Читать книгу Sixty Days and Counting - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 6

Again foul weather shall not change my mind, But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.

—Thoreau

Against the pressure at the front of one’s thoughts must be held the power of cognition, as a shield. Cognition that could see its own weak points, and attempt to work around them.

Examination of the relevant literature, however, revealed that there were cognitive illusions that were as strong or even stronger than optical illusions. This was an instructive analogy, because there were optical illusions in which one’s sight was fooled no matter how fully one understood the illusion and its effect, and tried to compensate for it. Spin a disk with certain black and white patterns on it, and colors appear undeniably to the eye. Stand at the bottom of a cliff and it will appear to be about a thousand feet tall, no matter its real height; mountaineers called this foreshortening, and Frank knew it could not be avoided. From the bottom of El Capitan, one looked up three thousand feet, and it looked like about a thousand. In Klein Scheidegg one looked up the north face of the Eiger, and it looked about a thousand feet tall. You could not alter that even by focusing on the strangely compact details of the face’s upper surface. In Thun, twenty miles away, you could look south across the Thunersee and see that the north face of the Eiger was a stupendous face, six thousand feet tall and looking every inch of it. But if you returned to Klein Scheidegg, so would the foreshortening. You could not make the adjustment.

There were many cognitive errors just like those optical errors. The human mind had grown on the savannah, and there were kinds of thinking not natural to it. Calculating probabilities, thinking about statistical effects; the cognitive scientists had cooked up any number of logic problems, and tested great numbers of subjects with them, and even working with statisticians as their subjects they could find the huge majority prone to some fairly basic cognitive errors, which they had given names like anchoring, ease of representation, the law of small number, the fallacy of near certainty, asymmetric similarity, trust in analogy, neglect of base rates, and so on.

One test that had caught even Frank, despite his vigilance, was the three-box game. Three boxes, all closed, one ten-dollar bill hidden in one of them; the experimenter knows which. Subject chooses one box, at that point left closed. Experimenter opens one of the other two boxes, always an empty one. Subject then offered a chance to either stick with his first choice, or switch to the other closed box. Which should he do?

Frank had decided it didn’t matter; fifty-fifty either way. He thought it through.

But each box at the start had a one-third chance of being the one. When subject chooses one, the other two have two-thirds of a chance of being right. After experimenter opens one of those two boxes, always empty, those two boxes still have two-thirds of a chance, now concentrated in the remaining unchosen box, while the subject’s original choice still had its original one-third chance. So one should always change one’s choice!

Shit. Well, put it that way, it was undeniable. Though it still seemed wrong. But this was the point. Human cognition had all kinds of blind spots. One analyst of the studies had concluded by saying that we simulate in our actions what we wish had already happened. We act, in short, by projecting our desires.

Well – but of course. Wasn’t that the point?

But clearly it could lead to error. The question was, could one’s desires be defined in such a way as to suggest actions that were truly going to help make them come to pass in one of those futures still truly possible, given the conditions of the present?

And could that be done if there was a numb spot behind one’s nose – a pressure on one’s thoughts – a suspension of one’s ability to decide anything?

And could these cognitive errors exist for society as a whole, as well as for an individual? Some spoke of ‘cognitive mapping’ when they discussed taking social action – a concept that had been transferred from geography to politics, and even to epistemology, as far as Frank could tell. One mapped the unimaginable immensity of postmodern civilization (or, reality) not by knowing all of it, which was impossible, but by marking routes through it. So that one was not like the GPS or the radar system, but rather the traffic controller, or the pilot.

At that point it became clear even mapping was an analogy. Anna would not think much of it. But everyone needed a set of operating procedures to navigate the day. A totalizing theory forming the justification for a rubric for the daily decisions. The science of that particular Wednesday. Using flawed equipment (the brain, civilization) to optimize results. Most adaptive practices. Robustness.

Something from ecology, from Aldo Leopold: What’s good is what’s good for the land.

Something from Rudra (although he said from the Dalai Lama, or the Buddha): Try to do good for other people. Your happiness lies there.

Try it and see. Make the experiment and analyze it. Try again. Act on your desires.

So what do you really want?

And can you really decide?

One day when Frank woke up in the garden shed with Rudra, it took him a while to remember where he was – long enough that when he sat up he was actively relieved to be Frank Vanderwal, or anybody.

