Forty Signs of Rain

IV Science in the Capital

What’s New From the Department of Unfortunate Statistics?

Extinction Rate in Oceans Now Faster Than on Land. Coral Reef Collapses Leading to Mass Extinctions; Thirty Percent of Warm-water Species Estimated Gone. Fishing Stocks Depleted, UN Declares Scaleback Necessary or Commercial Species Will Crash.

Topsoil Loss Nears a Million Acres a Year. Deforestation now faster in temperate than tropical forests. Only 35% of tropical forests left.

The average Indian consumes 200 kilograms of grain a year; the average American, 800 kilograms; the average Italian, 400 kilograms. The Italian diet was rated best in the world for heart disease.

300 Tons of Weapons-grade Uranium and Plutonium Unaccounted For. High Mutation Rate of Microorganisms Near Radioactive Waste-treatment Sites. Antibiotics in Animal Feed Reduce Medical Effectiveness of Antibiotics for Humans. Environmental estrogens suspected in lowest-ever human sperm counts.

Two Billion Tons of Carbon Added to the Atmosphere This Year. One of the five hottest years on record. The Fed Hopes U.S. Economy Will Grow by Four Percent in the Final Quarter.

Anna Quibler was in her office getting pumped. Her door was closed, the drapes (installed for her) were drawn. The pump was whirring in its triple sequence: low sigh, wheeze, clunk. The big suction cup made its vacuum pull during the wheeze, tugging her distended left breast outward and causing drips of white milk to fall off the end of her nipple. The milk then ran down a clear tube into the little clear bag in a plastic protective tube, which she would fill to the ten ounce mark.

It was an unconscious activity by now, and she was working on her computer while it happened. She only had to remember not to overfill the bottle, and to switch breasts. Her right breast produced more than the left even though they were the same size, a mystery that she had given up solving. She had long since explored the biological and engineering details of this process, and had gotten not exactly bored, but as far as she could go with it, and used to the sameness of it all. There was nothing new to investigate, so she was on to other things. What Anna liked was to study new things. This was what kept her coauthoring papers with her sometime-collaborators at Duke, and kept her on the editorial board of The Journal of Statistical Biology, despite the fact that her job at NSF as director of the Bioinformatics Division might be said to be occupying her more than full-time already; but much of that job was administrative, and like the milk pumping, fully explored. It was in her other projects where she could still learn new things.

Right now her new thing was a little search investigating the NSF’s ability to help Khembalung. She navigated her way through the on-line network of scientific institutions with an ease born of long practice, click by click.

Among NSF’s array of departments was an Office of International Science and Engineering, which Anna was impressed to find had managed to garner ten percent of the total NSF budget. It ran an International Biological Program, which sponsored a project called TOGA—“ Tropical Oceans, Global Atmosphere.” TOGA funded study programs, many including an infrastructure-dispersion element, in which the scientific infrastructure built for the work was given to the host institution at the end of the study period.

Anna had already been tracking NSF’s infrastructure-dispersion programs for another project, so she added this one to that list too. Projects like these were why people joked about the mobile hanging in the atrium being meant to represent a hammer and sickle, deconstructed so that outsiders would not recognize the socialistic nature of NSF’s tendency to give away capital and to act as if everyone owned the world equally. Anna liked these tendencies and the projects that resulted, though she did not think of them in political terms. She just liked the way NSF focused on work rather than theory or talk. That was her preference too. She liked quantitative solutions to quantified problems.

In this case, the problem was the Khembalis’ little island (fifty-two square kilometers, their website said), which was clearly in all-too-good a location to contribute to ongoing studies of Gangean flooding and tidal storms in the Indian Ocean. Anna tapped at her keyboard, bookmarking for an e-mail to Drepung, cc-ing also the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies, which he had told her about. This institute’s website indicated it was devoted to medicinal and religious studies (whatever those were, she didn’t want to know) but that would be all right—if the Khembalis could get a good proposal together, the need for a wider range of fields among their researchers could become part of its “broader impacts” element, and thus an advantage.

She searched the web further. USGCRP, the “U.S. Global Change Research Program,” two billion dollars a year; the South Asian START Regional Research Centre (SAS-RRC), based at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, stations in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Mauritius…China and Thailand, aerosol study…INDOEX, the Indian Ocean Experiment, also concerned with aerosols, as was its offspring, Project Asian Brown Cloud. These studied the ever-thickening haze covering South Asia and making the monsoon irregular, with disastrous results. Certainly Khembalung was well-situated to join that study. Also ALGAS, the “Asia Least Cost Greenhouse Gas Abatement Strategy”; and LOICZ, “ Land Ocean Interaction in the Coastal Zones.” That one had to be right on the money. Sri Lanka was the leader there, lots of estuarine modeling—Khembalung would make a perfect study site. Training, networking, bio-geo-chemical cycle budgeting, socioeconomic modeling, impacts on the coastal systems of South Asia. Bookmark the site, add to the e-mail. A research facility in the mouth of the Ganges would be a very useful thing for all concerned.

“Ah shit.”

She had overflowed the milk bottle. Not the first time for that mistake. She turned off the pump, poured off some of the milk from the full bottle into a four-ounce sack. She always filled quite a few four-ouncers, for use as snacks or supplements when Joe was feeling extra hungry; she had never told Charlie that most of these were the result of her inattention. Since Joe often was extra hungry, Charlie said, they were useful.

As for herself, she was starving. It was always that way after pumping sessions. Each twenty ounces of milk she gave was the result of some thousand calories burned by her in the previous day, as far as she had been able to calculate; the analyses she had found had been pretty rough. In any case, she could with a clear conscience (and great pleasure) run down to the pizza place and eat till she was stuffed. Indeed she needed to eat or she would get light-headed.

But first she had to pump the other breast at least a little, because let-down happened in both when she pumped, and she would end up uncomfortable if she didn’t. So she put the ten-ouncer in the little refrigerator, then got the other side going into the four-ouncer, while printing out a list of all the sites she had visited, so that over her lunch she could write notes on them before she forgot what she had learned.

She called Drepung, who answered his cell phone number.

“Drepung, can you meet for lunch? I’ve got some ideas for how you might get some science support there in Khembalung. Some of it’s from NSF, some from elsewhere.”

“Yes, of course Anna, thanks very much. I’ll meet you at the Food Factory in twenty minutes, if that’s all right, I’m just trying to buy some shoes for Rudra down the street here.”

“Perfect. What kind are you getting him?”

“Running shoes. He’ll love them.”

On her way out she ran into Frank, also headed for the elevator.

“What you got?” he asked, gesturing at her list.

“Some stuff for the Khembalis,” she said. “Various programs we run or take part in that might help them out.”

“So they can study how to adapt to higher sea levels?”

She frowned. “No, it’s more than that. We can get them a lot of infrastructural help if it’s configured right.”

“Good. But, you know. In the end they’re going to need more than studies. And NSF doesn’t do remediation. It just serves its clients. Pays for their studies.”

Frank’s comment bugged Anna, and after a nice lunch with Drepung she went up to her office and called Sophie Harper, NSF’s liaison to Congress.

“Sophie, does NSF ever do requests for proposals?”

“Not for a long time. In general it’s been policy to make the program proposal-driven.”

“So is there any way that NSF can, you know, set the agenda so to speak?”

“I don’t know what you mean. We ask Congress for funding in very specific ways, and they earmark the money they give us for very specific purposes.”

“So we might be able to ask for funds for various things?”

“Yes, we do that. I think the way to think of it is that science sets its own agenda. To tell the truth, that’s why the appropriations committees don’t like us very much.”

“Why?”

“Because they hold the purse strings, honey. And they’re very jealous of that power. I’ve had senators who believe the Earth is flat say to me, ‘Are you trying to tell me that you know what’s good for science better than I do?’ And of course that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell them, because it’s true, but what can you say? That’s the kind of person we sometimes have to deal with. Even with the best of committees, there’s a basic dislike for science’s autonomy.”

“But we’re only free to study things.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Anna sighed. “I don’t either. Listen Sophie, thanks for that. I’ll get back to you when I have a better idea what I’m trying to ask.”

“Always here. Check out NSF’s history pages on the website, you’ll learn some things you didn’t know.”

Anna hung up, and then did that very thing.

She had never gone to the website’s history pages before; she was not much for looking back. But she valued Sophie’s advice, and as she read, she realized Sophie had been right; because she had worked there for so long, unconsciously she had felt that she knew the Foundation’s story. But it wasn’t true.

