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“I get that, but interesting how?”
Frank sighed. “In the sense that it might be the way to solve your targeted delivery problem. If his methods work, and you get a patent on them, then the potential for licensing income might be really considerable.”
Derek was silent. He knew that Frank knew the company was on life support. That being the case, Frank would not bother him with trifles, or even with big deals that needed capital and time. He had to be offering a fix.
“Why did he send this grant proposal to NSF?”
“Beats me. Maybe he was turned down by one of your guys here. Maybe his advisor told him to do it. But have your people working on the delivery problem take a look at his work. After you get him hired.”
“Why don’t you talk to them? Go talk to Leo Mulhouse about this.”
“Well …” Frank thought it over. “Okay. I’ll go see how things are going. You get this Pierzinski on board. We’ll see what happens from there.”
Derek nodded, still not happy. “You know, Frank, what we really need here is you. Things haven’t been the same since you left. Maybe when you get back we could rehire you at whatever level UCSD will allow.”
“I thought you just said you didn’t have any money for hires.”
“Well that’s true, but for you we could work something out, right?”
“Maybe. But let’s not talk about that now. I need to get out of NSF first, and see what my blind trust has done. I used to have some options here.”
“You sure did. Hell, we could bury you in those, Frank.”
“That would be nice.”
Giving people options to buy stock cost a company nothing. They were feel-good gestures, unless everything went right with the company and the market; and with NASDAQ having been in the tank for so long, they were not often seen as real compensation anymore. More a kind of speculation. And in fact Frank expressing interest in them had cheered Derek up, as it was a sign of confidence in the future of the company.
Back outside, Frank sighed. Torrey Pines Generique was looking like a thin reed. But it was his reed, and anything might happen. Derek was good at keeping things afloat. But Sam Houston was dead weight. Derek needed Frank there as scientific advisor. Or rather consultant, given his UCSD position. And if they had Pierzinski under contract, things might work out. By the end of the year the whole situation might turn around. And if it all worked out, the potential was big. Even huge.
Frank wandered across the complex to Leo’s lab. It was noticeably lively compared to the rest of the building—people bustling about, the smell of solvents in the air, machines whirring away. Where there’s life there’s hope. Or perhaps they were only like the band on the Titanic, playing on while the ship went down.
Frank went in and exchanged pleasantries with Leo and his people. He mentioned that Derek had sent him down to talk about their current situation, and Leo nodded noncommittally and gave him a rundown. Frank listened, thinking: Here is a scientist at work in a lab. He is in the optimal scientific space. He has a lab, he has a problem, he’s fully absorbed and going full tilt. He should be happy. But he isn’t happy. He has a tough problem he’s trying to solve, but that’s not it; people always have tough problems in the lab.
It was something else. Probably, that he was aware of the company’s situation—of course, he had to be. Probably this was the source of his unease. The musicians on the Titanic, feeling the tilt in the deck. In which case there was a kind of heroism in the way they played on.
But for some reason Frank was also faintly annoyed. People plugging away in the same old ways, trying to do things according to the plan, even a flawed plan: normal science, in Kuhnian terms, as well as in the more ordinary sense. All so normal, so trusting that the system worked, when obviously the system was both rigged and broken. How could they persevere? How could they be so blinkered, so determined, so dense?
Frank slipped his content in. “Maybe if you had a way to test the genes in computer simulations, find your proteins in advance.”
Leo looked puzzled. “You’d have to have a, what. A theory of how DNA codes its gene expression functions. At the least.”
“Yes.”
“That would be nice, but I’m not aware anyone has that.”
“No, but if you did … Wasn’t George working on something like that, or one of his temporary guys? Pierzinski?”
“Yeah that’s right, Yann was trying some really interesting things. But he left.”
“I think Derek is trying to bring him back.”
“Good idea.”
Then Marta walked into the lab. When she saw Frank she stopped, startled.
“Oh hi Marta.”
“Hi Frank. I didn’t know you were going to be coming by.”
“Neither did I.”
“Oh no? Well—” She hesitated, turned. The situation called for her to say something, he felt, something like “Good to see you,” if she was going to leave so quickly. But she said only, “I’m late, I’ve got to get to work.”
And then she was out the door.
