Green Earth

He went to his car, threw the bag in, hummed over the dark streets back to Arlington, past the Ballston stop. He parked on a wet street well away from the NSF building. No one was about. There were eight million people in the immediate vicinity, but it was 2 A.M. and so there was not a person to be seen. Who could deny sociobiology at a moment like that! What a sign of their animal natures, completely diurnal in the technosurround of postmodern society, fast asleep in so many ways, and most certainly at night. Unavoidably fallen into a brain state still very poorly understood. Frank felt a little exalted to witness such overwhelming evidence of their animal nature. A whole city of sleeping primates. Somehow it confirmed his feeling that he was doing the right thing. That he himself had woken up for the first time in many years.

On the south side of the NSF building it was the work of a moment to stand a plastic crate on its side and hop up to the lowest rung of the service ladder bolted to the concrete wall, and then quickly to pull himself up and ascend the twelve stories to the roof, using his leg muscles for all the propulsion. As he neared the top of the ladder it felt very high and exposed, and it occurred to him that if it were really true that an excess of reason was a form of madness, he seemed to be cured. Unless of course this truly was the most reasonable thing to do—as he felt it was.

Over the coping, onto the roof, land in a shallow rain puddle against the coping. In the center of a flat roof, the atrium skylight.

It was a muggy night, the low clouds orange with the city’s glow. He pulled out his tools. The big central skylight was a low four-sided pyramid of triangular glass windowpanes. He went to the one nearest the ladder and cleaned the plate of glass, then affixed a big sucker to it.

Using his old X-Acto knife he cut the sun-damaged polyurethane caulking on the window’s three sides. He pulled it away and found the window screws, and zipped them out with his old Grinder screwdriver. When the window was unscrewed he grabbed the handle on the sucker and yanked to free the window, then pulled back gently; out it came, balanced in the bottom frame stripping. He pulled it back until the glass was almost upright, then tied the sling-rope from the handle of the sucker to the lowest rung of the ladder. The open gap near the top of the atrium was more than big enough for him to fit through. Cool air wafted up from some very slight internal pressure.

He laid a towel over the frame, stepped into his climbing harness, and buckled it around his waist. He tied his ropes off on the top rung of the service ladder; that would be bombproof. Now it was just a matter of slipping through the gap and rappelling down the rope to the point where he would begin his pendulum.

He sat carefully on the angled edge of the frame. He could feel the beer from Anna’s reception still sloshing in him, impeding his coordination very slightly, but this was climbing, he would be all right. He had done it in worse condition in his youth, fool that he had been. Although it was perhaps the wrong time to be critical of that version of himself.

Turning around and leaning back into the atrium, he tested the figure-eight device constricting the line—good friction—so he leaned farther back into the atrium, and immediately plummeted down into it. Desperately he twisted the rappelling device and felt the rope slow; it caught fast and he was bungeeing down on it when he crashed into something—a horrible surprise because it didn’t seem that he had had time to fall to the ground, so he was confused for a split second—then he saw that he had struck the top piece of the mobile, and was now hanging over it, head downward, grasping it and the rope both with a desperate prehensile clinging.

And very happy to be there. The brief fall seemed to have affected him like a kind of electrocution. His skin burned everywhere. He tugged experimentally on his rope; it seemed fine, solidly tied to the roof ladder. Perhaps after putting the figure eight on the rope he had forgotten to take all the slack out of the system, he couldn’t remember doing it. That would be forgetting a well-nigh instinctual action for any climber, but he couldn’t honestly put it past himself on this night. His mind was full or perhaps overfull.

Carefully he reached into his waist bag. He got out two ascenders and carabinered their long loops to his harness, then connected them to the rope above him. Next he whipped the rope below him around his thigh, and had a look around. He would have to use the ascenders to pull himself back up to the proper pendulum point for Diane’s window—

The whole mobile was twisting slightly. Frank grabbed it and tried to torque it until it stilled, afraid some security person would walk through the atrium and notice the motion. Suddenly the big space seemed much too well lit for comfort, even though it was only a dim greenish glow created by a few night-lights in the offices around him.

