Sixty Days and Counting

-

Against the pressure at the front of one’s thoughts must be held the power of cognition, as a shield. Cognition that could see its own weak points, and attempt to work around them.

Examination of the relevant literature, however, revealed that there were cognitive illusions that were as strong or even stronger than optical illusions. This was an instructive analogy, because there were optical illusions in which one’s sight was fooled no matter how fully one understood the illusion and its effect, and tried to compensate for it. Spin a disk with certain black-and-white patterns on it, and colors appear undeniably to the eye. Stand at the bottom of a cliff and it will appear to be about a thousand feet tall, no matter its real height; mountaineers called this foreshortening, and Frank knew it could not be avoided. From the bottom of El Capitan, one looked up three thousand feet, and it looked like about a thousand. In Klein Scheidegg one looked up the north face of the Eiger, and it looked about a thousand feet tall. You could not alter that even by focusing on the strangely compact details of the face’s upper surface. In Thun, twenty miles away, you could look south across the Thunersee and see that the north face of the Eiger was a stupendous face, six thousand feet tall and looking every inch of it. But if you returned to Klein Scheidegg, so would the foreshortening. You could not make the adjustment.

There were many cognitive errors just like those optical errors. The human mind had grown on the savannah, and there were kinds of thinking not natural to it. Calculating probabilities, thinking about statistical effects; the cognitive scientists had cooked up any number of logic problems, and tested great numbers of subjects with them, and even working with statisticians as their subjects they could find the huge majority prone to some fairly basic cognitive errors, which they had given names like anchoring, ease of representation, the law of small numbers, the fallacy of near certainty, asymmetric similarity, trust in analogy, neglect of base rates, and so on.

One test that had caught even Frank, despite his vigilance, was the three-box game. Three boxes, all closed, one ten-dollar bill hidden in one of them; the experimenter knows which. Subject chooses one box, at that point left closed. Experimenter opens one of the other two boxes, always an empty one. Subject then offered a chance to either stick with his first choice, or switch to the other closed box. Which should he do?

Frank had decided it didn’t matter; fifty-fifty either way. He thought it through.

But each box at the start had a one-third chance of being the one. When subject chooses one, the other two have two-thirds of a chance of being right. After experimenter opens one of those two boxes, always empty, those two boxes still have two-thirds of a chance, now concentrated in the remaining unchosen box, while the subject’s original choice still had its original one-third chance. So one should always change one’s choice!

Shit. Well, put it that way, it was undeniable. Though it still seemed wrong. But this was the point. Human cognition had all kinds of blind spots. One analyst of the studies had concluded by saying that we simulate in our actions what we wish had already happened. We act, in short, by projecting our desires.

Well—but of course. Wasn’t that the point?

But clearly it could lead to error. The question was, could one’s desires be defined in such a way as to suggest actions that were truly going to help make them come to pass in one of those futures still truly possible, given the conditions of the present?

And could that be done if there was a numb spot behind one’s nose—a pressure on one’s thoughts—a suspension of one’s ability to decide anything?

And could these cognitive errors exist for society as a whole, as well as for an individual? Some spoke of “cognitive mapping” when they discussed taking social action—a concept that had been transferred from geography to politics, and even to epistemology, as far as Frank could tell. One mapped the unimaginable immensity of postmodern civilization (or, reality) not by knowing all of it, which was impossible, but by marking routes through it. So that one was not like the GPS or the radar system, but rather the traffic controller, or the pilot.

At that point it became clear even mapping was an analogy. Anna would not think much of it. But everyone needed a set of operating procedures to navigate the day. A totalizing theory forming the justification for a rubric for the daily decisions. The science of that particular Wednesday. Using flawed equipment (the brain, civilization) to optimize results. Most adaptive practices. Robustness.

Something from ecology, from Aldo Leopold: What’s good is what’s good for the land.

Something from Rudra (although he said from the Dalai Lama, or the Buddha): Try to do good for other people. Your happiness lies there.

Try it and see. Make the experiment and analyze it. Try again. Act on your desires.

So what do you really want?

And can you really decide?

-

ONE DAY WHEN FRANK WOKE UP in the garden shed with Rudra, it took him a while to remember where he was—long enough that when he sat up he was actively relieved to be Frank Vanderwal, or anybody.

Then he had trouble figuring out which pants to put on, something he had never considered before in his life; and then he realized he did not want to go to work, although he had to. Was this unusual? He wasn’t sure.

As he munched on a PowerBar and waited for his bedside coffee machine to provide, he clicked on his laptop, and after the portentous chord announced the beginning of his cyber-day, he went to Emersonfortheday.com.

“Hey, Rudra, are you awake?”

“Always.”

“Listen to this. It’s Emerson, talking about our parcellated mind theory:

“Maybe so,” Rudra said. “But whole sight is good too. Being one.”

“But isn’t it interesting he talks about it in the same terms.”

“It is common knowledge. Anyone knows that.”

“I guess. I think Emerson knows a lot of things I don’t know.”

He was a man who had spent time in the forest, too. Frank liked to see the signs of this: “The man who rambles in the woods seems to be the first man that ever entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so novel and strange.” That was right; Frank knew that feeling. Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal—Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. “Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o’clock; cold and shabby at six.” The quick strangeness of the world, how it came on you all of a sudden—now, for Frank, the feeling started on waking in the morning. Coming up blank, the primal man, the first man ever to wake. Strange indeed, not to know who or what you were.

Often these days he felt he should be moving back out into the park, and living in his treehouse. That would mean leaving the Khembalis, however, and that was bad. But on the other hand, it would in some ways be a relief. He had been living with them for almost a year now, hard to believe but it was true, and they were so crowded. They could use all the extra space they could get. Besides, it felt like time to get back outdoors and into the wind again. Spring was coming, spring and all.

But there was Rudra to consider. As his roommate, Frank was part of his care. He was old, frail, sleeping a lot. Frank was his companion and his friend, his English teacher and his Tibetan student. Moving out would inevitably disrupt that situation.

He read on for a while, then realized he was hungry, and that in poking around and thinking about Emerson and Thoreau, and cognitive blind spots, he had been reading for over an hour. Rudra had gotten up and slipped out. “Aack!” Time to get up! Seize the day!

Up and out then. Another day. He had to consult with Edgardo about the Caroline situation. Best get something to eat first. But—from where?

He couldn’t decide.

A minute or two later, angrily, and before even actually getting up, he grabbed his cell phone and made the call. He called his doctor’s office, and found that, regarding a question like this, the doctor couldn’t see him for a week.

