Fifty Degrees Below. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ The sky was lightening fast, and what had seemed to him cloud cover was revealed as a clear pale sky. Dim greens began to flush the grays. The air was still cool.

      It turned out that in this area Rock Creek ran at the bottom of a fairly steep ravine, and the flood had torn the sidewalls away in places, as he saw when he came to a sudden drop-off. Below him, bare sandstone extruded roots like ripped wiring. He circled above the drop, dodging between low trees.

      From a little clearing he could suddenly see downstream. The flood in spate had torn the little canyon clear. Everything that had been down there before – Beach Road, the small bridges and buildings, the ranger station, the picnic areas – all of it was gone, leaving a raw zone of bare sandstone, flat mud, thrashed grass, downed timber, and stubborn trees that were either clinging to life or dead in place. Many trees had been knocked over and yet held on by a few roots, forming living snags piled high with mud and trash. A larger snag downstream looked like a giant beaver dam, creating a dirt-brown pond.

      The sky stood big and blue overhead, a tall dome that seemed to rise as the day lightened. Muddy Rock Creek burbled noisily down its course, spilling from one foamy brown stretch to the next.

      At the far edge of the pond a heron strode slowly, its knees bending backward. Long body, long legs, long neck, long head, long beak. A great blue heron, Frank guessed, though this one’s dark gray feathers looked more green than blue. A kind of dinosaur. And indeed nothing could have looked more pterodactylic. Two hundred million years.

      Sunlight blazed green at the tops of the trees across the ravine. Frank and the heron stood attentively, listening to unseen smaller birds whose wild twittering now filled the air. The heron’s head cocked to one side. For a time everything was as still as bronze.

      Then beyond the twittering came a different sound, fluid and clear, rising like a siren, like a hook in the flesh:

       Oooooooooooooooooop!

      National Science Foundation, Arlington Virginia, basement parking lot, seven AM. A primate sitting in his car, thinking things over. As one of the editors of The Journal of Sociobiology Frank was very much aware of the origins of their species. The third chimp, as Diamond had put it. Now he thought: chimps sleep outdoors. Bonobos sleep outdoors.

      Housing was ultimately an ergonomic problem. What did he really need? His belongings were here in the car, or upstairs in his office, or in boxes at UCSD, or in storage units in Encinitas, California, or down the road in Arlington, Virginia. The fact that stuff was in storage showed how much it really mattered. By and large he was free of worldly things. At age forty-three he no longer needed them. That felt a little strange, actually, but not necessarily bad. Did it feel good? It was hard to tell. It simply felt strange.

      He got out of his car and took the elevator to the third floor, where there was a little exercise room, with a men’s room off its entryway that included showers. In his shoulder bag he carried his laptop, his cell phone, his bathroom kit, and a change of clothes. The three shower stalls stood behind white curtains, near an area with benches and lockers. Beyond it extended the room containing toilets, urinals, and a counter of sinks under a long mirror.

      Frank knew the place, having showered and changed in it many times after runs at lunch with Edgardo and Kenzo and Bob and the others. Now he surveyed it with a new regard. It was as he remembered: an adequate bathroom, public but serviceable.

      He undressed and got in one of the showers. A flood of hot water, almost industrial in quantity, washed away some of the stiffness of his uncomfortable night. Of course no one would want to be seen showering there every day. Not that anyone was watching, but some of the morning exercisers would eventually notice.

      A membership in some nearby exercise club would provide an alternative bathroom.

      What else did one need?

      Somewhere to sleep, of course. The Honda would not suffice. If he had a van, and an exercise club membership, and this locker room, and his office upstairs, and the men’s rooms up there … As for food, the city had a million restaurants.

      What else?

      Nothing he could think of. Many people more or less lived in this building, all the NSF hardcores who spent sixty or seventy hours a week here, ate their meals at their desks or in the neighborhood restaurants, only went home to sleep – and these were people with families, with kids, homes, pets, partners!

      In a crowd like that it would be hard to stick out.

      He got out of the shower, dried off (a stack of fresh white towels was there at hand), shaved, dressed.

      He glanced in the mirror over the sink, feeling a bit shy. He didn’t look at himself in mirrors anymore, never met his eye when shaving, stayed focused on the skin under the blade. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because he did not resemble his conception of himself, which was vaguely scientific and serious, say Darwinesque; and yet there in the glass getting shaved was always the same old sun-fried jock.

      But this time he looked. To his surprise he saw that he looked normal – that was to say, the same as always. Normative. No one would be able to guess by his appearance that he was sleep-deprived, that he had been thinking some pretty abnormal thoughts, or, crucially, that he had spent the previous night in his car because he no longer had a home.

      ‘Hmm,’ he told his reflection.

      He took the elevator up to the tenth floor, still thinking it over. He stood in the doorway of his new office, evaluating the place by these new inhabitory criteria. It was a true room, rather than a carrel in a larger space, so it had a door he could close. It boasted one of the big inner windows looking into the building’s central atrium, giving him a direct view of the big colored mobile that filled the atrium’s upper half.

      This view was unfortunate, actually. He didn’t want to look at that mobile, for not too long ago he had found himself hanging upside down from it, in the middle of the night, working desperately to extricate himself from an ill-conceived and poorly executed break-and-enter job. He had been trying and failing to recover a poorly-worded resignation letter he had left for Diane Chang, the NSF director. It was an incident he would really rather forget.

      But there the mobile hung, at the new angle which Frank had given to it and which no one had noticed, perhaps a reminder to – to what? To try not to do stupid things. To think things through before attempting them. But he always tried to do that, so the reminder was unnecessary. Really, the mobile outside his window was a disadvantage. But drapes could be installed.

      There was room for a short couch against one wall, if he moved the bookcase there to the opposite corner. It would then be like a kind of living room, with the computer as entertainment center. There was an ordinary men’s room around the corner, a coffee nook down the hall, the showers downstairs. All the necessities. As Sucandra had remarked, at dinner once at the Quiblers’, tasting spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon: Ahhhh – what now is lacking?

      Same answer: Nothing.

      It had to be admitted that it made him uneasy to be contemplating this idea. Unsettled. It was deranged, in the literal sense of being outside the range. Typically people did not choose to live without a home. No home to go home to; it was perhaps a little crazy.

      But in some obscure way, that aspect pleased him too. It was not crazy in the way that breaking into the building through the skylight had been crazy; but it shared that act’s commitment to an idea. And was it any crazier than handing well over half of your monthly take-home income to pay for seriously crappy lodging?

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