Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [12]
She was pleased with this last, Frank could see. “Tell me about it,” he said to her when they were settled into the main course. “Is it a good position? I mean, what does the science advisor do?” Did it have any power, in other words?
“It all depends on the president,” Diane said. “I’ve been looking into it, and it appears the position began as Nixon’s way of spanking the science community for publicly backing Johnson over Goldwater. He sent NSF packing out here to Arlington, and abolished his science advisory committee, and established this position. So it became a single advisor he could appoint without any consultation or approval mechanism, and then he could stick them on the shelf somewhere. Which is where these people have usually stayed, except in a few instances.”
That didn’t sound good. “But?”
“Well, in theory, if a president were listening, it could get pretty interesting. I mean, clearly there’s a need for more coordination of the sciences in the federal government. We’ve seen that at NSF. Ideally there would be a cabinet post, you know, some kind of Department of Science, with a Secretary of Science.”
“The science czar.”
“Yes.” She was wrinkling her nose. “Except that would create huge amounts of trouble, because really, most of the federal agencies are already supposed to be run scientifically, or have science as part of their subject, or in their operation. So if someone tried to start a Department of Science, it would poach on any number of other agencies, and none of them would stand for it. They would gang up on such an advisor and kill him, like they did to the so-called intelligence czar when they tried to coordinate the intelligence agencies.”
This gave Frank a chill. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
“So, now, maybe the science advisor could act like a kind of personal advisor. You know. If we presented a menu of really robust options, and Chase chose some of them to enact, then…well. It would be the president himself advocating for science.”
“And he might want to do that, given the situation.”
“Yes, it seems that way, doesn’t it? Although Washington has a way of bogging people down.”
“The swamp.”
“Yes, the swamp. But if the swamp freezes over”—they laughed—“then maybe we can ice-skate over the obstacles!”
Frank nodded. “Speaking of which, we were supposed to be going to try ice-skating down here, when the river froze over.”
“That’s right, we were. But now we’ve got this so-called heat spell.”
“True. Return of the Gulf Stream.”
“That is so crazy. I bet we will get freezing spells just like before.”
“Yes. Well, until that happens maybe we can just walk the shore then, and see where you could rent ice skates when the time comes.”
“Sure. I think the Georgetown Rowing Club is going to do it, we can go check it out. I read they’re going to convert when the river freezes over. They’re going to put out floodlights and boundary lines and everything.”
“Good for them! Let’s go take a look after dinner.”
And so they finished the meal cheerfully, moving from one great Levantine dish to the next. Even the basics were exquisite: olives, hummus, dill—everything. And by the time they were done they had split a bottle of a dry white wine. They walked down to the Potomac arm in arm, as they had in Manhattan so very briefly; they walked the Georgetown waterfront, where the potted shrubs lining the river wall were lit by little white Christmas tree lights. All this had been overwhelmed in the great flood, and they could still see the high-water mark on the buildings behind the walk, but other than that, things were much as they had been before, the river as calm as a sheet of black silk as it poured under the Key Bridge.
Then they came to the mouth of Rock Creek, a tiny little thing. Following it upstream in his mind, Frank came to the park and his treehouse, standing right over a bend in this same creek—and thus it occurred