The pilot had looped around to come in to San Diego from the ocean side. From this height most of the coastline north to Los Angeles was visible. That city was cloaked in its permanent haze; otherwise the day was clear and bright. The sun sparked flashes of brilliance from the windows of high-rise office blocks. Peterson stared vacantly at the sea. Tiny puckered lines of waves crawled imperceptibly toward the shore. Here and there, as the plane swung lower, he could see curves of white froth against the blue, vastly different from the ocean he had flown over the day before. He had taken a commercial flight. From the air, the diatom bloom on the Atlantic had been horribly visible. It now extended over a hundred-kilometer diameter. Bloom was a good word for it, he thought wryly. It had looked like some giant flower, a scarlet camellia blossoming far off the shores of Brazil. His fellow passengers had been excited by the vision, stampeding from window to window to get a better view, asking agitated questions.
