Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Put like that, the priority on solar power went pretty high. Which made it baffling to see how little money had been invested in it in the past three decades. But what was done was done. And looking forward, it was a little encouraging, even gratifying, to see results beginning to come out of the experiments he had funded in the previous two years, because some of the new prototypes were looking pretty good. There were new photovoltaics at 42 percent efficiencies now. This was getting closer and closer to the holy grail. And at the largest scales, the Stirling engines were doing almost as well, at even less expense.

  Really, with results like that, it was now only a matter of money, and time, and they could be there. Clean power.

  Sometimes he even skipped to the other items on the list.

  Among the really big-ticket items when it came to carbon emissions, transportation and agriculture ranked up there with power generation. Here again, the expense of changing out such a big and fundamental technology would be very high—until one compared it to the cost of not changing.

  This was the case that Diane wanted to make to the reinsurance companies, and the UN, and everyone else. Say it cost a trillion dollars to install clean energy generators and change out the transport fleet. Weigh that against the financial benefit to civilization of continuing with approximately the sea level it now enjoyed, the weather, the biosphere support, etc.; also the difficult-to-calculate-in-dollars but undoubtedly huge benefit of avoiding a great deal of human suffering. Not to mention a mass extinction event for the rest of the biosphere, which might threaten their very survival.

  Wouldn’t it pencil out? It seemed like it would have to. Indeed, if it didn’t pencil out, maybe there was something wrong with the accounting system.

  Compare these costs to the U.S. military budget. Two trillion dollars would not be more than three or four years of the Pentagon’s budget. This gave Frank a shock—that the military was so expensive, sure, but also that they could shift to clean power and transport so cheaply relative to the total economy. Electricity now cost about six cents a kilowatt hour, and they spoke of clean energy costing up to ten—and then said it couldn’t be done? For financial reasons? “It wouldn’t take much of a carbon-ceiling regulation to make it pencil out immediately,” Frank said to Diane when they were talking on the phone. “Companies like Southern California Edison must be begging for a strict emissions cap. They’ll make a killing when that happens. They’ll be raking it in.”

  “True.”

  “I wonder what would happen if the reinsurance companies refused to insure oil companies that didn’t get with the cap program right now?”

  “Good idea.” She sighed. “Boy, if only we could sic them on the World Bank and the IMF too.”

  “Maybe we can. Phil Chase is president now.”

  “So maybe we can! Hey, it’s two already—have you had lunch?”

  In his office, Frank smiled. “No, you wanna?”

  “Yes. Give me five minutes.”

  “Meet you at the elevator.”

  So they had lunch, and among other things talked over the move to the White House, and what it meant. The danger of becoming an advisory body only, of having no budget to do things—as against the potential advantage of being able to tell all the federal agencies, and to an extent the whole government, what to do.

  Diane said, “My guess is Chase is still trying to work out what’s really possible. He’s talked quite a line but now push has come to shove, and it’s a big machine he’s got to move. I’ve gotten a whole string of questions about the technical agencies, and just today I got an e-mail asking me to submit a thorough analysis of all the particulars of the New Deal—what he called the scientific aspects of the New Deal. I have no idea what he means.”

  Nevertheless, she had looked into it. There had been five New Deals, she said. Each had been a distinct project, with different goals and results. She listed them with a pen on the back of a napkin:

  1) Hundred Days, 1933

  2) Social Security, 1935

  3) Keynesian stimulation 1938 (this package, she explained, had been enacted partly to re-prime the pump, partly to restore what the Supreme Court had blocked from New Deal 2)

  4) the defense buildup of 1940–41, and

  5) the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944

  “Number five was entirely FDR’s idea, by the way. Nothing’s ever done more for ordinary Americans, the analysis said. It was what made the postwar middle class, and the baby boom.”

  “Encouraging,” Frank said, studying the list.

  “Very. Granted, this all took twelve years, but still. It doesn’t even count the international stuff, like getting us prepared for the war, or winning it. Or starting the UN!”

  “Impressive,” Frank said. “Let’s hope Chase can do as well.”

  Here Diane looked doubtful. “One thing seems pretty clear already,” she confessed. “He’s too busy with other stuff for me to be able to make many of our arguments to him in person. I mean, I’ve barely met him yet.”

  “That’s not good.” Frank was surprised to hear this.

  “Well, he’s pretty good at replying to his e-mail. And his people get back to me when I send along questions or requests.”

  “Maybe that’s where I should ask Charlie for help. He might be able to influence the decision about how to allocate Chase’s meeting time.”

  “That would be good.”

  It seemed to Frank, watching her and thinking about other kinds of things, that she appeared to have forgotten his abrupt cancellation of their post–North Atlantic date. Or—since no one ever really forgot things like that—to have let it go. Forgiven, if not forgotten—all he could expect, of course. Maybe it had only been a little weird. In any case a relief, after his experiences with Marta, who neither forgot nor forgave.

