Forty Signs of Rain (14 page)

She called Drepung, who answered his cell phone number.

“Drepung, can you meet for lunch? I’ve got some ideas for how you might get some science support there in Khembalung. Some of it’s from NSF, some from elsewhere.”

“Yes, of course Anna, thanks very much. I’ll meet you at the Food Factory in twenty minutes, if that’s all right, I’m just trying to buy some shoes for Rudra down the street here.”

“Perfect. What kind are you getting him?”

“Running shoes. He’ll love them.”

On her way out she ran into Frank, also headed for the elevator.

“What you got?” he asked, gesturing at her list.

“Some stuff for the Khembalis,” she said. “Various programs we run or take part in that might help them out.”

“So they can study how to adapt to higher sea levels?”

She frowned. “No, it’s more than that. We can get them a lot of infrastructural help if it’s configured right.”

“Good. But, you know. In the end they’re going to need more than studies. And NSF doesn’t do remediation. It just serves its clients. Pays for their studies.”

Frank’s comment bugged Anna, and after a nice lunch with Drepung she went up to her office and called Sophie Harper, NSF’s liaison to Congress.

“Sophie, does NSF ever do requests for proposals?”

“Not for a long time. In general it’s been policy to make the program proposal-driven.”

“So is there any way that NSF can, you know, set the agenda so to speak?”

“I don’t know what you mean. We ask Congress for funding in very specific ways, and they earmark the money they give us for very specific purposes.”

“So we might be able to ask for funds for various things?”

“Yes, we do that. I think the way to think of it is that science sets its own agenda. To tell the truth, that’s why the appropriations committees don’t like us very much.”

“Why?”

“Because they hold the purse strings, honey. And they’re very jealous of that power. I’ve had senators who believe the Earth is flat say to me, ‘Are you trying to tell me that
you
know what’s good for science better than
I
do?’ And of course that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell them, because it’s true, but what can you say? That’s the kind of person we sometimes have to deal with. Even with the best of committees, there’s a basic dislike for science’s autonomy.”

“But we’re only free to study things.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Anna sighed. “I don’t either. Listen Sophie, thanks for that. I’ll get back to you when I have a better idea what I’m trying to ask.”

“Always here. Check out NSF’s history pages on the website, you’ll learn some things you didn’t know.”

Anna hung up, and then did that very thing.

She had never gone to the website’s history pages before; she was not much for looking back. But she valued Sophie’s advice, and as she read, she realized Sophie had been right; because she had worked there for so long, unconsciously she had felt that she knew the Foundation’s story. But it wasn’t true.

Basically it was a story of science struggling to extend its reach in the world, with mixed success. After World War Two, Vannevar Bush, head
of the wartime Office of Science and Technology, advocated a permanent federal agency to support basic scientific research. He argued that it was their basic scientific research that had won the war (radar, penicillin, the bomb), and Congress had been convinced, and had passed a bill bringing the NSF into being.

After that it was one battle after another, with both Congress and the President, contesting how much say scientists would have in setting national policy. President Truman forcing a presidentially selected board of directors on the Foundation in the beginning. President Nixon abolishing the Office of Science and Technology, which NSF had in effect staffed, replacing it with a single “scientific advisor.” The Gingrich Congress abolishing its Office of Technology Assessment. The Bush administrations zeroing out major science programs in every single budget. On it went.

Only occasionally in this political battle did science rally and win a few. After Sputnik, scientists were begged to take over again; NSF’s budget had ballooned. Then in the 1960’s, when everyone was an activist, NSF had created a program called “Interdisciplinary Research Relevant to Problems of Our Society.” What a name from its time that was!

Although, come to think of it, the phrase described very well what Anna had had in mind when querying Sophie in the first place. Interdisciplinary research, relevant to problems of our society—was that really such a sixties joke of an idea?

Back then, IRRPOS had morphed into RANN, “Research Applied to National Needs.” RANN had then gotten killed for being too applied; President Nixon had not liked its objections to his antiballistic missile defense. At the same time he preemptively established the EPA so that it would be under him rather than Congress.

The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn’t wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of business. They didn’t want to know.

For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her:
they didn’t want to know
. And yet they did want to call
the shots. To Anna this was clearly crazy. Even Joe’s logic was stronger. How could such people exist, what could they be thinking? On what basis did they build such an incoherent mix of desires, to want to stay ignorant and to be powerful as well? Were these two parts of the same insanity?

She abandoned that train of thought, and read on to the end of the piece. “No agency operates in a vacuum,” it said. That was one way to put it! The NSF had been buffeted, grown, stagnated, adapted—done the best it could. Throughout all, its basic purposes and methods had held fast: to support basic research; to award grants rather than purchase contracts; to decide things by peer-review rather than bureaucratic fiat; to hire skilled scientists for permanent staff; to hire temporary staff from the expert cutting edges in every field.

Anna believed in all these, and she believed they had done demonstrable good. Fifty thousand proposals a year, eighty thousand people peer-reviewing them, ten thousand new proposals funded, twenty thousand grants continuing to be supported. All functioning to expand scientific knowledge, and the influence of science in human affairs.

She sat back in her chair, thinking it over. All that basic research, all that good work; and yet—thinking over the state of the world—somehow it had not been enough. Possibly they would have to consider doing something more.

P
RIMATES IN the driver’s seat. It looked like they should all be dead. Multicar accidents, bloody incidents of road rage. Cars should have been ramming one another in huge demolition derbies, a global auto-da-fé.