That was fine with Frank. He had made the decision and made the call. Caroline would have no reason to reproach him, and he could go back to the way things were. Not that something didn’t have to be done. It was getting ridiculous. It was a—an obstacle. A disability. An injury, not just to his brain, but to his thinking.

That very afternoon, the urgency in him about Caroline being so sharp and recurrent, he made arrangements to go out on a run with Edgardo. It was an afternoon so cold that no one but Kenzo would have gone out with them, and he was away at a conference, so after they cleared themselves with the wand (which Frank now questioned as fully reliable indicators), off they went.

The two of them ran side by side through the streets of Arlington, bundled up in nearly Arctic running gear, their heavy wool caps rolled up just far enough to expose their ears’ bottom halves, which allowed sound into the eardrums so they could hear each other over the noise of traffic without shouting or completely freezing their ears. Very soon they would be moving with Diane over to the Old Executive Offices, right next door to the White House; this would be one of their last runs on this route. But it was such a lame route that neither would miss it.

Frank explained what had happened in Maine, in short rhythmic phrases synchronized with his stride. It was such a relief to be able to tell somebody about it. Almost a physical relief. One vented, as they said.

“So how the heck did they follow me?” he demanded at the end of his tale. “I thought your friend said I was clean.”

“He thought you were,” Edgardo said. “And it isn’t certain you were followed. It could have been a coincidence.”

Frank shook his head.

“Well, there may be other ways you are chipped, or they may indeed have just followed you physically. We’ll work on that, but the question now becomes what has she done.”

“She said she has a Plan C that no one can trace. And she said it would get her down in this area. That she’d get in touch with me. I don’t know how that will work. Anyway now I’m wondering if we can, you know, root these guys out. Maybe sic the president on them.”

“Well,” Edgardo said, elongating the word for about a hundred yards. “These kinds of black operations are designed to be insulated, you know. To keep those above from responsibility for them.”

“But surely if there was a problem, if you really tried to hunt things down from above? Following the money trail, for instance?”

“Maybe. Black budgets are everywhere. Have you asked Charlie?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should, if you feel comfortable doing that. Phil Chase has a million things on his plate. It might take someone like Charlie to get his attention.”

Frank nodded. “Well, whatever happens, we need to stop those guys.”

“We?”

“I mean, they need to be stopped. And no one else is doing it. And, I don’t know—maybe you and your friends from your DARPA days, or wherever, might be able to make a start. You’ve already made the start, I mean, and could carry it forward from there.”

“Well,” Edgardo said. “I shouldn’t speak to that.”

Frank focused on the run. They were down to the river path now, and he could see the Potomac was frozen over again, looking like a discolored white sheet that had been pulled over the river’s surface and then tacked down roughly at the banks. The sight reminded him of Long Pond, and the shock of seeing those men striding across the ice toward them; his pulse jumped, but his hands and feet got colder. The tip of his nose, still a bit numb at the best of times, was even number than usual. He squeezed and tugged it to get some feeling and blood flow.

“Nose still numb?”

“Yes.”

Edgardo broke into the song “Comfortably Numb”: “I—I, have become, comfortably numb,” then scat singing the famous guitar solo, “Da daaaa, da da da da da-da-daaaaaa,” exaggerating Gilmour’s bent notes. “Okay! Okay, okay, Is there anybody in there?” Abruptly he broke off. “Well, I will go talk to my friend whom you met. He’s into this stuff and he has an interest. His group is still looking at the election problem, for sure.”

“Do you think I could meet him again? To explore some strategies?” And ask a bunch of questions, he didn’t say.

“Maybe. Let me talk to him. It may be pointless to meet. It depends. I’ll check. Meanwhile you should try your other options.”

“I don’t know that I have any.”

“Are you still having trouble making decisions?”

“Yes.”

“Go see your doctor, then.”

“I did! I mean, I’ve got an appointment. The time has almost come.”

Edgardo laughed.

“Please,” Frank said. “I’m trying. I made the call.”

But in fact, when the time came for his doctor’s appointment, he went in unhappily. Surely, he thought obstinately, deciding to go to the doctor meant he was well enough to decide things!

So he felt ridiculous as he described the problem to the doctor, a young guy who looked rather dubious. Frank felt his account was sketchy at best, as he very seldom tasted blood at the back of his throat anymore. But he could not complain merely of feeling indecisive, so he emphasized the tasting a little more than the most recent data would truly support, which made him feel even more foolish. He hated visiting the doctor at any time, so why was he there just to exaggerate an occasional symptom? Maybe his decision-making capability was damaged after all! Which meant it was good to have come in. And yet here he was making things up. Although he was only trying to physicalize the problem, he told himself. To describe real symptoms.

In any case, the doctor offered no opinion, but only gave him a referral to an ear nose and throat guy. It was the same one Frank had seen immediately after his accident. Frank steeled himself, called again (two decisions?) and found that here the next appointment available was a month away. Happily he wrote down the date and and forgot about it.

Or would have; except now he was cast back into the daily reality of struggling to figure out what to do. Hoping every morning that Emerson or Thoreau would tell him. So he didn’t really forget about the appointment, but it was scheduled and he didn’t have to go for a long time, so he could be happy. Happy until the next faint taste of old blood slid down the back of his throat, like the bitterness of fear itself, and he would check and see the day was getting nearer with a mix of relief and dread.

Once he noticed the date when talking with Anna, because she said something about not making it through the winter in terms of several necessary commodities that people had taken to hoarding. She had gotten into studying hoarding in the social science literature. Hoarding, Anna said, represented a breakdown in the social contract which even their economy’s capacity for overproduction in many items could not compensate for.

“It’s another case of prisoner’s dilemma,” Frank said. “Everyone’s choosing the ‘always defect’ option as being the safest. Or the one in which you rely least on others.”

“Maybe.”

Anna was not one for analogies. She was as literal-minded a person as Frank had ever met; it was always good to remember that she had started her scientific training as a chemist. Metaphors bounced off of her like spears off bulletproof glass. If she wanted to understand hoarding, then she googled “hoarding,” and when she saw links to mathematical studies of the economics and social dynamics of “hoarding in shortage societies,” those were the ones she clicked on, even if they tended to be old work from the socialist and post-socialist literature. Those studies had had a lot of data to work with, sadly, and she found their modeling interesting, and spoke to Frank of things like choice rubrics in variable information states, which she thought he might be able to formalize as algorithms.

