Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [154]
“We’re all from Africa,” Frank said.
“Very true but your people obviously left there before mine did. Your people look to have gone directly to the North Pole.”
“I do like the cold,” Frank admitted.
“Like to die in it.”
That night Frank slept in his van, and rejoined Cutter’s tree crew for the morning, after a dawn walk up and down the park. Deer nibbled unhappily among the snowdrifts; the rest of the animals stuck near the hot boxes. The gibbons looked more and more unhappy, but Nancy said an attempt to capture them had only caused them to swing away through the trees, hooting angrily. The zoo zoologists were thinking of trying to dart them with tranquilizers.
The air temperature remained well below zero, but now there was an almost full load of traffic back on the streets, and a great number of trees and branches to be cleared. More people walked the sidewalks, some bundled up like the Michelin Man. The tree crew put out orange plastic stripping to keep crowds away from their work, especially when things were falling. Frank carried wood. No way did he want to go up in a tree and end up like poor Byron, hollering “My leg my leg. . . .” Chop wood, carry water; chop water, carry wood.
When they took a break for lunch he left them and walked down to see how people were doing in the UDC shelter, and at the Dupont Metro vent. Then back up to the zoo, where many people from FOG and FONZ were still working to capture the ferals. In the zoo enclosures they were reduced to supplementing the regular heating system with weird combinations of battery-powered space heaters to try to keep the enclosures a bit warmer. The animals looked miserable anyway, and quite a few had died.
It was such a busy week that Frank almost forgot when Friday rolled around, until that morning, when it became all he thought about. He ate Friday evening at the Rio Grande, then stood stamping his feet and blowing into his gloved hands at his pay phone in Bethesda.
But no call; and when it was ten after nine, he called Caroline’s number, and let it ring and ring, with never an answer.
What did that mean?
He would find out next Friday, at best. So it seemed. Suddenly their system looked very inadequate. He wanted to talk to her!
Nothing to be done. He tried one last time, listened to the ring. No answer. He had to do something else. He could go to work, or he could . . . no. Just leap. Deflated or not, indecisive or not.
Walking back to his van, he called Diane on his cell phone, as he had every day of the cold snap. She always answered, and her cheery voice held no huge aura of meaning or possibility. She considered that it had been a very good week for the cause. “Everybody knows now that the problem is real. This isn’t like the flood; this could happen three or four times every winter. Abrupt climate change is real, no one can deny it, and it’s a big problem. Things are a mess! So, come on in as soon as they call off the shutdown. There are things we can do.”
“Oh I will,” Frank promised.
But the cold snap went on. The jet stream was running straight south from Hudson Bay. The wind strengthened, and added to every already-existing problem—fire, frostbite, trees down, power lines down. It began to seem like street work and polar emergency services were what he had always done. Get up in the frigid van and drive to get warm. Hike out to the tree house, climb the trunk to pull Miss Piggy up a ways and tack her there on a piton; downclimb, most awkwardly. Scrounge, like a real homeless person, for cold-weather clothing he could give away at the UDC shelter. His own gear at fullest deployment was more than adequate: an old knit hat, a windbreaker shell with a hood, an old Nike ACG (All Conditions Gear, well maybe), a windstopped fleece jacket made of DuPont’s Drylete material, very warm stuff; capilene long underwear and long-sleeved shirt, Insport briefs that had a windstop panel in front, which would also hold a mitten to give his privates extra protection, until the rabbit fur arrived; then some bike shorts