But they were primates, they were social creatures. The brain had ballooned to its current size precisely to enable it to make the calculations necessary to get along in groups. These were the parts of the brain engaged when people drove in crowded traffic. Thus along with all the jockeying and frustration came the almost subliminal satisfactions of winning a competition, or the grudging solidarities of cooperating to mutual advantage. Let that poor idiot merge before his on-ramp lane disappeared; it would pay off in the overall speed of traffic. Thus the little primate buzz.

When things went well. But so often what one saw were people playing badly. It was like a giant game of prisoners’ dilemma, the classic game in which two prisoners are separated and asked to tell tales on the other one, with release offered to them if they do. The standard computer model scoring system had it that if the prisoners cooperate with each other by staying silent, they each get three points; if both defect against the other, they each get one point; and if one defects and the other
doesn’t, the defector gets five points and the sap gets zero points. Using this scoring system to play the game time after time, there is a first iteration which says, it is best always to defect. That’s the strategy that will gain the most points over the long haul, the computer simulations said—if you are only playing strangers once, and never seeing them again. And of course traffic looked as if it were that situation.

But the shadow of the future made all the difference. Day in and day out you drove into the same traffic jam, with the same basic population of players. If you therefore played the game as if playing with the same opponent every time, which in a sense you were, with you learning them and them learning you, then more elaborate strategies would gain more points than always defect. The first version of the more successful strategy was called tit for tat, in which you did to your opponent what they last did to you. This out-competed always defect, which in a way was a rather encouraging finding. But tit for tat was not the perfect strategy, because it could spiral in either direction, good or bad, and the bad was an endless feud. Thus further trials had found successful variously revised versions of tit for tat, like generous tit for tat, in which you gave opponents one defection before turning on them, or always generous, which in certain limited conditions worked well. Or, the most powerful strategy Frank knew of, an irregularly generous tit for tat, where you forgave defecting opponents once before turning on them, but only about a third of the time, and unpredictably, so you were not regularly taken advantage of by one of the less cooperative strategies, but could still pull out of a death spiral of tit-for-tat feuding if one should arise. Various versions of these firm but fair irregular strategies appeared to be best if you were dealing with the same opponent over and over.

In traffic, at work, in relationships of every kind—social life was nothing but a series of prisoners’ dilemmas. Compete or cooperate? Be selfish or generous? It would be best if you could always trust other players to cooperate, and safely practice always generous; but in real life people did not turn out to earn that trust. That was one of the great shocks of adolescence, perhaps, that realization; which alas came to many at an
even younger age. And after that you had to work things out case by case, your strategy a matter of your history, or your personality, who could say.

Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than Frank could have walked. He wondered how it was that certain turn-signal indicators managed to express a great desperation to change lanes, while others seemed patient and dignified. The speed of blinking, perhaps, or how close the car hugged the lane line it wanted to cross. Although rapid blinking did look insistent and whiny, while slow blinking bespoke a determined inertia.

It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. On the West Coast they played tit for tat, or even firm but fair, because it moved things along faster. Maybe this only meant Californians had lived through that many more freeway traffic jams. People had learned the game from birth, sitting in their baby seats, and so in California cars in two merging lanes would alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the game and play it right. Even young males cooperated. In that sense if none other, California was indeed the edge of history, the evolutionary edge of
Homo automobilicus
.

Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about, everyone girding up to get one point in a crash. Every SUV was a defection. Then there were the little cars that always gave way, the saps. A terrible combination. It was so slow, so unnecessarily, unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.

And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction of traffic: you could loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain could explain this, so it was like witnessing magic, the “technological sublime” people spoke of, which was the emotion experienced when the primate mind could not find a natural explanation for what it saw.

And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and just
curse
someone
ferociously, from a few feet away, and yet have no ramifications to such a grave social transgression. It was not much compared to the satisfactions of cooperation, but perhaps rarer. It was something, anyway.

He crept forward in his car, cursing. He should not have gotten onto the Beltway. It was often badly overloaded at this hour. Stop and go, inch along. Curse defectors and saps. Inch along.

It stayed so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to get there for the panel to start on time; there was no slack in the schedule. The panel members were all in town, having spent a boring night the night before, probably. And the Holiday Inn in the Ballston complex often did not have enough hot water to supply everyone showering at that hour of the morning, so some of the panelists would be grumpy about that. Some would be gathering at this very moment in their third floor conference room, ready to go and feeling that there wasn’t enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded it on purpose, and they had flights home late the next day that they could not miss. To arrive late in this situation would be bad form indeed, no matter traffic on the Beltway. There would be looks, or perhaps a joke or two from Pritchard or Lee; he would have to explain himself, make excuses. It could interfere with his plan. He cursed the driver of a car cutting uselessly in front of him.

Then he was coming on Route 66, and impulsively he decided to get on it going east, even though at this hour it was restricted to High Occupancy Vehicles only. Normally Frank obeyed this rule, but feeling a little desperate, he took the turn and curved onto 66, where traffic was indeed moving faster. Every vehicle was occupied by at least two people, of course, and Frank stayed in the right lane and drove as unobtrusively as possible, counting on the generally inward attention of multiply occupied vehicles to keep too many people from noticing his transgression. Of course there were highway patrol cars on the lookout for lawbreakers like Frank, so he was taking a risk that he didn’t like to take, but it seemed to him a lower risk than staying on the Beltway as far as arriving late was concerned.