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

IX Trigger Event

Anna was working with her door open, and once again she heard Frank’s end of a phone conversation. Having eavesdropped once, it seemed to have become easier; and as before, there was a strain in Frank’s voice that caught her attention. Not to mention louder sentences like:

“What? Why would they do that?”

Then silence, except for a squeak of his chair and a brief drumming of fingers.

“Uh-huh, yeah. Well, what can I say. It’s too bad. It sucks, sure…Yeah. But, you know. You’ll be fine either way. It’s your workforce that will be in trouble. —No no, I understand. You did your best. Nothing you can do after you sell. It wasn’t your call, Derek… Yeah I know. They’ll find work somewhere else. It’s not like there aren’t other biotechs out there, it’s the biotech capital of the world, right? Yeah, sure. Let me know when you know… Okay, I do too. Bye.”

He hung up hard, cursed under his breath.

Anna looked out her door. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah.”

She got up and went to her doorway. He was looking down at the floor, shaking his head disgustedly.

He raised his head and met her gaze. “Small Delivery Systems closed down Torrey Pines Generique and let almost everyone go.”

“Really! Didn’t they just buy them?”

“Yes. But they didn’t want the people.” He grimaced. “It was for something Torrey Pines had, like a patent. Or one of the people they kept. There were a few they invited to join the Small Delivery lab in Atlanta. Like that mathematician I told you about. The one who sent us a proposal, did I tell you about him?”

“One of the jackets that got turned down?”

“That’s right.”

“Your panel wasn’t that impressed, as I recall.”

“Yeah, that’s right. But I’m not so sure they were right.” He shrugged. “We’ll never know now. They’ll get him to sign a contract that gives them the rights to his work, and then they’ll have it to patent, or keep as a trade secret, or even bury if it interferes with some other product of theirs. Whatever their legal department thinks will make the most.”

Anna watched him brood. Finally she said, “Oh well.”

He gave her a look. “A guy like him belongs at NSF.”

Anna lifted an eyebrow. She was well aware of Frank’s ambivalent or even negative attitude toward NSF, which he had let slip often enough.

Frank understood her look and said, “The thing is, if you had him here then you could, you know, sic him on things. Sic him like a dog.”

“I don’t think we have a program that does that.”

“Well you should, that’s what I’m saying.”

“You can add that to your talk to the Board this afternoon,” Anna said. She considered it herself. A kind of human search engine, hunting math-based solutions…

Frank did not look amused. “I’ll already be out there far enough as it is,” he muttered. “I wish I knew why Diane asked me to give this talk anyway.”

“To get your parting wisdom, right?”

“Yeah right.” He looked at a pad of yellow legal-sized paper, scribbled over with notes.

Anna surveyed him, feeling again the slightly irritated fondness for him she had felt on the night of the party for the Khembalis. She would miss him when he was gone. “Want to go down and get a coffee?”

“Sure.” He got up slowly, lost in thought, and reached out to close the program on his computer.

“Wow, what did you do to your hand?”

“Oh. Burned it in a little climbing fall. Grabbed the rope.”

“My God Frank.”

“I was belayed at the time, it was just a reflex thing.”

“It looks painful.”

“It is when I flex it.” They left the offices and went to the elevators. “How is Charlie getting along with his poison ivy?”

“Still moaning and groaning. Most of the blisters are healing, but some of them keep breaking open. I think the worst part now is that it keeps waking him up at night. He hasn’t slept much since it happened. Between that and Joe he’s kind of going crazy.”

In the Starbucks she said, “So are you ready for this talk to the Board?”

“No. Or as much as I can be. Like I said, I don’t really know why Diane wants me to do it.”

“It must be because you’re leaving. She wants to get your parting wisdom. She does that with some of the visiting people. It’s a sign she’s interested in your take on things.”

“But how would she know what that is?”

“I don’t know. Not from me. I would only say good things, of course, but she hasn’t asked me.”

He rubbed a finger gently up and down the burn on his palm.

“Tell me,” he said, “have you ever heard of someone getting a report and, you know, just filing it away? Taking no action on it?”

“Happens all the time.”

“Really.”

“Sure. With some things it’s the best way to deal with them.”

“Hmm.”

They had made their way to the front of the line, and so paused for orders, and the rapid production of their coffees. Frank continued to look thoughtful. It reminded Anna of his manner when he had arrived at her party, soaking wet from the rain, and she said, “Say, did you ever find that woman you were stuck in the elevator with?”

“No. I was going to tell you about it. I did what you suggested and contacted the Metro offices, and asked service and repair to get her name from the report. I said I needed to contact her for my insurance report.”

“Oh really! And?”

“And the Metro person read it right off to me, no problem. Read me everything she wrote. But it turns out she wrote down the wrong stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

They walked out of the Starbucks and back into the building.

