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Now his amused look was like that of everyone’s favorite uncle. “So they reeled you in for this on the fly.” Then, holding a hand up to stop all of them, he near-whispered: “Sorry—should I whisper?”
“No sir, no need for that,” Charlie assured him in his ordinary speaking voice. “He’s out for the duration. Pay no attention to that man behind the shoulder.”
The President smiled. “Got a wizard on your back, eh?”
Charlie nodded, smiling quickly to conceal his surprise. It was a pastime in some circles to judge just how much of a dimwit the President was, but facing him in person Charlie felt instantly confirmed in his minority opinion that the man had such a huge amount of low cunning that it amounted to a kind of genius. The President was no fool. And hip to at least the most obvious of movie trivia. Charlie couldn’t help feeling a bit reassured.
Now the President said, “That’s nice, Charles, let’s get to it then, shall we? I heard from Dr. S. here about the meeting this morning, and I wanted to check in on it in person, because I like Phil Chase. And I understand that Phil now wants us to join in with the actions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the point of introducing a bill mandating our participation in whatever action they recommend, no matter what it is. And this is a UN panel.”
“Well,” Charlie said, shifting gears into ultradiplomatic mode, not just for the President but for the absent Phil, who was going to be upset with him no matter what he said, since only Phil should actually be talking to the President about this stuff. “That isn’t exactly how I would put it, Mr. President. You know the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a number of hearings this year, and Phil’s conclusion after all that testimony was that the global climate situation is quite real. And serious to the point of being already almost too late.”
The President shot a glance at Strengloft. “Would you agree with that, Dr. S.?”
“We’ve agreed that there is general agreement that the observed warming is real.”
The President looked to Charlie, who said, “That’s good as far as it goes, certainly. It’s what follows from that that matters—you know, in the sense of us trying to do something about it.”
Charlie swiftly rehearsed the situation, known to all: average temperatures up by six degrees Fahrenheit already, CO
levels in the atmosphere topping 600 parts per million, from a start before the industrial revolution of 280, and predicted to hit 1,000 ppm within a decade, which would be higher than it had been at any time in the past seventy million years. Also the long-term persistence of greenhouse gases, on the order of thousands of years.
Charlie also spoke briefly of the death of all coral reefs, which would lead to even more severe consequences for oceanic ecosystems. “The thing is, Mr. President, the world’s climate can shift very rapidly. There are scenarios in which a general warming causes parts of the Northern Hemisphere to get quite cold, especially in Europe. If that were to happen, Europe could become something like the Yukon of Asia.”
“Really!” the President said. “Are we sure that would be a bad thing? Just kidding of course.”
“Of course sir, ha ha.”
The President fixed him with a look of mock displeasure. “Well, Charles, all that may be true, but we don’t know for sure if any of that is the result of human activity. Isn’t that a fact?”
“No sir,” Charlie said doggedly. “The carbon we’ve burned is different than what was already up there, so we do know. You could say it isn’t for sure that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, and in a limited sense you’d be right, but I’ll bet you the sun will come up.”
“Don’t be tempting me to gamble now.”
“Besides, Mr. President, you don’t delay acting on crucial matters when you have a disaster that might happen, just because you can’t be one hundred percent sure it will happen. Because you can never be one hundred percent sure of anything, and some of these matters are too important to wait on.”
The President frowned at this, and Strengloft interjected, “Charlie, you know the precautionary principle is an imitation of actuarial insurance that has no real resemblance to it, because the risk and the premium paid can’t be calculated. That’s why we refused to hear any precautionary principle language in the discussions we attended at the UN. We said we wouldn’t even attend if they talked about precautionary principles or ecological footprints, and we had very good reasons for those exclusions, because those concepts are not good science.”
The President nodded his “So that is that” nod, familiar to Charlie from many a press conference. He added, “I always thought a footprint was kind of a simplistic measurement for something this complex anyway.”
Charlie countered, “It’s just a name for a good economic index, Mr. President, calculating use of resources in terms of how much land it would take to provide them. It’s pretty educational, really,” and he launched into a quick description of the way it worked. “It’s a good thing to know, like balancing your checkbook, and what it shows is that America is consuming the resources of ten times the acreage it actually occupies. So that if everyone on Earth tried to live as we do, given the greater population densities in much of the world, it would take fourteen Earths to support us all.”
