More time had passed. Too cold to stay still any longer, he threw open the driver’s door and climbed out.
Instant shock of frigid air. Reach back in and put on windpants, gaiters, ski gloves. Snowshoes and ski poles under one arm. Off into the night.
No one out on nights like these. At the park’s edge he stepped into his snowshoes, tightened the straps. Crunch crunch over hard snow, then sinking in; he would have posted through if he had been in boots. So the snowshoes had been a good idea. Note to self: when in doubt, just do it. Try something and observe the results. Good-enough decision algorithm. Most often the first choice, made by the unconscious mind, would be best anyway. Tests had shown this.
Out and about, under the stars. The north wind was more obvious in the Rock Creek watershed, gusting down the big funnel and cracking frozen branches here and there. Snaps like gunshots amidst the usual roar of the gale.
No one was out. No fires; no black figures in the distance against the snow; no animals. He poled over the snow as if he were the last man on Earth. Left behind on some forest planet that everyone else had abandoned. Like a dream. When the dream becomes so strange that you know you’re going to wake up, but then you discover that you’re already awake—what then?
Then you know you’re alive. You find yourself on the cold hill’s side.
Back at site 21. He had come right back to the spot where he had gotten hurt, maybe it wasn’t wise. He circled it from above for a while, checking to be certain it was empty. No one out. What if you had a world and then one night you came home to it and it was gone? This sometimes happened to people.
He clattered down to the picnic tables, sat on one, unbuckled his snowshoes. He looked around. Sleepy Hollow was empty, a very unappetizing snowy trench with black mud sidewalls, the sorry little shelters all knocked apart. Tables bare. The fire out. Ashes and charcoal, all dusted with snow.
Strange to see.
So . . . He had run in from the direction of the zoo. Knocked one of the assailants down; funny how that skinny face and moustache had fooled him, taken him back to an earlier trauma; but only for a second. Facial recognition was another quick and powerful unconscious ability.
So. He had to have been about . . . about here when he was struck.
He stood on the spot. It did not seem to be true that the memory held nothing after such impacts; he actually recalled a lot of it. The moment of recognition; then something swinging in from his left. A quick blur. Baseball bat, branch, maybe a two-by-four. . . . Ouch. He touched his numb nose in sympathy.
After that moment there were at least a few seconds he did not recall at all. He didn’t recall the impact (although he did, in his nose, kind of; the feel of it) nor falling to the ground. He must have gotten his hands out to catch himself; his left wrist was sore, and the first thing he remembered for sure was kneeling and seeing his nose shoot out blood like a fountain. Trying to catch black blood in his hands; not staunch it, just catch it; finding it hard to believe just how much blood was pouring through his hands onto the ground, also down his throat and the back of his mouth. Swallowing convulsively. Then touching his nose, fearing to know what shape his fingers might find; finding it had no feeling, but that it seemed to be occupying much the same space as before. Peculiar to feel his own nose as if someone else’s. It was the same now. His fingers told him the flesh was being manipulated, but his face didn’t confirm it.
Very strange. And here he was. Back on the spot, some days later . . . let’s see; must be . . . two days.
He crouched, looked around. He got on his hands and knees, in the same position he had been in while watching the blood fountain out of him. It was still seeping a little bit. Taste of blood. For a second during the prodigious flow he had wondered if he would bleed to death. And indeed there was a large black stain on the ground.
Now he twisted slowly this way and that, as if to prick more memories to life. He took off a glove and got his little keychain flashlight out of his pocket. He aimed the beam of light; frail though it was, it made the night seem darker.
There. Off to his right, up the slope of snow, half embedded. He leaped over with a shout, snatched it up and shook it at the wind. His hand axe.
He stared at it there in his hand. A perfect fit and heft. Superficially it looked like the other gray quartzite cobbles that littered Rock Creek. It was possible no one would ever have known it was different. But when he clutched it the shaping was obvious. Knapped biface. Frank whacked it into the nearest tree trunk, a solid blow. Thunk thunk thunk thunk. Quite a weapon.
He put it back in his jacket pocket, where it jostled nicely against his side.
He hiked through the trees under bouncing black branches, their flailing visible as patterns in the occlusion of stars. The north wind poured into him. Clatter and squeak of snowshoes. He slept in his van.
Inevitably, he had to explain what had happened to a lot of people. Diane of course had seen him at the hospital. “How are you feeling?” she asked when he went into Optimodal the next morning.
“I think a nerve must have been crushed.”
She nodded. “I can see where the skin was split. Broken nose, right?”
“Yes. Maxillary bone. I just have to wait it out.”
She touched his arm. “My boy broke his nose. The problem is the cartilage heals at new angles, so your breathing could be impaired.”
“Oh great. I hate having to breathe through my mouth when I have a cold.”
“They can ream you out if you want. Anyway it could have been worse. If you had been hit a little higher, or lower—”
“Or to either side.”
“True. You could have been killed. So, I guess your nose was like the air bag in a car.”
“Ha ha. Don’t make me laugh or I’ll bleed on you.” He held his upper lip between thumb and forefinger as he chuckled, squeezing it to keep from re-opening the vertical cut. Everything had cracked vertically.
