Fifty Degrees Below (36 page)

“How you know?”

“You Santa Claus?”

“He knows because he give it to them all is how.”

“Yeah that’s right. Just call me Johnny Appletent.”

“Har har har! Perfesser Appletent!”

They cackled as he measured out rectangles of about ten by six, then cut them off with the scissors on his Swiss Army knife. He showed them how the nylon could be secured, in many cases right on top of their already existing shelters. “Dry means warm, bros, you know that.” A well-set tarp was a complete home in itself, he told them. Sides down to the ground, suspend the middle on a line, high enough to sit up in at one end, don’t worry about how low the rest of it was. The lower the warmer, except don’t let it come down on the bottom of the sleeping bag. Get plastic to put under the bags for God’s sake.

It was the kind of camp work that Frank enjoyed. He wandered around among them as they fiddled, evaluating their obstacles and the solutions they were concocting to circumvent them. They were inept, but it was a learned skill. Winter camping. Maybe they had only stayed out in the summertime before, and in previous winters sought conventional shelter. Winter backpacking was a very technical matter—well, ultimately simple; but it took attention to detail, it was a meticulous thing if you wanted to stay comfortable. A technique. The Alpine man would have been superb at it. And now they were all being carried up to the heights.

The bros lay there watching him or not, Andy calling “Watch out, will ya.” Some lit cigarettes and blew plumes of smoke onto the new insides of their tarps, frosting them grayly.

“The first wind’ll knock that down on you,” Frank warned Andy. “Tie that far corner out to that tree.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Here, I am going to save your lazy ass.”

They all laughed at this.

“He’s saving us now! Look out!”

“Preacher Pastor Perfesser.”

“Yeah right!” Frank objected. “The Church of Dry Toes.”

They liked this.

By the time all the tarps were set Frank’s hands were white and red. He swung them around for a while, feeling them throb back to life, looking around at the scene. You could see another fire down toward the zoo.

He bid them goodnight. They mumbled things. Zeno said, “Nyah, get your ass outta here, quit bothering us with your crap, goddamn Peace Corps bleeding heart charity pervert think you know what you’re doing out here fuck that shit, get outta here.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another night, through the snowy forest under a full moon: a solid snowfall had come down at last, and now surreal whiteness blanketed everything, every bump and declivity suddenly defined by the snow’s infinitely shaded luminosity. Low cloud, noctilucent on the western half of the sky, every black stroke of branch and twig distinct against it, wind and even a bit of snow whirling down, the flakes catching the moonlight and sparking like bits of mica among the stars. The world all alive. “The great day in the man is the birth of perception.” (Emersonfortheday, February 22nd)

Frank had taken his snowshoes and ski poles out of the storage unit in Arlington, and now he cruised over the drifts. In many places the snowshoes were not needed, but they saved him from postholing into taller drifts, so they were worth it.

No need to turn on his miner’s headlamp tonight! It was light you could read by.

He came on a black thing half-buried in snow. He stopped, fearing some child had died of exposure, thinking of Chessman. But when he knelt by the form he saw that it was a wombat. “Ah shit.”

Two, actually. Mother and infant, it looked like. Frank called in the GPS location on his FOG phone, cursing sadly as he did. “God damn it. You poor guys.”

It looked like Nancy was right. They needed to recover the warm weather ferals. “Yeah,” she confirmed when he called her next day, “a lot of them aren’t making it. The shelters are helping, but we really have to bring them back in.”

“I hope we can,” Frank said.

At work Frank continued to hack away at his list of
Things To Do,
which nevertheless continued to grow at the bottom faster than he removed things at the top. Settling in after a session at Optimodal, his days for a while were mostly concerned with:

1) arranging small business exploratory grants for the photovoltaic programs with the most robust results. These were getting rather excit-ing, actually. Progress in this field was measured by efficiency and cost. Efficiency as the percentage of photonic energy striking the cell transferred to electrical energy, now reaching well above forty percent; and cost, now down to six cents per kilowatt-hour, very competitive with any other form of energy generation. Switching over to solar would be a major expense, but after that the possibilities were somewhat staggering. One of the grantees calculated that it would soon be possible, theoretically, to power the entire country from a ten-mile by ten-mile photovoltaic array located in some sunny desert location in the Southwest.

