Green Earth

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 time came when the full Shooting Gallery Syndrome had 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 so 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 was 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. 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 ‘Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codon Sequences as Predictors of Gene/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 makes 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 a gene would produce!”

“But if you could, you would see what proteins you would get without needing to do microassays,” 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 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. Rate of funded proposals was down to around ten or twenty percent these days.

“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, and only the best couple funded.

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 overrule it, but in the great majority of cases the panels’ 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; she was 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 called his friend Sridar.

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

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

“We’re keeping at it. We’ve got some interesting clients.”

“As always.”

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

“So you said something about a new country?”

“It’s through Anna, like I said. 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?”

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

“Even worse! What are we going to do about that, stop global warming?”

“Well, yeah. That’s the idea. And you know, 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 meet them and see.”

“Okay, my plate is kind of full right now, but I could do that.”

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

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

After that Charlie was in the mood to talk, but he had no 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. “It’s 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. 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.”

Joe’s point was undeniable. They couldn’t stay in this house all day. “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 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 dim coolness a powerful soporific. But Joe wanted to play around just above the drop to the power rail, being naturally attracted to that enormous source of energy. The hundred-thousand-watt child. Charlie ran around keeping him from the edge. 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 toddler playing a game. By laughter itself. 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. Their next Metro car reached the Smithsonian station, and Charlie put Joe into the backpack, and they rode the escalator up 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 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 cherished the old story of how the first thirteen states had needed a capital, but no particular state could be allowed to nab that honor; so they had bickered, you give up some land, no, you give it, until 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 place like that.

True, Maryland had said. Okay, we’ll give that land to the nation for its capital. But not too much! Just that worst part!

And so here they were. Charlie sat on grass, drowsing. Joe gamboled about him like a bumblebee. 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. 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, waved it so Joe could see it. Joe trundled over, eyelids at half-mast; 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.

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 expressed precisely 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. Humans were like cells in their bodies. Probably one’s cells also thought their lives were important and under their control. But the great bodies knew better.

Over the white dome of the Capitol, however, the air shimmered. Congress was a roaring thermal so hot that no cloud could form in it.

He had fallen into a slumber as deep as Joe’s when his phone rang. He answered it before waking.

“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 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, you know it inside 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.

“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, you sure as hell can talk to the President’s science advisor. 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 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 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 mitigation. That went too far for this administration. Their line was that it would be much too expensive to do anything about it, so they were going to punt and let the next generation solve the problem in their own time. In other words, the hell with them. Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.