Sixty Days and Counting (40 page)

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 water back up onto the polar plateau, although really they should be spread out elsewhere in the world, because these will only run during the six months the sun is up.”

Here Frank got curious enough to get on the plane’s phone and call Wade directly. He had no idea what time it was in Antarctica, he didn’t even know how they told time down there, but he figured Wade must be used to calls at all hours by now, and probably turned his phone off when he didn’t want to get them.

But Wade picked up, and their connection was good, with what sounded like about a second in transmission delay.

“Wade, it’s Frank Vanderwal, and I’m looking at that e-mail you sent with the video of the prototype pumping system.”

“Oh yeah, hi Frank. How are you? Isn’t that neat? I helo’ed out there day before yesterday, I think it was.”

“Yeah it’s neat,” Frank said. “But tell me, does anyone down there have any idea how frozen sea water is going to behave on the polar cap?”

“Oh sure. It’s kind of a mess, actually. You know, when water freezes the ice is fresh and the salt gets extruded, so there are layers of salt above and below and inside the new ice, so it’s kind of slushy or semifrozen. So the spill from the pumps really spreads flat over the surface of the polar cap, which is good, because then it doesn’t pile up in big domes. Then in that layer the salts kind of clump and rise together, and get pushed onto the surface, so what you end up with is a mostly solid fresh water ice layer, with a crust of salt on top of it, like a devil’s golf-course-type feature. Then the wind will blow that salt down the polar cap, and disperse it as a dust that will melt or abrade surface ice, and whatever stays loose will blow off the polar cap in the katabatic winds. So, back into the ocean again! Pretty neat, eh?”

“Interesting,” Frank said.

“Yeah. If we build enough of these pumping systems, it really will be kind of a feat. I mean, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will eventually all fall into the ocean, it looks like, or most of it. No one can see that stopping now. But we might be able to pump the equivalent in water back onto the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, where it’ll stay frozen and stabilized.”

“So what about the desert basins in the north thirties?” Frank said. “A lot of those are turning into salt lakes. It’ll be like a bunch of giant Salton Seas.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know, what do you think about that? Isn’t the Salton Sea really sick?”

“I guess so, but that’s because it’s drying up again, right? And getting saltier? Run one of these systems to the Salton Sea and its problems would be over. I think you have to keep pumping water into this kind of a sea, to keep it from getting too salty and eventually turning back into a playa. Maybe in a few hundred years you could let that happen, if you wanted. I bet by then you wouldn’t. They’ll be hydrating the areas downwind, don’t you think?”

“Would that be good?”

“More water? Probably good for people, right? It wouldn’t be good for arid desert biomes. But maybe people figure we have enough of those already. I mean, desertification is a big problem in some regions. If you were to create some major lakes in the western Sahara, it might slow down the desertification of the Sahel. I think that’s what the ecologists are talking about now anyway. It’s a big topic of conversation among the beakers down here. They’re loving all this stuff. I sometimes think they love it that the world is falling apart. It makes the earth sciences all the rage now. They’re like the atomic physicists were in World War Two.”

“I suppose they are. But on the other hand…”

“Yeah, I know. Better if we didn’t have to do all this stuff. Since we do, though, it’s good we’ve got some options.”

“I hope this doesn’t give people the feeling that we can just silver-bullet all the problems and go on like we were before.”

“No. Well, we can think about crossing that bridge if we get to it in the first place.”

“True.”

“Have to hope the bridge is still there at that point.”

“True.”

“So you’re flying where?”

“I’m on my way around the world.”

“Oh cool. When are you going to meet with Phil about these pumps?”

“Diane will do it.”

“Okay good. Say hi to him, or have her say hi to him. It’s been a lot harder to get him on the phone since he got elected.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I keep telling him to come down here and see for himself, and he always says he will.”

“I’m sure he wants to.”

“Yeah he would love it.”

“So Wade, are you still seeing that woman down there?”

“It’s complicated. Are you still seeing that woman in D.C.?”

“It’s complicated.”

Satellite hiss, as they both were cast into thoughts of their own—then short and unhumorous laughs from both of them, and they signed off.

In San Diego, Frank rented a van and drove up to UCSD, checking in at the department to collect mail and meet with his remaining grad students. From there he walked up North Torrey Pines Road to RRCCES.

The labs were back, fully up and running, crowded, not messy but busy. A functioning lab was a beautiful thing to behold. A bit of a Fabergé egg; fragile, rococo, needing nurturance and protection. A bubble in a waterfall. Science in action. In these, they changed the world.

And now—

Yann came in and they got down to the latest. “You have to go to Russia,” Yann said.

“I am.”

“Oh! Well good. The Siberian forest is amazing. It’s so big that even the Soviets couldn’t cut it all down. We flew from Cheylabinsk to Omsh and it just went on and on and on.”

“And your lichen?”

“It’s way east of where we spread it. The uptake has been just amazing. It’s almost even scary.”

“Almost?”

Yann laughed defensively. “Yeah, well, given the problems I see you guys are having shifting away from carbon, a little carbon drawdown overshoot might not be such a bad thing, right?”

Frank shook his head. “Who knows? It’s a pretty big experiment.”

“Yeah it is. Well, you know, it’ll be like any other experimental series, in that sense. We’ll see what we get from this one and then try another one.”

“The stakes are awfully high.”

