Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [148]
He stared at the paper. There were a bunch of other reasons piling up to go out to San Diego again. And San Diego was only one of several places he wanted to visit in person, or was being asked to visit. Taken together they implied much more travel than he had time to accomplish; he didn’t know exactly what to do, and so went nowhere, and the problem got worse. It wasn’t quite like his indecision fugue state; it was just a problem. But it was Diane who suggested that he string all the trips together in a quick jaunt around the world, dropping in on Beijing, the Takla Makan, Siberia, and England. He could start with San Diego, and the White House travel office could package it so it would only take him a couple of weeks at the most. A meeting, two conferences, and three on-site inspections.
So he agreed, and then the day of his departure was upon him, and he had to dig out his passport and get his visas and other documents from the travel office, and put together a travel bag and jump on the White House shuttle out to Dulles.
As soon into his flight as he could turn on his laptop, he checked out a video attachment in an e-mail that had come in from Wade Norton right before departure. The little movie appeared boxed in the middle of his screen, miniaturized so that Wade could show quite a lot. There was even a soundtrack—the opening shot, of the Antarctic coastline, was accompanied by a hokey high-wind and bird-cry combination, even though the sea looked calm and there were no birds in sight. The black rock of the coastline was filigreed with frozen white spume, a ragged border separating white ice and blue water. Summer again in Antarctica. The shot must have been taken from a helicopter, hovering in place.
Then Wade’s voice came over the fake sound: “See, there in the middle of the shot? That’s one of the coastal installations.”
Finally Frank saw something other than coastline: a line of metallic blue squares. Photovoltaic blue. “What you see covers about a football field. The sun is up twenty-four/seven right now. Ah, there’s the prototype pump, down there in the water.”
More metallic blue: in this case, thin lines, running from the ocean’s edge up over the black rocks, past the field of solar panels on the nearby ice, and then on up the broad tilted road of the Leverett Glacier toward the polar cap. At this pixel level the lines very quickly became invisible to the eye.
“Heated pumps and heated pipelines. It’s the latest oil tech, developed for Alaska and Russia. And it’s looking good, but now we need a lot more of it. And a lot more shipping. The pipes are huge. You probably can’t tell from these images, but the pipes are like sewer mains. They’re as big as they could make them and still get them on the ships. Apparently it helps the thermal situation to have them that big. So they’re taking in like a million gallons an hour, and moving it at about ten miles an hour up the glacier. The pipeline runs parallel to the polar overland route, that way they have the crevasses already dealt with. I rode with Bill for a few days on the route, it’s really cool. So there you have your proof of concept. It’s working just like you’d want it to. They’ve mapped all the declivities in the polar ice, and the oil companies are manufacturing the pumps and pipes and all. They’re loving this plan, as you can imagine. The only real choke points in the process now are speed of manufacture and shipping and installation. They haven’t got enough people who know how to do the installing. That’ll all have to ramp up. I’ve been running the numbers with Bill and his gang, and every system like this one can put ten cubic kilometers a year of water up on the polar cap. So depending on how fast the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks up, you would need some thousands of these systems to get the