Only later, when reviewing his actions, did Frank see that he had cut short the talk with Leo, and pretty obviously at that, in order to follow Marta. In the moment itself he simply found himself walking down the hall, catching up to her before he even realized what he was doing.
She turned and saw him. “What,” she said sharply, looking at him as if to stop him in his tracks.
“Oh hi I was just wondering how you’re doing, I haven’t seen you for a while, I wondered. Are you up for, how about going out and having dinner somewhere and catching up?”
She surveyed him. “I don’t think so. I don’t think that would be a good idea. We might as well not even go there. What would be the point.”
“I don’t know, I’m interested to know how you’re doing I guess is all.”
“Yeah I know, I know what you mean. But sometimes there are things you’re interested in that you can’t really get to know anymore, you know?”
“Ah yeah.”
He pursed his lips, looked at her. She looked good. She was both the strongest and the wildest woman he had ever met. Somehow things between them had gone wrong anyway.
Now he looked at her and understood what she was saying. He was never going to be able to know what her life was like these days. He was biased, she was biased; the scanty data would be inescapably flawed. Talking for a couple of hours would not make any difference. So it was pointless to try. Would only churn to the surface bad things from the past. Maybe in another ten years. Maybe never.
Marta must have seen something of this train of thought in his face, because with an impatient nod she turned and was gone.
A few days after Frank dropped by, Leo turned on his computer when he came in to the lab and saw there was an e-mail from Derek. He opened and read it, then the attachment that had come with it. When he was done he forwarded it to Brian and Marta. When Marta came in about an hour later she had already done some work on it.
“Hey Brian,” she called from Leo’s door, “come check this out. Derek has sent us a new paper from that Yann Pierzinski who was here. He was funny. It’s a new version of the stuff he was working on when he was here. It was interesting.”
Brian had come in while she was telling him this, and she pointed to parts of the diagram on Leo’s screen as he caught up. “See what I mean?”
“Well, yeah. It would be great. If it worked … Maybe crunch them through this program over and over, until you see repeats, if you did … then test the ones with the ligands that fit best, and look strongest chemically.”
“And Pierzinski is back to work on it with us!”
“Is he?”
“Yeah, he’s coming back. Derek says we’ll have him at our disposal.”
“Cool.”
Leo checked this in the company’s directory. “Yep, here he is. Rehired just this week. Frank Vanderwal came by and mentioned this guy, he must have told Derek about it too. Well, Vanderwal should know, this is his field.”
“It’s my field too,” Marta said sharply.
“Right, of course, I’m just saying Frank might have, you know. Well, let’s ask Yann to look at what we’ve got. If it works …”
Brian said, “Sure. It’s worth trying anyway. Pretty interesting.” He googled Yann, and Leo leaned over his shoulder to look at the list.
“Derek obviously wants us to talk to him right away.”
“He must have rehired him for us.”
“I see that. So let’s get him before he gets busy with something else. A lot of labs could use another biomathematician.”
“True, but there aren’t a lot of labs. I think we’ll get him. Look, what do you think Derek means here, ‘write up the possibilities right away’?”
“I suppose he wants to get started on using the idea to try to secure more funding.”
“Shit. Yeah, that’s probably right. Unbelievable. Okay, let’s pass on that for now, damn it, and give Yann a call.”
Their talk with Yann Pierzinski was indeed interesting. He breezed into the lab just a few days later, as friendly as ever, and happy to be back at Torrey Pines with a permanent job. He was going to be based in George’s math group, he told them, but had already been told by Derek to expect to work a lot with Leo’s lab; so he arrived curious, and ready to go.
Leo enjoyed seeing him again. Yann still had a tendency to become a speed-talker when excited, and he still canted his head to the side when thinking. His algorithm sets were works in progress, he said, and underdeveloped precisely in the gene grammars that Leo and Marta and Brian needed from him; but that was okay, Leo thought, because they could help him, and he was there to help them. They could collaborate, and Yann was a powerful thinker. Leo felt secure in his own lab abilities, devising and running experiments, but when it came to the curious mix of math, symbolic logic, and computer programming that biomathematicians dove into, he was way out of his depth. So Leo was happy to watch Yann sit down and plug his laptop into their desktop.
