"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that
blocked the steep stairs to the cellar. Careening around like a human pinball. Anna had taped
bubblewrap to all the corners; it looked like the kitchen had just recently arrived and not yet been
completely unpacked.

“Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.”

“Ba!”

“Yes, bottle.”

This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over
him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the
back burner. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short
permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, capped by brown rubber nipples
that Charlie had pricked many times with a needle, and topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the
nipples from contamination in the freezer. Contamination in the freezer? Charlie had wanted to ask Anna,
but he hadn’t. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts
of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at
work. So Charlie logged in while the water started to bubble, thinking as he always did that the main
purpose here was to fulfill Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.

He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone
rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.

“Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.”

“Oh hi Roy, what’s up.”

“Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check first to see what I
should be looking for, how you solved the IPCC stuff.”

“Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.” The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil
would require the U.S. to act on certain recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.

“Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?”

“I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that one. I tried to put it in a context that made it look
inevitable. International body that we are part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to
work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory for us or else the whole world
cooks in our juices, that sort of thing.”

“Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and
you’re his climate guy, if he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.”

“Yeah I know. Wait just a second.”

Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it was at body temperature, or almost.
“A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?”