2

Portland, Oregon

Monday, 13 August

The woman with the Bettie Page bangs and the “DR. LIONEL AZIMUTH” sign at the Portland airport is exactly the one I would hire if I were the fourteenth-richest man in America. She looks like a pin-up. A pin-up who can box.

“Not interested,” she says as I walk up to her.

“I’m Lionel Azimuth.”

“Fuck off.”

I don’t take it personally. I look like a dick with a fist on the end of it. “I’ve got a meeting with Rec Bill,” I say.^[5]

She considers this. “Do you have luggage?”

“Just this.”

A second later: “You don’t use the wheels?”

“The handle’s not long enough.”

She looks around, but there’s no one else willing to claim to be Azimuth.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m Violet Hurst. Rec Bill’s paleontologist.”^[6]

★★★

“Why does Rec Bill have his own paleontologist?” I say when we’re out of the rain and under the airport garage. It’s eight at night.

“I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.”

“Are you cloning dinosaurs, like in Jurassic Park?”

“No one’s cloning dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park. DNA degrades in forty thousand years, even if it’s in a mosquito in some amber. The only way we’re going to get sixty-million-year-old dinosaur DNA is by reverse-engineering it from currently living descendants. And we’ll be eating human flesh in the streets before we have that kind of technology.”

“We will? Why?”

“That’s where the protein is. Anyway, I’m not a zoological paleontologist. This is me.”

We’ve come to a car. It’s an old Saab with rust along the bottom like a waterline. Maybe it is a waterline.

“What kind of paleontologist are you?” I ask her.

“Catastrophic. You might want to just say it.”

“What?”

“If I work for the fourteenth-richest man in America, how come my car’s such a piece of shit?”

I have kind of been wondering that. “I don’t even own a car,” I say.

“Rec Bill doesn’t pay much, in case no one’s warned you,” she says, unlocking the passenger door. “He’s worried people will take advantage of him.”

“So he does it to them first?”

“He does whatever he thinks will keep him sane. Don’t mention the fourteenth-richest thing to him either, by the way. He hates that.”

“Because it objectifies him, or because he’s only fourteenth?”

“Probably both. Throw it in the back. The trunk doesn’t open.”

★★★

“So how long until we’re eating human flesh in the streets?” I say.

“You don’t want to know.”

We’re on the highway. The rain keeps forming a trembling gel on the windshield.

“I think I do.”

I want to keep her talking, in any case. I’m not used to casual conversation, even with people who don’t look like they could steam up their own jungle planet. I’m worried I might say something that resembles my actual thoughts.

“In the U.S.?” she says. “Less than a hundred years. Maybe less than thirty.”

“Really? Why?”

She gives me a look like people asking her questions just to watch her talk is something that happens all the time.

Must get frustrating.

“Bottom line,” she says, “there’s too many people and not enough food. A billion people are already starving, and climate change and oil scarcity will make it a lot worse.”

“The issue with oil scarcity being that we won’t be able to use trucks and farm equipment?”

“We won’t be able grow things in the first place. All modern fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are made from hydrocarbons.”

“And you really think we’re about to run out?”

“It doesn’t have to be gone,” she says. “It just has to be where it costs more energy or money to produce a barrel of oil than you can get from a barrel of oil. We may have already reached that point—it’s hard to tell, because energy companies are so heavily subsidized that they can sell gas for less than it costs to make. When you can dump a hundred and seventy million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico and take a write-off on the cleanup, cost-efficiency doesn’t really enter into it.”

“But won’t there eventually be other energy sources?”

“You mean like solar? Or wind, or geothermal? Not too likely. Petroleum is four billion years’ worth of organisms using radiation from the sun to turn airborne carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Nothing we can make is going to come close to producing that kind of energy. And even if it did, we wouldn’t be able to design batteries efficient enough to store it. That’s another thing about oil: it’s its own storage and transport medium.”

“Safer nuclear?”

“Nuclear’s a hoax, even when it doesn’t leak or explode. No nuclear plant has ever produced as much energy as it costs to build and maintain. All nuclear does is keep France clean while it poisons South America. Which is enough crazy-scientist-lady info for one evening. You talk.”

I laugh. “I feel like an idiot,” I say. “Here I thought it was all about the climate change.”

“That’s not really what I meant by ‘talk.’ ” But when I don’t respond, she says “And anyway, a lot of it is all about the climate change. The oil crash will kill six billion people—at a minimum, because that would take us back to where we were before the Industrial Revolution, and the planet’s lost a lot of carrying capacity since then. But climate change will kill everybody else. Climate change will kill everyone on Earth even if we prevent the oil crash. We could stop using hydrocarbons right now, and just let the six billion die, and climate change would continue to speed up. We’ve already pulled the methane trigger.”

“Which is what?”

“It’s where you heat the Earth to the point where the Arctic methane hydrate shelf starts to melt. Methane’s twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Fifty million years ago it turned the sky green. This time it’ll do it a lot faster.” She looks at me again. “You know, you seem to be strangely enjoying this.”

I am. I’m not sure why. The complete destruction of the human race is fairly amusing, obviously—particularly if it happens through overpopulation and technology, the only goals humanity has ever taken seriously. But it’s just as likely that this woman’s suspicions are accurate, and what’s making me happy is being near her. With Violet Hurst, what message isn’t the medium going to kick the shit out of?

Must get lonely, as well as frustrating.

“So when was the point of no return?” I say.

“Forget it. I’m cutting you off.”

“But that’s what catastrophic paleontologists do? Study the end of the world?”

“The various ends of the world. The specific extinction event that’s about to happen is a subspecialty.”

“And that’s what you do for Rec Bill?”

“What I do for Rec Bill is confidential. And no.”

“Can you at least tell me what he wants to talk to me about?”

“Not really.”

“Off the record?”

“Sorry,” she says. “He wants to tell you himself. With Rec Bill, it’s all about trust.”

She signals toward an exit. “Speaking of which, he wants me to wait around and drive you to your hotel when you guys get done, but I think I’m going to put my foot down on this one. I clearly love catastrophic paleontology enough to bore the hell out of strange men with it, but even I have to go get drunk afterward and pretend I’ve never heard of it. Just tell Rec Bill to call you a cab. And keep the receipt.”