“Your poor lip. It sticks out almost as far as your nose. You look like the spies in ‘Spy vs. Spy.’ ”
“Don’t make me laugh!”
She smiled up at him. “Okay I won’t.”
In his office about twenty minutes later, he smiled to think of her; he had to press his upper lip together.
His appreciation for Diane grew as he saw more of the responses he got to the injury. Oversolicitous, amused, uninterested, grossed out—they were bad in different ways. So Frank kept discussions limited. The lunch runners were okay, and Frank told them a bit more about what had happened. Same with the frisbee guys, who all nodded rather grimly as they listened to him. There had been quite a few incidents like the fight Frank had joined, Spencer said: robbery, assaults, site stealing. For a while it had been really bad. Now, as the news of these attacks spread, and the cold got worse, the park had lost a lot of people, and the fights were fewer. But they hadn’t ended, and the frisbee guys were now telling everybody to move around in packs.
Frank did not do this, but when he strapped on his snowshoes and went for walks, he kept away from the trails and did his best never to be seen.
Work was more problematic. When he sat down in his office, the list of Things To Do sometimes looked like a document in another language. He had to look up acronyms that suddenly seemed new and nonintuitive. OSTP? PITAC? Oh yeah. Office of Science and Technology Policy. Executive branch, a turned agency, an impediment to them. There were so many of those. PITAC: President’s Information Technology Advisory Council. Another advisory body. Anna had a list of over two hundred of them, followed by a list of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) just as long. All calling for some kind of action—from the sidelines. Unfunded. Anna had waved a whole sheaf of lists in her hand, not appalled or angry like Frank had been, more astonished than anything. “There’s so much information out there. And so many organizations!”
“What does it all mean?” Frank had said. “Is it a form of paralysis, a way of pretending?”
Anna nodded. “We
know, but we can’t act.”
The phrase, something Diane had once said, haunted him as he tried to get back to work. He knew what should come next for most of the items on his list of Things To Do, but there was no obvious mechanism for action in any case; nor any way to decide which to do first. Call the science and technology center coordinator’s office, and see if the leasing of Torrey Pines Generique’s empty facility was complete. Call Yann, and therefore Marta; put them directly in touch with the carbon drawdown and sequestration team. Talk to Diane and General Wracke about the Gulf Stream project. Check in with the carbon emissions team, see if photovoltaics clearly outperformed mirrors before dropping the mirror funding. Okay but which first?
He decided to talk to Diane. She could not only update him, but advise him on how to prioritize. Tell him what to do.
Again Diane was easier to talk to than anyone else. But after she told him what she had heard from Wracke and the Coast Guard and the International Maritime Organization, all of which seemed to indicate that assembling a transport fleet, loading it and sailing it to the Greenland Sea would be at least physically possible, she shifted to something else with a quick grimace. Their new Inspector General appeared to be on the hunt, and the pattern of his interviews and requests seemed to indicate that Diane herself was his quarry, along with several of the most active members of the National Science Board, including its best contact to National Academy of Science, and the one with the strongest links to the Senate. “I’ve got to meet with OMB and have it out with them,” she said darkly. “Maybe call in the GAO for a cross-check to this guy.”
“Is there any chance he’ll . . .”
“No. I am clean. They are looking at my son’s affairs too. All the program directors; you too, I assume. We will hope for the best. They can twist things that are real, and suddenly you’re in trouble.”
“Oh dear.”
“It’s all right. I can get some help. And the colder it gets this winter, the better for us. People are getting motivated to try something. If it comes out that the Department of Energy is trying to stop us from helping the situation here, they will catch hell. So, the colder the better!”
“Up to a point,” Frank warned.
“True.” She looked over his list. “Talk to your carbon drawdown people, we need to get them to commit to the new institute in San Diego.”
“Okay.” That meant a call to Yann and Marta.
Back in his office, Anna was waiting to discuss their alliances program. She was pleased with a search program that was identifying groups tightly allied to NSF’s current goals. Also, FCCSET had been funded and given back its budgetary power, and should be able to coordinate climate spending from the federal government, including the Corps of Engineers. It looked like even if the President and Congress refused all funding for climate work, still engaged in their head-in-the-sand exercise, they could be bypassed by a more diffuse economic network, now interested in taking action.
So that was nice; but Frank still had to call Marta. It was amazing how his pulse rose at the prospect. His lip throbbed with each heartbeat. Every other item on the list seemed suddenly more pressing. Nevertheless, he took a deep breath and punched the number, wondering briefly how much this would bump his stock in the futures market. Why, if only he could get some shares, he could do things to raise their value, and then sell! Maybe this was what was meant by the ownership society. Maybe this was capitalism; you owned stock in yourself, and then by your actions the price per share rose. Except that you didn’t own a majority share. You might not even own any shares, and have no way to buy in; as with Frank and the spooks’ virtual market.
But there were other markets.
Marta picked up, and Frank said, “Hi Marta it’s Frank,” all in a rush. Forging on through her cold greeting and lack of conversation, he asked her how it was going with the lichen project.
