Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  As the morning wore on, more and more boats appeared. The TV shots from the air made it looked like some kind of regatta—the Mall as water festival, like something out of Ming China. Many people were out on makeshift craft that did not look seaworthy. Police boats on patrol were even beginning to ask people who were not doing rescue work to leave, one report said, though clearly they were not having much of an impact. The situation was still so new that the law had not yet fully returned. Motorboats zipped about, leaving beige wakes behind. Rowers rowed, paddlers paddled, kayakers kayaked; swimmers swam; some people were even out in the blue pedal boats that had once been confined to the Tidal Basin, pedaling around the Mall in majestic mini-steamboat style.

  Although these images from the Mall dominated the media, some channels carried other news from around the region. Hospitals were filled. The two days of the storm had killed many people, no one knew how many; and there were many rescues as well. In the first part of the third morning, the TV helicopters often interrupted their overviews to pluck people from rooftops. Rescues by boat were occurring all through the Southwest district and up the Anacostia basin. Reagan Airport remained drowned, and there was not a single passable bridge over the Potomac all the way upstream to Harpers Ferry. The Great Falls of the Potomac was no more than a huge turbulence in a nearly unbroken, gorge-topping flow. The President had evacuated to Camp David, and now he declared all of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware a federal disaster area, the District of Columbia, in his words, “worse than that.”

  * * * *

  Then there came yells from down the hall.

  A police motor launch was at the second-floor windows, facing Constitution, ready to ferry people to dry ground. This one was going west, and, yes, would eventually dock in Georgetown if people wanted off there. It was perfect for Charlie’s hope to get west of Rock Creek and then walk home.

  And so when his turn came, he climbed out of a window, down into a big boat. A stanza from a Robert Frost poem he had memorized in high school came back to him suddenly:

  It went many years, but at last came a knock,

  And I thought of the door with no lock to lock.

  The knock came again, my window was wide;

  I climbed on the sill and descended outside.

  He laughed as he moved forward in the boat to make room for other refugees. Strange what came back to the mind. How had that poem continued? Something something; he couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. The relevant part had come to him after waiting all these years. And now he was out the window and on his way.

  The launch rumbled, glided away from the building, turned in a broad curve west down Constitution Avenue. Then left, out onto the broad expanse of the Mall. They were boating on the Mall.

  The National Gallery reminded him of the Taj Mahal—same water reflection, same gorgeous white stone. All the Smithsonian buildings looked amazing. No doubt they had been working inside them all night to get things above flood level. What a mess it was going to be.

  Charlie steadied himself against the gunwale, feeling so stunned that it seemed he might lose his balance and fall. That was probably the boat’s doing, but he was, in all truth, reeling. The TV images had been one thing, the actual reality another; he could scarcely believe his eyes. White clouds stood overhead in the blue sky, and the flat brown lake was gleaming in the sunlight, reflecting a blue glitter of sky, everything all glossy and compact—real as real, or even more so. None of his poison-ivy visions had ever been as remotely real as this lake was now.

  Their pilot maneuvered them farther south. They were going to pass the Washington Monument on its south side. They puttered slowly past it. It towered over them like an obelisk in the Nile’s flood, making all the watercraft look correspondingly tiny.

  The Smithsonian buildings appeared to be drowned to about ten feet. Upper halves of their big public doors emerged from the water like low boathouse doors. For some of the buildings, that would be a catastrophe. Others had steps or stood higher on their foundations. A mess any way you looked at it.

  Their launch growled west at a walking pace. Trees flanking the western half of the Mall looked like water shrubs in the distance. The Vietnam Memorial would of course be submerged. The Lincoln Memorial stood on its own little pedestal hill, but it was right on the Potomac and might be submerged to the height of all its steps; the statue of Lincoln might even be getting his feet wet. Charlie found it hard to tell, through the shortened trees, just how high the water was down there.

  Boats of all kinds dotted the long brown lake, headed this way and that. The little blue paddle boats from the Tidal Basin were particularly festive, but all the kayaks and rowboats and inflatables added their dots of neon color, and the little sailboats tacking back and forth flashed their triangular sails. Brilliant sunlight filled the clouds and the blue sky. The festival mood was expressed even by what people wore—Charlie saw Hawaiian shirts, bathing suits, even Carnival masks. There were many more black faces than Charlie was used to seeing on the Mall. It looked as if something like Trinidad’s Mardi Gras parade had been disrupted by a night of storms, but was re-emerging triumphant in the new day. People were waving to each other, shouting things (the helicopters overhead were loud); standing in boats in unsafe postures, turning in precarious circles to shoot three-sixties with phones and cameras. It would only take a water-skier to complete the scene.

