Welcome to the Greenhouse (15 page)

All Interior employees were working ten-hour days, often six days a week. Not surprisingly, Amos received his reward for coming in that afternoon (after getting the day off). The branch supervisor asked him to report again on Saturday—though only for an eight-hour day.

Just before leaving Amos pulled out the threatening letter and read it again. He considered turning it over to Interior security, but decided against it. Whoever had sent it was smart enough not to leave fingerprints. The typeface was Times New Roman, probably impossible to identify as from a specific printer. He started a new paper file, labeled “Odd,” and put it away.

At 5:30 Amos followed a crowd of other vehicles to the south entrance gate, exiting the controlled access area onto Florida Road 3—and into chaos. A long flatbed truck stood parked across both lanes of the southbound road, a few hundred yards from the gate. Forced to stop, Amos got out of his car and looked ahead, over two rows of shiny car tops. A man holding a microphone, dressed all in green, paced back and forth on the truck bed, haranguing the few people who had gotten out of their cars to listen. A powerful sound system amplified his voice. A three-piece band sat by the truck cab, occasionally emphasizing his words with drumbeats and fanfares, or playing short riffs. A sheriff’s car had pulled up behind the truck, but a wall of people, also dressed in green, refused to move aside for the two deputies. Amos could see over the low truck body, and watched as the officers gave up on trying to force their way through, instead starting to arrest the people passively resisting them. But they quickly ran out of plastic restraints, and the backseat of their vehicle held only three.

The deputies had still not reached the truck when two more sheriff’s cars arrived, followed a few minutes later by a large prisoner transport van. As they began arresting the protesters en masse, someone in a lead car in front of the truck managed to back up slightly, and turned his vehicle to the east. He crossed the soft dirt median to the northbound lanes without getting stuck and triumphantly fled, continually blowing his horn. But it was a thin, weak sound, immediately drowned out by the small band.

Other cars jockeyed to follow the leader across the median. Some of the green-clad men and women left their defense of the truck and tried to put their bodies across the escape route, but the deputies shifted their focus and arrested them first. One deputy took up traffic control duties, urging the Interior workers on their way. After only a short distance Amos followed the car ahead back across the median into the southbound lanes, and was home in another fifteen minutes.

“The Greenies? That’s the group that says the ocean rise is natural, and we shouldn’t have built houses near the beaches in the first place?” said Janine at dinner, after Amos told them about the incident.

“Officially ‘Green Earth.’ One of the largest and best-organized protest groups,” said Stephanie. “There are others.”

“But don’t they have a point?” asked Jada. “Didn’t we do this to ourselves?”

“A lot of climatologists don’t think so,” said Amos. “We know sea levels fluctuated long before humans started putting man-made gases into the atmosphere. But we probably caused the extreme speed-up in melting the ice packs, and this really fast rise in ocean levels.”

Both girls gave Amos a look that told him they thought this well-worn topic boring, so he stopped and listened to accounts of their day instead. After dinner the girls went to their rooms to study for two remaining finals, and Amos and Stephanie watched an old movie. He looked over at her frequently and realized that her eyes were on the screen, but she wasn’t seeing or hearing the movie at all.

The first loggerheads were arriving. Stephanie spent seven evenings over the next two weeks rescuing turtle eggs. At home she remained quiet and withdrawn as they waited for the inevitable final rejection of their appeal. It came, with the two official deadlines. Now it was time to start looking for an apartment. Neither wanted to buy another house on the island, even if one could be found.

Three weeks after the first threatening letter, Amos received a second; physically identical, again mailed from Orlando. Only the message had changed.

Whoever this was, he—and Amos felt almost certain this was a man— knew Amos had not quit his job. Someone was watching him, or at least checking his job status; not hard to do with a government employee. But the threat of death had grown more immediate. He would be struck down “soon.”

Amos placed the letter in his “Odd” file, and again did not tell anyone of the threat.