Then he had trouble figuring out which pants to put on, something he had never considered before in his life; and then he realized he did not want to go to work, although he had to. Was this unusual? He wasn’t sure.

As he munched on a power bar and waited for his bedside coffee machine to provide, he clicked on his laptop, and after the portentous chord announced the beginning of his cyber-day, he went to emersonfortheday.net.

‘Hey, Rudra, are you awake?’

‘Always.’

‘Listen to this. It’s Emerson, talking about our parcellated mind theory:

“It is the largest part of a man that is not inventoried. He has many enumerable parts: he is social, professional, political, sectarian, literary, and is this or that set and corporation. But after the most exhausting census has been made, there remains as much more which no tongue can tell. And this remainder is that which interests. Far the best part of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed, before him. This dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility.”’

‘Maybe so,’ Rudra said. ‘But whole sight is good too. Being one.’

‘But isn’t it interesting he talks about it in the same terms.’

‘It is common knowledge. Anyone knows that.’

‘I guess. I think Emerson knows a lot of things I don’t know.’

He was a man who had spent time in the forest, too. Frank liked to see the signs of this: ‘The man who rambles in the woods seems to be the first man that ever entered a grove, his sensations and his world are so novel and strange.’ That was right; Frank knew that feeling. Hikes in the winter forest, so surreal – Emerson knew about them. He had seen the woods at twilight. ‘Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon; incredibly excellent topaz and ruby at four o’clock; cold and shabby at six.’ The quick strangeness of the world, how it came on you all of a sudden – now, for Frank, the feeling started on waking in the morning. Coming up blank, the primal man, the first man ever to wake. Strange indeed, not to know who or what you were.

Often these days he felt he should be moving back out into the park, and living in his treehouse. That would mean leaving the Khembalis, however, and that was bad. But on the other hand, it would in some ways be a relief. He had been living with them for almost a year now, hard to believe but it was true, and they were so crowded. They could use all the extra space they could get. Besides, it felt like time to get back outdoors and into the wind again. Spring was coming, spring and all.

But there was Rudra to consider. As his roommate, Frank was part of his care. He was old, frail, sleeping a lot. Frank was his companion and his friend, his English teacher and his Tibetan student. Moving out would inevitably disrupt that situation.

He read on for a while, then realized he was hungry, and that in poking around and thinking about Emerson and Thoreau, and cognitive blind spots, he had been reading for over an hour. Rudra had gotten up and slipped out. ‘Aack!’ Time to get up! Seize the day!

Up and out then. Another day. He had to consult with Edgardo about the Caroline situation. Best get something to eat first. But – from where?

He couldn’t decide.

A minute or two later, angrily, and before even actually getting up, he grabbed his cell phone and made the call. He called his doctor’s office, and found that, regarding a question like this, the doctor couldn’t see him for a week.

That was fine with Frank. He had made the decision and made the call. Caroline would have no reason to reproach him, and he could go back to the way things were. Not that something didn’t have to be done. It was getting ridiculous. It was a – an obstacle. A disability. An injury, not just to his brain, but to his thinking.

That very afternoon, the urgency in him about Caroline being so sharp and recurrent, he made arrangements to go out on a run with Edgardo. It was an afternoon so cold that no one but Kenzo would have gone out with them, and he was away at a conference, so after they cleared themselves with the wands (which Frank now questioned as fully reliable indicators), off they went.

The two of them ran side by side through the streets of Arlington, bundled up in nearly Arctic running gear, their heavy wool caps rolled up just far enough to expose their ears’ bottom halves, which allowed sound into the eardrums so they could hear each other over the noise of traffic without shouting or completely freezing their ears. Very soon they would be moving with Diane over to the Old Executive Offices, right next door to the White House; this would be one of their last runs on this route. But it was such a lame route that neither would miss it.

Frank explained what had happened in Maine, in short rhythmic phrases synchronized with his stride. It was such a relief to be able to tell somebody about it. Almost a physical relief. One vented, as they said.

‘So how the heck did they follow me?’ he demanded at the end of his tale. ‘I thought your friend said I was clean.’

‘He thought you were,’ Edgardo said. ‘And it isn’t certain you were followed. It could have been a coincidence.’

Frank shook his head.