Basically it was a story of science struggling to extend its reach in the world, with mixed success. After World War Two, Vannevar Bush, head of the wartime Office of Science and Technology, advocated a permanent federal agency to support basic scientific research. He argued that it was their basic scientific research that had won the war (radar, penicillin, the bomb), and Congress had been convinced, and had passed a bill bringing the NSF into being.

After that it was one battle after another, with both Congress and the President, contesting how much say scientists would have in setting national policy. President Truman forcing a presidentially selected board of directors on the Foundation in the beginning. President Nixon abolishing the Office of Science and Technology, which NSF had in effect staffed, replacing it with a single “scientific advisor.” The Gingrich Congress abolishing its Office of Technology Assessment. The Bush administrations zeroing out major science programs in every single budget. On it went.

Only occasionally in this political battle did science rally and win a few. After Sputnik, scientists were begged to take over again; NSF’s budget had ballooned. Then in the 1960’s, when everyone was an activist, NSF had created a program called “Interdisciplinary Research Relevant to Problems of Our Society.” What a name from its time that was!

Although, come to think of it, the phrase described very well what Anna had had in mind when querying Sophie in the first place. Interdisciplinary research, relevant to problems of our society—was that really such a sixties joke of an idea?

Back then, IRRPOS had morphed into RANN, “Research Applied to National Needs.” RANN had then gotten killed for being too applied; President Nixon had not liked its objections to his antiballistic missile defense. At the same time he preemptively established the EPA so that it would be under him rather than Congress.

The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn’t wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of business. They didn’t want to know.

For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her: they didn’t want to know. And yet they did want to call the shots. To Anna this was clearly crazy. Even Joe’s logic was stronger. How could such people exist, what could they be thinking? On what basis did they build such an incoherent mix of desires, to want to stay ignorant and to be powerful as well? Were these two parts of the same insanity?

She abandoned that train of thought, and read on to the end of the piece. “No agency operates in a vacuum,” it said. That was one way to put it! The NSF had been buffeted, grown, stagnated, adapted—done the best it could. Throughout all, its basic purposes and methods had held fast: to support basic research; to award grants rather than purchase contracts; to decide things by peer-review rather than bureaucratic fiat; to hire skilled scientists for permanent staff; to hire temporary staff from the expert cutting edges in every field.

Anna believed in all these, and she believed they had done demonstrable good. Fifty thousand proposals a year, eighty thousand people peer-reviewing them, ten thousand new proposals funded, twenty thousand grants continuing to be supported. All functioning to expand scientific knowledge, and the influence of science in human affairs.

She sat back in her chair, thinking it over. All that basic research, all that good work; and yet—thinking over the state of the world—somehow it had not been enough. Possibly they would have to consider doing something more.

Primates in the driver’s seat. It looked like they should all be dead. Multicar accidents, bloody incidents of road rage. Cars should have been ramming one another in huge demolition derbies, a global auto-da-fé.

But they were primates, they were social creatures. The brain had ballooned to its current size precisely to enable it to make the calculations necessary to get along in groups. These were the parts of the brain engaged when people drove in crowded traffic. Thus along with all the jockeying and frustration came the almost subliminal satisfactions of winning a competition, or the grudging solidarities of cooperating to mutual advantage. Let that poor idiot merge before his on-ramp lane disappeared; it would pay off in the overall speed of traffic. Thus the little primate buzz.

When things went well. But so often what one saw were people playing badly. It was like a giant game of prisoners’ dilemma, the classic game in which two prisoners are separated and asked to tell tales on the other one, with release offered to them if they do. The standard computer model scoring system had it that if the prisoners cooperate with each other by staying silent, they each get three points; if both defect against the other, they each get one point; and if one defects and the other doesn’t, the defector gets five points and the sap gets zero points. Using this scoring system to play the game time after time, there is a first iteration which says, it is best always to defect. That’s the strategy that will gain the most points over the long haul, the computer simulations said—if you are only playing strangers once, and never seeing them again. And of course traffic looked as if it were that situation.

But the shadow of the future made all the difference. Day in and day out you drove into the same traffic jam, with the same basic population of players. If you therefore played the game as if playing with the same opponent every time, which in a sense you were, with you learning them and them learning you, then more elaborate strategies would gain more points than always defect. The first version of the more successful strategy was called tit for tat, in which you did to your opponent what they last did to you. This out-competed always defect, which in a way was a rather encouraging finding. But tit for tat was not the perfect strategy, because it could spiral in either direction, good or bad, and the bad was an endless feud. Thus further trials had found successful variously revised versions of tit for tat, like generous tit for tat, in which you gave opponents one defection before turning on them, or always generous, which in certain limited conditions worked well. Or, the most powerful strategy Frank knew of, an irregularly generous tit for tat, where you forgave defecting opponents once before turning on them, but only about a third of the time, and unpredictably, so you were not regularly taken advantage of by one of the less cooperative strategies, but could still pull out of a death spiral of tit-for-tat feuding if one should arise. Various versions of these firm but fair irregular strategies appeared to be best if you were dealing with the same opponent over and over.

In traffic, at work, in relationships of every kind—social life was nothing but a series of prisoners’ dilemmas. Compete or cooperate? Be selfish or generous? It would be best if you could always trust other players to cooperate, and safely practice always generous; but in real life people did not turn out to earn that trust. That was one of the great shocks of adolescence, perhaps, that realization; which alas came to many at an even younger age. And after that you had to work things out case by case, your strategy a matter of your history, or your personality, who could say.

Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than Frank could have walked. He wondered how it was that certain turn-signal indicators managed to express a great desperation to change lanes, while others seemed patient and dignified. The speed of blinking, perhaps, or how close the car hugged the lane line it wanted to cross. Although rapid blinking did look insistent and whiny, while slow blinking bespoke a determined inertia.

It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. On the West Coast they played tit for tat, or even firm but fair, because it moved things along faster. Maybe this only meant Californians had lived through that many more freeway traffic jams. People had learned the game from birth, sitting in their baby seats, and so in California cars in two merging lanes would alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the game and play it right. Even young males cooperated. In that sense if none other, California was indeed the edge of history, the evolutionary edge of Homo automobilicus.

Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about, everyone girding up to get one point in a crash. Every SUV was a defection. Then there were the little cars that always gave way, the saps. A terrible combination. It was so slow, so unnecessarily, unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.

And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction of traffic: you could loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain could explain this, so it was like witnessing magic, the “technological sublime” people spoke of, which was the emotion experienced when the primate mind could not find a natural explanation for what it saw.

And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and just curse someone ferociously, from a few feet away, and yet have no ramifications to such a grave social transgression. It was not much compared to the satisfactions of cooperation, but perhaps rarer. It was something, anyway.

He crept forward in his car, cursing. He should not have gotten onto the Beltway. It was often badly overloaded at this hour. Stop and go, inch along. Curse defectors and saps. Inch along.

It stayed so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to get there for the panel to start on time; there was no slack in the schedule. The panel members were all in town, having spent a boring night the night before, probably. And the Holiday Inn in the Ballston complex often did not have enough hot water to supply everyone showering at that hour of the morning, so some of the panelists would be grumpy about that. Some would be gathering at this very moment in their third floor conference room, ready to go and feeling that there wasn’t enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded it on purpose, and they had flights home late the next day that they could not miss. To arrive late in this situation would be bad form indeed, no matter traffic on the Beltway. There would be looks, or perhaps a joke or two from Pritchard or Lee; he would have to explain himself, make excuses. It could interfere with his plan. He cursed the driver of a car cutting uselessly in front of him.

Then he was coming on Route 66, and impulsively he decided to get on it going east, even though at this hour it was restricted to High Occupancy Vehicles only. Normally Frank obeyed this rule, but feeling a little desperate, he took the turn and curved onto 66, where traffic was indeed moving faster. Every vehicle was occupied by at least two people, of course, and Frank stayed in the right lane and drove as unobtrusively as possible, counting on the generally inward attention of multiply occupied vehicles to keep too many people from noticing his transgression. Of course there were highway patrol cars on the lookout for lawbreakers like Frank, so he was taking a risk that he didn’t like to take, but it seemed to him a lower risk than staying on the Beltway as far as arriving late was concerned.

He drove in great suspense, therefore, until finally he could signal to get off at Fairfax. Then as he approached he saw a police car parked beside the exit, its officers walking back toward their car after dealing with another miscreant. They might easily look up and see him.

A big old pickup truck was slowing down to exit before him, and again without pausing to consider his actions, Frank floored the accelerator, swerved around the truck on its left side, using it to block the policemen’s view, then cut back across in front of the truck, accelerating so as not to bother it. Room to spare and no one the wiser. He curved to the right down the exit lane, slowing for the light around the turn.