Over the next eight weeks Amos watched Stephanie slowly but steadily deteriorate, as ferment seethed in the world around them. Under hastily passed legislation, the nation’s prison population was cut by more than half, when inmates serving terms for minor offenses received paroles for agreeing to work ten years in the Save America program. The crime rate fell to its lowest point since national records were kept. Factories sometimes quiet for decades roared back to life, to produce the needed machinery. The most massive mobilization of national resources since the end of that war was well under way, with labor shortages everywhere. The unemployment rate fell close to zero, because the Labor Department counted as employed the millions receiving government stipends for returning to school, to learn the skills needed for Save America jobs. The country had not been so unified or busy since World War II, a hundred years ago. Congress had just passed a series of new taxes and surcharges to pay the huge bill, with little protest from anyone.

On his Sunday morning Newsreader one day in July, Amos saw a notice that the Green Earth organization had dissolved. With considerable amusement, he read that the national president had somehow appropriated most of the available funds for himself, and absconded with them. The board of directors had given up their charter as a charitable organization and issued a statement that it had become too difficult to get members to rallies because everyone was working such long hours.

Amos received a third note. It said judgment had been passed; since he had not repented, his life was forfeit. He finally took all three to the Interior security officer, who admonished Amos for not bringing them to him sooner. After comparing it with letters that other employees had received and finding no matches, he promised an immediate investigation and said Amos shouldn’t worry too much. The air of national crisis gripping the country had brought squirrels down out of the trees everywhere.

“How tired are you?” Stephanie asked after dinner the next Saturday. They had spent the day packing.

“Not too bad,” said Amos. “Why?”

“Our monitors indicate the first nest we moved will break out tonight. Two of my students will be there, to keep away the predators. I’d like to see it too.”

Stephanie’s tone was wistful, but she seemed to have more life and animation than Amos had seen recently. He realized this hatching of the baby turtles was very important to her. She had told him of growing up in Cocoa Beach, and visits with her parents to turtle nests when the eggs were due to hatch. This was always at night, when the sand had cooled and the fragile baby turtles could avoid the heat of the sun. This early exposure had been one of the drivers causing her to select marine biology as a career.

Jada and Janine were spending the night at a friend’s house. “Sure. Let’s go,” said Amos.

Stephanie made coffee and sandwiches, and they left at ten for the beach. She had called one of her students, already there, and learned the sound monitor indicated the breakout would be within two hours. All hundred or so eggs always hatched at the same time. The baby turtles scrambled toward the water in a crowd, increasing the number who would survive to reach it.

They drove south, east over the 520 causeway, and south again on State Road A1A along the beaches. Stephanie pulled into a small local park, where wooden walkways over the fragile, grass-covered sand dunes provided access to the beach. One other vehicle sat in the parking area. Stephanie carried the hamper of sandwiches, Amos the large thermos jug of coffee. A three-quarter moon provided enough light for safe walking as they crossed over the dunes to the beach. Stephanie headed south for another hundred yards, to where the dunes, well east of the almost flat beach, gradually reared up to become more than ten feet high. The two students, one male and one female, were waiting for them.

Stephanie made hasty introductions. “Sasha and Tamburu, my husband Amos. What’s the activity level?”

“Point eight on our scale,” said Tamburu, a short, sturdy, round-faced young woman with close-cropped black hair and very dark skin. Sasha was tall and thin, with lank blonde hair hanging to his shoulders. Florida Tech enjoyed a high percentage of foreign students working for engineering degrees. “They should be out in thirty minutes.”

Amos poured coffee into plastic cups and handed them to the students. Stephanie opened the hamper and gave them sandwiches. As the two ate, Stephanie led Amos to the nest, near the top of the gently rising slope of the dune. Voice very low, she said, “We moved the eggs from the original lower site to this elevation. The experts pretty much agree the ocean level will rise no more than seven feet over the next twenty years, and that will leave this nest still well above the waves. This is one of the few areas where we didn’t have to transport the eggs to a new beach.”

