Page 22 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Shangri-la South

Shangri-la and the whole valley suddenly falls into a gigantic
sinkhole.”
“Not bad,” said Cyril Kornfleck. “Poetic justice is a winner. I
like it. Nothing supernatural about that punishment! Anyone else
want to chime in?”
Hydrargyrum Diggers looked up from the doodle she had been
making on her paper napkin.
“Yes,” she said. “I like irony and poetic justice as much as the
next sarcastic cynic. But I think sudden death is too good for these
elitists. There is something else they might have forgotten or
ignored. They were all trying to be ‘beautiful people’, lightly tanned
in thin white silks and linens, before and after their flight to the
greatest spa on Earth. But it is high in the Andes—not a beach in
the Mediterranean or South Pacific. At that elevation, say seven or
eight thousand feet, the exposure to ultraviolet light is intense. And
maybe the ozone layer reaches a tipping point, owing to the
pollution from the plutocrats’ power plants and factories, down to
the size of a pinhead soon after they are ensconced. Their lovely
skin becomes tanned in a different way, and they all die slowly of
malignant melanomas.”
“I’d have a hard time topping that,” opined Kornfleck.

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