  Which reminded him that he had to talk to Marta sometime soon about Small Delivery Systems’ Russian experiment. Damn.

  As always, the thought of having to communicate with his ex-partner filled Frank with a combination of dread and a perverse kind of anticipation, which came in part from trying to guess how it would go wrong this time. For go wrong it would. He and Marta had always had a stormy relationship, and Frank had come to suspect that all Marta’s intimate relationships were stormy. Certainly her relations with her ex-husband had been inflamed, which had been one of the reasons she and Frank too had come to a nasty end. Marta had needed to keep her name off the paperwork on the house she and Frank had bought together, in order to keep it clear of the divorce and bankruptcy morass created by Marta’s always soon-to-be ex. This absence of her name had created the possibility for Frank later to sign a third mortgage, in effect taking all their equity out of the place and losing it in a surefire biotech that had guttered out.

  A very bad idea. One of a string of bad decisions that Frank had made in those years, many clustered around Marta. There had to be some kind of nostalgia for bad times involved in Frank’s desire to talk to her. In any case he had to call her, because she was his contact with the Russian lichen project, and he needed to know more about how that was going. Given the ongoing opacity of Russian government and science—the weird mix of Kremlinocracy and nouveau-capitalist corporate secrecy—a (semi)reliable informant was crucial if he was going to learn anything solid. So the call had to be made. Or rather the visit. Because he wanted to see the new facility too. NSF had rented the very same building once occupied by Torrey Pines Generique, and the committee involved had offered contracts to an array of very good people in the relevant sciences, including Yann and Marta. The geosciences were hot these days, and the new head of the institute had called a conference to discuss various proposals for new action. Frank was unsurprised to see that Yann and Marta were on the program. He called down to the travel office to have them book a flight for him.

  F OR THE QUIBLERS AS FOR THE REST of the capital’s residents, the winter’s blackouts had developed their own routines, with the inconveniences balanced by the seldom-
indulged pleasures of the situation: fire in the fireplace, candles, blankets, blocks, and books. Anna had taken up knitting again, so when the power went out she helped get things settled and then got under a comforter and clicked away. Charlie read aloud to them. He and Anna discussed whether they should get satellite cell phones, so they could stay in contact if they happened to get caught out somewhere when the next one hit. The blackouts were getting more frequent; it was widely debated whether they were caused by overdemand, mechanical failure, sabotage, computer viruses, corporate rigging, or the cold drought, but no one could deny they were becoming regular occurrences. And sometimes they lasted for two days.

  On this particular dark evening, after Anna had gone to the appropriate drawer and cabinets and got out their blackout gear, there came a knock at their door, very unusual. So much so that Nick said, “Frank must be here!”

  And so he was.

  He stamped in looking freeze-dried, put the back of his hand to their cheeks and had them shrieking. “Is it okay?” he asked Charlie uncertainly.

  “Oh sure, sure, what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It seemed to Charlie almost as if Frank’s thinking had been chilled on the hike over; his words were slow, his manner distracted. He had been out snowshoeing in Rock Creek Park, he said, checking on his homeless friends, and had decided afterward to drop by.

  “Good for you. Have some tea with us.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nick and Joe were delighted. Frank brought a new element to the power-free evening with his hint of mystery and strangeness. “Tiger man!” Joe exclaimed. Nick talked with him about the animals at the zoo, and still at large in the park. Joe plucked the appropriate plastic animals out of his big box as they spoke, lining them up in a parade on the floor for their inspection. “Tiger tiger tiger!” he said, pleasing Charlie very much; lately he had been showing a preference for zebras and dolphins and hippos.

  Frank and Nick were saying that there were very few feral animals still at large, and almost all the holdouts were either arctic or mountain species. The other exotics had all come in from the cold, or died.

  Charlie noticed Nick smoothly change the subject: “What about your friends?”

  The human ferals, Frank said, were still pretty easy to find. “My own group is kind of scattered, but in general I think there’ll be more and more people like them as time goes on. Housing is just too expensive. If you can arrange some other way, it makes sense in a lot of ways.”

  “You wouldn’t have to worry about blackouts,” Charlie remarked.

  Later, when the boys were asleep, Frank hunkered down by the fire, holding his hands to it and staring into the flames.

  “Charlie,” he said hesitantly, “has anyone on Chase’s staff been looking into the election, and that talk that went around about irregularities in some of the votes?”

  “No one I know of.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Well, it’s kind of a Satchel Paige moment.”

  “What does that mean?” Anna said.

  “Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.”

  Frank nodded. “But what if something is gaining on you?”

  “I think that was Satchel’s point. But what do you mean?”

  “What if there was a group that tried to fix the election, but failed?”

  Charlie was surprised. “Then good.”

  “But what if they’re still out there?”

  “I’m sure they are. It’s a spooky world these days.”

  Frank glanced quickly at Charlie, then nodded, the corners of his mouth tight. “A spooky world indeed.”