‘Well, there may be other ways you are chipped, or they may indeed have just followed you physically. We’ll work on that, but the question now becomes what has she done.’

‘She said she has a Plan C that no one can trace. And she said it would get her down in this area. That she’d get in touch with me. I don’t know how that will work. Anyway now I’m wondering if we can, you know, root these guys out. Maybe sic the president on them.’

‘Well,’ Edgardo said, elongating the word for about a hundred yards. ‘These kinds of black operations are designed to be insulated, you know. To keep those above from responsibility for them.’

‘But surely if there was a problem, if you really tried to hunt things down from above? Following the money trail, for instance?’

‘Maybe. Black budgets are everywhere. Have you asked Charlie?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe you should, if you feel comfortable doing that. Phil Chase has a million things on his plate. It might take someone like Charlie to get his attention.’

Frank nodded. ‘Well, whatever happens, we need to stop those guys.’

‘We?’

‘I mean, they need to be stopped. And no one else is doing it. And, I don’t know – maybe you and your friends from your DARPA days, or wherever, might be able to make a start. You’ve already made the start, I mean, and could carry it forward from there.’

‘Well,’ Edgardo said. ‘I shouldn’t speak to that.’

Frank focused on the run. They were down to the river path now, and he could see the Potomac was frozen over again, looking like a discolored white sheet that had been pulled over the river’s surface and then tacked down roughly at the banks. The sight reminded him of Long Pond, and the shock of seeing those men striding across the ice toward them; his pulse jumped, but his hands and feet got colder. The tip of his nose, still a bit numb at the best of times, was even number than usual. He squeezed and tugged it to get some feeling and blood flow.

‘Nose still numb?’

‘Yes.’

Edgardo broke into the song ‘Comfortably Numb’: ‘I – – I, have become, comfortably numb,’ then scat singing the famous guitar solo, ‘Da daaaa, da da da da da-da-daaaaaa,’ exaggerating Gilmour’s bent notes. ‘Okay! Okay, okay, Is there anybody in there?’ Abruptly he broke off. ‘Well, I will go talk to my friend whom you met. He’s into this stuff and he has an interest. His group is still looking at the election problem, for sure.’

‘Do you think I could meet him again? To explore some strategies?’ And ask a bunch of questions, he didn’t say.

‘Maybe. Let me talk to him. It may be pointless to meet. It depends. I’ll check. Meanwhile you should try your other options.’

‘I don’t know that I have any.’

‘Are you still having trouble making decisions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go see your doctor, then.’

‘I did! I mean, I’ve got an appointment. The time has almost come.’

Edgardo laughed.

‘Please,’ Frank said. ‘I’m trying. I made the call.’

But in fact, when the time came for his doctor’s appointment, he went in unhappily. Surely, he thought obstinately, deciding to go to the doctor meant he was well enough to decide things!

So he felt ridiculous as he described the problem to the doctor, a young guy who was looking rather dubious. Frank felt his account was sketchy at best, as he very seldom tasted blood at the back of his throat anymore. But he could not complain merely of feeling indecisive, so he emphasized the tasting a little more than the most recent data would truly support, which made him feel even more foolish. He hated visiting the doctor at any time, so why was he there just to exaggerate an occasional symptom? Maybe his decision-making capability was damaged after all! Which meant it was good to have come in. And yet here he was making things up. Although he was only trying to physicalize the problem, he told himself. To describe real symptoms.

In any case, the doctor offered no opinion, but only gave him a referral to an ear nose and throat guy. It was the same one Frank had seen immediately after his accident. Frank steeled himself, called again (two decisions?) and found that here the next appointment available was a month away. Happily he wrote down the date and forgot about it.

Or would have; except now he was cast back into the daily reality of struggling to figure out what to do. Hoping every morning that Emerson or Thoreau would tell him. So he didn’t really forget about the appointment, but it was scheduled and he didn’t have to go for a long time, so he could be happy. Happy until the next faint taste of old blood slid down the back of his throat, like the bitterness of fear itself, and he would check and see the day was getting nearer with a mix of relief and dread.

Once he noticed the date when talking with Anna, because she said something about not making it through the winter in terms of several necessary commodities that people had taken to hoarding. She had gotten into studying hoarding in the social science literature. Hoarding, Anna said, represented a breakdown in the social contract which even their economy’s capacity for over-production in many items could not compensate for.

