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78.

Freya and Dan returned to the Rabbit Hill Inn, feeling better after they’d eaten. The clerk at the front desk welcomed them back warmly, and they were in luck, no one had booked their room. Freya checked in and arranged to have their clothes laundered overnight. She didn’t want to wear the same underwear for a third day straight.

The room wasn’t ready yet. Freya walked over to maître d’ stand and made an order, then she joined Dan in the common room. He was sitting on a big plaid couch in front of the hearth. Freya joined him and rested her head on his shoulder, smiling with anticipation. It wasn’t long before a waiter arrived with their hot chocolate. It wasn’t quite as good as Lassa’s, but the look of surprise on Dan’s face was what Freya had really wanted anyway. They stared into the fire and drank together, so close and yet so far.

There was another couple in the common room, playing cards at a little table beside the fireplace. Dan was craning his head, interested in their game. Freya recognized them, the Germans from their first night at the inn.

“What game is that?” Dan asked Freya quietly, trying not to disturb them.

“It’s cribbage,” Freya told him, noticing the little peg scoreboard. Watching the game brought back a host of memories. Randall had loved cribbage, it was one of his favorite ways to spend a rainy afternoon. He knew so many weird card games, Piquet, Casino, Gin Rummy, and a dozen others she’d forgotten. Sometimes they could convince Lassa to join them and they’d play Sergeant Major, a three player trick-taking game Lassa had learned in the army. Lassa’s favorite was Schnapsen, a two player game of intense concentration that Freya could never quite beat her at. Randall used to claim he’d won once, but Freya had never seen it happen.

There was a point in elementary school when everyone was getting into card games and playing at lunch. It was one of the first times Freya could remember feeling really different from everyone else. The other children liked to play things like Uno and Go Fish, but Freya found them pure tedium. They were barely games at all, just the luck of the draw. When Freya tried to teach the games her family played, they other children found them confusing, they forgot the rules and accused her of making them up as she went along.

Freya’s train of thought was interrupted when Dan got up. She assumed he was headed for the bathroom, but instead he walked over to the older couple and struck up a conversation. Freya felt a pang of alarm, she was afraid he would annoy them and embarrass her.

Instead the couple seemed thrilled to talk, Dan had cracked some joke and they were both laughing. How did he do that so easily? Everyone always liked him, no one ever liked her. Freya despaired on the couch until she reached a point where it was more awkward to sit alone than to join them. Dan smiled and introduced her.

“This is Freya Jokela, she’s the brains of the operation. Freya these are Jeremias and Frieda Waltz.”

“Freut mich,” Freya said. The Waltzes lit up.

“Sprichst du Deutsch?” Frieda asked.

“Nein, Entschuldigen Sie,” Freya said. “Finnisch?”

Frieda and Jeremias both shook their heads, and Freya was a little relieved. “That’s ok, my Finnish is pretty rusty anyway. I’d like to learn more German, I loved Düsseldorf.”

“We are from Essen! It’s just up the road from Düsseldorf,” Frieda said. Freya could already tell she was the sterner of the pair.

“I’ve been to Essen! I went to the ATT there, it’s a big convention for amateur astronomers.”

“Ah! A star-gazer. Is that what you’re studying?” Jeremias asked.

“No, we’re both still in high school. It’s like uh, what do you call it, gymnasium?”

The Waltzes turned to each other, eyebrows raised.

“I can’t believe you’re that young. It’s so rare to meet Americans who know anything about Germany. You haven’t even mentioned Hitler yet.”

“That was my next question,” Dan joked.

Freya had expected they would just exchange a few awkward words and part ways, but Dan seemed eager to converse. Soon they were being invited to pull up chairs and sit down. They learned Waltzes had meant to fly back to Berlin today but the storm had delayed their flight. Freya guessed they were in their mid fifties.

The Waltzes seemed a little stir crazy, just as eager as Dan to talk. That was something that Freya had never quite gotten used to in mainland Europe, people were so gregarious and happy to chat with strangers. It was a far cry from living here in the Northeast, which was much more like being in Finland.

“Are you here with your parents?” Frieda asked, once they’d settled in and pushed the cribbage board aside.

“No, we’ve just been skiing,” Freya explained. “Are you here on holiday?”

“The end of our trip is a holiday, the beginning was business. Frieda is a professor of sociology at Universität Duisburg-Essen, she was invited to speak at Dartmouth for a symposium on migration.”

“Oh wow, that’s really impressive. I’m applying to Dartmouth, but there’s no way I’m getting in.”

“Why not?” Frieda asked, turning her focus onto Dan. “How are your marks?”

