Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [108]
And if he were going to continue at NSF, he wanted to be able to do things there. He needed Diane’s respect. It would be so much better if he could take the letter back without her ever knowing he had left it.
Unbidden an old thought leapt to mind. He had often sat in his office cubicle, looking through the window into the central atrium, and thought about climbing the mobile hanging in there. There was a crux in the middle, shifting from one piece of it to another, a stretch of chain that looked to be hard if you were free-climbing it. And a fall would be fatal. But he could come down to it on a rappel from the skylight topping the atrium. He wouldn’t even have to descend as far as the mobile. Diane’s offices were on the twelfth floor, so it would be a short drop. A matter of using his climbing craft and gear, and his old skyscraper window skills. Come down through the skylight, do a pendulum traverse from above the mobile over to her windows, tip one out, slip in, snatch his letter out of the in-box, and climb back out, sealing the windows as he left. No security cameras pointed upward in the atrium, he had noticed during one of his climbing fantasies; there were no alarms on window framing; all would be well. And the top of the building was accessible by a maintenance ladder bolted permanently to the south wall. He had noticed that once while walking by, and had already worked it into various daydreams of the past year. Occupying his mind with images of physical action, perhaps to model the kind of dexterity needed to solve some abstract problem, biomathematics as a kind of climbing up the walls of reality—or perhaps just to compensate for the boredom of sitting in a chair all day.
Now it was a plan, fully formed and ready to execute. He did not try to pretend to himself that it was the most rational plan he had ever made, but he urgently needed to do something physical, right then and there. He was quivering with the tension of contained action. The operation’s set of physical maneuvers were all things he could do, and that being the case, all the other factors of his situation inclined him to do it. In fact he had to, if he was really going to take responsibility for his life at last, and cast it in the direction of his desire. Make a sea change, start anew—make possible whatever follow-up with the woman in the elevator he might later be able to accomplish.
It had to be done.
He got out at the Ballston station, still thinking hard. He walked to the NSF parking garage door by way of the south side of the building, to confirm the exterior ladder’s lower height. Bring a box to step on, that’s all it would need. He walked to his car and drove west to his apartment over wet empty streets, not seeing a thing.
At the apartment he went to the closet and pawed through his climbing gear. Below it, as in an archaeological dig, were the old tools of a windowman’s trade.
When it was all spread out on the floor it looked like he had spent his whole life preparing to do this. For a moment, hefting his caulking gun, he hesitated at the sheer weirdness of what he was contemplating. For one thing the caulking gun was useless without caulk, and he had none. He would have to leave cut seals, and eventually someone would see them.
Then he remembered again the woman in the elevator. He felt her kisses still. Only a few hours had passed, though since then his mind had spun through what seemed like years. If he were to have any chance of seeing her again, he had to act. Cut seals didn’t matter. He stuffed all the rest of the gear into his faded red nylon climber’s backpack, which was shredded down one side from a rock fall in the Fourth Recess, long ago. He had done crazy things often back then.
He went to his car, threw the bag in, hummed over the dark streets back to Arlington, past the Ballston stop. He parked on a wet street well away from the NSF building. No one was about. There were eight million people in the immediate vicinity, but it was two A.M. and so there was not a person to be seen. Who could deny sociobiology at