Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [101]
Soon after that Diane convened a full meeting of the National Science Board, which was NSF’s board of directors, in effect. The twenty-four members of the board had all been appointed by the president, from a list which, though vetted by Strengloft, had been created by the National Academy of Sciences and other sources. This meant they were a mixed-ideology group, and clearly Diane wanted to make sure they were behind her for the coming battles. She made it a closed meeting, and when she came out of it Frank couldn’t tell if she had gotten what she wanted or not. But later she told him they had been almost unanimous in their support for NSF trying to coordinate a national response, even an international response. Then he saw again the little smile that crossed her face sometimes when she had gotten her way in these struggles. She seemed unflustered, even content. She shook her head wonderingly as she told Frank about it, put a hand to his arm, as in the gym, smiled her little smile. What a strange game they were caught in, she seemed to say. But clearly no one was going to intimidate her. Frank certainly wouldn’t want to be the one to try it.
Meanwhile, to implement anything in the North Atlantic, they would have to coordinate plans with the IPCC, and the rest of the UN, and really the whole world; get approvals, get funding, get the actual materials manufactured or gathered, whatever they might be.
Eventually this need to liase with international agencies impelled them to arrange a day’s meetings in the UN building in New York. Diane asked Frank to join her for a few of these, and he was happy to agree.
“Easy travel to other planets,” he said.
“What?”
“Manhattan.”
“Oh, yes.”
When hanging with the bros in the evenings, Frank sometimes became curious about their plans. The picnic tables and fireplace were not going to hack it as winter furniture. The fireplace was such a misbegotten thing, like a pizza oven placed on the ground, that it was useless for heating, cooking, or fire-gazing. Perhaps that was the point; surely the men of the CCC, or whoever had built the thing, had to have known better. Some of the other picnic sites had open fire rings; but the bros had chosen to hang here by the oven.
One night Frank arrived to find they had tried to solve this problem by commandeering a steel trash barrel and starting a fire inside it, a fire that only just flickered over its rim. Possibly the entire barrel gave off some radiant heat, and the fire would not be visible from a distance, of course, if that was a concern. But it was a miserable excuse for a campfire.
“Hey Perfesser!” Zeno bellowed. “How’s it hanging, man? We haven’t seen you for a while.”
The others chimed in with their habitual welcomes. “He’s been too busy!” “Those co-eds wanted him.”
They were all bulked up, thick with thrift shop sweaters and coats, and also, Frank was pleased to see, greasy down jackets. Old down jackets were probably cheap, being unfashionable; and there was nothing better in the cold.
“Hey,” he said. “Super long time. What was it, yesterday?”
“Yarrr. Ha ha ha.”
“I know you’ve done so much you want to tell me about.”
“HA!!!” They crowed their approval of this jape. “We ain’t done a fucking thing! Why should we?”
And yet it soon transpired that they had all experienced an extraordinary number of traumas since Frank last came around. They interrupted each other ceaselessly as they related them, making a mish-mash that no one could have followed, but Frank knew from the start not to try. “Yeah right,” was all he had to say from time to time. Again it struck him how well they recalled scrapes, scuffles, or fights; they could re-enact every move in slow motion, and did so when telling their tale—it was part of the tale, maybe the most interesting part: “I twisted like this, and he missed over my shoulder, like this, and then I ducked,” ducking and weaving against the absent but well-remembered