“And what is Dr. Penninger working on?”
“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!”
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 underpinnings. We have to live on pure prestige now, and that’s a very thin way to live.”
“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.”