Distraction

“I would never think that, Albert.”

“I feel personally very sorry that you should be subject to this kind of harassment. It’s an honor to help you, really.”

Oscar nodded. “I appreciate, that sentiment. It’s good of you to take me in. I’ll try not to get in the way of your labwork.”

Dr. Gazzaniga led him down an aisle past seven bu

“I see.”

Gazzaniga shrugged beneath his lint-free labcoat. “That whole gene-technology scare tactic — the giant towers, the catacombs, the airlocks, the huge sealed dome — I guess that made a lot of political sense in the old days, but it was always a naive idea basically, and now it’s very old-fashioned. Except for a few classified military apps, the Collaboratory gave up on survivable bugs ages ago. There’s nothing growing inside the Hot Zone that could hurt you. Genetic engineer-ing is a very stable field of practice now, it’s fifty years old. In terms of bugs, we use only thermo extremophiles. Germs native to volcanic environments. Very efficient, high metabolism, and good industrial turnover, and of course they’re very safe. Their metabolism doesn’t function at all, under 90° C. They live off sulfur and hydrogen, which you’d never find inside any human bloodstream. Plus, all our stocks are double knockouts. So even if you literally bathed in those bugs — well, you might well get scalded, but you’d never risk infection or genetic bleed-over.”

“That sounds very reassuring.”

“Greta’s a professional. She’s a stickler for good lab procedure. No, more than that — the lab is where she really shines personally. She’s very strong in neurocomputational math, don’t get me wrong there — but Greta’s one of the great hands-on lab fiends. She can do stuff with STM probes like nobody else in the world. And if we could just get her hands on some decent thixotropic centrifuges instead of this Stone Age rotor crap, we’d be really kicking ass in here.”

Gazzaniga was on a roll now. He was visibly trembling with passionate commitment. “In publishable papers per man-hour, this is the most productive lab in Buna. We’ve got the talent, and Greta’s lab krewe is second to none. If we could only get proper resources, there’s no telling what we could accomplish here. Neuroscience is really breaking open right now, the same way genetics did forty years ago, or computers forty years before that. The sky’s the limit, really.”

“What is it, exactly, that you’re doing in here?”

“Well, in layman’s terms…”

“Never mind that, Albert. Just tell me about your work.”

“Well, basically, we’re still following up her Nobel Prize results. That was all about glial neurochemical gradients evoking attentional modulation. It was the biggest neurocognitive breakthrough in years, so there’s a lot of open field for us to run in now. Karen there is working on phasic modulation and spiking frequency. Yung-Nien is our token cognition wizard in the krewe, she does stochastic resonance and rate-response modeling. And Serge over yonder is your basic receptor-mechanic, he’s working on dendritic transformer up-takes. The rest of these people are basically postdoc support staff, but you never know, when you work with Greta Pe

“And what is Dr. Pe

“Well, you can ask her that yourself!” Greta had arrived. Gaz-zaniga tactfully absented himself.

Oscar apologized for having interrupted her work.

“No, that’s all right,” Greta said serenely. “I’m going to make the time for you. I think it’s worth it.”

“That’s very broad-minded of you.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

Oscar gazed about her laboratory. “It’s odd that we should meet inside a place like this… I can tell that this locale suits you per-fectly, but for me, this has such a strong personal resonance… Can we talk privately here?”

“My lab is not bugged. Every surface in here is sterilized twice a week. Nothing as large as a listening device could possibly survive in here.” She noticed his skeptical reaction, and changed her mind. She reached out and turned a switch on a homogenizer, which began to make a comforting racket.

Oscar felt much better. They were still in plain sight, but at least the noise would drown audio eavesdropping. “Do you know how I define ‘politics,’ Greta?”

She looked at him. “I know that politics means a lot of trouble for scientists.”

“Politics is the art of reconciling human aspirations.”

She considered this. “Okay. So?”

“Greta, I need you to level with me. I need to find some reason-able people who can testify in the upcoming Senate hearing. The standard talking heads from senior management just won’t do anymore. I need people with some street-level awareness of what’s really going on at this facility.”

“Why ask me? Why don’t you ask Cyril Morello or Warren Titche? Those guys have tons of time for political activism.”

Oscar was already very aware of Morello and Titche. They were two of Collaboratory’s grass-roots community leaders, though as yet they were quite unaware of that fact. Cyril Morello was the assistant head of the Human Resources Department, a man who through his consistently self-defeating, anti-careerist actions had won the trust of the Collaboratory rank and file. Warren Titche was the lab’s vociferous token radical, a ragged-elbowed zealot who fought for bike racks and cafeteria menus as if failure meant nuclear holo-caust.

“I’m not asking you for a list of specific gripes. I have a long list of those already. What I need is, well, how shall I put this… The spin, the big picture. The pitch. The Message. You see, the new Con-gress has three brand-new Senators on the Science Committee. They lack the in-depth experience of the Committee’s very, very long-serving former chairman, Senator Dougal of Texas. It’s really an en-tirely new game in Washington now.”

Greta glanced surreptitiously at her watch. “Do you really think this is going to help anything?”

“I’ll cut to the chase. Let me put a simple question to you. Let’s assume you have absolute power over federal science policy, and can have anything you please. Give me the blue-sky version. What do you want?”

“Oh! Well!” She was interested now. “Well, I guess… I’d want American science to be just like it was in the Golden Age. That would be in the Communist Period, during Cold War One. You see, back in those days, if you had a strong proposal, and you were ready to work, you could almost always swing decent, long-term federal fund-ing. ”

“As opposed to the nightmare you have now,” Oscar prompted. “Endless paperwork, bad accounting, senseless ethics hassles…”

Greta nodded reflexively. “It’s hard to believe how far we’ve fallen. Science funding used to be allocated by peer review from within the science community. It wasn’t doled out by Congress in pork-barrel grants for domestic political advantage. Nowadays, scien-tists spend forty percent of their working time mooching around for funds. Life in science was very direct, in the good old days. The very same person who swung the grant would do her own benchwork and write up her own results. Science was a handicraft, really. You’d have scientific papers written by three, four co-authors-never huge krewes of sixty or eighty, like we’ve got now.”

“So it’s economics, basically,” Oscar coaxed.

She leaned forward tautly. “No, it’s much deeper than that. Twentieth-century science had an entirely different arrangement. There was understanding between the government and the science community. It was a frontier mentality. Those were the gold-rush days. National Science Foundation. NIH. NASA. ARPA … And the science agencies held up their end of the deal. Miracle drugs, plastics, whole new industries… people literally flew to the moon!”