Green Earth

“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.”