“Come on, Charlie,” Dr. Strengloft objected. “Next you’ll be wanting us to use Bhutan’s Gross Domestic Happiness, for goodness’ sake. But we can’t use little countries’ indexes, they don’t do the job. We’re the hyperpower. And really, the anticarbon crowd is a special interest lobby in itself. You’ve fallen prey to their arguments, but it’s not like CO
is some toxic pollutant. It’s a gas that is natural in our air, and it’s essential for plants, even good for them. The last time there was a significant rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, human agricultural productivity boomed. The Norse settled Greenland during that period, and there were generally rising lifespans.”
“The end of the Black Death might account for that,” Charlie pointed out.
“Well, maybe rising CO
levels ended the Black Death.”
Charlie felt his jaw gape.
“It’s the bubbly in my club soda,” the President told him gently.
“Yes.” Charlie rallied. “But a greenhouse gas nevertheless. It holds in heat that would otherwise escape back into space. And we’re putting more than two billion tons of it into the atmosphere every year. It’s like putting a plug in your exhaust pipe, sir. The car is bound to warm up. There’s general agreement from the scientific community that it causes really significant warming. Has already caused it.”
“Our models show the recent temperature changes to be within the range of natural fluctuation,” Dr. Strengloft replied. “In fact, temperatures in the stratosphere have gone down, and there’s been eighteen years of flat air temperatures. It’s complex, and we’re studying it, and we’re going to make the best and most cost-effective response to it. Meanwhile, we’re already taking effective precautions. The President has asked American businesses to limit the growth of carbon dioxide to one-third of the economy’s rate of growth.”
“But that’s the same ratio of emissions to growth we have already.”
“Yes, but the President has gone further, by asking American businesses to try to reduce that ratio over the next decade by eighteen percent. It’s a growth-based approach that will accelerate new technologies, and the partnerships that we’ll need with the developing world on climate change.”
As the President looked to Charlie to see what he would reply to this errant nonsense, Charlie felt Joe stir on his back. This was unfortunate, as things were already complicated enough. The President and his science advisor were not only ignoring the specifics of Phil’s bill, they were actively attacking its underlying concepts. Any hope Charlie had had that the President had come to throw his weight behind some real dickering was gone.
And Joe was definitely stirring. His face was burrowed sideways into the back of Charlie’s neck, as usual, and now he began doing something that he sometimes did when napping: he latched on to the right tendon at the back of Charlie’s neck and began sucking it rhythmically, like a pacifier. Always before Charlie had found this a sweet thing, one of the most momlike moments of his Mr. Momhood. Now he had to steel himself to it and forge on.
The President said, “I think we have to be very careful what kind of science we use in matters like these.”
Joe sucked a ticklish spot and Charlie smiled reflexively and then grimaced, not wanting to appear amused by this double-edged pronouncement.
“Naturally that’s true, Mr. President. But the arguments for taking vigorous action are coming from a broad range of scientific organizations, also governments, the UN, NGOs, universities, about ninety-seven percent of all the scientists who have ever declared on the issue,” everyone but the very far right end of the think tank and pundit pool, he wanted to add, everyone but hack pseudoscientists who would say anything for money, like Dr. Strengloft here—but he bit his tongue and tried to shift track. “Think of the world as a balloon, Mr. President. And the atmosphere as the skin of the balloon. Now, if you wanted the thickness of the skin of a balloon to correctly represent the thickness of our atmosphere in relation to Earth, the balloon would have to be about as big as a basketball.”
At the moment this barely made sense even to Charlie, although it was a good analogy if you could enunciate it clearly. “What I mean is that the atmosphere is really, really thin, sir. It’s well within our power to alter it greatly.”
“No one contests that, Charles. But look, didn’t you say the amount of CO
in the atmosphere was six hundred parts per million? So if that CO
were to be the skin of your balloon, and the rest of the atmosphere was the air inside it, then that balloon would have to be a lot bigger than a basketball, right? About the size of the moon or something?”
Strengloft snorted happily at this thought, and went to a computer console on a desk in the corner, no doubt to compute the exact size of the balloon in the President’s analogy. Charlie suddenly understood that Strengloft would never have thought of this argument, and realized further—instantly thereby understanding several people in his past who had mystified him at the time—that sometimes people known for intelligence were actually quite dim, while people who seemed a bit dim could on the contrary be very sharp.
“Granted, sir, very good,” Charlie conceded. “But think of that CO
skin as being a kind of glass that lets in light but traps all the heat inside. It’s that kind of barrier. So the thickness isn’t as important as the glassiness.”
