Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [137]
“No.”
“Maybe they’ll learn to regrow nerves.”
“I think they may. There are some angles converging on that one.”
“Cool.” She sighed.
“I’ve gotta get back,” Frank said. “I’ve got a call time in with Anna, to talk about coordinating all her Fix-it agencies into the mission architecture, you should drop in on that.”
“Okay I will.” And as they started back: “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
Mostly he left the VW van in a driveway behind the feral potluck house on Linnean. If he drove it at all, mostly out to the farm, he checked it thoroughly first. Dry cleaning, Edgardo called it. It always proved free of all chips, tags, and transponders. Easy to believe when you looked at it: VW vans as a class were getting kind of old and skanky. But what a fine house. And sitting in the curved vinyl seat at night, reading his laptop on the curved little table, Thoreau seemed to second the thought:
In those days when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the workmen locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get him such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and shut the lid and hook it, and so have freedom in his mind, and in his soul be free. This did not seem the worst alternative, nor by any means a despicable resource. I should not be in so bad a box as many a man is in now.
He had understood entirely. Put such a box in a tree, and you had your treetop view as well. Put the box in a book and you had Walden. Put the box on wheels and you had your VW van. Frank printed the passage out and stuck it on the wall the next time he was at the fregan potluck. They too had found the key. He ate with them about three nights a week, all over Northwest, in house after house. There were feral subcultures: there was a farmers’ market wing, and a hunters’ crowd, and dumpster purists, and many other ways of going feral in the city.
At work Frank was making wonderful strides with the guy from OMB who was administering the Fix-it program that Anna had rediscovered. His name too was Henry, and he worked with Roy and Andrea and the rest of the White House brain trust. Right now, he and Frank were teaming up on the clean-energy part of the mission architecture. The Navy had made an agreement with the Navajo nation to build and run a prototype nuclear power plant that would reuse fuel rods and was overengineered for safety. Meanwhile Southern California Edison had agreed to build a dozen more Stirling heat engine solar-power generators, for themselves and other energy companies around the American West, and for some federal plants that were going to be built on BLM land, using a federal grant program. SCE had also won the contract to build the first big generation of fully clean coal plants, which would capture both the particulates and the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on firing, so that all they would be releasing from the pipe was steam. The first plants were to be built in Oklahoma, and the CO2 collected in the process was to be injected into nearby depleted oil wells. Oil wells nearby that were still working would look to see if they got any uptick in pressure differentials, making for a complete systems test.
“Sweet,” the OMB Henry commented. He was about thirty, it seemed to Frank, utterly fresh and determined. He was unfazed by the past, even unaware of it. The defeats and obstructions, the nightmarish beginning to the century, so balked and stupidified; none of that meant a thing to him. And Washington had hundreds of these kids ready to rip. The world was full of them. He said, “That’s a good big subunit of the whole mission architecture, up and running.”
“True,” Frank said. “I think the question now is how quick we can