Green Earth

“Happens all the time.”

“Really?”

“Sure. With some things it’s the best way to deal with them.”

“Hmm.”

They had made their way to the front of the line, and so paused for orders, and the rapid production of their coffees. Frank continued to look thoughtful. It reminded Anna of his manner when he had arrived at her party, soaking wet from rain, and she said, “Say, did you ever find that woman you were stuck in the elevator with?”

“No. I was going to tell you about that. I did what you suggested and contacted the Metro offices, and asked service and repair to get her name from the report. I said I needed to contact her for my insurance report.”

“Oh really! And?”

“And the Metro person read it right off to me, no problem. Read me everything she wrote. But it turns out she wrote down the wrong stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

They walked out of the Starbucks back into the building.

“It was a wrong address she put down. There’s no residence there. And she wrote down her name as Jane Smith. I think she made everything up.”

“That’s strange! I guess they didn’t check your IDs.”

“No.”

“I’d have thought they would.”

“Maybe people just freed from stuck elevators are not in the mood to be handing over their IDs.”

“No, I suppose not.” An up elevator opened and they got in. They had it to themselves. “Like your friend, apparently.”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder why she would write down the wrong stuff though.”

“Me too.”

“What about what she told you—something about being in a cycling club, was it?”

“I’ve tried that. None of the cycling clubs in the area will give out membership lists. I cracked into one in Bethesda, but there wasn’t any Jane Smith.”

“Wow. You’ve really been looking into it.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she’s a spook. Hmm. Maybe you could go to all the cycling club meetings, just once. Or join one and ride with it, and look for her at meets, and show her picture around.”

“What picture?”

“Get a portrait program to generate one.”

“Good idea, although,” sigh, “it wouldn’t look like her.”

“No, they never do.”

“I’d have to get better at riding a bike.”

“At least she wasn’t into skydiving.”

He laughed. “True. Well, I’ll have to think about it. But thanks, Anna.”

Later that afternoon they met again, on the way up to one of Diane’s meetings with the NSF Science Board. They got out on the twelfth floor and walked around the hallways. The outer windows at the turns in the halls revealed that the day had darkened, low black clouds now tearing over themselves in their hurry to reach the Atlantic, sheeting down rain as they went.

In the big conference room Laveta and some others were repositioning a whiteboard and PowerPoint screen according to Diane’s instructions. Frank and Anna were the first ones there.

“Come on in,” Diane said. She busied herself with the screen and kept her back to Frank.

The rest of the crowd trickled in. NSF’s Board of Directors was composed of twenty-four people, although usually there were a couple of vacant positions in the process of being filled. The directors were all powers in their parts of the scientific world, appointed by the President from lists provided by NSF and the National Academy of Science, and serving four-year terms.

Now they were looking wet and windblown, straggling into the room in ones and twos. Some of Anna’s fellow division directors came in as well. Eventually fifteen or sixteen people were seated around the big table, including Sophie Harper, their congressional liaison. The light in the room flickered faintly as lightning made itself visible diffusely through the coursing rain on the room’s exterior window. The gray world outside pulsed as if it were an aquarium.

Diane welcomed them and moved quickly through the agenda’s introductory matter. After that she ran down a list of large projects that had been proposed or discussed in the previous year, getting the briefest of reports from Board members assigned to study the projects. They included climate mitigation proposals, many highly speculative, all extremely expensive. A carbon sink plan included reforestations that would also be useful for flood control; Anna made a note to tell the Khembalis about that one.

But nothing they discussed was going to work on the global situation, given the massive nature of the problem, and NSF’s highly constricted budget and mission. Ten billion dollars; and even the $50 billion items on their list of projects only addressed small parts of the global problem.

At moments like these Anna could not help thinking of Charlie playing with Joe’s dinosaurs, holding up a little pink mouselike thing, a first mammal, and exclaiming, “Hey it’s NSF!”

He had meant it as a compliment to their skill at surviving in a big world, or to the way they represented the coming thing, but unfortunately the comparison was also true in terms of size. Scurrying about trying to survive in a world of dying dinosaurs—worse yet, trying to save the dinosaurs too—where was the mechanism? As Frank would say, How could that work?

She banished these thoughts and made her own quick report, about the infrastructure distribution programs that she had been studying. A lot of infrastructure had been dispersed in the last decade. Anna’s concluding suggestion that the programs were a success and should be expanded was received with nods all around, as an obvious thing to do. But also expensive.

There was a pause as people thought this over.

Finally Diane looked at Frank. “Frank, are you ready?”

Frank stood to answer. He did not exhibit his usual ease. He walked over to the whiteboard, took up a red marker, fiddled with it. His face was flushed.

“All the programs described so far focus on gathering data, and the truth is we have enough data already. The world’s climate has already changed. The Arctic Ocean ice pack breakup has flooded the surface of the North Atlantic with fresh water, and the most recent data indicate that that has stopped the surface water from sinking, and stalled the circulation of the big Atlantic current. That’s been pretty conclusively identified as a major trigger event in Earth’s climatic history. So, abrupt climate change has almost certainly already begun.”

Frank stared at the whiteboard, lips pursed. “So. The question becomes, what do we do? Business as usual won’t work. For you here, the effort should be toward finding ways that NSF can make a much broader impact than it has till now.”

“Excuse me,” one of the Board members said, sounding a bit peeved. He was a man in his sixties, with a gray Lincoln beard; Anna did not recognize him. “How is this any different from what we are always trying to do? I mean, we’ve talked about trying to do this at every Board meeting I’ve ever been to. We always ask ourselves, how can NSF get more bang for its buck?”

“Maybe so,” said Frank. “But it hasn’t worked.”

Diane said, “What are you saying, Frank? What should we be doing that we haven’t already tried?”

Frank cleared his throat. He and Diane stared at each other for a long moment, locked in some kind of undefined conflict.