Suddenly there was loud honking from behind, and his rearview mirror had been entirely filled by the front grille of the pickup truck, its headlights at about the same height as the roof of his car. Frank speeded up. Then, closing on the car in front of him, he had to slow down. Suddenly the truck was now passing him on the left, as he had passed it earlier, even though this took the truck up onto the exit lane’s tilted shoulder. Frank looked and glimpsed the infuriated face of the driver, leaning over to shout down at him. Long stringy hair, mustache, red skin, furious anger.

Frank looked over again and shrugged, making a face and gesture that said What? He slowed down so that the truck could cut in front of him, a good thing as it slammed into the lane so hard it missed Frank’s left headlight by an inch. He would have struck Frank for sure if Frank hadn’t slowed down. What a jerk!

Then the guy hit his brakes so hard that Frank nearly rear-ended him, which could have been a disaster given how high the truck was jacked up: Frank would have hit windshield first.

“What the fuck!” Frank said, shocked. “Fuck you! I didn’t come anywhere near you!”

The truck came to a full stop, right there on the exit.

“Jesus, you fucking idiot!” Frank shouted.

Maybe Frank had cut closer to this guy than he thought he had. Or maybe the guy was hounding him for driving solo on 66, even though he had been doing the same thing himself. Now his door flew open and out he jumped, swaggering back toward Frank. He caught sight of Frank still shouting, stopped and pointed a quivering finger, reached into the bed of his truck and pulled out a crowbar.

Frank reversed gear, backed up and braked, shifted into drive and spun his steering wheel as he accelerated around the pickup truck’s right side. People behind them were honking, but they didn’t know the half of it. Frank zoomed down the now empty exit lane, shouting triumphant abuse at the crazy guy.

Unfortunately the traffic light at the end of the exit ramp was red and there was a car stopped there, waiting for it to change. Frank had to stop. Instantly there was a thunk and he jerked forward. The pickup truck had rear-ended him, tapping him hard from behind.

“YOU FUCKER!” Frank shouted, now frightened; he had tangled with a madman! The truck was backing up, presumably to ram him again, so he put his little Honda in reverse and shot back into the truck, like hitting a wall, then shifted again and shot off into the narrow gap to the right of the car waiting at the light, turning right and accelerating into a gap between the cars zipping by, which caused more angry honks. He checked his rearview mirror and saw the light had changed and the pickup truck was turning to follow him, and not far behind. “Shit!”

Frank accelerated, saw an opening in traffic coming the other way, and took a sharp left across all lanes onto Glebe, even though it was the wrong direction for NSF. Then he floored it and began weaving desperately through cars he was rapidly overtaking, checking the rearview mirror when he could. The pickup appeared in the distance, squealing onto Glebe after him. Frank cursed in dismay.

He decided to drive directly to a fire station he recalled seeing on Lee Highway. He took a left on Lee and accelerated as hard as the little fuel-cell car could to the fire station, squealing into its parking lot and then jumping out and hurrying toward the building, looking back down Lee toward Glebe.

But the madman never appeared. Gone. Lost the trail, or lost interest. Off to harass someone else.

Cursing still, Frank checked his car’s rear. No visible damage, amazingly. He got back in and drove south to the NSF building, involuntarily reliving the experience. He had no clear idea why it had happened. He had driven around the guy but he had not really cut him off, and though it was true he had been poaching on 66, so had the guy. It was inexplicable. And it occurred to him that in the face of such behavior modeling devices like prisoners’ dilemma were useless. People did not make rational judgments. Especially, perhaps, the people driving too-large pickup trucks, this one of the dirty-and-dinged variety rather than the factory-fresh steroidal battleships that the area’s carpenters drove. Possibly then it had been some kind of class thing, the resentment of an unemployed gas-guzzler against a white-collar type in a fuel-cell car. The past attacking the future, reactionary attacking progressive, poor attacking affluent. A beta male in an alpha machine, enraged that an alpha male thought he was so alpha he could zip around in a beta machine and get away with it.

Something like that. Some kind of asshole jerk-off loser, already drunk and disorderly at seven A.M.

Despite all that, Frank found himself driving into the NSF building’s basement parking with just enough time to get to the elevators and up to the third floor at the last possible on-time moment. He hurried to the men’s room, splashed water on his face. He had to clear his mind of the ugly incident immediately, and it had been so strange and unpleasant that this was not particularly difficult. Incongruent awfulness without consequence is easily dismissed from the mind. So he pulled himself together, went out to do his job. Time to concentrate on the day’s work. His plan for the panel was locked in by the people he had convened for it. The scare on the road only hardened his resolve, chilled his blood.

He entered the conference room assigned to their panel. Its big inner window gave everyone the standard view of the rest of NSF, and the panelists who hadn’t been there before looked up into the beehive of offices making the usual comments about Rear Window and the like. “A kind of ersatz collegiality,” one of them said, must have been Nigel Pritchard.

“Keeps people working.”

On the savannah a view like this would have come from a high outcrop, where the troop would be resting in relative safety, surveying everything important in their lives. In the realm of grooming, of chatter, of dominance conflicts. Perfect, in other words, for a grant proposal evaluation panel, which in essence was one of the most ancient of discussions: whom do we let in, whom do we kick out? A basic troop economy, of social credit, of access to food and mates—everything measured and exchanged in deeds good and bad—yes—it was another game of prisoners’ dilemma. They never ended.

Frank liked this one. It was very nuanced compared to most of them, and one of the few still outside the world of money. Anonymous peer-review—unpaid labor—a scandal!

But science didn’t work like capitalism. That was the rub, that was one of the rubs in the general dysfunction of the world. Capitalism ruled, but money was too simplistic and inadequate a measure of the wealth that science generated. In science, one built up over the course of a career a fund of “scientific credit,” by giving work to the system in a way that could seem altruistic. People remembered what you gave, and later on there were various forms of return on the gift—jobs, labs. In that sense a good investment for the individual, but in the form of a gift to the group. It was the non zero-sum game that prisoners’ dilemma could become if everyone played by the strategies of always generous, or, better, firm but fair. That was one of the things science was—a place that one entered by agreeing to hold to the strategies of cooperation, to maximize the total return of the game.

In theory that was true. It was also the usual troop of primates. There was a lot of tit for tat. Defections happened. Everyone was jockeying for a lab of their own, or any project of their own. As long as that was generating enough income for a comfortable physical existence for oneself and one’s family, then one had reached the optimal human state. Having money beyond that was unnecessary, and usually involved a descent into the world of hassle and stupidity. That was what greed got you. So there was in science a sufficiency of means, and an achievable limit to one’s goals, that kept it tightly aligned with the brain’s deepest savannah values. A scientist wanted the same things out of life as an Australopithecus; and here they were.

Thus Frank surveyed the panelists milling about the room with a rare degree of happiness. “Let’s get started.”

They sat down, putting laptops and coffee cups beside the computer consoles built into the tabletop. These allowed the panelists to see a spreadsheet page for each proposal in turn, displaying their grades and comments. This particular group all knew the drill. Some of them had met before, more had read one another’s work.

There were eight of them sitting around the long cluttered conference table.

Frank made his usual introductory remarks and then said, “We’ve got a lot of them to go through this time. I’m sorry it’s so many, but that’s what we’ve received. I’m sure we’ll hack our way through them all if we keep on track. Let’s start with the fifteen-minutes-per-jacket drill, and see if we can get twelve or even fourteen done before lunch. Sound good?”

Everyone nodded and tapped away, calling up the first one.

“Oh, and before we start, let’s have everyone give me their conflict-of-interest forms, please. I have to remind you that as referees here, you have a conflict if you’re the applying principal investigator’s thesis advisor or advisee, an employee of the same institution as the P.I. or a co-P.I., a collaborator within the last four years of the P.I. or a co-P.I., an applicant for employment in any department at the submitting institution, a recipient of an honorarium or other pay from the submitting institution within the last year, someone with a close personal relationship to the P.I. or a co-P.I., a shareholder in a company participating in the proposal, or someone who would otherwise gain or lose financially if the proposal were awarded or declined.

“Everybody got that? Okay, hand those forms down to me, then. We’ll have a couple of people step outside for some of the proposals today, but mostly we’re clear as far as I know, is that right?”

“I’ll be leaving for the Esterhaus proposal, as I told you,” Stuart Thornton said.