“It’s called ‘always defect,’” Frank insisted.

“Okay, but then look at what that leads to.”

“All right.”

Clearly Anna was incensed at how unreasonable people were being. To her it was a matter of being rational, of being logical. “Why don’t they just do the math?” she demanded.

A rhetorical question, Frank judged. Though he wished he could answer it, rhetorically or not, in a way that did not depress him. His investigations into cognition studies were not exactly encouraging. Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape.

After this conversation, Frank recalled her saying “end of the winter” as if that were near, and he checked his desk calendar—the date for his ENT appointment was circled there, and not too far away—and suddenly he realized that in America, when it came to health care, the most important product of them all, they always operated in a shortage society.

In any case, he went to the doctor when the day came. Ear, nose, and throat—but what about brain? He read Walden in the waiting room, was ushered into an examination room to wait and read some more, then five minutes of questions and inspections, and the diagnosis was made: he needed to see another specialist. A neurologist, in fact, who would have to take a look at some scans, possibly CT, PET, SPECT, MRI; the brain guy would make the calls. The ENT guy would give him a referral, he said, and Frank would have to see where they could fit him in. Scans; the reading and analysis of the brain guy; then perhaps a re-examination by the ENT. How long would it all take? Try it and see. They hurried things up in scheduling when there were questions about the brain, but only so much could be done; there were a lot of other people out there with equally serious problems, or worse ones.

So, Frank thought as he went back to work in his office. You could buy DVD players for thirty dollars and flat-screen TVs for a hundred, also a million other consumer items that would help you to experience vicariously the lives that your work and wages did not give you time to live (that T-shirt seen on Connecticut Avenue, “Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do”)—everything was cheap, in overproduction—except you lived in a permanent shortage of doctors, artificially maintained. Despite the high cost of medical insurance (if you could get it) you had to wait weeks or months on tests to find out how your body was sick or injured, when such events befell you. Even though it was possible to measure statistically how much health care a given population was going to need, and provide it accordingly.

But there was nothing for it but to think about other things, when he could; and when not, to bide his time and try to work, like everyone else.

It had been every kind of winter so far, warmer, drier, stormier, colder. Bad for agriculture, but good for conversation. In the first week of March, a cold front swept south and knocked them back into full winter lockdown, the river frozen, the city frozen, every Metro vent steaming frost, which then froze and fell to the ground as white dust. The whole city was frosted, and with all the steam curling out of the ground, looked as if it had been built atop a giant hot spring. Bad Washington. When the sun came out everything glittered whitely, then prismatically when the melting began, then went gray when low stratus clouds obscured the sun.

For Frank this was another ascent into what he thought of as high latitude or high altitude: a return to the high country one way or another, because weather was landscape, in that however the land lay underfoot, it was the weather that gave you a sense of where you were.

If it was below zero, then you were in the arctic. You found yourself on the cold hill’s side, in a dreamscape as profound as any imaginable. One recalled in the body itself that the million-year ballooning of the brain, the final expansion with its burst into language and art and culture, had occurred in the depths of an ice age, when it had been like this all the time. No wonder the mind lit up like a fuse in such air!

And so Frank got out his snowshoes and gaiters and ski poles, and drove over to Rock Creek Park and went out for hikes, just as he had the winter before. And though this year there was not that sense of discovery in the activity, it was certainly just as cold, or almost. Wind barreling down the great ravine from the north—the icy new rip in the canyon, looking from its rim just as blasted by the great flood as the day the waters had receded.

The park was emptier this year, however. Or maybe it was just that there was no one at Site 21. But many of the other sites were empty as well. Maybe it was just that during weeks this cold, people simply found shelter. That had happened the previous winter as well. In theory one could sleep out in temperatures like this, if one had the right gear and the right expertise, but it took a great deal of time and energy to accomplish, and would still be somewhat dangerous; it would have to become one’s main activity. And no doubt some people were doing it; but most had found refuge in the coffee shops by day and the shelters and feral houses by night, waiting out the coldest part of the winter indoors. As Frank had done, when he had been taken in by the Khembalis.

Leaving, in these most frigid days, the animals. He saw the aurochs once; and a Canada lynx (I call it the Concord lynx, Thoreau said), as still as a statue of itself; and four or five foxes in their winter white. And a moose, a porcupine, coyote, and scads of white-tailed deer; also rabbits. These last two were the obvious food species for what predators there were. Most of the exotic ferals were gone, either recaptured or dead. Although once he spotted what he thought was a snow leopard; and people said the jaguar was still at large.

As were the frisbee guys. One Saturday Frank heard them before he saw them—hoots over a rise to the north—Spencer’s distinctive yowl, which meant a long putt had gone in. Cheered by the sound, Frank poled around the point in the ravine wall, snowshoes sinking deep in the drifts there, and suddenly there they were, running on little plastic showshoes, without poles, and throwing red, pink, and orange frisbees, which blazed through the air like beacons from another universe.

“Hi guys!” Frank called.

“Frank!” they cried. “Come on!”

“You bet,” Frank said. He left his poles and daypack under a tree at Site 18, and borrowed one of Robert’s disks.

Off they went. Quickly it became clear to Frank that when the snow was as hard as it was, running on snowshoes was about as efficient as walking on them. One tended to leap out of each step before the snowshoe had sunk all the way in, thus floating a bit higher than otherwise.

Then he threw a drive straight into a tree trunk, and broke the disk in half. Robert just laughed, and Spencer tossed him a spare. The guys did not over-value any individual disk. They were like golf balls, made to be lost.

Work as hard as they did, and you would sweat—just barely—after which, when you stopped, sweat would chill you. As soon as they were done, therefore, Frank found out when they thought they would play snow golf again, then bid farewell and hustled away, back to his daypack and poles. A steady hike then, to warm back up: plunging poles in to pull him uphill, to brace him downhill; little glissades, tricky traverses, yeoman ups; quickly he was warm again and feeling strong and somehow full, the joy of the frisbee buzzing through the rest of the afternoon. The joy of the hunt and the run and the cold.

He walked by his tree, looked up at it longingly. He wanted to move back out there. But he wanted to stay with Rudra too. And Caroline’s ex might be keeping watch out here. The thought made him stop and look around. No one in sight. He would have to wand his tree to see if there was anything there. The floorboards of the treehouse were visible, at least if you knew where to look, and of course Frank did, so it was hard for him to judge how obvious they were to others. Wherever he went in the park, if his tree was in sight, he could see various bits of the little black triangle that was his true home.