In the days that followed, they tried his algorithms on the genes of their “HDL factory” cells, Yann substituting different procedures in the last steps of his operations, then checking what they got in the computer simulations, and selecting some for their dish trials. Pretty soon they found one version of the operation that was consistently good at predicting proteins that matched well with their target cells—making keys for their locks, in effect. “That’s what I’ve been hunting for the past year at least!” Yann said happily after one such success.
As they worked, Pierzinski told them some of how he had gotten to that point in his work, following aspects of his advisor’s work at Caltech and the like. Marta and Brian asked him where he had hoped to take it all, in terms of applications. Yann shrugged; not much of anywhere, he told them.
“But Yann, don’t you see what the applications of this could be?”
“I guess. I’m not really interested in pharmacology.”
Leo and Brian and Marta stood there staring at him. Despite his earlier stint there, they didn’t know him very well. He seemed normal enough in most ways, aware of the outside world and so on. To an extent.
Leo said, “Look, let’s go get some lunch, let us take you out to lunch. I want to tell you more about what all this could help us with.”
The lobbying firm of Branson & Ananda occupied offices off Pennsylvania Avenue, near the intersection of Indiana and C Streets, overlooking the Marketplace. Charlie’s friend Sridar met them at the front door. First he took them in to meet old Branson himself, then led them into a meeting room dominated by a long table. Sridar got the Khembalis seated, then offered them coffee or tea; they all took tea. Charlie stood near the door, bobbing mildly about to keep Joe asleep on his back, ready to make a quick escape if he had to.
“So you’ve been a sovereign country since 1960?” Sridar was saying.
“The relationship with India is a little more … complicated than that. We have had sovereignty in the sense you suggest since about 1993.” Drepung rehearsed the history of Khembalung, while Sridar took notes.
“So—fifteen feet above sea level at high tide,” Sridar said at the end of this recital. “Listen, one thing I have to say at the start—we are not going to be able to promise you anything much in the way of results on the global warming side of things. That’s been given up on by Congress—” He glanced at Charlie: “Sorry, Charlie. Maybe not so much given up on, as swept under the rug.”
Charlie glowered despite himself. “Not by Senator Chase or anyone else who’s really paying attention. And we’ve got a big bill coming up—”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Sridar said, holding up a hand to stop him before he went into rant mode. “You’re doing what you can. But quite a few members of Congress think of it as being too late to do anything.”
“Better late than never!” Charlie insisted, almost waking Joe.
“We understand,” Drepung said to Sridar, after a glance at Rudra. “We won’t have any unrealistic expectations of you. We only hope to engage help that is experienced in the procedures used. We ourselves will be responsible for the content of our appeals to the reluctant bodies.”
Sridar kept his face blank, but Charlie knew what he was thinking. Sridar said, “We do our best to give our clients all the benefits of our expertise. I’m just reminding you that we are not miracle workers.”
“The miracles will be our department,” Drepung said.
Charlie thought, these two jokers might get along fine.
Slowly they worked out what they would expect from each other, and Sridar wrote down the details of an agreement. The Khembalis were happy to have him write up what in essence was their request for proposal. Sridar remarked, “A clever way to make me write you a fair deal.”
Later that day Sridar gave Charlie a call. Charlie was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle, feeding Joe a bottle and watching two of the local chess hustlers practice on each other. They played too fast for Charlie to follow the game.
“Look, Charlie, this is a bit ingrown, since you put me in touch with these guys, but really it’s your man that the lamas ought to be meeting. The Foreign Relations Committee is one of the main ones we’ll work on, so it all begins with Chase. Can you set us up with a good chunk of the senator’s quality time?”
“I can with some lead time,” Charlie said, glancing at Phil’s master calendar on his wrist screen. “How about next Thursday?”
“Perfect.”
Here in the latter part of his third term, Senator Phil Chase had fully settled into Washington, and his seniority was such that he had become very powerful, and very busy. He had every hour from 6 A.M. to midnight scheduled in twenty-minute units. It was hard to understand how he could keep his easy demeanor and relaxed ways. It was partly that he did not sweat the details. He was a delegating senator, a hands-off senator, as many of the best of them were. Some senators tried to learn everything, and burned out; others knew almost nothing, and were in effect living campaign posters. Phil was somewhere in the middle. He used his staff well—as an exterior memory bank, as advice, as policy makers, even occasionally as a source of accumulated wisdom.
