Forty Signs of Rain (34 page)

A
NNA WAS working with her door open, and once again she heard Frank’s end of a phone conversation. Having eavesdropped once, it seemed to have become easier; and as before, there was a strain in Frank’s voice that caught her attention. Not to mention louder sentences like:

“
What?
Why would they do
that?”

Then silence, except for a squeak of his chair and a brief drumming of fingers.

“Uh-huh, yeah. Well, what can I say. It’s too bad. It sucks, sure … Yeah. But, you know. You’ll be fine either way. It’s your workforce that will be in trouble.—No no, I understand. You did your best. Nothing you can do after you sell. It wasn’t your call, Derek.… Yeah I know. They’ll find work somewhere else. It’s not like there aren’t other biotechs out there, it’s the biotech capital of the world, right? Yeah, sure. Let me know when you know.… Okay, I do too. Bye.”

He hung up hard, cursed under his breath.

Anna looked out her door. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah.”

She got up and went to her doorway. He was looking down at the floor, shaking his head disgustedly.

He raised his head and met her gaze. “Small Delivery Systems closed down Torrey Pines Generique and let almost everyone go.”

“Really! Didn’t they just buy them?”

“Yes. But they didn’t want the people.” He grimaced. “It was for something Torrey Pines had, like a patent. Or one of the people they kept. There were a few they invited to join the Small Delivery lab in Atlanta. Like that mathematician I told you about. The one who sent us a proposal, did I tell you about him?”

“One of the jackets that got turned down?”

“That’s right.”

“Your panel wasn’t that impressed, as I recall.”

“Yeah, that’s right. But I’m not so sure they were right.” He shrugged. “We’ll never know now. They’ll get him to sign a contract that gives them the rights to his work, and then they’ll have it to patent, or keep as a trade secret, or even bury if it interferes with some other product of theirs. Whatever their legal department thinks will make the most.”

Anna watched him brood. Finally she said, “Oh well.”

He gave her a look. “A guy like him belongs at NSF.”

Anna lifted an eyebrow. She was well aware of Frank’s ambivalent or even negative attitude toward NSF, which he had let slip often enough.

Frank understood her look and said, “The thing is, if you had him here then you could, you know, sic him on things. Sic him like a dog.”

“I don’t think we have a program that does that.”

“Well you should, that’s what I’m saying.”

“You can add that to your talk to the Board this afternoon,” Anna said. She considered it herself. A kind of human search engine, hunting math-based solutions …

Frank did not look amused. “I’ll already be out there far enough as it is,” he muttered. “I wish I knew why Diane asked me to give this talk anyway.”

“To get your parting wisdom, right?”

“Yeah right.” He looked at a pad of yellow legal-sized paper, scribbled over with notes.

Anna surveyed him, feeling again the slightly irritated fondness for him she had felt on the night of the party for the Khembalis. She would miss him when he was gone. “Want to go down and get a coffee?”

“Sure.” He got up slowly, lost in thought, and reached out to close the program on his computer.

“Wow, what did you do to your hand?”

“Oh. Burned it in a little climbing fall. Grabbed the rope.”

“My God Frank.”

“I was belayed at the time, it was just a reflex thing.”

“It looks painful.”

“It is when I flex it.” They left the offices and went to the elevators. “How is Charlie getting along with his poison ivy?”

“Still moaning and groaning. Most of the blisters are healing, but some of them keep breaking open. I think the worst part now is that it keeps waking him up at night. He hasn’t slept much since it happened. Between that and Joe he’s kind of going crazy.”

In the Starbucks she said, “So are you ready for this talk to the Board?”

“No. Or as much as I can be. Like I said, I don’t really know why Diane wants me to do it.”

“It must be because you’re leaving. She wants to get your parting wisdom. She does that with some of the visiting people. It’s a sign she’s interested in your take on things.”

“But how would she know what that is?”

“I don’t know. Not from me. I would only say good things, of course, but she hasn’t asked me.”