‘It’s another case of prisoner’s dilemma,’ Frank said. ‘Everyone’s choosing the “always defect” option as being the safest. Or the one in which you rely least on others.’

‘Maybe.’

Anna was not one for analogies. She was as literal-minded a person as Frank had ever met; it was always good to remember that she had started her scientific training as a chemist. Metaphors bounced off her like spears off bulletproof glass. If she wanted to understand hoarding, then she googled ‘hoarding,’ and when she saw links to mathematical studies of the economics and social dynamics of ‘hoarding in shortage societies,’ those were the ones she clicked on, even if they tended to be old work from the socialist and post-socialist literature. Those studies had had a lot of data to work with, sadly, and she found their modeling interesting, and spoke to Frank of things like choice rubrics in variable information states, which she thought he might be able to formalize as algorithms.

‘It’s called “always defect,”’ Frank insisted.

‘Okay, but then look at what that leads to.’

‘All right.’

Clearly Anna was incensed at how unreasonable people were being. To her it was a matter of being rational, of being logical. ‘Why don’t they just do the math?’ she demanded.

A rhetorical question, Frank judged. Though he wished he could answer it, rhetorically or not, in a way that did not depress him. His investigations into cognition studies were not exactly encouraging. Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape.

After this conversation, Frank recalled her saying ‘end of the winter’ as if that were near, and he checked his desk calendar – the date circled for his ENT appointment was circled there, and not too far away – and suddenly he realized that in America, when it came to health care, the most important product of them all, they always operated in a shortage society.

In any case, he went to the doctor when the day came. Ear nose and throat – but what about brain? He read Walden in the waiting room, was ushered into an examination room to wait and read some more, then five minutes of questions and inspections, and the diagnosis was made: he needed to see another specialist. A neurologist, in fact, who would have to take a look at some scans, possibly CT, PET, SPECT, MRI; the brain guy would make the calls. The ENT guy would give him a referral, he said, and Frank would have to see where they could fit him in. Scans; the reading and analysis of the brain guy; then perhaps a re-examination by the ENT. How long would it all take? Try it and see. They hurried things up in scheduling when there were questions about the brain, but only so much could be done; there were a lot of other people out there with equally serious problems, or worse ones.

So, Frank thought as he went back to work in his office. You could buy DVD players for thirty dollars and flat-screen TVs for a hundred, also a million other consumer items that would help you to experience vicariously the lives that your work and wages did not give you to live (that T-shirt seen on Connecticut Avenue, ‘Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do’) – everything was cheap, in overproduction – except you lived in a permanent shortage of doctors, artificially maintained. Despite the high cost of medical insurance (if you could get it) you had to wait weeks or months on tests to find out how your bodies were sick or injured, when such events befell you. Even though it was possible to measure statistically how much health care a given population was going to need, and provide it accordingly.

But there was nothing for it but to think about other things, when he could; and when not, to bide his time and try to work, like everyone else.

It had been every kind of winter so far, warmer, drier, stormier, colder. Bad for agriculture, but good for conversation. In the first week of March, a cold front swept south and knocked them back into full winter lockdown, the river frozen, the city frozen, every Metro vent steaming frost, which then froze and fell to the ground as white dust. The whole city was frosted, and with all the steam curling out of the ground, looked as if it had been built atop a giant hot springs. When the sun came out everything glittered whitely, then prismatically when the melting began, then went gray when low stratus clouds obscured the sun.

For Frank this was another ascent into what he thought of as high latitude or high altitude: a return to the high country one way or another, because weather was landscape, in that however the land lay underfoot, it was the weather that gave you a sense of where you were.

If it was below zero, then you were in the arctic. You found yourself on the cold hill’s side, in a dreamscape as profound as any imaginable. One recalled in the body itself that the million-year ballooning of the brain, the final expansion with its burst into language and art and culture, had occurred in the depths of an ice age, when it had been like this all the time. No wonder the mind lit up like a fuse in such air!

And so Frank got out his snowshoes and gaiters and ski poles, and drove over to Rock Creek Park and went out for hikes, just as he had the winter before. And though this year there was not that sense of discovery in the activity, it was certainly just as cold, or almost. Wind barreling down the great ravine from the north, the icy new rip in the canyon looking from its rim just as blasted by the great flood as the day the waters had receded.

