Ovid’s eyebrows lifted in a familiar way, almost amused. “I’m afraid you have missed the boat, Tina. Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. Pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck.”
She raised her jaw slightly, an edgier look, and started over once again. Her stamina for replays was unbelievable. “Dr. Byron, let’s talk about global warming. Many environmentalists contend that burning fuel puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”
He pulled back his chin in such skeptical dismay he looked like a startled turtle. “They contend this? That burning carbon puts carbon in the air, this is a contention?” His voice notched up so severely it squeaked a little. “Tina, Tina. Think about what you are saying. All the coal that has ever been mined, that’s carbon. All the oil wells, carbon, again! We have evaporated that into the air. What’s in the world stays in the world, it does not go poof and disappear. It’s called the conservation of matter. The question was settled well before the time of Sir Isaac Newton.”
Tina blinked once, twice. “Scientists tell us they can’t predict the exact effects of global warming.”
“Correct. We tell you that, because we are more honest than other people. We know evidence will keep coming in. It does not mean we ignore the subject until further notice. We brush our teeth, for instance, even though we do not know exactly how many cavities we may be avoiding.”
“Well, a lot of people are just not convinced. We’re here to get information.”
He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and showed his teeth in a grimace, the tip of his tongue just visible between his front teeth. When he finally looked at her again, this seemed to cause him actual pain. “If you were here to get information, Tina, you would not be standing in my laboratory telling me what scientists think.”
She opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “What scientists disagree on now, Tina, is how to express our shock. The glaciers that keep Asia’s watersheds in business are going right away. Maybe one of your interns could Google that for you. The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?”
Tina sucked her teeth, eyes wide. The effect was not flattering. “If this were Niagara Falls, I’d have a decent background,” she said. “I can’t do anything with this without a visual.”
Ovid’s eyebrows pressed toward his hairline. “Intangible things are outside your range? Can’t you people be a little imaginative?”
Tina did not reply.
“An election result!” he said, looking a little nuts. “A stock market! Those are intangibles. And yet you manage to cover them. Ad nauseam!”
Tina tossed her hair ever so slightly and used a voice she had probably honed as a teenager. “Because people care.”
“You have a job to do, woman, and you are not doing it.” Ovid’s head dropped forward and his eyes narrowed, a posture that stunned Dellarobia. She’d never figured him for a schoolyard fighter. He took a step forward, leveling his finger like a blade toward her chest, inciting in Tina an equal and opposite step backward. “Fire is an excellent visual, Tina. So are hurricanes, and floods. The whole damn melting Arctic.” They edged into the part of the lab where the stuff was piled from the portion they’d cleaned up. “How will you feel ten years from now, when a serious lot of the farms in the world don’t have a damn rainy season anymore? And you were party to that?” Ovid’s long finger seemed to move everything, pulling him forward, backing Tina around the table.
Everett spoke up. “You’re outside the shot.”
“You keep out of this!” Ovid shouted. Everett looked slapped. “You think this will only happen to Africa or Asia,” he told Tina. “Someplace that is not your assignment.”
Tina suddenly held up one sideways hand as if she had a martial arts move up her sleeve. “Now you stop right there, buddy. I have two little boys adopted from Thailand.”
Ovid did not seem impressed. “And so that’s it, you’ve done your duty? Now you can chart your career on the path of least resistance?”
“You have no idea. Everybody thinks TV is so easy. This is work.”
“Convince me, Tina. You are letting a public relations firm write your scripts for you. The same outfit that spent a decade manufacturing doubts for you about the smoking-and-cancer contention. Do you people never learn? It’s the same damned company, Tina, the Advancement of Sound Science. Look it up, why don’t you. They went off the Philip Morris payroll and into the Exxon pocket.”
Tina’s moment of anger turned out to be highly soluble in worry. She was backed up against the refrigerator now, eyeing an escape route. Ovid turned away from her abruptly and walked across the lab, unbuttoning his white coat. “You have no interest in real inquiry. You are doing a two-step with your sponsors.” He began to pull off his lab coat before realizing he was wired up with the little microphone on the lapel and the gizmo in the pocket. He unclipped the lapel mike and looked around, possibly for a place to throw it. Finding no clear target, he faced Tina and held the clip to his mouth.
“Here is my full statement. What you are doing is unconscionable. You’re allowing the public to be duped by a bunch of damned liars.”
Tina raised both hands. “Like I could even use that word on TV.”
Ovid clipped the mike back on his lapel and managed a fair reconstruction of his normal grin, the full revelation of eyeteeth.
“Sorry,” he said. “You are allowing the public to be duped by a bunch of damned prevaricators.”
“O-kay,” Tina said. “That’s a wrap.”
Everett rolled up his cords in a flash. Tina already had her phone to her ear as they exited, her voice rising to a shrill pitch outside in the barn. The news Jeep was probably tearing up the highway before the stunned pall in the laboratory lifted. Preston and Cordie bore the wide-eyed, zipped-up expression children assume in the presence of unraveling adults. Dellarobia looked a bit like that herself, waiting for the return of some recognizable version of her boss. He was manically sorting through manila folders that had been shuffled in the fray, gathering things together.