Fifty Degrees Below

IV. IS THERE A TECHNICAL SOLUTION?

No one thinks it will ever happen to them until suddenly they are in the thick of it, thoroughly surprised to be there.

A tornado in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the third and catastrophic year of drought in Ireland; major floods on the Los Angeles River: these kinds of anomalies kept happening, at a rate of more than one a day around the world. Sooner or later almost everyone got caught up in some event, or lived in the midst of some protracted anomaly, for the weather events were both acute and chronic, a matter of hours or a matter of years.

Still it was hard to imagine it would ever happen to you.

At the poles the results were particularly profound, because of major and rapid changes in the ice. For reasons poorly understood, both polar regions were warming much faster than the rest of the planet. In the north this had resulted in the breakup of the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice, the imminent extinction of many species, including the polar bear, and the subsequent stall of the Gulf Stream. In the south it had resulted in the rapid breakup of the giant ice shelves hugging the Antarctic coast, unblocking the big glaciers falling into the Ross Sea so that they became “ice rivers,” moving so rapidly down their channels that they were destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the biggest variable in the whole picture: if this sheet came off its underwater perch on the sea floor, the world would suffer impacts greater by far than what had been witnessed already, most especially a rapid rise in sea level, up to as much as seven meters if the whole sheet came off.

Still it was hard to imagine it would ever happen to you. There were further ramifications. The ocean bottom, where it drops from the continental shelves to the abyssal seafloor, is in many places a steep slope, and these slopes are coated by thick layers of mud that contain methane in the form of clathrates, a chemical form of freezing that cages molecules of the gas in a frozen matrix. As ocean temperatures rose, these chemical cages were being destabilized, and release of the methane could then cause underwater avalanches in which even more methane was released, rising through the water and rejoining the atmosphere, where it was a greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide. Warmer atmosphere meant warmer ocean meant released methane meant warmer atmosphere meant—

A complex of cycles—geologic, oceanic, and atmospheric —all blending into each other and affecting the rest. The interactions were so complex, the feedbacks positive and negative so hard to gauge in advance, the unforeseen consequences so potentially vast, that no one could say what would happen next to the global climate. Modeling had been attempted to estimate the general rise in temperature, and actually these had been refined to the point that there was some agreement as to the outside parameters of possible change, ranging from about a two to an eleven degree C. rise in temperatures—a very big range, but that’s how uncertain any estimates had to be at this point. And even if the estimates could have been tighter, global averages did not reveal much about local or ultimate effects, as people were now learning. There were nonlinear tipping points, and now some of these were beginning to reveal themselves. The stall of the Gulf Stream was expected to chill the temperature in the northern hemisphere, especially on both sides of the Atlantic; further effects were much less certain. The recent two-year failure of the monsoon was not understood, nor its violent return, and the effects of both, having devastated communities all across south Asia and beyond, in Africa and southeast Asia, would create still further effects as yet unforeseen. China’s drought was ongoing, as was the longest-ever El Niño, now called the Hyperniño. Desertification in the Sahel was moving south at an ever-increasing rate, and South America was suffering the worst floods in recorded history because of the rain brought by the El Niño. It had rained in the Atacama.

Wild weather everywhere. The most expensive insurance year ever, for the eighth year in a row, and by more than ever. That was just a number, an amount of money distributed out through the financial systems of the world by insurance of all kinds; but it was also a measure of catastrophe, death, suffering, fear, insecurity, and sheer massive inconvenience.

The problem they faced was that everything living depended on conditions staying within certain tight climactic parameters. The atmosphere was only so thick; as Frank put it once, talking to Anna and Kenzo, when you drive by Mount Shasta on US Interstate 5, you can see the height of the livable part of the atmosphere right there before your eyes. No permanent human settlement on Earth was higher than Shasta’s summit, at 14,200 feet, so the mountain served to show in a very visible form just how thick the breathable atmosphere was—and the mountain wasn’t very tall at all, in comparison to the immense reach of the plateau the highway ran over, or to the height of the sky above. It was just a snowy hill! It was sobering, Frank said; after you saw the matter that way, looking at the mountain and sensing the size of the whole planet, you were changed. Ever afterward you would be aware of an invisible ceiling low overhead containing all the breathable air under it— the atmosphere thus no more than the thinnest wisp of a skin, like cellophane wrapped ever so tightly to the lithosphere. An equally thin layer of water had liquefied in the low basins of this lithosphere, and that was the life zone: cellophane wrapping a planet, a mere faint exhalation, wisping off into space. Frank would shake his head, remembering it.

Still, it was hard to imagine.

Frank’s habits were his home now, and so the trip to Khembalung and its aftermath made him feel a bit homeless all over again. What to do with the day; again this became a question he had to answer anew, hour by hour, and it could be hard.

On the other hand, all the Khembali refugees flying into Washington helped him keep things in perspective. He was homeless by choice, they were not; he had his van, his tree, his office, his club—all the rooms of his house-equivalent, scattered around town; they had nothing. Their embassy’s house in Arlington gave them temporary shelter, but everything there was in cheek-by-jowl crisis mode, and would be for a long time.

And yet they were cheerful in their manner. Frank found this impressive, though he also wondered how long it would last. Doubly exiled, first from Tibet, then from their island; now, he thought, they would join the many other refugee groups who had come to Washington to plead their case in an attempt to get back to their homes, then failed and never left, adding their children, cuisine, and holidays to the metro region’s rich mix.

Because Khembalung was wrecked. There was talk of draining the island and repairing the dike, but there was no ready source of electricity to drive the pumps, no equipment available to rebuild the dike; and though those problems could be dealt with, maybe, their fresh-water supply appeared to have been compromised as well; and the island was being thoroughly saturated by sea-water; and the longer things were submerged, the worse the damage got.

Above all, Khembalung was simply too low. It had always been too low, the Sundarbans were swampy islands, seasonally wetlands; and now, with the ocean’s average level rising, the margin of safety had disappeared. No matter what they did, catastrophic floods were bound to inundate all the Sundarbans again and again. Moon tides, storm surges, even the occasional tsunamis, likely to become more frequent as methane clathrates warmed and triggered underwater landslides—all these would be flooding the coastal lowlands of the world more often.

So the immense expense and effort that would be necessary to pump out and rebuild Khembalung was not worth it. The Khembalis had other options: there were other Tibetan refugee colonies scattered around India, and the Khembalis themselves owned some land in the hills north of Calcutta. And some people at the embassy in D.C. were talking about buying land in the metro area, and settling there. Meanwhile, it could be said that all twelve thousand citizens of Khembalung had for their national territory just one old Arlington house and an office in the NSF building.

So it was a crowded house and office. Frank was always amazed to see just how crowded they were. He dropped by often to say hi, and see if there was anything he could do to help, and every time he was struck anew at how many people could be crammed into a place without breaking anything but zoning codes. Carrying boxes from delivery trucks into the kitchen, talking to Rudra in English, getting the old man to teach him some Tibetan words. Frank was always happy to see them, and always happy to get out of there—to be able to drive over the Potomac to Rock Creek and the refuge of the forest.

The late summer days were still pretty long, and this was good, because Frank needed the light. He hiked into the park checking in on his FOG phone, getting the latest fixes and hoping he could locate the gibbons, whom he had learned were a family, Bert and May and their kids, or the siamangs; but any of the ferals would do. In the last hour before sundown many of them made their way to the watering hole in the gorge for a last drink for the night, and he often had good luck spotting them. Ostrich, tapir, spider monkey, eland, sitatunga, tamarin, red deer, brown bear; his personal list of sightings kept growing.

His Acheulian hand axe came in the mail at work, and he pulled it out of its bubble wrap and held it up to the light. Instantly it was his favorite rock. It had a lovely weight, and fitted his hand perfectly; it was the classic Acheulian oval, with a sharp tip at its smaller end. Chipped on both sides very expertly, so that it seemed as much a work of sculpture as a tool, a little Andy Goldsworthy sculpture; a petroglyph all by itself, speaking in its heft a whole world. The people who made it. Gray quartzite, slightly translucent, the chipped faces almost as smoothed by patination during their four hundred thousand years of exposure as the browned curve of original core. It was beautiful.

He took it to the park and pulled it from his daypack to show to Spencer and Robin and Robert the next time they ran, and they spontaneously fell to their knees to honor it, crying out wordlessly, like the gibbons. “Ahh! Ahh! Oh my God. Oh God, here it is.” Robin salaamed to it, Spencer inspected every chip and curve, kissing it from time to time. “Look how perfect it is,” he said.

“Look,” Robin said when he held it, “it’s shaped for a left-hander, see? It fits a lot better when you hold it in your left hand.” Robin was left-handed. “Do you think maybe Homo erectus were all left-handed?” he went on. “Like polar bears? Polar bears are all left-handed, did you know that?”

“Only because you’ve told us a thousand times,” Spencer said, taking it from him. “How old did you say?” he asked Frank.

“Four hundred thousand years.”

“Unbelievable. But look, you know—I really hate to say this—but it doesn’t look like it would fly like a frisbee.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Also, that thing about how it wouldn’t make a very good hand axe, because it’s sharpened all the way around? Actually it seems to me you could hold it almost anywhere and still hit something without cutting your hand. The edge isn’t sharp enough.”

“True.”

“Have you tried throwing it yet?”

“No.”

“Well heck, let’s give it a try.”

“Let’s throw it at a rabbit!”

“Now come on.”

“Hey we have to test this thing, how else are we going to do it? Throw it at one of those tapirs, it’ll bounce right off them.”

“No it won’t.”

“You kill it you eat it.”

“Fine by me!”

They ran the course, and when they came to the meadow near picnic site 14, they stopped and Frank pulled out the axe, and they threw it at a tree (it left an impressive gash) and then at trash bottles set up on a log. Yes, you could break a bottle with it, if you could hit it; and it did tend to spin on its axis, though not necessarily horizontally; in fact it tended to rotate through a spiral as it flew forward.

“You could kill a rabbit if you hit it.”