The mobile’s top piece was a bar bent into a big circle, hanging by a chain from a point on its circumference, with two shorter bars extending out from it—one about thirty degrees off from the top, bending to make a staircase shape, the other across the circle and below, its two bends making a single stair riser down. The crescent bar hung about fifteen feet below the circle. In the dark they appeared to be different shades of gray, though Frank knew they were primary colors. For a second that made it all seem unreal.

Finally the whole contraption came still. Frank ran one ascender up his rope, put his weight on it. Every move had to be delicate, and for a time he was lost to everything else, deep in that climber’s space of purely focused concentration.

He placed the other ascender even higher, and carefully shifted his weight to it, and off the first ascender. A very mechanical and straightforward process. He wanted to leave the mobile with no push on it at all.

But the second ascender slipped when he put his weight on it, and instinctively he grabbed the rope with his hand and burned his palm before the other ascender caught him. A totally unnecessary burn.

Now he really began to sweat. A bad ascender was bad news. This one was slipping very slightly and then catching. Looking at it, he thought that maybe it had been smacked in the fall onto the top of the mobile, breaking its housing. Ascender housings were often cast, and sometimes bubbles left in the casting caused weaknesses that broke when struck. It had happened to him before, and it was major adrenaline time. No one could climb a rope unaided for long.

But this one kept holding after its little slips, and fiddling with his fingertips he could see that shoving the cam back into place in the housing after he released it helped it to catch sooner. So with a kind of teeth-clenching patience, a holding-the-breath antigravitational effort, he could use the other one for the big pulls of the ascent, and then set the bad one by hand, to hold him (hopefully) while he moved the good one up above it again.

Eventually he got back up to the height he had wanted to descend to in the first place, and was finally ready to go. He was drenched in sweat and his right hand was burning. He tried to estimate how much time he had wasted, but could not. Somewhere between ten minutes and half an hour, he supposed. Ridiculous.

Swinging side to side was easy, and soon he was swaying back and forth, until he could reach out and place a medium sucker against Laveta’s office window. He depressed it slightly as he swung in close, and it stuck first try.

Held thus against her window, he could pull a T-bar from his waist bag and reach over, just barely, and fit it into the window washer’s channel next to the window. After that he was set, and could reach up and place a dashboard into the slot over the window, and rig a short rope he had brought to tie the sucker handle up to the dashboard, holding open Laveta’s window.

All set. Deploy the X-Acto, unscrew the frame, haul up the window toward the dashboard, almost to horizontal, keeping its top edge in the framing. Tie it off. Gap biggest at the bottom corner; slip under there and pull into the office, twisting as agilely as the gibbons at the National Zoo, then kneeling on the carpeted floor, huffing and puffing as quietly as possible.

Clip the line to a chair leg, just to be sure it didn’t swing back out into the atrium and leave him stuck. Tiptoe across Laveta’s office, over to Diane’s in-box, where he had left his letter.

Not there.

A quick search of the desktop turned up nothing there either.

He couldn’t think of any other high-probability places to look for it. The halls had surveillance cameras, and besides, where would he look? It was supposed to be here, Diane had been gone when he had left it in her in-box. Laveta had nodded, acknowledging receipt of same. Laveta?

Helplessly he searched the other surfaces and drawers in the office, but the letter was not there. There was nothing else he could do. He went back to the window, unclipped his line. He clipped his ascenders back onto it, making sure the good one was high, and that he had taken all the slack out before putting his weight on it. Faced with the tilted window and the open air, he banished all further consideration of the mystery of the absent letter, with a final thought of Laveta and the look he sometimes thought he saw in her eye; perhaps it was a purloined letter. On the other hand, Diane could have come back. But enough of that for now; it was time to focus. He needed to focus. The dreamlike quality of the descent had vanished, and now it was only a sweaty and poorly illuminated job, awkward, difficult, somewhat dangerous. Getting out, letting down the window, rescrewing the frame, leaving the cut seal to surprise some future window washer … Luckily, despite feeling stunned by the setback, the automatic pilot from hundreds of work hours came through. In the end it was an old expertise, a kid skill, something he could do no matter what.

