Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

that wouldn’t be the best use for you, I agree.”
    “Good.” Charlie felt as if a bullet had just whizzed by his head. He was quivering as he said, very firmly, “Let’s just keep things like they are with me.”
    “No, that’s not what I mean, either. Listen, can you come down here and at least talk it over with me? Fit that into your schedule?”
    Well, shit. How could he say no? This was his boss, also the president of the United States, speaking. But if he had to talk to him in person about it…. Hesighed. “Yeah, yeah, of course. Your wish is my demand.”
    “Bring Joe, if you can, I’d enjoy seeing him. We can take him out for a spin on the Tidal Basin.”
    “Yeah yeah.”
    What else could he say?
             
    The problem was that
yeah yeah
was pretty much the only thing you could say, when replying to the president of the United States making a polite request of you. Perhaps there had been some presidents who had established a limit there, by asking for impossible things and then seeing what happened; power could quickly bring out the latent sadism in the powerful; but if a sane and clever president wanted only ever to get yeses in response to his questions, he could certainly frame them to make it that way. That was just the way it was.
    Certainly it was hard to say no to a president-elect inviting you and your toddler to paddle around the Tidal Basin in one of the shiny blue pedal boats docked on the east side of the pond.
    And once on the water, it indeed proved very hard to say no to Phil. Joe was wedged between them, life-jacketed and strapped down by Secret Service agents in ways that even Anna would have accepted as safe. He was looking about blissfully; he had even been fully compliant and agreeable about getting into the life jacket and being tied down by the seat belting. It had made Charlie a bit seasick to watch. Now it felt like Phil was doing most of the pumping on the boat’s foot pedals. He was also steering.
    Phil was always in a good mood on the water, rapping away about nothing, looking down at Joe, then over the water at the Jefferson Memorial, the most graceful but least emotional of the city’s memorials; beaming at the day, sublimely unaware of the people on the shore path who had noticed him and were exclaiming into their cell phones or taking pictures with them. The Secret Service people had taken roost on the paddleboat dock, and there were an unusual number of men in suits walking the shore among the tourists and joggers.
    “Where I need you in the room,” Phil said out of the blue, “is when we gather a global-warming task force. I’ll be out of my depth in that crowd, and there’ll be all kinds of information and plans put forth. That’s where I’ll want your impressions, both real-time and afterward, to help me cross-check what I think. It won’t do to have me describe these things to you after the fact. There isn’t time for that, and besides I might miss the most important thing.”
    “Yeah, well—”
    “None of that! This task force will be as close to a Department of Science or a Department for the Environment as I can make. It’s going to set the agenda for a lot of what we do. It’ll be my strategy group, Charlie, and I’m saying I need you in it. Now, I’ve looked into the daycare facilities for children at the White House. They’re adequate, and we can get to work making them even better. Joe will be my target audience. You’d like to play all day with a bunch of kids, wouldn’t you Joe?”
    “Yeah Phil,” Joe said, happy to be included in the conversation.
    “We’ll set up whatever system works best for you, what do you think of that?”
    “I like that,” Joe said.
    Charlie started to mutter something about the Chinese women who buried their infants up to the neck in riverbank mud every day to leave them to go to work in the rice paddies, but Phil overrode him.
    “Gymboree in the basement, if that’s what it takes! Laser tag,