“Then maybe more of it won’t make all that much of a difference,” the President said kindly. “Look, Charles. Fanciful comparisons are all very well, but the truth is we have to slow these emissions’ growth before we can try to stop them, much less reverse them.”
This was exactly what the President had said at a recent press conference, and over at the computer Strengloft beamed and nodded to hear it, perhaps because he had authored the line. The absurdity of taking pride in writing stupid lines for a quick president suddenly struck Charlie as horribly funny. He was glad Anna wasn’t there beside him, because in moments like these, the slightest shared glance could set them off guffawing like kids. Even the thought of her in such a situation almost made him laugh.
So now he banished his wife and her glorious hilarity from his mind, not without a final bizarre tactile image of the back of his neck as one of her breasts, being suckled more and more hungrily by Joe. Very soon it was going to be time for a bottle.
Charlie persevered nevertheless. “Sir, it’s getting kind of urgent now. And there’s no downside to taking the lead on this issue. The economic advantages of being in the forefront of climate rectification and bioinfrastructure mitigation are huge. It’s a growth industry with uncharted potential. It’s the future no matter which way you look at it.”
Joe clamped down hard on his neck. Charlie shivered. Hungry, no doubt about it. Would be ravenous on waking. Only a bottle of milk or formula would keep him from going ballistic at that point. He could not be roused now without disaster striking. But he was beginning to inflict serious pain. Charlie lost his train of thought. He twitched. A little snort of agony combined with a giggle. He choked it back, disguised it as a smothered cough.
“What’s the matter, Charles, is he waking up on you?”
“Oh no sir, still out. Maybe stirring a little—ah! The thing is, if we don’t address these issues now, nothing else we’re doing will matter. None of it will go well.”
“That sounds like alarmist talk to me,” the President said, an avuncular twinkle in his eye. “Let’s calm down about this. You’ve got to stick to the commonsense idea that sustainable economic growth is the key to environmental progress.”
“Sustainable, ah!”
“What’s that?”
He clamped down on a giggle. “Sustainable’s the point! Sir.”
“We need to harness the power of markets,” Strengloft said, and nattered on in his usual vein, apparently oblivious to Charlie’s problem. The President however eyed him closely. Huge chomp. Charlie’s spine went electric. He suppressed the urge to swat his son like a mosquito. His right fingers tingled. Very slowly he lifted a shoulder, trying to dislodge him. Like trying to budge a limpet. Sometimes Anna had to squeeze his nostrils shut to get him to come off. Don’t think about that.
The President said, “Charles, we’d be sucking the life out of the economy if we were to go too far with this. You chew on that awhile. As it is, we’re taking bites out of this problem every day. Why, I’m like a dog with a bone on this thing! Those enviro special interests are like pigs at a trough. We’re weaning them from all that now, and they don’t like it, but they’re going to have to learn that if you can’t lick them, you—”
And Charlie dissolved into gales of helpless laughter.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_970e3b6b-b374-5bfe-af25-ee7931a8e5b9)
ATHENA ON THE PACIFIC (#ulink_970e3b6b-b374-5bfe-af25-ee7931a8e5b9)
California is a place apart.
Gold chasers went west until the ocean stopped them, and there in that remote and beautiful land, separated from the rest of the world by desert and mountain, prairie and ocean, they saw there could be no more moving on. They would have to stop and make a life there.
Civil society, post–Civil War. A motley of argonauts, infused with Manifest Destiny and gold fever, also with Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln and Twain, their own John Muir. They said to each other, Here at the end of the road it had better be different, or else world history has all come to naught.
So they did many things, good and bad. In the end it turned out the same as everywhere else, maybe a little bit more so.
But among the good things, encouraged by Lincoln, was the founding of a public university. Berkeley in 1867, the farm at Davis in 1905, the other campuses after that; in the 1960s new ones sprang up like flowers in a field. The University of California. A power in this world.
An oceanographic institute near La Jolla wanted one of the new campuses of the sixties to be located nearby. Next door was a U.S. Marine Corps rifle training facility. The oceanographers asked the Marines for the land, and the Marines said yes. Donated land, just like Washington, D.C., but in this case a eucalyptus grove on a sea cliff, high over the Pacific.
The University of California, San Diego.
By then California had become a crossroads, San Francisco the great city, Hollywood the dream machine. UCSD was the lucky child of all that, Athena leaping out of the tall forehead of the state. Prominent scientists came from everywhere to start it, caught by the siren song of a new start on a Mediterranean edge to the world.