“True with an ordinary rock though.”

“You could spook a big animal by the watering hole.”

“True with an ordinary rock though.”

“All right, okay.”

“It’d work to skin an animal I guess.”

“That’s true,” Frank said. “But they’ve tried that in South Africa, and they’ve found that they lose their edge really quick, like after one animal.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what they found. That’s why they think there might be so many of them. They think they used to just knap a new one pretty much any time they needed to do something.”

“Hmm, I don’t know. This thing looks pretty perfect for a throwaway. It looks like someone’s favorite tool.”

“His Swiss Army knife.”

“That’s just patination. It’s four hundred thousand years old, man. That’s old. Older than art and religion, like you said.”

“It is art and religion.”

“A fossilized frisbee.”

“Fossil killer frisbee.”

“Except it doesn’t look like that’s what it was.”

“Well, I’m sticking with it,” Spencer said. “It’s too good a theory to give up on just for the sake of some evidence.”

“Yahhh!”

“This is just anecdotal evidence anyway. Means nothing.”

Frisbee golf in the last hour of light, running through the flickering shadow and light. Working up a sweat, making shots magnificent or stupid. Living entirely in his frisbee mind, nothing else intruding. The blessed no-time of meditation. Sports could do that sometimes, and in that sense, it did become religion. Turning the moment into eternity.

His shelter was completely rain-proofed now, and given the frequent summer showers, this made for a wonderfully satisfying situation: his little room, open-sided under its clear plastic canopy, was frequently walled by sheets of falling water, like a bead curtain perpetually falling. The rain pounded down with its plastic drumming noise, like the shower you hear in the morning when your partner gets up—a susurrus or patter, riding on the liquid roar of the forest and the clatter of the creek below. The air less humid than during those muggy days when the rain held off.

Often it rained just before dawn or just after. Charcoal turning gray in the dimness of a rainy day. Low clouds scudding or lowering overhead. Sometimes he would sleep again for another half hour. The night’s sleep would have been broken, no matter where he spent the night; something would bring him up, his heart racing for no reason, then the brain following: thinking about work, or Caroline, or Marta, the Khembalis, the homeless guys, the frisbee players, housing prices in north San Diego County—anything could spark it off, and then it was very difficult to fall back asleep. He would lie there, in van or tree house or very occasionally his office, aware that he needed more sleep but unable to drop back in.

Rain then would be a blessing, as the sound tended to knock him out. And rain in the morning gave him time to lie there and think about projects, experiments, animals, papers, money, women. Time to remember that many men his age, maybe most men his age, slept with a woman every night of their lives, to the point where they hardly even noticed it, except in their partner’s absence.

Better to think about work.

Or to look at the pattern leaves made against the sky, black against the velvet grays. Stiffly shift around, trying to wake up, until he was sitting on the edge of the platform, sleeping bag draped over him like a cape, feet swinging in air, to listen for the gibbons. Insomnia as a kind of a gift, then, from nature, or Gaia, or the animals and birds, or his unquiet unconscious. Of course one woke a little before dawn! How could you not? It was so beautiful. Sometimes he felt like he was sitting on the edge of some great thing that only he could see was about to happen. Some change like morning itself, but different.

Other days he woke and could only struggle to escape the knot his stomach had been tied into during the night. Then it took the gibbons to free him. If they were within earshot, and he heard them lift their voices, then all was immediately well within him, the knot untied. An aubade: all will be well, and all will be well, and all will be perfectly well. That was what they were singing, as translated by some nuns in medieval Europe. It was another gift. Sometimes he just listened, but usually he sang with them, if singing was the right word. He hooted, whooped, called; but really it was most like singing, even if the word he sang was always “ooooooooop,” and every ooop was a glissando, sliding up or down. Ooooooop! Ooooooop!

If they sounded like they were nearby, he would descend from his tree and try to spot them. He had to be quiet, and as invisible as possible. But this was true for all his stalking. Light steps, looking down at the still-gray ground, seeking footfalls between the ubiquitous twigs, in the bare black mud.

All the animals in the park were pretty skittish by now, and the gibbons and siamangs were no exception. At the least noise someone in the gibbon gang would shout some kind of warning (often a loud “Aaack!,” as in the comic strip Cathy) and then they would tarzan away with only a few muffled calls to indicate even what direction they had gone. Typically they moved fifty to a hundred yards before resettling; so if they spooked, Frank usually shifted his hunt to some other animal. You couldn’t beat brachiation in a forest.

He would work his way down Rock Creek, headed for the waterhole overlook. FOG had put a salt lick on the edge of the water. He was careful in his final approach, because the overlook itself had been marked by big paw prints, feline in appearance but large, huge in fact—like sign of the missing jaguar, still unsighted, or at least unreported. Or maybe the prints were of one of the forest’s smaller cats, the snow leopard or lynx or the native bobcat. In any case not a good animal to catch by surprise. Sometimes he even approached the overlook clutching his hand axe, reassured by the heft of it.

Once there he could watch the animals below, drinking warily and taking licks of the salt lick. On this morning he saw two of the tiny tamarins, a gazelle, an okapi, and the rhinoceros, all radio-tagged already. The day before he had seen a trio of red wolves bring down a young eland.

After the waterhole he explored, striking out to get mildly lost, in the process checking out the tributaries in Rock Creek’s rippled watershed. Stealthy walking in the hope of spotting animals: again, as with the heft of the hand axe, or the swaying of his tree in the wind, it felt familiar to his body, as if he had often done it before. Used to things he had never done. Stalking—paparazzi following movie stars—

Slink of gray flashing over the creek.

In his memory he reconstructed the glimpse. Silvery fur; something like a fisher or minx. Bounding over the rocks in a hurry.

Around a corner he came on the hapless tapirs, rooting in the mud. This forest floor did not have what they needed, and Frank had heard they were living off care packages provided by the zoo staff and FOG members. Some people argued that this meant they should be recaptured. Only animals that could make their way in the forest on their own should be considered for permanent feral status, these people argued.

Of course many of the feral species were tropical or semitropical. Already there was a lot of debate about what to do when winter came. Possibly the feral project for these creatures would come to an end; although it wasn’t clear exactly how some of them could be recaptured.

Well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it. For now, GPS the tapirs, add them to his FOG phone’s log. So far his list included forty-three non-native species, from aardvarks to zebras. Then trudge out west to his van, to drive over the river to Optimodal. Often all this would happen and he would still get to the gym before seven.

After that, the day got more complicated. No meetings at eight, so a quick visit to the Optimodal weight room. If he ran into Diane, they worked out together. That was habitual, and it was getting a little complicated, actually. Not that it wasn’t fun, because it was. Her hand on his arm: it was interesting. But friendly conversations and shared workouts with a woman at the gym suggested a certain kind of relationship, and when the woman in question was also one’s boss—also single, or at least known to have been widowed several years before—there was no way to avoid certain little implications that seemed to follow, expressed by the ways in which they didn’t meet each other’s eye or discuss various matters, also little protocols and courtesies, steering clear of what might be more usual behaviors in the gym situation. He often began a workout feeling he was too preoccupied by other concerns to think about this matter; but quickly enough it was unavoidable. Diane’s businesslike cheer and quick mind, her industry and amusement, her musely middle-aged body flexing and pinking before him, sometimes under his care—it was impossible not to be affected by that. She looked good. He wanted Caroline to call him again.

To tell the truth, ever since his encounter with Francesca, all women looked good to him. In the Metro, at NSF, in the gym. Some mornings it was better just to shower and shave and get right over to work. Into his office, sit down with coffee, survey the huge list of Things To Do. Many of them were very interesting things, like:

Pick one and dive in, and then it was a rapid flurry of meetings, phone calls, reading at furious speed, memos, reports, abstracts—God bless abstracts, if only everything were written as an abstract, what would be lost after all— writing at the same furious speed, memos mostly, abstracts no matter what, need to do this, need to do that. All the little steps needed if things were ever going to get done.

Then another meeting with Diane and several members of the National Science Board. Diane seemed a bit grim to Frank this time; not surprising to him, as really she was trying almost by force of will to make NSF a major node in the network of scientific organizations working on climate. So she was doing exactly what Frank had urged her to do in his presentation before the flood, and though no one would ever speak of it in that way, he found himself pleased. Jump into action as soon as they could identify an action. All the board members in attendance seemed on board with that. Potential partners were being identified in the scientific community, also supportive members of Congress, sympathetic committees. As Diane kept saying, they needed legislation, they needed funding. Meanwhile she was working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Council for Science, the World Conservation Union, the National Academy of Engineering, NASA and NOAA, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the World Meteorological Organization, the World Resources Institute, the Pew Charitable Trust, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Nature Conservancy, the Ecological Society of America, DIVERSITAS, which was the umbrella program to coordinate global research effort in the biodiversity sciences, and GLOBE, which stood for Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment—And so on,” she concluded, looking impassively at the PowerPoint slide listing these organizations. “There are many more. There is no shortage of organizations. Government agencies, UN, scientific societies, NGOs. The situation is in many ways being intensely monitored. Whether all these efforts can be coordinated and lead to any action is another question. It’s the question I want to discuss today, after we’ve gotten through the other items on the agenda. This is the real problem: we know, but we can’t act.”

The more Frank watched Diane in these meetings, the more he liked her. She got things done without making a fuss. She was not diverted, she kept to the important points, she made sure everyone knew what she thought was important. She didn’t waste time. She worked with people and through people— as she did with Frank—and people worked like maniacs for her, thinking they were pursuing their own projects (and often they were), but enacting Diane’s projects too; and she was the one coordinating them, enabling them. Setting the pace and finding the money.

Now she came back to Frank’s chief interest. “We have to consider potential interventions in the biosphere itself,” shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying. “If there are ways to tip the global climate back out of this abrupt change, we should identify them and do them. Too much else that we want to do will be hammered if we don’t accomplish that. So, can it be done, and if so, how? Which interventions have the best chance, and which can we actually do?”

“It makes sense to try to work on the trigger we’ve already identified,” Frank said.