Then they started the group evaluations. This was the heart of their task for that day and the next—also the heart of NSF’s method, indeed of science more generally. Peer-review; a jury of fellow experts. Frank clicked the first proposal’s page onto his screen. “Seven reviewers, forty-four jackets. Let’s start with EIA-02 18599, ‘Electromagnetic and Informational Processes in Molecular Polymers.’ Habib, you’re the lead on this?”

Habib Ndina nodded and opened with a description of the proposal. “They want to immobilize cytoskeletal networks on biochips, and explore whether tubulin can be used as bits in protein logic gates. They intend to do this by measuring the electric dipole moment, and what the P.I. calls the predicted kink-solitonic electric dipole moment flip waves.”

“Predicted by whom?”

“By the P.I.” Habib smiled. “He also states that this will be a method to test out the theories of the so-called quantum brain.”

“Hmm.” People read past the abstract.

“What are you thinking?” Frank said after a while. “I see Habib has given it a ‘Good,’ Stuart a ‘Fair,’ and Alice a ‘Very Good.’”

This represented the middle range of their scale, which ran Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, and Excellent.

Habib replied first. “I’m not so sure that you can get these biochips to array in neural nets. I saw Inouye try something like that at MIT, and they got stuck at the level of chip viability.”

“Hmm.”

The others chimed in with questions and opinions. At the end of fifteen minutes, Frank stopped the discussion and asked them to mark their final judgments in the two categories they used: intellectual merit and broader impacts.

Frank summed up the responses. “Four ‘Goods,’ two ‘Very Goods’ and a ‘Fair.’ Okay, let’s move on. But tell you what, I’m going to start the big board right now.”

He had a whiteboard in the corner next to him, and a pile of Post-it pads on the table. He drew three zones on the whiteboard with marker, and wrote at the top “Fund,” “Fund If Possible,” and “Don’t Fund.”

“I’ll put this one in the ‘Fund If Possible’ column for now, although naturally it may get bumped.” He stuck the proposal’s Post-it in the middle zone. “We’ll move these around as the day progresses and we get a sense of the range.”

Then they began the next one. “Okay. ‘Efficient Decoherence Control Algorithms for Computing Genome Construction.’”

This jacket Frank had assigned to Stuart Thornton.

Thornton started by shaking his head. “This one’s gotten two ‘Goods’ and two ‘Fairs,’ and it wasn’t very impressive to me either. It may be a candidate for limited discussion. It doesn’t really exhibit a grasp of the difficulties involved with codon tampering, and I think it replicates the work being done in Seattle by Johnson’s lab. The applicant seems to have been too busy with the broader impacts component to fully acquaint himself with the literature. Besides which, it won’t work.”

People laughed shortly at this extra measure of disdain, which was palpable, and to those who didn’t know Thornton, a little surprising. But Frank had seen Stuart Thornton on panels before. He was the kind of scientist who habitually displayed an ultrapure devotion to the scientific method, in the form of a relentless skepticism about everything. No study was designed tightly enough, no data were clean enough. To Frank it seemed obvious that it was really a kind of insecurity, part of the gestural set of a beta male convincing the group he was tough enough to be an alpha male, and maybe already was.

The problem with these gestures was that in science one’s intellectual power was like the muscle mass of an Australopithecus—there for all to see. You couldn’t fake it. No matter how much you ruffed your fur or exposed your teeth, in the end your intellectual strength was discernible in what you said and how insightful it was. Mere skepticism was like baring teeth; anyone could do it. For that reason Thornton was a bad choice for a panel, because while people could see his attitude and try to discount it, he set a tone that was hard to shake off. If there was an always defector in the group, one had to be less generous oneself in order not to become a sap.

That was why Frank had invited him.

Thornton went on, “The basic problem is at the level of their understanding of an algorithm. An algorithm is not just a simple sequence of mathematical operations that can each be performed in turn. It’s a matter of designing a grammar that will adjust the operations at each stage, depending on what the results are from the stage before. There’s a very specific encoding math that makes that work. They don’t have that here, as far as I can tell.”

The others nodded and tapped in notes at their consoles. Soon enough they were on to the next proposal, with the previous one posted under “Don’t Fund.”

Now Frank could predict with some confidence how the rest of the day would go. A depressed norm had been set, and even though the third reporter, Alice Freundlich from Harvard, subtly rebuked Thornton by talking about how well-designed her first jacket was, she did so in a less generous context, and was not overly enthusiastic. “They think that the evolutionary processes of gene conservation can be mapped by cascade studies, and they want to model it with big computer array simulations. They claim they’ll be able to identify genes prone to mutation.”

Habib Ndina shook his head. He too was a habitual skeptic, although from a much deeper well of intelligence than Thornton ’s; he wasn’t just making a display, he was thinking. “Isn’t the genome’s past pretty much mapped by now?” he complained. “Do we really need more about evolutionary history?”

“Well, maybe not. Broader impacts might suffer there.”

And so the day proceeded, and, with some subliminal prompting from Frank (“Are you sure they have the lab space?” “Do you think that’s really true, though?” “How would that work?” “How could that work?”), the full Shooting Gallery Syndrome slowly emerged. The panelists very slightly lost contact with their sense of the proposals as human efforts performed under a deadline, and started to compare them to some perfect model of scientific practice. In that light, of course, all the candidates were wanting. They all had feet of clay and their proposals all became clay pigeons, cast into the air for the group to take potshots at. New jacket tossed up: bang! bang! bang!

“This one’s toast,” someone said at one point.

Of course a few people in such a situation would stay anchored, and begin to shake their heads or wrinkle their noses, or even protest the mood, humorously or otherwise. But Frank had avoided inviting any of the real stalwarts he knew, and Alice Freundlich did no more than keep things pleasant. The impulse in a group toward piling on was so strong that it often took on extraordinary momentum. On the savannah it would have meant an expulsion and a hungry night out. Or some poor guy torn limb from limb.

Frank didn’t need to tip things that far. Nothing explicit, nothing heavy. He was only the facilitator. He did not express an obvious opinion on the substance of the proposals at any point. He watched the clock, ran down the list, asked if everybody had said what they wanted to say when there were three minutes left out of the fifteen; made sure everyone got their scores into the system at the end of the discussion period. “That’s an ‘Excellent’ and five ‘Very Goods.’ Alice do you have your scores on this one?”

Meanwhile the discussions got tougher and tougher.

“I don’t know what she could have been thinking with this one, it’s absurd!”

“Let me start by suggesting limited discussion.”

Frank began subtly to apply the brakes. He didn’t want them to think he was a bad panel manager.

Nevertheless, the attack mood gained momentum. Baboons descending on wounded prey; it was almost Pavlovian, a food-rewarded joy in destruction that did not bode well for the species. The pleasure taken in wrecking anything meticulous. Frank had seen it many times: a carpenter doing demolition with a sledgehammer, a vet who went duck-hunting on weekends…It was unfortunate, given their current overextended moment in planetary history, but nevertheless real. As a species they were therefore probably doomed. And so the only real adaptive strategy, for the individual, was to do one’s best to secure one’s own position. And sometimes that meant a little strategic defection.

Near the end of the day it was Thornton ’s turn again. Finally they had come to the proposal from Yann Pierzinski. People were getting tired.

Frank said, “Okay, almost done here. Let’s finish them off, shall we? Two more to go. Stu, we’re to you again, on ‘Mathematical and Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.’ Mandel and Pierzinski, Caltech.”

Thornton shook his head wearily. “I see it’s got a couple of ‘Very Goods’ from people, but I give it a ‘Fair.’ It’s a nice thought, but it seems to be promising too much. I mean, predicting the proteome from the genome would be enough in itself, but then understanding how the genome evolved, building error-tolerant biocomputers—it’s like a list of the big unsolved problems.”

Francesca Taolini asked him what he thought of the algorithm that the proposal hoped to develop.

“It’s too sketchy to be sure! That’s really what he’s hoping to find, as far as I can tell. There would be a final toolbox with a software environment and language, then a gene grammar to make sense of palindromes in particular, he seems to think those are important, but I think they’re just redundancy and repair sequences, that’s why the palindromic structure. They’re like the reinforcement at the bottom of a zipper. To think that he could use this to predict all the proteins that a particular gene would produce!”

“But if you could, you would see what proteins you would get without needing to do microassays and use crystallography to see what came up,” Francesca pointed out. “That would be very useful. I thought the line he was following had potential, myself. I know people working on something like this, and it would be good to have more people on it, it’s a broad front. That’s why I gave it a ‘Very Good,’ and I’d still recommend we fund it.” She kept her eyes on her screen.

