Distraction

Oscar nodded. “Producing miracles,” he said. “That sounds like a steady line of work.”

“Sure, there was job security back then,” Greta said. “Tenure was nice, in particular. Have you ever heard of that old term ‘tenure’?”

“No,” Oscar said.

“It was all too good to last,” Greta said. “National government controlled the budgets, but scientific knowledge is global. Take the Internet — that was a specialized science network at first, but it ex-ploded. Now tribesmen in the Serengeti can log on directly over Chi-nese satellites.”

“So the Golden Age stopped when the First Cold War ended?” Oscar said.

She nodded. “Once we’d won, Congress wanted to redesign American science for national competitiveness, for global economic warfare. But that never suited us at all. We never had a chance.”

“Why not?” Oscar said.

“Well, basic research gets you two economic benefits: intellectual property and patents. To recoup the investment in R D, you need a gentlemen’s agreement that inventors get exclusive rights to their own discoveries. But the Chinese never liked ‘intellectual property.’ We never stopped pressuring them about the issue, and finally a major trade war broke out, and the Chinese just called our bluff. They made all English-language intellectual property freely available on their satel-lite networks to anybody in the world. They gave away our store for nothing, and it bankrupted us. So now, thanks to the Chinese, basic science has lost its economic underpi

“China bashing’s out of style this year,” Oscar said. “How about bashing the Dutch?”

“Yeah, Dutch appropriate-technology… The Dutch have been going to every island, every seashore, every low-lying area in the world, making billions building dikes. They’ve built an alliance against us of islands and low-lying states, they get in our face in every interna-tional arena… They want to reshape global scientific research for purposes of ecological survival. They don’t want to waste time and money on things like neutrinos or spacecraft. The Dutch are very troublesome.”

“Cold War Two isn’t on the agenda of the Senate Science Com-mittee,” Oscar said. “But it certainly could be, if we could build a national security case.”

“Why would that help?” Greta shrugged. “Bright people will make huge sacrifices, if you’ll just let them work on the things that really interest them. But if you have to spend your life grinding out results for the military, you’re just another cubicle monkey.”

“This is good!” Oscar said. “This is just what I was hoping for — a frank and open exchange of views.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You want me to be really frank, Oscar?”

“Try me.”

“What did the Golden Age get us? The public couldn’t handle the miracles. We had an Atomic Age, but that was dangerous and poisonous. Then we had a Space Age, but that burned out in short order. Next we had an Information Age, but it turned out that the real killer apps for computer networks are social disruption and soft-ware piracy. Just lately, American science led the Biotech Age, but it turned out the killer app there was making free food for nomads! And now we’ve got a Cognition Age waiting.”

“And what will that bring us — your brand-new Cognition Age?”

“Nobody knows. If we knew what the outcome would be in advance, then it wouldn’t be basic research.”

Oscar blinked. “Let me get this straight. You’re dedicating your life to neural research, but you can’t tell us what it will do to us?”

“I can’t know. There’s no way to judge. Society is too complex a phenomenon, even science is too complex. We’ve just learned so in-credibly much in the past hundred years… Knowledge gets frag-mented and ultraspecialized, scientists know more and more about less and less… You can’t make informed decisions about the social results of scientific advances. We scientists don’t even really know what we know anymore.”

“That’s pretty frank, all right. You’re frankly abandoning the field, and leaving science policy decisions to the random guesses of bureaucrats.”

“Random guesses don’t work either.”

Oscar rubbed his chin. “That sounds bad. Really bad. It sounds hopeless.”

“Then maybe I’m painting too dark a picture. There’s a lot of life in science — we’ve made some major historic discoveries, even in the past ten years.”

“Name some for me,” Oscar said.

“Well, we now know that eighty percent of the earth’s biomass is subterranean. ”

Oscar shrugged. “Okay.”

“We know there’s bacterial life in interstellar space,” Greta said. “You have to admit that was big.”

“Sure. ”

“There have been huge medical advances in this century. We’ve defeated most cancers. We cured AIDS. We can treat pseudo-estrogen damage,” Greta said. “We have one-shot cures for cocaine and heroin addiction.”

“Too bad about alcoholism, though.”

“We can regenerate damaged nerves. We’ve got lab rats smarter than dogs now.”

“Oh, and of course there’s cosmological torque,” Oscar said. They both laughed. It seemed impossible that they could have overlooked cosmological torque, even for an instant.

“Let me switch perspectives,” Oscar said. “Tell me about the Collaboratory. What’s your core competency here in Buna — what does this facility do for America that is unique and irreplaceable?”

“Well, there’s our genetic archives, of course. That’s what we’re world-famous for.”

“Hmmm,” Oscar said. “I recognize that gathering all those spec-imens from all around the world was very difficult and expensive. But with modern techniques, couldn’t you duplicate those genes and store them almost anywhere?”

“But this is the logical place for them. We have the genetic safety vaults. And the giant safety dome.”

“Do you really need a safety dome? Genetic engineering is safe and simple nowadays.”

“Well, sure, but if America ever needs a Class IV biowar facility, we’ve got one right here.” Greta stopped. “And we have first-class agricultural facilities. A lot of crop research goes on here. Overclass people still eat crops. They love our rare animals, too.”

“Rich people eat natural crops,” Oscar said.

“Our biotech research has built whole new industries,” Greta insisted. “Look at what we’ve done to transform Louisiana.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Do you think I should emphasize that in the Senate hearings?”

Greta looked glum.

Oscar nodded. “Let me level with you, Greta, just like you did with me. Let me tell you about the reception you might expect in today’s Congress. The country’s broke, and your administrative costs are through the roof You have well over two thousand people on the federal payroll here. You don’t generate any revenue yourselves — out-side of wi

“We’re protecting and securing the planet’s natural heritage,” Greta said. “We’re conservationists.”

“Come on. You’re genetic engineers, you have nothing to do with ‘nature.’ ”

“Senator Dougal never seemed to mind a steady flow of federal funds into Texas. We always have state support from the Texas delega-tion. ”

“Dougal is history,” Oscar said. “You know how many cyclo-trons the U.S. used to have?”

“ ‘Cyclotrons’?” Greta said.

“Particle accelerator, a kind of primitive, giant klystron,” Oscar said. “They were huge, expensive, prestigious federal laboratories, and they’re all long gone. I’d like to fight for this place, but we need compelling reasons. We need sound bites that the layman can under-stand. ”