Diane nodded. That meant the stalled downwelling of the thermohaline circulation, and she had already begun discussions with the UN and the IPCC broaching the possibility of overcoming the stall. “We’ll get a report on that later. Right now, what about carbon capture methods?”

Frank went down the list he had compiled.

This last point was vexing all plans to stimulate carbon drawdown by biological means. “It’s the law of unintended consequences,” as one ecologist had put it to Frank. Now he explained to Diane and the others: “Say your iron spurs the growth of marine bacteria, drawing down carbon, but that includes the growth of types of bacteria that release nitrous oxides. And NOs are a much worse greenhouse gas than CO₂. Also, a lot of the carbon in the ocean is fixed in dead diatom shells. Some marine bacteria feed on dead diatoms, and when they do, they free up that carbon, which had been fixed in carbonates that would have eventually become limestone. So is fertilizing the ocean with iron necessarily going to result in a net drawdown in greenhouse gases? Even in the short term it isn’t sure.”

“We need to be sure,” Diane said.

“That’s going to be hard, in this area anyway.”

In another meeting they discussed methods that had been proposed for direct climate alteration, including adding chemicals to jet fuel so that contrails would last longer and reflect more light back into space; seeding clouds; shooting dust into the upper atmosphere in imitation of volcanoes; and flying various sunscreens to high altitude. Again, because of the complexity of the various feedback mechanisms, and the importance of water vapor both in blocking incoming light and holding in outgoing heat, it was hard to predict what the result of any given action would be. No one had a good sense of how clouds might change in any given scenario.

“I don’t think we’re ready for anything like these projects,” Diane said. “We can’t be sure what effects we’ll get.”

At the time she said it, they were all looking at a slide from an NSF polar programs ecologist’s presentation. Both poles were heating up fast, but especially the Arctic; and the slide informed them that one-seventh of all the carbon on Earth was cached in biotic material frozen in the Arctic permafrost, which was rapidly melting. Once it was liquid again, bacterial action would start releasing some of that carbon into the atmosphere. “It could be more positive feedback, like the methane hydrates unfreezing on the continental shelves.”

“It’s the law of unintended consequences again.”

“Wouldn’t the tundra just turn into peat bogs?” Frank asked.

“Peat bogs are anoxic. Permafrost isn’t.”

“Ah.”

In a meeting the next day, a team from NOAA gave a presentation on what they had done to try to get a handle on the numbers involved in any potential scheme to intervene in the North Atlantic. It was a matter of sensitive dependencies, their main speaker claimed, so there was chaos math involved. Frank was interested in the algorithms used in the computer modeling, but he saved that aspect for later; accuracy within orders of magnitude was probably good enough for the questions facing them now. How much water used to sink in the downwelling? What volume of water would have to sink at each particular site to start it again? What kind of thermohaline differentials were they talking about? How much more saline would the sea have to be to sink through the freshwater cap on the ocean now there? How much dry weight of salt would be needed to create that differential?

The NOAA people did their best with these questions. Frank and the others there tried out various back-of-the-envelope calculations, and they talked over what it might take to bring that much salt to bear. It seemed within the industrial and shipping capacities of the advanced nations, at least theoretically— somewhat similar to the numbers involved in oil transport—although there were also questions concerning whether this would be a one-time application, or would have to be an annual thing to offset the Arctic sea ice that would presumably form every winter, break up every spring, and float south every summer.

“We can deal with that issue later,” Diane declared. “Meanwhile I want all the answers here as constrained as possible, so I can take a plan to Congress and the president. Anything we can do that makes the point we are not helpless will be useful on other fronts. So, as far as I can tell, this is as good a place to start as any.”

At lunch he ran with the NSF runners, when he could get away. It was an indulgence but he couldn’t help himself. He justified it by inventing questions he could ask Kenzo about the Arctic climate and so on. That would get Kenzo started on his Master of Disaster shtick, detailing the latest like a curator with an exceptionally good show; but this was likely to happen anyway, for Kenzo never tired of the role, nor seemed to think he was telling the story of the beginning of the end of civilization.

That part was Edgardo’s job. “How are your Khembalis doing, Frank?”

“Well, it’s getting pretty crowded at their house.”

“I can see they’re sleeping in their office too.”

“Yes. I think Immigration is beginning to get on their case. They’re going for some kind of refugee status.”

“They’ll never get that,” Edgardo advised. “They should call themselves Washington’s only Buddhist think tank.”

“Maybe so.”

“They should say they are the embassy from Atlantis.”

“That’ll really help them with access to Congress.”

Edgardo laughed. “It would! They would love it! Atlantis, Shambhala—your guys have to be from somewhere interesting. Do they have lawyers identifying who to sue for compensation?”

“No.”

“Do they have insurance companies ready to back their suit?”

“No! Be quiet and run, will you?”

But Frank couldn’t run fast enough to wind them. They were stronger runners than he was, and so it was talk talk talk, every step of the way. Scientists, bureaucrats—scientific bureaucrats—technocrats—they were all intellectuals to one degree or another. Although of course not therefore all equally talkative, or the same in personality. Frank pounded along behind Edgardo and Kenzo contemplating the different characters in even so homogenous a technocracy as NSF. There were shy types; there were science geeks like Kenzo; then also raving intellectuals like Edgardo; and bluff “simple folk” like Bob or Clark, who weren’t willing to admit to knowing anything or having any opinions except in their areas of expertise, implying that this modesty was the purest form of scientific precision and right action: no opinions, only assert what you think you can prove.

Edgardo was not like that. He had come up with another idea for a popular science bestseller: “I was reading an enormously long paper on hypergraphia when it came to me that the researcher suffered from the disease and that was why he was interested. I wonder how often that is the case. Anyway this hypergraphia is kind of like epilepsy, it happens in the same part of the brain.”

“Hard to imagine the evolutionary history of that,” Frank noted. “A tendency to write things down?”

“Presumably it’s just a variant of hyperlogia,” Kenzo said, “which would explain Edgardo’s interest too.”

“Ha ha, but no that’s a different part of the brain. Talking is in Broca’s and Wernicke’s, hypergraphia is in the epilepsy region, and it actually creates a kind of style. There is a suite of stylistic habits that can be abstracted and quantified by computer to make the diagnosis. Of course sheer mass of output is still the first clue, and it must have been useful to several very prolific novelists, this is a nice match of problem and solution. But even with the hypergraphic greats like Balzac or Dick it seems to have been as much a pain as a benefit, like a kind of priapism, but what I noticed immediately is that these stylistic tics common to hypergraphics are all evident in both the Book of Mormon and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and then of course the Quran, and I thought, of course, all these prophets, writing down the truth at great length—and the religious center of the brain is also tightly bound with the epilepsy center! It’s all one complex! So these scribbling prophets were all suffering from a form of epilepsy, they wrote under the spell of a convulsion.”

“Mohammed dictated the Quran.”

“Is that right? Well, maybe hyperlogia is also implicated.”

“How many religions do you think you could offend at once with this book?”

“I would think many, but that would not be the point. Explanation of our behavior is the point. Besides humanism too could be included here. Sartre was clearly hypergraphic, especially when he used amphetamines.”

“You’re going to have quite a tour promoting this one!” Kenzo said.

On other lunchtimes Frank went out and ate with Anna and Drepung at the Food Factory. Drepung would come in with the latest from the embassy, shaking his head as he ate. Every week it seemed clearer that they had lost Khembalung for good. Salvage plans had replaced restoration in his talk.

“Did you have any flood insurance?” Anna asked.

“No. I don’t think anyone would underwrite it.”

“So what will you do?”

Drepung shrugged. “Not sure yet.”

“Ouch,” Anna said.

“I do not mind it. It seems to be good for people. It wakes them up.”

Frank nodded at this, but Anna only looked distressed. She said, “But you’re making arrangements?”

“Yes, of course. Such freedom from habit cannot last, people would go mad.” He glanced at Frank and laughed; Frank felt his face get hot. “We’re talking with the Dalai Lama, of course, and the Indian government. Probably they would give us another island in the Sundarbans.”

“But then it will only happen again,” Frank pointed out.

“Yes, it seems likely.”

“You need to get to higher ground.”

“Yes.”

“Back to the Himalayas,” Anna suggested.

“We will see. For now, Washington, DC.”

“Go higher than that for God’s sake!”

Sometimes Drepung would leave on errands and Frank and Anna would order another coffee and talk a few minutes more before taking the coffees back up to work. They shared their news in a desultory fashion. Anna’s was usually about Charlie and the boys, Frank’s about something he had done or seen around the city. Anna laughed at the discrepancy between their tales: “Things are still happening to you.”

Frank rolled his eyes at this. For a while they talked in a different way than they usually did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one’s set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of the giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive success were the goal, he noted under his breath). Thus Frank was living a plot while Anna was living a life, and when they talked about personal matters he had news while she had the “same old same old,” which was understood by both to be the desired state, irritating and difficult though it might be to maintain.

Anna merely laughed at this.

One day the Things To Do list included a lunch meeting at a Crystal City restaurant with the four-star general who headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a friendly and unassuming man named Arthur Wracke, “pronounced rack” he said, “yes, as in rack and ruin.” White-haired, brown-skinned, grizzled. A strangely pixie grin. Unflappable; this, Frank saw, was what had gotten him his four stars. And along the way he had surely been in any number of political firestorms over major environmental interventions like the ones they were now contemplating at NSF.

When Frank expressed doubt that any major climate mitigation was possible, either physically or politically, Wracke waved a hand. “The Corps has always done things on a big scale. Huge scale. Sometimes with huge blunders. All with the best intentions of course. That’s just the way things happen. We’re still gung-ho to try. Lots of things are reversible, in the long run. Hopefully this time around we’ll be working with better science. But, you know, it’s an iterative process. So, long story short, you get a project approved, and we’re good to go. We’ve got the expertise. The Corps’ esprit de corps is always high.”

“What about budget?” Frank asked.

“What about it? We’ll spend what we’re given.”

“Well, but is there any kind of, you know, discretionary fund that you can tap into?”

