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By Root 889 0

done, but repair and replacement. It had been an odd but wonderful thing, going off the roofs of those buildings and descending their sides to clean windows, repair leaking caulk and flashing, replace cracked panes, and so on. The climbing was straightforward, usually involving platforms for convenience; the belays and T-bars and dashboards and other gear had been bombproof. His fellow workers had been a mixed bag, as was always true with climbers—everything from nearly illiterate cowboys to eccentric scholars of Nietzsche or Adam Smith. And the window work itself had been a funny thing, what the Nietzsche scholar had called the apotheosis of kindergarten skills, very satisfying to perform—slicing out old caulk, applying heated caulk, unscrewing and screwing screws and bolts, sticking giant suckers to panes, levering them out and winching them up to the roofs or onto the platforms—and all under the cool onrush of the marine layer, just under clouds all mixed together with bright sun, so that it was warm when it was sunny, cool when it was cloudy, and the whole spread of downtown San Diego there below to entertain him when he wasn’t working. Often he had felt surges of happiness, filling him in moments when he stopped to look around: a rare thing in his life.

Eventually the repetition got boring, as it will, and he had moved on, first to go traveling, until the money he had saved was gone; then back into academia again, as a sort of test, in a different lab, with a different advisor, at a different university. Things had gone better there. Eventually he had ended up back at UCSD, back in San Diego—his childhood home, and still the place where he felt most comfortable on this Earth.

He actually noticed that feeling as he left the airport terminal’s glassed-in walkway over the street, and hopped down the outdoor escalator to the rental car shuttles. The comfort of a primate on home ground, no doubt—a familiarity in the slant of the light and the shape of the hills, but above all in the air itself, the way it felt on his skin, that combination of temperature, humidity, and salinity that together marked it as particularly San Diegan. It was like putting on familiar old clothes after spending a year in a tux; he was home, and his cells knew it.

He got in his rental car (always the same one, it seemed) and drove out of the lot. North on the freeway, crowded but not impossibly so, people zipping along like starlings, following the flocking rules keep as far apart from the rest as possible and change speeds as little as possible. The best drivers in the world. Past Mission Bay and Mount Soledad on the left, into the region where every off-ramp had been a major feature of his life at one time or another. Off at Gilman, up the tight canyon of apartments hanging over the freeway, past the one where he had once spent a night with a girl, ah, back in the days when such things had happened to him. Down a hill and onto campus.

UCSD. Home base. The school in the eucalyptus grove. Quick-witted, sophisticated, scarily powerful—even from inside it, Frank remained impressed by the place. Among other things it was a very effective troop of primates, collaborating to further the welfare of its members.

Even after a year in the East Coast’s great hardwood forest, there was something appealing about the campus’s eucalyptus grove—something charming, even soothing. The trees had been planted as a railroad-tie farm, before it was discovered that the wood was unsuitable. Now they formed a kind of mathematically gridded space, within which the architectural mélange of UCSD’s colleges lay scattered, connected by two broad promenades that ran north and south.

Frank had arranged an afternoon of appointments. The department had given him the use of an empty office facing the Revelle Plaza; his own was still occupied by a visiting researcher from Berlin. After getting the key from Rosaria, the department secretary, he sat at a dusty desk by a functioning phone, and discussed dissertation progress with his four remaining graduate students. Forty-five