They founded a school and helped to invent a technology: biotech, Athena’s gift to humankind. University as teacher and doctor too, owned by the people, no profit skimmed off. A public project in an ever-more-privatized world, tough and determined, benign in intent, but very intent. What does it mean to give?
Frank considered adding a postscript to Yann Pierzinski’s Form Seven, suggesting that he pursue internal support at Torrey Pines Generique. Then he decided it would be better to work through Derek Gaspar. He could do it in person during his trip to San Diego to prepare for his move back.
A week later he was off. Transfer at Dallas, up into the air again, back to sleep. He woke when he felt the plane tilt down. They were still over Arizona, its huge baked landforms flowing by underneath. A part of Frank that had been asleep for much longer than his nap began to wake up too: he was returning to home ground. It was amazing the way things changed in the American West. Frank put his forehead against the inner window of the plane, looked ahead to the next burnt range coming into view. Thought to himself, I’ll go surfing.
The pale umber of the Mojave gave way to Southern California’s big scrubby coastal mountains. Then suburbia hove into view, spilling eastward on filled valleys and shaved hilltops: greater San Diego, bigger all the time. He could see bulldozers scraping platforms for the newest neighborhood, and freeways glittering with their arterial flow.
Frank’s plane drifted down. Downtown’s cluster of glassy skyscrapers came into view immediately to the left of the plane, seemingly at about the same height. Those buildings had been Frank’s workplace for a year of his youth, and he watched them as he would any old home. He knew exactly which buildings he had climbed; they were etched on his mind. That had been a good year. Disgusted with his advisor, he had taken a leave of absence from graduate school, and after a season of climbing in Yosemite and living at Camp Four, he had run out of money and decided to do something for a living that would require his physical skills and not his intellectual ones. A young person’s mistake, although at least he had not thought he could make his living as a professional climber. But those same skills were needed for the work of skyscraper window maintenance; not just window washing, which he had also done, but repair and replacement. It had been an odd but wonderful thing, going off the roofs of those skyscrapers and descending their sides to clean windows, repair leaking caulk and flashing, replace cracked panes, and so on. The climbing was straightforward, usually involving platforms for convenience; the belays and T-bars and dashboards and other gear had been bombproof. His fellow workers had been a mixed bag, as was always true with climbers—everything from nearly illiterate cowboys to eccentric scholars of Nietzsche or Adam Smith. And the window work itself had been a funny thing, what the Nietzsche scholar had called the apotheosis of kindergarten skills, very satisfying to perform—slicing out old caulk, applying heated caulk, unscrewing and screwing screws and bolts, sticking giant suckers to panes, levering them out and winching them up to the roofs or onto the platforms—and all under the cool onrush of the marine layer, just under clouds all mixed together with bright sun, so that it was warm when it was sunny, cool when it was cloudy, and the whole spread of downtown San Diego there below to entertain him when he wasn’t working. Often he had felt surges of happiness, filling him in moments when he stopped to look around: a rare thing in his life.
Eventually the repetition got boring, as it will, and he had moved on, first to go traveling, until the money he had saved was gone; then back into academia again, as a sort of test—in a different lab, with a different advisor, at a different university. Things had gone better there. Eventually he had ended up back at UCSD, back in San Diego—his childhood home, and still the place where he felt most comfortable on this earth.
He noticed that feeling as he left the airport terminal’s glassed-in walkway over the street, and hopped down the outdoor escalator to the rental car shuttles. The comfort of a primate on home ground—a familiarity in the slant of the light and the shape of the hills, but above all in the air itself, the way it felt on his skin, that combination of temperature, humidity, and salinity that together marked it as particularly San Diegan. It was like putting on familiar old clothes after spending a year in a tux.
He got in his rental car and drove out of the lot. North on the freeway, crowded but not impossibly so, people zipping along like starlings, following the two rules of flocking, keep as far apart from the rest as possible, and change speeds as little as possible. The best drivers in the world. Past Mission Bay and Mount Soledad on the left, into the region where every off-ramp had been a major feature of his life. Off at Gilman, up the tight canyon of apartments hanging over the freeway, past the one where he had once spent a night with a girl, ah, back in the days when such things had happened to him.
Then UCSD. Home base. Even after a year in the East Coast’s great hardwood forest, there was something appealing about the campus’s eucalyptus grove—something charming, even soothing. The trees had been planted as a railroad-tie farm, before it was discovered that the wood was unsuitable. Now they formed a kind of mathematically gridded space, within which the architectural mélange of UCSD’s colleges lay scattered.