He rubbed a finger gently up and down the burn on his palm.

“Tell me,” he said, “have you ever heard of someone getting a report and, you know, just filing it away? Taking no action on it?”

“Happens all the time.”

“Really.”

“Sure. With some things it’s the best way to deal with them.”

“Hmm.”

They had made their way to the front of the line, and so paused for
orders, and the rapid production of their coffees. Frank continued to look thoughtful. It reminded Anna of his manner when he had arrived at her party, soaking wet from the rain, and she said, “Say, did you ever find that woman you were stuck in the elevator with?”

“No. I was going to tell you about it. I did what you suggested and contacted the Metro offices, and asked service and repair to get her name from the report. I said I needed to contact her for my insurance report.”

“Oh really! And?”

“And the Metro person read it right off to me, no problem. Read me everything she wrote. But it turns out she wrote down the wrong stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

They walked out of the Starbucks and back into the building.

“It was a wrong address she put down. There’s no residence there. And she wrote down her name as Jane Smith. I think she made everything up.”

“That’s strange! I guess they didn’t check your IDs.”

“No.”

“I’d have thought they would.”

“People just freed from stuck elevators are not in the mood to be handing over their IDs.”

“No, I suppose not.” An UP elevator opened and they got in. They had it to themselves. “Like your friend, apparently.”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder why she would write down the wrong stuff though.”

“Me too.”

“What about what she told you—something about being in a cycling club, was it?”

“I’ve tried that. None of the cycling clubs in the area will give out membership lists. I cracked into one in Bethesda, but there wasn’t any Jane Smith.”

“Wow. You’ve really been looking into it.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she’s a spook. Hmm. Maybe you could go to all the cycling
club meetings, just once. Or join one and ride with it, and look for her at meets, and show her picture around.”

“What picture?”

“Get a portrait program to generate one.”

“Good idea, although”—sigh—“it wouldn’t look like her.”

“No, they never do.”

“I’d have to get better at riding a bike.”

“At least she wasn’t into skydiving.”

He laughed. “True. Well, I’ll have to think about it. But thanks, Anna.”

Later that afternoon they met again, on the way up to one of Diane’s meetings with the NSF Board of Directors. They got out on the twelfth floor and walked around the hallways. The outer windows at the turns in the halls revealed that the day had darkened, low black clouds now tearing over themselves in their hurry to reach the Atlantic, sheeting down rain as they went.

In the big conference room Laveta and some others were repositioning a whiteboard and PowerPoint screen according to Diane’s instructions. Frank and Anna were the first ones there.

“Come on in,” Diane said. She busied herself with the screen and kept her back to Frank.

The rest of the crowd trickled in. NSF’s Board of Directors was composed of twenty-four people, although usually there were a couple of vacant positions in the process of being filled. The directors were all powers in their parts of the scientific world, appointed by the President from lists provided by NSF and the National Academy of Science, and serving six-year terms.

Now they were looking wet and windblown, straggling into the room in ones and twos. Some of Anna’s fellow division directors came in as well. Eventually fifteen or sixteen people were seated around the big table, including Sophie Harper, their congressional liaison. The light in the
room flickered faintly as lightning made itself visible diffusely through the coursing rain on the room’s exterior window. The gray world outside pulsed as if it were an aquarium.

Diane welcomed them and moved quickly through the agenda’s introductory matter. After that she ran down a list of large projects that had been proposed or discussed in the previous year, getting the briefest of reports from Board members assigned to study the projects. They included climate mitigation proposals, many highly speculative, all extremely expensive. A carbon sink plan included reforestations that would also be useful for flood control; Anna made a note to tell the Khembalis about that one.

But nothing they discussed was going to work on the global situation, given the massive nature of the problem, and NSF’s highly constricted budget and mission. Ten billion dollars; and even the fifty-billion-dollar items on their list of projects only addressed small parts of the global problem.

