Fifty Degrees Below (38 page)

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! The 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?”

“We walked you up. You were okay, just bleeding a lot.”

“I don’t remember that part.”

“Concussion, I’m sure. You got hammered.”

“Did you see what hit me?”

“No, I was tucked down in a lay-by during the fight. Zeno and Andy found you afterward and we took you on up. You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“That’s concussion for you.”

One day at NSF he worked on the photovoltaic cell trials. Department of Energy was now squawking that this was their bailiwick. Then his alarm went off and he went down and sat in his van.

He couldn’t figure out what to do next.

He could taste blood at the back of his throat.

What did that mean? Was something not healing right, some ruptured blood vessel still leaking? Was there pressure on his brain?

Blood was leaking, that was for sure. But of course there must still be swelling inside; he still had a fat lip, after all, and why should swelling inside go away any faster? His black eyes were still visible, though they were turning purple and brown. Who knew? And what now?

He could go to the doctor’s. He could visit the Quiblers, or the Khembalis. He could go to his tree house. He could go back up to work. He could go out to dinner. He could sleep right there in the NSF basement, in the back of his van.

The sense of indecision hadn’t been like this for a while. He was pretty sure of that. Recalling the past week, it seemed to him it had been getting better. Now worse. The stab of elevated heart rate galvanized him again. Maybe this was what they meant by the word terror.

He felt chilled. And in fact it was freezing in his van. Should he put on his down jacket, or—but stop. He grabbed the down jacket and wrestled his way into it, muttering “Do the obvious things, Vanderwal, just do the first fucking thing that pops into your head. Worry about it later. Leap before you look.”

Indecision. Before his accident he had been much more decisive. Wait, was that right? No. That could not be quite true. Maybe it was before he came to Washington that he had been sure of himself. But had he been? Had he ever been?

For a second he wasn’t sure of anything. He thought back over the years, reviewing his actions, and wondered suddenly if he had ever been quite sane. He had made any number of bad decisions, especially in the past few years, but also long before that. All his life, but getting worse, as in a progressive disease. Why would he have risked Marta’s part of their equity without asking her? Why would he ever have gotten involved with Marta in the first place? How could he have thought it was okay to sabotage Pierzinski’s grant proposal? What had he been thinking, how had he justified it?

He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought about it; one might even say that he had managed to avoid thinking about it. It was a kind of mental skill, a negative capability. Agile in avoiding the basic questions. He had considered himself a rational, and, yes, a good person, and ignored all signs to the contrary. He had made up internal excuses, apparently. All at the unconscious level; in a world of internal divisions. A parcellated mind indeed. But brain functions
were
parcellated, and often unconscious. Then they got correlated at higher levels—that was consciousness, that was choice. Maybe that higher system could be damaged even when most of the parts were okay.

He twisted the rearview mirror around, stared at himself in it. For a while there in his youth he would stare into his eyes in a mirror and feel that he was meeting some Other. After returning from a climb where a falling rock had missed him by a foot—those kinds of moments.

But after Marta left he had stopped looking at himself in the mirror.

Now he saw a frightened person. Well, he had seen that before. It was not so very unfamiliar. He had never been so sure of himself when he was young. When had certainty arrived? Was it not a kind of hardening of the imagination, a dulling? Had he fallen asleep as the years passed?

Nothing was clear. A worried stranger looked at him, the kind of face you saw glancing up at the clock in a train station. What had he been feeling these last several months before his accident? Hadn’t he been better in that time? Had he not, from the moment Rudra Cakrin spoke to him, tried to change his life?

Surely he had. He had made decisions. He had wanted his tree house. And he had wanted Caroline. These sprang to mind. He had his desires. They might not be entirely conventional, but they were strong.

Maybe it was a little convoluted to be relieved by the notion that having been a fuck-up all his life, there did not have to be a theory of brain trauma to explain his current problems. To think that he was uninjured and merely congenitally deformed, so that was okay. Maybe it would be better to be injured.

He fell asleep at the wheel, thinking I’ll go back to the tree house. Or out to San Diego. Or out to Great Falls. Or call the Khembalis. . . .

The next morning he did not have to decide what to do, as the conference room next to Diane’s office filled with European insurance executives, come to discuss the situation. They politely ignored Frank’s face as Diane made the introductions. They were all people from the four biggest re-insurance companies, Munich Re, Swiss Re, GE Insurance Solutions, and General Re. Two CEOs were there, also Chief Risk Officers, Heads for Sustainability Management, and some men who were “nat cat” guys, as they called it, scientists expert in natural catastrophes, and the mathematical modeling used to develop scenarios and assign risk values.