Fifty Degrees Below. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ done.’

      She took up a hand towel and wiped her brow. She looked different in gym clothes, of course. Short, rounded, muscular; hard to characterize, but she looked good. She drew the eye. Anyway, she drew Frank’s eye; presumably everyone was different that way.

      She sat there, barefoot and sweaty. ‘Do you want to get on here?’

      ‘Oh no, no hurry. I’m just kind of waking myself up to tell the truth.’

      ‘Okay.’

      She blew a strand of hair away from her mouth, kicked out against the weight ten times, slowing down in the last reps. She smelled faintly of sweat and soap. Presumably also pheromones, estrogens, estrogenlike compounds, and perfumes.

      ‘You’ve got a lot on the stack there.’

      ‘Do I?’ She peered at the weights. ‘Not so much.’

      ‘Two hundred pounds. Your legs are stronger than mine.’

      ‘I doubt that.’

      But it was true, at least on that machine. Diane pressed the two hundred ten more times; then Frank replaced her and keyed down the weights. Diane picked up a dumbbell and did some curls while he kicked in his traces. She had very nice biceps. Firm muscles under flushed wet skin. Absence of fur made all this so visible. On the savannah they would have been watching each other all the time, aware of each other as bodies.

      He wondered if he could make an observation like that to Diane, and if he did, what she would say. She had surprised him often enough recently that he had become cautious about predicting her.

      She was looking at the line of runners on treadmills, so Frank said, ‘Everyone’s trying to get back to the savannah.’

      Diane smiled and nodded. ‘Easy to do.’

      ‘Is it?’

      ‘If you know that’s what you’re trying for.’

      ‘Hmmm. Maybe so. But I don’t think most people know.’

      ‘No. Hey, are you done there? Will you check me on the bench press? My right elbow kind of locks up sometimes.’

      So Frank held the handle bar outside her hand. A young woman, heavily tattooed on her arms, waited for the machine to free up.

      Diane finished and Frank held out a hand to help her. She took it and hauled herself up, their grips tightening to hold. When she was up the young woman moved in to replace her, but Diane took up a towel and said, ‘Wait a second, let me wipe up the wet spot.’

      ‘Oh I hate the wet spot,’ the young woman said, and immediately threw a hand to her mouth, blushing vividly. Frank and Diane laughed, and seeing it the young woman did too, glowing with embarrassment. Diane gave the bench a final flourish and handed it over, saying, ‘There, if only it were always that easy!’

      They laughed again and Frank and Diane moved to the next machine. Military press, leg curls; then Diane looked at her watch and said, ‘Oops, I gotta get going,’ and Frank said ‘Me too,’ and without further ado they were off to their respective locker rooms. ‘See you over there.’ ‘Yeah, see you.’

      Into the men’s room, the shower, ahhhh. Hot water must have been unusual in the hominid world. Hot springs, the Indian Ocean shallows. Then out on the street, the air still cool, feeling as benign as he had in a long time. And Diane emerged at the same time from the women’s locker room, transformed into work mode, except wetter. They walked over to NSF together, talking about a meeting they were scheduled to attend later in the day. Frank arrived in his office at eight AM as if it were any ordinary morning. He had to laugh.

      

      The meeting featured a presentation by Kenzo and his team to Diane, Frank’s committee, and some of the members of National Science Board, the group that oversaw the Foundation in somewhat a board of directors style, if Frank understood it correctly. By the time Frank arrived, a large false-color map of the North Atlantic was already on the screen. On it the red flows marking the upper reaches of the Gulf Stream broke apart and curled like new ferns, one near Norway, one between Iceland and Scotland, one between Iceland and Greenland, and one extending up the long channel between Greenland and Labrador.

      ‘This is how it used to look,’ Kenzo said. ‘Now here’s the summer’s data from the Argos buoy system.’

      They watched as the red tendrils shrank in on themselves until they nearly met, at about the latitude of southern Ireland. ‘That’s where we’re at now, in terms of temperature. Here’s surface height.’ He clicked to another false-colored map that revealed what were in effect giant shallow whirlpools, fifty kilometers wide but only a few centimeters deep.

      ‘This is another before map. We think these downwelling sites were pretty stable for the last eight thousand years. Note that the Coriolis force would have the currents turning right, but the land and sea-bottom configurations make them turn left. So they aren’t as robust as they might be. And then, here’s what we’ve got now – see? The downwelling has clearly shifted to southwest of Ireland.’

      ‘What happens to the water north of that now?’ Diane asked.

      ‘Well – we don’t know yet. We’ve never seen this before. It’s a fresh water cap, a kind of lens on the surface. In general, water in the ocean moves in kind of blobs of relative freshness or salinity, you might say, blobs that mix only slowly. One team identified and tracked the great salinity anomaly of 1968 to ‘82, that was a huge fresher blob that circled in the North Atlantic on the surface. It made one giant circuit, then sank on its second pass through the downwelling zone east of Greenland. Now with this fresh water cap, who knows? If it’s resupplied from Greenland or the Arctic, it may stay there.’

      Diane stared at the map. ‘So what do you think happened to cause this fresh water cap?’

      ‘It may be a kind of Heinrich event, in which icebergs float south. Heinrich found these by analyzing boulders dropped to the sea floor when the icebergs melted. He theorized that anything that introduces more fresh water than usual to the far North Atlantic will tend to interfere with downwelling there. Even rain can do it. So, we’ve got the Arctic sea ice break-up as the main suspect, plus Greenland is melting much more rapidly than before. The poles are proving to be much more sensitive to global warming than anywhere else, and in the north the effects look to be combining to freshen the North Atlantic. Anyway it’s happened, and the strong implication is that we’re in for a shift to the kind of cold-dry-windy climate that we see in the Younger Dryas.’

      ‘So.’ Diane looked at the board members in attendance. ‘We have compelling evidence for an ocean event that is the best-identified trigger event for abrupt climate change.’

      ‘Yes,’ Kenzo said. ‘A very clear case, as we’ll see this winter.’

      ‘It will be bad?’

      ‘Yes. Maybe not the full cold-dry-windy, but heck, close enough. The Gulf Stream used to combine with Greenland to make a kind of jet stream anchor, and now the jet stream is likely to wander more, sometimes shooting straight down the continents from the Arctic. It’ll be cold and dry and windy all over the northern hemisphere, but especially in the eastern half of North America, and all over Europe.’ Kenzo gestured at the screen. ‘You can bet on it.’

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