“We don’t seek funding, usually,” the general admitted.

“But could you?”

“Well, in tandem with a request for action. Say you came to us with a request for action that would cost more than you have available. We could refer it up, and it would have to go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get supplementary funding. Do even the Chiefs have much discretionary funding?” He grinned. “Sure they do. But not as much as you might think. They got into some trouble for what they called reprogrammed funding. Really, it all goes back to Congress. They control the purse strings. Even more than the president. So if they were to allocate funds, the Joint Chiefs would do what they’re told to with it, by and large.”

Frank nodded. “But if it was just the Pentagon…”

“We’d have to see. But we could make your case, and if the funding’s there, we are good to go.”

“Major climate mitigation.”

“Oh heck yes. We like these kinds of challenges. Who wouldn’t?”

Frank had to laugh. The world was their sandbox. Castles and moats, dams and bulwarks … they had drained and then rehydrated the Everglades, they kept New Orleans dry, they had rerouted all the major rivers, irrigated the West, moved mountains. You could see all that right there on the general’s happy face. Stewardship, sustainability—fine! Rack but not ruin! Working for the long haul just meant no end, ever, to their sandbox games.

“No deep ecologists in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, I guess.”

“Ha ha.” Wracke’s eyes twinkled. “You give us a chance and we’ll become deep ecologists. We’ll go right down to the mantle.”

Driving back to the office Frank considered how interesting it was to see the way some people enjoyed becoming the avatar of the institution they worked for, expressing the organizational personality like an actor in a role they love. Most people played their institution’s personality with diligence but no particular flair; sometimes, however, he met good actors in a role well-matched to them. Diane was somewhat like that herself, though as Edgardo had noted, she was pushing the NSF character into realms it had never entered before, so the vibe she gave was not like Wracke’s evocation of the Corps, supremely at ease with his role, but rather that of a person in the midst of a great awakening, or coming into one’s own. Diane as Science, becoming self-aware. Maybe even unbound. Diane the prometheus.

In the last hour of the work day Frank usually sat back in his office chair and glanced through jackets. No matter that you might be inventing a new-but-old world religion, or saving the biosphere itself, you still had to complete NSF’s unconscious life-support activity, its heartbeat and breath. How many jackets did you process today?

Sometimes he couldn’t stand that, and he scanned submissions to The Journal of Sociobiology instead. Maternal sentiment not innate, one paper said; this asserted because women in northern Taiwan, also European women in the medieval and early modern period, gave away their own children on a regular basis, for economic reasons. Maternal sentiment therefore perhaps a learned response. Frank had his doubts, and besides all these conclusions were long since outlined in Hrdy, a source the paper’s authors seemed unaware of. That ignorance and the huge generalizations given the evidence probably would doom this paper to rejection.

Abstract, conclusion; abstract, conclusion. Female brown capuchin monkeys throw things if they see other monkeys getting more than they got from an equivalent exchange. Aversion to inequity therefore probably very deep-rooted, evolutionarily. Sense of fairness evolved. Thus cooperative groups, long before hominids. Monkey ethics; interesting.

First primate found and identified, in China, 55 million years old. Named Teilhardina, very nice. One ounce; fit in the palm of your hand. Amazing.

Groups of female baboons could coerce new male members of the troop into more peaceful behaviors. Females of the Japanese quail Coturnix japonica tended to choose the losers in male-male confrontations. Maybe that’s why Caroline likes me, Frank thought, then grimaced at this traitorous self-judgment. It was postulated that for the female quail, choosing the loser reduced the risk of later injury, the males being rough during sex. Previously-mated females more likely to choose losers than virgins were.

On he read, his face thrust forward into the laptop so eagerly that his nose almost touched the screen. There could not be another person on earth who read these things with more intense interest than he did, for to him these were questions of immediate practice, influencing what he might do later that very day. To him every paper had the unwritten subtitle How Should I Live Right Now?

When his wristwatch alarm beeped the question always remained unanswered. Time to get up and invent the evening.

Run a round of frisbee, drop in on the bros, play chess with Chessman, visit the Quiblers, sit in Kramer’s or Second Story to read, have an ouzo at Odysseus. For about a month he played chess with Chessman almost every night, becoming a regular mark, as Zeno put it, as Chessman was getting unbeatable. He played more than anyone else, he was a pro, and it might be that he was getting really good; Frank didn’t play well enough to be sure. Paradoxically, the youth’s style had become less aggressive. He waited for people to extend a little, then beat them. The games took more time, and maybe that was the point; it gave people hope, and thus might create more repeat customers.

In between games they sat by a kerosene lantern, nursing coffees or beers. Chessman read paperbacks under the lamp, books with titles like One Hundred Best End Games. Once it had been The Immortal Games of Paul Morphy, another time The Genius of Paul Morphy. Frank chatted with the others. It was another iteration of a conversation they had had many times before, concerning the inadequacies of the National Park Service. All their various conversations were like performances of long-running plays, alternating in repertory style. Laughs in the usual places. The bros laughed more than anyone Frank knew, but it was seldom happy laughter. They were shouting defiance. Vocalizations were as important to people as to gibbons. The daily hoot, oooooooooop!

So they sat there, telling stories. Awful things from Vietnam, a rare item in their repertory, but sometimes Zeno and Fedpage and Andy got a horrible urge to reminisce. More often they described recent scuffles, re-enacted in full. The bros retained a choreographic memory of every fight they had ever been in. Then also, recent meals; ranger actions of any kind, important or trivial; the weather. Cutter would drop by almost every night, even though he clearly had somewhere else he could go. In that sense he was like Frank, and perhaps as a result he and Frank didn’t talk much. The truth was that Frank spoke to few but Chessman and Zeno. Sometimes he would talk to Fedpage about items from the Post, or Andy would command that he join one of Andy’s stock exchanges. Cutter always brought a sixpack or two, and they would fall to and divide the cans and drink until the drink was gone. This usually perked them up.

“Cutter is a tree surgeon,” Zeno clarified to Frank, “our tree surgeon, currently unemployed.”

“Not city parks?” Frank asked Cutter, gesturing at the patch on the shoulder of his shirt.

“Used to be.”

“But you look like you’re still doing it?”

“Oh I am, I am.”

“Cutter is the keeper of the forest. He is the unsung savior of this fucking city.”

“What else am I gonna do.”

“So you cut on your own?”

“Yes I do.”

“He steals gas outta cars to keep his chainsaw going, don’t ya Cutter?”

“Someone’s gotta do it. This town’d disappear like that.”

“The forest it wants this city back, you know it does! That’s who’s winning.”

“—two three years I swear. But city knows some of us’ll keep at it, so they keep cutting staff.”

“They cut more people than trees!”

Cutter laughed. “Yesterday Byron couldn’t buckle his harness but in the last hole, you know he’s so fat these days, and so it gave loose on him as he finished dropping a big branch, and he fell and popped out of the waist belt but his legs held, so he swung down and the chainsaw smacked him right here on top of his leg. So he’s hanging there screaming like a fool, I cut my leg, I cut off my leg oh God! But weren’t no cut on his leg, just a bruise and a scrape. So we calling up to him, Byron you okay, ain’t no cut on your leg, quit your wiggling, you gonna slip out your harness and crack your head like a egg. But he was yelling so loud he never heard us, My leg, my leg, I’ve cut off my laaig! I can’t feel it no more! And we telling him, Open your eyes fool and look you’re fine, and he won’t do it. I can’t stand to see it! His eyes all squished shut, No no no, I can’t do it I can’t stand to see it, I can’t stand to look it’s too horrible, I can feel it’s gone, I can feel the blood dripping!”

The bros loved this. “I can feeeel it!” It was obvious this was something they’d be saying for months to come, a new addition to their clutch of stock phrases.

“How’d you get him down?”

“We had to pinch his eyelids open and make him look.”

Bursts of raucous laughter, shouted comments, a mocking re-enactment of how it must have been. Another little climax of hilarity or celebration punctuating the day.

After that they sank slowly into sullen peacefulness or sullen squabbling, same as always. The various aches and complaints. Fedpage went back to his Post, the rest to the chessboard or the scraps on the grill topping the flue of the smoky fire. Dry leaves and wet branches and again the meat was both black with smoke and undercooked. Prod the fire to keep it sputtering along. Out into the dark for a round of copious urination. Some slipped off to find another haunt; others slumped in their places, the evening’s entertainment over.

Frank walked out into the night. Sound of the creek, the citysurround. Voices in the distance; there were people at site 20, as always, and also at 18, which was a surprise. As he closed on his tree it got quieter and so did he, making his final approach as quietly as possible, covered by the noise of the creek a short distance below. Under his tree he waited, listening carefully. Night goggles, survey the scene; nothing warm upstream or down. When he was convinced no one was nearby, he called down Miss Piggy and clambered up into the night, up into his aerie, like a mountaineer scaling a last overhang to a ledge camp.

He pulled through the gap in the rail and sat on the plywood. Cranking Miss Piggy up, it occurred to him that the rent he was saving these days might eventually enable him to afford a down payment on a house, when he finally returned to San Diego. A quick calculation indicated that to save enough he would have to stay up here some five or six years.

Well—it could be worse. It was not such a bad prospect, really. Up in the night and the wind, swaying slightly north and south; how bad was that?

He lay down on his bed. In the mellow glow of his battery-powered Coleman lantern, he opened a paperback copy of Italo Calvino’s The Baron In the Trees. He had seen the book in Second Story and bought it, thinking it might teach him something. But so far it had been short on logistical detail, and lacking also the explanatory power he was hoping for. The young baron had barged into the trees one day after a fight with his father, which was believable enough, but unilluminating. And his decision to stay up there the rest of his life, without ever coming down at all, was simply unreasonable. Cosimo could have done everything he had done and still come down from time to time. Not coming down made it more of a parable than a program. An allegory, perhaps, for staying in nature no matter what. Well, in that sense Cosimo was a hero, his story a good fable.