Which was a good thing, because he wasn’t actually focusing very well. On various levels his mind was racing. What could have happened? Who had his letter? Would he be able to find the woman from the elevator?

Thus only the next morning, when he came into the building in the ordinary way, did he look up self-consciously and notice that the mobile now hung at a ninety-degree angle to the position it had always held before. But no one seemed to notice.

CHAPTER 9

TRIGGER EVENT

Department of Homeland Security CONFIDENTIAL

Transcript NSF 3957396584

Phones 645d/922a

922a: Frank are you ready for this?

645d: I don’t know Kenzo, you tell me.

922a: Casper the Friendly Ghost spent last week swimming over the sill between Iceland and Scotland, and she never got a salinity figure over 34.

645d: Wow. How deep did she go?

922a: Surface water, central water, the top of the deep water. And never over 34. 33.8 on the surface once she got into the Norwegian Sea.

645d: Wow. What about temperatures?

922a: 0.9 on the surface, 0.75 at three hundred meters. Warmer to the east, but not by much.

645d: Oh my God. So it’s not going to sink.

922a: That’s right.

645d: What’s going to happen?

922a: I don’t know. It could be the stall.

645d: Someone’s got to do something about this.

922a: Good luck my friend! I personally think we’re in for some fun. A thousand years of fun.

Anna was working with her door open, and once again she heard Frank’s end of a phone conversation. Having eavesdropped once, it seemed to have become easier; and as before, there was a strain in Frank’s voice that caught her attention. Not to mention louder sentences like:

“What? Why would they do that?”

Then silence, except for a squeak of his chair and a brief drumming of fingers.

“Uh-huh, yeah. Well, what can I say. It’s too bad. It sucks, sure … Yeah. But, you know. You’ll be fine either way. It’s your workforce that will be in trouble … No no, I understand. You did your best. Nothing you can do after you sell. It wasn’t your call, Derek … Yeah I know. They’ll find work somewhere else. It’s not like there aren’t other biotechs out there, it’s the biotech capital of the world, right? … Yeah, sure. Let me know when you know … Okay, I do too. Bye.”

He hung up hard, cursed under his breath.

Anna looked out her door. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah.”

She got up and went to her doorway. He was looking down at the floor, shaking his head disgustedly.

He raised his head and met her gaze. “Small Delivery Systems closed down Torrey Pines Generique and let almost everyone go.”

“Really! Didn’t they just buy them?”

“Yes. But they didn’t want the people.” He grimaced. “It was for something Torrey Pines had, like a patent. Or one of the people they kept. There were a few they invited to join the Small Delivery lab in Atlanta. Like that mathematician I told you about. The one who sent us a proposal, did I tell you about him?”

“One of the jackets that got turned down?”

“That’s right.”

“Your panel wasn’t that impressed, as I recall.”

“Yeah, that’s right. But I’m not so sure—I don’t think they were right.” He grimaced, shrugged. “It was a mistake. Anyway, they’ll get him to sign a contract that gives them the rights to his work, and then they’ll have it to patent, or keep as a trade secret, or even bury if it interferes with some other product of theirs. Whatever their legal department thinks will make the most.”

Anna watched him brood. Finally she said, “Oh well.”

He gave her a look. “A guy like him belongs at NSF.”

Anna lifted an eyebrow. She was well aware of Frank’s ambivalent or even negative attitude toward NSF, which he had let slip often enough.

Frank understood her look and said, “The thing is, if you had him here then you could, you know, sic him on things. Sic him like a dog.”

“I don’t think we have a program that does that.”

“Well you should, that’s what I’m saying.”

“You can add that to your talk to the Board this afternoon,” Anna said. She considered it herself. A kind of human search engine, hunting math-based solutions …

Frank did not look amused. “I’ll already be out there far enough as it is,” he muttered. “I wish I knew why Diane asked me to give this talk anyway.”