“Well yeah,” Thornton said crossly, “but where would he get the biosensors that would tell him if he was right or not? There’s no controls.”

“That would be someone else’s problem. If the predictions were turning out good you wouldn’t have to test all of them, that would be the point.”

Frank waited a beat. “Anyone else?” he said in a neutral tone.

Pritchard and Yao Lee joined in. Lee obviously thought it was a good idea, in theory. He started describing it as a kind of cookbook with evolving recipes, and Frank ventured to say, “How would that work?”

“Well, by successive iterations of the operation, you know. It would be to get you started, suggest directions to try.”

“Look,” Francesca interjected, “eventually we’re going to have to tackle this issue, because until we do, the mechanics of gene expression are just a black box. It’s a very valid line of inquiry.”

“Habib?” Frank asked.

“It would be nice, I guess, if he could make it work. It’s not so easy. It would be like a roll of the dice to support it.”

Before Francesca could collect herself and start again, Frank said, “Well, we could go round and round on that, but we’re out of time on this one, and it’s late. Those of you who haven’t done it yet, write down your scores, and let’s finish with one more from Alice before we go to dinner.”

Hunger made them nod and tap away at their consoles, and then they were on to the last one for the day, “Ribozymes as Molecular Logic Gates.” When they were done with that, Frank stuck its Post-it on the whiteboard with the rest. Each little square of paper had its proposal’s averaged scores written on it. It was a tight scale; the difference between 4.63 and 4.70 could matter a great deal. They had already put three proposals in the “Fund” column, two in the “Fund If Possible,” and six in the “Do Not Fund.” The rest were stuck to the bottom of the board, waiting to be sorted out the following day. Pierzinski’s was among those.

That evening the group went out for dinner at Tara, a good nearby Thai restaurant with a wall-sized fish tank. The conversation was animated and wide-ranging, the mood getting better as the meal wore on. Afterward a few of them went to the hotel bar; the rest retreated to their rooms. At eight the next morning they were back in the conference room doing everything over again, working their way through the proposals with an increasing efficiency. Thornton recused himself for a discussion of a proposal from someone at his university, and the mood in the room noticeably lightened; even when he returned they held to this. They were learning each other’s predilections, and sometimes jetted off into discussions of theory that were very interesting even though they were only a few minutes long. Some of the proposals brought up interesting problems, and several strong ones in a row made them aware of just how amazing contemporary work in bioinformatics was, and what some of the potential benefits for human health might be, if all this were to come together and make a robust biotechnology. The shadow of a good future drove the group toward more generous strategies. The second day went better. The scores were, on average, higher.

“My Lord,” Alice said at one point, looking at the whiteboard. “There are going to be some very good proposals that we’re not going to be able to fund.”

Everyone nodded. It was a common feeling at the end of a panel.

“I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could fund about ninety percent of all the applications. You know, only reject the limited-discussions. Fund everything else.”

“It might speed things up.”

“Might cause a revolution.”

“Now back to reality,” Frank suggested. “Last jacket here.”

When they had all tapped in their grading of the forty-fourth jacket, Frank quickly crunched the numbers on his general spreadsheet, sorting the applicants into a hierarchy from one to forty-four, with a lot of ties.

He printed out the results, including the funding each proposal was asking for, then called the group back to order. They started moving the unsorted Post-its up into one or another of the three columns.

Pierzinski’s proposal had ended up ranked fourteenth out of the forty-four. It wouldn’t have been that high if it weren’t for Francesca. Now she urged them to fund it; but because it was in fourteenth place, the group decided it should be put in “Fund If Possible,” with a bullet.

Frank moved its Post-it on the whiteboard up into the “Fund If Possible” column, keeping his face perfectly blank. There were eight in “Fund If Possible,” six in “Fund,” twelve in “Do Not Fund.” Eighteen to go, therefore, but the arithmetic of the situation would doom most of these to the “Do Not Fund” column, with a few stuck into the “Fund If Possible” as faint hopes.

Later it would be Frank’s job to fill out a Form Seven for every proposal, summarizing the key aspects of the discussion, acknowledging outlier reviews that were more than one full place off the average, and explaining any “Excellents” awarded to nonfunded reviews; this was part of keeping the process transparent to the applicants, and making sure that nothing untoward happened. The panel was advisory only, NSF had the right to overule it, but in the great majority of cases the panel’s judgments would stand—that was the whole point—that was scientific objectivity, at least in this part of the process.

In a way it was funny. Solicit seven intensely subjective and sometimes contradictory opinions; quantify them; average them; and that was objectivity. A numerical grading that you could point to on a graph. Ridiculous, of course. But it was the best they could do. Indeed, what other choice did they have? No algorithm could make these kinds of decisions. The only computer powerful enough to do it was one made up of a networked array of human brains—that is to say, a panel. Beyond that they could not reach.

So they discussed the proposals one last time, their scientific potential and also their educational and benefit-to-society aspects, the “broader impacts” rubric, usually spelled out rather vaguely in the proposals, and unpopular with research purists. But as Frank put it now, “NSF isn’t here just to do science but also to promote science, and that means all these other criteria. What it will add to society.” What Anna will do with it, he almost said.

And speak of the devil, Anna came in to thank the panelists for their efforts, slightly flushed and formal in her remarks. When she left, Frank said, “Thanks from me too. It’s been exhausting as usual, but good work was done. I hope to see all of you here again at some point, but I won’t bother you too soon either. I know some of you have planes to catch, so let’s quit now, and if any of you have anything else you want to add, tell me individually. Okay, we’re done.”

Frank printed out a final copy of the spreadsheet. The money numbers suggested they would end up funding about ten of the forty-four proposals. There were seven in the “Fund” column already, and six of those in the “Fund If Possible” column had been ranked slightly higher than Yann Pierzinski’s proposal. If Frank, as NSF’s representative, did not exercise any of his discretionary power to find a way to fund it, that proposal would be declined.

Another day for Charlie and Joe. A late spring morning, temperatures already in the high nineties and rising, humidity likewise.

They stayed in the house for the balm of the air-conditioning, falling out of the ceiling vents like spills of clear syrup. They wrestled, they cleaned house, they ate breakfast and elevenses. Charlie read some of the Post while Joe devastated dinosaurs. Something in the Post about India ’s drought reminded Charlie of the Khembalis, and he put in his earphone and gave his friend Sridar a call.

“Hey Sridar, it’s Charlie.”

“Charlie, good to hear from you! I got your message.”

“Oh good, I was hoping you had. How’s the lobbying business going?”

“We’re keeping at it. We’ve got some interesting clients, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes I do.”

Charlie and Sridar had worked together for a lobbying firm several years before. Now Sridar worked for Branson and Ananda, a small but prestigious firm representing several foreign governments in their dealings with the American government. Some of these governments had customs at home that made representing them to Congress a challenge.

“So you said something about a new country? I’m glad you’re keeping an eye out for new clients for me.”

“Well it was through Anna, like I said.” Charlie explained how they had met. “When I was talking to them I thought they could use your help.”

“Oh dear, how nice.”

“Yeah well, you need some challenges.”

“Right, like I have no challenges. What’s this new country, then?”

“Have you heard of Khembalung?”

“I think so. One of the League of Drowning Nations?”

“Yeah that’s right.”

“You’re asking me to take on a sinking island nation?”

“Actually they’re not sinking, it’s the ocean that’s rising.”

“Even worse. I mean what are we going to be able to do about that, stop global warming?”

“Well, yeah. That’s the idea. But you know. There’ll be all sorts of other countries working on the same thing. You’d have lots of allies.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway they could use your help, and they’re good guys. Interesting. I think you’d enjoy them. You should at least meet with them and see.”

“Yeah okay. My plate is kinda full right now, but I could do that. No harm in meeting.”

“Oh good. Thanks Sridar, I appreciate that.”

“No problem. Hey can I have Krakatoa too?”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

After that Charlie was in the mood to talk, but he had no real reason to call anybody. He and Joe played again. Bored, Charlie even resorted to turning on the TV. A pundit show came on and helplessly he watched. “They are such lapdogs,” he complained to Joe. “See, that whole studio is a kind of pet’s bed, and these guys sit in their places like pets in the palm of a giant, speaking what the giant wants to hear. My God how can they stand it! They know perfectly well what they’re up to, you can see the way they parade their little hobbies to try to distract us, see that one copies definitions out of the dictionary, and that one there has memorized all the rules of pinochle for Christ’s sake, all to disguise the fact that they have not a single principle in their heads except to defend the rich. Disgusting.”

