Out of Time by David Klass

Author:David Klass
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SEVEN

He sat on a bench a hundred feet from the swirl of bodies and loud chants, and he watched the youth rally with a mix of pride and bemusement. They had clearly read his manifesto and taken it to heart. Their signs read “Proud Earth Defender” and “The Cabbage Head Must Roll,” and the angry speech booming out over Columbus Circle via a sound system was about how it was their planet and their generation’s destiny and they must take matters into their own hands. It wasn’t a direct incitement to violence, and the policemen watching the rally on foot and horseback did nothing to stop it or arrest anyone. But it was damn close—a clarion call to action—and Green Man had little doubt who was to blame for their passion, because he spotted several placards with his own supposed image on them, downloaded from the creatively imagined portrait of him on the Internet.

The young man speaking ended with a chant of “Save the Earth,” shook a fist, and stepped away from the podium. Green Man watched as a tall, young black woman walked to the mic and said, “Hi, everybody, I’m Julie, and I want to talk to you about the great die-off.” The speeches before had been loud and strident but short on facts. Julie spoke softly and stressed the science. She explained how, of the roughly eight million species living on Earth, more than a million were directly threatened by human behavior and were dying off at an accelerating rate. In detailing the chief causes for this die-off, she displayed an impressive command of biology, chemistry, oceanography, and atmospheric science. She wasn’t showing off but building a case, and rather than cheer her on, the audience fell silent and drank it in.

Green Man watched, mesmerized, remembering Ellen speaking at rallies in Berkeley and San Francisco in the 1990s. Julie’s voice and manner were eerily similar to her mother’s—the understated yet infectious passion, the intellectual depth and easy command of hard science that lifted and transformed a political diatribe into an almost indisputable logical argument, and the charm and charisma that held a fractious crowd captive.

She ended by getting personal, telling the audience, “Look, I’m not a terrorist. I’m just a high school student, getting ready for midterms. I don’t want to hurt anyone or destroy anything. The most destructive I usually get is a hard foul in a soccer game. I hate public speaking, and giving speeches like this scares me almost as much as the AP Physics test I have to take next week.” There was appreciative laughter from the audience that this charming speaker who had built such a strong and scary scientific argument was now revealing her own normal teenage angst.

But then Julie finished her speech by switching to the manifesto, and she quoted Green Man’s lines as if she had written them: “But there are causes bigger than ourselves. There are struggles that require us to give up our own identities to take on something larger.

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