Extensive computer modeling of various scenarios had led them to believe that in order to create the masses of sinking water necessary, they would have to alter its salinity about two p.s.u., from 29.8 to 31.6—meaning the addition of about two grams of salt for every kilogram of water they had to alter. The necessary volume of water was a much less certain thing, depending as it did on various assumptions plugged into the model, but the minimal volume they had gotten to get good results totaled approximately five thousand cubic kilometers of water. About a thousand kilograms per cubic meter of water, depending on temperature; two grams of salt per kilogram of water . . . thus, about ten billion kilograms of salt.
Five hundred million tons.
Someone whistled.
“Just how much salt is that?” Frank asked.
Edgardo and General Wracke laughed. Diane smiled but said to the NOAA people, “Can you give us a sense of what that means in terms of volumes, availability, shipping capacities and so on?”
“Yes, I’m sure we can. We would have done that already but we just finished the analysis this morning. But I have to say, you know, before we get to that part, that we’re still very uncertain about the wisdom of trying this at all. I mean we don’t really know what effect it will have, and just going by the law of unintended consequences—”
“Please!” Edgardo said, raising a hand. “No more of this law of unintended consequences! There is no such law. You hear this said and then you look for the equation that expresses this law, or even the principle, and there is no equation or principle. There is just the observation that actions have unintended consequences, though sometimes they matter and other times they don’t. It’s like saying ‘Shit happens.’ ”
“Okay, maybe you’re right. Although shit does happen.”
“Just look into the practicalities of gathering and moving that quantity of salt,” Diane said with her little smile. “It may be completely impossible, in which case no consequences will follow.”
At night the trees of the forest were bare black statues, fractal and huge. There were points from which one could see down great lengths of the gorge. The snow was still rather thin on the ground, drifted into banks against the flood windrows and then icing over, leaving uneven layers of slimy black leaves underfoot. The resulting black-and-white patchwork made the topography of the park almost impossible to read, a kind of Rorschach space in which the tossing branches of the canopy were the best way to stay oriented to the ravine’s forms. The wind hooted and roared like the air choir of the world, gibbons had nothing on the winter forest as far as vocalizations were concerned. Ooooooooooooooooo!
Bouncing patterns, shifting whether he walked or not, and yet somehow the brain made the picture cohere. But sometimes it didn’t, and briefly he would be in an abstract world, all pattern, shifting shifting—ah, that was the Military Road bridge—and then a sudden understanding of what he was seeing would snap back into place with its customary “YOU ARE HERE” function. It was remarkable just how much understanding one lost when the visual field went haywire like that—not just what one saw, but where one was, who one was; a glitch in which everything blanked for a moment, pure consciousness caught in a mystery—then bang, all the explanations falling back in at once, leaving only a faint memory of absence.
He was the paleolithic in the park. A recent article in The Journal of Sociobiology had reminded him of the man in the ice, a man who had died crossing a Tyrolean pass some five thousand years before. He had lain there frozen in a glacier until something, perhaps global warming, had caused him to emerge and be discovered, in 1991. All his personal possessions had been preserved along with his body, giving archeologists a unique look at the technology of his time. Reading the inventory of his possessions, Frank had noticed how many correlations there were between his own gear and the man in the ice’s. Probably both kits were pretty much what people had carried in the cold for the last fifty thousand years.
The Alpine man had worn a coat made of sewn furs, the stitching very fine, all similar in design and effect to the down jacket Frank was wearing at that very moment. The Alpine man had worn a fanny pack like Frank’s, filled with several small tools that added up to the equivalent of Frank’s Swiss Army knife. The Alpine man’s unfinished bow stave and copper-headed axe (a marvel) had no ready equivalent in Frank’s equipment, though the axe resembled the ice axe he kept in his tree house; and he had taken to carrying his Acheulian hand axe around with him, in his fanny pack or even sometimes in his hand, just for the pleasure of the heft of it. It might even do a little good, in terms of personal defense; there were more and more people in the park, including some little gangs that did not look good to Frank. Not to mention the jaguar.
The Alpine man had worn a backpack made of wood and fur, quite similar in design to Frank’s nylon backpack; inside it were stuff sacks. A birch bark container had been designed to carry live embers, and there was also a little stone bowl in which to place flammable stuff to light by striking flints; all that equivalent to Frank’s handy cigarette lighter. Frank also had a little Primus stove up in the tree house, a primitive-looking steel thing that roared like a blowtorch and was almost as hot. How the Alpine man would have loved that! In effect Frank had a little bottle of fire he could light anywhere. The technological sublime indeed, when he had a little pot of coffee or soup on the boil.
The Alpine man had also carried a flat circular piece of white marble, holed through its middle. A loop of leather ran through the central hole, and a number of smaller leather loops were tied around through the main loop: this “tassel” as the archeologists called it, looked to Frank like a sling of carabiners. It was the one possibly nonutilitarian piece on the man (though his skin had also displayed tattoos). The birch fungus in his fanny pack had perhaps been medicinal, like the aspirin in Frank’s bathroom bag.
