Fifty Degrees Below (35 page)

“Yes.”

“When do you have to be back?”

“Soon.”

“And . . . look, is there some way I can call you? Is
your
phone tapped?”

“Maybe.” She hesitated. “I don’t want to use it for anything important.”

“Ah.” He thought about it. “There must be some protocols you guys use. . . .”

She shook her head quickly. “It really isn’t like that in my department. Although sure, there are methods. We could use phone cards and public phones.”

“We’d have to synchronize.”

“Right, but that’s part of the method.”

“Fridays at nine kind of thing.”

“Right. Let’s do that. Let’s find pay phones we think will work, maybe get a few numbers from a few in a row, so there would be alternates. We’ll share them next time I get a chance to call you, and after that we won’t be putting anything on your phone. You might get bumped up again any time, the way things are going in the market. You guys are really impressing the investors.” She looked at her watch. “Ah hell.”

She twisted into him, kissed him again. “Hmmm,” she said after a while. “I’ve gotta go. . . .”

“That’s okay.”

“Sorry.”

“I understand. You’ll call?”

“Yes. When I can. Get those pay phone numbers ready.”

“I will.”

One last kiss and she was off into the night.

OOOP OOP!

Now Frank went fully optimodal. For a few days he even experienced the “walking on air” phenomenon, which was surely a physiological effect caused by an incomplete integration of happiness into sense data. Life in his tree, in the winter forest, at the gym, at work, in the restaurants he frequented, out in the brief hour of pale winter evening sun, running or throwing the disks or stalking animals—every day parcellated but full, every night a forest adventure, always alive, always generous. Ooop!

How big the world became in a wind. Everything expanded, inside and out. Hike in the dreamlike black forest, huge and blustery. Evening sky over the black branches, violet in the east shading to aquamarine in the west, all luminous, a Maxfield Parrish sky, only now it was obvious that Parrish had never exaggerated at all, but only done his best to suggest a reality that was so much more vivid and intense than any art.

One evening he tromped into 21 not long after sunset and found only Zeno and Redbeard and Fedpage and a couple more. “Where is everybody?”

“Over on Connecticut.”

“Seeking the heat, man.”

“What about Chessman, where’s he?”

Shrugs all around.

“Haven’t seen him for a while.”

“I bet he found a place to stay for the winter. He’s smart.”

“Come and go, Doctor Checkmate, come and go.”

Frank couldn’t read their attitude. He wondered if the chess hustlers at Dupont Circle might know where Chessman was, and resolved to visit and see. There was nothing more to be learned here.

Snow began to fall, small flakes ticking down. After the first heavy snowfall there had been little more of it; and it was usually this kind of frozen frost, swirling on the wind. The bros noted it gloomily, then wandered off. They had actually built the little shelters Zeno had proposed, Frank saw, in the dip they now called Sleepy Hollow, just to the west of the site. Some of them were already tucked into their low shelters, staring out red-eyed at the fire and the snowflakes. Cardboard, trashbags, branches, sheets of plywood, drop cloths, two-by-fours, cinder blocks: under that, dirty nylon or even cotton sleeping bags, toeing into snowbanks. You needed a groundpad under a sleeping bag for it to work.

Frank found himself annoyed. Living like rats when they didn’t have to; it was incompetent. Even if it was all they could find to build with.

It was hard to judge what was happening with them. One time Frank was running with the frisbee guys, completely absorbed in it, when they came into 21 and there was a quartet of young black men, wearing multiple cotton hooded sweatshirts, hands deep in their pockets. Spencer pulled up sharply and turned to the tables. “Hey how’s it going?”

“Oh good!” Zeno said sarcastically. “Real good! These brothers are wondering if we have any
drugs
to sell.”

“
You
guys?” Spencer laughed, and Robert and Robin echoed him as they flanked him on both sides, their golf disks held before them like Oddjob’s hat. Frank was just comprehending the situation when the young men joined the laughter, smiles flashing in the gloom, and headed down Ross without a farewell.

“Catch you guys,” Spencer said as he moved on to the next tee.

