“It wasn’t my idea, this Hussinger thing.”
“I know that.”
“Well, thanks. Really. Look, I’ll follow up on this chain picture you got here.”
“If it is a chain.”
“Yeah. But I mean, maybe we can publish that. Together.”
“Fine. Fine.”
The resonance curves remained smooth. However, the noise level continued to rise. Gordon spent more of his time in the laboratory, trying to suppress the electromagnetic sputter. He had most of his lecture notes for the graduate course in Classical Electromagnetism finished, so he was free to pursue research. He abandoned his sample preparation, however, in favor of more time on the NMR rig. Cooper was still digesting his own data. The noise would not go away.
CHAPTER THIRTY
HE BANGED THE OUTER OFFICE DOOR SHUT AND thumped across the old broad-boarded flooring. He had a respectably ancient office, just off Naval Row, but at times he would just as soon have had less oiled wood and more modern air-conditioning. Ian Peterson, returning from a morning-long meeting, dumped a file of papers on his desk. His sinuses had a stuffed, cottony feel. Meetings invariably did that. He had felt a thin haze descend on his mind as the meeting progressed, sealing him off from much of the tedious detail and bickering. He knew the effect from years of experience; fatigue at so much talk, so many qualified phrases, so many experts covering their asses with carefully impersonal judgments.
He shook off the mood and thumbed into his desktop Sek. First, a list of incoming calls, arranged by priority. Peterson had carefully sorted out names into lists, so the answering Sek computer would know whether to alert him. The list changed weekly, as he moved from problem to problem. People who had once worked with him on a project had an annoying tendency to assume that they could then ring him up about continuing secondary issues, even months or years later.
Second, incoming memos, flagged with deadlines for reply.
Third, personal messages. Nothing there this time except a note from Sarah about her bloody party.
Fourth, news items of interest, broken down into abstracts. Last, minor unclassifiable items. No time for that today. He reviewed category One.
Hanschman, probably wailing about the metals problem. Peterson deflected that one to an assistant by typing in a three-letter symbol. Ellehlouh, the North African, with a last-gasp plea for more fly-ins to the new drought region. That he routed up to Opuktu. He was the officer in charge of selecting who got the grain and molasses shipments; let him take the flak. Call from that Kiefer in La Jolla, flagged urgent. Peterson picked up his telephone and punched through. Busy. He stabbed Repeat Call and said “Dr. Keifer” so the tape could add it to the “Mr. Peterson of the World Council is urgently trying to reach” message which now would try Kiefer’s number every twenty seconds.
Peterson turned to the memos and brightened. He punched for a screening of his own memo, dictated while riding to work this morning and machine-typed. He had never tried the system before.
deployed system is in the Gulf Stream hope I’ve got those capitalizations right off the Atlantic coast of Miami period yes. There is a four not oh special spelling button. I suppose k-n-o-t, there, a four knot current steady and reliable. Those currents rotate the giant turbine fans, producing enough electricity for all Florida. The turbines are admittedly huge, 500 meters in diameter. However, I would paraphrase the technical discussion as saying they are basically Victorian engineering. Large and simple. Their floating hull is 345 meters long and they hang fully 25 meters below the surface. That’s enough for passing ships to run safely over. The anchoring cables have to go down 
that’s t-w-o miles in some places. That is minor compared to the cables carrying power to land, but technical branch says that probably has no bad side effects either.
Our projections are that the nearest candidates—natural gas from seaweed and ocean thermal energy conversion—are hopelessly behind Coriolis. The name, as you undoubtedly know and I didn’t, springs from a French mathematician who had a hand in showing why ocean currents go as they do. Effects of the earth’s rotation and so on.
The snags are obvious. Having 400 of these slowing the Gulf Stream might be dicey. The weather pattern for much of the Atlantic Ocean hinges on that current, which sweeps by the US and Canada and then out to sea and back to the Caribbean is that the spelling must be. A full-scale numerical simulation on the omni all caps OMNI computer shows a measurable effect of one percent. Safe enough, by current guidelines.
Negative political impact is minimal. Introducing 40 gigawatts to that area will silence criticism of our halt to fishing, I should believe. I therefore advise prompt approvals. Yours sincerely et cetera.
Peterson grinned. Remarkable. They even assigned the most probable homonym. He corrected the piece and sent it off through the electronic labyrinth to Sir Martin. Committee flotsam and jetsam was for the assistants; Sir Martin saved his time for judgments, the delicate balancing act above the flood of information. He had taught Peterson a good deal, all the way down to such fine points as how to speak on a committee where your opponents are lying in wait. Sir Martin would pause and breathe in the middle of his sentences, then rush past the period at the end and on for a clause or two into the next sentence. No one knew when to make a smooth interruption.
Peterson asked his Sek for an update. He found the Kiefer call still facing the blank buzzing of a busy signal, and two underlings leaving recorded messages he would check later.
He reclined in his armchair and studied his office wall. Quite an array, yes. Pseudoparchment citations for bureaucratic excellence. Photos of himself beside various charismatic sloganeers with their buzzword bibles. Practitioners of leaderbiz, smiling at the camera.
The committee meeting this morning had its share of those, along with earnest biochemists and numerical meteorologists. Their reports on the distribution of the clouds were unsettling but vague. The clouds were further examples of “biological cross function,” an all-purpose term meaning interrelations nobody had thought of yet. Apparently the circumpolar wind vortex, which had shifted towards the equator in recent years, was picking up something from the region near the bloom. The unknown biological agents being carried by the clouds had caused withering of the Green Revolution crop strains. Besides giving uniform high yields, the Green Revolution plants also had uniform weaknesses. If one became diseased, they all did. How devastating the strange yellow-tan clouds might be was unknown. Something odd was in the biocycle, but research had not pieced together the puzzle as yet. The meeting had broken up into rivulets of indecision. Belgian biologists argued with plump disasterologists, neither with any hard evidence.
Peterson pondered what it might mean, while leafing through some reports. Inventories, assessments, speculative calculations, order-of-magnitude truths. Some were in the clunky gingerbread of Cyrillic, or the swoops of Arabic script, or Asia’s ant squiggles, or the squared-off machine type of ModEng. A tract on
