Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [145]
He reached out for Joe, which meant that Charlie was going to have to join him, and so Charlie took a kid’s life preserver from the ranger offering it and tried to get one of Joe’s arms through it. A quick wrestling move, similar to the one honed by long practice with baby backpack insertions, got him started, but then Charlie looked up to see that Frank had taken Diane by the upper arm and slipped through the group to the edge of the dock. “Here,” Frank said, ushering Diane into Phil’s boat, “I’ve got to be the one who goes out with Joe, I promised him the last time I took out Nick, so I need to go out with them. So here, Diane, you go with the president this time, you guys need to talk anyway.” She looked surprised.
“Good idea!” Phil said, reaching out to help her step into the boat. He smiled his famous smile. “Let’s get a head start on them.”
“Okay,” Diane said as she sat down. Frank turned away from them to greet Joe and lead Charlie to another boat.
Phil and Diane pedaled away from the dock. Charlie and Frank got in the next one, held in place by rangers with boathooks, and they took Joe and strapped him in between them. By the time they were ready to go some time had passed; Phil and Diane were already midpond, chomping away like a little steamboat across the coppery water. Frank waved to them, but they did not see; they were laughing at something, their attention already otherwise engaged.
PC: Morning Charlie. Have some coffee. Joe, do you want coffee?
JQ: Sure Phil.
CQ: How about hot chocolate.
PC: Oh yeah, that’s what I’m having.
JQ: Sure.
PC: Rain on our dawn patrol. Too bad. Although rain has gotten a lot more interesting than it used to be, hasn’t it?
CQ: Droughts will do that.
PC: Yes. But now is the winter of our wet content. Here you go, Joe. Here you go, Charlie. These south windows are big, aren’t they. I like looking at rain out the window. Here Joe, you can put those right here on the carpet. Good.
(Pause. Slurping.)
PC: So, Charlie, I’ve been thinking that we can’t afford to bog down like we kind of are. We have to go fast, so maybe we can’t afford to fight capital anymore. They’ve rigged the numbers and written the laws.
CQ: So, let me guess, now you want to make saving the world a capitalist project? You make it some kind of canny investment opportunity, with a great six-month rate of return?
PC: This is why you are one of my trusted advisors, Charlie. You can guess what I’m thinking right after I say it.
JQ: Ha Dad.
CQ: Ha yourself.
PC: So yes, that’s what you do. Without conceding that private ownership of the public trust is right, or even sensible, but only because it has bought up so much of the next thirty years. Heck it supposedly owns the world in perpetuity. We’ll change that later. Right now we have to harness it to our cause, and use it to solve our problem. If we can do that, then the capitalism we end up with won’t be the same one we began with anyway. The rescue operation is so much larger than anything else we’ve ever done that it will change everything.
CQ: Or so you hope!
PC: It’s what I’m going to try. I think we are more or less forced to try it that way. I don’t see any alternative. Really, if we don’t get the infrastructure and transport systems swapped out as fast as is physically possible, the world is cooked. It’s like our first sixty days never ended, but only keeps rolling over. It’s like sixty days and counting all the time. So we have to look to what we have now. And right now we have capitalism. So we have to use it.
CQ: I don’t see how.
PC: For one thing, capital has a lot of capital. And a lot of it they keep liquid and available for investment. It runs into trillions of dollars. They want to invest it. At the same time there’s an overproduction problem. They can make more than they can sell of lots of things. And so all capital of all kinds is on the hunt for a good investment, some thing or a service