The park was emptier this year, however. Or maybe it was just that there was no one at site 21. But many of the other sites were empty as well. Maybe it was just that during weeks this cold, people simply found shelter. That had happened the previous winter as well. In theory one could sleep out in temperatures like this, if one had the right gear and the right expertise, but it would have taken a great deal of time and energy to accomplish, and would still have been somewhat dangerous; it would have to become one’s main activity. And no doubt some people were doing it; but most had found refuge in the coffee shops by day and the shelters and feral houses by night, waiting out the coldest part of the winter indoors. As Frank had done, when he had been taken in by the Khembalis.

Leaving, in these most frigid days, the animals. He saw the aurochs once; and a Canada lynx (I call it the Concord lynx, Thoreau said), as still as a statue of itself; and four or five foxes in their winter white. And a moose, a porcupine, coyote, and scads of white-tailed deer; also rabbits. These last two were the obvious food species for what predators there were. Most of the exotic ferals were gone, either recaptured or dead. Although once he spotted what he thought was a snow leopard; and people said the jaguar was still at large.

As were the frisbee guys. One Saturday Frank heard them before he saw them – hoots over a rise to the north – Spencer’s distinctive yowl, which meant a long putt had gone in. Cheered by the sound, Frank poled around the point in the ravine wall, snowshoes sinking deep in the drifts there, and suddenly there they were, running on little plastic snowshoes, without poles, and throwing red, pink and orange frisbees, which blazed through the air like beacons from another universe.

‘Hi guys!’ Frank called.

‘Frank!’ they cried. ‘Come on!’

‘You bet,’ Frank said. He left his poles and daypack under a tree at site 18, and borrowed one of Robert’s disks.

Off they went. Quickly it became clear to Frank that when the snow was as hard as it was, running on snowshoes was about as efficient as walking on them. One tended to leap out of each step before the snowshoe had sunk all the way in, thus floating a bit higher than otherwise.

Then he threw a drive straight into a tree trunk, and broke the disk in half. Robert just laughed, and Spencer tossed him a spare. The guys did not over-value any individual disk. They were like golf balls, made to be lost.

Work as hard as they did, and you would sweat – just barely – after which, when you stopped, sweat would chill you. As soon as they were done, therefore, Frank found out when they thought they would play snow golf again, then bid farewell and hustled away, back to his daypack and poles. A steady hike then, to warm back up: plunging poles in to pull him uphill, to brace him downhill; little glissades, tricky traverses, yeoman ups; quickly he was warm again and feeling strong and somehow full, the joy of the frisbee buzzing through the rest of the afternoon. The joy of the hunt and the run and the cold.

He walked by his tree, looked up at it longingly. He wanted to move back out there. But he wanted to stay with Rudra too. And Caroline’s ex might be keeping watch out here. The thought made him stop and look around. No one in sight. He would have to wand his tree to see if there was anything there. The floorboards of the treehouse were visible, at least if you knew where to look, and of course Frank did, so it was hard for him to judge how obvious they were to others. Wherever he went in the park, if his tree was in sight, he could see various bits of the little black triangle that was his true home.

The following Monday he made sure to arrange a run with Edgardo again. The need to speak securely was going to drive them to new levels of fitness.

As they trailed Kenzo and Bob down the narrow path next to Route 66, he said, ‘So did you ever hear anything back from your friend?’

‘Yes. A little. I was going to tell you.’

‘What?’

‘He said, the problem with taking the top-down approach is the operation might be legal, and also legally secret, such that even the President might have trouble finding out about it.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No. He said that most presidents want it that way, so they aren’t breaking the law by knowing, if the operation chooses to do something illegal for the higher good. So, Chase might have to order a powerful group right under his command to seek something like this out.’

‘Jesus. Are there any such powerful groups?’

‘Oh sure. He would have his choice of three or four. But this presumes that you could get him that interested in the matter. The thing you have to remember is, a president has a lot on his plate. He has a staff to filter it all and prioritize what gets to him, so there are levels to get through. So, these people we’re interested in know that, and they trust he would never go after something this little.’

‘Something as little as stolen presidential elections?’

‘Well, maybe, but how much would he want to know about that, when he just won?’

They paced on while Frank tried to digest this.