“It was a wrong address she put down. There’s no residence there. And she wrote down her name as Jane Smith. I think she made everything up.”

“That’s strange! I guess they didn’t check your IDs.”

“No.”

“I’d have thought they would.”

“People just freed from stuck elevators are not in the mood to be handing over their IDs.”

“No, I suppose not.” An UP elevator opened and they got in. They had it to themselves. “Like your friend, apparently.”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder why she would write down the wrong stuff though.”

“Me too.”

“What about what she told you—something about being in a cycling club, was it?”

“I’ve tried that. None of the cycling clubs in the area will give out membership lists. I cracked into one in Bethesda, but there wasn’t any Jane Smith.”

“Wow. You’ve really been looking into it.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she’s a spook. Hmm. Maybe you could go to all the cycling club meetings, just once. Or join one and ride with it, and look for her at meets, and show her picture around.”

“What picture?”

“Get a portrait program to generate one.”

“Good idea, although”—sigh—“it wouldn’t look like her.”

“No, they never do.”

“I’d have to get better at riding a bike.”

“At least she wasn’t into skydiving.”

He laughed. “True. Well, I’ll have to think about it. But thanks, Anna.”

Later that afternoon they met again, on the way up to one of Diane’s meetings with the NSF Board of Directors. They got out on the twelfth floor and walked around the hallways. The outer windows at the turns in the halls revealed that the day had darkened, low black clouds now tearing over themselves in their hurry to reach the Atlantic, sheeting down rain as they went.

In the big conference room Laveta and some others were repositioning a whiteboard and PowerPoint screen according to Diane’s instructions. Frank and Anna were the first ones there.

“Come on in,” Diane said. She busied herself with the screen and kept her back to Frank.

The rest of the crowd trickled in. NSF’s Board of Directors was composed of twenty-four people, although usually there were a couple of vacant positions in the process of being filled. The directors were all powers in their parts of the scientific world, appointed by the President from lists provided by NSF and the National Academy of Science, and serving six-year terms.

Now they were looking wet and windblown, straggling into the room in ones and twos. Some of Anna’s fellow division directors came in as well. Eventually fifteen or sixteen people were seated around the big table, including Sophie Harper, their congressional liaison. The light in the room flickered faintly as lightning made itself visible diffusely through the coursing rain on the room’s exterior window. The gray world outside pulsed as if it were an aquarium.

Diane welcomed them and moved quickly through the agenda’s introductory matter. After that she ran down a list of large projects that had been proposed or discussed in the previous year, getting the briefest of reports from Board members assigned to study the projects. They included climate mitigation proposals, many highly speculative, all extremely expensive. A carbon sink plan included reforestations that would also be useful for flood control; Anna made a note to tell the Khembalis about that one.

But nothing they discussed was going to work on the global situation, given the massive nature of the problem, and NSF’s highly constricted budget and mission. Ten billion dollars; and even the fifty-billion-dollar items on their list of projects only addressed small parts of the global problem.

At moments like these Anna could not help thinking of Charlie playing with Joe’s dinosaurs, holding up a little pink mouselike thing, a first mammal, and exclaiming, “Hey it’s NSF!”

He had meant it as a compliment to their skill at surviving in a big world, or to the way they represented the coming thing, but unfortunately the comparison was also true in terms of size. Scurrying about trying to survive in a world of dying dinosaurs—worse yet, trying to save the dinosaurs too—where was the mechanism? As Frank would say, How could that work?

She banished these thoughts and made her own quick report about the infrastructure distribution programs that she had been studying. These had been in place for some years, and she could therefore provide some quantitative data, tallying increased scientific output in the participating countries. A lot of infrastructure had been dispersed in the last decade. Anna’s concluding suggestion that the programs were a success and should be expanded was received with nods all around, as an obvious thing to do. But also expensive.

There was a pause as people thought this over.

Finally Diane looked at Frank. “Frank, are you ready?”

Frank stood to answer. He did not exhibit his usual ease. He walked over to the whiteboard, took up a red marker, fiddled with it. His face was flushed.

“All the programs described so far focus on gathering data, and the truth is we have enough data already. The world’s climate has already changed. The Arctic Ocean ice pack breakup has flooded the surface of the North Atlantic with fresh water, and the most recent data indicate that that has stopped the surface water from sinking, and stalled the circulation of the big Atlantic current. That’s been pretty conclusively identified as a major trigger event in Earth’s climactic history, as most of you no doubt know. Abrupt climate change has almost certainly already begun.”

Frank stared at the whiteboard, lips pursed. “So. The question becomes, what do we do? Business as usual won’t work. For you here, the effort should be toward finding ways that NSF can make a much broader impact than it has up until now.”

