Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [78]
After that, they heard a report from the Russian environmental office. The altered tree lichens they had distributed in Siberia the previous summer were surviving the winter there like any ordinary lichen. Dispersal had been widespread, uptake on trees rapid, as the engineers at Small Delivery Systems had hoped for.
The only problem the Russian could see was that it was possible, at least in theory, that the lichen dispersal would become too successful. What they were seeing now led them to think they might have overseeded, or actually overdispersed. Since most of what they had dispersed had survived, by next summer the Siberian forest around the site would reap whatever the winds and the Russians had sown. In the lab it was proving to grow more like algal blooms encased in mushrooms than like ordinary lichens. “Fast lichen, we call it,” the Russian said. “We didn’t think it was possible, but we see it happening.”
All that was very interesting, but when Frank got back in his office, he found that his computer wouldn’t turn on. And when the techs arrived to check it out, they went pale, and isolated the machine quickly, then carried the whole thing away. “That’s one bad virus,” one of them said. “Very dangerous.”
“So was I hacked in particular?” Frank asked.
“We usually see that one when someone has been targeted. A real poke in the eye. Did you back up your disks?”
“Well…”
“You better have. That’s a complete loss there.”
“A hard-drive crash?”
“A hard-drive bombing. You’ll have to file and report, and they’ll be adding you to the case file. Someone did this to you on purpose.”
Frank felt a chill.
CHARLIE’S DAYTIME OUTINGS WITH JOE had to happen on the weekends now. Even though they were past the First Sixty Days and had had a pretty good run with them, they were trying to keep the momentum going, and things kept popping up to derail the plans, sometimes intentional problems created by the opposition, sometimes neutral matters created by the sheer size and complexity of the system. Roy was pushing so hard that sometimes he even almost lost his cool. Charlie had never seen that, and would have thought it impossible, at least on the professional level. In personal matters, Roy and Andrea had gone through a spectacular in-office breakup, and during that time Charlie had endured some long and bitter rants from Roy. But when it came to business, Roy had always prided himself on staying calm. Calmness at speed was his signature style, as with certain surfing stars. And even now he persisted with that style, or tried to; but the workload was so huge it was hard to keep the calmness along with the pace. They were far past the time when he and Charlie were able to chat about things like they used to. Now their phone conversations went something like:
“Charlie it’s Roy have you met with IPCC?”
“No, we’re both scheduled to meet with the World Bank on Friday.”
“Can you meet them and the Bank team at six today instead?”
“I was going to go home at five.”
“Six then?”
“Well if you think—”
“Good okay more soon bye.”
“Bye.”—said to the empty connection.
Charlie stared at his cell phone and cursed. He cursed Roy, Phil, Congress, the World Bank, the Republican Party, the world, and the universe. Because it was nobody’s fault.
He hit the cell phone button for the daycare.
He was going to have to carve time for an in-person talk with Roy, a talk about what he could and couldn’t do. That would be an unusual meeting. Even though Charlie was now at the White House fifty hours a week, he still never saw Roy in person; Roy was always somewhere else. They spoke on the phone even when one of them was in the West Wing and the other in the Old Executive Offices, less than a hundred yards away. For a second Charlie couldn’t even remember what Roy looked like.
So; call to arrange for “extended stay” for Joe, a development his teachers were used to.