Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [117]
Now Diane made a motion as if to cut the discussion short. “Frank,” she said, drawing his name out; “Fraannnnnk—you’re the one who’s brought this up, as if there is something we could do about it. So maybe you should be the one who heads up a committee tasked with figuring out what these things are. Sharpening up the list of things to try, in effect, and reporting back to this Board. You could proceed with the idea that your committee would be building the way to the next paradigm.”
Frank stood there, looking at all the red words he had scribbled so violently on the whiteboard. For a long moment he continued to look at it, his expression grim. Many in the room knew that he was due to go back to San Diego. Many did not. Either way Diane’s offer probably struck them as another example of her managerial style, which was direct, public, and often had an element of confrontation or challenge in it. When people felt strongly about taking an action she often said, You do it, then. Take the lead if you feel so strongly.
At last Frank turned and met her eye. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’d be happy to do that. I’ll give it my best shot.”
Diane revealed only a momentary gleam of triumph. Once when Anna was young she had seen a chess master play an entire room of opponents, and there had been only one player among them he was having trouble with; when he had checkmated that person, he had moved on to the next board with that very same quick satisfied look.
Now, in this room, Diane was already on to the next item on her agenda.
AFTERWARD, THE bioinformatics group sat in Anna’s and Frank’s rooms on the sixth floor, sipping cold coffee and looking into the atrium.
Edgardo came in. “So,” he said cheerily, “I take it the meeting was a total waste of time.”
“No,” Anna snapped.
Edgardo laughed. “Diane changed NSF top to bottom?”
“No.”
They sat there. Edgardo went and poured himself some coffee.
Anna said to Frank, “It sounded like you were telling Diane you would stay another year.”
“Yep.”
Edgardo came back in, amazed. “Will wonders never cease! I hope you didn’t give up your apartment yet!”
“I did.”
“Oh no! Too bad!”
Frank flicked that away with his burned hand. “The guy is coming back anyway.”
Anna regarded him. “So you really are changing your mind.”
“Well…”
The lights went out, computers too. Power failure.
“Ah shit.”
A blackout. No doubt a result of the storm.
Now the atrium was truly dark, all the offices lit only by the dim green glow of the emergency exit signs. EXIT. The shadow of the future.
Then the emergency generator came on, making an audible hum through the building. With a buzz and several computer pings, electricity returned.
Anna went down the hall to look north out the corner window. Arlington was dark to the rain-fuzzed horizon. Many emergency generators had already kicked in, and more did so as she watched, powering glows that in the rain looked like little campfires. The cloud over the Pentagon caught the light from below and gleamed blackly.
Frank came out and looked over her shoulder. “This is what it’s going to be like all the time,” he predicted gloomily. “We might as well get used to it.”
Anna said, “How would that work?”
He smiled briefly. But it was a real smile, a tiny version of the one Anna had seen at her house. “Don’t ask me.” He stared out the window at the darkened city. The low thrum of rain was cut by the muffled sound of a siren below.
THE HYPERNIÑO that was now into its forty-second month had spun up another tropical system in the East Pacific, north of the equator, and now this big wet storm was barreling northeast toward California. It was the fourth in a series of pineapple-express storms that had tracked along this course of the jet stream, which was holding in an exceptionally fast run directly at the north coast of San Diego County. Ten miles above the surface, winds flew at a hundred and seventy miles