Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [113]
“What do you mean?”
They walked out of the Starbucks and back into the building.
“It was a wrong address she put down. There’s no residence there. And she wrote down her name as Jane Smith. I think she made everything up.”
“That’s strange! I guess they didn’t check your IDs.”
“No.”
“I’d have thought they would.”
“People just freed from stuck elevators are not in the mood to be handing over their IDs.”
“No, I suppose not.” An UP elevator opened and they got in. They had it to themselves. “Like your friend, apparently.”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder why she would write down the wrong stuff though.”
“Me too.”
“What about what she told you—something about being in a cycling club, was it?”
“I’ve tried that. None of the cycling clubs in the area will give out membership lists. I cracked into one in Bethesda, but there wasn’t any Jane Smith.”
“Wow. You’ve really been looking into it.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe she’s a spook. Hmm. Maybe you could go to all the cycling club meetings, just once. Or join one and ride with it, and look for her at meets, and show her picture around.”
“What picture?”
“Get a portrait program to generate one.”
“Good idea, although”—sigh—“it wouldn’t look like her.”
“No, they never do.”
“I’d have to get better at riding a bike.”
“At least she wasn’t into skydiving.”
He laughed. “True. Well, I’ll have to think about it. But thanks, Anna.”
Later that afternoon they met again, on the way up to one of Diane’s meetings with the NSF Board of Directors. They got out on the twelfth floor and walked around the hallways. The outer windows at the turns in the halls revealed that the day had darkened, low black clouds now tearing over themselves in their hurry to reach the Atlantic, sheeting down rain as they went.
In the big conference room Laveta and some others were repositioning a whiteboard and PowerPoint screen according to Diane’s instructions. Frank and Anna were the first ones there.
“Come on in,” Diane said. She busied herself with the screen and kept her back to Frank.
The rest of the crowd trickled in. NSF’s Board of Directors was composed of twenty-four people, although usually there were a couple of vacant positions in the process of being filled. The directors were all powers in their parts of the scientific world, appointed by the President from lists provided by NSF and the National Academy of Science, and serving six-year terms.
Now they were looking wet and windblown, straggling into the room in ones and twos. Some of Anna’s fellow division directors came in as well. Eventually fifteen or sixteen people were seated around the big table, including Sophie Harper, their congressional liaison. The light in the room flickered faintly as lightning made itself visible diffusely through the coursing rain on the room’s exterior window. The gray world outside pulsed as if it were an aquarium.
Diane welcomed them and moved quickly through the agenda’s introductory matter. After that she ran down a list of large projects that had been proposed or discussed in the previous year, getting the briefest of reports from Board members assigned to study the projects. They included climate mitigation proposals, many highly speculative, all extremely expensive. A carbon sink plan included reforestations that would also be useful for flood control; Anna made a note to tell the Khembalis about that one.
But nothing they discussed was going to work on the global situation, given the massive nature of the problem, and NSF’s highly constricted budget and mission. Ten billion dollars; and even the fifty-billion-dollar items on their list of projects only addressed small parts of the global problem.
At moments like these Anna could not help thinking of Charlie playing with Joe’s dinosaurs, holding up a little pink mouselike thing, a first mammal, and exclaiming, “Hey it’s NSF!”
He had meant it as a compliment to their skill at surviving in a big world, or to the way they represented the coming thing, but unfortunately the comparison was also