“Yes and no,” Carlos said. “Capitalism is the dominant economic order, and it tends to subsume everything else, it wants to subsume everything else. But the great outsider, the system that capitalism cannot conquer, is science. The two are actually at odds with each other, the one trying to defeat the other. This is the great war of our time!”
“Capitalism versus science?” Wade said, skeptical.
“Sure. First it was capitalism versus socialism, and then capitalism versus democracy, and now science is the only thing left! And science itself is part of the battlefield, and can be corrupted. But in essence, in my heart as a scientist, I say to you that it is a utopian project. It tries to make a utopia within itself, in the rules of scientific conduct and organization, and it also tries to influence the world at large in a utopian direction. No, it is true!” he cried, noting the skeptical looks on both Wade’s and X’s faces. “Here, have you seen this book?” He leaned over the lab bench and pulled a book from under a stack of dirty dishes. “Do you know it? This is the Spanish version, it was written by Chileans. Los Elementos Eticos, Políticos y Utópicos Incorporados en la Estructura de la Ciencia Moderna. Recently it has been translated into English, of course, for that is the language of science. In English it is called something like The Ethical, Political, and Utopian Elements Embodied in the Structure of Modern Science. And this book is really having an impact, it is quite a revolution in scientific circles. Because what it demonstrates very clearly is that what we think of as neutral objective science is actually a utopian politics and worldview already. There is a big historical section describing the rise of science, showing that science is self-organizing and self-actualizing, and always trying to get better, to be more scientific, as one of its rules. And there is a big middle section showing how various features of normal scientific practice, the methodology and so on, are in fact ethical positions. Things like reproducibility, or Occam’s razor, or peer review—almost everything in science that makes it specifically scientific, the authors show, is utopian. Then the final section tells what the ramifications of this fact are, how scientists should behave now, once they realize this truth. And the book is a kind of underground bestseller! It goes from lab to lab, the graduate students are all reading it, the senior scientists who are still thinking—everyone! This is the cause of the recent explosion in appropriate technologies, if you ask me, the so-called materials revolution, the ecological-efficiency movement, permaculture, all these scientific movements and strands, all networked together of course, and all vibrating now with the philosophy of this book!”
“I’d like to read that,” X said, tapping madly at his paperback’s console to see if it was in there already.
“Me too,” Wade said.
Carlos nodded. “It should be in most of the e-books like X’s here, unless you have an old one that isn’t getting supplemented. The translation is about five years old now. Anyway, you know, what I have been saying to you is the utopian description of the situation. In reality, there are a great number of scientists who are not interested in the reasons they do what they do. This makes them bad scientists in that way, but there you are. Bad work is done in every field. So, you know, there are some scientists used to the old ways down here, when the technology being deployed was not safe for the environment. Consider the nuclear reactor that American scientists brought down to McMurdo, for instance.”
“Nuclear reactor?” Wade said.
“It’s gone now. Along with a big chunk of Observation Hill, which had been contaminated. A hundred thousand tons of dirt, shipped north to the nuclear dump in South Carolina. Nukey Poo, they called it.”
“You can still set a dosimeter ringing if you stick it in the dirt in the right places,” X confirmed. “Some people used to do that for fun.”
“For fun?” Wade said.
“McMurdo,” X explained.
“Anyway,” Carlos said, taking their emptied bowls over to a narrow shelf on the wall and stacking them, “when more people realize what we are doing out here—the high safety factor, the need to capture as much methane as we can before it is released as a greenhouse gas—the desperate need for energy in the countries of the consortium—then there will no longer be this ignorant outcry. Meanwhile”—he grinned at Wade, waving at the door—“let us show you something.”
Hey you, do you read?
We read.
Everything ready?
Everything’s ready. The hardware’s in place, and we have made contact with the friends who are going to clear all personnel from active sites. They’re in position, so we can go on the prearranged schedule.
Great. They’ve got track of everyone?
Yes. Everyone’s in their site camps.
Cool. Okay, we go on schedule then, very good. Everyone have a nice trip home, and remember, no talk ever. Eco radical not ego radical. This is probably the last time most of us will communicate, so for all of us, let me say it’s been nice working with you.
You too.
You too.
Over and out.
Outside, the other two men prepped three snowmobiles. While Wade watched he called Phil Chase back again; “Did you hear any of that, Phil?”
“Yes I did. I was asleep when you called, and I may have slipped back under from time to time, but I kept the phone to my ear, and it was very interesting. Sir Humphrey indeed. And I want to read that book. It sounds good. It would be good if what this man said was true. But I don’t think he’s taking into account the true power of power. There’s guns under the table, Wade. There’s a cancer in the social body, and the tumor cells are the brains of these god-damned Götterdämmerung executives, guiding the traffic over the cliff and then flying off to their Caribbean isle. I’d like to figure out a new kind of chemotherapy … it’d look kind of like Eraserhead I guess….” Either the connection broke or Phil had gone back to sleep.
Then Carlos and X were ready, and Wade was given a one-minute tutorial in operating a Skidoo, which was a little snowmobile with a single broad ski for a front wheel. Then they were off, buzzing over the white surface in a line of three, with Wade in the middle. He had never ridden a snowmobile before, but with a thumb-squeeze accelerator, and no brakes at all, and handlebars for the front ski like a bicycle, it was no great problem to handle. It was like being astraddle a giant clumsy extra-wide Harley Davidson, he supposed, having never been on a motorcycle either. Certainly balancing the thing was no problem, except for occasional lurches into dips he did not see, for which he grossly overcompensated with anxious leans and turns in the other direction.
But by and large the ride was very close to effortless, especially after he relaxed the viselike grip he had taken on the handlebars, which were heated to keep his hands warm. Both his hands and wrists were inside giant borrowed mitts called bear claws, but without the heat from the handlebars they still would have been cold.
After several more minutes of roaring over the white firn, he felt free to unlock his gaze from Carlos’s back and look around a bit. Off to their left a black serrated rock ridge broke the horizon. Carlos was following a barely discernible line of green flags, waving limply on top of bamboo poles. At one of these he slowed down, turned to the left and sped on, toward a new manifestation of the black mountains on the horizon, this time straight ahead of them. As they closed on it Wade saw it in more detail, looming up over the white plain: a brown-black spur of rock, lined horizontally. A mountain buried to the neck in ice. Nearer to it he saw that the rock disrupted the ice around it into rings of frozen eddies, and even what looked like frozen breakers, forever almost about to break against the lower slopes of the rock cliff.