But Frank was content to be up here when he was, without wanting more. Around him the aging leaves clattered, and in the distance the cry of a loon, or maybe even a coyote—in any case one of those crazies who would not shut up at night. Like certain of the bros. Every animal trait had its echo in some human quality. “Owwww,” he howled quietly. “Owwwwwww.” The tree rocked him in its slight syncopation against the wind.

He wanted Caroline to call him. He was tired of waiting for her to call, why didn’t she call? Surely she knew he was waiting. Even if she had trouble at home, even if she couldn’t get away, surely she could call? Could she be in trouble? Could her husband (an awful phrase) have her under surveillance? Such tight surveillance that she couldn’t get away to call? Could he have that same kind of surveillance trained on Frank, making it doubly hard for her to call? Was there some reason why she couldn’t get loose like she had before? After all, she had both called and appeared in the Bethesda park. Perhaps it required a stay with her friends. Who were these friends she had stayed with? Whose boat had she been on during the flood? Had she been under surveillance then? Why didn’t she … but maybe she couldn’t— but why didn’t she call?

He was getting sleepy. There were so many questions he couldn’t answer, couldn’t ask. So much he didn’t know. There were so many times when he wanted to touch her again. Kiss her. Have his face in her hair. In her absence this specific desire was becoming a general desire, diffusing into the landscape itself. In D.C. that could be quite an experience; the women of Washington were gorgeous. All the exiled goddesses of Earth passed you by on the street. Every woman metamorphosed into the movie star who would have played her on screen; every woman became the avatar of her particular type and yet remained completely herself. Why didn’t she call?

Voices below. Frank hung like a spirit above them. No way people would see him in the dark, even infrared wouldn’t work through the plywood and the branch-camouflaged insulation tacked to its underside; he had tested that to be sure.

The voices were discussing something, it sounded like plans. He surveiled until they moved off and were lost in the sound of the creek.

She didn’t call because of surveillance. Frank had looked into this a little, what this might mean to be under surveillance in this day and age. But he had been using his computer at work to make the search, at first, and that began to seem like it might put out a flag of some kind. He had felt constrained, and started to do his research in the NSF library, a very different resource. Maybe he had already given himself away. Would they become suspicious (if they were watching), concluding that he knew they were watching? And if so, would that increase or otherwise alter the watching?

Frank read and heard all kinds of things about modern surveillance, and whenever he asked Edgardo about it on their runs, when they would not be overheard, Edgardo would grin and nod and say “That’s right.” He said “That’s right” to everything, until Frank said “Are you saying you don’t really know what’s going on and neither does anyone else on Earth?”

“That’s right.”

It was an impossible situation. No amount of googling would clarify it, and indeed any very extensive hunt might catch someone’s attention and make his situation worse. Better to lay low. Better to investigate by talking only to people who might know, and wouldn’t tell anyone else, in places where they wouldn’t be overheard. Strange but true; the possibility of electronic surveillance was driving him back to the oldest technology of all, talking out in the open air.

He wondered if Yann knew he was under surveillance, or that he was the reason many people of his acquaintance were also. He was going to have to talk to Yann.

He had discussed with Diane his idea of headhunting Pierzinski, and she had liked it. Carbon sequestration was in large part a biological problem; the amount of carbon they wanted to shift was beyond any currently affordable and deployable industrial capacity. They needed to involve the bacterial world, if they could. Pierzinski had been working on an algorithm that Frank thought might give them a much finer ability to predict and manipulate genomes, and apparently Yann and Eleanor and Marta were having their best successes at the bacterial level.

So he should go to Atlanta and talk to Yann. Add that to his visit to Francesca and he might even tweak the futures market in a way that Caroline could notice and tell him about when she called. And he needed to get a sense of how Pierzinski’s algorithm was coming along, and what Yann might be thinking about how he wanted his work situation to be configured.

But talking to Yann meant he would have to see Marta again. She and Yann lived together, so it seemed that if he flew down to meet with Yann, Marta would have to be part of it one way or another. That might very well be awful. The last time he had seen her had been terrible. However, too bad; he still had to do it. It would end up worse if he went down there and tried to see Yann while avoiding her. That would backfire for sure, although it might not be possible to make her any more angry with him than she already was, so maybe it didn’t matter.

But a part of him wanted to see her again anyway. All these women he was thinking about—mainly Caroline, the thought of whom made his heart pulse, and also perhaps spread a certain feeling over thoughts of Diane and her clever calmness, or even Francesca, whom he didn’t want to think about at all—all these thoughts often led in the end back to Marta, a woman he had lived with for years, someone he really knew and had had a relationship with, even if it had imploded. She would still be mad at him. But he had to see her.

From Atlanta’s airport he took a shuttle to a hotel downtown. The area around Georgia Tech featured wide avenues running up and down waves of low hills, between huge glossy skyscrapers, copper and blue and dragonfly green. The school’s football stadium appeared below street level to his right as the shuttle inched along, reminding him with a brief pang of Khembalung.

After checking into the hotel Frank showered, then dressed with more care than usual. Uneasy glances in the mirror. Pierzinski had a little touch of Asperger’s, not uncommon in mathematicians; over the phone he had agreed to Frank’s request for a meeting with innocent delight, saying, “I’ll bring Marta along, she’ll love to see you.”

Frank had recalled his last encounter with Marta in San Diego, and held his tongue. It was enough to make him wonder just how close Yann and Marta were. Maybe she was not in the habit of talking to Yann about her past. Frank hoped not.

Anyway, she would be there. Her unavoidable connection to Yann still surprised Frank a little; Marta and Yann did not seem to him a likely couple; but then again what couple did?

Yann had suggested a restaurant nearby as a place to meet. Frank remained stuck before his hotel bathroom mirror. He found he really didn’t want to go. He was almost afraid to go. He looked neon pink in the mirror, somewhat boiled by the shower. He looked like he was wearing a costume signifying “academic at lunch.” Best give up on appearances. Marta knew what he looked like.

As did whoever was spying on him. And spying on Yann and Marta as well! This would be a red-blink situation, presumably: three of that market’s commodities getting together.

He left the hotel and walked to the restaurant Yann had suggested, called Manuel’s. It was a sultry night, a wet wind pouring like syrup through the streets. Marta had sent him directions in an e-mail that had no personal touches whatsoever. Not a good sign.

Manuel’s turned out to be an old-fashioned saloon, thick with the smell of old cigar smoke and machine politics. Wooden beams crossed the ceiling in Tudor style, dividing the space into small rooms. Sports paraphernalia, TVs overhead. A perfect place to spy on someone. The walls of the entryway were covered with black-and-white photos of groups sitting at the biggest tables, men in vests. Campaign buttons surrounded the photos. It was hard for Frank to imagine Marta even entering such a place.

But she was there already, it turned out, seated in a booth at the back with Yann. “Hi Yann, hi Marta.”

Yann rose and shook his hand; Marta didn’t. After one charged look Frank avoided her gaze and sat down, trying not to cringe. He thought of Caroline, brought her deliberately to mind; the look in her eye; then by accident thought of Diane too. Francesca. Caroline’s touch. He knew some powerful women. Too many one might say. He met Marta’s eye again, held his ground. Ooooop! Oooooop!

They made small talk of the how-have-you-been variety, ordered drinks. It was early, and Frank and Marta declined food, while Yann ordered French fries. When they arrived Yann downed them like popcorn, bang bang bang.

Silence inevitably fell, Yann being so busy. “So what brings you here?” Marta said.

“Well, I’m still at NSF.”

Frank knew that Marta thought he had gone to NSF to escape her, back when they were breaking up. So this also might be construed as saying he had had other reasons for going there.

She wasn’t buying it. “Why would you do that?”

“Well, I’ve gotten interested in things NSF can do that UCSD can’t. National policy, and some big new programs. I was offered the chance to help with some of them, so I decided to give it a try.”

“Uh huh,” Marta said. “So what are you doing?”

“Well, a number of things. But one of them is looking into trying to start up some institutes, like the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, that would focus on particular problems. And, you know, one of the obvious things to look at would be the stuff you guys were doing out in San Diego. You know, trying to do a really robust proteomics, with the idea that if we got that going properly, it might lead to some really important advances. So I came down to see, well, you know—to see if you’d have any interest in joining something like that.”

Well, if spies were listening in, then they knew all. Frank shuddered at the idea that he had ever tried to rig this game with his Thornton-in-the-panel.

Headhunting, however, was standard practice.

“It’s going fine,” Marta said curtly. “Small Delivery is part of Bizet.” One of the Big Pharms, as Edgardo put it. “We’ve got a budget bigger than anything NSF could offer.”

This was not true, and Frank longed to say I’ve got two billion dollars to spend, does Bizet have two billion dollars? He clamped his jaw shut; his jaw muscles would be bunching in a way she knew to notice. She knew him. He tried to relax. “Well… so, you’re still working on the same stuff you were in San Diego?”

The French fries were gone, and Yann nodded. “The algorithm is working better on plant genomes? So some of the algae work is getting really predictable.”

Marta frowned. She didn’t like Yann saying even this much.

Frank felt his stomach shrinking. He and Marta had been together for four very intense years, and their breakup had been so terrible … the dread and remorse from that time were like a vise inside him still, ready to clamp down any time he thought about it. A lot of what had happened between them had been his fault. He had known that for most of the last year, but now it was all falling on him again. Anger vibed across the table at him in waves, and he couldn’t meet her gaze.

Yann appeared oblivious to all this. It was kind of hard to believe. It was also hard to imagine these two together. Yann was describing some of the tweaking he had done to his algorithm, and Frank did his best to follow, and to ask the questions he had come down to ask. How did that work? How would that work? Would more research funds speed the work on it? It was important to concentrate. It was important to get a better fix on how Pierzinski’s work was progressing. Frank still had ideas about where it could go, and he wanted to talk about that.

But it became clear Yann had changed emphasis during his time at Small Delivery. At first Frank didn’t follow the significance of the changes. “So you’re engineering changes in lichen?” he asked, feeling that Marta’s glare was making him stupid.