“Yeah, catch you,” Zeno growled. “Fucking drop by any time.”

At work that week, a group from NOAA came over to share their analysis of the Gulf Stream stall. They had done the calculations and modeling necessary to say something quantitative about the idea of restarting the far north downwelling, and Diane had asked General Wracke and several members of the Science Board to attend. The NOAA PI ran them through a quick recap of the problem: fresh-water cap introduced onto the surface of the far north Atlantic, reducing salinity and raising the water temperature both; normal temperatures for this month averaged -1.2° C, so melted ice actually warmed it. Density was a function of salinity and temperature combined, which was why the movement of seawater was called the thermohaline cycle. Before the fleet of Arctic icebergs had arrived, the surface in the downwelling regions had had an average salinity of 31.0 p.s.u. (practical salinity units; these were measured in various ways, but a p.s.u. was still roughly equivalent to how many grams of salt per kilogram of water). Now the surface salinity was 29.8, the temperature -1.0° C. Following the PI’s red laser dot down the isopycnals on her graph, they could see just how much salinity would have to be bumped to make the cap dense enough to sink down into the water underneath it.

The biggest downwelling region had been north of Iceland and east of Greenland, but the PI explained that all that region was not equally involved. Currents branching from the great current had flowed north and east almost to the coast of Norway, then turned left toward Greenland in very predictable currents, slowing and then swirling down in giant whirlpools that were thirty or fifty kilometers wide, but only three or four centimeters deep. These whirlpools were visible only to satellite laser altimetry, where false-color graphing could make them psychedelically obvious. They had been relatively stable in location, presumably constrained by the sea bottom, the nearest coastline configurations, the force of the currents, and the Coriolis force.

They were small areas compared to the total surface of the ocean, so that the idea of restarting the current did not seem immediately impossible; but as the PI pointed out, one could not restart the circulation merely by increasing density at the old downwelling sites in isolation, separated from the thrust of the Gulf Stream by some hundreds of kilometers of stalled and unusually fresh water. It would be necessary to draw the full momentum of the Gulf Stream back up to the old sites again, by causing surface water to sink just north of the current downwelling sites, then continue the process, in Pied Piper fashion, until they had drawn the Gulf Stream up behind them and could dump as much as needed in the old downwelling locations. This was the only method that the NOAA team could think of to renew the flow; but it added greatly to the amount of water that they had to make sink. To “isopycnalate,” as Edgardo called it.

Extensive computer modeling of various scenarios had led them to believe that in order to create the masses of sinking water necessary, they would have to alter its salinity about two p.s.u., from 29.8 to 31.6—meaning the addition of about two grams of salt for every kilogram of water they had to alter. The necessary volume of water was a much less certain thing, depending as it did on various assumptions plugged into the model, but the minimal volume they had gotten to get good results totaled approximately five thousand cubic kilometers of water. About a thousand kilograms per cubic meter of water, depending on temperature; two grams of salt per kilogram of water . . . thus, about ten billion kilograms of salt.

Five hundred million tons.

Someone whistled.

“Just how much salt is that?” Frank asked.

Edgardo and General Wracke laughed. Diane smiled but said to the NOAA people, “Can you give us a sense of what that means in terms of volumes, availability, shipping capacities and so on?”

“Yes, I’m sure we can. We would have done that already but we just finished the analysis this morning. But I have to say, you know, before we get to that part, that we’re still very uncertain about the wisdom of trying this at all. I mean we don’t really know what effect it will have, and just going by the law of unintended consequences—”

“Please!” Edgardo said, raising a hand. “No more of this law of unintended consequences! There is no such law. You hear this said and then you look for the equation that expresses this law, or even the principle, and there is no equation or principle. There is just the observation that actions have unintended consequences, though sometimes they matter and other times they don’t. It’s like saying ‘Shit happens.’ ”

“Okay, maybe you’re right. Although shit does happen.”

“Just look into the practicalities of gathering and moving that quantity of salt,” Diane said with her little smile. “It may be completely impossible, in which case no consequences will follow.”

