it,” Isaac said.
“Why not, yingele?”
“Don’t do it!”
“Give me a reason.”
“Everybody is laughing at us already. Is that reason enough for you?”
“Are you ashamed of me?”
“Maybe for more reasons than one,” Isaac said, fleeing.
Seated at his rolltop desk with the two bullet holes in it, awash in estimates and brochures, Henry turned to his Pentateuch for solace, rocking over it, reading, “And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”
Of course that could never happen again. God had established a covenant. He had set his bow in a cloud. But the conditions that prevailed today, the wickedness of man great in the earth, were as bad as those of Noah’s time. God’s punishment, Henry was convinced, would be another ice age. Then there would be floods and a properly equipped ship would be crucial to survival. Meanwhile, Henry continued to study the entrails.
A CIA report predicted catastrophic changes that would return the world climate to a condition similar to that of one hundred to four hundred years ago. The report, leaked to the Washington Post, anticipated famine in the near future.
The earth’s cooling will lead to increasingly desperate attempts on the part of the powerful, but hungry, nations to get grain any way they can. Massive migrations, sometimes backed by force, will be a live issue and political and economic instability will be widespread.
Henry’s file also included a recent item clipped from the Edmonton Journal.
The proposition that the planet is cooling has been advanced most articulately by Reid Bryson, professor of meteorology and geography at the University of Wisconsin.
Between 1880 and 1940, the mean global temperature rose about one degree Fahrenheit. Since then it has fallen by about half that amount.
Bryson argues that the period of 1930–61 was a time of extraordinarily benign weather that has been mistaken for normality. The earth’s declining temperature and the historical evidence persuade him that the weather in the coming years will be more unpredictable than ever—and quite possibly devastating.
Once his parents had gone to bed, Isaac lit his handrolled cigarette in his own little bedroom, switching on a tape.
A gale-force wind screamed across the Arctic. “Last week,” the narrator said, “we left Captain Allan Cohol lying in a fish net inches from death. Frightened by the golden-haired stranger’s escape from a coffin of ice after centuries of entombment, the men of the Eskimo village have overcome him and are preparing now to thrust a harpoon through the giant stranger’s heart.”
“No!” Kirnik cried. “We will take him by sled to Dr. Fantom. The doctor has things to cause sleep. When he sleeps we will send for the police.”
“So the men of Fish Fiord,” the narrator said, “manhandled the mighty man of muscle onto a dogsled, his fabulous frame still entangled in the coils of the net. Their destination was the sinister quarters of Dr. Fantom, renegade refugee from the world of medicine, practising his nefarious skills in the hiding of the high north. Fantom looked down at the giant in the net.”
“I am Captain Allan Cohol. Inter-galactic 80321. I demand my rights.”
Chuckling malevolently, Fantom said, “Come now, relax. My name is Frederick Fantom, MD. You may call me Fred. I will call you Al. Well, isn’t that amusing, gentlemen? Meet our new friend. Al Cohol. What a truly intoxicating pleasure to make your acquaintance. Now then, your arm, my friend. This won’t hurt a bit.”
“Don’t touch me with that needle, you foul physician. This is medical mayhem,” Captain Al Cohol protested, already in a daze.
“Let’s get some stimulant into you. Overproof rum. Just what the doctor ordered, Al. Now open your mouth like a good patient.”
Sounds of struggle. Gurglings, splutterings, liquid being swallowed.
“Look,” Kirnik cried, alarmed. “Look at his eyes. Look at the way his face is changing.”
Captain Al Cohol began to roar. “Kill! I’ll kill you all. A-a-rghh-h-h!”
There now came the terrifying sounds of tearing and rending. The Eskimos shout and scream as Captain Al Cohol hurls himself at them.
“What is this?” the narrator asked. “Captain Al Cohol, the hero of the inter-galactic fleet, driven into madness by a glass of rum?”
Then another voice proclaimed, “The ordeals of Captain Al Cohol is a radio adaptation by E.G. Perrault of a comic-book series written by Art Sorensen for the Alcohol Education Program of the Northwest Territories Government.”
His tape done, Isaac reached under his mattress to dig out his folder of New York photographs, cut from the pages of Time, Newsweek and People. Photographs of the world out there where the main event wasn’t the arrival of an Otter from Yellowknife and the sun didn’t sink below the horizon for month after chilling month. Photographs of film stars and tycoons and fashion models. He had written to his Uncle Lionel, reminding him of his visit and inviting him to come again, signing himself, “Your admirer, Isaac.” In response, he had been sent an electric train set with a card signed by Lionel’s private secretary.
The next evening a resolute Isaac delighted Henry at the dinner table, joining him in saying grace and asking if they might resume their Talmud studies. They had only been at it a week when Isaac burst into tears at the table.
“What is it, yingele?”
“Please don’t send me to school in Yellowknife. I want to attend the Rebbe’s yeshiva in Brooklyn.”