2) keeping in touch with the people establishing the Max Planck equivalent in San Diego. This was proceeding nicely, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography had pitched in to help, seeing that a federal research center in climate issues would very often require their help, and send funding their way, becoming another component of the already powerful UCSD research complex. The old Torrey Pines Generique facility was being remodeled and equipped, and a lot of hires about to be made. The people involved were already aware of Yann, Marta, and their colleague Eleanor, and were preparing a salary and research funding offer for all three, a really impressive package deal.

3) consulting with the various people in-house trying to deal with the SSEEP melodrama, already a mess. The platform had been released as a National Academy of Sciences study, but the connection to NSF was well-known. Scientific organizations and op-ed pages had weighed in on the matter of a “scientific political platform”—whether it was possible, whether it was a good idea, whether it was dangerous, either to science or society. Some of the usual suspects in the science world had quickly disavowed any knowledge of such a program, attacking it as unscientific and inappropriate; while others had surprised Frank by welcoming the move and suggesting additions and modifications to the platform. Attacks in Congress and the press were common, and sometimes exhibited the kind of spluttering rage indicative of a fear-based response. Phil Chase had immediately embraced the platform as a scientifically backed version of what he had been advocating for many years. As he was emerging as the clear frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination, outraising a tired and undistinguished pack of competitors two-to-one even when all their contributions were combined, this looked to Frank to be an interesting convergence of political forces.

4) Looking into a new analysis of the Sekercioglu study which had claimed that the bird extinctions they were now seeing on every continent, up to two thousand species in the coming century, were going to leave gaps in ecological function so serious that whole biomes might crash. Things like pollination and dispersal of seed, predation and fertilization, the list went on. At first it seemed odd to think of birds as so crucial, but of course they were very ancient elements of the system. So Frank got to think about the algorithms used in biodiversity studies, a welcome dip into math and theory—and damned if the corridors in habitat network theory didn’t look just like the tendrils in Snowdrift, in the version of the game in which always generous prospered.

5) Investigating amorphous or glassy metals, in particular amorphous steel, made by a new method that scrambled the atomic structures of the metal by yttrium, chromium, and boron, making the resulting “glassy steel” stronger, nonmagnetic, and less corrosive. The Navy was interested in making ship hulls of this stuff, and it seemed tothe materials team working with Frank that all kinds of ocean-proofed machinery could perhaps be improved, enough so that practical methods of tapping into the ocean’s energy might be built.

6) Talking to General Wracke over the phone about the salt-mining and transport capabilities of modern civilization. Wracke was upbeat; the quantities being discussed were not completely off the charts when compared to the amount of oil shipped around the globe, and the oil tanker fleet included a significant percentage of single-hulled ships due to be replaced, or rather overdue. As for salt availability, they were still looking into it, but as the general said, “There’s a lot of salt in this world.”

Money was a different matter. The Pentagon had recently gotten in trouble with Congress, Wracke said, for its practice of hiding money left over at the ends of budget years, then using these savings for its own purposes, calling them “reprogrammed funds.” Congress did not approve, and any high-profile project was likely to have to get conventional funding.

“Does it look like it will be expensive?” Frank asked.

“Depends what you call expensive. Billions for sure.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

“Thanks. Oh—different subject—does the Pentagon have an intelligence service of its own?”

Wracke laughed. “Is that a trick question?”

“No, how could it be?”

