Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They pounded on a few paces thinking about it.

  “Do you have no way of getting in contact with her?”

  “No.”

  “You need that. That should be a normal part of the repertory. Next time she contacts you, you have to tell her you need a dead drop, or a dedicated cell phone, or some other way to get in touch with her.”

  “I said that up on Mount Desert Island, believe me.”

  “She was reluctant?”

  “I guess. She said she would get in touch with me. But that was four months ago.”

  “Hmm.”

  More running. Now they had been out long enough that Frank had begun to sweat.

  Edgardo said, “I wonder. You said she said she is surveiling her ex. So I wonder if you can use that surveillance of hers, and tap into it to get a message to her.”

  “Like…pin a message to his door, and hope she’ll see it and read it on camera before he gets home?”

  “Well, something like that. You could show up at his doorstep, hold up a sign, then off you go. Your gal can stop her video, if she’s got one there, and read what you’ve said.”

  “What if he’s got a camera on his place too?”

  “Well, yes, but would he watch himself like that? I’m not sure too many people take things that far.”

  “I guess not. Anyway it’s an idea. Even if he saw it too, he wouldn’t know any more than he did before. I’ll think about it.”

  “Good. You might also go back up and check that place in Maine, especially if nothing else works. If she liked it as much as she said she did, maybe she’s gone back there, or stayed all along. Sometimes being close to where you were, but not too close, is the best place to hide.”

  “Interesting,” Frank said. “I’d have to be sure not to lead him back to her though.”

  “Yes.”

  A few more strides. Frank shook his head, snorted unhappily. “It’s too complicated, this surveillance stuff. I hate it. I just want to be able to call her.”

  “You need a dead drop system. They’re easy to set up, even within the current tech.”

  “Yeah, but I need to find her first.”

  “Yeah yeah. You need to change vans too, if that’s really how they followed you north. My friend still doesn’t believe that.”

  “Yeah well they just found it again. I should get rid of it.”

  “Wait till you need to get clear, then buy an old one for cash. Or just go without a car.”

  “I need a car! I need a van, actually. God damn it.”

  “Let’s just run. That’s all the going round and round we need right now.”

  “Okay. Sorry. Thanks.”

  “No problem. We will figure something out and prevail. The world and your love life deserve no less.”

  “Shit.”

  “Did you schedule a time for that nasal surgery yet?”

  “No! Let’s just run!”

  T HE FEELING OF HELPLESSNESS and indecision grew in him until he couldn’t sleep at night. You had to decide to sleep a night through. In one of the long cold insomniac hours, listening unhappily to Rudra’s uneven snore, he realized he had to do something about finding Caroline, no matter how futile it might be, just to give himself some small release from the anxiety of the situation. So the next night, after Rudra fell asleep, he drove to Bethesda, and at three a.m. parked and got out, and walked quickly up the empty streets to the apartment building that Caroline and her ex had lived in before her disappearance.

  All empty. Streetlight across the street from the building; a dim doorway light illuminating the steps of the building. If Caroline had the place under surveillance then she would presumably have some kind of motion sensor on her camera or her data. If she saw him in that doorway, she would know that he wanted her to contact him. He was afraid that there might also be a security camera of some kind on the building, perhaps monitored by Caroline’s ex. It would make sense, if you were in that line of work and thinking along those lines. Well, shit. She definitely was surveiling the building, her ex only possibly. It had to be tried.

  He walked deliberately up to the steps of the place, looked at the address panel as if seeking a name. Shaking his head slightly, he looked out at the street and the buildings across the street, said “call me,” feeling awkward. Then off again into the night. Lots of people had to come to that door, and some would be lost, or just looking randomly at things. It was the best he could do. He couldn’t decide whether it was adequate or not. When he tried to figure out what to do he felt sick to his stomach.

  He went to work the next day wondering if she would see him. Wondering where she was and what she was thinking. Wondering how she could stay away from him so long. He wouldn’t have done it to her.

  At work they were getting things done while still settling into the Old Executive Offices. Diane and the others were obviously pleased to be there. It still amazed Frank that physical proximity mattered in questions of influence and power within the executive branch. It was as clear a sign of their primate nature as any he could think of, as it made no sense given current technology. But some previous president had kicked his science advisor out of the Old Executive Offices, and so Phil Chase’s immediate order that it return to the fourth floor of the old monstrosity, and take up one whole wing, had been an excellent sign. And there was even a practical sense in which it was useful, in that once inside the security barrier of the White House compound they were free to walk next door any time they wanted, to consult in person with the president’s various staffers, or even with the man himself, if it should come to that.

  Their new building was officially named after Eisenhower, but in practice always referred to by its older name, the Old Executive Offices. It was spectacularly ugly on the outside, disfigured by many pairs of nonfunctional pillars, some rising from ground level to the third floor, others filling embrasures on the upper stories, and all blackened as if by one of London’s coal smogs. Frank had never seen anything like it.