“Excuse me,” one of the Board members said, sounding a bit peeved. He was a man in his sixties, with a gray Lincoln beard; Anna did not recognize him. “How is this any different from what we are always trying to do? I mean, we’ve talked about trying to do this at every Board meeting I’ve ever been to. We always ask ourselves, how can NSF get more bang for its buck?”

“Maybe so,” said Frank. “But it hasn’t worked.”

Diane said, “What are you saying, Frank? What should we be doing that we haven’t already tried?”

Frank cleared his throat. He and Diane stared at each other for a long moment, locked in some kind of undefined conflict.

Frank shrugged, went to the whiteboard, uncapped his red marker. “Let me make a list.”

He wrote a 1 and circled it.

“One. We have to knit it all together.” He wrote Synergies at NSF.

“I mean by this that you should be stimulating synergistic efforts that range across the disciplines to work on this problem. Then,” he wrote and circled a 2, “you should be looking for immediately relevant applications coming out of the basic research funded by the Foundation. These applications should be hunted for by people brought in specifically to do that. You should have a permanent in-house innovation and policy team.”

Anna thought, That would be that mathematician he just lost.

She had never seen Frank so serious. His usual manner was gone, and with it the mask of cynicism and self-assurance that he habitually wore, the attitude that it was all a game he condescended to play even though everyone had already lost. Now he was serious, even angry it seemed. Angry at Diane somehow. He wouldn’t look at her, or anywhere else but at his scrawled red words on the whiteboard.

“Three, you should commission work that you think needs to be done, rather than waiting for proposals and funding choices given to you by others. You can’t afford to be so passive anymore. Four, you should assign up to fifty percent of NSF’s budget every year to the biggest outstanding problem you can identify, in this case catastrophic climate change, and direct the scientific community to attack and solve it. Both public and private science, the whole culture. The effort could be organized through something like Germany ’s Max Planck Institutes, which are funded by the government to go after particular problems. There’s about a dozen of them, and they exist while they’re needed and get disbanded when they’re not. It’s a good model.

“Five, you should make more efforts to increase the power of science in policy decisions everywhere. Organize all the scientific bodies on Earth into one larger body, a kind of UN of scientific organizations, which then would work together on the important issues, and would collectively insist they be funded, for the sake of all the future generations of humanity.”

He stopped, stared at the whiteboard. He shook his head. “All this may sound, what. Large-scaled. Or interfering. Antidemocratic, or elitist or something—something beyond what science is supposed to be.”

The man who had objected before said, “We’re in no position to stage a coup.”

Frank shook him off. “Think of it in terms of Kuhnian paradigms. The paradigm model Kuhn outlined in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”

The bearded man nodded, granting this.

“Kuhn postulated that in the usual state of affairs there is general agreement to a group of core beliefs that structure people’s theories, that’s a paradigm, and the work done within it he called ‘normal science.’ He was referring to a theoretical understanding of nature, but let’s apply the model to science’s social behavior. We do normal science. But as Kuhn pointed out, anomalies crop up. Undeniable events occur that we can’t cope with inside the old paradigm. At first scientists just fit the anomalies in as best they can. Then when there are enough of them, the paradigm begins to fall apart. In trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, it becomes as weird as Ptolemy’s astronomical system.

“That’s where we are now. We have our universities, and the Foundation and all the rest, but the system is too complicated, and flying off in all directions. Not capable of coming to grips with the aberrant data.”

Frank looked briefly at the man who had objected. “Eventually, a new paradigm is proposed that accounts for the anomalies. It comes to grips with them better. After a period of confusion and debate, people start using it to structure a new normal science.”

The old man nodded. “You’re suggesting we need a paradigm shift in how science interacts with society.”

“Yes I am.”

“But what is it? We’re still in the period of confusion, as far as I can see.”

“Yes. But if we don’t have a clear sense of what the next paradigm should be, and I agree we don’t, then it’s our job now as scientists to force the issue and make it happen, by employing all our resources in an organized way. To get to the other side faster. The money and the institutional power that NSF has assembled ever since it began has to be used like a tool to build this. No more treating our grantees like clients whom we have to satisfy if we want to keep their business. No more going to Congress with hat in hand, begging for change and letting them call the shots as to where the money is spent.”

“Whoa now,” objected Sophie Harper. “They have the right to allocate federal funds, and they’re very jealous of that right, believe you me.”

“Sure they are. That’s the source of their power. And they’re the elected government, I’m not disputing any of that. But we can go to them and say look, the party’s over. We need this list of projects funded or civilization will be hammered for decades to come. Tell them they can’t give half a trillion dollars a year to the military and leave the rescue and rebuilding of the world to chance and some kind of free-market religion. It isn’t working, and science is the only way out of the mess.”