The following Monday he made sure to arrange a run with Edgardo again. The need to speak securely was going to drive them to new levels of fitness.

As they trailed Kenzo and Bob down the narrow path next to Route 66, he said, “So did you ever hear anything back from your friend?”

“Yes. A little. I was going to tell you.”

“What?”

“He said, the problem with taking the top-down approach is the operation might be legal, and also legally secret, such that even the president might have trouble finding out about it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. He said that most presidents want it that way, so they aren’t breaking the law by knowing, if the operation chooses to do something illegal for the higher good. So, Chase might have to order a powerful group right under his command to seek something like this out.”

“Jesus. Are there any such powerful groups?”

“Oh sure. He would have his choice of three or four. But this presumes that you could get him that interested in the matter. The thing you have to remember is, a president has a lot on his plate. He has a staff to filter it all and prioritize what gets to him, so there are levels to get through. So, these people we’re interested in know that, and they trust he would never go after something this little.”

“Something as little as stolen presidential elections?”

“Well, maybe, but how much would he want to know about that, when he just won?”

They paced on while Frank tried to digest this.

“So did your friend have any other ideas?”

“Yes. He said, it might be possible to get these people embroiled in some kind of trouble with an agency that is less black than they are. Some kind of turf battle or the like.”

“Ahhh…”

Quickly Frank began to see possibilities. While at NSF, Diane had been fighting other agencies all over the place, usually David-and-Goliath type actions, as most of NSF’s natural rivals in the federal bureaucracy were far bigger than it. And size mattered in the Feds, as elsewhere, because it meant money. This little gang of security thugs Frank had tangled with were surely treading on some other more legitimate agency’s turf. Possibly they had even started in some agency and gone rambo without the knowledge of their superiors.

“That’s a good idea. Did they have any specific suggestions?”

“He did, and he was going to work up some more. It turns out he has reasons to dislike these guys beyond the destruction-of-democracy stuff.”

“Oh good.”

“Yes. It is best never to rely on people standing on principle.”

“So true,” Frank said grimly.

This set off Edgardo’s raucous laugh and his little running prance of cynical delight. “Ah yes, you are learning! You are beginning to see! My friend said he will give me a menu of options soon.”

“I hope it’s real soon. Because my friend’s out there enacting her Plan C, and I’m worried. I mean, she’s a data analyst, when you get right down to it. She isn’t any kind of field spook. What if her Plan C is as bad as her Plan B was?”

“That would be bad. But my friend has been looking into that too. I asked him to, and he did, and he said he can’t see any sign of her. She seems to be really off the net this time.”

“That’s good. But her ex might know more than your friend. And she said she’d be around here somewhere.”

“Yes. Well, I’ll go see my friend as soon as I can. I have to follow our protocol though, unless it’s an emergency. We only usually talk once a week.”

“I understand,” Frank said, then wondered if he did.

-

WITH CHASE NOW IN OFFICE the new administration’s activity level was manic but focused. Among many more noted relocations, Diane and all the rest of the science advisor’s team moved into their new offices in the Old Executive Building, just to the west of the White House and within the White House security barrier.

So Frank gave up his office at NSF, which had served as the living room and office in his parcellated house. As he moved out he felt a bit stunned, even dismayed. He had to admit that the set of habits that had been that modular house was now completely demolished. He followed Diane to their new building, wondering if he had made the right decision to go with her. Of course his real home now was the Khembali embassy’s garden shed. He was not really homeless. Maybe it was a bad thing not to have rented a place somewhere. If he had kept looking he could have found something.

Then Diane convened a week’s worth of meetings with all the agencies and departments she wanted to deal with frequently, and during that week he saw that being inside the White House compound was a good thing, and that he needed to be there for Diane. She needed the help; there were literally scores of agencies that had to be gathered into the effort they had in mind, and many of them had upper managements appointed during the years of executive opposition to climate mitigation. Even after the long winter, not all of them were convinced they needed to change. “They’re being actively passive-aggressive,” Diane said with a wry grin. “War of the agencies, big-time.”

“Such trivial crap they’re freaking about,” Frank complained. He was amazed it didn’t bother her more. “EPA trying to keep USGS from interpreting pesticide levels they’re finding, because interpretation is EPA’s job? Energy and Navy fighting over who gets to do new nuclear? It’s always turf battles.”

She waved them all away with a hand, seemingly unannoyed. “Turf battles matter in Washington, I’m sorry to say. We’re going to have to get things done using these people. Chase has to make a lot of appointments fast for us to have any chance of doing that. And we’ll have to be scrupulous in keeping to the boundaries. It’s no time to be changing the bureaucracy too much; we’ve got bigger fish to fry. I plan to try to keep all these folks happy about their power base holding fast, but just get them on board to help the cause.”

It made sense when she put it that way, and after that he understood better her manner with the old-guard technocracy they were so often dealing with. She was always conciliatory and unassuming, asking questions, then laying out her ideas as more questions rather than commands, and always confining herself to whatever that particular agency was specifically involved in.

“Not that that’s what I always do,” Diane said, when Frank once made this observation to her. She looked ashamed.

“What do you mean?” Frank asked quickly.

“Well, I had a bad meeting with the deputy secretary of Energy, Holderlin. He’s a holdover, and he was trying to disparage the alternatives program. So I got him fired.”

“You did?”

“I guess so. I sent a note over to the president describing the problem I was having, and the next thing I knew he was out.”

“Do people know that’s how it happened?”

“I think so.”

“Well—good!”

She laughed ruefully. “I’ve had that thought myself. But it’s a strange feeling.”

“Get used to it. We probably need a whole bunch of people fired. You’re the one who always calls it the war of the agencies.”

“Yes, but I never had the power to get people in other agencies fired before.”

To change the subject to something that would make her more comfortable, Frank said, “I’m having some luck getting the military interested. They’re the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in this zoo. If they were to come down definitively on the side of our efforts, as being a critical aspect of national defense, then these other agencies would either get on board or become irrelevant.”

“Yes, maybe,” Diane said. “But what they are you talking about? The Joint Chiefs?”

“Well, to an extent. Although I’ve been starting with people I know, like General Wracke. Also meeting some of the chief scientists. They’re not much in the decision-making loop, but they might be easier to convince about the science. I show them the Marshall Report they did internally, rating climate change as more of a defense threat than terrorism. It seems to help.”

“Can you make a copy of that for distribution?”