  Inside it was merely a very old musty office complex, retrofitted for modern conveniences a few too many years before, and otherwise about as moldy and dim as the outside of the hulk might suggest. In physical terms it was a real step down for those coming from the light-filled tower that NSF occupied in Arlington, but the political coup for science meant no complaints. All they really needed were rooms with electrical outlets and high-speed internet access, and these they had. And it had to be admitted that it was an interesting thing to look out one’s window and see the business side of the White House right there across a little concrete gap. The seat of power itself; and thus a sign that Phil Chase understood the importance of science in their current crisis. Which was an encouragement to them to throw themselves into things even more intently than before.

  So, at least, Diane seemed to take it. She had commandeered one of the offices with a window facing the White House, and set her desk in such a way that she saw it when she looked to her right. She did not actually see Phil Chase, he was so busy, but he sent e-mail questions on a regular basis, and Charlie Quibler and the rest of his staffers concerned with environmental questions were always dropping by.

  Her main conference room was across the hall from her office, and as soon as it was properly outfitted, she convened the climate group to discuss their next moves.

  Frank took notes doggedly, trying to stay focused. It looked like the Arctic ice would not break up this summer, which would set a base for an even thicker layer next winter. This meant that the northern extension of the Gulf Stream would probably be salty for the next few seasons, which meant the Gulf Stream’s petawatt per year of heat would again be transferred twenty degrees of latitude north, and this in turn would bring heat back to the Arctic, and contribute again to the ongoing overall warming that despite the harsh winters in the eastern half of North America and in Europe was still dominating world weather. To Frank it was beginning to look like a lose-lose situation, in that no matter what they did, things were li
kely to degrade. It was a war of feedback loops, and very difficult to model. Kenzo pointed to the graphs on his last slide and simply shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows. There are too many factors in play now. Cloud action by itself is enough to confound most of the models. The one thing I can say for sure is that we need to reduce carbon emissions as soon as possible. We’re in damage control mode at best, until we get to clean energy and transport. The sea water pH change alone is a huge problem, because if the ocean food chain collapses because of that, well, then…”

  “Can that danger be quantified?” Diane asked.

  “Sure, they are trying. Lots of the finest seashells are dissolved by what we’re seeing already, but it may be that more resilient ones will bloom to fill the niche. So we have some parameters, but it’s all pretty loose. What’s clear is that if the plankton and the coral reefs both die, the oceans could go catastrophic. A major mass extinction, and there’s no recovering from that. Not in less than several million years.”

  Unlike his pronouncements on the weather, Kenzo exhibited none of his usual happy air, of an impresario with a particularly spectacular circus. This stuff could not possibly be interpreted as some kind of fun, too-interesting-to-be-lamented event; this was simply bad, even dire. To see Kenzo actually being grave startled Frank, even frightened him. Kenzo Hayakawa, making a dire warning? Could there be a worse sign?

  And yet there were ongoing matters to attend to, new things to try. The springtime reports from Siberia indicated that the altered lichens the Russians had released the previous summer were continuing to grow faster than predicted. “Like pond scum,” as one of the Russian scientists reported. This was very unlike the pace of growth and dispersion for ordinary lichens, and seemed to confirm the suggestion that the bioengineered version was behaving more like an algae or a fungus than like the symbiosis of the two typically did. That was interesting, perhaps ominous; Kenzo thought it could cause a major carbon drawdown from the atmosphere if it continued. “Unless it kills the whole Siberian forest, and then who knows? Maybe instead of gray goo, we die by green goo, eh?”

  “Please, Kenzo.”

  On other fronts the news was just as ambiguous. Vicious infighting at the Department of Energy, the nuclear folks still doing their best to forestall the alternatives crowd; Diane was trying to convince the president to order Energy to develop clean energy ASAP—first finding bridge technologies, moving away from what they had now while still using it—then the next real thing, the next iteration on the way to a completely sustainable technology. Diane thought it would take two or three major iterations. Lots of federal agencies would have to be entrained to this effort, of course, but DOE was crucial, given that energy was at the heart of their problem. But all this would depend on who Phil appointed to be the new Energy Secretary. If that person were on board with the program, off they would all go; if opposed, more war of the agencies. One could only hope that Phil would not tie down his people in such a self-defeating way. But campaign debts were owed, and Big Oil had a lot of people still in positions of great power. And Phil had not yet appointed his Energy Secretary.

  After a meeting running over the list of possible candidates for this crucial cabinet position, Diane came by Frank’s new office, which had no living-room feel whatsoever—in fact it looked like he had been condemned to clerk in some bureaucratic hell, right next to Bob Cratchit or Bartelby the Scrivener.

  Even Diane seemed to notice this, to the point of saying “It’s a pretty weird old facility.”

  “Yes. I don’t think I’ll ever like it like I did NSF.”

  “That turned out pretty well, in terms of the building. Although that too was a political exile.”

  “So Anna told me.”

  “Want to go out and hunt for a new coffee place?”

  “Sure.”

  Frank got his windbreaker from its hook and they left the building and then the compound. Just south of the White House was the Ellipse, and then the Washington Monument, towering over the scene like an enormous sundial on an English lawn. The buildings around the White House included the Treasury, the World Bank, and any number of other massive white buildings, filling the blocks so that every street was as if walled. These big expanses of granite and concrete and marble were very bad in human terms; even Arlington was better.