“To get your parting wisdom, right?”

“Yeah right.” He looked at a pad of yellow legal-sized paper, scribbled over with notes.

Anna surveyed him, feeling again the slightly irritated fondness for him she had felt on the night of the party for the Khembalis. She would miss him when he was gone. “Want to go down and get a coffee?”

“Sure.” He got up slowly, lost in thought, and reached out to close the program on his computer.

“Wow, what did you do to your hand?”

“Oh. Burned it in a little climbing fall. Grabbed the rope.”

“My God Frank.”

“I was belayed at the time, it was just a reflex thing.”

“It looks painful.”

“It is when I flex it.” They left the offices and went to the elevators. “How is Charlie getting along with his poison ivy?”

“Still moaning and groaning. Most of the blisters are healing, but some of them keep breaking open. I think the worst part now is that it keeps waking him up at night. He hasn’t slept much since it happened. Between that and Joe he’s kind of going crazy.”

In the Starbucks she said, “So are you ready for this talk to the Board?”

“No. Or, as much as I can be. Like I said, I don’t really know why Diane wants me to do it.”

“It must be because you’re leaving. She wants to get your parting wisdom. She does that with some of the visiting people. It’s a sign she’s interested in your take on things.”

“But how would she know what that is?”

“I don’t know. Not from me. I would only say good things, of course, but she hasn’t asked me.”

He rubbed a finger gently up and down the burn on his palm.

“Tell me,” he said, “have you ever heard of someone getting a report and, you know, just filing it away? Taking no action on it?”

“Happens all the time.”

“Really?”

“Sure. With some things it’s the best way to deal with them.”

“Hmm.”

They had made their way to the front of the line, and so paused for orders, and the rapid production of their coffees. Frank continued to look thoughtful. It reminded Anna of his manner when he had arrived at her party, soaking wet from rain, and she said, “Say, did you ever find that woman you were stuck in the elevator with?”

“No. I was going to tell you about that. I did what you suggested and contacted the Metro offices, and asked service and repair to get her name from the report. I said I needed to contact her for my insurance report.”

“Oh really! And?”

“And the Metro person read it right off to me, no problem. Read me everything she wrote. But it turns out she wrote down the wrong stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

They walked out of the Starbucks back into the building.

“It was a wrong address she put down. There’s no residence there. And she wrote down her name as Jane Smith. I think she made everything up.”

“That’s strange! I guess they didn’t check your IDs.”

“No.”

“I’d have thought they would.”

“Maybe people just freed from stuck elevators are not in the mood to be handing over their IDs.”

“No, I suppose not.” An up elevator opened and they got in. They had it to themselves. “Like your friend, apparently.”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder why she would write down the wrong stuff though.”

“Me too.”

“What about what she told you—something about being in a cycling club, was it?”

“I’ve tried that. None of the cycling clubs in the area will give out membership lists. I cracked into one in Bethesda, but there wasn’t any Jane Smith.”

“Wow. You’ve really been looking into it.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she’s a spook. Hmm. Maybe you could go to all the cycling club meetings, just once. Or join one and ride with it, and look for her at meets, and show her picture around.”

“What picture?”

“Get a portrait program to generate one.”

“Good idea, although,” sigh, “it wouldn’t look like her.”

“No, they never do.”

“I’d have to get better at riding a bike.”

“At least she wasn’t into skydiving.”

He laughed. “True. Well, I’ll have to think about it. But thanks, Anna.”

Later that afternoon they met again, on the way up to one of Diane’s meetings with the NSF Science Board. They got out on the twelfth floor and walked around the hallways. The outer windows at the turns in the halls revealed that the day had darkened, low black clouds now tearing over themselves in their hurry to reach the Atlantic, sheeting down rain as they went.

In the big conference room Laveta and some others were repositioning a whiteboard and PowerPoint screen according to Diane’s instructions. Frank and Anna were the first ones there.

