Sixty Days and Counting

Chapter One

By the time Phil Chase was elected president, the world's climate was already far along the way to irrevocable change. There were already four hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and another hundred parts would be there soon if civilization continued to burn its fossil carbon-and at this point there was no other option. Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in the midst of a crisis that in some ways worsened before it got better, they were entangled in a moment of history when climate change, the destruction of the natural world, and widespread human misery were combining in a toxic and combustible mix. The new president had to contemplate drastic action while at the same time being constrained by any number of economic and politic factors, not least the huge public debt left deliberately by the administrations preceding him.

It did not help that the weather that winter careened wildly from one extreme to another, but was in the main almost as cold as the previous record-breaking year. Chase joked about it everywhere he went: "It's ten below zero, aren't you glad you elected me? Just think what it would have been like if you hadn't!" He would end speeches with a line from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:

"O, Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

"Maybe it can," Kenzo pointed out with a grin. "We're in the Youngest Dryas, after all."

In any case, it was a fluky winter-above all windy-and the American people were in an uncertain state of mind. Chase addressed this: "The only thing we have to fear," he would intone, "is abrupt climate change!"

He would laugh, and people would laugh with him, understanding him to be saying that there was indeed something real to fear, but that they could do something about it.

His transition team worked with an urgency that resembled desperation. Sea level was rising; temperatures were rising; there was no time to lose. Chase's good humor and casual style were therefore welcomed, when they were not reviled-much as it had been with FDR in the previous century. He would say, "We got ourselves into this mess and we can get out of it. The problems create an opportunity to remake our relationship to nature, and create a new dispensation. So-happy days are here again! Because we're making history, we are seizing the planet's history, I say, and turning it to the good."

Some scoffed; some listened and took heart; some waited to see what would happen.

As far as Frank Vanderwal's personal feelings were concerned, there was something reassuring about the world being so messed up. It tended to make his own life look like part of a trend, and a small part at that. A hill of beans in this world. Perhaps even so small as to be manageable.

Although, to tell the truth, it didn't feel that way. There were reasons to be very concerned, almost to the edge of fear. Frank's friend Caroline had disappeared on election night, chased by armed agents of some superblack intelligence agency. She had stolen her husband's plan to steal the election, and Frank had passed this plan to a friend at NSF with intelligence contacts, to what effect he could not be sure. He had helped her to escape her pursuers. To do that he had had to break a date with another friend, his boss and a woman he loved-although what that meant, given the passionate affair he was carrying on with Caroline, he did not know. There was a lot he didn't know; and he could still taste blood at the back of his throat, months after his nose had been broken. He could not think for long about the same thing.