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“We’re going to have to tell Derek the bad news.”
“Derek is not going to like it.”
“Not going to like it! Fifty-one million dollars? He’s going to hate it!”
“Think about blowing that much money. What an idiot he is.”
“Is it worse to have a scientist who is a bad businessman as your CEO, or a businessman who is a bad scientist?”
“What about when they’re both?”
They sat around the bench looking at the mice cages and the rolls of data sheets. A Dilbert cartoon mocked them as it peeled away from the end of the counter. It was a sign of something deep that this lab had Dilberts taped to the walls rather than Far Sides.
“An in-person meeting for this particular communication is contraindicated,” Brian suggested.
“No shit,” Leo said.
Marta snorted. “You can’t get a meeting with him anyway.”
“Ha ha.” But Leo was far enough out in Torrey Pine Generique’s power structure that getting a meeting with Derek was indeed difficult.
“It’s true,” Marta insisted.
“Which is stupid,” Brian pointed out. “The company is totally dependent on what happens in this lab.”
“Not totally,” Leo said.
“Yes it is! But that’s not what the business schools teach these guys. The lab is just another place of production. Management tells production what to produce. Input from the agency of production would be wrong.”
“Like the assembly line choosing what to make,” Marta said.
“Right. Thus the idiocy of business management theory in our time.”
“I’ll send him an e-mail,” Leo decided.
So Leo sent Derek an e-mail concerning what Brian and Marta persisted in calling the exploding mice problem. Derek (according to reports they heard later) swelled up like one of their experimental subjects. It appeared he had been IV’d with two liters of genetically engineered righteous indignation.
“It’s in the literature!” he was reported to have shouted at Dr. Sam Houston, his vice president in charge of research and development. “It was in The Journal of Immunology, there were two papers that were peer-reviewed, they got a patent for it, I went out there to Maryland and checked it all out myself! It worked there, damn it. So make it work here!”
“Make it work?” Marta said when she heard this. “See what I mean?”
“Well, you know,” Leo said grimly. “That’s the tech in biotech, right?”
“Hmmm,” Brian said, interested despite himself.
After all, manipulations of gene and cell were hardly ever done “just to find things out.” They were done to accomplish certain things inside the cell, and later, inside a living body. Biotechnology, bio techno logos; the word on how to put the tool into the living organism. Genetic engineering meant putting something new inside a body’s DNA, to effect something in the metabolism.
They had done the genetics; now it was time for the engineering.
So Leo and Brian and Marta, and the rest of Leo’s lab, began to work on it. Sometimes at the end of a day, when the sun was breaking sideways through gaps in the clouds out to sea, shining weakly in the tinted windows, they would compare their most recent results, and try to make sense of the problem. Sometimes one of them would stand up and use the whiteboard to sketch out some diagram illustrating his or her conception of what was going on, down there forever below the level of their physical senses. The rest would comment, and drink coffee, and think it over.
“What we need is to package the inserts with a ligand that is really specific for the target cells. If we could find that specificity, out of all the possible proteins, without going through all the rigmarole of trial and error …”
“Too bad we don’t still have Pierzinski! He could run the possibilities through his algorithm.”
“Well, we could call him up and ask him to give it a try.”
“Sure, but who’s got time for that kind of thing?”
“He’s still working on a paper with Eleanor on campus,” Marta said, meaning UCSD. “I’ll ask him when he comes down.”
They wandered off to go home, or back to their desks and benches, thinking over plans for more experiments. Getting the mice, getting the time on the machines, sequencing genes, sequencing schedules; when you were doing scientific work the hours flew by, and the days, and the weeks. This was the main feeling: there was never enough time to do it all. Was this different from other kinds of work? Leo’s things-to-do list grew and shrank, grew and shrank, grew and then refused to shrink. He spent much less time than he wanted to at home in Leucadia with Roxanne. Roxanne understood, but it bothered him, even if it didn’t bother her.
He called the Jackson labs and ordered new and different strains of mice, each strain with its own number and bar code and genome. He got his lab’s machines scheduled, and assigned the techs to use them, moving some things to the front burner, others to the back, all to accommodate this project’s urgency.
On certain days, he went into the lab where the mouse cages were kept and opened a cage door. He took out a mouse, small and white, wriggling and sniffing the way they did, checking things out with its whiskers. Quickly he shifted it so that he was holding it at the neck with the forefingers and thumbs of both hands. A quick hard twist and the neck broke. Very soon after that the mouse was dead.
