Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Prices would go up,” Edgardo said. “That’s inflation. Then again, inflation always hurts the big guys less than the little guys, because they have enough to do better at differential accumulation. And it’s differential accumulation that counts. As long as you’re doing better than the system at large, you’re fine.”

“Still,” Frank said. “The occasional false shortage, Anna is saying. Or just stimulating a fear. Creating bogeymen, pretending we’re at war, all that. To keep us anxious.”

“To keep us hoarding!” Anna insisted.

Edgardo laughed. “Sure! Like health care and housing!”

Frank said, “So we’ve got all the toys and none of the necessities.”

“That’s backwards, isn’t it,” Anna said.

“It’s insane,” Frank said.

Edgardo was grinning. “I told you, we’re stupid! We’re going to have a tough time getting out of this mess, we are so stupid!”

AGAIN FRANK FLEW OUT TO SAN DIEGO.Descending the escalator from the airport’s glassed-in pedestrian walkway, he marveled that everything was the same as always; the only sign of winter was a certain brazen quality to the light, so that the sea was a slate color, and the cliffs of Point Loma a glowing apricot. Gorgeous Mediterranean coast of the Pacific. His heart’s home.

He had not bothered to make hotel reservations. Rent a van and that was that—no way was Mr. Optimodal, Son of Alpine Man, going to pay hundreds of dollars a night for the dubious pleasure of being trapped indoors at sunset! The light at dusk over the Pacific was too precious and superb to miss in such a thoughtless way. And the Mediterranean climate meant every night was good for sleeping out, or at the very least, for leaving the windows of the van open to the sea breezes. The salt-and-eucalyptus air, the cool warmth, it was all otherworldly in its sensuous caress. His home planet.

During the day he dropped by his storage locker in Encinitas and got some stuff, and that night he parked the van on La Jolla Farms Road and walked out onto the bluff between Scripps and Black’s Canyons. This squarish plateau, owned by UCSD, was a complete coastal mesa left entirely empty—a very rare thing at this point. In fact it might have been the only undeveloped coastal mesa left between Mexico and Camp Pendleton. And its sea cliff was the tallest coastal cliff in all of southern California, some 350 feet high, towering directly over the water so that it seemed taller. A freak of both nature and history, in short, and one of Frank’s favorite places. He wasn’t the first to have felt that way; there were graves on it that had given carbon-14 dates around seven thousand years before present, the oldest archeological site in mainland southern California.

It occurred to him as he walked out to the edge of the cliff that on the night he had lost his apartment and first gone out into Rock Creek Park, he had been expecting something like this: instant urban wilderness, entirely empty, overlooking the world. To bang into the bros in the claustrophobic forest had come as quite a shock.

At the cliff’s edge itself there were small scallops in the sandstone that were like little hidden rooms. He had slept in them when a student, camping out for the fun of it. He recognized the scallop farthest south as his regular spot. It had been twenty-five years since the last time he had slept there. He wondered what that kid would think to see him here now.

He slept there again, fitfully, and in the gray wet dawn hiked up to the rented van and dropped off his sleeping bag and ground pad, then continued up to campus and the huge new gym called RIMAC. His faculty card got him entry into the spotless men’s rooms, where he showered and shaved, then walked down to Revelle College for a catch-up session at the department office. A good effort now would save him all kinds of punitive work when he finally made it back.

After that he bought an outdoor breakfast at the espresso stand overlooking the women’s softball diamond, and watched the team warm up as he ate. Oh my. How he loved American jock women. These classics of the type threw the ball around the horn like people who fully understood the simple joys of throwing something at something. The softballs were like intrusions from some more Euclidean universe, a little example of the technological sublime in which rocks like his hand axe had become Ideas of Order. When the gals whipped them around the pure white spheres did not illustrate gravity or the wind, as frisbees did, but rather a point drawing a line. Whack! Whack! God that shortstop had an arm. Frank supposed it was perverted to be sitting there regarding women’s softball practice as some kind of erotic dance, but oh well, he couldn’t help it; it was a very sexy thing.

After that he walked down La Jolla Shores Road to the Visualization Center at Scripps. This was a room located at the top of a wooden tower six stories tall, one room to each floor. Two or three of the bottom floors were occupied by a single computer, a superpowerful behemoth like something out of a 1950s movie; it was rather mind-boggling to consider the capacities of that much hardware now. They must have entered the kingdom of petaflops.

The top room was the visualizing center per se, consisting of a 3-D wraparound movie theater that literally covered three walls. Two young women in shorts, graduate students of the professor who had invited Frank to drop by, greeted him and tapped up their show, placing Frank in the central viewing spot and giving him 3-D glasses. When the room went dark, the screen disappeared and Frank found himself standing on the rumpled black floor of the Atlantic, just south of the sill that ran like a range of hills between Iceland and Scotland, and looking north, into the flow at the two-thousand-meter level. Small temperature differences were portrayed in false color that extended across the entire spectrum, all the colors transparent, so that the air appeared to have become flowing banners of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo. The main flow was about chest high on Frank. Like standing in a lava lamp, one of the techs suggested, although Frank had been thinking he was flying in a rainbow that had gone through a shredder. The pace of the flow was speeded up, the techs told him, but it was still a stately waving of flat bands of red and their penumbral oranges, ribboning south through the blues and blue-greens, undulating like a snake, and then rolling smoothly over a blue and purple layer and down, as if passing over a weir.

“That was five years ago,” one of the grad students said. “Watch now, this is last year this time—”

The flow got thinner, slower, thinner. A yellow sheet, roiling under a green blanket in a midnight-blue room. Then the yellow thinned to nothing. Green and blue pulsed gently back and forth, like kelp swinging in a moon swell, in a sea of deep purple.

“Wow,” Frank said. “The stall.”

“That’s right,” the woman at the computer said. “But now:”

The image lightened; tendrils of yellow appeared, then orange; then ribbons of red appeared, coalesced in a broad band. “It’s about ninety percent what they first measured at the sill.”

“Wow,” Frank said. “Everyone should see this. For one thing, it’s so spacy.”

“Well, we can make DVDs, but it’s never the same as, you know, what you have here. Standing right in the middle of it.”

“No. Definitely not.” For a time he stood and luxuriated in the wash of colors running past and through him. It looked kind of like a super-slo-mo screening of the hyperspace travel at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey . The underside of the Gulf Stream, flowing through his head. “Very pretty,” he finally said, rousing himself. “Say thanks to Mark for getting me down to see this.”