Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [185]
“Might you be able to counter one of these, if you saw it in advance? Some kind of reverse transcription that would neutralize the tweak without tipping off the people deploying it?”
“Me?”
“Or people you know.”
“Let me look at what you have. If it looks like it might be what you think, then I’ll pass it along to some friends of mine.”
“Thanks, Edgardo.”
“But here we come to the bike path, let’s change the subject. Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll see what I can do. But give it to me at Food Factory, at three, and let’s not talk about this in the building.”
“No,” Frank said, interested to see how Edgardo appeared to assume that the building might be compromised. So the surveillance was real after all. Of course he had known that; Caroline had told him. But it was interesting to get data from a different source.
Back at work, showered and in his office, checking the clock frequently and then setting his alarm for three so he didn’t forget, Frank saw in an e-mail from Diane that Yann Pierzinski was on the first list for the expanded Grants for Exploratory Research program. He smiled, but then frowned. The new climate studies institute in San Diego had been approved, and the old Torrey Pines Generique facility rented to house it; and Leo Mulhouse had even been hired to run a genetic engineering lab. It all added up to good news, which of course he ought to call and share with Marta.
For a while he found other more pressing things on his list of Things To Do. But it kept coming back to mind, and he found he wanted to tell her this stuff anyway, to hear her reaction—how she would manage to downplay it. So that afternoon, after running down to Food Factory and giving Edgardo the disk, Frank went over and called Small Delivery Systems from a pay phone down in the Metro, thinking to reduce the number of obvious contacts in the hope it would keep their stock down. He asked for Marta rather than Yann. After a minute she got on, and Frank said Hi.
She greeted him coolly, and he hacked his way through the preliminaries until her lack of cooperation forced him to the point. “I got it arranged like you asked, I mean I couldn’t stay in it directly because of conflict of interest, but it was such a good idea that they did it on their own. There’s to be a new federal science and tech center, focused on climate interventions and housed in Torrey Pine Generique’s old labs. And Yann and your whole team down there is listed for a big Grant for Exploratory Research too. So now you can go back to San Diego.”
“I can go wherever I want,” she said. “I don’t need your permission or your help.”
“No, that isn’t what I meant.”
“Uh huh. Don’t be trying to buy me off, Frank.”
“I’m not. I mean, I owe you that money, but you wouldn’t take it. Anyway this is just a good thing. Yann and you guys get one of the grants, and this will be one of the best research labs anywhere for what you guys are up to.”
“We already have a lab.”
“Small Delivery is too small to deliver.”
“Not so, actually. We’ve just gotten a contract from the Russian government. We’re licensing the genome for our altered tree lichen to them, and we’ll be helping them to manufacture and distribute it in Siberia and Kamchatka this fall.”
“But—wow. Have you had any field trials for this lichen?”
“This is the field trial.”
“What? How big an area?”
“Lichen propagate by wind dispersion.”
“That’s what I thought! Have the Russians talked to us or the UN or anyone?”
“The president believes it’s an internal matter.”
“But the wind blows from Russia to Alaska.”
“No doubt.”
“And so to Canada.”
“Sure. The spruce forest wraps the whole world at that latitude,” Marta agreed. “Our lichen could eventually spread through all of it.”
“And what’s the estimated maximum takedown from that, do you suppose?”
“Eleanor thinks maybe a hundred parts per million.”
“Holy shit!”
“I know, it’s a lot. But