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

standard in any case ever since the tainted elections at the beginning of the
century—and secure in the knowledge that the American public did not like to think
about troubling news of this sort no matter who won, Phil was free to forge ahead
with a nonstop schedule of meetings, meetings from dawn till midnight, and often
long past it. He was lucky he was one of those people who only needed a few hours
of sleep a day to get by.
Not so Charlie, who was jolted out of sleep far too often by calls from his colleague
Roy Anastophoulus, Phil’s new chief of staff, asking him to come down to the
office and pitch in.
“Roy, I can’t,” Charlie would say. “I’ve got Joe here, Anna’s off to work already,
and we’ve got Gymboree.”
“Gymboree? Am I hearing this? Charlie which is more important to the fate of the
Republic, advising the president or going to Gymboree?”
“False choice,” Charlie would snap. “Although Gymboree is far more important if
we want Joe to sleep well at night, which we do. You’re talking to me now, right?
That’s what telephones are for. How would this change in any way if I were down
there?”
“Yeah yeah yeah yeah, hey Chucker I gotta go now, but listen you have to come in
from the cold, this is no time to be baby-sitting, we’ve got the fate of the world in
the balance and we need you in the office and taking one of these crucial jobs that
no one else can fill as well as you can. Joe is around two right? So you can put him
in the daycare down here at the White House, or anywhere else in the greater
metropolitan region for that matter, but you have to be here or else you will have
missed the train, Phil isn’t going to stand for someone phoning home like E.T., lost
somewhere in Bethesda when the world is sinking and freezing and drowning and
burning up and everything else all at once.”
“Roy. Stop. I am talking to you like once an hour, maybe more. I couldn’t talk to
you more if we were handcuffed together.”
“Yeah it’s nice it’s sweet it’s one of the treasured parts of my day, but it’s a face
business, you know that, and I haven’t seen you in months, and Phil hasn’t either,
and I’m afraid it’s getting to be a case of not seen not heard.”
“Are you establishing a climate-change task force?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to ask Diane Chang to be the science advisor?”
“Yes. He already did.”
“And are you going to convene a meeting with all the reinsurance companies?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re proposing the legislative package to the Congress?”
This was Charlie’s big omnibus environmental bill, brought back—in theory—from
death by dismemberment.
“Of course we are.”
“So how exactly am I being cut out? That’s every single thing I’ve ever suggested to
you.”
“But Charlie, I’m looking forward, to how you will be cut out. You’ve gotta put Joe
in daycare and come in out of the cold.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“I gotta go you get a grip and get down here bye.”
He sounded truly annoyed. But Charlie could speak his mind with Roy, and he
wasn’t going to let the election change that. And when he woke up in the morning,
and considered that he could either go down to the Mall and talk policy with policy