Marta answered for Yann. “It’s not about human health anymore,” she said, sharply. “We’re interested in engineering a tree lichen that will incorporate carbon into the host trees much faster than they do naturally.”

Frank sat back. “So, a kind of carbon sink thing?”

“Yes. A kind of carbon sink thing.”

Frank thought it over. “Why?” he said finally.

Yann said, “The problems with gene uptake in humans were getting too complicated, we just couldn’t…”

“We couldn’t make it work,” Marta said flatly. “No one can. It may be the showstopper for the whole idea of gene therapy. They can’t get altered genes into cells without infecting them with a virus, and a lot of times that’s a really bad idea. That’s what it comes down to.”

“Well, but these nanobits look promising,” Yann said enthusiastically. “We’re making little bits of metal? They hold DNA on one side, and then when the metal bits imbed in cell walls, the DNA leaves the nanobits and crosses inside and is taken up.”

“In vivo?”

“No, in vitro, but they’re about ready for phase ones.”

“We,” Marta corrected him.

“Yeah, but the other lab. And we’re working on some Venter viruses too, you can build some pretty harmless viruses that alter the bacteria they jump into. The algorithms there are about the same as the lichen augmenters.” Suddenly he looked at his watch. “Hey, I’m sorry Frank, but I have to go. I had a previous appointment I can’t let down.”

Abruptly he stood and extended a greasy hand to Frank, shook hands briefly, and with a quick wave to Marta was out the door.

Frank stared at the space Yann had vacated. What was Yann thinking, this was an appointment they had made, Frank had flown down for it! And now here he was alone with Marta. It was like the things that tended to happen in his nightmares, and quickly fear began to fill him.

“Well,” he said experimentally.

Marta continued to alternate between staring and glaring. Unbidden, and indeed squirting out with the sudden force characteristic of the return of the repressed, he recalled her on the beach at Cardiff Reef, shouting leave me alone.

“Look,” he said abruptly, as if cutting her off in the middle of a rant, “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey. You don’t sound sorry.”

“I am sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

Frank pursed his lips, tried to achieve a level tone. It was a fair enough question after all.

“I’m sorry I borrowed money on the house without telling you about it. I owe you some money because of that.”

“You owe me more than that.”

Frank shrugged. “Maybe so. But I figure I owe you about $18,400 on the house deal.” He was surprised how readily the figure came to mind. “I can at least pay you back the money. What you put into the place.”

While they had been together, their financial arrangement had been informal; a mess, in fact. And so when they broke up, which had come as a surprise to Frank, the money situation had caused big trouble. It had not been entirely Frank’s fault, or so he told himself. At the time they bought a house together in Cardiff, Marta had been in some sort of bankruptcy snarl with her soon-to-be ex-husband. She had married an ex-professor of hers, very foolishly as it had always seemed to Frank, and after the first year they had lived apart, but Marta had not bothered to get an official divorce until it became necessary. All this should have told Frank something, but it hadn’t. Marta was therefore bogged in her ex’s financial disasters, which had gone on for years—making her extra-intolerant of any funny business, as Frank only realized later, when his own affairs had gotten snarled in their turn. His had not been as bad as her ex’s, but on the other hand, there were aspects that were maybe worse, as her ex had gotten into his trouble mostly after he and Marta had split up, whereas Frank had deliberately concealed from her a third mortgage on their house, a mortgage he had taken to give him money to invest in a biotech start-up coming out of UCSD. This start-up had sparked his interest but unfortunately no one else’s, and soon the money from the third mortgage was gone, sucking all the equity they had accrued out of the place with it. So it was a really bad time for Marta to move out and demand that they sell the place and split the proceeds. He had had no time to put back the money, and when he confessed to her that there were no proceeds to split—that the money she had paid into the place, a matter of many thousands, was not there—she had freaked out. First she screamed at him, indeed threw a lamp at him; then she had refused to speak to him, or, later, to negotiate a payment schedule by which he could pay her back. At that point, it seemed to Frank, she actually wanted him to have ripped her off, the better to feel angry at him. Which no doubt helped her to avoid admitting to herself, or anyone else, that it was her wildness—specifically her sexual escapades, always “a part of the deal” of being with her, as she claimed, but increasingly upsetting—that had caused him to demand a different basis to the relationship, which had then started the whole breakup in the first place. In other words it had actually been all her fault, but with the money situation she didn’t have to admit it.

He could only hope she knew this. She had to know it; and probably she felt some guilt or responsibility, which helped to make her so abrasive and hostile. She had cheated on him, and he had cheated her. Love and money. Ah well. The pointless wars of the heart.

“Why did you do it?” she burst out.

“Do what?”

“Why did you take out a third on our house without telling me? Why didn’t you just talk about it? I would have been up for it.”

Well, he owed her an explanation for this. “I don’t know. I didn’t think you would be up for it.”

“Well either I would or I wouldn’t, but since you lost it all, because it was a bad idea, maybe if I hadn’t gone for it, it would have been for a good reason! I’m not stupid you know.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know! You think I’m just a lab tech. You think I’m the surfer slut who kills the mice and makes the coffee—”

“I do not! No way!”

“Fucking right no way.” She glowered viciously. She hated killing lab mice. “I’ve got my own lab here, and the stuff we’re doing with Yann is really interesting. You’d be amazed.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Yes you would! You have no idea.”

“You’re making a carbon sink organism. You told me. A way to sequester carbon quickly by biotechnical means.”

“Yes.”

“That’s great. But you know,” Frank said carefully, “much as we need a quick carbon capture these days, your customers are going to have to be governments. Corporations aren’t going to pay for it, or be able to get the permits. It’s the U.S. government or the UN or something like that who will.”

She glowered less viciously. “So?”

“So, you’ll need to get government approvals, government funding—”

“It’s no different than the drug stuff.”

“Except for the customer. It won’t be individuals, if I understand you right. It can’t be. So it’s not like drugs at all.”

“Not that part. We know that.”

“So, well, you know, you’ve got to have some government agencies on your side. DOE, EPA, OMB, Congress, the White House—they’ll all have to be on board with it.”

She waved all that away. “We’re talking to the Russians.”

This was news to Frank, and interesting, but he ignored it for the moment and said, “But if you had NSF behind you, you’d be set to get the rest of the U.S. government behind you too.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’m working on this stuff. I’m saying there’s a committee at NSF that’s working with two billion dollars in this year’s budget alone.”

There. He had said it.

She was determined not to be impressed. “So?”

“So, that’s two billion dollars more than Small Delivery Systems has.”

She cracked up despite herself. “You’re headhunting me. Or rather, you’re headhunting Yann.”

“I am. You and Yann and Eleanor, and whoever else is working on this.”

She stared at him.

“You and Yann could stay together,” he heard himself saying. “Maybe the institute could be paired somehow with UCSD, and you two could move back to San Diego.”

She was frowning. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know. You wouldn’t end up with job offers in different places. That happens to couples all the time, you know it does. And you guys probably aren’t done moving.”

She laughed abruptly. “We’re not a couple either.”

“What?”

“You are so stupid, Frank.”

“What do you mean.”

“Yann is gay. We’re just friends. We share a house here. We share a lot more than you and I ever did. We talk instead of fight and fuck. It’s very nice. He’s a really good guy. But he has his boyfriends, and I have mine.”

“Oh.”

She laughed again, unamused. “You are such a …”

She couldn’t think of a word that fit. Frank couldn’t either. He waited, staring down at the battered wooden table top. He was such a—a what? A something. Really, there was no word that came to mind. A fool? A mess?

Was he any more of a mess than anyone else, though?

Maybe so.

He shrugged. “Did you … know about Yann in San Diego?”

“Yeah sure. We were friends, we went out. It was nice not to have to think about guys. People left us alone, or went for Yann. He’s a sweet guy, and this stuff in math—well, you know. He’s a kind of genius. He’s like Wittgenstein, or Turing.”

“Hopefully happier than them.”

“Were they unhappy?”

“I don’t know. I seem to remember reading they were.”

“Well, Yann seems pretty happy to me. He’s really smart and really nice and he pays attention to my work.” Unlike you, her expression said. “And he and Eleanor and I are getting good results.”

“I’m glad. I really am! That’s why I came down here. I wanted to tell you about this, this possibility, of federally funded work.”

“Why not talk with the Small Delivery management?”

“I want the new institutes to be in full control of their scientific results. No private trade secrets or patents.”

She thought that over.

“What about with public universities?”

“Like UCSD and a federal lab, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I think that would be okay. I wish there was more of it. And there will be. We’re trying a bunch of things like that.”

Marta nodded, interested despite herself.

“We’ve got the go-ahead,” Frank said. “The go-ahead and the budget.”

Now she was pursing her lips into a little bloodless bloom, her sign of serious thought. “San Diego.”

“What?”

“You said UCSD.”

“Yes, that’s right. I’d have to recuse myself because of my position there, but it makes so much sense, Diane would run it through, I’m sure. Why? Do you want to move back there?”

She gave him another look. “What do you think?”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Frank. We’re in Atlanta, Georgia.”

“I know, I know. I thought it looked pretty nice, actually.”

“My God. You’ve been out here too long.”

“Probably so.”

“It’s warped your mind.”

“That’s very true.”

Her stare grew suspicious, then calculating. “You can’t possibly like Washington, DC.”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m beginning to think it’s okay.”

“It’s the East Coast, Frank! Jesus, you’ve lost your perspective out here. It’s a swamp! No beach, no ocean—”

“There’s the Atlantic—”

“No waves, and it’s hours to get to there, even if there were.”

“I know.”

“Frank,” she said, looking at him with new interest. “You’ve gone crazy.”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“That’s why you apologized to me.”

“Well, I meant it. I should have said it before.”

“That’s true.”

“So maybe I’m getting less crazy.” He laughed, met her eye.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Ah well.”

She watched him, shrugged. “Time will tell.”