“Come on in,” Diane said. She busied herself with the screen and kept her back to Frank.

The rest of the crowd trickled in. NSF’s Board of Directors was composed of twenty-four people, although usually there were a couple of vacant positions in the process of being filled. The directors were all powers in their parts of the scientific world, appointed by the President from lists provided by NSF and the National Academy of Science, and serving four-year terms.

Now they were looking wet and windblown, straggling into the room in ones and twos. Some of Anna’s fellow division directors came in as well. Eventually fifteen or sixteen people were seated around the big table, including Sophie Harper, their congressional liaison. The light in the room flickered faintly as lightning made itself visible diffusely through the coursing rain on the room’s exterior window. The gray world outside pulsed as if it were an aquarium.

Diane welcomed them and moved quickly through the agenda’s introductory matter. After that she ran down a list of large projects that had been proposed or discussed in the previous year, getting the briefest of reports from Board members assigned to study the projects. They included climate mitigation proposals, many highly speculative, all extremely expensive. A carbon sink plan included reforestations that would also be useful for flood control; Anna made a note to tell the Khembalis about that one.

But nothing they discussed was going to work on the global situation, given the massive nature of the problem, and NSF’s highly constricted budget and mission. Ten billion dollars; and even the $50 billion items on their list of projects only addressed small parts of the global problem.

At moments like these Anna could not help thinking of Charlie playing with Joe’s dinosaurs, holding up a little pink mouselike thing, a first mammal, and exclaiming, “Hey it’s NSF!”

He had meant it as a compliment to their skill at surviving in a big world, or to the way they represented the coming thing, but unfortunately the comparison was also true in terms of size. Scurrying about trying to survive in a world of dying dinosaurs—worse yet, trying to save the dinosaurs too—where was the mechanism? As Frank would say, How could that work?

She banished these thoughts and made her own quick report, about the infrastructure distribution programs that she had been studying. A lot of infrastructure had been dispersed in the last decade. Anna’s concluding suggestion that the programs were a success and should be expanded was received with nods all around, as an obvious thing to do. But also expensive.

There was a pause as people thought this over.

Finally Diane looked at Frank. “Frank, are you ready?”

Frank stood to answer. He did not exhibit his usual ease. He walked over to the whiteboard, took up a red marker, fiddled with it. His face was flushed.

“All the programs described so far focus on gathering data, and the truth is we have enough data already. The world’s climate has already changed. The Arctic Ocean ice pack breakup has flooded the surface of the North Atlantic with fresh water, and the most recent data indicate that that has stopped the surface water from sinking, and stalled the circulation of the big Atlantic current. That’s been pretty conclusively identified as a major trigger event in Earth’s climatic history. So, abrupt climate change has almost certainly already begun.”

Frank stared at the whiteboard, lips pursed. “So. The question becomes, what do we do? Business as usual won’t work. For you here, the effort should be toward finding ways that NSF can make a much broader impact than it has till now.”

“Excuse me,” one of the Board members said, sounding a bit peeved. He was a man in his sixties, with a gray Lincoln beard; Anna did not recognize him. “How is this any different from what we are always trying to do? I mean, we’ve talked about trying to do this at every Board meeting I’ve ever been to. We always ask ourselves, how can NSF get more bang for its buck?”

“Maybe so,” said Frank. “But it hasn’t worked.”

Diane said, “What are you saying, Frank? What should we be doing that we haven’t already tried?”

Frank cleared his throat. He and Diane stared at each other for a long moment, locked in some kind of undefined conflict.

Frank shrugged, went to the whiteboard, uncapped his red marker. “Let me make a list.”

He wrote a 1 and circled it.

“One. We have to knit it all together.” He wrote, “Synergies at NSF.”

“I mean by this that you should be stimulating synergistic efforts that range across the disciplines to work on this problem. Then,” he wrote and circled a 2, “you should be looking for immediately relevant applications coming out of the basic research funded by the foundation. These applications should be hunted for by people brought in specifically to do that. You should have a permanent in-house innovation and policy team.”