“You mean the scientific deployment of human effort in these causes,” Diane said.

“Whatever,” Frank snapped, then paused, as if recognizing what Diane had said. His face went even redder.

“I don’t know,” another Board member said. “We’ve been trying more outreach, more lobbying of Congress, all that. I’m not sure more of that will get the big change you’re talking about.”

Frank nodded. “I’m not sure they will either. They were the best I could think of, and more needs to be done there.”

“In the end, NSF is a small agency,” someone else said.

“That’s true too. But think of it as an information cascade. If the whole of NSF was focused for a time on this project, then our impact would hopefully be multiplied. It would cascade from there. The math of cascades is fairly probabilistic. You push enough elements at once, and if they’re the right elements and the situation is at the angle of repose or past it, boom. Cascade. Paradigm shift. New focus on the big problems we’re facing.”

The people around the table were thinking it over.

Diane never took her eyes off Frank. “I’m wondering if we are at such an obvious edge-of-the-cliff moment that people will listen to us if we try to start such a cascade.”

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “I think we’re past the angle of repose. The Atlantic current has stalled. We’re headed for a period of rapid climate change. That means problems that will make normal science impossible to pursue.”

Diane smiled tautly. “You’re suggesting we have to save the world so science can proceed?”

“Yes, if you want to put it that way. If you’re lacking a better reason to do it.”

Diane stared at him, offended. He met her gaze unapologetically.

Anna watched this standoff, on the edge of her seat. Something was going on between those two, and she had no idea what it was. To ease the suspense she wrote down on her handpad, saving the world so science can proceed. The Frank Principle, as Charlie later dubbed it.

“Well,” Diane said, breaking the frozen moment, “what do people think?”

A discussion followed. People threw out ideas: creating a kind of shadow replacement for Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment; campaigning to make the President’s scientific advisor a cabinet post; even drafting a new amendment to the Constitution that would elevate a body like the National Academy of Science to the level of a branch of government. Then also going international, funding a world body of scientific organizations to push everything that would create a sustainable civilization. These ideas and more were mooted, hesitantly at first, and then with more enthusiasm as people began to realize that they all had harbored various ideas of this kind, visions that were usually too big or strange to broach to other scientists. “Pretty wild notions,” as one of them noted.

Frank had been listing them on the whiteboard. “The thing is,” he said, “the way we have things organized now, scientists keep themselves out of political policy decisions in the same way that the military keeps itself out of civilian affairs. That comes out of World War Two, when science was part of the military. Scientists recused themselves from policy decisions, and a structure was formed that created civilian control of science, so to speak.

“But I say to hell with that! Science isn’t like the military. It’s the solution, not the problem. And so it has to insist on itself. That’s what looks wild about these ideas, that scientists should take a stand and become a part of the political decision-making process. If it were the folks in the Pentagon saying that, I would agree there would be reason to worry, although they do it all the time. What I’m saying is that it’s a perfectly legitimate move for us to make, even a necessary move, because we are not the military, we are already civilians, and we have the only methods there are to deal with these global environmental problems.”

The group sat for a moment in silence, thinking that over. Monsoonlike rain coursed down the room’s window, in an infinity of shifting delta patterns. Darker clouds rolled over, making the room dimmer still, submerging it until it was a cube of lit neon, hanging in aqueous grayness.

Anna’s notepad was covered by squiggles and isolated words. So many problems were tangled together into the one big problem. So many of the suggested solutions were either partial or impractical, or both. No one could pretend they were finding any great strategies to pursue at this point. It looked as if Sophie Harper was about to throw her hands in the air, perhaps taking Frank’s talk as a critique of her efforts to date, which Anna supposed was one way of looking at it, although not really Frank’s point.

Now Diane made a motion as if to cut the discussion short. “Frank,” she said, drawing his name out; “Fraannnnnk—you’re the one who’s brought this up, as if there is something we could do about it. So maybe you should be the one who heads up a committee tasked with figuring out what these things are. Sharpening up the list of things to try, in effect, and reporting back to this Board. You could proceed with the idea that your committee would be building the way to the next paradigm.”

Frank stood there, looking at all the red words he had scribbled so violently on the whiteboard. For a long moment he continued to look at it, his expression grim. Many in the room knew that he was due to go back to San Diego. Many did not. Either way Diane’s offer probably struck them as another example of her managerial style, which was direct, public, and often had an element of confrontation or challenge in it. When people felt strongly about taking an action she often said, You do it, then. Take the lead if you feel so strongly.

At last Frank turned and met her eye. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’d be happy to do that. I’ll give it my best shot.”

Diane revealed only a momentary gleam of triumph. Once when Anna was young she had seen a chess master play an entire room of opponents, and there had been only one player among them he was having trouble with; when he had checkmated that person, he had moved on to the next board with that very same quick satisfied look.

