'I'll be waiting,' Craig said.
'We won't be long,' Gerrard said. 'It's just a little story I want to tell her.'
'I hope it's as fascinating as the opera,' Craig said.
'More so,' Gerrard said.
'Well, she can't ask for better than that.' Craig put on his earphones.
Knowing the tension that Craig fought not to reveal, Tess allowed Gerrard to guide her toward one of many empty seats in the rear of the cabin.
'And now?'
'Actually I have two stories,' Gerrard said. 'One's about vinegar. The other's about frogs.'
'Vinegar? Frogs? You're confusing me, Alan.'
'You'll understand when I finish.'
SIX
'To begin,' Gerrard said as they buckled their seatbelts, 'I'm told that since I last saw you, since you graduated from college, you've become an environmentalist, not just in your attitudes but as your profession. You're a staff writer for Earth Mother Magazine.'
'That's right,' Tess said.
'I confess I haven't read the magazine, but my investigators searched through several back issues. They tell me your articles are very informative, the writing quite accomplished. They particularly mentioned how impressed they were with an essay you'd written on the alarmingly rapid disappearance of wetlands and the rare species that inhabit them. What struck my investigators was that it wasn't a topic they would have expected to find interesting, but you made it so and indeed convinced them of how important those wetlands were. The photographs that accompanied the article – taken by you – were exceptional, they said, and made them realize how beautiful the rare insects, birds, and fish that inhabit those wetlands are, what a loss to the planet they'd be. To the world's ecology.'
'Thank them for the compliment;' Tess said. 'Now if they'd just follow through and donate to organizations devoted to preserving those wetlands.'
'As a matter of fact, they did.'
Tess felt gratified. 'Please, thank them twice.'
'I will. Now here's the point. Even though I haven't read Mother Earth Magazine, I'm an environmentalist as well. You may have read about the controversy I caused when I voted against the president to break the tie on the Senate's rigid clean-air bill.'
'I did,' Tess said, 'and I have to say I was impressed. You did the right thing.'
'The president has a different opinion. You wouldn't want to have been in the Oval Office when he chewed me out for being disloyal. What he doesn't know is that in matters about the environment I'll continue to be disloyal, even if it means he chooses someone else as a running mate in the next election. There comes a time when you have to take a stand, no matter the personal cost.'
Tess felt her suspicions dwindling. Despite her fear, Gerrard had begun to win her respect. 'He'd be making a mistake if he dumped you.'
'Write him a letter. Tell him so.' Gerrard chuckled. A few moments later, he sobered. 'Because you're an expert in these matters, maybe you know this story, but I'll tell it to you anyhow.'
He was interrupted. A voice asked, 'Sir, would you care for a drink?'
Gerrard glanced up. A flight attendant stood beside him. 'The usual. Orange juice.'
'Sounds good to me,' Tess said.
As the flight attendant departed, Gerrard said, There's a man I beard about who lives in Iowa. A farmer. His name's Ben Gould. He's a member of the National Audubon Society. He's also an amateur climatologist. Near his barn, he's got a shed with a rain-gauge, barometer, wind indicator, and various other weather-analysis instruments. Two summers ago, after an extended period of drought that just about killed his corn and soybeans, his farm was blessed with several days of heavy rain. Or at least Gould thought his farm had been blessed. He put on rubber boots and slogged through mud to his weather shack. His rain gauge was almost full. He poured its contents into a sterile container, carried the container into his shack, and dumped the liquid into an instrument that analyses the chemical contents of water. This instrument was computerized. Red numbers glowed on a console. Two point five.'
The flight attendant handed Tess and Gerrard glasses of orange juice along with napkins.
They nodded their thanks.
'Two point five,' Gerrard repeated. 'What those numbers represented was the pH of the rain, the level of acid. The rule is, the lower the number, the higher the acid. Pure rainwater registers at five point three. But two point five! Gould was shocked. He told himself that there had to be a mistake, so he doublechecked his readings, using rain from another gauge. But the instrument's console showed the same numbers. Two point five. That's the acidic level of vinegar. Gould suddenly realized why his crops looked stunted. Vinegar? That's what you put on a salad . Not on your crops. It could rain every week, and Gould's crops would still look stunted. In a panic, he examined his wind charts. Global warming and its erratic effects had caused the jet stream to veer unusually southward. Into New Mexico. Then across Iowa. New Mexico's copper smelters are notorious for spewing outrageous amounts of sulphur fumes into the atmosphere. Those sulphur fumes, as you know, produce acid rain. And acid rain, in never before such intense concentration, was poisoning Gould's land.'
Pausing, Gerrard sipped his orange juice. 'Anyway, that's my story about vinegar. I wish I could say it had a climax, a happy ending, but the fact is, Gould's crops are still being poisoned, and there won't be a happy ending until we have legislation that forces those copper smelters and other heavy industries to clean up their act. Not just legislation in America, but worldwide. In Germany and Czechoslovakia, for example, there are thousands of square kilometers of woodland that have been totally destroyed and blackened by acid rain.'
Tess nodded. 'I know about those sections of Germany and Czechoslovakia, but your story about Iowa is new to me.'
'Then write an article on it. Maybe it'll do some good, get people thinking, motivated enough to write to their congressional representative, demanding controls.'
'I will,' Tess said. 'Poisoned forests don't seem to bother people unless they see the devastation. But a personal story, like Gould's, might make the crisis vivid.'
'And while you're at it, write the other story I'm about to tell you, the one about the frogs.' Gerrard drained his glass of orange juice and set it down. The main character in this one is a biologist named Ralph McQueen. His specialty is amphibians, and each year he likes to make a field trip into the Sierra Nevadas. A decade ago, he checked thirty-eight lakes and found them teeming with yellow-legged frogs. Last summer when he went back, he couldn't believe what he found or rather didn't find. The frogs had vanished from all but one of those lakes. In shock, he tried to discover why they'd vanished. His best guess was that some kind of deadly virus had wiped out almost the entire local population. But when he went to a herpetology convention in Brussels last fall, his shock became greater. It turns out that the Sierra Nevadas aren't the only area where frogs are disappearing. From colleagues, he learned that the same thing was happening all over the United States and indeed all over the world – in Costa Rica, Japan, Europe, Australia, Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, South America, everywhere. The frogs are dying, and no one's quite sure why. Acid rain, pesticides, water pollution, air pollution, global warming, too many ultraviolet rays caused by the hole in the ozone layer. Maybe all of those. It's hard to say. But the interesting thing about frogs is that they don't have scales to protect them, and they breathe through their skin, which is very sensitive. That makes them extremely vulnerable to damaging changes in the environment. It used to be that coal miners took a caged canary into the shaft they were working on. If odorless poisonous gases built up, they'd know because the canary, so small, would die first. The miners would have a chance to run from the shaft.'