Again Frank understood that he had lost a relationship with someone he could have gotten along with. But now what had happened in the past had a kind of trajectory or inertia to it, that could not be altered; the relationship was wrecked for good. He caught a quick glimpse of a different life, he and Marta still together in San Diego. But the bad things that had happened could never be undone, and that whole world of possibility was gone, popped like a soap bubble.

What if humanity’s relationship to Earth was like that?

A nasty thought.

It occurred to him that he could warn Marta about the surveillance they were living under, Yann too. But as with Francesca, he found he wasn’t ready for that—for what he would have to get into to tell her about it. I have this spook girlfriend, we’re all under surveillance, we’re part of an experiment in which computer programs bet on us, and our stock may now be rising. No.

Instead he said, “So you would consider an offer to move your lab to a federal institute?”

“Maybe. I’ll talk to Yann. But it might really crimp any chance for big compensation for all this.”

“Well, but it won’t have much chance of happening at all if it stays in the private sector.”

“That’s what you say. I’ll talk to Yann about it. And Eleanor. We’ll come to a decision together.”

Frank nodded, yeah yeah yeah: point already taken, blade in to the hilt, no call to be twisting it.

Marta, eyeing him, relented. “Make it so it could get us back to San Diego. That might do it. I need to get back in the water.”

Anna was convinced that Joe had caught something in Khembalung, or on the long journey home. He had been more than usually fractious on all the return flights, and worse as they went on, from the confused tears in the helicopter to the exhausted screams on the final L.A.-to-Dulles leg. What with that and their own exhaustion, and the shock of the flood overwhelming Khembalung, they had reached the moment that sometimes happens in a bad trip, when everyone is thinking what a terrible idea it was to begin with and no one can think of anything to say, or even meet their fellow sufferers in the eye. Anna and Charlie had endured a few of these trips before, none quite so bad, but they both knew what the lack of eye contact meant and what the other one was thinking. Dispense with talk and do the necessary, in a kind of grim solidarity. Just get home.

But then, at home, Joe’s disease had continued, and to Anna he felt a little hot. She got out the thermometer, ignoring Charlie’s heavy look and biting her tongue to avoid yet another ridiculous argument on this topic of medical data gathering. Though he would not usually admit to it, Charlie suffered from a kind of magical thinking that believed that taking a temperature might invite an illness to appear which did not exist until it was measured. Anna suspected this came from the Christian Scientists in Charlie’s family background, giving him a tendency to see illness as the taint of sin. This was, of course, crazy.

And Anna craved data, as usual. Taking a temperature was just a matter of getting more information. It always helped her to know things more precisely; the more she knew, the less her fears could imagine things worse than what she knew. So she took Joe’s temperature without consulting Charlie, and found it registered 99.0.

“That’s his normal temperature,” Charlie pointed out.

“What do you mean?” Anna said.

“He always charts high.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well it’s true. It happens every time I take him in for a checkup. I don’t think they’ve ever gotten a reading under 99 for him.”

“Hmm.” Anna let that go. She was pretty sure it wasn’t true, but she certainly didn’t want to get into an argument that could only be resolved by getting into medical records. She knew that Joe felt warmer now than he had before, in her arms and on the nipple. And his face was always flushed. “Maybe we should take him in to be checked anyway.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Well, when is he scheduled for a checkup?”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t been that long since the last one.”

Anna gave up on it, not wanting to seethe. She would wait and see how things went for a day or two more, then insist if necessary. Take him in herself if she had to.

After a fraught silence went on for quite a while, Charlie said, “Look, let’s see how he goes. If it still seems like there’s a problem I’ll take him in next week.”

“Okay, good.”

So it went in the world of Charlie and Anna, a world of telepathic negotiations made out of silence and gesture: a world in which the sharp words were usually felt in the air, or, if spoken in a burst of irritation, taken as one part of a mind reproving another, in the way one will easily snap at oneself for doing something foolish, knowing there is no one to misunderstand or get upset.

But of course even an old matrimonial mindmeld is never total, and for his part, Charlie did not articulate, indeed hid in one of the far reaches of his mind, outside the reach of Anna’s telepathy, his worries about what might be wrong with Joe. He knew that to Anna he seemed afraid of the idea of illness, ready always to ignore it or condemn it, and that to her this was inappropriate, craven, counterproductive. But first of all, mind-body studies of placebos and positive attitudes gave some support to the idea of not tolerating or ritually opposing the idea of illness; and second, if she knew what he was really worrying about, the whole Joe/Khembalung dynamic, she would have thought him foolish and maybe even a little naive and credulous, even though she respected the Khembalis and knew (he hoped) that they took this kind of thing seriously. How she managed to reconcile that he was not sure, but in regards to their own interaction, better for her to think he was still just in his old curse-the-disease mode. So he kept his thoughts to himself.

Thus there was a dissonance there palpable to both of them, an awareness that they were not as fully known to each other as they usually were. Which also would worry Anna; but Charlie judged that the lesser of two worries, and held his tongue. No way was he going to bring up the possibility of some kind of problem in Joe’s spiritual life. What the hell was that, after all? And how would you measure it?

So at work Anna spent her time trying to concentrate, over a persistent underlying turmoil of worry about her younger son. Work was absorbing, as always, and there was more to do than there was time to do it in, as always. And so it provided its partial refuge.

But it was harder to dive in, harder to stay under the surface in the deep sea of bioinformatics. Even the content of the work reminded her, on some subliminal level, that health was a state of dynamic balance almost inconceivably complex, a matter of juggling a thousand balls while unicycling on a tightrope over the abyss—in a gale—at night—such that any life was an astonishing miracle, brief and tenuous. But enough of that kind of thinking! Bear down on the fact, on the moment and the problem of the moment!

Frequently she found herself unable to concentrate no matter her exhortations, and she would spend an hour or two digging around on the internet, to see if she could find anything useful for Diane and Frank. Old things that had worked but been forgotten; new things that hadn’t yet been noticed or appreciated. This could be rather depressing, of course. The government sites devoted to climate change were often inadequate; the State Department’s page, for instance, began with the administration’s ludicrous goal of reducing carbon emissions by eighteen percent over ten years, by voluntary actions—a thumbing-of-the-nose to the Kyoto Accords that was still the current administration’s only tangible proposal for action. Conference proceedings on another page spoke of “climate change adaptation,” actually development agendas, with only a few very revealing admissions that “adaptation” had no meaning in regard to actual technologies, that the whole concept of “adaptation” to climate change was a replacement for “mitigation,” and at this point completely hollow, a word only, a way of saying Do nothing. Whole conferences were devoted to that.

After discoveries like this she would give up and search elsewhere, on scientific sites that were more technically oriented, that had real content. More and more it seemed to her that science as it was ordinarily practiced was really the only thing that worked in the world; so that even with abrupt climate change upon them, requiring an emergency response, dispersing science more rapidly was still not only the only thing she could do to help, but the only thing anyone could do.

Edgardo shook his head when she expressed this thought. “One tends to think only the method one knows will work.”

“Yes I’m sure. But what if it’s true?”

Site after site.

Once after one of these hunts, she went into one of Diane and Prank’s meetings and said, “Let me tell you some history.”

In her reading she had run across a description of a “Scientists For Johnson Campaign” in the presidential election of 1964. A group of prominent scientists, worried by Goldwater’s nuclear bravado, had organized into what would later be called a political action committee, and taken out ads urging people to vote for Johnson. Dire warnings were made of what could happen if Goldwater won, and a vote for Johnson was portrayed as a vote for world peace, for the reality principle, for all good things.

All of which had perhaps helped Johnson; but it backfired when Nixon won four years later, because he came into the White House convinced that all scientists hated him.

“But Nixon was paranoid, right?”

“Paranoid or clearsighted.”

“Both. He thought people hated him, and then he made it come true so he could feel clearsighted.”

“Maybe.”

But for science this had been a bad thing. Nixon had first shut down the Office of Science and Technology, then demoted the remaining position of presidential science advisor out of the Cabinet, exiling the office to the hinterlands. Then he had kicked NSF itself off the Mall, out to Arlington.

“It’s like we’re still in some feudal court,” Frank observed, “where physical proximity to the king actually mattered.”

“You’re sounding like Edgardo.”

“Yes, he said that out on the run today, actually.”

In any case, science had been in effect booted out of the policy arena, and it had never come back.

“Meaning?” Diane said.

“Meaning science isn’t part of policymaking anymore! It doesn’t support candidates, and scientists never run for office themselves. They just ask for money and let it go at that.”

“Science is a higher activity,” Edgardo proclaimed. “What it does is so valuable that you have to give it a lot of money, no strings attached. Pay up or die.”

“Pretty clever.”

“I think so.”

“Too bad it doesn’t work better though.”

“Well, that’s true. That’s what we’re working on.”

Frank was shaking his head. “It seems to me that this story about Johnson and Nixon is just one more indication that science is generally thought of as being liberal in its political orientation.”

No one wanted to think about this, Anna could tell.

“How so?” Diane asked.

“Well, you know. If the Republican Party has been hijacked by the religious right, which most people say it has, then the Democrats begin to look like the party for secular people, including lots of scientists. It’s like the debate over evolution all over again. Christianity versus science, now equating to Republican versus Democrat.”

This was a bad thought. Diane said, “We can’t afford to get caught on one side in the so-called culture wars.”

Anna said, “But what if we are on one side? What if we’ve been put there by others?”

They thought about this.

“Even so,” Diane said. “Getting tagged as leaning Democrat could be really dangerous for science. We have to stay above that fray.”

“But we may already be tagged. And we are trying to affect policy, right? Isn’t that what this committee is about?”

“Yes. But we have to be jumping on the fray. Squashing it from above.”

They laughed at this image. Edgardo said, “Beyond good and evil! Beyond Marx and Jesus! Prometheus unbound! Science über alles!”

Even Anna had to laugh. It was funny even though it wasn’t; and less so the more she thought about it; and yet she laughed. As did the others.

Diane shook her head ruefully. “Oh well,” she said. “Let’s give it a try. Time for science in the capital.”