“BOOM!” Joe concurred, catching Charlie’s mood and flinging a tyrannosaurus into the radiator with a clang.

“That’s right,” Charlie said. “Good job.”

He changed the channel to ESPN 5, which showed classic women’s volleyball doubles all day along. Retired guys at home must be a big demographic. And so tall muscular women in bathing suits jumped around and dove in the sand; they were amazingly skillful. Charlie particularly liked the exploits of the Brazilian Jackie Silva, who always won even though she was not the best hitter, server, passer, blocker, or looker. But she was always in the right place doing the best thing, making miraculous saves and accidental winners.

“I’m going to be the Jackie Silva of Senate staffers,” Charlie told Joe.

But Joe had had enough of being in the house. “Go!” he said imperiously, hammering the front door with a diplodocus. “Go! Go! Go!”

“All right all right.”

His point was undeniable. They couldn’t stay in this house all day. “Let’s see. What shall we do. I’m tired of the park. Let’s go down to the Mall, we haven’t done that for a while. The Mall, Joe! But you have to get in your backpack.”

Joe nodded and tried to climb into his baby backpack immediately, a very tippy business. He was ready to party.

“Wait, let’s change your diaper first.”

“NO!”

“Ah come on Joe. Yes.”

“NO!”

“But yes.”

They fought like maniacs through a diaper change, each ruthless and determined, each shouting, beating, pinching. Charlie followed Jackie Silva’s lead and did the necessary things.

Red-faced and sweating, finally they were ready to emerge from the house into the steambath of the city. Out they went. Down to the Metro, down into that dim cool underground world.

It would have been good if the Metro pacified Joe as it once had Nick, but in fact it usually energized him. Charlie could not understand that; he himself found the dimness and coolness a powerful soporific. But Joe wanted to play around just above the drop to the power rail, he was naturally attracted to that enormous source of energy. The hundred-thousand-watt child. Charlie ran around keeping Joe from the edge, like Jackie Silva keeping the ball off the sand.

Finally a train came. Joe liked the Metro cars. He stood on the seat next to Charlie and stared at the concrete walls sliding by outside the tinted windows of the car, then at the bright orange or pink seats, the ads, the people in their car, the brief views of the underground stations they stopped in.

A young black man got on carrying a helium-filled birthday balloon. He sat down across the car from Charlie and Joe. Joe stared at the balloon, boggled by it. Clearly it was for him a kind of miraculous object. The youth pulled down on its string and let the balloon jump back up to its full extension. Joe jerked, then burst out laughing. His giggle was like his mom’s, a low gorgeous burbling. People in the car grinned to hear it. The young man pulled the balloon down again, let it go again. Joe laughed so hard he had to sit down. People began to laugh with him, they couldn’t help it. The young man was smiling shyly. He did the trick again and now the whole car followed Joe into paroxysms of laughter. They laughed all the way to Metro Center.

Charlie got out, grinning, and carried Joe to the Blue/Orange level. He marveled at the infectiousness of moods in a group. Strangers who would never meet again, unified suddenly by a youth and a toddler playing a game. By laughter. Maybe the real oddity was how much one’s fellow citizens were usually like furniture in one’s life.

Joe bounced in Charlie’s arms. He liked Metro Center ’s crisscrossing mysterious vastness. The incident of the balloon was already forgotten. It had been unremarkable to him; he was still in that stage of life where all the evidence supported the idea that he was the center of the universe, and miracles happened. Kind of like a U.S. Senator.

Luckily Phil Chase was not like that. Certainly Phil enjoyed his life and his public role, it reminded Charlie of what he had read about FDR’s attitude toward the presidency. But that was mostly a matter of being the star of one’s own movie; thus, just like everyone else. No, Phil was very good to work for, Charlie thought, which was one of the ultimate tests of a person.

Their next Metro car reached the Smithsonian station, and Charlie put Joe into the backpack and on his back, and rode the escalator up and out, into the kiln blaze of the Mall.

The sky was milky white everywhere. It felt like the inside of a sauna. Charlie fought his way through the heat to an open patch of grass in the shade of the Washington Monument. He sat them down and got out some food. The big views up to the Capitol and down to the Lincoln Memorial pleased him. Out from under the great forest. It was like escaping Mirkwood. This in Charlie’s opinion accounted for the great popularity of the Mall; the monuments and the big Smithsonian buildings were nice but supplementary, it was really a matter of getting out into the open. The ordinary reality of the American West was like a glimpse of heaven here in the green depths of the swamp.

Charlie knew and cherished the old story: how the first thirteen states had needed a capital, and so someone had to give up some land for it, or else one particular state would nab the honor; and Virginia and the other southern states were particularly concerned it would go to Philadelphia or New York. And so they had bickered, you give up some land, no you give it. No bureaucracy ever wanted to give up sovereignty over anything whatsoever, be it the smallest patch of sand in the sea; and so finally Virginia had said to Maryland, look, where the Potomac meets the Anacostia there’s a big nasty swamp. It’s worthless, dreadful, pestilent land. You’ll never be able to make anything out of a festering pit like that.

True, Maryland had said, you’re right. Okay, we’ll give that land to the nation for its capital. But not too much! Just a section of the worst part. And good luck draining it!

And so here they were. Charlie sat on grass, drowsing. Joe gamboled about him like a bumblebee, investigating things. The diffuse midday light lay on them like asthma. Big white clouds mushroomed to the west, and the scene turned glossy, bulging with internal light, like a computer photo with more pixels than the human eye could process. The ductile world, everything bursting with light. He really had to try to remember to bring his sunglasses on these trips.

To get a good long nap from Joe, he needed to tank him up. Charlie fought his own sleep, got the food bag out of the backpack’s undercarriage pocket, waved it so Joe could see it. Joe trundled over, eyelids at half-mast; there was no time to lose. He settled into Charlie’s lap and Charlie popped a bottle of Anna’s milk into his mouth just as his head was snapping to the side.

They were like zombies together: Joe sucked himself unconscious while Charlie slumped over him, chin on chest, comatose. Snuggling an infant in mind-numbing heat, what could be cozier.

Clouds over the White House were billowing up like the spirit of the building’s feisty inhabitant, round, dense, shiny white. In the other direction, over the Supreme Court’s neighborhood, stood a black nine-lobed cloud, dangerously laden with incipient lightning. Yes, the powers of Washington were casting up thermals and forming clouds over themselves, clouds that filled out precisely the shapes and colors of their spirits. Charlie saw that each cumulobureaucracy transcended the individuals who temporarily performed its functions in the world. These transhuman spirits all had inborn characters, and biographies, and abilities and desires and habits all their own; and in the sky over the city they contested their fates with one another. Humans were like cells in their bodies. Probably one’s cells also thought their lives were important and under their individual control. But the great bodies knew better.

Thus Charlie now saw that the White House was a great white thunderhead of a spirit, like an old emperor or a small-town sheriff, dominating the landscape and the other players. The Supreme Court on the other hand was dangerously dark and low, like a multiheaded minotaur, brooding and powerful. Over the white dome of the Capitol, the air shimmered; Congress was a roaring thermal so hot that no cloud could form in it.

Oh yes—there were big spirits above this low city, hammering one another like Zeus and his crowd, or Odin, or Krishna, or all of them at once. To make one’s way in a world like that one had to blow like the North Wind.

He had fallen into a slumber as deep as Joe’s when his phone rang. He answered it before waking, his head snapping dangerously on his neck.

“Wha.”

“Charlie? Charlie, where are you? We need you down here right now.”

“I’m already down here.”

“Really? That’s great. Charlie?”

“Yes, Roy?”

“Look, Charlie, sorry to bother you, but Phil is out of town and I’ve got to meet with Senator Ellington in twenty minutes, and we just got a call from the White House saying that Dr. Strangelove wants to meet with us to talk about Phil’s climate bill. It sounds like they’re ready to listen, maybe ready to talk too, or even to deal. We need someone to get over there.”

“Now?”

“Now. You’ve got to get over there.”

“I’m already over there, but look, I can’t. I’ve got Joe here with me. Where is Phil again?”

“ San Francisco.”

“Wasn’t Wade supposed to get back?”

“No he’s still in Antarctica. Listen Charlie, there’s no one here who can do this right but you.”

“What about Andrea?” Andrea Palmer was Phil’s legislative director, the person in charge of all his bills.

“She’s in New York today. Besides you’re the point man on this, it’s your bill more than anyone else’s and you know it inside and out.”

“But I’ve got Joe!”

“Maybe you can take Joe along.”

“Yeah right.”

“Hey, why not? Won’t he be taking a nap soon?”

