Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [106]
Out the window flashed the backs of long row houses, tawdry unkempt yards. Old industrial buildings of the Mid-Atlantic states, rusty and broken-windowed, flying by click-click-click, sway sway, gone. Over one of the great rivers, then by the gray Atlantic, mumbling its dirty whitecaps onshore.
Then descending underground, to go under the Hudson and enter Metropolis, just like Fritz Lang pictured it. Dark ancient brick walls, unmarked by any graffiti.
The train stopped in midtunnel.
“Did you ever live in New York?” Diane asked.
“No. I’ve hardly even visited.”
“Wow.”
“You lived here?”
“Yes, I went to Columbia.”
“What for?”
“Med school.”
“Really.”
“Yes, a long time ago.”
“Did you practice medicine?”
“Sure. Five years, but then I got into research, and then administration, and that just kept going, I guess you’d say.”
“Yes, I would,” peering at her laptop screensaver, which cycled a succession of Asian-American faces. “I mean, director of NSF—that’s administration all right.”
She sighed. “It’s true. Things just kept on happening.”
She tapped a button and made the faces go away. Replacing them was her calendar, every hour and half hour obviously accounted for. Under it was a spreadsheet of projects, a kind of Things To Do list, but with events categorized and broken down by background reading, premeetings, biographies of participants, and so on.
“You must have a system too,” she noted, seeing him looking at it.
“Sure,” Frank said. “A Things To Do list.”
“That sounds healthier than this. So, are you enjoying yourself?”
“Well, I suppose I am.”
She laughed. “More than last year anyway, I hope?”
He felt himself blushing. “Yeah, sure. It’s more of a challenge, of course. But I asked for it.” He gulped at that topic, and said quickly, “I’ll be a lot happier if the UN goes for one of these projects.”
“Sure. But the work itself, in the building?”
“Yeah, sure. More variety.”
“It still isn’t research.”
“I know. But I’m trying. Maybe it’s a different kind. I don’t know. I’ve never been too sure what we’re up to at NSF.”
“I know.”
His face was fully hot now. He thought: Come on, don’t be chicken here; if ever there was a chance to talk about this, it’s here and now. Only a few short months before, Diane had taken Frank’s angry critique of NSF and
1. pretended she had never seen it,
2. asked him to give a presentation on its contents to the NSF Science Board, and
3. asked him publicly to stay on at NSF and chair a committee to study his suggestions, and all other possible methods for increasing NSF’s impact on the global warming situation—thus, in front of his ostensible peer group, making him prove that he was not a blowhard by taking on a hard thankless job for the good of all.
And he had agreed to do it.
So he took a deep breath, and said, “Why didn’t you say anything when I gave you that letter?”
She pursed her lips. “I thought I did.”
“Yes,” he tried not to be irritated, “but you know what I mean.”
She nodded, looked down and tapped a note into her schedule. “It read to me like someone who was burnt out on doing jackets, and wanted to be doing something else. NSF itself didn’t really seem to be what you were talking about, not to me.”
“Well, maybe not entirely, but I did want to talk about it too.”
“Sure. I thought you made some good points. I thought you might be interested in trying them out. So, here you are.”
“So you let the other stuff go.”
“It has to stay in your file, I can’t change people’s files. But there’s no sense looking for trouble. I find letting trouble stay in a file often works pretty well. And in your case, it was all going to work out one way or another. Either you’d go back to San Diego, or you’d help us here. In that sense you did good to give it to me in person like you did, I mean just the hard copy.”
“I tried to take it back,” Frank confessed.
“You did? How?”
“I came back and looked for it. But Laveta had