‘So did your friend have any other ideas?’

‘Yes. He said, it might be possible to get these people embroiled in some kind of trouble with an agency that is less black than they are. Some kind of turf battle or the like.’

‘Ahhh …’

Quickly Frank began to see possibilities. While at NSF, Diane had been fighting other agencies all over the place, usually David-and-Goliath type actions, as most of NSF’s natural rivals in the federal bureaucracy were far bigger than it. And size mattered in the Feds, as elsewhere, because it meant money. This little gang of security thugs Frank had tangled with were surely treading on some other more legitimate agency’s turf. Possibly they had even started in some agency and gone rambo without the knowledge of their superiors.

‘That’s a good idea. Did he have any specific suggestions?’

‘He did, and he was going to work up some more. It turns out he has reasons to dislike these guys beyond the destruction-of-democracy stuff.’

‘Oh good.’

‘Yes. It is best never to rely on people standing on principle.’

‘So true,’ Frank said grimly.

This set off Edgardo’s raucous laugh and his little running prance of cynical delight. ‘Ah yes, you are learning! You are beginning to see! My friend said he will give me a menu of options soon.’

‘I hope it’s real soon. Because my friend’s out there enacting her Plan C, and I’m worried. I mean, she’s a data analyst, when you get right down to it. She isn’t any kind of field spook. What if her Plan C is as bad as her Plan B was?’

‘That would be bad. But my friend has been looking into that too. I asked him to, and he did, and he said he can’t see any sign of her. She seems to be really off the net this time.’

‘That’s good. But her ex might know more than your friend. And she said she’d be around here somewhere.’

‘Yes. Well, I’ll go see my friend as soon as I can. I have to follow our protocol though, unless it’s an emergency. We only usually talk once a week.’

‘I understand,’ Frank said, then wondered if he did.

With Chase now in office the new administration’s activity level was manic but focused. Among many more noted relocations, Diane and all the rest of the science advisor’s team moved into their new offices in the Old Executive Building, just to the west of the White House and within the White House security barrier.

So Frank gave up his office at NSF, which had served as the living room and office in his parcellated house. As he moved out he felt a bit stunned, even dismayed. He had to admit that the set of habits that had been that modular house was now completely demolished. He followed Diane to their new building, wondering if he had made the right decision to go with her. Of course his real home now was the Khembali embassy’s garden shed. He was not really homeless. Maybe it was a bad thing not to have rented a place somewhere. If he had kept looking he could have found something.

Then Diane convened a week’s worth of meetings with all the agencies and departments she wanted to deal with frequently, and during that week he saw that being inside the White House compound was a good thing, and that he needed to be there for Diane. She needed the help; there were literally scores of agencies that had to be gathered into the effort they had in mind, and many of them had upper managements appointed during the years of executive opposition to climate mitigation. Even after the long winter, not all of them were convinced they needed to change. ‘They’re being actively passive-aggressive,’ Diane said with a wry grin. ‘War of the agencies, big time.’

‘Such trivial crap they’re freaking about,’ Frank complained. He was amazed it didn’t bother her more. ‘EPA trying to keep USGS interpreting pesticide levels they’re finding, because interpretation is EPA’s job? Energy and Navy fighting over who gets to do new nuclear? It’s always turf battles.’

She waved them all away with a hand, seemingly un-annoyed. ‘Turf battles matter in Washington, I’m sorry to say. We’re going to have to get things done using these people. Chase has to make a lot of appointments fast for us to have any chance of doing that. And we’ll have to be scrupulous in keeping to the boundaries. It’s no time to be changing the bureaucracy too much; we’ve got bigger fish to fry. I plan to try to keep all these folks happy about their power base holding fast, but just get them on board to help the cause.’

It made sense when she put it that way, and after that he understood better her manner with the old guard technocracy they were so often dealing with. She was always conciliatory and unassuming, asking questions, then laying out her ideas more as questions rather than commands, and always confining herself to whatever that particular agency was specifically involved in.

‘Not that that’s what I always do,’ Diane said, when Frank once made this observation to her. She looked ashamed.

‘What do you mean?’ Frank asked quickly.

‘Well, I had a bad meeting with the deputy secretary of Energy, Holderlin. He’s a hold-over, and he was trying to disparage the alternatives program. So I got him fired.’

‘You did?’