  “You mean spooks,” Anna clarified.

  Frank nodded, eyes still on the fire. “There’s seventeen intelligence agencies in the federal government now. And some of them are not fully under anyone’s control anymore.”

  “Whoah. How do you mean?”

  “You know. Black agencies. Black agencies so black they’ve disappeared, like black holes.”

  “Disappeared?” Charlie said.

  “No oversight. No connections. I don’t think even the president knows about them. I don’t think anyone knows about them, except the people in them.”

  “But how would they get funding?”

  Anna laughed at that, but Frank frowned. “I don’t know. I suppose they have access to some kind of slush fund.”

  “So, whoever was responsible for those funds would know.”

  “They might only know…maybe they’re being run by people who have discretionary funds, so those people know, but they’re in the groups, or leading them. Forming them…I don’t know. You know more about that kind of stuff than I do. But surely there’s money sloshing around that certain people have access to? Especially in intelligence?”

  Charlie nodded. “Forty billion per year on intelligence. Black program money could get subdivided. I’ve heard of that happening before.”

  “Well…” Frank paused, as if weighing his words carefully. “They are a danger to the republic.”

  “Whoah.” Charlie had never heard Frank say such a thing.

  Frank shrugged. “Sorry, but it’s true. If we mean to be a constitutional government, then we’re going to have to root some of these groups out. Because they are a danger to democracy and open government as we’re used to thinking of it. They’re trying to move all the important stuff into the shadows.”

  “And so…”

  “So I’m wondering if you could direct Chase’s attention to them. Make him aware of them, and urge him to root them out.”

  “Do you think he could?”

  “I should hope so!” Frank looked disturbed at the question. “I mean, if he followed the money, made his secretaries and agency heads account for all of it fully—maybe sicced the OMB on all the black money to find out who was using it, and for what…couldn’t you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Charlie admitted. “Maybe you could.”

  “The Pentagon can’t account for its outlays,” Anna pointed out grimly, knitting like one of the women under the guillotine, click click click! “They have a percentage gone missing that is bigger than NSF’s entire budget.”

  “Gone missing?”

  “Unaccounted for. Unaccountable. I call that gone missing.” Anna’s disapproval was like dry ice, smoking with cold. Freeze all the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into one big cake of dry ice and drape it around Anna’s shoulders, in the few moments when she was professionally contemptuous.

  “But if it were done by a competent team,” Frank persisted, “without any turned people on it, and presidential backing to look into everything?”

  Charlie still was dubious, but he said, “In theory that would work. Legally it should work.”

  “But?”

  “Well, but the government, you know. It’s big. It has lots of nooks and crannies. Like what you’re talking about—black programs that have been fire-walled so many times, there are blacks within blacks, superblacks, superblack blacks. With black accounts and dedicated political contributions, so that the money is socked away in Switzerland, or Wal-Mart….”

  “Jesus. There are government programs with that kind of funding?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Frank was staring at him, startled, even perhaps frightened. “In that case, we could all be in big trouble.”

  Anna was shaking her head. “A complete audit would find even that. It would include all accounts of every federal employee or unit, and also what they’re doing with every hour of their work time. It’s a fairly simple spreadsheet, for God’s sake.”

  “But it could be faked so easily,” Charlie objected.

  “Well, you have to have some way to check the data.”

  “But there are hundreds of thousands of employees.”

  “I guess you’d have to use a statistically valid sampling method.”

  “But that’s just the kind of method you can hide your black
programs out of the reach of!”

  “Hmm.” Now Anna was frowning too. She was also sending curious glances Frank’s way. This was a pretty un-Frank-like inquiry, in both content and style. “Well, maybe you’d have to be comprehensive with the intelligence and security agencies in particular. Account for everything in those.”

  Charlie said, “So, that being the case, they probably aren’t tucked there. They’re probably in Commerce or the Coast Guard or the Treasury. Which by itself is huge. Like, you know, the bank.”

  Frank said, “So maybe it isn’t possible.”

  Charlie and Anna did not reply; each was thinking it over.

  Frank sighed. “Maybe if we found a specific problem, and then told the president about it? Or, whoever could best put a stop to it? Wouldn’t that be the president?”

  Charlie said, “I should think the president would always be best at that kind of thing. But there are a lot of demands on his time.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that. But this could be important. Even, you know…crucial.”

  “Then I would hope it would get attended to. Maybe there’s a unit designed to do it. In the Secret Service or something.”

  Frank nodded. “Maybe you could talk to him, then. When you think it’s a good time. Because I know where to start the hunt.”

  Charlie and Anna glanced at each other, saw that neither knew what he was talking about.

  “What do you mean?” Charlie said.

  “I’ve run across some stuff,” Frank said, adjusting a log in the fire.

  Then the power flickered and hummed back on, and after a while Frank made his excuses and took off, still looking distant and thoughtful.