Oscar visited the suspect in his cell. His would-be assassin was disheveled and wretched, utterly lost, with the awful cosmic disloca-tion of the seriously mentally ill. Oscar felt a sudden unexpected pang of terrible pity. It was very clear to him that this man had no focused malice. The poor wretch had simply been hammered into his clumsy evildoing through a ceaseless wicked pelting of deceptive net-based spam. Oscar found himself so shocked by this that he blurted out his instinctive wish that the man might be set free.
The local cops were wisely having none of that, however. They had called the Secret Service office in Austin. Special agents would be arriving presently to thoroughly interrogate Mr. Spencer, and dis-creetly take him elsewhere.
The very next day, another lethal crank showed up. This gen-tleman, Mr. Bell, was cleverer. He had attempted to hide himself in-side a truck shipment of electrical transformers. The truck driver had noticed the lunatic darting out from beneath a tarp, and had called security. A frantic chase ensued, and the stowaway was finally found burrowing desperately into a tussock of rare marsh grass, still gamely clutching a homemade black-powder pistol.
The advent of the third man, Mr. Anderson, was the worst by far. When caught lurking inside a dumpster, Anderson screamed loudly about flying saucers and the fate of the Confederacy, while slashing at his arms with a razor. This bloodshed was very shocking, and it made Oscar’s position difficult.
It was clear that he needed a safe house. And the safest area inside the Collaboratory was, of course, the Hot Zone.
The interior of the Hot Zone was rather less impressive than its towering china-white shell. The Zone was a very odd environment, since every item inside the structure had been designed to withstand high-pressure cleansing with superheated steam. The interior decor consisted of poreless plastics, acid-resistant white ceramic benchtops, bent-tubing metal chairs, and grainy nonslip floors. The Hot Zone was simultaneously deeply strange and profoundly mundane. After all, it wasn’t a fairyland or a spacecraft, it was simply a set of facilities where people carried out certain highly specific activities under closely defined and extremely clean circumstances. People had been working in the place for fifteen years.
Inside the dressing room-cum-airlock, Oscar was required to shed his street clothes. He outfitted himself in a disposable paper labcoat, gloves, a bouffant cap, a mask, and sockless ankle-wrapping clean-room booties. Greta Penninger, swiftly appointing herself his unofficial hostess, sent a male lab gofer to take him in hand.
Dr. Penninger possessed a large suite of laboratory offices within a brightly lit warren known as Neurocomputational Studies. A plastic door identified her as GRETA V. PENNINGER, PRINCIPAL INVESTlGATOR, and behind that door was a brightly lit surgical theater. Yards of white tabletop. Safety treading. Drying racks. Safety film. Detergents. Bal-ances, fume hoods, graduated beakers. Hand pipettes. Centrifuges. Chromatographs. And a great many square white devices of utterly unknown function.
Oscar was met by Greta’s krewe majordomo, Dr. Albert Gaz-zaniga. Gazzaniga was the exemplar of what Oscar had come to recog-nize as “the Collaboratory look,” intense and yet strangely diffuse, like a racquetball player in Lotusland. Gazzaniga spent his working life in clean-room gear, and relaxed outside in rotting sneakers and khaki shorts. Gazzaniga had an eager, honest, backpack-wearing look about him. He was one of the few people in the Collaboratory who identi-fied himself as a Federal Democrat. Most politically active Col-laboratory people tended to be tedious, fuzzy Left Tradition Bloc types, party members of the Social Democrats or the Communists. It was rare to find one with enough grit and energy to take a solidly Reformist stance.
“So, what’s become of Dr. Penninger?”
“Oh, you mustn’t be offended, but she’s running a procedure now. She’ll be here when she’s good and done. Believe me, when Greta wants to concentrate, it’s always best to let her be.”
“That’s all right. I quite understand.”
“It’s not that she doesn’t take you seriously, you know. She’s very sympathetic to your situation. We’ve had troubles of our own with extremists. Animal rights people, vivisection nuts… I know we scientists lead very sheltered lives compared to you politicians, but we’re not entirely out-of-it here.”
“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 bunny-suited workers probing at their jello dishes. “I hope you don’t have the im-pression that Greta’s lab is a biohazard zone. We never work on any-thing hot in this lab. We wear this clean-gear strictly to protect our cultures from contamination.”
“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 Penninger. This is a world-famous lab. It’s a magnet. It’s got the right stuff. By the time she’s fifty or sixty, even her junior co-authors will be running neuro labs. ”