"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

about a thousand vertical feet. After that he showered and dressed, getting into one
of his “nicer” shirts for the occasion, and met Diane out in the lobby at the
appointed time. She too had changed into something nice, and for a second Frank
considered the possibility that she lived out of her office and Optimodal, just as he
had contemplated doing before building his treehouse. What evidence did he or
anyone else have to disprove it? When they arrived in the morning she was there,
when they left at night she was there. There were couches in her big office, and she
went to Optimodal every morning of the week, as far as he knew….
But then again, she certainly had a home somewhere. Everyone did, except for him.
And the bros in the park. And the fregans and ferals proliferating in the metropolis.
Indeed some twenty or thirty million people in America, he had read. But one
thought of everyone as having a home.
Enough—it was time to refocus on the moment and their date. It had to be called
that. Their second date, in fact—the first one having occurred by accident in New
York, after discussing the North Atlantic project at the UN. And now they were in a
Lebanese restaurant in Georgetown that Diane had recently discovered.
And it was very nice. Now they could celebrate not only the actual salting itself, but
its subsequent success in restarting the thermohaline circulation; and now, also,
Diane’s invitation to become the new Presidential Science Advisor.
She was pleased with this last, Frank could see. “Tell me about it,” he said to her
when they were settled into the main course. “Is it a good position? I mean, what
does the science advisor do?” Did it have any power, in other words?
“It all depends on the president,” Diane said. “I’ve been looking into it, and it
appears the position began as Nixon’s way of spanking the science community for
publicly backing Johnson over Goldwater. He sent NSF packing out here to
Arlington, and abolished his science advisory committee, and established this
position. So it became a single advisor he could appoint without any consultation or
approval mechanism, and then he could stick them on the shelf somewhere. Which
is where these people have usually stayed, except in a few instances.”
That didn’t sound good. “But?”
“Well, in theory, if a president were listening, it could get pretty interesting. I mean,
clearly there’s a need for more coordination of the sciences in the federal
government. We’ve seen that at NSF. Ideally there would be a cabinet post, you
know, some kind of Department of Science, with a Secretary of Science.”
“The science czar.”
“Yes.” She was wrinkling her nose. “Except that would create huge amounts of
trouble, because really, most of the federal agencies are already supposed to be run
scientifically, or have science as part of their subject, or in their operation. So if
someone tried to start a Department of Science, it would poach on any number of
other agencies, and none of them would stand for it. They would gang up on such
an advisor and kill him, like they did to the so-called intelligence czar when they tried
to coordinate the intelligence agencies.”
This gave Frank a chill. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
“So, now, maybe the science advisor could act like a kind of personal advisor. You
know. If we presented a menu of really robust options, and Chase chose some of
them to enact, then…well. It would be the president himself advocating for science.”
“And he might want to do that, given the situation.”
“Yes, it seems that way, doesn’t it? Although Washington has a way of bogging
people down.”
“The swamp.”