“Yes. It would also make sense to reach out to all the scientists in government, and ask them to get behind the National Academy statement on the climate for starters, then help us to work on the agencies they’re involved with.”

“Sure. But they don’t decide, and there’s management who will be against us no matter what their scientists say, because that’s why they were appointed in the first place.”

“There’s where your firing one of them may have an effect.” Frank grinned and Diane made a face.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to talk to Energy then. If they’re scared that they’ll lose their funding, that’s the moment to strike.”

“Which means we should be talking to the OMB?”

“Yes. We definitely need the OMB on our side. That should be possible, if Chase has appointed the right people to head it.”

“And then the appropriations committees.”

“The best chance there is to talk to their staffs, and to win some new seats in the midterm election. For Chase’s first two years, it’ll be a bit uphill when it comes to Congress.”

“At least he’s got the Senate.”

“Yes, but really you need both.”

“Hm.”

Frank saw it anew: hundreds of parts to the federal government, each part holding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, jockeying to determine what kind of picture they all made together. War of the agencies, the Hobbesian struggle of all against all—it needed to be changed to some kind of dance. Made coherent. Lased.

In his truncated time off it was hard to get many hours in with Nick anymore, as Nick was often busy with other people in FOG, including a youth group, as well as with all his other activities at school and home. They still held to a meeting at the zoo every third Saturday morning, more or less, starting with an hour at the tiger enclosure, taking notes and photos, then doing a cold-certification course, or walking up to the beaver pond to see what they might see. But that time quickly passed, and then Nick was off. Frank missed their longer days out together, but it wasn’t something that he could press about. His friendship with the Quiblers was unusual enough as it was to make him feel awkward, and he didn’t want them wondering if he had some kind of peculiar thing going on about Nick—really the last thing that would occur to him, although he enjoyed the boy’s company greatly. He was a funny kid.

More likely a suspicion was that Frank might have some kind of a thing for Anna, because there was some truth to it. Although it was not something he would ever express or reveal in any way, it was only just a sort of heightened admiration for a friend, an admiration that included an awareness of the friend’s nice figure and her passionate feelings about things, and most of all, her quick and sharp mind. An awareness of just how smart she was. Indeed, here was the one realm in which Frank felt he must know Anna better than Charlie did—in effect, Charlie didn’t know enough to know just how smart Anna was. It was like it had been for Frank when trying to evaluate Chessman as a chess player. Once while waiting for Nick to get ready, Frank had posed the three-box problem to Anna, and she had repeated his scenario carefully, and squinted, and then said “I guess you’d want to change to that other box, then?” and he had laughed and put out his hands and bowed like the kids on Saturday Night Live. And this was just the smallest kind of indicator of her quickness—of a quality of thought Frank would have to characterize as boldly methodical.

Charlie only grinned at the exchange and said, “She does that kind of thing all the time.” He would never see the style of her thought well enough to know how to admire it. Indeed what he called her quibbling was often his own inability to see a thrust right to the heart of a problem he had not noticed. She had married a man who was blind in exactly the area she was most dashing.

Well, there were no total relationships. Maybe what he felt for Anna was just what friendship was with certain co-workers of the opposite sex. Nietzsche had declared friendship between men and women to be impossible, but he had written many stupid things among his brilliant insights, and had had terrible relationships with women and then gone insane. Surely on the savannah there would have been all sorts of friendships between the sexes. On the savannah things might have been a little more flexible at the borders.

But he did not want Charlie to misunderstand, and so all this was just a matter of thoughts. Trying to figure things out. Feelings and behaviors. Sociobiology was like a green light cast over their naked faces. Sometimes he classed these among the thoughts that made him worry about his mentation.

At work now, however, he missed Anna very much. He tried to focus on the various problems on his master list of Things To Do, and about twice a day he would have gone over to ask her a question about something or other. But not anymore. Now he forged on with what was in effect Diane’s list of Things To Do, compiled by them all. Frank focused on the solar-power front in particular, as being the crux of the problem. If solar did not step in immediately, they were going to have to commission and build a whole lot of new nuclear power plants. Or else they would go ahead and burn the 530 gigatons of carbon that would raise the atmospheric level of CO₂ to five hundred parts per million, frying the planet.

Put like that, the priority on solar power went pretty high. Which made it baffling to see how little money had been invested in it in the past three decades. But what was done was done. And looking forward, it was a little encouraging, even gratifying, to see results beginning to come out of the experiments he had funded in the previous two years, because some of the new prototypes were looking pretty good. There were new photovoltaics at 42 percent efficiencies now. This was getting closer and closer to the holy grail. And at the largest scales, the Stirling engines were doing almost as well, at even less expense.

Really, with results like that, it was now only a matter of money, and time, and they could be there. Clean power.

Sometimes he even skipped to the other items on the list.

Among the really big-ticket items when it came to carbon emissions, transportation and agriculture ranked up there with power generation. Here again, the expense of changing out such a big and fundamental technology would be very high—until one compared it to the cost of not changing.

This was the case that Diane wanted to make to the reinsurance companies, and the UN, and everyone else. Say it cost a trillion dollars to install clean energy generators and change out the transport fleet. Weigh that against the financial benefit to civilization of continuing with approximately the sea level it now enjoyed, the weather, the biosphere support, etc.; also the difficult-to-calculate-in-dollars but undoubtedly huge benefit of avoiding a great deal of human suffering. Not to mention a mass extinction event for the rest of the biosphere, which might threaten their very survival.

Wouldn’t it pencil out? It seemed like it would have to. Indeed, if it didn’t pencil out, maybe there was something wrong with the accounting system.

Compare these costs to the U.S. military budget. Two trillion dollars would not be more than three or four years of the Pentagon’s budget. This gave Frank a shock—that the military was so expensive, sure, but also that they could shift to clean power and transport so cheaply relative to the total economy. Electricity now cost about six cents a kilowatt hour, and they spoke of clean energy costing up to ten—and then said it couldn’t be done? For financial reasons? “It wouldn’t take much of a carbon-ceiling regulation to make it pencil out immediately,” Frank said to Diane when they were talking on the phone. “Companies like Southern California Edison must be begging for a strict emissions cap. They’ll make a killing when that happens. They’ll be raking it in.”

“True.”

“I wonder what would happen if the reinsurance companies refused to insure oil companies that didn’t get with the cap program right now?”

“Good idea.” She sighed. “Boy, if only we could sic them on the World Bank and the IMF too.”

“Maybe we can. Phil Chase is president now.”

