Short Fiction, Mack Reynolds [best book reader txt] 📗

short and fitting, her blouse silken, her walking shoes dainty.

He considered for a moment and then decided against informing her that Muslims, particularly in this part of the world, were little used to seeing semi-nude women strolling about. He’d leave the job of explanation to Pierre, as a fellow Frenchman and the oldest man present to boot.

“Bonjour,” she said. “What a lovely day. I have been strolling about your little oasis. But you have made it a garden!”

“Thanks,” Johnny said. “We’ve got to have something to do after working hours. Entertainment is on the scarce side. But it’s more than a garden. We’ve been experimenting to see just what trees will take to this country⁠—given water and care through the early years. Besides, we use it as a showplace.”

“Showplace?”

“For skeptical politicians who come through,” Johnny said, seating her in a chair near his desk. “We give them the idea that the whole Sahara could eventually be like this square mile or so at Bidon Cinq. Palm trees, fruit trees, pines, shade trees. The works.”

“And could it?”

Johnny grinned sourly. “Well, not exactly. Not all in one spot, at least. You’ve got to remember, the Sahara covers an area of some three and a half million square miles. In that area you find almost everything.”

“Everything except water, eh?” She was tapping a cigarette on a polish-reddened thumbnail. As he lit it for her, Johnny McCord realized that he hadn’t seen fingernail polish for a year. He decided it was too long.

“Even water, in some parts,” he said. “There’s more water than most people realize. For instance, the Niger, which runs right through a considerable part of the Sahara, is the eleventh largest river in the world. But until our commission went to work on it, it dumped itself into the Gulf of Guinea, unused.”

“The Niger is a long way from here,” she said through her smoke.

He nodded. “For that matter, though, we have a certain amount of rain, particularly in the highland regions of the central massif. In the past, with no watershed at all, it ran off, buried itself in the sands, or evaporated.”

“Mr. McCord,” she said, “you are amazingly optimistic. Formerly, I must admit I had little knowledge of the Sahara Reforestation Commission. And I deliberately avoided studying up on the subject after receiving this assignment, because I wanted first impression to be received on the spot. However, I’ve just driven across the Sahara. My impression is that your Commission is one great⁠—Comment dit-on?⁠—boondoggling project, a super-W.P.A. into which to plow your American resources and manpower. It is a fake, a delusion. This part of the world has never been anything but wasteland, and never will be.”

Johnny McCord heard her out without change in expression.

He’d been through this before. In fact, almost every time a junketing congressman came through. There was danger in the viewpoint, of course. If the fantastic sums of money which were being spent were cut off, such pessimistic views would become automatically correct.

He took the paperweight from a stack of the correspondence on his desk and handed it to her.

She looked at it and scowled⁠—very prettily, but still a scowl. “What is this? It’s a beautiful piece of stone.”

“I picked it up myself,” Johnny said. “Near Reggan. It’s a chunk of petrified wood, Miss Desage. From a tree that must have originally had a diameter of some ten feet. Not quite a redwood, of course, but big.”

“Yes,” she said, turning it over in her hand. “I can see this part, which must have once been bark. But why do you show it to me?”

“The Sahara was once a semitropical, moist area, highly wooded. It can become so again.”

She put the piece of fossil back on his desk. “How long ago?” she said bluntly.

“A very long time ago, admittedly. During the last Ice Age and immediately afterwards. But, given man’s direction, it can be done again. And it must be.”

She raised pencilled eyebrows at him. “Must be?”

Johnny McCord shifted in his chair. “You must be aware of the world’s population explosion, Miss Desage. The human race can’t allow three and a half million square miles of land to be valueless.” He grunted in deprecation. “And at the rate it was going, it would have been four million before long.”

She didn’t understand.

Johnny spelled it out for her. “A desert can be man-made. Have you ever been in the Middle East?” At her nod, he went on. “Visitors there usually wonder how in the world the ancient Jews could ever have thought of that area as a land of milk and honey. On the face of it, it’s nothing but badlands. What was once the Fertile Crescent now looks like Arizona.”

Hélène Desage was frowning at him. “And you suggest man did this⁠—not nature?”

“The goat did it. The goat, and the use of charcoal as fuel. Along with ignorance of soil erosion and the destruction of the wonderful watershed based on the Cedars of Lebanon. Same thing applies to large areas of Libya and Tunisia, and to Morocco and Spain. Those countries used to be some of the richest agricultural areas of the Roman Empire. But you can’t graze goats, probably the most destructive animal domesticated, and you can’t depend on charcoal for fuel, unless you want to create desert.”

“Those things happened a long time ago.”

Johnny snorted. “When we first began operations, the Sahara was going south at the rate of two miles a year. Goats prefer twigs and bark even to grass. They strip a country.”

“Well,” the reporter said, shrugging shapely shoulders, “at any rate, the task is one of such magnitude as to be fantastic. Yesterday, I drove for nearly eight hours without seeing even a clump of cactus.”

“The route you traveled is comparatively untouched by our efforts, thus far,” Johnny nodded agreeably. “However, we’re slowly coming down from Algeria, up from the Niger, and, using the new chemical methods of freshening sea water, east from Mauretania.”

He came to his feet and pointed out spots on