Now, in this room, Diane was already on to the next item on her agenda.

Afterward, the bioinformatics group sat in Anna’s and Frank’s rooms on the sixth floor, sipping cold coffee and looking into the atrium.

Edgardo came in. “So,” he said cheerily, “I take it the meeting was a total waste of time.”

“No,” Anna snapped.

Edgardo laughed. “Diane changed NSF top to bottom?”

“No.”

They sat there. Edgardo went and poured himself some coffee.

Anna said to Frank, “It sounded like you were telling Diane you would stay another year.”

“Yep.”

Edgardo came back in, amazed. “Will wonders never cease! I hope you didn’t give up your apartment yet!”

“I did.”

“Oh no! Too bad!”

Frank flicked that away with his burned hand. “The guy is coming back anyway.”

Anna regarded him. “So you really are changing your mind.”

“Well…”

The lights went out, computers too. Power failure.

“Ah shit.”

A blackout. No doubt a result of the storm.

Now the atrium was truly dark, all the offices lit only by the dim green glow of the emergency exit signs. EXIT. The shadow of the future.

Then the emergency generator came on, making an audible hum through the building. With a buzz and several computer pings, electricity returned.

Anna went down the hall to look north out the corner window. Arlington was dark to the rain-fuzzed horizon. Many emergency generators had already kicked in, and more did so as she watched, powering glows that in the rain looked like little campfires. The cloud over the Pentagon caught the light from below and gleamed blackly.

Frank came out and looked over her shoulder. “This is what it’s going to be like all the time,” he predicted gloomily. “We might as well get used to it.”

Anna said, “How would that work?”

He smiled briefly. But it was a real smile, a tiny version of the one Anna had seen at her house. “Don’t ask me.” He stared out the window at the darkened city. The low thrum of rain was cut by the muffled sound of a siren below.

The Hyperniño that was now into its forty-second month had spun up another tropical system in the East Pacific, north of the equator, and now this big wet storm was barreling northeast toward California. It was the fourth in a series of pineapple-express storms that had tracked along this course of the jet stream, which was holding in an exceptionally fast run directly at the north coast of San Diego County. Ten miles above the surface, winds flew at a hundred and seventy miles an hour, so the air underneath was yanked over the ground at around sixty miles an hour, all roiled, torn, downdrafted and compressed, its rain squeezed out of it the moment it slammed into land. The sea cliffs of La Jolla, Blacks, Torrey Pines, Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Encinitas, and Leucadia were all taking a beating, and in many places the sandstone, eaten by waves from below and saturated with rain from above, began to fall into the sea.

Leo and Roxanne Mulhouse had a front seat on all this, of course, because of their house’s location on the cliff edge in Leucadia. Leo had spent many an hour since being let go sitting before their west window, or even standing out on the porch in the elements, watching the storms come onshore. It was an astonishing thing to see that much weather crashing into a coastline. The clouds and sky appeared to pour up over the southwest horizon together. They flew overhead and yet the cliffs and the houses held, making the wind howl at the impediment, compressed and intensified in this first assault on the land.

This particular morning was the worst yet. Tree branches tossed violently; three eucalyptus trees had been knocked over on Neptune Avenue alone. And Leo had never seen the sea look like this before. All the way out to where rapidly approaching black squalls blocked the view of the horizon, the ocean was a giant sheet of raging surf. Millions of whitecaps rolled toward the land under flying spume and spray, the waves toppling again and again over infinitely wind-rippled gray water. The squalls flew by rapidly, or came straight on in black bursts of rain against the house’s west side. Brief patches and shards of sunlight lanced between these squalls, but failed to light the sea surface in their usual way; the water was too shredded. The gray shafts of light appeared to be eaten by spray.

Up and down Neptune Avenue, their cliff was wearing away. It happened irregularly, in sudden slumps of various sizes, some at the cliff top, some at the base, some in the middle.

The erosion was not a new thing. The cliffs of San Diego had been breaking off throughout the period of modern settlement, and presumably for all the centuries before that. But along this level stretch of seaside cliff north and south of Moonlight Beach, the houses had been built close to the edge. Surveyors studying photos had seen little movement in the cliff’s edge between 1928 and 1965, when the construction began. They had not known about the storm of October 12, 1889, when 7.58 inches of rain had fallen on Encinitas in eight hours, triggering a flood and bluff collapse so severe that A, B, and C Streets of the new town had disappeared into the sea. They also did not understand that grading the bluffs and adding drainage pipes that led out the cliff face destroyed natural drainage patterns that led inland. So the homes and apartment blocks had been built with their fine views, and then years of efforts had been made to stabilize the cliffs.

