“Oh hi, Yann, how are you?”

“I’m good Leo, thanks. I’m just coming by to say good-bye. I’m back to Pasadena now, my job here is finished.”

“Too bad. I bet you could have helped us figure out this pig in a poke we just bought.”

“Really?”

Yann’s face brightened like a child’s. He was a true mathematician, and had what Leo considered to be the standard mathematician personality: smart, spacy, enthusiastic, full of notions. All these qualities were a bit under the surface, until you really got him going. As Marta had remarked, not unkindly (for her), if it weren’t for the head tilt and the speed-talking, he wouldn’t have seemed like a mathematician at all. Whatever; Leo liked him, and his work on protein identification had been really interesting, and potentially very helpful.

“Actually, I don’t know what we’ve got yet,” Leo admitted. “It’s likely to be a biology problem, but who knows? You sure have been helpful with our selection protocols.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that. I may be back anyway, I’ve got a project going with Sam’s math team that might pan out. If it does they’ll try to hire me on another temporary contract, he says.”

“That’s good to hear. Well, have fun in Pasadena in the meantime.”

“Oh I will. See you soon.”

And their best biomath guy slipped out the door.

CHARLIE QUIBLER had barely woken when Anna left for work. He got up an hour later to his own alarm, woke up Nick with difficulty, got him to dress and eat, put the still-sleeping Joe in his car seat while Nick climbed in the other side of the car. “Have you got your backpack and your lunch?” this not always being the case and off to Nick’s school. They dropped him off, returned home to fall asleep again on the couch, Joe never waking during the entire process. An hour or so later he would rouse them both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin, the earlier interval like a problem dream that always played out the same.

“Joey and Daddy!” Charlie would say then, or “Joe and Dad at home, here we go!” or “How about breakfast? Here how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of Mom’s milk.Mom’s milk.”

This had always worked like a charm with Nick, and sometimes Charlie forgot and put Joe down in the old blue plastic playpen in the living room, but if he did Joe would let out a scandalized howl the moment he saw where he was. Joe refused to associate with baby things; even getting him into the car seat or the baby backpack or the stroller was a matter of very strict invariability. Where choices were known to be possible, Joe rejected the baby stuff as an affront to his dignity.

So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that blocked the steep stairs to the cellar. Careening around like a human pinball. Anna had taped bubblewrap to all the corners; it looked like the kitchen had just recently arrived and not yet been completely unpacked.

“Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.”

“Ba!”

“Yes, bottle.”

This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the back burner. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, capped by brown rubber nipples that Charlie had pricked many times with a needle, and topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the nipples from contamination in the freezer. Contamination in the freezer? Charlie had wanted to ask Anna, but he hadn’t. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at work. So Charlie logged in while the water started to bubble, thinking as he always did that the main purpose here was to fulfill Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.

He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.

“Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.”

“Oh hi Roy, what’s up.”

“Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check first to see what I should be looking for, how you solved the IPCC stuff.”

“Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.” The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil would require the U.S. to act on certain recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?”

“I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that one. I tried to put it in a context that made it look inevitable. International body that we are part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory for us or else the whole world cooks in our juices, that sort of thing.”

“Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and you’re his climate guy, if he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.”

“Yeah I know. Wait just a second.”

Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it was at body temperature, or almost.

“A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?”

“Well, I’m drinking my wife’s breast milk, if you must know.”

“Say what?”

“I’m testing the temperature of one of Joe’s bottles. They have to be thawed to a very exact temperature or else he gets annoyed.”

“So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?”

“Yes I am.”

“How is it?”

“It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat, and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.”

“I bet.” Roy cackled. “Do you ever get it straight from the source?”

“Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.”

“Ah ha. So you have to take the long-term view.”

“Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck much harder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.”

“He understood!”

“Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?” he said, handing him the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.

“Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill Phil introduces in this session.”

“Come on it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean ”

“Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you ASAP. I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.”

“That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.”

“Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.”