Free Portent by James Herbert Page B

clear of paper debris, while on a comer desk stood a word processor and fax machine. A sizeable beaten-leather chair was positioned at the trestle table, its back to a high French window, outside of which were sun-scorched lawns and vegetable patches. Shelves stocked with files and reference books filled two walls, while a third was covered in cork squares that served as a floor-to-ceiling notice board. This was almost entirely overlaid with press cuttings, clipped magazine articles and typed sheets of paper. Some of the cuttings were marked with red felt-tip. By the window on the fourth wall was a large map of the world, which was studded with coloured pins.
        Poggs was waving a hand at the paper-littered cork wall. 'Take time to look through these if you will, Mr. Rivers. You needn't study them-I'm sure you're more than familiar with most of the reports and articles. I feel it might be useful if you, uh, digest them en masse, as it were, perhaps gain a global perspective.'
        Rivers turned quizzically to Diane. 'Please,' she said.
        By now it wasn't a question of humouring the old boy-Rivers was genuinely curious-but something deep inside him was reluctant to get involved. Apart from the fact that these people were complete strangers to him, his own professional code of conduct could allow no collusion with them. Was Poggs aware of that? Did he realize that Rivers was a member of one of the British working groups specifically set up to investigate the climate phenomena of the past decade? Maybe not, otherwise he wouldn't be suggesting these cuttings might provide a 'global perspective'-he'd know he already had such a view. Still, a quick revision, courtesy of Hugo Poggs, wouldn't do any harm. Placing his glass on a comer of the trestle table, he walked over to the wall-size press collage.
        Every report concerned environmental or climatic disasters of some kind or other, from floods in Bangladesh to drought in America's Midwest. He read the headlines mostly, occasionally glancing at photographs and their captions, or skipping through a paragraph or two included in a typed account. There were stories of hailstones and chronic frosts in southern Australia that destroyed the continent's finest vineyards, starvation in the Horn of Africa, devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean, the Pacific Basin, and even in England. There were earthquakes in Armenia, San Francisco, Italy, Japan and more recently the second great Alaskan earthquake, this one having flattened the city of Anchorage and its neighbours Portage and Whittier.
        Two volcanic eruptions were clipped together: the first was the massive explosion of a broken fissure in Heimaey, a member of the group of small islands just off the coast of Iceland, which had exceeded the damage a similar eruption had caused in 1973 by obliterating the port town completely and turning the harbour into a solid mass of frozen lava; the second was the eruption of Mount Merapi in densely populated central Java, its disgorged superheated gases and ash descending on villages for miles around. Beside these there was a smaller report of an undersea eruption on the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's north-east coastline, a baffling catastrophe that had killed 128 tourists and holidaymakers.
        He skimmed through a lengthy typewritten study on Poland's industrial pollution problem, where in Upper Silesia acid snow had ruined streams and rendered pine forests into slopes and valleys of blackened skeletal stumps, where immense poisonous clouds had formed over towns such as Zabrze, Chorzow, Katowice, to drift and join, staining the very air with their effluent filth-sulphur dioxide, bituminous substances, lead, zinc, magnesium, an endless list of destructive emissions-corrupting the atmosphere, inflicting diseases, turning cities like Krakow into ecological disaster zones. The land itself was spoilt, its waters made toxic. Even though the facts were familiar to