Now, among other problems, the cliffs were often unnaturally vertical as a result of all the shoring up they had been given. Concrete and steel barriers, iceplant berms, wooden walls and log beams, plastic sheets and molding, crib walls, boulder walls, concrete abutments—all these efforts had been made in the same period when the beaches were no longer being replenished by sand washing out of the lagoons to the north, because all these had had their watersheds developed and their rivers made much less prone to flooding sand out to sea. So over time the beaches had disappeared, and these days waves stuck directly at the bases of ever-steepening cliffs. The angle of repose was very far exceeded.

Now the ferocity of the Hyperniño was calling all that to account, overwhelming a century’s work all at once. The day before, just south of the Mulhouses’ property, a section of the cliff a hundred feet long and fifteen feet deep went, burying a concrete berm lying at the bottom of the cliff. Two hours later a hemispheric arc forty feet deep had fallen into the surf just north of them, leaving a raw new gap between two apartment blocks—a gap that quickly turned into a gritty mudslide that slid down into the tormented water, staining it brown for hundreds of yards offshore. The usual current was southerly, but the storm was shoving the ocean as well as the air northward, so that the water offshore was chaotic with drifts, with discharge from suddenly raging river mouths, with backwash from the strikes of the big swells, and with the everpresent wind, slinging spray over all. It was so bad no one was even surfing.

As the dark morning wore on, many of the residents of Neptune Avenue went out to look at their stretch of the bluff. Various authorities were there as well, and interested spectators were filling the little cross streets that ran east to the coast highway, and gathering at public places along the cliff’s edge. Many residents had gone the previous evening to hear a team from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers give a presentation at the town library, explaining their plan to stabilize the cliff at its most vulnerable points with impromptu riprap seawalls made of boulders dumped from above. In some places getting the boulders over the side would damage the iceplant covering. Routes out to some of the cliff top dumping points might also be trashed. Given the situation it was felt the damage was justified for the greater good. Repairs when the crisis had passed were promised. Of course some things could not be fixed; in many places the already narrow beach would be buried, becoming a wall of boulders even at low tide—like the side of a jetty, or a stretch of some very rocky coastline. Some people at the meeting lamented this loss of the area’s signature landscape feature, a beach that had been four hundred yards wide in the 1920’s, and even in its present narrowed state, the thing that made San Diego what it was. There were people there who felt that was worth more than houses built too close to the edge. Let them go!

But the cliff-edge homeowners had argued that it was not necessarily true that the cliffside line of houses would be the end of the losses. Everyone now knew the story behind the westernmost street in Encinitas being named D Street. The whole town was on the edge of a sandstone cliff, when you got right down to it, a cliff badly fractured and faulted. If massive rapid erosion had happened before, it could happen again. One look at the raging surface of the Pacific roaring in at them was enough to convince people it was possible.

So, later that morning, Leo found himself standing near the edge of the cliff at the south end of Leucadia, his rain jacket and pants plastered to his windward side as he shoved a wheelbarrow over a wide plank path. Roxanne was inland helping at her sister’s, and so he was free to pitch in, and happy to have something to do. A county dump truck working with the Army Corps of Engineers was parked on Europa, and men running a small hoist were lifting granite boulders from the truck bed down into wheelbarrows. A lot of amateur help milled about, looking like a volunteer fire company that had never met before. The county and Army people supervised the operations, lining up plankways and directing rocks to the various points on the cliff’s edge where they were dumping them over.

Meanwhile scores or even hundreds of people had come out in the storm, to stand on the coast highway or in the viewpoint parking lots, and watch the wheelbarrowed boulders bound down the cliff and crash into the sea. It was already the latest spectator event, like a new extreme sport. Some of the bounding rocks caught really good air, or spun, or held still like knuckleballs, or splashed hugely. The surfers who were not helping (and there were only so many volunteers who could be accommodated at any one time) cheered lustily at the most dramatic falls. Every surfer in the county was there, drawn like moths to flame, entranced, and on some level itching to go out; but it was not possible. The water was crazy everywhere, and when the big broken waves smashed into the bottom of the cliffs, they had nowhere to go. Big surges shoved up, disintegrated into a white smash of foam and spray, hung suspended for a moment—balked masses of water, regathering themselves high against the cliff face—then they fell and muscled back out to sea, bulling into the incoming waves and creating thick tumultuous backwash collisions, until all in the brown shallows was chaos and disorder, and another surge managed to crash in only slightly impeded.