Afterward the situation did not seem so funny. It did not help of course to come home to Joe’s low-grade fever, after which nothing seemed funny. Charlie had already given in and taken him to the doctor; but they hadn’t found anything.

It wasn’t a matter of energy levels. Joe was as energetic as ever, if not more so. Hectic, irritable, ceaselessly in motion, complaining, interrupting … but had he ever been any different, really? This was what Charlie seemed to be implying, that Joe was perhaps just a little hotter now, more flushed and sweaty, but otherwise much the same feisty little guy.

But she wasn’t buying it. Something was different. He was not himself.

Sometimes she worried so intensely that she could not talk to Charlie about it at all. What if she convinced him to join her in her worry, what good would that do him or any of them?

The best way to prevent worry was to be so busy by day that there was no time for it. Then, at night, to go to bed so exhausted that sleep hit like a wall falling on her, giving her several hours of oblivion. It was heavy and somehow unrestful sleep; she woke with the gears of her mind already engaged in something—memory, dream, work calculation—on it ran, unstoppable, thoroughly awake at 4:30 in the morning. Miserable.

And no matter where her night thoughts began, they always came back to Joe. When she remembered the situation her pulse would shoot up. Eventually she would get up, with a brief touch to the sleeping Charlie, and go stand in the shower for twenty minutes, trying to relax. What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless enterprise, in that it could not do anything. It was an anticipation of grief, a nightmare of the future. A species of fear; and she was determined not to be afraid.

So she would steel herself and turn off the shower, and motor through her preparations for work, thinking about how to sequence the day’s activities. But before she left she had to go up and nurse Joe, and so all her plans were overthrown by his hot little body lying cradled in her arms. His mouth was hot. The world was hotter, Joe was hotter, even Charlie was hotter. Everything seemed to have had more energy poured into it than it could handle. All but Anna, and her Nick. She put her sleeping wild man back in his crib and went to Nick’s room and kissed her firstborn on his head, inhaling him gratefully, his cool curly hair—her soulmate in this chaos, her fellow stoic, her cool calculator— imperturbable, unflappable, amused by his hectic brother and everything else: amused where others would be enraged. Who could imagine a better older brother, or a better son, a kind of young twin to her. In a sudden blaze of maternal affection she held his shoulder, squeezed it as he slept; then clumped down the stairs and walked up Wisconsin to the re-opened Metro, shaking her wet locks from side to side to feel their cool damp in the cool air.

Then meeting with Diane, wet-haired herself. Session with Aleesha on visiting program directors, their timing and assignments. Lunch at desk while reading papers for The Journal of Biostatistics. Calls one through six on her long list of calls to be made. Brief visit downstairs to the Khembali women in the embassy office, to see how they were doing with their resettlement issues. Then hellos to Sucandra and Padma, who were leading an English lesson; they enlisted her briefly to aid them, Anna feeling helpless across the great divide of languages. She resolved once again to learn Tibetan, tried to remember the Tibetan words she heard them explaining. It was a habit of mind, this inhaling of information. Charlie would laugh when he heard about it.

Back to the office, glancing briefly at the Tibetan language cheat-sheet they had given her. “The tide rises in six hours. The waves are hollow when the tide ebbs.”

In the next meeting with Diane and Frank, Anna brought to the screen another web page she had found. This one was on FCCSET, the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering and Technology.

“What’s this?” Frank said as he read over her shoulder. “Fuck set?”

“No, they pronounced it Fix-it” laughing.

“Oh right, so very clever these acronyms. I like DICE, Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy, where you just skip the M.”

“Fix-it was a program that looked at scientific problems and tried to identify already-existing federal programs that could match up with other programs, to work together on particular problems.”

“So what killed it?”

“How do you know it got killed?”

Frank just looked at her.

“Well, it was a matter of money, I guess. Or control. The programs identified as worthy by Fix-it were automatically funded by the Office of Management and Budget. There was an OMB person sitting in on all the Fix-it meetings, and if the program was approved then it was funded.”

“Now that’s power!”

“Yes. But too much power, in the end. Because the top people in the agencies being identified didn’t like getting funding like that. It took away from their control over the purse strings.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake. Is that really why it ended?”

“Apparently. I mean it didn’t end, but it had that budgetary power taken away. So, I’m wondering if we could get Congress to bring it back.”

“Worth a try,” Diane judged.

Frank was still shaking his head. “Territoriality really does run deep. They might as well be peeing around the edges of their building.”

“I guess.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I don’t know. It’s a theory. Anyway, I think we should try to reintroduce this program. You’d be able to get agencies all across the board coordinated. What if they were all doing parts of the same large project?”

Frank’s eyebrows were arched. “Talk about a theory. This is Bob’s Manhattan Project idea again.”

“Well, the method is there,” Anna claimed. “Potentially, anyway. What if you could get a proposal funded through all those agencies, using Fix-it as a coordinating committee?”

Diane liked the idea. “We need Congress to put it in place, obviously. I’ll talk to Sophie.”

After a moment’s silence Frank said, “We could really use a president with that in his platform.”

“Unlikely,” Diane judged.

Frank scowled. “I don’t see why. What century do people think they’re living in?”

Anna and Diane shared a look, anticipating a rant, but Frank saw it and said, “Well, but why? Why why why? We should have a scientist candidate for president, some emeritus biggie who can talk, explaining what the scientific approach would be, and why. A candidate using ecological theory, systems theory, what-have-you, in-out throughputs, some actual economics…”

Diane was shaking her head. “Who exactly would that be?”

“I don’t know, Richard Feynman?”

“Deceased.”

“Stephen Hawking.”

“British, and paralyzed. Besides, you know those emeritus guys. There isn’t a single one of them who could go through the whole process without, I don’t know…”

“Exploding?” Anna suggested.

“Yes.”

“Make up a candidate,” Anna said. “What science would do if it were in the White House.”

“Like Nick’s Swiss council,” Frank said. “A phantom candidate.”

“Shadow candidate,” Diane corrected. “Like in Europe.”

“Or,” Anna said, “just put the platform out there, with a virtual candidate. Dr. Science. See which party picks it up.”

“Neither,” Frank and Diane said together.

“We don’t know that,” Anna said. “And it would be safer than endorsing one party over the other, or starting some kind of scientific third party that would only hurt politicians who are on our side. Either way we could get pushed out of policy for years to come. Cast into the wilderness.”

“We’re already there,” Frank pointed out.

“So what have we got to lose?”

“Well, that’s true enough.” Frank thought it over. “We could get hammered.”

“Like we aren’t already?”

“Hmmm.”

“Maybe we have to take a stand. Maybe that’s what it means to get involved in politics. You have to declare. You have to talk about what people should do.”

They sat there, thinking things over. Edgardo walked in and they explained to him what they were thinking.

He laughed hard.

Frank kept scribbling. “Social Science Experiment in Politics.”

“In elective politics,” Anna insisted, frowning at Edgardo. “Then it’s, what, SSEEP. Pronounced ‘Seep.’ Like we’re seeping into policy.”

“Seep!” Diane laughed. “We’ll seep in like a bull in a china shop! Seep in and the whole shop will start screaming.”

“Maybe so. But the china shop is going under. It needs a bull to, what, to pull the whole thing up to higher ground.”

They laughed at this image.

“Well,” Diane said, “we need to do everything we can. Sort all this out, Frank. Look into all of it.”

Frank nodded. “Bold and persistent experimentation! I have a list here.”

Diane waved a hand. “More later. I’m starving.”

“Sure. You want to go get a bite?”

“Sure.”

Anna quickly glanced down. They had just arranged a date, right in front of her eyes. And not the first one, from the sound of it.

She thought, what about Frank’s woman from the elevator? Had he given up on her? That didn’t seem like him. Anna was obscurely disappointed; she liked that story, that possibility. It had appealed to the romantic in her, which was buried but substantial. She had almost asked him about it at one of their lunches, but something in his manner had kept her from it. And as for Frank and Diane, well, she could not imagine what it meant. Surely she had misread the situation. Diane was nice, certainly; but even in the light of Anna’s own puritanical work ethic, she was a bit much. What would she be like socially? It was hard to imagine.

And she herself would never know what Diane was like socially. She was a woman, and married; while Frank was a man, and unmarried; and Diane was now unmarried too, poor thing. And Frank had been plucked out from among the visiting program directors by Diane, to run her climate project committee.

“I’ve got to get home,” she said, throwing her things together. Home to her boys, who would leap on her and say the same things, all deep in their own worlds, and the dinner only partly made. Although in the same flare of irritation she felt a deep relief and a desire to be there at once.

At home her boys did leap on her, as predictable as clockwork, and the house was warm with kitchen smells.

The flood had revolutionized their cooking habits, Charlie trying old recipes and new, based on whatever produce the grocery store had available. Tonight, Mexican. Joe commanded her attention, insisting on Goodnight, Moon again, read in an up-tempo declamatory singsong very unsuited to the book’s soporific nature, which worked like a charm on her no matter what, but not on him. He was fretful again, and sucked at her desperately, as if seeking a relief beyond food. She spoke in quiet tones to Nick, and he read as he replied, or didn’t, mostly off in his own world. She tried not to worry about Joe, although his distemper had now lasted six weeks. Every test had been taken. Nothing had been discovered, except that slightly elevated temperature, which the record showed was real, if ever so slight. Its periodicity reminded her of her own temperatures when she had kept records to find her time of ovulation every month.

The red face, the lack of ease. No matter how hard she tried she was still scared by these changes in him. She knew what he should be like. And she knew this had started after their trip to Khembalung. She watched him, and nursed him, and played with him—tried to feel him, there in his body—tried to think about work, while humming to him as he sucked. She crooned the book in Tibetan, “Don nom, zla-ba.” Joe started slightly, hit her as he drowsed. Anna went back to the inviolable rhythms of the hypnotic little book; and she did everything she could to make herself stop worrying; but it never really went away. And so the days passed; and almost surreptitiously, while Charlie was doing other things, she took Joe’s temperature, and charted it, then went on; and tried to think about work; but she would have given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Gulf Stream itself for just a week of normal temperatures.