“Good so far,” Dan said, looking a little uncomfortable under her sharp gaze. “What about you, what do you do?” he asked Jeremias.

“I’m very fortunate to be married to a famous academic, sometimes they let me tag along and speak too,” Jeremias said, he had a wry smile. Frieda shook her head.

“He’s only pretending to be modest, because this trip his lectures were better attended than mine,” Freida explained, giving Jeremias a sideways glance. “Which by the way, is a rarity.”

Jeremias held up his palms in surrender.

“Truly,” he grinned. “I’m an inventor, my patents are primarily concerned with vertical farming, specifically aeroponics. Are you familiar with aeroponics?”

Freya nodded, but Dan shook his head.

“Essentially it’s using a nutrient mist to feed plants, rather than having the roots continually immersed in water. It’s much more complicated, but it solves a few problems with hydroponic systems. Most importantly, it uses far less water, which will be pivotal in the days to come. Also it’s likely the way to go if we ever want to grow crops in space stations or the like,” Jeremias nodded to Freya. He was trying to include her by building a bridge to her interest in astronomy. She recognized and appreciated the move.

“Why do you say it will become more important?” Dan asked.

“Water scarcity. You may not think of it now—” Jeremias waved a hand out the window to the heavy snowfall. “—but assuming there’s no nuclear unpleasantness, it’s the number one problem your generation will face. Most water supplies are already considerably strained, the problem will only increase as the population grows. There will be ten billion people on the earth in 2100. We don’t have enough clean water for the eight billion people who are here right now.”

Jeremias paused to let them consider that, this was clearly a subject he’d spoken on many times.

“I’ve read that basically everyone will have to go vegetarian at some point, because livestock is energy-inefficient,” Dan offered.

“Disastrously inefficient, and I could go on for hours about it. But even if we assume it were possible to convince everyone to go almost completely vegetarian, that’s not enough. Once you factor in sea-level rises and water scarcity, the picture becomes far darker. Then if you consider the upheaval of the mass-migration and inevitability of conflict, it’s darker still. So what are we going to do?”

“Destroy ourselves,” Freya said. At once she felt she’d been too edgy. But Jeremias gave her a serious nod.

“That’s a good bet, considering our current trajectory,” Jeremias agreed. “The problem is very large, and seems far in the distance. Most people just want to push it out of their heads and get on with their lives. Science is hard, it’s demanding, and the money isn’t great. So most ignore it, and hope someone else will figure out the problem while they become lawyers, fashion designers, systems administrators. They chase after what pays, trying to be the best-dressed rats on a sinking ship.”

Freya and Dan exchanged a look, the conversation had gotten so serious. The Waltzes were watching them very closely.

“So, how do you stop the ship from sinking?” Dan asked.

You don’t, Freya thought, but she held her tongue. At the back of her throat was the memory of river water.

“Well the first step is admitting it is in fact sinking. I’ve been disheartened to learn that isn’t a given in this country. You are both aware that there’s a big crash looming, correct?”

Freya and Dan nodded their heads.

“How bad do you think it will be?”

“Pretty bad,” Dan said, rubbing the back of his head. “Like probably mandatory population controls, rationing, a lot of depression and drugs. Like those rat experiments where they kept increasing the population density and they all went crazy.”

“That’s John Calhoun and his behavioral sink,” Frieda interjected, frowning with disapproval. “They’re fascinating experiments, but you should know much of that research only applies to rodents. They couldn’t replicate his results with primates. What about you Freya, how do you think it will go?”

Frieda and Jeremias kept making a point of including Freya. She would have liked to recede into the background but it was impossible. She took a moment to think before she answered.

“My dad used to say we’re in a race between being buried under two hundred feet of seawater or fourteen thousand warheads,” Freya said. Unity withdrawal made her feel so bleak.

“She’s the brains of the operation for sure,” Frieda concluded with a nod.

“Wait, two hundred feet?” Dan blinked. “Is that for real?”

“That’s the low end for a scenario with total glacier melt. It’s probably more like two hundred and thirty feet of sea-level rise. Seventy meters,” Freya added for the benefit of the Waltzes. She wasn’t sure if they needed the conversion or not.

“She’s right,” Jeremias said. “We used to think it might take thousands of years for the glaciers to melt. Now we’re learning there are half a trillion tons of methane hydrates trapped beneath Antarctic ice, it’s bubbling up from Greenland, and there’s far, far more in the arctic permafrost. It’s going to create a feedback loop. Methane raises temperatures which accelerates warming which releases more methane. London, Shanghai, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, New Orleans, they could all be gone in your lifetimes, or your children’s.”