His longevity in office, and the strict code of succession that both parties obeyed, had landed him the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a seat on Environment and Public Works. These were A-list committees, and the stakes were high. The Democrats had come out of the recent election with a one-vote advantage in the Senate, a two-vote disadvantage in the House, and the President was still a Republican. This was in the ongoing American tradition of electing as close to a perfect gridlock of power in Washington as possible, presumably in the hope that nothing further would happen and history would freeze forever. An impossible quest, like building a card house in a gale, but it made for tight politics and good theater.
In any case, Phil was now very busy, and heading toward reelection himself. His old chief of staff Wade Norton was on the road now, and though Phil valued Wade and kept him on staff as a telecommuting advisor, Roy and Andrea had taken over executive staff duties. Charlie did their environmental research, though he too was a part-timer, and mostly telecommuting.
When he did make it in, he found operations had a chaotic edge which he had long ago concluded was mostly engendered by Phil himself. Phil would seize the minutes he had between appointments and wander from room to room, looking to needle people. “We’re surfing the big picture today!” he would exclaim, then start arguments for the hell of it. His staff loved it. Congressional staffers were by definition policy wonks; many had joined their high school debate clubs of their own free will, so talking shop with Phil was right up their alley. And his enthusiasm was infectious, his grin like a double shot of espresso. He had one of those smiles that invariably looked as if he was genuinely delighted. If it was directed at you, you felt a glow inside. In fact Charlie was convinced that it was Phil’s smile that had gotten him elected the first time, and maybe every time. What made it so beautiful was that it wasn’t faked. He didn’t smile if he didn’t feel like it. But he often felt like it. That was very revealing, and so Phil had his effect.
With Wade gone, Charlie was now his chief advisor on climate. Actually Charlie and Wade functioned as a sort of tag-team telecommuting advisor, both of them part-time, Charlie calling in every day, dropping by every week; Wade calling in every week, and dropping by every month. It worked because Phil didn’t always need them for help when environmental issues came up. “You guys have educated me,” he would tell them. “I can take this on my own. So don’t worry, stay at the South Pole, stay in Bethesda. I’ll let you know how it went.”
That would have been fine with Charlie, if only Phil had always done what Charlie and Wade advised. But Phil had pressures from many directions, and he had his own opinions. So there were divergences. Like most congresspeople, he thought he knew better than his staff how to get things done; and because he got to vote and they didn’t, in effect he was right.
On Thursday at 10 A.M., when the Khembalis had their twenty minutes with Phil, Charlie was very interested to see how it would go, but that morning he had to attend a Washington Press Club appearance by a scientist from the Heritage Foundation who was claiming rapidly rising temperatures would be good for agriculture. Assisting in the destruction of such people’s pseudoarguments was important work, which Charlie was happy to do; but on this day he wanted to be there when Phil saw the Khembalis, so when the press conference was over and Charlie’s quiver empty, he hustled back and arrived right at 10:20. He hurried up the stairs to Phil’s offices on the third floor. At 10:23 A.M., Phil ushered the Khembalis out of his corner office, chatting with them cheerfully. “Yes, thanks, of course, I’d love to—talk to Evelyn about setting up a time.”
The Khembalis looked pleased. Sridar looked impassive but faintly amused, as he often did.
Just as he was leaving, Phil spotted Charlie and stopped. “Charlie! Good to see you at last!”
Grinning hugely, he came back and shook his blushing staffer’s hand. “So you laughed in the President’s face!” He turned to the Khembalis: “This man burst out laughing in the President’s face! I’ve always wanted to do that!”
The Khembalis nodded neutrally.
“So what did it feel like?” Phil asked Charlie. “And how did it go over?”
Charlie, still blushing, said, “Well, it felt involuntary, to tell the truth. Like a sneeze. Joe was really tickling me. And as far as I could tell, it went over okay. The President looked pleased. He was trying to make me laugh, so when I did, he laughed too.”
“Yeah I bet, because at that point he had you.”
“Well, yes. Anyway he laughed, and then Joe woke up and we had to get a bottle in him before the Secret Service guys did something rash.”
