They all despised him. There were frequent discussions about why Ray Hough had let him in the lab in the first place. Finally somebody asked Ray about it, and he said, “He’s my wife’s cousin. And nobody else would take him.”
“Come on, people,” Minot said, “nobody works this late in this lab, and here you all are.” Waving his hands again.
Jenny snorted disdainfully. “Hand-waver.”
“I heard that,” Minot said. “Meaning what?”
Jenny turned her back on him.
“Meaning what? Don’t turn your back on me.”
Peter went over to Danny. “A hand-waver,” he said, “is somebody who hasn’t worked out his ideas and can’t defend them. So when he presents at a colloquium, and he comes to the parts he hasn’t worked out, he starts waving his hands and talking fast. Like the way someone waves their hands and says, ‘Et cetera, et cetera.’ In science, hand-waving means you don’t have the goods.”
“Not what I am doing here,” Minot said, waving his hand. “The semiotics are completely garbled.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But as Derrida said, techno-translation is so difficult. I am attempting to indicate all of you in a gestural mode of inclusiveness. What’s going on?”
“Don’t tell him,” Rick said, “or he’ll want to come.”
“Of course I want to come,” Minot said. “I am the chronicler of life in this lab. I must come. Where are you going?”
Peter briefly told him the entire story.
“Oh yes, I am definitely coming. The intersection of science and commerce? The corruption of golden youth? Oh definitely-I’ll be there.”
Peter was getting a cup of coffee from the machine in the corner of the lab when Erika walked over. “What are you doing later?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“I thought maybe I could stop by tonight.”
She was staring right at him. Something about the directness of her manner put him off. “I don’t know, Erika,” he said, “I might be working here late.” Thinking: I haven’t seen you for three weeks, since the last time.
“I’m almost finished, myself,” she said. “And it’s only nine o’clock.”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“It doesn’t appeal to you, my offer?” She was still staring at him, scanning his face.
“I thought you were seeing Amar.”
“I like Amar, very much. He is very intelligent. I like you too. I always have.”
“Maybe we’ll talk later,” he said, pouring milk in his coffee, and moving away so quickly that it spilled a little.
“I hope so,” she said.
“Trouble with your coffee?” Rick Hutter said, glancing up at Peter and grinning. Under a halogen lamp, Rick was holding a rat upside down, measuring its swollen rear paw with a small caliper.
“No,” Peter said, “I was just, uh, surprised at how hot it was.”
“Uh-huh. I’d say, surprisingly hot.”
“Is that a carageenen prep?” Peter said, changing the subject. Carageenen was the usual method to produce edema in the paw of a lab animal. It was a standardized animal model for edema, employed in labs around the world to study inflammation.
“Correct,” Rick said. “I injected carageenen, making the paw swollen. Then I wrapped the foot in an extract from the bark of Himatanthus sucuuba, a medium-size rain-forest tree, and now we are-hopefully-demonstrating its anti-inflammatory properties. I already demonstrated it for the tree’s latex. Himatanthus is an extremely versatile tree, it heals wounds and cures ulcers. The shamans in Costa Rica say this tree also has antibiotic, anti-fever, anti-cancer, and anti-parasite qualities, but I haven’t tested those claims yet. Certainly the bark extract has reduced this rat’s swelling remarkably fast.”
“You determined what chemicals are responsible for the anti-inflammatory response?”
“Researchers in Brazil attribute it to alpha-amyrin cinnamate and other cinnamate compounds, but I haven’t verified that yet.” Rick finished measuring the rat, set it down in the cage, and typed in a measurement and time in his laptop. “Tell you one thing, though: extracts from the tree appear to be completely nontoxic. One day you might even be able to give this to pregnant women. Huh, look at that.” He pointed to the rat as it moved around the cage. “It’s not limping at all anymore.”
Peter slapped him on the back. “Better be careful,” he said, “or you’ll have some pharmaceutical company beating you to your results.”
“Hey, I’m not worried. If those guys were really in the business of developing drugs, they’d already be working on this tree,” Rick said. “But why should they take the risk? Let the American taxpayer fund the research, let some graduate student spend months to make the discovery, and then they swoop in and buy it up from the university. And then they sell our discovery back to us, at full price. Sweet deal, huh?” He was starting to wind up for one of his tirades. “I tell you, these Goddamned pharma-”
“Rick,” Peter said, “I’ve got to go.”
“Oh sure, yeah. Nobody wants to hear it, I know.”
“I have to spin down my naja venom.”
“No problem.” Rick hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at Erika. “Listen, it’s none of my business-”
“That’s right, it’s not-”
“But I hate to see a good guy like you fall into the clutches of somebody who is…well…Anyway, you met my friend Jorge, who does computer science at MIT? If you want to know what’s really going on with Erika, call this number-” he handed Peter a card-“and Jorge will access her phone records, including voice and text messages, and you can find out the truth about her, uh, promiscuous ways.”
“Is that legal?”
“No. But it’s damn useful.”
“Thanks anyway,” Peter said, “but-”
“No, no, keep it,” Rick insisted.
“I won’t use it.”
“You never know,” Rick said. “Phone records don’t lie.”
“Okay.” It was easier to keep the card than argue. He slipped it in his pocket.
“By the way,” Rick said, “about your brother…”
“What about him?”
“You think he’s on the level?”
“About his company?”
“Yeah, Nanigen.”
“I think so,” Peter said. “But to be honest I don’t know a lot about it.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“He’s been pretty secretive about the whole thing.”
“But you think it’s innovative?”
Yes, I think it’s innovative, Peter thought, peering through the scanning microscope. He was looking again at the white pebble, or micro-bot, or whatever the thing was. Trying to account for his brother’s explanation that it wasn’t a cockpit but just a slot for a micro-power-pack, or a control unit. It didn’t look like a slot for anything. It looked like a seat facing a tiny, highly detailed control panel.
He was still puzzling over this when he became aware that the lab around him had become absolutely silent. He looked up, and saw that the microscope was also displaying on a large flat-panel screen mounted on the wall. Everybody in the lab was staring at it.
“What the hell is that?” Rick said.
“I don’t know.” Peter flicked off the monitor. “And we’re not going to find out, unless we go to Hawaii.”
Chapter 3
Maple Avenue, Cambridge 27 October, 6:00 a.m.
One by one, all seven of the graduate students decided to take Vin Drake up on his offer. They collected data, they wrote out descriptions of their research, and they sent letters and information to Alyson Bender at Nanigen. One by one, they were informed that Nanigen would fly them to Hawaii; and for simplicity they would travel as a group. As October ran to its end, their days were devoted to preparations for departure. All seven had a lot to do-finishing experiments, getting their research projects in shape to leave them for a while, and, of course, packing. They planned to leave early on a Sunday morning out of Boston’s Logan Airport, with a connection through Dallas, arriving in Honolulu that same afternoon. They would, by general agreement, stay four days, returning toward the end of the week.