“Right, I remember. He was the guy who was supposed to get shot.”
“That’s right,” said Mariel. “He certainly seems to be a lucky young man.”
Berman looked up and fixed Mariel with a stare. Was she messing with him? He knew that Mariel was fully aware of his unrequited interest in Pia, and he knew with ever greater certainty that his brief affair with Mariel had been a mistake, a big mistake. She had latched on to him like a limpet and had taken some shaking off, despite the chasm in status between the two of them at work. Mariel had been spurned, but he was certain she was hoping that passion would be rekindled, and if so, she would come back to him in a second.
Berman would have liked nothing more than to fire Mariel so he wouldn’t have to be continually reminded of his mistake, but no one knew more about Nano’s medical nanotechnology program than she did. The sum total of everything she knew about Berman and Nano could be dangerous to him, so he was constantly walking a tightrope with her. Perhaps one day he’d jump off, but not today. Berman wondered why Mariel couldn’t be as mature as Whitney Jones. Whitney knew the working relationship they had was too important to jeopardize over something as frivolous as a few rolls in the hay.
“Do you want to go and see her?” Mariel broke the uncomfortable silence. “When I left her, which wasn’t that long ago, she was in the lab with the young man checking on some of her experiments. Perhaps she is still there.”
“How are those experiments going?” Zach was well aware of what Pia was doing and was impressed, which only fanned his desire. She was erotically gorgeous and smart, both qualities Zach found irresistible, especially in the same person.
“Seems they’re going well. So far no suggestion of any immune response. But they are not over.”
“Right,” Zachary said. He got to his feet. “I need to talk to her about the flagellum issue. Now that she’s been making such progress on the biocompatibility problem, she needs to get cracking on what she was initially hired for.”
“Of course,” said Mariel, backing away to let the onrushing Berman past. She knew the real reason he wanted to get down to Pia’s lab, and she set off slowly behind her boss, letting him charge ahead. In his eagerness he was soon out of sight. “Men, they are so predictable,” she muttered disparagingly.
When she got back to the lab where Pia worked, she found Berman standing alone in the center of the room, holding a file.
“She left,” he said. “What does this mean?” Berman handed the file to Mariel. She was well aware of Pia’s ongoing experiments — she had helped to design the protocol herself for most of them.
“It is a summary to date of what is currently running. As you can see, everything is negative for any suggestion of an immune reaction, which is encouraging. The new microbivore design with the polyethylene glycol molecules incorporated into the outer shell apparently is a stroke of genius. Obviously, Pia was right, and I think we should use it you know where.”
Mariel might not have been the easiest person to get along with, but she was honest to a fault. She disliked Pia not only because of Pia’s signature aloofness but also because Berman was so obviously physically attracted to her and not to Mariel. She also knew that Berman’s ardor was fueled by Pia’s rejection of him, meaning he wanted what he couldn’t have. Although Pia was a reminder to Mariel that Zach had rejected her, she was able to give Pia credit for her intelligence.
“If these positive results continue,” Berman said, “I think we can start considering moving to mammals for safety studies.”
Mariel studied Berman’s face. It appeared as though he had forgotten momentarily about Pia. She recognized his expression — he had it every time they made a step toward the major breakthrough they sought. The look on Berman’s face suggested more to Mariel than just excited anticipation of a seriously profitable business accomplishment, it was almost yearning.
CHAPTER 5
Pia sat on her couch, going over a copy of the same results Mariel and Berman had just seen while George took a shower. The results were certainly favorable, enough so that she anticipated she’d soon be encouraged if not forced to return to the flagellum conundrum, and her mind wandered to it. Her intuition told her that it was not going to be as easy to solve as the biocompatibility problem. As she had explained to George, the flagellum issue was more of a mechanical problem, and she thought the solution would have to be mechanical, too. Pia had developed a clear picture in her mind of the battle that would take place in the body between the bacteria and her beloved nanorobots.
“What’s the figure again, ten to the minus nine?” George’s question disturbed Pia’s concentration. George might as well have clashed cymbals together, and Pia literally jumped at the intrusion. In the eighteen months she’d been in Boulder, Pia had never had company in her apartment.
Pia shot a quick glance over to see George standing in the doorway, loosely wrapped in her only large bath towel. She’d put out a hand towel, of which she had several, and apparently it wasn’t adequate. Pia had a thing about her space and her stuff. In foster care she’d always had to fight for both.
“A nanometer is what size?” George continued.
“Yes, that’s right, a billionth of a meter,” Pia responded. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. She found the towel issue irritating; she was irritated he was there at all. What the hell was she going to do with him until Tuesday?
“I was really blown away when you described the relationship of a nanometer to a meter being the equivalent of a marble to the size of the earth. And when you said human fingernails grow at a rate of a nanometer a second. I really have an appreciation of how small a nanometer really is.”
“I’m glad,” Pia said with a hint of sarcasm that was lost on George.
“Before today I really didn’t know anything about nanotechnology. And you say in a few years, fifteen percent of everything manufactured will use nanotechnology in some form or fashion?”
“Maybe within three years. In 2011 nanotechnology had already spiked to over fifty billion dollars a year worldwide. Now it is around seventy billion.”
“And who’s regulating it?’
Pia drummed her fingers absently on the arm of the couch. Social and political issues about nanotechnology didn’t interest her. For her it was all science, extraordinarily promising science.
“I don’t know, George. I don’t think there’s any real regulation. I mean, who cares whether tennis racket frames are lighter and stronger. I certainly don’t.”
“I’m thinking more about those nanoparticles you mentioned in the car on the way back from Nano: the buckyballs and nanotubes. As small as they are, I imagine they’d be absorbed through the lungs, maybe even through the skin. Seems to me that health and environmental issues should be considered, especially if they are as stable as you described.”
“You’re probably right,” Pia conceded, but her mind was already back on the flagellum issue. A mechanical solution was beginning to germinate in her mind.
“And the microbivores that you are working with. Are they safe do you think?”
Pia rolled her eyes as her incipient creative thoughts fled from her consciousness under George’s persistent questioning. “Proving microbivores safe is what I’ve been doing for the last eighteen months.”