Fifty Degrees Below. Kim Stanley Robinson
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production.’
‘Animal Flatulence Avoidance Feed! AF AF – the sound of Congress laughing when they hear about that one.’
‘But it’s a good idea. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and it’s mostly biologic in origin. It wouldn’t be much different than putting vitamin A in soy sauce. They’ve done that and saved millions of kids from rickets. How is it different?’
They laughed at Bob, but he was convinced that if they acted boldly, they could alter the climate deliberately and for the good. Kenzo wasn’t so sure; Edgardo didn’t think so.
‘Just think of it as something like the Manhattan Project,’ Bob said. ‘A war against disaster. Or like Apollo.’
Edgardo was his usual acid bath. ‘I wonder if you are fantasizing physically or politically.’
‘Well we obviously can change the atmosphere, because we have.’
‘Yes, but now we’ve triggered abrupt change. Global warming is a problem that could have taken centuries to fix, and now we have three years.’
‘Maybe less!’ Kenzo bragged.
‘Well, heck,’ Bob said, unperturbed. ‘It’ll be a matter of making things up as we go along.’
Frank liked the sound of that.
They ran in silence for a while. Fleeting consciousness of the pack; immersion in the moment. Slipping slickly in your own sweat.
‘Hotter than hell out here.’
After these runs Frank would shower and spend the afternoons working, feeling sharper than at any other time of the day. Mornings were for talking and prepping, afternoons were for work. Even algorithm work, where the best he could do these days was try to understand Yann’s papers, now growing scarcer as Small Delivery made his work confidential.
There was always more to do than there was time to get it done, so he pitched in to the items on the list and set his watch’s alarm for five, a trick he had picked up from Anna, so he would not forget and work deep into the evening. Then he cranked until it beeped. These hours disappeared in a subjective flow where they felt like minutes.
More work was accomplished than there is time to tell, ranging from discussions in house to communications with other people in other organizations, to the endless Sisyphean labor of processing jackets, which is what they called the grant proposals, never mind they were all onscreen now. No matter how high in the Foundation a person got, and no matter how important his or her other tasks might be, there was always the inevitable question from above: how many jackets did you process today? And so really there was no conceivable end to the work that could be done. Given Diane’s interests now, there could never be enough networking with the outside world, and this of course brought Frank news of what everyone else was doing; and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system that placed a barge on a ratcheted piling in the tidal zone, then conferring with a group of NGO science officers concerning the Antarctic microwave project, and then speaking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it to the high beeping of his watch alarm, dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already – that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from ‘desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored’ to ‘minor problems robustly dealt with.’ It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation.
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