“He is right now.”

Charlie could see the trees backing the White House, there on the other side of the Ellipse. He could walk over there in ten minutes. Theoretically Joe would stay asleep a couple of hours. And certainly they should seize the moment on this, because so far the President and his people had shown no interest whatsoever in dealing on this issue.

“Listen,” Roy cajoled, “I’ve had entire lunches with you where Joe is asleep on your back, and believe me, no one can tell the difference. I mean you hold yourself upright like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders, but you did that before you had Joe, so now he just fills up that space and makes you look more normal, I swear to God. You’ve voted with him on your back, you’ve shopped, you’ve showered, hey once you even made love with your wife while Joe was on your back, didn’t you tell me that?”

“What!”

“You told me that, Charlie.”

“I must have been drunk to tell you that, and it wasn’t really sex anyway. I couldn’t even move.”

Roy laughed his raucous laugh. “Since when does that make it not sex? You had sex with Joe in a backpack asleep on your back, so you sure as hell can talk to the President’s science advisor that way. Doctor Strangelove isn’t going to care.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“So? They’re all jerks over there but the President, and he is too but he’s a nice guy. And he’s the family President, right? He would approve on principle, you can tell Strengloft that. You can say that if the President were there he would love it. He would autograph Joe’s head like a baseball.”

“Yeah right.”

“Charlie, this is your bill!”

“Okay okay okay!” It was true. “I’ll go give it a try.”

So, by the time Charlie got Joe back on his back (the child was twice as heavy when asleep) and walked across the Mall and the Ellipse, Roy had made the calls and they were expecting him at the west entry to the White House. Joe was passed through security with a light-fingered shakedown that was especially squeamish around his diaper. Then they were through, and quickly escorted into a conference room.

The room was brightly lit, and empty. Charlie had never been in it before, though he had visited the White House several times. Joe weighed on his shoulders.

Dr. Zacharius Strengloft, the President’s science advisor, entered the room. He and Charlie had sparred by proxy several times before, Charlie whispering killer questions into Phil’s ear while Strengloft testified before Phil’s committee, but the two of them had never spoken one-on-one. Now they shook hands, Strengloft peering curiously over Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie explained Joe’s presence as briefly as he could, and Strengloft received the explanation with precisely the kind of frosty faux benevolence that Charlie had been expecting. Strengloft in Charlie’s opinion was a pompous ex-academic of the worst kind, hauled out of the depths of a second-rate conservative think tank when the administration’s first science advisor had been sent packing for saying that global warming might be real and not only that, amenable to human mitigations. That went too far for this administration. Their line was that no one knew for sure and it would be much too expensive to do anything about even if they were certain it was coming—everything would have to change, the power generation system, cars, a shift from hydrocarbons to helium or something, they didn’t know, and they didn’t own patents or already existing infrastructure for that kind of new thing, so they were going to punt and let the next generation solve their own problems in their own time. In other words, the hell with them. Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

All this had become quite blatant since Strengloft’s appointment. He had taken over the candidate lists for most of the federal government’s science-advisory panels, and very quickly candidates were being routinely asked who they had voted for in the last election, and what they thought of stem-cell research and abortion and evolution. This had recently culminated in a lead industry defense witness being appointed to the panel for setting safety standards for lead in children’s blood, and immediately declaring that seventy micrograms per deciliter would be harmless to children, though the EPA’s maximum was ten. When his views were publicized and criticized, Strengloft had commented, “You need a diversity of opinions to get good advice.” Mentioning his name was enough to make Anna hiss.

Be that as it may, here he was standing before Charlie; he had to be dealt with, and in the flesh he seemed friendly.

They had just gotten through their introductory pleasantries when the President himself entered the room. Strengloft nodded complacently, as if he were often joined in his crucial work by the happy man.

“Oh, hello Mr. President,” Charlie said helplessly.

“Hello, Charles,” the President said, and came over and shook his hand.

This was bad. Not unprecedented, or even terribly surprising; the President had become known for wandering into meetings like this, apparently by accident but perhaps not. It had become part of his legendarily informal style.

Now he saw Joe sacked out on Charlie’s back, and stepped around Charlie to get a better view. “What’s this, Charles, you got your kid with you?”

“Yes sir, I was called in on short notice when Dr. Strengloft asked for a meeting with Phil and Wade, they’re both out of town.”

The President found this amusing. “Ha! Well, good for you. That’s sweet. Find me a marker pen and I’ll sign his little head.” This was another signature move, so to speak. “Is he a boy or a girl?”

“A boy. Joe Quibler.”

“Well that’s great. Saving the world before bedtime, that’s your story, eh Charles?” He smiled to himself and moved restlessly over to the chair at the window end of the table. One of his people was standing in the door, watching them without expression.

The President’s face was smaller than it appeared on TV, Charlie found. The size of an ordinary human face, no doubt, looking small precisely because of all the TV images. On the other hand it had a tremendous solidity and three-dimensionality to it. It gleamed with reality.

His eyes were slightly close-set, as was often remarked, but apart from that he looked like an aging movie star or catalog model. A successful businessman who had retired to get into public service. His features, as many observers had observed, mixed qualities of several recent presidents into one blandly familiar and reassuring face, with a little dash of Ross Perot to give him a piquant antiquity and edgy charm.

Now his amused look was like that of everyone’s favorite uncle. “So they reeled you in for this on the fly.” Then, holding a hand up to stop all of them, he nearly whispered: “Sorry—should I whisper?”

“No sir, no need for that,” Charlie assured him in his ordinary speaking voice. “He’s out for the duration. Pay no attention to that man behind the shoulder.”

The President smiled. “Got a wizard on your back, eh?”

Charlie nodded, smiling quickly to conceal his surprise. It was a pastime in some circles to judge just how much of a dimwit the President was, how much of a performing puppet for the people manipulating him; but facing him in person, Charlie felt instantly confirmed in his minority position that the man had such a huge amount of low cunning that it amounted to a kind of genius. The President was no fool. And hip to at least the most obvious of movie trivia. Charlie couldn’t help feeling a bit reassured.

Now the President said, “That’s nice, Charles, let’s get to it then, shall we? I heard from Dr. S. here about the meeting this morning, and I wanted to check in on it in person, because I like Phil Chase. And I understand that Phil now wants us to join in with the actions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the point of introducing a bill mandating our participation in whatever action they recommend, no matter what it is. And this is a UN panel.”

“Well,” Charlie said, shifting gears into ultradiplomatic mode, not just for the President but for the absent Phil, who was going to be upset with him no matter what he said, since only Phil should actually be talking to the President about this stuff. “That isn’t exactly how I would put it, Mr. President. You know the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a number of hearings this year, and Phil’s conclusion after all that testimony was that the global climate situation is quite real. And serious to the point of being already almost too late.”

The President shot a glance at Strengloft. “Would you agree with that, Dr. S.?”

“We’ve agreed that there is general agreement that the observed warming is real.”

The President looked to Charlie, who said, “That’s good as far as it goes, certainly. It’s what follows from that that matters—you know, in the sense of us trying to do something about it.”

Charlie swiftly rehearsed the situation, known to all: average temperatures up by six degrees Fahrenheit already, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere topping six hundred parts per million, from a start before the industrial revolution of 280, and predicted to hit a thousand ppm within a decade, which would be higher than it had been at any time in the past seventy million years. Two and a half billion metric tons of CO₂ added to the atmosphere by American industry every year, some 150 percent more than the Kyoto agreement would have allowed if they had signed it, and rising fast. Also long-term persistence of greenhouse gases, on the order of thousands of years.

Charlie also spoke briefly of the death of all coral reefs, which would lead to even more severe consequences for oceanic ecosystems. “The thing is, Mr. President, the world’s climate can shift very rapidly. There are scenarios in which the general warming causes parts of the Northern Hemisphere to get quite cold, especially in Europe. If that were to happen, Europe could become something like the Yukon of Asia.”

“Really!” the President said. “Are we sure that would be a bad thing? Just kidding of course.”

“Of course sir, ha ha.”

The President fixed him with a look of mock displeasure. “Well, Charles, all that may be true, but we don’t know for sure if any of that is the result of human activity. Isn’t that a fact?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘know for sure,’” Charlie said doggedly. “Two and a half billion tons of carbon per year, that’s got to make a difference, it’s just plain physics. You could say it isn’t for sure that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, and in a limited sense you’d be right, but I’ll bet you the sun will come up.”

“Don’t be tempting me to gamble now.”