“Yeah true. Good planets are hard to find.” Yann shrugged. “But maybe the stakes have always been high, you know? Maybe we just didn’t know it before. Now we know it, and so maybe we’ll, I don’t know. Do them a little more…”

“Carefully? Like by putting in suicide genes or other negative feedback constraints? Or environmental safeguards?”

Yann shrugged, embarrassed. “Yeah sure.”

He changed the subject, with a look heavenward as if to indicate that what the Russians had done was beyond his control. “But look here, I’ve been working on those gene-expression algorithms some more, and I’ve seen a wrinkle in the palindrome calculation. I want you to take a look at it see what you think.”

“Sure,” Frank said.

They went into Yann’s office, a cubicle just like any other office cubicle, except that the window’s view was of the Pacific Ocean from three hundred feet above sea level. Yann clicked his mouse as rapidly as a video game player and brought up pages that worked like transparencies, one colored pattern after another, until it looked like the London tube map replicated a few times around a vertical axis. As he continued to click, this cat’s cradle rotated more on the axis, so that a really good false sense of three dimensions was established. He squished that image into the top of his huge screen and then on the bottom began to write out the equations for the middle steps of his algorithm. It was like working through a cipher set in which the solution to each step cast a wave of probabilities that then had to be explored and in some cases solved before the next step could be formulated; and then again like that, through iterations within sets, and decision-tree choices to determine the steps that properly followed. Algorithms, in short; or in long. They dug in, and Yann talked and drew on a whiteboard and clicked on the mouse, and typed like a madman, speed-talking all the while, free-associating as well as running a quick tutorial for Frank in his latest thinking, Frank squinting, frowning, asking questions, nodding, scribbling himself, asking more questions. Yann was now the leader of the pack, no doubt about it. It was as it would have been watching Richard Feynman chalkboarding quantum chromodynamics for the first time. A new understanding of some aspect of the unfolding of the world in time. Here they were in the heart of science, the basic activity, the mathematics of alchemy, discovered in the equations, matched against reality, and examined for its own internal logic as math.

“I have to pee,” Yann announced midequation, and they broke for the day. Suddenly it was dinnertime.

“That was good,” Frank said. “Jesus, Yann. I mean, do you know what you’re saying here?”

“Well, I think so. But you tell me. I only learn what this stuff might mean when you tell me. You and Leo.”

“Because it depends on what he can do.”

“Right. Although he’s not the insertion guy, as he’s always saying.”

“Which is what we need now.”

“Well, that’s more Marta and Eleanor. They’re doing their thing, and they’re hooked into a whole network of people doing that.”

“So those nanorods are working?” Frank said, looking at one of the shotgun sequencers.

“Yeah. They’ll tell us about it if we go up to the Paradigms for drinks. The gang usually meets there around this time on Fridays.”

“Nice.”

“But first let’s go talk to Leo, and then we can tell him to join us too.”

“Good idea.”

Leo was in his office reading an online paper with lots of tables and false-color photos. “Oh hi guys, hi Frank. Out here again I see.”

“Yes, I’m doing some other stuff too, but I wanted to check in and see how things are coming along.”

“Things are coming along fine.” Leo had the kind of satisfied, paws-dug-in look of a dog with a bone. Still looking at the screen as he spoke with them. “Eleanor and Marta are putting the triple nanorods through all kinds of trials.”

“So it’s nanotechnology at last.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Although I’ve never seen how nanotechnology isn’t just what we used to call chemistry. But anyway here I am using it.”

“So these nanorods are taking your DNA into mice?”

“Yes, the uptake is really good, and the rods don’t do anything but cross over and give up their attached DNA, so they’re looking like very good insertion agents. The best I’ve seen anyway.”

“Wow.”

Yann described to Leo some of his new work on the algorithm.

“Combine the two advances,” Frank murmured. “And…”

“Oh yeah,” Leo said, smiling hungrily. “Very complementary. It could mean—” And he waved a hand expressively. Everything.

“Let’s go get that drink,” Yann said.

Marta was looking good, although Frank was inoculated. She had been out in the water that day, and it was a truism among surfers that salt water curled hair attractively. Bad hair became good hair, good hair became ravishing. People paid fortunes to salons to get that very look. And of course the sunburn and bleaching, the flush in the skin. “Hi, Frank” she said and pecked him hard on the cheek, like taking a bite out of him. “How’s it going out in the nation’s capital?”

He glowered at her. “It’s going well, thanks,” Ms. Poisoner.

“Right.” She laughed at his expression and they went into the bar.

Eleanor joined them; she too was looking good. Frank ordered a frozen margarita, a drink he never drank more than a mile away from the California coastline. They all decided to join him and it became a pitcher, then two. Frank told them about developments in D.C., and they told him what they had been hearing from Russia, also the lab news, and the latest on North County. Leo took the lead here, being utterly exposed by events; he and his wife lived right on the cliffs in Leucadia, and were embroiled in the legal battle between the neighborhood and the city of Encinitas as to what should be done. The city was a political fiction, made from three coastal villages, Leucadia, Encinitas, and Cardiff, which gloried in the full name of Cardiff-by-the-Sea (now often changed to Cardiff-in-the-Sea, even though only its beach restaurants had actually washed away). Now it was beginning to look like a civic divorce was in order, Leo said. All the cliffside houses in Leucadia had been condemned, or at least the cliff legally abandoned by the city, and it was uncertain really what was going on given all the lawsuits, but for sure it was making for huge insurance and liability problems, and the involvement of the California Coastal Commission and the state legislature. A lot of Leucadia depended on the outcome.