This was not unusual. During this round of experiments, he and Brian and Marta and the rest of them tourniqueted and injected about three hundred mice, drew their blood, then killed and rendered and analyzed them. That was an aspect of the process they didn’t talk about, not even Brian. Marta in particular went black with disgust; it was worse than when she was premenstrual, as Brian joked (once). Her headphones stayed on her head all day long, the music turned up so loud that even the other people in the lab could hear it. Ultraprofane hip-hop. If she can’t hear she can’t feel, Brian joked right next to her, Marta oblivious and trembling with rage, or something like it.
But it was no joke, even though the mice existed to be killed, even though they were killed mercifully, and usually only some few months before they would have died naturally. There was no real reason to have qualms, and yet still there was no joking about it. Maybe Brian would joke about Marta (if she couldn’t hear him), but he wouldn’t joke about that. In fact he insisted on using the word kill rather than sacrifice, even in write-ups and papers, to keep it clear what they were doing. Usually they had to break their necks right behind the head; you couldn’t inject them to “put them to sleep,” because their tissue samples had to be clear of all contaminants. So it was a matter of breaking necks, as if they were tigers pouncing on prey. If done properly it paralyzed them so that it was quick and painless—or at least quick. No feeling below the head, no breathing, immediate loss of mouse consciousness, one hoped. Leaving only the killers to think it over. Usually the mice deaths occurred in the mornings, so they could get to work on the samples. By the time the scientists got home the experience was somewhat forgotten, its effects muted. But people like Marta went home and dosed themselves with drugs on those days—she said she did—and played the most hostile music they could find, 110 decibels of forgetting. Went out surfing. Didn’t talk about it.
In the meantime, while they were working on this problem, their good results with the HDL “factory cells” had been plugged into the paper they had written about the process, and sent upstairs to Torrey Pines’ legal department, where it had gotten hung up. Repeated queries from Leo got the same e-mailed response: still reviewing—do not publish.
“They want to see what they can patent in it,” Brian said.
“They won’t let us publish until we have a patent and a delivery method,” Marta predicted.
“But that may never happen!” Leo cried. “It’s good work, it’s interesting! It could help make a big breakthrough!”
“That’s what they don’t want,” Brian said.
“They don’t want a big breakthrough unless it’s our big breakthrough.”
“Shit.”
Leo had never gotten used to this. Sitting on results, doing private science, secret science—it went against the grain. It wasn’t science as he understood it, which was a matter of finding out things and publishing them for all to see and test, critique, put to use.
But it was getting to be standard operating procedure. Security in the building remained intense; even e-mails out had to be checked for approval, not to mention laptops, briefcases, and boxes leaving the building. “You have to check in your brain when you leave,” as Brian put it.
“Fine by me,” Marta said.
“I just want to publish,” Leo insisted grimly.
“You’d better find a targeted delivery method if you want to publish that particular paper, Leo.”
So they continued to work on the Urtech method. The new experiments slowly yielded their results. The volumes and dosages had sharp parameters on all sides. The Maryland method stubbornly remained an artifact.
By now, however, enough time had passed that Derek could pretend that the whole Urtech purchase had never happened. It was a new financial quarter; there were other fish to fry, and for now the pretense could be plausibly maintained that it was a work in progress rather than a total bust. It wasn’t as if anyone else had solved the targeted nonviral delivery problem, after all. It was a hard problem. Or so Derek could say, in all truth, and did so whenever anyone was inconsiderate enough to bring the matter up. Whiners on the company’s website chat room could be ignored as always.
Analysts on Wall Street, however, and in the big pharmaceuticals, and in relevant venture capital firms, could not be ignored. And while they weren’t saying anything directly, investment money started to go elsewhere. Torrey Pines’ stock fell, and because it was falling it fell some more, and then more again. Biotechs were fluky, and so far Torrey Pines had not generated any potential cash cows. They remained a start-up. Fifty-one million dollars was being swept under the rug, but the big lump in the rug gave it away to anyone who remembered what it was. No—Torrey Pines Generique was in trouble.
In Leo’s lab they had done what they could. Their job had been to get certain cell lines to become unnaturally prolific protein factories, and they had done that. Delivery wasn’t their part of the deal, and they weren’t physiologists, and now they didn’t have the wherewithal to do that part of the job. Torrey Pines needed a whole different wing for that, a whole different field of science. It was not an expertise that could be bought for $51 million. Or maybe it could have been, but Derek had bought defective expertise. And because of that, a multibillion-dollar cash-cow method was stalled right on the brink, and the whole company might go under.