“I know the adult female always returns to her hatching beach to build a new nest, but I didn’t think the elevation mattered,” said Amos.

Stephanie hesitated, then said, “There’s still a lot we don’t know. The exact chemical markers that separate one beach from another, for example. But the adult female can find her birthplace, unerringly. We think it’s safest to have these babies born in a nest where that sand will still be above water when she returns.”

Sasha and Tamburu had spread a wide blanket on the flatter sand, about thirty feet below and north of the nest. It became a little crowded with four people, but they managed to sit without rubbing shoulders. Stephanie suggested they wait in silence. Some of her research indicated the baby turtles, somehow aware of the external environment through the thin layer of sand that hid them, would not emerge on the first possible day if it was noisy above them.

Now it was past midnight. Amos could hear the gentle sound of waves washing up on the sand and retreating, the engine of an occasional hybrid passing on the road a hundred yards to the west. There were no lights in the park, and the communities north and south of them had passed laws restricting the use of lights along the beaches during turtle hatching season. The tiny crawlers were easily disoriented, heading toward the brightest lights when they emerged instead of moonlight reflecting off the water.

Tamburu wore the earphones monitoring the sound sensors adjacent to the nest. She took off the phones and gestured. Amos heard the sound without amplification, a low, hissing susurration, as almost a hundred small bodies simultaneously struggled up through the thin layer of sand. All four got to their feet and hurried to the nest, staying well away from the slope leading to the flat beach. They were in time to see a mass of small black bodies, struggling and clutching for support in the heaving sand, push themselves up and out, onto the firmer surface below the round nest.

“They’re beautiful,” said Sasha softly. Noise no longer mattered to the tiny travelers, now that they had begun their long and dangerous journey.

Tamburu wore thin plastic gloves. She dropped to her knees and assisted a last few stragglers out of the soft sand, then swept both hands slowly through the nest area, searching for any still buried. She found none.

“Hey! Raccoon!” Sasha suddenly yelled. Amos turned, to see a small dark animal darting toward the stream of babies struggling across the sand to the water. “Hey!” Sasha yelled again, and took off at a run toward the animal. Startled, the raccoon stopped. In the moonlight Amos saw it turn to face this intruder, unexpectedly interfering with the easy dinner this predator and its kin had long enjoyed on these beaches. But the human rushing toward him, yelling and waving his arms, seemed about to attack. The raccoon turned and fled.

Tamburu, satisfied the nest was clear of babies, joined the other three as they stood a couple of yards away from the direct path to the water. She suddenly darted forward, picking up a large crab that had emerged from nowhere and was scuttling toward the last few babies. She held it carefully in her gloved hand as it tried in vain to reach back with its single large pincer. Still carrying the crab, she paced along with the other three as they followed the last of the hatchlings toward the water. It took several minutes for the newborns to cross the forty feet of flat beach, but eventually the last slow one made it, and disappeared into the water. Tamburu gently lowered the crab to the sand and watched it scurry away in frustration.

“We counted ninety-eight eggs,” said Stephanie. “I think they all made it into the water. Every single one!”

“One of our best,” said Sasha. “I wish we could be at every nest breaking this season.”

“We know we can’t save them all,” said Stephanie. “But this was a darn good start.”

They returned to the blanket, where Stephanie handed the coffee jug to Amos and picked up the hamper. When they turned to leave, Stephanie saw that Sasha and Tamburu had made no move to go. She took out the remaining sandwiches, handed them to Sasha, and said goodnight. The use the two young adults would make of the blanket, for the remainder of this lovely, moonlit night, was not a concern of their teacher.

Stephanie led the way back up the beach, across the wooden walkway over the dunes, and into the small parking area. As they neared their car, walking side by side, a dark figure suddenly stepped out from concealment behind it. The moonlight provided enough illumination for Amos to see what appeared to be a pistol in his hand. And then Amos saw that in their absence, a third car had parked near the end of the lot.