And all the while the wind howled over them, through them, against them. It was basically a warm wind, perhaps sixty or even sixty-five degrees. Leo found it impossible to judge its speed. Even though the cliffs in this area were low compared to those at Torrey Pines—about eighty feet tall rather than three hundred and fifty—that was still enough and more to block the terrific onshore flow and cause the wind to shoot up the cliffs and over them, so that a bit back from the edge it could be almost still, while right at the edge a blasting updraft was spiked by frequent gusts, like uppercuts from an invisible fist. Leo felt as if he could have leaned out over the edge and put out his arms and be held there at an angle—even jump and float down. Young windsurfers would probably be trying it soon, or surfers with their wetsuits altered to make them something like flying squirrels. Not that they would want to be in the water now. The sheer height of the whitewater surge against the cliffside was hard to believe, truly startling; bursts of spray regularly shot up into the wind and were whirled inland onto the already-drenched houses and people.

Leo got his wheelbarrow to the end of the plank road, and let a gang of people grasp his handles with him and help him tilt the stone out at the right place. After that he got out of the way and stood for a moment, watching people work. Restricted access to some of the weakest parts of the cliff meant that this was going to take days. Right now the rocks simply disappeared into the waves. No visible result whatsoever. “It’s like dropping rocks in the ocean,” he said to no one. The noise of the wind was terrific, a constant howl, like jets warming up for takeoff, interrupted by frequent invisible whacks on the ear. He could talk to himself without fear of being overheard, and did: a running narration of his day. His eyes watered in the wind, but that same wind tore the tears away and cleared his vision again and again.

This was purely a physical reaction to the gale; he was basically very happy to be there. Happy to have the distraction of the storm. A public disaster, a natural world event; it put everyone in the same boat, somehow. In a way it was even inspiring—not just the human response, but the storm itself. Wind as spirit. It felt uplifting. As if the wind had carried him off and out of his life.

Certainly it put things in a very different perspective. Losing a job, so what? How did that signify, really? The world was so vast and powerful. They were tiny things in it, like fleas, their problems the tiniest of flea perturbations.

So he returned to the dump truck and took another rock, and then focused on balancing the broken-edged thing at the front end of the wheelbarrow: turning it, keeping it on the flexing line of planks, shouldering into the blasts. Tipping a rock into the sea. Wonderful, really.

He was running the empty wheelbarrow back to the street when he saw Marta and Brian, getting out of Marta’s truck parked down at the end of the street. “Hey!” This was a nice surprise—they were not a couple, or even friends outside the lab, as far as Leo knew, and he had feared that with the lab shut down he would never see either of them again.

“Marta!” he bellowed happily. “Bri-man!”

“LEO!”

They were glad to see him. Marta ran up and gave him a hug. Brian did the same.

“How’s it going?” “How’s it going?”

They were jacked up by the storm and the chance to do something. No doubt it had been a long couple of weeks for them too, no work to go to, nothing to do. Well, they would have been out in the surf, or otherwise active. But here they were now, and Leo was glad.

Quickly they all got into the flow of the work, trundling rocks out to the cliff. Once Leo found himself following Marta down the plank line, and he watched her broad bunched shoulders and soaking black curls with a sudden blaze of friendship and admiration. She was a surfer gal, slim hips, broad shoulders, raising her head at a blast of the wind to howl back at it. Hooting with glee. He was going to miss her. Brian too. It had been good of them to come by like this; but the nature of things was such that they would surely find other work, and then they would drift apart. It never lasted with old work colleagues, the bond just wasn’t strong enough. Work was always a matter of showing up and then enjoying the people who had been hired to work there too. Not only their banter, but also the way they did the work, the experiments they made together. They had been a good lab.

The Army guys were waving them back from the edge of the cliff. It had been a lawn and now it was all torn up, and there was a guy there crouching over a big metal box, USGS on his soaking windbreaker. Brian shouted in their ears: they had found a fracture in the sandstone parallel to the cliff’s edge here, and apparently someone had felt the ground slump a little, and the USGS guy’s instrumentation was indicating movement. It was going to go. Everyone dumped their rocks where they were and hustled the empty wheelbarrows back to Neptune.

Just in time. With a short dull roar and whump that almost could have been the sound of more wind and surf—the impact of a really big wave—the cliff edge slumped. Then where it had been, they were looking through space at the gray sea hundreds of yards offshore. The cliff top was fifteen feet closer to them.

Very spooky. The crowd let out a collective shout that was audible above the wind. Leo and Brian and Marta drifted forward with the rest, to catch a glimpse of the dirty rage of water below. The break extended about a hundred yards to the south, maybe fifty to the north. A modest loss in the overall scheme of things, but this was the way it was happening, one little break at a time, all up and down this stretch of coast. The USGS guy had told them that there was a whole series of faults in the sandstone here, all parallel to the cliff, so that it was likely to flake off piece by piece as the waves gouged away support from below. That was how A through C Streets had gone in a single night. It could happen all the way inland to the coast highway, he said.

