Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below

There was always more to do than there was time to get it done, so he pitched in to the items on the list and set his watch’s alarm for five, a trick he had picked up from Anna, so he would not forget and work deep into the evening. Then he cranked until it beeped. These hours disappeared in a subjective flow where they felt like minutes.

More work was accomplished than there is time to tell, ranging from discussions in house to communications with other people in other organizations, to the endless Sisyphean labor of processing jackets, which is what they called the grant proposals, never mind they were all onscreen now. No matter how high in the Foundation a person got, and no matter how important his or her other tasks might be, there was always the inevitable question from above: how many jackets did you process today? And so really there was no conceivable end to the work that could be done. Given Diane’s interests now, there could never be enough networking with the outside world, and this of course brought Frank news of what everyone else was doing; and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system that placed a barge on a ratcheted piling in the tidal zone, then conferring with a group of NGO science officers concerning the Antarctic microwave project, and then speaking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it to the high beeping of his watch alarm, dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already – that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from ‘desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored’ to ‘minor problems robustly dealt with.’ It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation.

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