“Luke fifteen,” the Client said approvingly.
In the cab to the airport, Eric handed me an envelope containing a check. It was more than I’d made in the last five years combined.
When I submitted my proposal to the National Science Foundation, I chose Kibsairlin’s ice cores as my research subject, with a secondary focus on methane levels in the Antarctic sedimentary basins. I suspected, or said I suspected—I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted to suspect—that the levels were not as high as had been reported. I remained surprised at the speed with which I had become an expert in the world of climate change denial. In other disciplines, my lack of published and peer-reviewed articles would preclude me from such a rapid ascension. My reliance on meta-analysis rather than original research would be seen as a grave liability. In this collegial community of like-minded individuals, however, meta-analysis was the most effective tool for picking apart inconsistencies and sowing doubt.
“The idea,” Eric told me, “is to make people think that there is controversy within the scientific community on whether climate change is human-caused. We won’t be in trouble until the public thinks the conversation is closed.” It was my job to keep the conversation going.
In early September 2002, the expected rejection letter from the NSF arrived, citing an overabundance of quality proposals. It was now time to move onto Phase Two of the Plan. In mid-November, I answered the door to find Fred Zimmer standing on my stoop. I managed to hide my shock, and invited him in. He asked after Annie, and I told him she was visiting her parents in Bismarck—going into the details about why she was no longer living in the house felt too complicated. I brewed a pot of coffee and we sat together at the kitchen table. I noticed how frail Fred was looking, how sunken his cheeks were, as if he’d been hollowed out from the inside and his skin had collapsed to fill the spaces. His thick glasses magnified his pale blue eyes so that they seemed to overtake his face, and his lips had curled inward, threatening to disappear completely.
“Colon cancer,” he told me. “Metastatic. But I didn’t come here to talk about that.” He scraped his chair forward so he could lean on the table with both elbows. “I got a call from the New Scientist yesterday, asking me about the circumstances of your resignation. What the hell’s going on, Frank?”
When I feigned incomprehension, he hit the table with his fist. I mopped up the spilled coffee with a napkin, and noticed Fred’s hands were shaking. I felt gripped by something—compassion, perhaps, or pity—and I gently laid my hands on his.
He kept them under mine for only a moment before snatching them away angrily. “What’s happened to you, Frank, that you’re running around with these tinfoil-hat-wearing reptiles?” Although I was used, after all these years, to Fred’s candor, I winced at this and he noticed.
“Cui bono, Frank?” he said.
“Taxpayers want disinterested science, Fred, not political alarmism.”
Zimmer’s eyes widened and a look of inexpressible sadness crossed his old and gnarled face. He said nothing for some minutes. “The stealing, the plagiarism—did you do it?” For only an instant did I consider lying to my old mentor. I could tell that the question was merely a formality, even though Zimmer was not known to stand on such things. He already knew.
I looked down at the coffee spoons, which I had set on top of one another, the bowls and the stems in perfect alignment. I didn’t raise my eyes again until I heard the front door slam shut.
*
The Plan steadily grew in scope. The Group (the consortium of energy companies with whom I’d met that night in the Royal Suite) had started meeting with the two conservative legislators who’d been chosen to take up the cause, in exchange for several generous campaign donations. I met the men once—a representative from Kansas named Sam Bayless and a representative from Tennessee named Jack Calhoun. Bayless was the younger, and more serious, of the two men—groomed, handsome, but not oleaginous. Calhoun was a husky man with crooked teeth, but a more sincere bearing. Bayless’s participation was clearly an act of opportunism, while Calhoun’s seemed like a last gasp. Both expected formidable challenges in the 2004 elections, and were eager to develop a major platform issue that would speak to their constituents.
Meanwhile, the promised endowed chair position was arranged for me with the kind of speed I’d thought impossible in academia—perhaps because Freedom University of Northern Virginia wasn’t exactly a principal player. In fact, I had never heard of it, despite its bloated enrollment logs. Nor did it have an established research track record, but the faculty and administration were remarkably enthusiastic about my work. I’d only been living part time at home since the Plan had been implemented, spending much of my time in a corporate apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, but taking the Freedom University position would require a move from my sleepy Midwest college town. Annie and I agreed to put the house up for sale. She had no interest in moving to Virginia, so she rented an apartment a few miles away from our old home, while I drove the U-Haul truck to Fairfax alone. We formally separated a week after I arrived in Virginia.
I was put up in a spacious but sterile campus apartment, and began lecturing on my quickly evolving research. Along the way, I was introduced to the concept of irreducible complexity by a fellow professor at Freedom, an idea that proved useful in my ongoing work with Olive Grove. Twice a month, I delivered lectures via videoconferencing, which were always well attended (Olive Grove was an unusually science-minded congregation). I found my fellow congregants deeply excited by the science of Intelligent Design.