‘I guess so. I sent a note over to the president describing the problem I was having, and the next thing I knew he was out.’

‘Do people know that’s how it happened?’

‘I think so.’

‘Well – good!’

She laughed ruefully. ‘I’ve had that thought myself. But it’s a strange feeling.’

‘Get used to it. We probably need a whole bunch of people fired. You’re the one who always calls it the war of the agencies.’

‘Yes, but I never had the power to get people in other agencies fired before.’

To change the subject to something that would make her more comfortable, Frank said, ‘I’m having some luck getting the military interested. They’re the eight-hundred pound gorilla in this zoo. If they were to come down definitively on the side of our efforts, as being a critical aspect of national defense, then these other agencies would either get on board or become irrelevant.’

‘Yes, maybe,’ Diane said. ‘But what they are you talking about? The Joint Chiefs?’

‘Well, to an extent. Although I’ve been starting with people I know, like General Wracke. Also meeting some of the chief scientists. They’re not much in the decision-making loop, but they might be easier to convince about the science. I show them the Marshall Report they did internally, rating climate change as more of a defense threat than terrorism. It seems to help.’

‘Can you make a copy of that for distribution?’

‘Yes. It would also make sense to reach out to all the scientists in government, and ask them to get behind the National Academy statement on the climate for starters, then help us to work on the agencies they’re involved with.’

‘Sure. But they don’t decide, and there’s management who will be against us no matter what their scientists say, because that’s why they were appointed in the first place.’

‘There’s where your firing one of them may have an effect.’ Frank grinned and Diane made a face.

‘Okay, fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s time to talk to Energy then. If they’re scared that they’ll lose their funding, that’s the moment to strike.’

‘Which means we should be talking to the OMB?’

‘Yes. We definitely need the OMB on our side. That should be possible, if Chase has appointed the right people to head it.’

‘And then the appropriations committees.’

‘The best chance there is to talk to their staffs, and to win some new seats in the mid-term election. For Chase’s first two years, it’ll be a bit uphill when it comes to Congress.’

‘At least he’s got the Senate.’

‘Yes, but really you need both.’

‘Hm.’

Frank saw it anew: hundreds of parts to the federal government, each part holding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, jockeying to determine what kind of picture they all made together. War of the agencies, the Hobbesian struggle of all against all – it needed to be changed to some kind of dance. Made coherent. Lased.

In his truncated time off it was hard to get many hours in with Nick any more, as Nick was often busy with other people in FOG, including a youth group, as well as with all his other activities at school and home. They still held to a meeting at the zoo every third Saturday morning, more or less, starting with an hour at the tiger enclosure, taking notes and photos, then doing a cold-certification course, or walking up to the beaver pond to see what they might see. But that time quickly passed, and then Nick was off. Frank missed their longer days out together, but it wasn’t something that he could press about. His friendship with the Quiblers was unusual enough as it was to make him feel awkward, and he didn’t want them wondering if he had some kind of peculiar thing going on about Nick – really the last thing that would occur to him, although he enjoyed the boy’s company greatly. He was a funny kid.

More likely a suspicion was that Frank might have some kind of a thing for Anna, because there was some truth to it. Although it was not something he would ever express or reveal in any way, it was only just a sort of heightened admiration for a friend, an admiration that included an awareness of the friend’s nice figure and her passionate feelings about things, and most of all, her quick and sharp mind. An awareness of just how smart she was. Indeed, here was the one realm in which Frank felt he must know Anna better than Charlie did – in effect Charlie didn’t know enough to know just how smart Anna was. It was like it had been for Frank when trying to evaluate Chessman as a chess player. Once while waiting for Nick to get ready, Frank had posed the three-box problem to Anna, and she had repeated his scenario carefully, and squinted, and then said ‘I guess you’d want to change to that other box, then?’ and he had laughed and put out his hands and bowed like the kids on Saturday Night Live. And this was just the smallest kind of indicator of her quickness – of a quality of thought Frank would have to characterize as boldly methodical.

Charlie only grinned at the exchange and said, ‘She does that kind of thing all the time.’ He would never see the style of her thought well enough to know how to admire it. Indeed what he called her quibbling was often his own inability to see a thrust right to the heart of a problem he had not noticed. She had married a man who was blind in exactly the area she was most dashing.