The Hackers all stared at me in disquiet. Senator Hacker looked ill. Only Alice responded:
“Boy, Hasan, you always got something to say that’ll curl the milk in your mama’s titty.”
With Senator Hacker’s vote secured, we were beginning to chip away. Congresswoman Aamanzaihou managed to secure and deliver the promise of a browbeaten affirmative vote by her unruly caucus. Similarly, the mainstream of the Democratic Party, hearing the signal from Wall Street and their financiers all too clearly, began to fall in line. And as promised, McCowen and Rathbone delivered the president, who finally appeared on TV endorsing the plan as “imperfect but necessary to restoring confidence in our economy.” That same night, a video appeared online of masked men wearing APL insignia burning a teenage girl alive in a cage. She’d been kidnapped from the House of Peace Islamic Community Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Such gruesome and pointless violence had long ago failed to surprise me. I understood too well that this kind of vicious nihilism existed within every color and stripe of humanity, but Hani was deeply shaken by it. She came over sobbing. “You and I won’t be safe. Noor and Greg and Forrest, they won’t be safe. What will we do if this doesn’t work?”
I had nothing to say to comfort her.
Though violence had long ago ceased to disturb me, I was greatly unsettled when that night Tony forwarded me a new paper from the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate outlining how the tsunami the previous spring that flooded large portions of the west coast of Svalbard had almost certainly been caused by the collapse of methane clathrates. Part of the seafloor, it seemed, had simply imploded, triggering an earthquake that sent a wave of water crashing over the shores and effectively destroying the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Given the flooding events in California, it barely registered in the global news stream. Tony and I spoke through our glasses. This was, after all, Tony’s original field. He’d made his name warning of the instability of the clathrates. He said: “It doesn’t matter right now. Well, it does matter, but not to what we’re doing—trying to sell a New Deal, a moonshot, and a Marshall Plan for the planet all in one go.”
We had our crucial meeting with Senate majority leader Russ Mackowski the next day.
I said: “You owe it to Senator Mackowski to alert him to this finding.”
“You think that knuckle dragger cares about a gas hydrate study? Wake up, man.”
“What do you think the study indicates?”
“What do you think it indicates, Hasan? You’re not exactly a dummy, last time I checked. If the Arctic Ocean experienced a sudden collapse along a continental shelf, it’s because some serious portion of its clathrate supply unfroze. It was the warmest summer for that sea since record-keeping began. It’s pretty elementary from there: the atmosphere just got a huge, unexpected dose of methane and it came from a clathrate collapse. Probably the equivalent of a year of Chinese emissions. Maybe more.”
“The science behind the mass release of Arctic clathrates remains uncertain, Tony.”
“Please. The Amazon, the permafrost, the clathrates, it’s all coming undone. We could be looking at CO2-equivalent concentrations of one thousand ppm by the end of the century. Which means even if this bill does pass, and even if we rouse this stupid fucking planet and its selfish idiot fucking inhabitants to the grandest cozy feel-good cuddle fest, it’s too late. It’ll be like bailing out the Titanic with a Dixie cup. By the time your kid and my grandchild are our age, it’ll be too hot to go outside on most of the planet’s surface.”
Senator Mackowski arrived the next morning with a smirking dismissal already stitched into his mouth and shook each of our hands like we were children petitioning our government for a later bedtime. His aides were more seasoned than the Hackers, including David Montreff, a cynical arrow-collar I’d dealt with previously. “Just like the old days, huh, Dr. Hasan?” The glare of his white, straight teeth made my skin hurt.
Silver hair swept back, Mackowski reclined comfortably, his muscled bulk creaking the hinges of his conference chair. He looked relaxed and content. Ms. Li Song began by explaining that her members were willing to shoulder enormous sacrifice if it helped save the economic system, but the senator interrupted her.
“Emii, honey, do you remember what you said to me back in ’31 when I was getting my exploratory committee off the ground to take down Randall? I was going to be president, and what did you say?”
Even I was taken aback by how crass this was, to revert immediately to grudges and naked ambition.
Ms. Li Song shook her head once. “I can’t recall, Senator.”
“You said your boys couldn’t back me because you had another candidate you were keeping your eye on. You thought putting a Democrat in the White House would be more useful, didn’t you? And look where it all ended up with Loren Victor Love, huh? Tell you what, if I’d just finished my second term, we wouldn’t be neck-deep in this shit right now. That much I got on lock.”
She said: “I’m surprised you take politics so personally. We’re in the throes of a serious crisis.”
“And then you backed this total crank-bank of a preacher, so now I’ve got the right flank of my guys ready to gut me, and everyone else on the Hill is running around like a chicken fresh off the chopping block. And then it’s hat in hand, ‘Senator Mack, please save us from ourselves.’ You understand how it might be awfully hard for me to take you seriously?”
I interrupted: “Senator, perhaps I could walk you through the legislation and speak to your concerns.”
Mackowski laughed. “Concerns? Yeah, I got a few of ’em. Like the biggest cramdown of socialism and state control in the history of the republic. This makes the travesty of the New Deal look like pure timidity. And Emii, you’re not the only game in town for oil and gas. Others in the sector have issued me assurances that, frankly, I’d never trust you to deliver on. I can’t believe you all had the balls to come drop this at my feet and expect me to rubber stamp it. D-O-A, my friends. Dead on arrival. I didn’t even want to take this meeting.”
Tony asked: “So why did you?”
Montreff replied for the senator: “Optics. So we can go to the press and say the senator heard you out, and it was even worse than he thought. You have to manage these situations pretty carefully.”
Tony bristled. “The country is spiraling into a depression it might never recover from.”
“Oh, it’ll recover. It’s just about timing. After another four years of crisis that began under a Democrat who’s locked up in a mental ward, folks’ll be looking for a change. That’s when someone who knows what the hell he’s doing can step in, jump-start the economy with a reinvigorated energy policy that will exploit all the new energy horizons and get some solar management underway. Hell, Hamby might not even make it till the end of the month. Wish you could call an election whenever you want, British-style, but, alas, we are what we are. Until then, I’ll carve my own bully pulpit with the chisel of majority leader.”