Nothing Leo could do about it. He couldn’t even publish his results.
The Quiblers’ small house was located at the end of a street of similar houses. All of them stood blankly, blinds drawn, no clues given as to who lived inside. They could have been empty for all an outsider could tell: they could have been walled compounds in Saudi Arabia, hiding their life from the desert.
Walking these streets with Joe on his back, Charlie assumed that these houses were mostly owned by people who worked in the District, people who were always either working or on vacation. Their homes were places to sleep. Charlie had been that way himself before the boys had arrived. That was how people lived in Bethesda.
So he walked to the grocery store shaking his head as he always did. “It’s like a ghost town, Joe, it’s like some Twilight Zone episode in which we’re the only two people left on Earth.”
Then they rounded the corner, and all thought of ghost towns was rendered ridiculous. Shopping center. They walked into a giant Giant grocery store. Joe, excited by the place as always, stood up in his baby backpack, his knees on Charlie’s shoulders, and whacked Charlie on the ears as if he were directing an elephant. Charlie reached up, lifted him around and stuffed him into the baby seat of the grocery cart, then strapped him down with the cart’s little red seat belt. A very useful feature.
Okay. Buddhists coming to dinner. He had no idea what to cook. He assumed they were vegetarians. It was not unusual for Anna to invite people from NSF to dinner and then be somewhat at a loss as to the meal itself. Charlie liked that; he enjoyed cooking, though he was not good at it.
Now he decided to resuscitate an old recipe from their student years, pasta with an olive and basil sauce that a friend had first cooked for them in Italy. He wandered the familiar aisles of the store, looking for the ingredients. Joe’s presence disguised his tendency to talk to himself in public spaces. “Okay, whole peeled tomatoes, pitted kalamatas, olive oil extra virgin first cold press, it’s the first press zat really matter,” slipping into their friend’s Italian accent, “but you must never keel ze pasta, my God! Oh and bread. And wine, but not more than we can carry home, huh Joe.”
With groceries tucked into the backpack pocket under Joe’s butt, and slung in plastic bags from both hands, Charlie walked Joe back along the empty street to their house. Their street dead-ended in a little triangle of trees next to Woodson Avenue, a feeder road that poured its load of cars onto Wisconsin south. An old four-story apartment block wrapped around their backyard like a huge brick sound barrier, its stacked windows like a hundred live webcasts streaming all at once, daily lives that were much too partial and mundane to be interesting. No Rear Window here, and thank God for that. Each nuclear family in its domicile was inside its own pocket universe, millions of them scattered over the surface of the planet, like the dots of light in nighttime satellite photos.
On this night, however, the bubble containing the Quiblers was breached. Visitors, aliens! When the doorbell rang they almost didn’t recognize the sound.
Anna was occupied with Joe and a diaper upstairs, so Charlie left the kitchen and hurried through the house to answer the door. Four men in off-white cotton pants and shirts stood on the stoop, like visitors from Calcutta, except their vests were the maroon color Charlie associated with Tibetan monks. Joe had run to the top of the stairs, and he grabbed a banister to keep his balance, agog at the sight of them. In the living room Nick was struck shy, his nose quickly back into his book, but he was glancing over the top of it frequently as the strangers were ushered in around him. Charlie offered them drinks, and they accepted beers, and when he came back with those, Anna and Joe were downstairs and had joined the fun. Two of their visitors sat on the living room floor, laughing off Anna’s offer of the little couches, and they all put their beer bottles on the coffee table.
The oldest monk and the youngest one leaned back against the radiator, down at Joe’s level, and soon they were engaged with his vast collection of blocks—a heaping mound of plain or painted cubes, rhomboids, cylinders, and other polygons, which they quickly assembled into walls and towers, working with and around Joe’s Godzillalike interventions.
The young one, Drepung, answered Anna’s questions directly, and also translated for the oldest one, named Rudra Cakrin. He was the official ambassador of Khembalung, but while he was without English, apparently, his two middle-aged associates, Sucandra and Padma Sambhava, spoke it pretty well—not as well as Drepung, but adequately.