Dan looked a little stunned, Freya was caught on the words, “your children.” She wasn’t going to have any, but somehow the words still loomed large in her mind, heavy with significance.

“That’s not a sure thing though, right?” Dan hedged, he was not ready to accept this idea.

“Nothing is sure in this world. But the more data we get, the clearer the picture becomes.

“Can we do anything to stop it?” Dan asked.

“No,” Jeremias said, with total certainty.

“If there’s nothing we can do, I might just major in swimming,” Dan joked.

“Ha, not a terrible idea. But I only meant there’s no halting the change. There is a tremendous amount you can do to help adapt to it. Here’s something no one told me when I was your age, or if they did it never sank in: You each have thirty five years of meaningful work in you, maybe forty if you’re lucky. Take away family, and that work is the only real impact you will have the world. Let me ask you something, how would you like to change the the world in those thirty five years?”

Freya and Dan were silent for a moment, thinking about it.

“Maybe become a doctor? You could help so many people,” Dan said.

“When I ask this question, that’s often the first place people go. When people think about a career, they think only about themselves. When they think about their total contribution to the world, they think about everyone else. So yes, you could become a doctor, and you would have a tremendous positive impact on the lives of many people. Over the course of your career, you would treat perhaps thirty thousand people, and save a great many of their lives. Generations later there would be thousands of people alive who would never have lived because of your intervention. It’s an admirable goal. But…” Jeremias trailed, turning his eyes from Dan to Freya.

“But it’s just bailing water,” Freya said, guessing where he was going.

“Exactly. Looking at your hypothetical career as a doctor in the greater context, out of ten billion people, your work touched .0003 percent. Which is like saying you saved the country of Liechtenstein but left the rest of the world untouched. That career also tends to exacerbate the problem we were talking about before, more people, more mouths. Let’s consider another direction. Do you know who Fritz Haber was?”

Neither of them did. All Freya could think of was Fritz Lieber, and she was certain this wasn’t about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

“Fritz Haber was the father of chemical warfare. He was a very accomplished chemist and a leading advocate for the use of poison gas in World War I. His first wife was also a PhD in chemistry, but she was bitterly opposed to using gas as a weapon of war. She committed suicide less than a week after the first gas attack in Ypres. Haber continued to push for development of chemical weapons until the day he died in 1934. This was even after he’d been expelled from Germany for being Jewish. Later, during the holocaust, an insecticide Haber invented was used in the gas chambers. Zyklon B. The nazis used Haber’s own creation to murder his relatives.”

“He sounds like a bit of an asshole,” Dan joked, and Jeremias nodded in agreement but didn’t laugh.

“He looked the part too, bald as a cue ball, with a push broom mustache and a pince-nez. If you saw a picture of him, you would swear he’s the archetypical evil scientist. But what if I told you he was also the savior of mankind?”

“That sounds like a pretty crazy plot twist.”

“In the midst of scheming to poison the continent and then conquer it, Haber created something of incredible importance. He devised the Haber process, where hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen are combined with a catalyst to synthesize ammonia. This was an enormous discovery. The Royal Swedish Academy had to hold their noses and give Haber the 1918 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and rightly so. The synthesis of ammonia was the most critical development in agriculture since irrigation. It lead to the widespread use of nitrate fertilizers which had a huge impact on crop yields. To put that in perspective, there are nearly eight billion people alive on the earth today. Without the Haber Process, it’s estimated there would be less than four. Half of humanity, without him you two might be looking at an empty table right now. Take all those poor souls who were gassed, and even if you want to expand that to people killed by explosives derived from his process, and he is still somehow the greatest saint of all time.”

“Jesus,” Dan breathed.

“Far greater than that one too,” Jeremias quipped, and Frieda gave the faintest shake of her head. In that tiny gesture, Freya recognized a friction between the two that was decades old. Jeremias didn’t miss her look, he seemed seemed to realize how far afield he’d drifted.

“In any case, that’s something to think about! I must apologize, I didn’t intend to veer our conversation into genocide.”

“It’s fine. This is fascinating,” Freya said. Dan nodded in agreement, he’d been hanging on every word.

“Anyhow, where I meant to be going with all of this is, there are other Haber Processes we must find. Monumental discoveries that will change the world forever. Novel ideas to provide clean water and nutritious food to billions of people who are not even born yet. So when you are wondering what to do with your brief span on this earth, I would urge you to consider that we need as many bright young people working on this problem as possible. You two are inheriting a terrible mess, and no one will blame you if you choose to throw up your hands. But if you want to try and save the world, the hard sciences are the place to be. There’s a terrible war on the horizon, and if we want to prevent it we need to make incredible strides in water purification, crop yield, and energy production. It’s our only chance for survival as a species.”