“You’ll have to ask the CIA about that. But yes, sure. After the other intelligence agencies in this town let us down so bad, we almost had to have one, to get good data. We were the ones getting killed you know. So there’s the Strategic Support Branch, and they’re an intelligence-gathering unit publicly acknowledged. They’re sometimes a bit more hands-on than the other agencies, but gathering intelligence is their job. Why, is there some secret climate group you’re having trouble with? Clandestine cloud seeding?”

“No no. I was just curious. Thanks. See you at the next meeting.”

“I look forward to it. You guys are doing great.”

In that same couple of weeks, along with everything else, Frank made an effort to locate Chessman. He centered the search on Dupont Circle, because that was the city’s outdoor chess epicenter. So much so, he found, that chesshounds converged on it from everywhere, and of course dispersed back out, using all eleven of the streets that met there. To ask about a young black kid was to ask about more than half the chess-playing population, and no one appreciated an inquiry framed that broadly. His motives also appeared to be questioned. So after a while, rather than ask, Frank simply walked and watched, played and lost and walked again, checking out the games, noting also the new little semi-winterized shelters popping up here and there all over town.

Cleveland Park sported many of these camps, especially in the fringe of buildings damaged by the flood and abandoned. Spencer’s crowd, clearly, as well as others less organized and competent. It seemed from his observations that the homeless population of Northwest alone must be in the thousands. The formal shelters and newspaper reports gave similar numbers. Between the Klingle Valley Park and Melvin Hazen Park, both small tributary ravines dropping into Rock Creek, there were many abandoned houses. If they had not been burned out, or even if they had, squatters were likely to be occupying them.

This made for a very quiet neighborhood. No one wanted to attract the attention of the police. Any lit windows Frank gave a wide berth on principle, and so apparently did everyone else. Good avoidance protocols make good neighbors. Chessman might be tucked away in one of these hulks, but if so Frank wasn’t going to find out by knocking on doors or looking in windows.

And he doubted the youth would be in any of them anyway. Chessman had had a healthy propensity for staying outdoors.

That being the case, where was he?

Then Frank ran into Cutter out on Connecticut, and a tendril connected two parcels in his mind. “Cutter, do you know what happened to Chessman?”

“No, I ain’t seen him lately. Don’t know what happened to him.”

“Do you know anyone who might?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Byron, he used to play chess with him. I’ll ask.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate that. Do you know what his real name was, by chance?”

“No, only thing I heard him called was Chessman.”

Out in the park proper the forest now seemed wilderness, with most human sign snowed over or overgrown or flooded away. It was a whole world. Firelight in the distance the only touch of humanity. A kind of Mirkwood or primeval forest, every tree Yggdrasil, and Frank the Green Man. Encountering a structure now was like stumbling on ruins. The Carter Barron amphitheater and the huge bridges south of the zoo looked like the work of Incans or Atlanteans.

The campfires in the park, unlike the squatter houses, could be investigated. It was possible to approach them surreptitiously, to put them under surveillance, to see if any of the little firelit faces were known to him. Stalking, pure and simple. Peering around trees, over flood snags, now flanked by snowdrifts. Rain had hardened the snow. Stepping through the crust made a distinct crunchy noise. One had to float on top with one’s weight on the back foot until the next step was pressed home. Time for the tiger mind to come to the fore. Someone had reported seeing the jaguar, east of the park.

Once he came on a single old man shivering before a smoky little blaze, obviously sick, and he roused him and asked him if he could get himself out to one of the homeless shelters on Connecticut, or the ER at the UDC hospital; but stubbornly the old man turned away from him, not quite coherent, maybe drunk, but maybe sick. All Frank could do was call 911 and give GPS coordinates, and wait for an EMS team to hike in and take over. Even if you were healthy, living out here was a tenuous thing, but for a sick person it was miserable. The paramedics ended up talking him onto a stretcher and carrying him out. The next night Frank passed by again, as part of his rounds, to see if the man had returned and if he was okay. No one there, fire out.

And never a sign of Chessman. The longer it went on the less likely it seemed Frank would ever find him. He must have moved to a different part of the city, or out of the metro area entirely.