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By Root 1369 0

of course brought Frank news of what everyone else was doing; and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system that placed a barge on a ratcheted piling in the tidal zone, then conferring with a group of NGO science officers concerning the Antarctic microwave project, and then speaking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it to the high beeping of his watch alarm, dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already—that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from “desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored” to “minor problems robustly dealt with.” It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation.

He put the finishing touches on the RFP for the Maxes, while also reassuring those in the NSF hardcore who felt that the Foundation was thereby creating its own evolutionary successors. It was easy in these arguments to see the way people thought of agencies in terms of human qualities, so that the agencies ended up behaving in the world like individuals in terms of power, will, skills, and effectiveness. Some were amazingly effective for their size, others were permanently hampered by personality and history. NSF’s ten billion a year made it a fairly small player on the national and world stage, but it was in a critical position, like the coxswain on a rowing team. It could coordinate the other scientific bodies, and to a certain extent industry; and exerting itself in that way, as it was now under Diane’s direction, there seemed to be some kind of tail-wagging-dog possibilities not unsupported even by the most reputable and straightforward of cascade mathematics. All the suprahuman personalities represented by the various scientific bodies were mutually reinforcing each other now, in a kind of ad hoc team surge against the problem at hand. Anna had already helped them to identify the scientific infrastructural elements currently in place in the federal government and internationally, and transfer-of-infrastructure programs initiated as a result of her studies were already getting assistance and equipment. In Frank’s mind, when he thought about it, science itself began to look like a pack on the move, big shadowy figures loping across the cave wall into the fray.

So he did his part, working hard in the building, learning about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential detachment from its seabed perch. Learning of plans to run oil tankers and other shipping over the pole from Japan to Scotland and Norway and back, halving the distance and making the Arctic Ocean a trading lake like the Mediterranean—

Then his watch alarm would go off, surprising him again, and it was off into the long green end of the day, livid and perspiring. Happy at the sudden release from the sitting at desk, the abstract thinking, the global anxiety (cave painting, Atlas figure, desperate effort to hold world aloft).

Because all that was only part of the optimodal project! Looking for animals, playing chess with Chessman, reading in the restaurants, sleeping in his tree. . . .

These summer days usually cooled off a little in the last hour before dark. The sun disappeared into the forest, and then in the remaining hour or two of light, if Frank had managed to get over to Rock Creek Park in time, he would join the frisbee golfers, and run through the shadows throwing a disk and chasing it. Chasing the other players. Frank loved the steeplechase aspect of it, and the way it made him feel afterward. The things it taught him about himself: once he was running