Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [73]
“Come on, Charlie.” Sridar shook his head. “You know it’s true. It’s true for all of them. ‘Yes’ means ‘maybe’; ‘I’ll see what I can do’ means ‘no.’ It means ‘not a chance.’ It means, ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me this question, but since you are, this is how I will say no.’”
“He will not help us?” Drepung asked.
“He will if he sees a way that will work,” Charlie declared. “I’ll keep on him about it.”
Drepung said, “You’ll see what you can do.”
“Yes—but I mean that, really.”
Sridar smiled sardonically at Charlie’s discomfiture. “And Phil’s the most environmentally aware senator of all, isn’t that right Charlie?”
“Well, yeah. That’s definitely true.”
The Khembalis pondered this.
Robot submarines cruise the depths, doing oceanography. Slocum gliders and other AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles), like torpedoes with wings, dock in underwater observatories to recharge their batteries and download their data. Finally oceanographers have almost as much data as the meteorologists. Among other things they monitor a deep layer of relatively warm water that flows from the Atlantic into the Arctic. (ALTEX, the Atlantic Layer Tracking Experiment.)
But they are not as good at it as the whales. White beluga whales, living their lives in the open ocean, have been fitted with sensors for recording temperature, salinity and nitrate content, matched with a GPS record and a depth meter. Up and down in the blue world they sport, diving deep into the black realm below, coming back up for air, recording data all the while. Casper the Friendly Ghost, Whitey Ford, The Woman in White, Moby Dick, all the rest: they swim to their own desires, up and down endlessly within their immense territories, fast and supple, continuous and thorough, capable of great depths, pale flickers in the blackest blue, the bluest black. Then back up for air. Our cousins. White whales help us to know this world. The warm layer is attenuating.
THE REST of Frank’s stay in San Diego was a troubled time. The encounter with Marta had put him in a black mood that he could not shake.
He tried to look for a place to live when he returned in the fall, and checked out some real estate pages in the paper, but it was discouraging. He saw that he should rent an apartment first, and take the time to look around before trying to buy something. It was going to be hard, maybe impossible, to find a house he both liked and could afford. He had some financial problems. And it took a very considerable income to buy a house in north San Diego these days. He and Marta had bought a perfect couple’s bungalow in Cardiff, but they had sold it when they split, adding greatly to the acrimony. Now the region was more expensive than a mere professor could afford. Extra income would be essential.
So he looked at some rentals in North County, and then in the afternoons he went to the empty office on campus, meeting with two postdocs who were still working for him in his absence. He also talked with the department chair about what classes he would teach in the fall. It was all very tiresome.
And worse than that, a letter appeared in his department mailbox from the UCSD Technology Transfer Office, Independent Review Committee. Pulse quickening, he ripped it open and scanned it, then got on the phone to the Tech Transfer Office.
“Hi Delphina, it’s Frank Vanderwal here. I’ve just gotten a letter from the review committee, can you please tell me what this is about?”
“Oh hello, Dr. Vanderwal. Let me see…the oversight committee on faculty outside income wanted to ask you about some income you received from stock in Torrey Pines Generique. Anything over two thousand dollars a year has to be reported, and they didn’t hear anything from you.”
“I’m at NSF this year, all my stocks are in a blind trust. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh, that’s right, isn’t it. Maybe…just a second. Here it is. Maybe they knew that. I’m not sure. I’m looking at their memo here…ah. They’ve been informed you’re going to be rejoining Torrey Pines when you get back, and—”
“Wait, what?