After an afternoon of departmental appointments, there was an hour and a half to go before his meeting with Derek. Parking at UCSD was a nightmare, but he had gotten a pass to a department slot from Rosario, and Torrey Pines was only a few hundred yards up the road, so he decided to walk. Then it occurred to him to take the climbers’ route that he and some friends had devised when they were all living at Revelle; that would nicely occupy about the amount of time he had.
It involved walking down La Jolla Shores and turning onto La Jolla Farms Road and heading out onto the bluff of land owned by the university, a squarish plateau between two canyons running down to the beach, ending in a cliff over the sea. This land had never been built on, and as they had found ancient graves on it, graves dated to seven thousand years before the present, it was likely to stay empty. A superb prospect, and one of Frank’s favorites places on Earth. In fact he had lived on it for a while, sleeping out there every night; he had had romantic encounters out there, oh my yes; and he had often dropped down the steep surfer’s trail that descended to the beach right at Blacks Canyon.
When he got to the cliff’s edge he found a sign announcing that the route was closed due to erosion of the cliff, and it was hard to argue with that, as the old trail was now a kind of gully down the edge of a sandstone buttress. But he still wanted to do it, and he strolled south along the cliff’s edge, looking out at the Pacific and feeling the onshore wind blow through him. The view was just as mind-boggling as ever, despite the gray cloud layer; as often happened, the clouds seemed to accentuate the great distances to the horizon, the two plates of ocean and sky converging at such a very slight angle toward each other. California, the edge of history—a stupid idea, totally untrue in all senses of the word, except for this: it did appear to be the edge of something.
An awesome spot. And the tighter canyon on the south side of the empty bluff had an alternative trail down that Frank was willing to break the rules and take. No one but a few cronies of his had ever used this one, because the initial drop was a scarily exposed knife-edge of a buttress, the gritty sandstone eroding to steep gullies on both sides. The trick was to descend fast and boldly, and so Frank did that, skidding out as he hit the bottom of the inland gully, sliding onto his side and down; but against the other wall he stopped himself, and then was able to hop down uneventfully.
Down to the salt roar of the beach, the surf louder here because of the tall cliff backing the beach. He walked north down the strand, enjoying yet another familiar place. Blacks Beach, the UCSD surfers’ home away from home.
The ascent to Torrey Pines Generique reversed the problems of the descent, in that here all the steepness was right down on the beach. A hanging gully dripped over a hard sill some forty feet up, and he had to free-climb the grit to the right of the green algal spill. After that it was just a scramble up the gully, to the clifftop near the hang glider port. At the top he discovered a sign that declared this climb too had been illegal.
Oh well. He had loved it. He felt refreshed, awake for the first time in weeks somehow. This was what it meant to be home. He could brush his hands through his slightly sweaty and seaspray-dampened hair, and walk in and see what might happen.
Onto the parklike grounds of Torrey Pines Generique, through the newly beefed-up security gates. The place was looking empty, he thought as he walked down the halls to Derek’s office. They had definitely let a lot of people go.
Frank was ushered in by a secretary, and Derek got up from his broad desk to shake hands. His office looked the same as the last time Frank had visited: window view of the Pacific; framed copy of Derek’s cover portrait on a U.S. News & World Report; skiing photos.
“So, what’s new with the great bureaucrats of science?”
“They call themselves technocrats, actually.”
“Oh I’m sure it’s a big difference.” Derek shook his head. “I never understood why you went out there. I suppose you made good use of your time.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re almost back.”
“Yes. I’m almost done.” Frank paused. “But like I said to you on the phone, I did see something interesting from someone who worked here.”
“Right, I looked into it. We could still hire him full-time, I’m pretty sure. He’s on soft money up at Caltech.”
“Good. Because I thought it was a very interesting idea.”
“So NSF funded it?”
“No, the panel wasn’t as impressed as I was. And they might have been right—it was a bit undercooked. But the thing is, if it did work, you could test genes by computer simulation, and identify proteins you wanted. It would really speed the process.”
Derek regarded him closely. “You know we don’t really have funds for new people.”
“Yeah I know. But this guy is a postdoc, right? And a mathematician. He was only asking NSF for some computer time really. You could hire him full-time for a starter salary, and put him on the case, and it would hardly cost you a thing. I mean, if you can’t afford that … Anyway, it could be interesting.”
“What do you mean, interesting?”
“I just told you. Hire him full-time, and get him to sign the usual contract concerning intellectual property rights and all. Really secure those.”