She told him that it was going pretty well. “Do you have a cold?”
“No.”
They had engineered one of their tree lichen’s algae to a much more efficient photosynthesis, and altered the fungus component of the lichen so that it exported its sugar to the tree faster than the original lichen had. This lichen had always taken hormonal control of its trees, so now the sugar production from photosynthesis was merely being packed into the lignin of the trees faster than before; meaning extra carbon, added to the trees’ trunk girth and root size. So far the alterations had been simple, Marta said, and the trees would live for centuries, and had millions of years’ experience in not getting eaten by bacteria. The sequestration would therefore last for the lifetime of the tree—not long on geological scales, but Diane had declared early on in this discussion that the length of sequestration time was not to be a heavily weighted factor in judging the various proposals; any port in a storm, as she put it.
“That all sounds great,” Frank said. “And which trees do these tree lichen live on?”
They were pretty much omniarboreal, Marta said. Indigenous to the great world-wrapping forest of the north sixties latitudes, crossing Europe, Siberia, Kamchatka, and Canada.
“I see,” Frank said.
“Yeah,” Marta replied, suddenly chilling. “So what’s up?”
“Well, I wanted to let you know that the new center is ongoing out in San Diego. You aren’t going to believe this, but they’re going to lease the old Torrey Pines Generique facility.”
“Ha! You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Well. You ought to hire Leo Mulhouse too while you’re at it. He’d get a cell lab working better than anyone.”
“That’s a good idea, I’ll pass that along. I liked him.”
Frank described the input from UCSD, Scripps, Salk, the San Diego biotech council. Then he told her about the progress with NSF’s unsolicited grants program. “There’s already a Small Grants for Exploratory Research program that’s been underutilized, and Diane has upped the maximum award. So the possibility is there for grants without external review.”
He couldn’t say any more; indeed, even saying this much might be dangerous: surveillance, recorded phone line, conflict of interest, hostile inspector general . . . shit. He had to leave the rest unsaid, but the implications seemed pretty damned obvious. And headhunting was still legal, he assumed.
“Yeah it sounds good,” Marta said sullenly, clearly in no mood to be grateful, or to hope. “So what?”
Frank had to let it go. He didn’t say, You’re going to have to be part of a government to get permission to release a genetically modified organism designed to alter the composition of the atmosphere. He didn’t say, I’ve arranged things so that you and Yann can both go back to San Diego and work on your projects with more power and funding. She could figure it out, and no doubt already had, which was what was making her grumpy. She didn’t like anything that might impede her being mad at him.
He stifled a sigh and got off as best he could.
One windless night he snowshoed out and saw that some of the fires were back. Sparks in the darkness, at picnic sites and squatter camps. People out and about. Perhaps it was the lack of wind.
Under the luminous cloud the snow was a brilliant white. The forest looked like the park of some enormous estate, everything groomed perfectly for a demanding squire. Far to the north a movement in the trees suggested to him the aurochs, or something else very big. The jaguar wouldn’t be that big.
The bros were back home, he was happy to see, several of them sitting at the picnic tables, a few standing by a good fire in the ring.
“Hey Perfesser! Perfesser Nosebleed! How ya doing, man?”
They did not gather around him, but for the moment he was the center of attention. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Good for you!”
“You look terrible!”
“Now’s when you should pop him on the nose if you were ever gonna!”
Frank said, “Oh come on.”
“I don’t have to ask who’s winning now! Th
e other guy’s winning!”
Frank said, “Don’t make me laugh or I’ll bleed on you.”
This pleased them very much. They went on ragging him. He threw a branch on the fire and sat down next to the woman, who nodded her approval as she counted stitches.
“You did good,” she told him.
“What do you mean?”
“The bozos here say you came blasting in like the cavalry.”
“So who were those guys?” Frank asked the group.
“Who knows.”
“Fucking little motherfuckers.”
“It’s one of them Georgia Avenue gangs, man, those guys just live off the streets like us, or worse.”
“But the guys beating on you were white,” Frank observed.
The fire crackled as they considered this.
“It’s getting kind of dangerous out here,” Frank said.
“It always was, Nosebleed.”
“Just got to keep out of the way,” the woman murmured as she began needling again, bringing the work up close to her eyes.
“How you doing?” Frank asked her as the others returned to their riffs and arias.
“Day hundred and forty-two,” she said with a decisive nod.
“Congratulations, that’s great. Are you keeping warm?”
“Hell no.” She guffawed. “How would I do that?”
“Did you get one of my tarps?”
“No, what’s that?”
“I’ll bring them out again. Just a tarp, like a tent fly, you know.”
“Oh.” She was dismissive; possibly she had a place to sleep. “How’d you do up at the hospital?”
“What? Oh fine, fine.”
She nodded. “They’ve got a good ER.”
“Did you—I mean, I don’t remember going there.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Frank was. He could recall the blow, the moments immediately afterward. It hadn’t occurred to him that the next thing he recalled after that was sitting in the ER waiting room, bleeding into paper towels, waiting to be seen. “How’d I get up there?”
Fifty Degrees Below Page 31