At moments like these Anna could not help thinking of Charlie playing with Joe’s dinosaurs, holding up a little pink mouselike thing, a first mammal, and exclaiming, “Hey it’s NSF!”

He had meant it as a compliment to their skill at surviving in a big world, or to the way they represented the coming thing, but unfortunately the comparison was also true in terms of size. Scurrying about trying to survive in a world of dying dinosaurs—worse yet, trying to save the dinosaurs too—where was the mechanism? As Frank would say, How could that work?

She banished these thoughts and made her own quick report about the infrastructure distribution programs that she had been studying. These had been in place for some years, and she could therefore provide some quantitative data, tallying increased scientific output in the participating countries. A lot of infrastructure had been dispersed in the last decade. Anna’s concluding suggestion that the programs were a success and should be expanded was received with nods all around, as an obvious thing to do. But also expensive.

There was a pause as people thought this over.

Finally Diane looked at Frank. “Frank, are you ready?”

Frank stood to answer. He did not exhibit his usual ease. He walked over to the whiteboard, took up a red marker, fiddled with it. His face was flushed.

“All the programs described so far focus on gathering data, and the truth is we have enough data already. The world’s climate has already changed. The Arctic Ocean ice pack breakup has flooded the surface of the North Atlantic with fresh water, and the most recent data indicate that that has stopped the surface water from sinking, and stalled the circulation of the big Atlantic current. That’s been pretty conclusively identified as a major trigger event in Earth’s climactic history, as most of you no doubt know. Abrupt climate change has almost certainly already begun.”

Frank stared at the whiteboard, lips pursed. “So. The question becomes, what do we do? Business as usual won’t work. For you here, the effort should be toward finding ways that NSF can make a much broader impact than it has up until now.”

“Excuse me,” one of the Board members said, sounding a bit peeved. He was a man in his sixties, with a gray Lincoln beard; Anna did not recognize him. “How is this any different from what we are always trying to do? I mean, we’ve talked about trying to do this at every Board meeting I’ve ever been to. We always ask ourselves, how can NSF get more bang for its buck?”

“Maybe so,” said Frank. “But it hasn’t worked.”

Diane said, “What are you saying, Frank? What should we be doing that we haven’t already tried?”

Frank cleared his throat. He and Diane stared at each other for a long moment, locked in some kind of undefined conflict.

Frank shrugged, went to the whiteboard, uncapped his red marker. “Let me make a list.”

He wrote a 1 and circled it.

“One. We have to knit it all together.” He wrote
Synergies at NSF
.

“I mean by this that you should be stimulating synergistic efforts that range across the disciplines to work on this problem. Then,” he wrote
and circled a 2, “you should be looking for immediately relevant applications coming out of the basic research funded by the Foundation. These applications should be hunted for by people brought in specifically to do that. You should have a permanent in-house innovation and policy team.”

Anna thought, That would be that mathematician he just lost.

She had never seen Frank so serious. His usual manner was gone, and with it the mask of cynicism and self-assurance that he habitually wore, the attitude that it was all a game he condescended to play even though everyone had already lost. Now he was serious, even angry it seemed. Angry at Diane somehow. He wouldn’t look at her, or anywhere else but at his scrawled red words on the whiteboard.

“Three, you should commission work that you think needs to be done, rather than waiting for proposals and funding choices given to you by others. You can’t afford to be so passive anymore. Four, you should assign up to fifty percent of NSF’s budget every year to the biggest outstanding problem you can identify, in this case catastrophic climate change, and direct the scientific community to attack and solve it. Both public and private science, the whole culture. The effort could be organized through something like Germany’s Max Planck Institutes, which are funded by the government to go after particular problems. There’s about a dozen of them, and they exist while they’re needed and get disbanded when they’re not. It’s a good model.

“Five, you should make more efforts to increase the power of science in policy decisions everywhere. Organize all the scientific bodies on Earth into one larger body, a kind of UN of scientific organizations, which then would work together on the important issues, and would collectively
insist
they be funded, for the sake of all the future generations of humanity.”