“And besides, Mr. President, there’s also what they call the precautionary principle, meaning you don’t delay acting on crucial matters when you have a disaster that might happen, just because you can’t be one hundred percent sure that it will happen. Because you can never be one hundred percent sure of anything, and some of these matters are too important to wait on.”

The President frowned at this, and Strengloft interjected, “Charlie, you know the precautionary principle is an imitation of actuarial insurance that has no real resemblance to it, because the risk and the premium paid can’t be calculated. That’s why we refused to hear any precautionary principle language in the discussions we attended at the UN. We said we wouldn’t even attend if they talked about precautionary principles or ecological footprints, and we had very good reasons for those exclusions, because those concepts are not good science.”

The President nodded his “So That Is That” nod, familiar to Charlie from many a press conference. He added, “I always thought a footprint was kind of a simplistic measurement for something this complex anyway.”

Charlie countered, “It’s just a name for a good economic index, Mr. President, calculating use of resources in terms of how much land it would take to provide them. It’s pretty educational, really,” and he launched into a quick description of the way it worked. “It’s a good thing to know, like balancing your checkbook, and what it shows is that America is consuming the resources of ten times the acreage it actually occupies. So that if everyone on Earth tried to live as we do, given the greater population densities in much of the world, it would take fourteen Earths to support us all.”

“Come on, Charlie,” Dr. Strengloft objected. “Next you’ll be wanting us to use Bhutan ’s Gross Domestic Happiness, for goodness’ sake. But we can’t use little countries’ indexes, they don’t do the job. We’re the hyperpower. And really, the anticarbon-dioxide crowd is a special interest lobby in itself. You’ve fallen prey to their arguments, but it’s not like CO₂ is some toxic pollutant. It’s a gas that is natural in our air, and it’s essential for plants, even good for them. The last time there was a significant rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, human agricultural productivity boomed. The Norse settled Greenland during that period, and there were generally rising lifespans.”

“The end of the Black Death might account for that,” Charlie pointed out.

“Well, maybe rising CO₂› levels ended the Black Death.”

Charlie felt his jaw gape.

“It’s the bubbly in my club soda,” the President told him gently.

“Yes.” Charlie rallied. “But a greenhouse gas nevertheless. It holds in heat that would otherwise escape back into space. And we’re putting more than two billion tons of it into the atmosphere every year. It’s like putting a plug in your exhaust pipe, sir. The car is bound to warm up. There’s general agreement from the scientific community that it causes really significant warming.”

“Our models show the recent temperature changes to be within the range of natural fluctuation,” Dr. Strengloft replied. “In fact, temperatures in the stratosphere have gone down. It’s complex, and we’re studying it, and we’re going to make the best and most cost-effective response to it, because we’re taking the time to do that. Meanwhile, we’re already taking effective precautions. The President has asked American businesses to keep to a new national goal of limiting the growth of carbon dioxide emissions to one-third of the economy’s rate of growth.”

“But that’s the same ratio of emissions to growth that we have already.”

“Yes, but the President has gone further, by asking American businesses to try to reduce that ratio over the next decade by eighteen percent. It’s a growth-based approach that will accelerate new technologies, and the partnerships that we’ll need with the developing world on climate change.”

As the President looked to Charlie to see what he would reply to this errant nonsense, Charlie felt Joe stir on his back. This was unfortunate, as things were already complicated enough. The President and his science advisor were not only ignoring the specifics of Phil’s bill, they were actively attacking its underlying concepts. Any hope Charlie had had that the President had come to throw his weight behind some real dickering was gone.

And Joe was definitely stirring. His face was burrowed sideways into the back of Charlie’s neck, as usual, and now he began doing something that he sometimes did when napping: he latched onto the right tendon at the back of Charlie’s neck and began sucking it rhythmically, like a pacifier. Always before Charlie had found this a sweet thing, one of the most momlike moments of his Mr. Momhood. Now he had to steel himself to it and forge on.

The President said, “I think we have to be very careful what kind of science we use in matters like these.”

Joe sucked a ticklish spot and Charlie smiled reflexively and then grimaced, not wanting to appear amused by this double-edged pronouncement.

“Naturally that’s true, Mr. President. But the arguments for taking vigorous action are coming from a broad range of scientific organizations, also governments, the UN, NGOs, universities, about ninety-seven percent of all the scientists who have ever declared on the issue,” everyone but the very far right end of the think tank and pundit pool, he wanted to add, everyone but hack pseudoscientists who would say anything for money, like Dr. Strengloft here—but he bit his tongue and tried to shift track. “Think of the world as a balloon, Mr. President. And the atmosphere as the skin of the balloon. Now, if you wanted the thickness of the skin of a balloon to correctly represent the thickness of our atmosphere in relation to Earth, the balloon would have to be about as big as a basketball.”

This barely made sense even to Charlie, although it was a good analogy if you could enunciate it clearly. “What I mean is that the atmosphere is really, really thin, sir. It’s well within our power to alter it greatly.”

“No one contests that, Charles. But look, didn’t you say the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere was six hundred parts per million? So if that CO₂ were to be the skin of your balloon, and the rest of the atmosphere was the air inside it, then that balloon would have to be a lot bigger than a basketball, right? About the size of the moon or something?”

Strengloft snorted happily at this thought, and went to a computer console on a desk in the corner, no doubt to compute the exact size of the balloon in the President’s analogy. Charlie suddenly understood that Strengloft would never have thought of this argument, and realized further—instantly thereby understanding several people in his past who had mystified him at the time—that sometimes people known for intelligence were actually quite dim, while people who seemed simple could be very sharp.

“Granted, sir, very good,” Charlie conceded. “But think of that CO₂ skin as being a kind of glass that lets in light but traps all the heat inside. It’s that kind of barrier. So the thickness isn’t as important as the glassiness.”

“Then maybe more of it won’t make all that much of a difference,” the President said kindly. “Look, Charles. Fanciful comparisons are all very well, but the truth is we have to slow the growth of these emissions before we can try to stop them, much less reverse them.”

This was exactly what the President had said at a recent press conference, and over at the computer Strengloft beamed and nodded to hear it, perhaps because he had authored the line. The absurdity of taking pride in writing stupid lines for a quick president suddenly struck Charlie as horribly funny. He was glad Anna wasn’t there beside him, because in moments like these they could with the slightest shared glance set each other off. Even the thought of her in such a situation almost made him laugh.

So now he banished his wife and her glorious hilarity from his mind, not without a final bizarre tactile image of the back of his neck as one of her breasts, being suckled more and more hungrily by Joe. Very soon it would be time for a bottle.

Charlie persevered nevertheless. “Sir, it’s getting kind of urgent now. And there’s no downside to taking the lead on this issue. The economic advantages of being in the forefront of climate rectification and bioinfrastructure mitigation are huge. It’s a growth industry with uncharted potential. It’s the future no matter which way you look at it.”

Joe clamped down hard on his neck. Charlie shivered. Hungry, no doubt about it. Would be ravenous on waking. Only a bottle of milk or formula would keep him from going ballistic at that point. He could not be roused now without disaster striking. But he was beginning to inflict serious pain. Charlie lost his train of thought. He twitched. A little snort of agony combined with a giggle. He choked it back, disguised it as a smothered cough.

“What’s the matter, Charles, is he waking up on you?”

“Oh no sir, still out. Maybe stirring a little—ah! The thing is, if we don’t address these issues now, nothing else we’re doing will matter. None of it will go well.”

“That sounds like alarmist talk to me,” the President said, an avuncular twinkle in his eye. “Let’s calm down about this. You’ve got to stick to the common sense idea that sustainable economic growth is the key to environmental progress.”

“Sustainable, ah!”

“What’s that?”

He clamped down on a giggle. “Sustainable’s the point! Sir.”

“We need to harness the power of markets,” Strengloft said, and nattered on in his usual vein, apparently oblivious to Charlie’s problem. The President however eyed him closely. Huge chomp. Charlie’s spine went electric. He suppressed the urge to swat his son like a mosquito. His right fingers tingled. Very slowly he lifted a shoulder, trying to dislodge him. Like trying to budge a limpet. Sometimes Anna had to squeeze his nostrils shut to get him to come off. Don’t think about that.

The President said, “Charles, we’d be sucking the life out of the economy if we were to go too far with this. You chew on that a while. As it is, we’re taking bites out of this problem every day. Why, I’m like a dog with a bone on this thing! Those enviro special interests are like pigs at a trough. We’re weaning them from all that now, and they don’t like it, but they’re going to have to learn that if you can’t lick them, you…”

And Charlie dissolved into gales of helpless laughter.