All down the list, familiar stuff. People still carried around things to do the same things. Frank’s kit had a provenance of thousands of years. It was a beautiful thought, and made him happy. He was Alpine man!
And so when he hiked into site 21 and saw again the bros’ ramshackle shelters, he said, “Come on guys. Let’s try to get up to paleolithic code, eh? I brought along a roll of ripstop nylon this time, check it out. First class army-navy surplus, it’ll match your camo flak jacket color scheme.”
“Yarrrr, fuck you!”
“Come on, I’m going to cut you all a tarp off the roll. Everyone in the park is under this stuff but you.”
“How you know?”
“You Santa Claus?”
“He knows because he give it to them all is how.”
“Yeah that’s right. Just call me Johnny Appletent.”
“Har har har! Perfesser Appletent!”
They cackled as he measured out rectangles of about ten by six, then cut them off with the scissors on his Swiss Army knife. He showed them how the nylon could be secured, in many cases right on top of their already existing shelters. “Dry means warm, bros, you know that.” A well-set tarp was a complete home in itself, he told them. Sides down to the ground, suspend the middle on a line, high enough to sit up in at one end, don’t worry about how low the rest of it was. The lower the warmer, except don’t let it come down on the bottom of the sleeping bag. Get plastic to put under the bags for God’s sake.
It was the kind of camp work that Frank enjoyed. He wandered around among them as they fiddled, evaluating their obstacles and the solutions they were concocting to circumvent them. They were inept, but it was a learned skill. Winter camping. Maybe they had only stayed out in the summertime before, and in previous winters sought conventional shelter. Winter backpacking was a very technical matter—well, ultimately simple; but it took attention to detail, it was a meticulous thing if you wanted to stay comfortable. A technique. The Alpine man would have been superb at it. And now they were all being carried up to the heights.
The bros lay there watching him or not, Andy calling “Watch out, will ya.” Some li
t cigarettes and blew plumes of smoke onto the new insides of their tarps, frosting them grayly.
“The first wind’ll knock that down on you,” Frank warned Andy. “Tie that far corner out to that tree.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Here, I am going to save your lazy ass.”
They all laughed at this.
“He’s saving us now! Look out!”
“Preacher Pastor Perfesser.”
“Yeah right!” Frank objected. “The Church of Dry Toes.”
They liked this.
By the time all the tarps were set Frank’s hands were white and red. He swung them around for a while, feeling them throb back to life, looking around at the scene. You could see another fire down toward the zoo.
He bid them goodnight. They mumbled things. Zeno said, “Nyah, get your ass outta here, quit bothering us with your crap, goddamn Peace Corps bleeding heart charity pervert think you know what you’re doing out here fuck that shit, get outta here.”
“You’re welcome.”
Another night, through the snowy forest under a full moon: a solid snowfall had come down at last, and now surreal whiteness blanketed everything, every bump and declivity suddenly defined by the snow’s infinitely shaded luminosity. Low cloud, noctilucent on the western half of the sky, every black stroke of branch and twig distinct against it, wind and even a bit of snow whirling down, the flakes catching the moonlight and sparking like bits of mica among the stars. The world all alive. “The great day in the man is the birth of perception.” (Emersonfortheday, February 22nd)
Frank had taken his snowshoes and ski poles out of the storage unit in Arlington, and now he cruised over the drifts. In many places the snowshoes were not needed, but they saved him from postholing into taller drifts, so they were worth it.
No need to turn on his miner’s headlamp tonight! It was light you could read by.
He came on a black thing half-buried in snow. He stopped, fearing some child had died of exposure, thinking of Chessman. But when he knelt by the form he saw that it was a wombat. “Ah shit.”
Two, actually. Mother and infant, it looked like. Frank called in the GPS location on his FOG phone, cursing sadly as he did. “God damn it. You poor guys.”
It looked like Nancy was right. They needed to recover the warm weather ferals. “Yeah,” she confirmed when he called her next day, “a lot of them aren’t making it. The shelters are helping, but we really have to bring them back in.”
“I hope we can,” Frank said.
At work Frank continued to hack away at his list of Things To Do, which nevertheless continued to grow at the bottom faster than he removed things at the top. Settling in after a session at Optimodal, his days for a while were mostly concerned with:
1) arranging small business exploratory grants for the photovoltaic programs with the most robust results. These were getting rather excit-ing, actually. Progress in this field was measured by efficiency and cost. Efficiency as the percentage of photonic energy striking the cell transferred to electrical energy, now reaching well above forty percent; and cost, now down to six cents per kilowatt-hour, very competitive with any other form of energy generation. Switching over to solar would be a major expense, but after that the possibilities were somewhat staggering. One of the grantees calculated that it would soon be possible, theoretically, to power the entire country from a ten-mile by ten-mile photovoltaic array located in some sunny desert location in the Southwest.