“So maybe we can! Hey, it’s two already—have you had lunch?”

In his office, Frank smiled. “No, you wanna?”

“Yes. Give me five minutes.”

“Meet you at the elevator.”

So they had lunch, and among other things talked over the move to the White House, and what it meant. The danger of becoming an advisory body only, of having no budget to do things—as against the potential advantage of being able to tell all the federal agencies, and to an extent the whole government, what to do.

Diane said, “My guess is Chase is still trying to work out what’s really possible. He’s talked quite a line but now push has come to shove, and it’s a big machine he’s got to move. I’ve gotten a whole string of questions about the technical agencies, and just today I got an e-mail asking me to submit a thorough analysis of all the particulars of the New Deal—what he called the scientific aspects of the New Deal. I have no idea what he means.”

Nevertheless, she had looked into it. There had been five New Deals, she said. Each had been a distinct project, with different goals and results. She listed them with a pen on the back of a napkin:

“Number five was entirely FDR’s idea, by the way. Nothing’s ever done more for ordinary Americans, the analysis said. It was what made the postwar middle class, and the baby boom.”

“Encouraging,” Frank said, studying the list.

“Very. Granted, this all took twelve years, but still. It doesn’t even count the international stuff, like getting us prepared for the war, or winning it. Or starting the UN!”

“Impressive,” Frank said. “Let’s hope Chase can do as well.”

Here Diane looked doubtful. “One thing seems pretty clear already,” she confessed. “He’s too busy with other stuff for me to be able to make many of our arguments to him in person. I mean, I’ve barely met him yet.”

“That’s not good.” Frank was surprised to hear this.

“Well, he’s pretty good at replying to his e-mail. And his people get back to me when I send along questions or requests.”

“Maybe that’s where I should ask Charlie for help. He might be able to influence the decision about how to allocate Chase’s meeting time.”

“That would be good.”

It seemed to Frank, watching her and thinking about other kinds of things, that she appeared to have forgotten his abrupt cancellation of their post–North Atlantic date. Or—since no one ever really forgot things like that—to have let it go. Forgiven, if not forgotten—all he could expect, of course. Maybe it had only been a little weird. In any case a relief, after his experiences with Marta, who neither forgot nor forgave.

Which reminded him that he had to talk to Marta sometime soon about Small Delivery Systems’ Russian experiment. Damn.

As always, the thought of having to communicate with his ex-partner filled Frank with a combination of dread and a perverse kind of anticipation, which came in part from trying to guess how it would go wrong this time. For go wrong it would. He and Marta had always had a stormy relationship, and Frank had come to suspect that all Marta’s intimate relationships were stormy. Certainly her relations with her ex-husband had been inflamed, which had been one of the reasons she and Frank too had come to a nasty end. Marta had needed to keep her name off the paperwork on the house she and Frank had bought together, in order to keep it clear of the divorce and bankruptcy morass created by Marta’s always soon-to-be ex. This absence of her name had created the possibility for Frank later to sign a third mortgage, in effect taking all their equity out of the place and losing it in a surefire biotech that had guttered out.

A very bad idea. One of a string of bad decisions that Frank had made in those years, many clustered around Marta. There had to be some kind of nostalgia for bad times involved in Frank’s desire to talk to her. In any case he had to call her, because she was his contact with the Russian lichen project, and he needed to know more about how that was going. Given the ongoing opacity of Russian government and science—the weird mix of Kremlinocracy and nouveau-capitalist corporate secrecy—a (semi)reliable informant was crucial if he was going to learn anything solid. So the call had to be made. Or rather the visit. Because he wanted to see the new facility too. NSF had rented the very same building once occupied by Torrey Pines Generique, and the committee involved had offered contracts to an array of very good people in the relevant sciences, including Yann and Marta. The geosciences were hot these days, and the new head of the institute had called a conference to discuss various proposals for new action. Frank was unsurprised to see that Yann and Marta were on the program. He called down to the travel office to have them book a flight for him.

-

FOR THE QUIBLERS AS FOR THE REST of the capital’s residents, the winter’s blackouts had developed their own routines, with the inconveniences balanced by the seldom-indulged pleasures of the situation: fire in the fireplace, candles, blankets, blocks, and books. Anna had taken up knitting again, so when the power went out she helped get things settled and then got under a comforter and clicked away. Charlie read aloud to them. He and Anna discussed whether they should get satellite cell phones, so they could stay in contact if they happened to get caught out somewhere when the next one hit. The blackouts were getting more frequent; it was widely debated whether they were caused by overdemand, mechanical failure, sabotage, computer viruses, corporate rigging, or the cold drought, but no one could deny they were becoming regular occurrences. And sometimes they lasted for two days.

On this particular dark evening, after Anna had gone to the appropriate drawer and cabinets and got out their blackout gear, there came a knock at their door, very unusual. So much so that Nick said, “Frank must be here!”

And so he was.

He stamped in looking freeze-dried, put the back of his hand to their cheeks and had them shrieking. “Is it okay?” he asked Charlie uncertainly.

“Oh sure, sure, what do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

It seemed to Charlie almost as if Frank’s thinking had been chilled on the hike over; his words were slow, his manner distracted. He had been out snowshoeing in Rock Creek Park, he said, checking on his homeless friends, and had decided afterward to drop by.

“Good for you. Have some tea with us.”

“Thanks.”

Nick and Joe were delighted. Frank brought a new element to the power-free evening with his hint of mystery and strangeness. “Tiger man!” Joe exclaimed. Nick talked with him about the animals at the zoo, and still at large in the park. Joe plucked the appropriate plastic animals out of his big box as they spoke, lining them up in a parade on the floor for their inspection. “Tiger tiger tiger!” he said, pleasing Charlie very much; lately he had been showing a preference for zebras and dolphins and hippos.

Frank and Nick were saying that there were very few feral animals still at large, and almost all the holdouts were either arctic or mountain species. The other exotics had all come in from the cold, or died.

Charlie noticed Nick smoothly change the subject: “What about your friends?”

The human ferals, Frank said, were still pretty easy to find. “My own group is kind of scattered, but in general I think there’ll be more and more people like them as time goes on. Housing is just too expensive. If you can arrange some other way, it makes sense in a lot of ways.”

“You wouldn’t have to worry about blackouts,” Charlie remarked.

Later, when the boys were asleep, Frank hunkered down by the fire, holding his hands to it and staring into the flames.

“Charlie,” he said hesitantly, “has anyone on Chase’s staff been looking into the election, and that talk that went around about irregularities in some of the votes?”