These two followed Charlie back out into the kitchen and stood there, beer bottles in hand, talking to him as he cooked. They stirred the unkilled pasta to keep the pot from boiling over, checked out the spices in the spice rack, and stuck their noses deep into the saucepot, sniffing with great interest and appreciation. Charlie found them surprisingly easy to talk to. They were about his age. Both had been born in Tibet, and both had spent years, they did not say how many, imprisoned by the Chinese, like so many other Tibetan Buddhist monks. They had met in prison, and after their release they had crossed the Himalayas and escaped Tibet together, afterward making their way gradually to Khembalung.
“Amazing,” Charlie kept saying to their stories. He could not help but compare them to his own relatively straightforward passage through the years. “And now after all that, you’re getting flooded?”
“Many times,” they said in unison. Padma, still sniffing Charlie’s sauce as if it were the perfect ambrosia, elaborated. “Used to happen only every eighteen years or about, moon tides, you know. We could plan it happening, and be prepared. But now, whenever the monsoon hits hard.”
“Also every month at moontide,” Sucandra added. “Certainly three, four times a year. No one can live that way for long. If it gets worse, then the island will no longer be habitable. So we came here.”
Charlie shook his head, tried to joke: “This place may be lower in elevation than your island.”
They laughed politely. Not the funniest joke. Charlie said, “Listen, speaking of elevation, have you talked to the other low-lying countries?”
Padma said, “Oh yes, we are part of the League of Drowning Nations, of course. Charter member.”
“Headquarters in The Hague, near the World Court.”
“Very appropriate,” Charlie said. “And now you are establishing an embassy here …”
“To argue our case, yes.”
Sucandra said, “We must speak to the hyperpower.”
The two men smiled cheerily.
“Well. That’s very interesting.” Charlie tested the pasta to see if it was ready. “I’ve been working on climate issues myself, for Senator Chase. I’ll have to get you in to talk to him. And you need to hire a good firm of lobbyists.”
They regarded him with interest. Padma said, “You think it best?”
“Yes. Definitely. You’re here to lobby the U.S. government, and there are pros in town to help foreign governments do that. I’ve got a good friend working for one of the better firms, I’ll put you in touch with him.”
Charlie slipped on potholders and lifted the pasta pot over to the sink, tipped it into the colander until it was overflowing. Always a problem with their little colander, which he never thought to replace except at moments like this. “I think my friend’s firm already represents the Dutch on these issues—oops—so it’s a perfect match. They’ll be knowledgeable about your problems.”
They nodded. “Thank you for that. We will enjoy that.”
They took the food into the little dining room, which was a kind of corner in the passageway between kitchen and living room, and with a great deal of to-and-froing all of them just managed to fit around the dining room table. Joe consented to a booster seat to get his head up to the level of the table, where he shoveled baby food industriously into his mouth or onto the floor, as the case might be, narrating the process all the while in his own tongue. Sucandra and Rudra Cakrin had seated themselves on either side of him, and they watched his performance with pleasure. Both attended to him as if they thought he was speaking a real language. They ate in a style that was not that dissimilar to his, Charlie thought—absorbed, happy, shoveling it in. The sauce was a hit with everyone but Nick, who ate his pasta plain.
Charlie got up and followed Anna out to the kitchen when she went to get the salad. He said to her under his breath, “I bet the old man speaks English too.”
“What?”
“It’s like in that Ang Lee movie, remember? The old man pretends not to understand English, but really he does? It’s like that I bet.”
Anna shook her head. “Why would he do that? It’s a hassle, all that translating. It doesn’t give him any advantage.”
“You don’t know that! Watch his eyes, see how he’s getting it all.”
“He’s just paying attention. Don’t be silly.”
“You’ll see.” Charlie leaned in to her conspiratorially: “Maybe he learned English in an earlier incarnation.”
“Quit it,” she said, laughing her low laugh. “You learn to pay attention like that.”
“Oh and then you’ll believe I understand English?”
“That’s right yeah.”
They returned to the dining room, laughing, and found Joe holding forth in a language anyone could understand, a language of imperious gesture and commanding eye, and the assumption of authority in the world. Which worked like a charm over them all, even though he was babbling.
After the salad they returned to the living room and settled around the coffee table again. Anna brought out tea and cookies. “We’ll have to have Tibetan tea next time,” she said.
The Khembalis nodded uncertainly.
“An acquired taste,” Drepung suggested. “Not actually tea.”
“Bitter,” Padma said appreciatively.
“You can use as blood coagulant,” Sucandra said.
Drepung added, “Also we add yak butter to it, aged until a bit rancid.”
“The butter has to be rancid?” Charlie said.
