“It’s not quibbling,” Anna insisted. “It’s a very important distinction.”
“What, the difference between nineteen and a half and twenty?”
“Yes,” over their squeals of laughter, “because you should never round off in the middle of an operation, because then the things you do later will exaggerate the inaccuracy! It’s an important principle!”
“Mrs. Quibler is a quibbler, Mrs. Quibler is a quibbler!”
Anna gave in and gave them The Eye, a squinting, one-eyed glare that she had worked up long ago when playing Lady Bracknell in high school. It never failed to crack them up. She growled, “That’s Quibler with one b,” melting them with laughter, as always, until Mrs. Wilkins came over to join the party and quiet it down.
After school Anna and Nick walked home together. It took about half an hour, and was one of the treasured rituals of their week the only time they got to spend together just the two of them. Past the big public pool where they would go swimming in the summers, past the grocery store, then down their quiet street. It was hot, of course, but bearable in the shade. They talked about whatever came into their heads.
Then they entered the coolness of their house, and returned to the wilder world of Joe and Charlie. Charlie was bellowing as he cooked in the kitchen, an off-key, wordless aria. Joe was killing dinosaurs in the living room. As they entered he froze, considering how he was going to signify his displeasure at Anna’s treasonous absence for the day. When younger this had been a genuine emotion, and sometimes when he saw her come in the door he had simply burst into tears. Now it was calculated, and she was immune.
He smacked himself in the forehead with a compsognathus, then collapsed to the rug face first.
“Oh come on,” Anna said. “Give me a break Joe.” She started to unbutton her blouse. “You better be nice if you want to nurse.”
Joe popped right up and ran over to give her a hug.
“Right,” Anna said. “Blackmail will get you everywhere. Hi hon!” she yelled in at Charlie.
“Hi babe.” Charlie came out to give her a kiss. For a second all her boys hung on her. Then Joe was latched on, and Charlie and Nick went into the kitchen. From there Charlie shouted out from time to time, but Anna couldn’t yell back without making Joe mad enough to bite her, so she waited until he was done and then walked around the corner into the kitchen.
“How was your day?” Charlie said.
“I fixed a data error all day long.”
“That’s good dear.”
She gave him a look. “I swore I wasn’t going to do it,” she said darkly, “but I just couldn’t bring myself to ignore it.”
“No, I’m sure you couldn’t.”
He kept a straight face, but she punched him on the arm anyway. “Smartass. Is there any beer in the fridge?”
“I think so.”
She hunted for one. “There was some good news that came in, did you see that? I forwarded it. The Khembalis got a couple of grants.”
“Really! That is good news.” He was sniffing at a yellow curry bubbling in the frying pan.
“Something new?”
“Yeah, I’m trying something out of the paper.”
“You’re being careful?”
He grinned. “Yeah, no blackened redfish.”
“Blackened redfish?” Nick repeated, alarmed.
“Don’t worry, even I wouldn’t try it on you.”
“He wouldn’t want you to catch fire.”
“Hey, it was in the recipe. It was right out of the recipe!”
“So? A tablespoon each of black pepper, white pepper, cayenne and chili powder?”
“How was I supposed to know?”
“What do you mean, you use pepper. You should have known what a tablespoon of pepper would taste like, and that was the least hot of them.”
“I guess I didn’t know it would all stick to the fish.”
Nick was looking appalled. “I wouldn’t eat that.”
“You aren’t kidding.” Anna laughed. “One touch with your tongue and you would spontaneously combust.”
“It was in a cookbook.”
“Even going in the kitchen the next day was enough to burn your eyes out.”
Charlie was giggling at his folly, holding the stirring spoon down to Nick to gross him out, although now he had a very light touch with the spices. The curry would be fine. Anna left him to it and went out to play with Joe.
She sat down on the couch, relaxed. Joe began to pummel her knees with blocks, babbling energetically. At the same time Nick was telling her something about something. She had to interrupt him, almost, to tell him about the coming of the Swimming Tigers. He nodded and took off again with his account. She heaved a great sigh of relief, took a sip of the beer. Another day flown past like a dream.
ANOTHER HEAT wave struck, the worst so far. People had thought it was hot before, but now it was July, and one day the temperature in the metropolitan area climbed to 105 degrees, with the humidity over ninety percent. The combination had all the Indians in town waxing nostalgic about Uttar Pradesh just before the monsoon broke, “Oh very much yes, just like this in Delhi, actually it would be a blessing if it were to be like this in Delhi, it would be a great improvement over what they have now, third year of drought you see, they are needing the monsoon to be coming very badly.”
The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France. The news was buried in the last pages of the international section. So many pieces of Antarctica had fallen off that it wasn’t big news anymore.
It wasn’t big news, but it was a big iceberg. Researchers joked about moving onto it and declaring it a new nation. It contained more fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined. It had come off near a Roosevelt Island, a low black rock that had been buried under the ice and known only to radar probes, and so was exposed to the air for the first time in either two or fifteen million years, depending on which research team you believed. Although it might not be exposed for long; pouring down toward it, researchers said, was the rapid ice of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, unimpeded now that the Ross Shelf in that region had embarked, and therefore moving faster than ever.
This accelerated flow of ice toward the sea had big ramifications. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet was much bigger than the Ross Ice Shelf, and had been resting on ground that was below sea level but that held the ice much higher than it would have been if it had been floating freely in the ocean. So when it broke up and sailed away, it would displace more ocean water than it had before.
Charlie read on, feeling somewhat amazed that he was learning this in the back pages of the Post. How fast could this happen? The researchers didn’t appear to know. As the sheet broke away, they said, seawater was lifting the edges of the ice still resting on the bottom, deeper and deeper at every tide, tugging with every current, and thus beginning to tear the sheet apart in big vertical cracks, and launch it out to sea.
Charlie checked this on the web, and watched one trio of researchers explain on camera that it could become an accelerating process, their words likewise accelerating a bit, as if to illustrate how it would go. Modeling inconclusive because the sea bottom under the grounded ice irregular, they said, with active volcanoes under it, so who knew? But it very well might happen fast.
Charlie heard in their voices the kind of repressed delirium of scientific excitement that he had heard once or twice when listening to Anna talk about some extraordinary thing in statistics that he had not even been able to understand. This, however, he understood. They were saying that the possibility was very real that the whole mass of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would break apart and float away, each giant piece of it then sinking more deeply into the water, thus displacing more water than it had when grounded in place so much more that sea level worldwide could rise by an eventual total of about seven meters. “This could happen fast,” one glaciologist emphasized, “and I’m not talking geology fast here, I’m talking tide fast. A matter of several years in some simulations.” The hard thing to pinpoint was whether it would start to accelerate or not. It depended on variables programmed into the models on they went, the usual kind of scientist talk.