Freya clutched the Starball in her pocket as the two of them grappled with everything Jeremias had said. She’d known a lot of this, but there was something undeniable about having an adult sit down and level with them. It felt like Paul Atreides had sat down to tell them all about his Golden Path.

There was something hard and determined in Dan’s face. The conversation had touched him deeply. As she reflected on the change, Freya thought if the room was ready she would bid the Waltzes adieu and drag him back there this moment.

“I will absolutely think about that. Thank you,” Dan said, looking sober and shaken. Freya wondered how many times Jeremias Waltz had given this little lecture. It had the practiced feel of something he had performed again and again, smoothing it down until there were no notes out of place. He was a herald for the end of the world.

“Of course, this is only one part of the picture. Unless we better understand ourselves, we will never get there,” Jeremias said with a nod at Frieda. She took the cue.

“At its heart, this is a problem with our nature. We’re trying to run a global society on tribal programming that was meant to cap out at a hundred individuals. Two hundred years of industrialization fighting against two hundred thousand years of inertia. I assure you we’re going to have a much harder time changing who we are than what we eat or how we generate electricity.” There was some distance in her look, she seemed drained. Freya could tell she didn’t share Jeremias’ optimism.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a similar sales pitch for sociology,” Frieda said, drumming her fingers on the deck of cards. “There are far too many of us already, and I’ve just spent an entire week doing nothing but talking about it. You two don’t play bridge, do you?”

“I know spades,” Dan said. “They’re similar, right?”

“Only in the way that a minnow and a marlin are both fish,” Jeremias joked. “They’re both trick-taking games. But bridge is much, much more complicated, the bidding is a real brain-burner.”

“I would be down to learn,” Dan offered, with a look to Frieda. Freya realized Dan was picking up on her discontent and trying to prop her up.

“I love card games,” Freya added, getting on board. But Jeremias and Frieda were shaking their heads.

“Thank you for the offer. I have no doubt you would both be excellent players. But it would take all evening to teach, and we’re going out for dinner soon. If you’re interested, I’d look into seeing if there’s a bridge club near you and attending their new player day. Bridge is one of those things that is very difficult to get into, but increasingly rewarding the longer you play. It’s an incredible feeling of gestalt when you and your partner are really on a streak together.” Jeremias took Frieda’s hand, trying to draw her out of her funk. Freya couldn’t resist the urge to smile at Dan.

If they only knew.

Dan was frowning, she could tell he felt a bit of “how dare these Germans think I’m too dumb for their game.” But she could understand. Serious players found casual play insufferable. Randall was that way with pool, if there wasn’t money on the line, it wasn’t a game to him.

“How was Dartmouth by the way?” Freya asked, changing the subject.

“It’s a great school, I met some incredibly bright people there. Good luck on your application by the way,” she offered Dan.

“It would take a miracle. I’m still trying to figure out how to pay for college at all. If I can’t get an athletic scholarship somewhere I’m probably going to have to join the military for the GI Bill.”

The Waltzes’ eyes went from Freya to Dan, unraveling the situation. Frieda exhaled through her nostrils in disapproval, it took Freya a moment to understand it wasn’t directed at her.

“It’s just criminal that higher education isn’t provided by the state in America. There’s so much wasted potential. In Germany, public universities have no tuition,” Frieda told them.

“Maybe I should try and immigrate,” Dan joked.

“There’s a long line I’m afraid.”

The front desk clerk glided over to their table and let Freya know their room was ready. She’d completely lost track of time, it was already getting dark outside.

“Here, let me get your e-mail address,” Jeremias said, pulling out his phone. “I’m good friends with the director of the US branch of Nuffield, it’s an agricultural NPO. If your marks are good and you’re interested in studying the field, he might be able to help you secure a scholarship.”

“Seriously?” Dan said.

“Yes, absolutely. I can’t promise anything of course. But, it can pay to let old people talk your ear off from time to time. Thank you both for the conversation, apologies for being a bit fanatic!”

“Thank you, you gave us a ton to think about. Auf Wiedersehen,” Freya said. The Waltzes smiled as they left. When they were gone, Dan turned to Freya with his eyebrows raised.

“Did they just give us a quest to save the world?”

“It’s a geas,” Freya said. When she saw the look on his face she knew she would have to explain. She felt unreasonably irked. Dan should just know what she meant, they should just be one. Every moment without the Unity hurt a little more.

Dan could tell. He set his hand over hers and leaned over.

“I miss you too,” he whispered in her ear and squeezed her hand. For a moment that was enough.