  But there were many coffee shops and delis tucked into the ground floor spaces, and so the two of them hiked around in an oblong pattern, looking at the possibilities and chatting. Nothing looked appealing, and finally Diane suggested one of the little National Park tourist kiosks out on the Mall itself. They were already east of the White House, and when they came out on the great open expanse into the low sun they could see much of official Washington, with the Capitol and the Washington Monument towering over everything else. That was the dominant impression Frank had of downtown at this point; the feel of it was determined principally by the height limit, which held all private buildings to a maximum of twelve stories, well under the height of the Washington Monument. The downtown was as if sheered off by a knife at that height, an unusual sight in a modern city, giving it a strangely nineteenth-century look, as for instance Paris right before the arrival of the Eiffel Tower. Once away from the federal district, this invisible ceiling gave things a more human scale than the skyscraper downtowns of other cities, and Frank liked that quality, even though the result was squat or unwieldy.

  Diane nodded as he tried to express these mixed feelings. She pointed out the lion statues surrounding Ulysses S. Grant in front of the Capitol: “See, they’re Disney lions!”

  “Like the ones on the Connecticut Avenue bridge.”

  “I wonder which came first, Disney or these guys?”

  “These must have, right?”

  “I don’t know. Disney lions have looked the same at least since Dumbo.”

  “Maybe Disney came here and saw these.”

  Within a week or so they had worked up a new traditional walk together. One afternoon as they drank their coffee, Diane suggested they return to work by way of a pass through the National Gallery annex; and there they found a Frederic Church exhibit. “Hey!” Frank said, and then had to lie a little bit, explaining that he had learned about Church on Mount Desert Island, long ago. As they walked through he remembered his intense time on the island, which he now saw through the eyes of the painter who had invented rusticating. His paintings were superb, far better than Bierstadt or Homer or any other American landscape artist Frank had ever seen. Church had been able to put an almost photorealist technique in the service of a Transcendentalist eye; it was the visionary, sacred landscape of Emerson and Thoreau, right there on the walls of the National Gallery. “My God,” Frank said more than once. This was also the time of Darwin and Humboldt; indeed the wall-sized “Heart of the Andes,” fifteen feet high and twenty wide, stood there like some stupendous PowerPoint slide illustrating all of natural selection at once, both data and theory.

  “My—God.”

  “It’s like the IMAX movie of its time,” Diane said.

  In the rooms beyond they saw Church travel and grow old, and become almost hallucinogenic in his coloring, like Galen Rowell after he discovered Fujichrome. These were the best landscape paintings Frank had ever seen. A giant close-up of the water leaping off the lip of Niagara Falls; the Parthenon at sunset; waves striking the Maine coast; every scene leaped off the wall, and Frank goggled at them. Diane laughed at him, but he could not restrain himself. How had he never been exposed to such an artist as this? What was American education anyway, that they could all grow up and not be steeped in Emerson and Thoreau and Audubon and Church? It was like inheriting billions and then forgetting it.

  Then Diane put her hand to his arm and directed him out of the gallery and back toward their new office. Back into the blackened old building, if not arm in arm, then shoulder to shoulder.

  Their meeting that evening had to do with the latest from Antarctica, compiled by NSF’s Antarctic d
ivision from the austral summer just past.

  Much of the research had been devoted to trying to determine how much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might come off, and how fast it would happen. The abstract of the summary made it clear that the several big ice streams that ran like immense glaciers through more stationary parts of the ice sheet had accelerated yet again, beyond even the earlier two accelerations documented in previous decades. The first acceleration had followed the rapid detachment of the two big floating ice shelves, the Ross and the Weddell. Their absence had destabilized the grounding line of the WAIS, which rested on land that was a bit below sea level, and so was susceptible at the edges to the lifting of tides and tearing of currents. As the ice margins tore away and followed the ice shelves out to sea, that exposed more grounded ice to the same tides and currents.

  What they had found this last summer was that all Antarctic temperatures, in air, water, and ice, had risen, and this was allowing melt water on the surface of the WAIS to run down holes and cracks, where it froze and split the ice around it further. When this “water wedging” reached all the way through the ice it poured down and pooled underneath, thus floating the broken ice a bit and lubricating its slide into the sea.

  Why the ice streams moved so much faster than the surrounding ice was still not fully understood, but some were now postulating under-ice watersheds, where melt water was flowing downstream, carrying the ice over it along. This would explain why the ice streams were now acting more like rivers than glaciers. There were different hydrodynamics resulting in different speeds.

  Diane interrupted the two glaciologists making the report before they got too deep into the mysteries of their calling. “So what kind of sea-level rise are we looking at?” she asked. “How much, and when?”

  The glaciologists and the NOAA people looked around at each other, then made a kind of collective shrug. Frank grinned to see it.

  “It’s difficult to say,” one finally ventured. “It depends so much on stuff we don’t know.”