Amazing. Leo could only hope that Roxanne’s mother’s house had been built on one of the more solid sections of the bluff. It had always seemed that way when he descended the nearby staircase and checked it out; it stood over a kind of buttress of stone. But as he watched the ocean flail, and felt the wind strike them, there was no reason to be sure any section would hold. A whole neighborhood could go. And all up and down the coast they had built close to the edge, so it would be much the same in many other places.

No house had gone over in the slump they had just witnessed, but one at the southern end of it had lost parts of its west wall—been torn open to the wind. Everyone stood around staring, pointing, shouting unheard in the roar of wind. Milling about, running hither and thither, trying to get a view.

There was nothing else to be done at this point. The end of their plank road was gone along with everything else. The Army and county guys were getting out sawhorses and rolls of orange plastic stripping; they were going to cordon off this section of the street, evacuate it, and shift the work efforts to safer platforms.

“Wow,” Leo said to the storm, feeling the word ripped out of his mouth and flung to the east. “My Lord, what a wind.” He shouted to Marta: “We were standing right out there!”

“Gone!” Marta howled. “That baby is gone! It’s as gone as Torrey Pines Generique!”

Brian and Leo shouted their agreement. Into the sea with the damned place!

They retreated to the lee of Marta’s little Toyota pickup, sat on the curb behind its slight protection and drank some espressos she had in the cab, already cold in paper cups with plastic tops.

“There’ll be more work,” Leo told them.

“That’s for sure.” But they meant boulder work. “I heard the coast highway is cut just south of Cardiff,” Brian said. “San Elijo Lagoon is completely full, and now the surf is coming up the river mouth. Restaurant Row is totally gone. The overpass fell in and then the water started ripping both ways at the roadbed.”

“Wow!”

“It’s going to be a mess. I bet that will happen at the Torrey Pines river mouth too.”

“All the big lagoons.”

“Maybe, yeah.”

They sipped their espressos.

“It’s good to see you guys!” Leo said. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the worst part of this whole thing,” Leo said.

“Yeah.”

“Too bad they didn’t hang on to us—they’re putting all their eggs in one basket now.”

Marta and Brian regarded Leo. He wondered which part of what he had just said they disagreed with. Now that they weren’t working for him, he had no right to grill them about it, or about anything else. On the other hand there was no reason to hold back either.

“What?”

“I just got hired by Small Delivery Systems,” Marta said, almost shouting to be heard over the noise. She glanced at Leo uncomfortably. “Eleanor Dufours is working for them now, and she hired me. They want us to work on that algae stuff we’ve been doing.”

“Oh I see! Well good! Good for you.”

“Yeah, well. Atlanta.”

There was a whistle from the Army guys. A whole gang of Leucadians were trooping behind them down Neptune, south to another dump truck that had just arrived. There was more to be done.

Leo and Marta and Brian followed, went back to work. Some people left, others arrived. Lots of people were documenting events on video cameras and digital cameras. As the day wore on, the volunteers were glad to take heavy-duty work gloves from the Army guys to protect their palms from further blistering.

About two that afternoon the three of them decided to call it quits. Their palms were trashed. Leo’s thighs and lower back were getting shaky, and he was hungry. The cliff work would go on, and there would be no shortage of volunteers while the storm lasted. The need was evident, and besides it was fun to be out in the blast, doing something. Working made it seem like a practical contribution to be out there, although many would have been out to watch in any case.

The three of them stood on a point just north of Swami’s, leaning into the storm and marveling at the spectacle. Marta was bouncing a little in place, stuffed with energy still, totally fired up; she seemed both exhilarated and furious, and shouted at the biggest waves when they struck the stubborn little cliff at Pipes. “Wow! Look at that. Outside, outside!” She was soaking wet, as they all were, the rain plastering her curls to her head, the wind plastering her shirt to her torso; she looked like the winner of some kind of extreme-sport wet T-shirt contest, her breasts and belly button and ribs and collarbones and abs all perfectly delineated under the thin wet cloth. She was a power, a San Diego surf goddess, and good for her that she had gotten hired by Small Delivery Systems. Again Leo felt a glow for this wild young colleague of his.

“This is so great,” he shouted. “I’d rather do this than work in the lab!”

Brian laughed. “They don’t pay you for this, Leo.”

“Ah hey. Fuck that. This is still better.” And he howled at the storm.

Then Brian and Marta gave him hugs; they were taking off.

“Let’s try to stay in touch you guys,” Leo said sentimentally. “Let’s really do it. Who knows, we may all end up working together again someday anyway.”

“Good idea.”

“I’ll probably be available,” Brian said.

Marta shrugged, looking away. “We either will be or we won’t.”

Then they were off. Leo waved at Marta’s receding truck. A sudden pang—would he ever see them again? The reflection of the truck’s taillights smeared in two red lines over the street’s wet asphalt. Blinking right turn signal—then they were gone.