CHAPTER ONE
CLASSROOM
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CAMBRIDGE
FALL 2019
“THEY ARRESTED HER!” Leroy Nelson cried out. He jerked his head so sharply as he turned to his fellow students that his long dreadlocks swung to the left. With the sun going down and the lights off, in the semi-darkness his brown eyes were dark enough to appear coal black. He was six feet tall with muscular thighs attesting to years of playing soccer and strong arms developed from training in Aikido. He sat at the back of a nearly empty classroom. The professor and most of the other students had already left. “Come get a load of this,” he urged.
“That can’t be!” Sally Douglas exclaimed. She had to scoot her chair closer to get a better take on what Leroy was looking at on his phone. Like Leroy, she was a senior majoring in Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences. Her blond hair, indigo blue eyes and pale skin brought to mind a fragile China doll. She leaned in and focused on the five-inch screen. “Can you expand it so that I can tell what’s happening?”
“What is this?” Diego Ramirez crowded in next to Sally and stood looking over Leroy’s shoulder. He bit a chunk out of the apple he was holding, swallowed it without chewing, and almost choked. “You’ve got to be kidding!” A junior from Puerto Rico, he was going for his friends’ degree and one in Computer Science simultaneously. At only five feet, five inches with a spindly body, he resembled a baby willow tree. “How could I have missed that?”
Leroy had his phone set to a news clip posted on Facebook. It showed Vicki being slammed to the ground face down in the mud. An officer jerked her arms behind her back and cuffed her wrists. Her denim jacket dangled from a branch in the tree she had occupied, and she had lost a sneaker. There were a dozen other heavily armed police surrounding her, but no one reached for the jacket or retrieved the other shoe. The officer who cuffed her simply picked her up, jammed her into a van and drove away.
Sally pushed her chair back. “That’s horrible” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t we know about this? We’ve been following her story since she started the tree sit, and we haven’t seen anything for a few months.” She nodded at Diego. “And our in-house genius never messes up.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Leroy reached up and patted Diego on the shoulder. “I gather this bit of old film just came out. If she’s back, we need to contact her,” he said, turning his phone off.
“Back?” They had been keeping track of the anti-pipeline protests in the Virginias and were ardent supporters. But Sally didn’t know that Vicki was from Massachusetts. She stood up and went back to her own seat. “She’s from here?”
“She grew up in Cambridge; her father was a high school math teacher, her mother taught science; her Masters from John Hopkins is in Environmental Science,” Diego said. He paused to take a breath. “She’s 34 years old; has a…”
Leroy interrupted him. “You could probably also tell us how tall she is, and what she weighs, Brainiac.”
“Five feet six, 123 pounds, is single…”
“Enough! That was a joke.” He poked Diego gently in the arm.
“Anything else worthy of note?” Sally asked.
Diego took his apple and went back to his seat on the other side of Sally. He sat down and propped his feet in defiance on the chair next to him. He took another bite, chewed and swallowed it. Then he looked at Leroy, a question on his face.
“Okay, you can tell us.”
He sat back up. “She works part time freelance. That allows her to oppose pipelines when she wants. What kind of work she does, I don’t know. But if I keep trying, I’ll probably find out.”
“No doubt.” Sally reached over and put an arm around Diego’s shoulders.
“And no need,” Leroy added. “But it would be good if you could find her cell number or email so that we can contact her.”
“Easy,” Diego said. He got up and dropped the apple core in a trash basket.
“Easy for you and the CIA no doubt,” Leroy retorted. As he spoke, a 25-pound mongrel charged into the room and leapt on him.
A tall man followed him in. He had dark wavy hair, intensely blue eyes and a charismatic smile. “Sorry about that. I should have had him on his leash, but I didn’t know you were still here. What’s up?”
The students looked at each other without answering. They were pretty sure their professor wouldn’t approve of their intended activism.
Leroy hugged the dog. “I love this mangy animal, you know that.” He answered the question with a question. “How come you came back?”
“I left a report behind that I need. You’re sitting here in the dark.” He flipped the lights on, went to the front of the room and took up a perch on top of the desk that faced the rows of chairs. From there his long legs almost reached the floor. “Speaking of reports, you’ve all read the latest IPCC missive that I assigned, right?”
Diego responded immediately. “We already know that we have to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius if we want to avoid disastrous climate change.”
Carson nodded. “The window for achieving it is declining rapidly.”
“The report says it’ll require far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” Diego added. He stopped and thought for a few seconds. “Ninety-one authors and editors from 40 countries prepared the report, and more than 6,000 scientific references are cited. Kinda impressive, don’t you think?”
“You or the people who worked on it?” Leroy asked.
“Since you mention it, both.”
“I suppose you’ve read all 6000 references?” Leroy said.
“I’ve only skimmed a thousand. Just give me time.”
Carson laughed. “Okay, knock it off you two. As you know, we’re already seeing the consequences of a one-degree Celsius rise in temperatures worldwide.”
Sally was eager to add her two cents. “Yes, more extreme hurricanes, droughts, raging wildfires, rising sea levels swamping our coastal cities, ocean acidification destroying shellfish, and killer heat waves, among lots of other things. You’ve taught us that.”
“That sure was a mouthful for you,” Leroy said. “Nice going. But you left out methane release from thawing permafrost.”
“If emissions of pollutants like methane aren’t curbed, there’s a 66 percent likelihood of surpassing the 1.5 Celsius threshold, regardless of reductions to carbon dioxide,” Diego said.
“And you could undoubtedly explain why it would be 66 percent, not 65.5 percent,” Leroy said.
“Well, when…”
“I said knock it off,” Carson repeated. “But yes. You also know more warming could lead to devastating irreversible changes. There’s good work being done, but it needs to ramp up.” Carson smiled at his students. “It gives me hope that you plan to spend your lives doing that.” He picked up his report and got off the desk. “On that note, I’m headed home.”
“We need to leave too,” Sally said. “Let’s pick up something to eat on the way back to our place.” She slipped the straps of her backpack over her shoulders. “I vote for the falafel Middle Eastern couscous we like since we can order it now, and they’ll have it ready by the time we reach the restaurant.”
“Make it a double order,” Diego said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a bear.”
“So it’s a bear, not your stomach that I hear growling?” Leroy said.
“Want to join us, Dr. Hunter?” Sally asked.
“No can do, but thanks.
Leroy stuffed some papers in his own backpack. “Then let’s get out of here. Somebody turn the lights off. We have places to go and a planet to save.”