  Charlie moved to the bow of the launch and stood there soaking it all in. His mouth hung open like a dog’s. The effort of getting out the window had reinflamed his chest and arms; now he stood there on fire, torching in the wind, drinking in the maritime vision. Their boat chugged west like a vaporetto on Venice’s broad lagoon. He could not help but laugh.

  “Maybe they should keep it this way,” someone said.

  A Navy river cruiser came growling over the Potomac toward them, throwing up a white bow wave on its upstream side. When it reached the Mall, it slipped through a gap in the cherry trees, cut back on its engines, settled down in the water, continued east at a more sedate pace. It was going to pass pretty close by them, and Charlie felt their own launch slow down as well.

  Then he spotted a familiar face among the people standing in the bow of the patrol boat. It was Phil Chase, waving to the boats he passed like the grand marshal of a parade, leaning over the front rail to shout greetings. Like a lot of other people on the water that morning, he had the happy look of someone who had already lit out for the territory.

  Charlie waved with both arms, leaning over the side of the launch. They were closing on each other. Charlie cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted as loud as he could.

  “HEY, PHIL! Phil Chase!”

  Phil heard him, looked over, saw him.

  “Hey, Charlie!” He waved cheerily, then cupped his hands around his mouth too. “Good to see you! Is everyone at the office okay?”

  “Yes!”

  “Good! That’s good!” Phil straightened up, gestured broadly at the flood. “Isn’t this amazing?”

  “Yes! It sure is!” Then the words burst out of Charlie: “So, Phil! Are you going to do something about global warming now?”

  Phil grinned his beautiful grin. “I’ll see what I can do!”

  From Fifty Degrees Below

  They came down on Reykjavík just before dawn. The surface of the sea lay around the black bulk of Iceland like a vast sheet of silver. By then, Diane was awake; back in DC, this was her usual waking hour, unearthly though that seemed to Frank, who had just gotten tired enough to lean his head on hers. These little intimacies were shaken off when seatbacks returned to their upright position. Diane leaned across Frank to look out the window; Frank leaned back to let her see. Then they were landing, and into the airport. Neither of them had checked luggage, and they weren’t there long before it was time to join a group of passengers trammed out to a big helicopter. On board, earplugs in, they rose slowly and then chuntered north over empty blue ocean.

  Soon after that, passen
gers with a view were able to distinguish the tankers themselves, long and narrow, like Mississippi river barges but immensely bigger. The fleet was moving in a rough convoy formation, and as they flew north and slowly descended, there came a moment when the tankers dotted the ocean’s surface for as far as they could see in all directions, spread out like iron filings in a magnetic field, all pointing north. Lower still: black syringes, lined in rows on a blue table, ready to give their “long injections of pure oil.”

  They dropped yet again, toward a big landing pad on a tanker called the Hugo Chavez, an Ultra Large Crude Carrier with a gigantic bridge at its stern. From this height, the ships around them looked longer than ever, all plowing broad white wakes into a swell from the north that seemed miniature in proportion to the ships but began to look substantial the lower they got. Hovering just over the Hugo Chavez’s landing pad, it became clear from the windcaps and spray that the salt armada was in fact crashing through high seas and a stiff wind, almost a gale. Looking in the direction of the sun the scene turned black-and-white, like one of those characteristically windblown chiaroscuro moments in Victory At Sea.

  When they got out of the helo, the wind blasted through their clothes and chased them upstairs to the bridge. There a crowd of visitors larger than the crew had a fine view over a broad expanse of ocean, crowded with immense ships. As the director of the US National Science Foundation, and therefore the person most responsible for gathering this fleet and making this effort, Diane was the star of the show.

  Looking away from the sun the sea was like cobalt, a deep Adriatic blue.

  The Hugo Chavez from its bridge looked like an aircraft carrier with the landing deck removed. The quarterdeck or sterncastle that held the bridge at its top was tall but only a tiny part of the craft; the forecastle looked like it was a mile away. The intervening distance was interrupted by a skeletal rig that resembled a loading crane but also reminded Frank of the giant irrigation sprayers one saw in California’s central valley. The salt in the hold was being vacuumed into this device, then cast out in powerful white jets, a couple hundred meters to both sides. The hardrock salt had been milled into sizes ranging from table salt grains to bowling balls. In the holds, it looked like dirty white gravel and sand. In the air, it looked almost like dirty water or slush, arching out and splashing in a satisfyingly broad swath. Between the salt fall and the ship’s wakes, and the whitecaps, the deep blue of the ocean surface was infinitely mottled by white. Looking aft, in the direction of the sun, it turned to silver on pewter and lead.