At night the trees of the forest were bare black statues, fractal and huge. There were points from which one could see down great lengths of the gorge. The snow was still rather thin on the ground, drifted into banks against the flood windrows and then icing over, leaving uneven layers of slimy black leaves underfoot. The resulting black-and-white patchwork made the topography of the park almost impossible to read, a kind of Rorschach space in which the tossing branches of the canopy were the best way to stay oriented to the ravine’s forms. The wind hooted and roared like the air choir of the world, gibbons had nothing on the winter forest as far as vocalizations were concerned. Ooooooooooooooooo!

Bouncing patterns, shifting whether he walked or not, and yet somehow the brain made the picture cohere. But sometimes it didn’t, and briefly he would be in an abstract world, all pattern, shifting shifting—ah, that was the Military Road bridge—and then a sudden understanding of what he was seeing would snap back into place with its customary “
YOU ARE HERE
” function. It was remarkable just how much understanding one lost when the visual field went haywire like that—not just what one saw, but where one was, who one was; a glitch in which everything blanked for a moment, pure consciousness caught in a mystery—then bang, all the explanations falling back in at once, leaving only a faint memory of absence.

He was the paleolithic in the park. A recent article in
The Journal of Sociobiology
had reminded him of the man in the ice, a man who had died crossing a Tyrolean pass some five thousand years before. He had lain there frozen in a glacier until something, perhaps global warming, had caused him to emerge and be discovered, in 1991. All his personal possessions had been preserved along with his body, giving archeologists a unique look at the technology of his time. Reading the inventory of his possessions, Frank had noticed how many correlations there were between his own gear and the man in the ice’s. Probably both kits were pretty much what people had carried in the cold for the last fifty thousand years.

The Alpine man had worn a coat made of sewn furs, the stitching very fine, all similar in design and effect to the down jacket Frank was wearing at that very moment. The Alpine man had worn a fanny pack like Frank’s, filled with several small tools that added up to the equivalent of Frank’s Swiss Army knife. The Alpine man’s unfinished bow stave and copper-headed axe (a marvel) had no ready equivalent in Frank’s equipment, though the axe resembled the ice axe he kept in his tree house; and he had taken to carrying his Acheulian hand axe around with him, in his fanny pack or even sometimes in his hand, just for the pleasure of the heft of it. It might even do a little good, in terms of personal defense; there were more and more people in the park, including some little gangs that did not look good to Frank. Not to mention the jaguar.

The Alpine man had worn a backpack made of wood and fur, quite similar in design to Frank’s nylon backpack; inside it were stuff sacks. A birch bark container had been designed to carry live embers, and there was also a little stone bowl in which to place flammable stuff to light by striking flints; all that equivalent to Frank’s handy cigarette lighter. Frank also had a little Primus stove up in the tree house, a primitive-looking steel thing that roared like a blowtorch and was almost as hot. How the Alpine man would have loved that! In effect Frank had a little bottle of fire he could light anywhere. The technological sublime indeed, when he had a little pot of coffee or soup on the boil.

The Alpine man had also carried a flat circular piece of white marble, holed through its middle. A loop of leather ran through the central hole, and a number of smaller leather loops were tied around through the main loop: this “tassel” as the archeologists called it, looked to Frank like a sling of carabiners. It was the one possibly nonutilitarian piece on the man (though his skin had also displayed tattoos). The birch fungus in his fanny pack had perhaps been medicinal, like the aspirin in Frank’s bathroom bag.

All down the list, familiar stuff. People still carried around things to do the same things. Frank’s kit had a provenance of thousands of years. It was a beautiful thought, and made him happy. He was Alpine man!

And so when he hiked into site 21 and saw again the bros’ ramshackle shelters, he said, “Come on guys. Let’s try to get up to paleolithic code, eh? I brought along a roll of ripstop nylon this time, check it out. First class army-navy surplus, it’ll match your camo flak jacket color scheme.”

“Yarrrr, fuck you!”

“Come on, I’m going to cut you all a tarp off the roll. Everyone in the park is under this stuff but you.”