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By Root 1362 0

started working with a team from the OMB on funding proposals. They had done some macrocalculations for strategic planning purposes, and it turned out they could swap out the electricity-generating infrastructure for about three hundred billion dollars—an astonishing bargain, as one OMB guy put it. Stabilizing sea level might cost more, because the amount of water involved was simply staggering. Sustainable ag, on the other hand, was only expensive in terms of labor. If it wasn’t going to be fossil fueled, it was going to be much more labor intensive. They needed more farmers, they needed intensive management grass-range ranchers. In other words they needed more cowboys, incredible though that seemed. It was suggestive, when one thought of the federal lands in the American West, and public employment possibilities. The emptying high plains—you could repopulate a region where too few people meant the end of town after town. Landscape restoration—habitat—buffalo biome—wolves and bears. Grizzly bears. Cost, about fifty billion dollars. These are such bargains! the OMB guy kept exclaiming. It doesn’t take that much to prime the pump! Who knew?

A little before sunset, unless something was absolutely pressing, Frank would leave the Old Executive Offices and the security compound, and take off into the streets. Check for tails, sprint at a few strategic moments down little cross streets, to test those behind; no one could follow him without him seeing it. Sometimes he then took the Metro up to the Zoo; sometimes he walked all the way. It was only two miles, about thirty minutes’ hiking. When traffic was bad the drive wouldn’t be that much faster. The city felt larger than it was because when in cars there were so many delays and turns and buildings; and when walking, the distances took a bit too long. At a running pace you saw how compact it was.

Run off the map and into the forest. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

That was it exactly; to the brink of fear. It filled you up. The wind in your face. These Concord guys! That America’s first great thinkers had been raving nature mystics was not accident, but inevitable. The land had spoken through them. They had lived outdoors in the great stony forest of New England, with its Himalayan weather. The blue of the sky, the abyss of fear behind things. A day out on the river, skinny-dipping with Ellery Channing.

One evening as he hiked past Site 21 he saw that the old gang was back, looking as if they had never been away.

“Zeno, Fedpage, Andy, Cutter!”

“Hey there! Doctor Blood! Where you been?”

“How are you guys, where you been?”

“We haven’t been anywhere,” Zeno declared.

“What!” Frank cried. “You haven’t been here!”

Cutter waved a hand at two of his city park friends, sitting at the table with him. “Out and about, you know.”

Andy yelled, “What do you mean where you been? Where you been?”

“I’ve been staying with some friends,” Frank said.

“Yeah well—us too,” Zeno growled.

“Any sight of Chessman?”

“No.” And stupid of you to ask.

“Are you still doing stuff with FOG?”

“With FOG! Are you kidding?”

They told him about it all together, Zeno prevailing in the end: “—and Fedpage is still pissed off at them!”

“He sure has bad luck with that federal government.”

“You mean they have bad luck with him! He’s a Jonah!”

“I am not a Jonah! I’m just the only one who looks up my rights in the personnel policies and then sticks up for them.”

“You need to be more ignorant,” Zeno instructed.

“I do! I’ve got to stop reading all this shit, but I can’t.” Fedpage was reading the Post as he said this, so the others laughed at him.

Actually, it transpired, he was still doing some work with FOG, despite his beef with them, helping Nancy to organize chipping expeditions to tag more animals. To no one’s surprise, the bros had liked being given little