  Diane watched the scene with her nose almost on the glass, deeply hooded in a blue heavy jacket. She smiled at Frank. “You can smell the salt.”

  “The ocean always smells like this.”

  “It seems like more today.”

  “Maybe so.” She had grown up in San Francisco, he remembered. “It must smell like home.” She nodded happily.

  They followed their hosts up a metal staircase to a higher deck of the bridge, a room with windows on all sides. It was this room that made the Hugo Chavez the designated visitor or party ship, and now the big glass-walled room was crowded with dignitaries and officials. Here they could best view the long ships around them, all the way to the horizon. Each ship cast two long curving jets out to the sides from its bow, like the spouts of right whales. Every element was repeated so symmetrically that it seemed they had fallen into an Escher print.

  The tankers flanking theirs seemed nearer than they really were because of their great size. They were completely steady in the long swells. The air around the ships was filled with a white haze. Diane pointed out that the diesel exhaust stayed in the air while the salt mist did not. “They look so dirty. I wonder if we couldn’t go back to sails again, just let everything go slower by sea.”

  “Labor costs,” Frank suggested. “Uncertainty. Maybe even danger.”

  “Would they be more dangerous? I bet you could make them so big and solid they wouldn’t be any more dangerous than these.”

  “These were reckoned pretty dangerous.”

  “I don’t hear of many accidents that actually killed people. It was mostly leaking oil when they hit something. Let’s look into it.”

  They moved from one set of big windows to the next, taking in the views.

  “It’s like the San Joaquin Valley,” Frank said. “There are these huge irrigation rigs that roll around spraying stuff.”

  Diane nodded. “I wonder if this will work.”

  “Me too. If it doesn’t . . .”

  “I know. It would be hard to talk people into trying anything else.”

  Around the bridge they walked. Everyone else was doing the same, in a circulation like any other party. Blue sky, blue sea, the horizon ticked by tiny wavelets, and then the fleet, each ship haloed by a wind-tossed cloud of white mist. Frank and Diane caught each other by the shoulder to point things out, just as they would have in Optimodal. A bird; a fin in the distance.

  Then another group arrived in the room, and soon they were escorted to Diane: the Secretary-General of the UN; Germany’s environmental minister, who was the head of their Green Party and a friend of Diane’s from earlier times; lastly, the prime minister of Great Britain, who had done a kind of Winston Churchill during their hard winter, and who now shook Diane’s hand and said, “So this is the face that launched a thousand ships,” looking very pleased with himself. Diane was distracted by all the introductions. People chatted as they circled the room, and after a while, Diane and Frank stood in a big circle, listening to people, their upper arms just barely touching as they stood side by side.

  After another hour of this, during which nothing varied outside except a shift west in the angle of the sun, it was declared time to go; one didn’t want the helicopters to get too far from Reykjavík, and there were other visitors waiting in Iceland for their turns to visit, and the truth was, they had seen what there was to see. The ship’s crew therefore halted the Hugo Chavez’s prodigious launching of salt, and they braved the chilly blast downstairs and got back in their helo. Up it soared, higher and higher. Again, the astonishing sight of a thousand tankers on the huge burnished plate spreading below them, instantly grasped as unprecedented: the first major act of planetary engineering ever attempted, and by God, it looked like it. They were salting the ocean to restart the Gulf Stream, to rescue the world’s climate. The hubris implied by that was astonishing—or maybe it was the desperation.

  But then the helo pilot ascended higher and higher, higher and higher, until they could see a much bigger stretch of ocean, water extending as far as the eye could see, for hundreds of miles in all directions—and all of it blank, except for their now-tiny column of ships, looking like a line of toys. And then ants. In a world so vast, could anything humans do make a difference?

  From Sixty Days and Counting

  It was Diane who suggested that Frank string all his necessary trips together in a quick jaunt around the world, dropping in on Beijing, the Takla Makan, Siberia, and England. He could start with San Diego, and the White House travel office could package it so it would only take him ten days or so. So he agreed, and then the day of his departure was upon him, and he had to dig out his passport and get his visas and other documents from the travel office, and put together a travel bag and jump on the White House shuttle out to Dulles.

  As soon into his flight as he could turn on his laptop, he checked out a video from Wade Norton. The little movie even had a soundtrack, a hokey 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. Photovolt
aic blue. “What you see covers about a football field. The sun is up 24-7 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.

  “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 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’s your proof of concept. It’s working just like you’d want. 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. You need some thousands of these systems to get the water back up onto the polar plateau.”

  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.