“No one I know of.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Well, it’s kind of a Satchel Paige moment.”

“What does that mean?” Anna said.

“Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.”

Frank nodded. “But what if something is gaining on you?”

“I think that was Satchel’s point. But what do you mean?”

“What if there was a group that tried to fix the election, but failed?”

Charlie was surprised. “Then good.”

“But what if they’re still out there?”

“I’m sure they are. It’s a spooky world these days.”

Frank glanced quickly at Charlie, then nodded, the corners of his mouth tight. “A spooky world indeed.”

“You mean spooks,” Anna clarified.

Frank nodded, eyes still on the fire. “There’s seventeen intelligence agencies in the federal government now. And some of them are not fully under anyone’s control anymore.”

“Whoah. How do you mean?”

“You know. Black agencies. Black agencies so black they’ve disappeared, like black holes.”

“Disappeared?” Charlie said.

“No oversight. No connections. I don’t think even the president knows about them. I don’t think anyone knows about them, except the people in them.”

“But how would they get funding?”

Anna laughed at that, but Frank frowned. “I don’t know. I suppose they have access to some kind of slush fund.”

“So, whoever was responsible for those funds would know.”

“They might only know…maybe they’re being run by people who have discretionary funds, so those people know, but they’re in the groups, or leading them. Forming them…I don’t know. You know more about that kind of stuff than I do. But surely there’s money sloshing around that certain people have access to? Especially in intelligence?”

Charlie nodded. “Forty billion per year on intelligence. Black program money could get subdivided. I’ve heard of that happening before.”

“Well…” Frank paused, as if weighing his words carefully. “They are a danger to the republic.”

“Whoah.” Charlie had never heard Frank say such a thing.

Frank shrugged. “Sorry, but it’s true. If we mean to be a constitutional government, then we’re going to have to root some of these groups out. Because they are a danger to democracy and open government as we’re used to thinking of it. They’re trying to move all the important stuff into the shadows.”

“And so…”

“So I’m wondering if you could direct Chase’s attention to them. Make him aware of them, and urge him to root them out.”

“Do you think he could?”

“I should hope so!” Frank looked disturbed at the question. “I mean, if he followed the money, made his secretaries and agency heads account for all of it fully—maybe sicced the OMB on all the black money to find out who was using it, and for what…couldn’t you?”

“I’m not sure,” Charlie admitted. “Maybe you could.”

“The Pentagon can’t account for its outlays,” Anna pointed out grimly, knitting like one of the women under the guillotine, click click click! “They have a percentage gone missing that is bigger than NSF’s entire budget.”

“Gone missing?”

“Unaccounted for. Unaccountable. I call that gone missing.” Anna’s disapproval was like dry ice, smoking with cold. Freeze all the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into one big cake of dry ice and drape it around Anna’s shoulders, in the few moments when she was professionally contemptuous.

“But if it were done by a competent team,” Frank persisted, “without any turned people on it, and presidential backing to look into everything?”

Charlie still was dubious, but he said, “In theory that would work. Legally it should work.”

“But?”

“Well, but the government, you know. It’s big. It has lots of nooks and crannies. Like what you’re talking about—black programs that have been fire-walled so many times, there are blacks within blacks, superblacks, superblack blacks. With black accounts and dedicated political contributions, so that the money is socked away in Switzerland, or Wal-Mart….”

“Jesus. There are government programs with that kind of funding?”

Charlie shrugged. “Maybe.”

Frank was staring at him, startled, even perhaps frightened. “In that case, we could all be in big trouble.”

Anna was shaking her head. “A complete audit would find even that. It would include all accounts of every federal employee or unit, and also what they’re doing with every hour of their work time. It’s a fairly simple spreadsheet, for God’s sake.”

“But it could be faked so easily,” Charlie objected.

“Well, you have to have some way to check the data.”

“But there are hundreds of thousands of employees.”

“I guess you’d have to use a statistically valid sampling method.”

“But that’s just the kind of method you can hide your black programs out of the reach of!”

“Hmm.” Now Anna was frowning too. She was also sending curious glances Frank’s way. This was a pretty un-Frank-like inquiry, in both content and style. “Well, maybe you’d have to be comprehensive with the intelligence and security agencies in particular. Account for everything in those.”

Charlie said, “So, that being the case, they probably aren’t tucked there. They’re probably in Commerce or the Coast Guard or the Treasury. Which by itself is huge. Like, you know, the bank.”

Frank said, “So maybe it isn’t possible.”

Charlie and Anna did not reply; each was thinking it over.

Frank sighed. “Maybe if we found a specific problem, and then told the president about it? Or, whoever could best put a stop to it? Wouldn’t that be the president?”

Charlie said, “I should think the president would always be best at that kind of thing. But there are a lot of demands on his time.”

“Everyone keeps saying that. But this could be important. Even, you know…crucial.”

“Then I would hope it would get attended to. Maybe there’s a unit designed to do it. In the Secret Service or something.”

Frank nodded. “Maybe you could talk to him, then. When you think it’s a good time. Because I know where to start the hunt.”

Charlie and Anna glanced at each other, saw that neither knew what he was talking about.

“What do you mean?” Charlie said.

“I’ve run across some stuff,” Frank said, adjusting a log in the fire.

Then the power flickered and hummed back on, and after a while Frank made his excuses and took off, still looking distant and thoughtful.

“What was that all about?” Charlie said.

“I don’t know,” Anna replied. “But I’m wondering if he found that woman in the elevator.”

Anna had been pleased when Diane asked her to join the Presidential Science Advisor’s staff, but it only took her a short period of reflection to decide against accepting the offer.

She knew she was right to do so, but explaining why to Diane and Frank had been a little tricky. She couldn’t just come out and say “I prefer doing things to advising people to do things,” or “I like science more than politics.” It wouldn’t have been polite, and besides, she wasn’t sure that was the real reason anyway. So all she could do was claim an abiding interest in her work at NSF, which was true. It was always best when your lies were true.

“But you’re the one who has been finding all these programs that knit together the federal agencies,” Frank said. “You’d be perfect to help in a project like this. You could maybe come over on loan for a year or so.”

This confirmed Anna’s suspicion that it was Frank’s idea to invite her over to the White House. Very nice of him, she liked that very much—but she said, “I can keep doing that from here, and still run my division too.”

“Maybe.”

