Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

  Site after site.

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

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

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

  “But Nixon was paranoid, right?”

  “Paranoid or clearsighted.”

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

  “Maybe.”

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

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

  “You’re sounding like Edgardo.”

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

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

  “Meaning?” Diane said.

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

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

  “Pretty clever.”

  “I think so.”

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

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

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

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

  “How so?” Diane asked.

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

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

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

  They thought about this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So what killed it?”

  “How do you know it got killed?”

  Frank just looked at her.

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

  “Now that’s power!”

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

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

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

  “Worth a try,” Diane judged.

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

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Unlikely,” Diane judged.

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

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

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

  “I don’t know, Richard Feynman?”

  “Deceased.”

  “Stephen Hawking.”

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

  “Exploding?” Anna suggested.

  “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

  “Neither,” Frank and Diane said together.

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

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

  “So what have we got to lose?”

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

  “Like we aren’t already?”

  “Hmmm.”

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

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

  He laughed hard.

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

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

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

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

  They laughed at this image.

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

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

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

  “Sure. You want to go get a bite?”

  “Sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  V

  AUTUMN IN NEW YORK

  The most beautiful regatta in the history of the world convened that year on Midsummer Day, at the North Pole.

  The sun hung in the same spot all day long, blazing down on open water that appeared more black than blue. A few icebergs floated here and there, most low and white, but including a few dolmens of jade or turquoise, standing in an obsidian sea.

  Among these floating extravaganzas sailed or motored some three hundred boats and ships. Sails were of every cut and color, some even prisming through the spectrum as they bent to the shifts of the mild southern breeze. People said the prisming sails allowed one to see every gust’s impact in a manner never possible before. That it also looked cool was too obvious to mention. All manner of sail, all possible rigs and hulls: catamarans and schooners, yawls, ketches, trimarans; also square-riggers, from caravels to clipper ships to newfangled experiments obviously not destined to prosper; a quintet of huge Polynesian outriggers; and every manner of motor launch, rumbling unctuously through the sails, each sporting a unique profile in white or cream; and a lot of single-person craft, including many kayakers and windsurfers in black drysuits.