2) keeping in touch with the people establishing the Max Planck equivalent in San Diego. This was proceeding nicely, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography had pitched in to help, seeing that a federal research center in climate issues would very often require their help, and send funding their way, becoming another component of the already powerful UCSD research complex. The old Torrey Pines Generique facility was being remodeled and equipped, and a lot of hires about to be made. The people involved were already aware of Yann, Marta, and their colleague Eleanor, and were preparing a salary and research funding offer for all three, a really impressive package deal.
3) consulting with the various people in-house trying to deal with the SSEEP melodrama, already a mess. The platform had been released as a National Academy of Sciences study, but the connection to NSF was well-known. Scientific organizations and op-ed pages had weighed in on the matter of a “scientific political platform”—whether it was possible, whether it was a good idea, whether it was dangerous, either to science or society. Some of the usual suspects in the science world had quickly disavowed any knowledge of such a program, attacking it as unscientific and inappropriate; while others had surprised Frank by welcoming the move and suggesting additions and modifications to the platform. Attacks in Congress and the press were common, and sometimes exhibited the kind of spluttering rage indicative of a fear-based response. Phil Chase had immediately embraced the platform as a scientifically backed version of what he had been advocating for many years. As he was emerging as the clear frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination, outraising a tired and undistinguished pack of competitors two-to-one even when all their contributions were combined, this looked to Frank to be an interesting convergence of political forces.
4) Looking into a new analysis of the Sekercioglu study which had claimed that the bird extinctions they were now seeing on every continent, up to two thousand species in the coming century, were going to leave gaps in ecological function so serious that whole biomes might crash. Things like pollination and dispersal of seed, predation and fertilization, the list went on. At first it seemed odd to think of birds as so crucial, but of course they were very ancient elements of the system. So Frank got to think about the algorithms used in biodiversity studies, a welcome dip into math and theory—and damned if the corridors in habitat network theory didn’t look just like the tendrils in Snowdrift, in the version of the game in which always generous prospered.
5) Investigating amorphous or glassy metals, in particular amorphous steel, made by a new method that scrambled the atomic structures of the metal by yttrium, chromium, and boron, making the resulting “glassy steel” stronger, nonmagnetic, and less corrosive. The Navy was interested in making ship hulls of this stuff, and it seemed tothe materials team working with Frank that all kinds of ocean-proofed machinery could perhaps be improved, enough so that practical methods of tapping into the ocean’s energy might be built.
6) Talking to General Wracke over the phone about the salt-mining and transport capabilities of modern civilization. Wracke was upbeat; the quantities being discussed were not completely off the charts when compared to the amount of oil shipped around the globe, and the oil tanker fleet included a significant percentage of single-hulled ships due to be replaced, or rather overdue. As for salt availability, they were still looking into it, but as the general said, “There’s a lot of salt in this world.”
Money was a different matter. The Pentagon had recently gotten in trouble with Congress, Wracke said, for its practice of hiding money left over at the ends of budget years, then using these savings for its own purposes, calling them “reprogrammed funds.” Congress did not approve, and any high-profile project was likely to have to get conventional funding.
“Does it look like it will be expensive?” Frank asked.
“Depends what you call expensive. Billions for sure.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I’ll get back to you on that.”
“Thanks. Oh—different subject—does the Pentagon have an intelligence service of its own?”
Wracke laughed. “Is that a trick question?”
“No, how could it be?”
“You’ll have to ask the CIA about that. But yes, sure. After the other intelligence agencies in this town let us down so bad, we almost had to have one, to get good data. We were the ones getting killed you know. So there’s the Strategic Support Branch, and they’re an intelligence-gathering unit publicly acknowledged. They’re sometimes a bit more hands
-on than the other agencies, but gathering intelligence is their job. Why, is there some secret climate group you’re having trouble with? Clandestine cloud seeding?”
“No no. I was just curious. Thanks. See you at the next meeting.”
“I look forward to it. You guys are doing great.”
In that same couple of weeks, along with everything else, Frank made an effort to locate Chessman. He centered the search on Dupont Circle, because that was the city’s outdoor chess epicenter. So much so, he found, that chesshounds converged on it from everywhere, and of course dispersed back out, using all eleven of the streets that met there. To ask about a young black kid was to ask about more than half the chess-playing population, and no one appreciated an inquiry framed that broadly. His motives also appeared to be questioned. So after a while, rather than ask, Frank simply walked and watched, played and lost and walked again, checking out the games, noting also the new little semi-winterized shelters popping up here and there all over town.
Cleveland Park sported many of these camps, especially in the fringe of buildings damaged by the flood and abandoned. Spencer’s crowd, clearly, as well as others less organized and competent. It seemed from his observations that the homeless population of Northwest alone must be in the thousands. The formal shelters and newspaper reports gave similar numbers. Between the Klingle Valley Park and Melvin Hazen Park, both small tributary ravines dropping into Rock Creek, there were many abandoned houses. If they had not been burned out, or even if they had, squatters were likely to be occupying them.
Fifty Degrees Below Page 29