Frank frowned, almost said something, stopped. Anna could not guess what it might have been. Some personal appeal? He looked a bit flushed. But maybe he was abashed at the thought of how little time he now had to give to his work on biological algorithms, his actual field. With this move he had shifted almost entirely to policy—to administration. To politics, in a word.

Of course maybe their circumstances called for a shift from science to policy, as an emergency measure, so to speak. Also an application of science to policy, which she knew was what Frank had in mind. Anna knew it was very common among scientists to be science snobs, and hold that no work in the world was as good and worthy as scientific research. Anna did not want to fall prey to that error even though she felt it pretty strongly herself, or at least, felt that she was better at science than at any of the mushier stuff. Correcting for that bias adequately was one part of the confusion of her feelings about all this. She would make lists sometimes of arguments pro and con, of qualities and their relative values, attempting to quantify and thus clarify her feelings.

In any case she held to her refusal, and to her job at NSF. And as she sat in the Metro on the way home, she thought somewhat grimly that it was too bad that Charlie hadn’t stuck to his guns too, and refused his new job offer like she had. Because here she was going home early again, to pick up Nick from school and take him to his piano lessons.

Of course Charlie’s situation had been different: he had been faced with a case of “come back or lose your job.” Still—if he had held—how much easier life would have been for her. Not that she ever shirked any work at all, but it would have been easier for the boys too. Not so much Nick, but Joe. She was intensely worried about Joe going into the White House daycare center. Was he ready for that? Would it make him even stranger—stranger and more difficult, to put it plainly—than he already was? Or would it normalize him? Was he perhaps autistic? Or just fractious? And why was he fractious? And what would be the effect on him (and on the other children) of confining him in a single room or group or situation for an entire day? Even Charlie, with all his energy and flexibility, had not been able to keep up with Joe’s demand for the new. She was afraid that in daycare, he and everyone around him would go mad.

Not that she put it exactly that way to herself. In her conscious mind she focused on incremental changes, specific worries, without moving on to larger and vaguer concepts. The conscious mind wasn’t the whole story, as she knew from her troubled sleep, but that was what she could actually think about and work on directing, and so she did.

This was one of many differences between her and Charlie, most of which were accentuated when they both worked at home. This was a bad system for other reasons, because it meant Joe was around too, scheming for attention when she was attempting to work or think, but sometimes it just had to be done, as when the Metro was down for the supposedly last round of flood repairs. And there she would be, at the computer, staring at the spreadsheet on the screen, entering data on pesticides in stream water as part of a project to measure their effects on amphibians, endless lists of chemical and product names collated from a wide range of studies, so that quantities had to be normed and reformatted and analyzed, meaning a whole flurry of highly specific technical e-mails from colleagues to be dealt with—questions, comments, criticisms concerning details of math or chemistry or statistical methodology, working in the parts per billion range—

And at the same time Charlie would be audible from the floor below, trying to amuse Joe while holding a simultaneous headphone conversation with his friend Roy, shouting out things like, “Roy these are not IDIOTS you’re dealing with here, you can’t just LIE to them! WHAT? Okay well maybe you can lie to THEM, but make it a smart lie. Put it at the level of myth, these are like Punch and Judy figures, and your people want to be doing the punching! Sledgehammer them in the forehead with this stuff! JOE! STOP THAT!”

And so on. Sledgehammer them in the forehead? Really, Anna couldn’t bear to listen.

But now this was Charlie’s work, full-time and more—meaning, as in the old days, evenings too. Of course Anna spent a lot of evenings working, but for Charlie it was something he had not done since Joe had arrived. Endless phone conversations now, how much help could these be? Of course there was the new administration’s first sixty days to execute successfully, accounting for much of this rush, but Anna doubted that very much would come of that. How could it? The system was simply slower than that. You could only do things at the speed they could be done.

So, whereas before she had most often come home to find the house in an uproar, Charlie cooking operatically while Joe banged pots and Nick read under the lamp in his corner of the couch, with the dinner soon to be on the table, now she often got home to find Nick sitting there like an owl, reading in the dark, and no one else home at all—and her heart would go out to him, all alone at seven p.m., at age twelve—

“You’ll go blind,” she would say.

“Mom,” he would object happily.

—and she would kiss his head and turn on his light and barge around banging her toes as she turned on the other lights and went out to the kitchen to rustle something up before she starved—and sometimes there would be nothing in the fridge or the cupboards that she could cook or eat, and grumpily she would throw on her daypack and tell Nick to answer the phone, if she did not need him to come along and carry extra bags, and would walk down the street to the Giant grocery store, still grumpy at first but then enjoying the walk—

And then at the grocery store there would be no meat on the shelves, and few fresh veggies, fewer fruits. She would have to forget about her list and troll the aisles for something palatable, amazed once again at the sight of so many empty shelves—she had thought like everyone else that it would be a temporary thing—then getting angry at people for their selfish hoarding instincts. Before this winter—ever since the flood, really—people had hoarded some of the essentials, but now it had spread far beyond toilet paper and bottled water, to almost every shelf in the store. But particularly to all the foods she most liked to eat. It had gotten so bad that once, when in her hurry she had driven the car, she got back in and drove over to the smaller grocery store on Woodson, and they didn’t have any eggplant either, though she craved it. So she got zucchini instead, and back home, late, starving, made chicken soup.

All this distracted her as she worked over the data in her biostatistical studies, but it also caused her to continue to think about the situation. She had chosen to stay at NSF because she felt she could do more there, and that NSF still had a crucial part to play in the larger effort. It was a small agency but it was central, in that it coordinated basic scientific research—really the heart of all their solutions. So she continued to do her work there, organizing the grant evaluation process and running the division. And when she could she kept working on the FCCSET program she had discovered, which Diane was going to try to get OMB to get Chase to reinstate—that kind of coordination of all the federal departments and agencies into overarching project architectures was a development with huge potential. But there had to be other things she could do too. She talked to Alyssa and the others in her office about it, she talked to Diane and Edgardo, she talked to Drepung, and then to Sucandra.

Sucandra she found particularly interesting. He was the one who had been her Cognizant Program Manager, so to speak, at the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies, and he had been the single most disconcerting person she had ever talked to about the underlying purposes of science, being a doctor himself (but of Tibetan medicine) as well as a kind of Buddhist teacher, or even mentor to her, if there could be such a thing—as well as her Tibetan tutor, which she liked the best as being the most straightforward of their interactions. But in that context she mentioned to him once her attempt to balance her scientific work with something larger, amorphous though it might be.

He said to her: “Look to China.”