Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [163]
“That’s how desperate this winter has made people,” Edgardo observed.
“I told you the cold snap was a good thing,” Diane replied.
Frank found it interesting, but beyond that felt little. It was hard to connect all the activity to the brainstorming of last summer, when it had been only one of many ideas, and not the most likely at that. Now it had the look of something obvious and inevitable, what Edgardo called a silver bullet solution; a grand exercise in planetary engineering that was exciting worldwide attention, funding, and controversy.
Very interesting indeed; but now it was out of their hands, and Frank’s daily work centered on other things. The Carbon Capture Campaign legislation was about to be introduced by one of Phil Chase’s allies on the House Resources Committee, and Frank was involved with the graphs and tables evaluating various options and scenarios. Then also the test result evaluations on three different heat-to-electricity transformers had to be finished; and the SSEEP project was still generating huge amounts of trouble for NSF, as many accused them of illegally entering into presidential politics, and in a most crassly unfashionable old-left way at that. Diane occasionally thought she would get fired over it, although there was no mechanism or precedent. The heat was coming from all directions—even the Phil Chase campaign, which now appeared to regard the SSEEP platform as some kind of third-party competition. Judging by the results so far, it had possibly been a bad idea to suggest a scientific approach to political problems, but on most days Frank was still glad they had tried it. Something had to be done. Although choosing which something remained a problem. One morning, walking from Optimodal to work, Diane said to him, “So what are you going to work on this morning?”
And Frank, distracted, said, “I don’t know. I could meet with Kenzo, or talk to George in Engineering, or call Yann. Or I could work on the Stirling calculations, or check into those flexible mirrors. Or call up the photovoltaics group. Or I could call Wracke, or the people at NASA to see if their heavy-duty booster is going to be ready this decade. Or there are these glassy metals I could—”
The light changed and they crossed Wilson. Diane, laughing at him, said, “You sound like I feel.” But she didn’t know how he felt; and he truly didn’t know what to do. But then going into the building, the way she looked up at him, he saw that she knew that.
Edgardo and Kenzo dropped by to ask him if he wanted to join them for a run, as he hadn’t for a while. He agreed to it, and they got dressed and took off.
It was crisp but sunny, perfect for running. It turned out Edgardo and Kenzo had run all winter long, except for during the cold snap. They were the most faithful of the faithful, also the most talkative of the talkative, which no doubt explained it. Only on a long run could you hold the floor for ten or fifteen minutes straight, discoursing on some subject or other while your audience pounded along, happy to listen because it distracted from their effort.
Edgardo was still the main talker, perhaps only because he was in the best running shape, and could natter on while the others were having to huff and puff. “Yes,” he was explaining to Bob, “the series is called the Alexandria Quartet.”
“Someone wrote four books about Alexandria?”
“That would be Alexandria, Egypt.”
“Oh!”
“Good books, really. Heavily dependent on Proust, of course, but how bad is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I read a good book,” Frank offered, having contributed nothing to the conversation. “The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
“Some kind of children’s writer?” Edgardo guessed.
“Yes, she wrote Little House on the Prairie, and a whole