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

is going for me these days.”
“Oh you’re doing fine. You’re Phil’s gold standard. But look, if now isn’t a good time…”

“No no, Joe’s asleep on my back. It’s fine. I’m still just kind of freaked out.”

“Sure, I can imagine. Listen we can do it later, although I must say we do need to get this thing staffed
out soon or else Phil might get caught short. Dr. Strangelove”—this was their name for the President’s
science advisor—“has been asking to see our draft too.”

“I know, okay talk to me. I can tell you what I think anyway.”

So for a while as he walked he listened to Roy read sentences from his draft, and then discussed with
him the whys and wherefores, and possible revisions. Roy had been Phil’s chief of staff ever since Wade
Norton hit the road and became an advisor in absentia, and after his years of staffing for the House
Resources Committee (called the Environment Committee until the Gingrich Congress renamed it), he
was deeply knowledgeable, and sharp too; one of Charlie’s favorite people. And Charlie himself was so
steeped now in the climate bill that he could see it all in his head, indeed it helped him now just to hear it,
without the print before him to distract him. As if someone were telling him a bedtime story.

Eventually, however, some question of Roy’s couldn’t be resolved without the text before him. “Sorry.
I’ll call you back when I get home.”

“Okay but don’t forget, we need to get this finished.”

“I won’t.”

They clicked off.

His walk home took him south, down the west edge of the Bethesda Metro district, an urban
neighborhood of restaurants and apartment blocks, all ringing the hole in the ground out of which people
and money fountained so prodigiously, changing everything: streets rerouted, neighborhoods
redeveloped, a whole clutch of skyscrapers bursting up through the canopy and establishing another
purely urban zone in the endless hardwood forest.

He stopped in at Second Story Books, the biggest and best of the area’s several used bookstores. It
was a matter of habit only; he had visited it so often with Joe asleep on his back that he had memorized
the stock, and was reduced to checking the hidden books in the inner rows, or alphabetizing sections that
he liked. No one in the supremely arrogant and slovenly shop cared what he did there. It was soothing in
that sense.

Finally he gave up trying to pretend he felt normal, and walked past the auto dealer and home. There it
was a tough call whether to take the baby backpack off and hope not to wake Joe prematurely, or just
to keep him on his back and work from the bench he had put by his desk for this very purpose. The
discomfort of Joe’s weight was more than compensated for by the quiet, and so as usual he kept Joe
snoozing on his back.

When he had his material open, and had read up on tidal power generation cost/benefit figures from the
UN study on same, he called Roy back, and they got the job finished. The revised draft was ready for
Phil to review, and in a pinch could be shown to Senator Winston or Dr. Strangelove.