Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“And would I then experience changes in my thinking?”

“Yes, it’s possible. Usually that’s the point, so patients like it, or are relieved. Some get agitated by the perception of difference.”

“Does it go away, or do they get used to it?”

“Well, either, or both. Or neither. I don’t really know about that part of it. We focus on draining the hematoma and removing that pressure.”

It will or it won’t. “So if I’m not in too much distress, maybe I ought not to mess with it?” Frank said. He did not want to be looking forward to brain surgery; even clearing out his sinuses sounded pretty dire to him.

The doctor smiled ever so slightly, understanding him perfectly. “You certainly don’t want to take it lightly. However, there is a mass of blood in there, and often the first sign of it swelling more is a change in thinking or feeling, or a bad headache. Some people don’t want to risk that. And problems in decision making can be pretty debilitating. So, some people preempt any problems and choose to have the surgery.”

“Jeez,” Frank said, “this is just the kind of decision I can’t make anymore!”

The doctor laughed briefly, but his look was sympathetic. “It would be a hard call no matter what. Why don’t you give it a set period of time and see how you feel about it? Make some lists of pros and cons, mark on your symptom calendar how you feel about it for ten days running, stuff like that. See if one course of action is consistently supported over time.”

Frank sighed. Possibly he could construct an algorithm that would make this decision for him, by indicating the most robust course of action. Some kind of aid. Because it was a decision that he could not avoid; it was his call only. And doing nothing was a decision too. But possibly the wrong one. So he had to decide, he had to consciously decide. Possibly it was the most important decision he had before him right now.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try that.”

BACK AT WORK, FRANK TRIEDto concentrate. He simply couldn’t do it. Or he concentrated, but it was on the word hematoma . Chronic subdural hematoma. There’s pressure on my brain. He thought, I can concentrate just fine, I can do it for hours at a time. I just can’t decide.

He closed his eyes, poked at his Things To Do list with a pen. That was what it had come to. Well, actually he had bundled three things to do in a military category, and now he realized he should have poked the GO TO THE PENTAGON item on the list, because Diane had told him to and he had made appointments, and today was the day. So there hadn’t been any choice to be made. Check the calendar first to avoid such tortures.

1) Navy, 2) Air Force, 3) Army Corps of Engineers, the list said. Secretary of the Navy’s office first: chief nuclear officer, happy to meet with the president’s science advisor’s advisor, Diane had said. Lunch at the Pentagon.

The Pentagon had its own Metro stop, just west of the Potomac. Frank came up out of the ground and walked the short distance to the steps leading up to the big doors of the place. These faced the river. From them it was impossible to see how big the Pentagon was; it looked like any plain concrete building, wide but not tall.

Inside there was a waiting room. He went through a metal detector, as at an airport, was nodded onward by a military policeman. At the desk beyond another MP took his driver’s license and checked his name against a list on his computer, then used a little spherical camera on top of the computer to take a picture of him. The MP took the photo from a printer and affixed it to a new ID badge, under a bar code, Frank’s name, and his host’s name. Frank took the badge from the man and clipped it to his shirt, waited in the waiting room. There was a table with promotional brochures, touting each of the services and its missions, also the last two wars.

The Navy’s chief nuclear officer was a Captain Ernest Gamble. He had been a physics professor at Annapolis. Cool and professional in style.

They walked down a very long hallway. Gamble took him up some stairs to an interior window, where the pentagonal inner park stood in the sunlight. Then it was onward, down another very long hallway. “They used to have little golf carts for the halls,” Gamble explained, “but people kept running them into things. It takes a long time to get repairs done here. The joke is, it took eighteen months to build the Pentagon, and ten years to remodel it.”

They passed a small shopping mall, which Frank was surprised to see there inside the Pentagon itself, and finally came to a restaurant, likewise deep inside the building. Sat down, ordered, went to a salad bar and loaded up. As they ate, they discussed the Navy’s nuclear energy capabilities. Ever since Admiral Hyman Rickover had taken over the nuclear fleet in the 1950s, the Navy’s nuclear program had been held to the highest possible safety standards, and had a spotless record, with not a single (unclassified) accident releasing more than fifty rads.

“What about classified accidents?”

“I wouldn’t know about those,” Gamble deadpanned.

In any case, the Navy had had no reactor accidents, and a half-century’s experience with design and operation. They discussed whether the Navy could lead the way in designing, maybe even overseeing, a number of federally funded “National Security Nuclear Plants.” That might avoid the cost-cutting disasters that free-market nuclear energy inevitably led to. It would also excuse the new power plants from those environmental regulations the military already had exemptions from. Overall those exemptions were a bad idea, but in this case, maybe not.

In effect, pursuing this plan would nationalize part of the country’s energy supply, Gamble pointed out. A bit of a Hugo Chavez move, he suggested, which would enrage the Wall Street Journal editorial page and its ilk. Between that and the environmental objections, there would be no lack of opponents to such a plan.

But the Navy, Frank suggested, had no reason to fear critics of any stripe. They did what Congress and the president asked them to do.

Gamble concurred. Then, without saying so outright, he conveyed to Frank the impression that the Navy brain trust might be happy to be tasked with some of the nation’s energy security. These days, global military strategy and technology had combined in a way that made navies indispensable but unglamorous; they functioned like giant water taxis for the other services. Ambition to do more was common in the secretary’s office, and over at Annapolis.

“Great,” Frank said. While listening to this artful description, vague but suggestive, something had occurred to him: “When there are blackouts, could the nuclear fleet serve as emergency generators?”

“Well, yes, if I understand you. They’ve done things like that before, doing emergency relief in Africa and Southeast Asia. Hook into the grid and power a town or a district.”

“How big a town?”

“The ships range from a few to several megawatt range. I think a Roosevelt-class aircraft carrier could power a town of a hundred thousand, maybe more.”

“I’d like to get the totals on that.”

Then lunch was over and it was time for 2) Air Force. A new aide appeared and escorted him around two bends of the Pentagon, to the Air Force hall. The walls here were decorated with giant oil paintings of various kinds of aircraft. Many of the gleaming planes were portrayed engaged in aerial dogfights, the enemy planes going down under curved pillars of smoke and flames. It was like being in a war-crazed teenager’s bedroom.

The Air Force’s chief scientist was an academic, appointed for a two-year stint. Frank asked him about the possibility of the Air Force getting involved in space-based solar power, and the rapid deployment thereof. The chief scientist was optimistic about this. Solar collectors doing photovoltaic in orbit, beaming the power down in microwaves to Earth, there to be captured by power plants, which became capture-and-transfer centers, rather than generating plants per se. Have to avoid frying too many birds and bees with the microwaves, not unlike the wind turbine problem in that regard, otherwise pretty straightforward, technically, and with the potential to be exceptionally, almost amazingly, clean.