no one like you, Edgardo,’ Bob pointed out.
‘On the contrary. In Buenos Aires everyone is like me. How else could we survive? We’ve lived the end of the world ten times already. What to do after that? You just put Piazzolla on the box and dance on, my friend. You laugh like a fool.’
You certainly do, Frank didn’t say. Of course Edgardo also did mathematics with applications in quantum computing, cryptology, and bio-algorithms, the last of which was the only aspect of his work that Frank understood. It was clear to him that at DARPA Edgardo must have had his fingers in all kinds of pies, subjects that Frank was much more interested in now than he had ever been before.
Where it paralleled Highway 66 the running path became a thin concrete walk immediately north of the freeway, between the cars and the soundwall, with only a chain link fence separating them from the roaring traffic to their right. The horribleness of it always made Edgardo grin. At midday when they usually ran it was totally exposed to the sun, but there was nothing for it but to put your head down and sweat through the smog.
‘You really should run with an umbrella hat on like I do.’ Edgardo looked ridiculous with this tall contraption on his saturnine head, but he claimed it kept him cool.
‘That’s what hair is for, right?’
‘Male pattern baldness has taken that away as an option for me, as I am sure you have noticed.’
‘Wouldn’t that make baldness maladaptive?’
‘Maladaptive in more ways than heat control, my friend.’
‘Did you read that book, Why We Run? Explains how everything about us comes from adaptations to running? Even hair staying on the tops of our heads?’
Edgardo made a rude noise. ‘Why We Run, Why We Love, Why We Reason, all these are the same, they are simply titles for the bestseller list.’
‘Why We Run was good,’ Frank objected. ‘It had stuff on the physiology of endurance. And it talked about how lots of native peoples ran animals down, over a matter of several days, even deer and antelope. The animals were faster, but the chase group would keep on pounding away until they wore the animals out.’
‘Tortoise and hare.’
‘I’m definitely a tortoise.’
‘I’m going to write one called Why We Shit,’ Edgardo declared. ‘I’ll go into all the details of digestion, and compare ours to other species, and describe all the poisons we take in and then have to process or pass through, or get poisoned by. By the time I’m done no one will ever want to eat again.’
‘So it could be the next diet book too.’
‘That’s right! Atkins, South Beach, and me. The Alfonso Diet. Eat nothing but information! Digest that for once and never shit at all.’
‘Like on Atkins, right?’
They left 66 for the river, passed through trees, and then the sun beat down on them again.
‘What did you think of Diane’s meeting?’ Frank asked Edgardo when they were bringing up the rear.
‘That was pretty good,’ Edgardo said. ‘Diane is really going for it. Whoever heads these agencies can make a lot of difference in how they function, I think. There are constraints on what each agency does, and the turf battles are fierce. But if an agency head were to get an idea and go after it aggressively, it could get interesting. So it’s good to have her pushing. What’s going to surprise her is what vicious opposition she’s going to get from certain other agencies. There are people out there really committed to the status quo, let us say.’
They caught up with Bob and Kenzo and Clark, who were discussing the various odd climate interventions they had heard proposed.
Bob said, ‘I like the one about introducing a certain bacterial agent to animal feed that would then live in the gut and greatly reduce methane 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
