But Kern's enthusiasm for the project had faded as the repetitious nightly work continued. He said his wife was badgering him to get home earlier. He said if they continued to work after hours on the project, it was just a matter of time before the lab's management found out. Kern said that, with just nineteen specimens, there wasn't much hope, anyway.
In reply, Tomlinson only smiled.
Now, on this Friday night, Tomlinson and Kern put on surgical booties, gloves, and masks before unlocking Room C. Kern switched on the lights and said, "Well, the crapshoot continues."
The light in the room was cold white, as sterile as the tile floors and walls.
In the far corner of the windowless room was the PCR machine-Genesis II, it was called. Genesis was a little high-tech box not much bigger than a stereo turntable, at the center of which were fifty uniform holes punched into aluminum stock to hold bullet-sized test tubes. There were wires and plastic programming keys. Cables connected the machine to computer monitors.
Kern found another key and knelt before the stainless specimen locker. "I'll get the samples out and you can set them in the machine. I think you know the procedure well enough."
Tomlinson said, "Sure, man. In fact, you want to go home to your wife, I think I can manage the wh amp;le thing. Except for maybe identifying the anomalous gene markers right off-"
"No kidding," Kern broke in dryly. "It only took me-what?- three or four years to get the hang of that."
"Hey, no doubt. It's a complicated gig. I'm not saying I don't need you, Kenny."
Kern took a rack containing twenty test tubes from the locker, stood, and said, "I know… I know. Same old Tomlinson. It gets to me, that's all."
"Like preparing the samples," Tomlinson said. "I didn't have a damn clue about that. Drilling to the bone cortex before taking samples. Doing all those little steps so neatly. Purifying, separating, all that stuff. Taking the strands and making them soluble in a water-based buffer. Like you said: Just add water, huh? Even from reading the books, I didn't know about any of that."
"The way you catch on to things so easily," Kern said. "That's what I mean." He was carrying the rack of test tubes across the room so carefully that the tubes might have been filled with hot tea. "It used to bother me. It did."
"Naw…"
"I don't mind being honest about it now. It's not a big deal anymore. Back in college, the way you always just cruised, but I had to work my ass off to keep up."
Tomlinson was surprised to hear that; a little saddened by it, too. "You were brilliant, man! Come on. Everybody said so."
"No, I'm gifted. And I'm a worker. At least, I was when I wasn't hanging out with you eating drugs." Kern was positioning test tubes in the Genesis machine as he talked, thinking in fragments as he did: Why am I telling this man these things? We were students together; now we're strangers… And maybe that's why…
Kern said, "But you, it was like you were born with a trillion bits of data and just needed your memory refreshed every now and then. Like writing all those papers for the journals when you were-what?-just a sophomore? Hell, I've got colleagues now who hold dinner parties when they're lucky enough to get published."
Tomlinson had the main computer on, checking the hardware before punching in the program they'd be using. "You think back, Kenny, you'll remember there was no cable television in those days. Sometimes a guy wakes up at three A.M. and just doesn't feel like watching static. And you always had that typewriter ready to go by the window. No shit, if we'd had 'Gilligan's Island' reruns back then, it woulda been a whole different story. The Skipper? Maryanne?" Hunched over the keyboard, Tomlinson snorted through his gauze mask. "My left hand pretended to be Maryanne so often that-when I hear the theme song?-the damn thing still jumps around like a cat. You shouldn't feel bad about that, Kenny."
"I don't. That's what I'm telling you. I look at what we ended up doing, the way we turned out. My life compared to your life." As the words left his mouth, Kern thought to himself, That's a damn cruel thing to say. Where is all this bitterness coming from? The pressure of running this damn department… the pressure of begging funds and grants every year… the strangeness of living with a woman I no longer even know… And he instantly felt miserable, wishing he could take it back. Wishing he could take back so many, many things.
But Tomlinson was nodding his head, dark goat's beard bobbing up and down as he threw an arm over Kern's shoulder and said, "Don't you be jealous about that, Kenny. You want to live on a sailboat, you should do it. This little bay where I'm anchored, Dinkin's Bay, there's plenty of room. I could introduce you around. Every day, when the fishing guides get back, we sit around the docks and drink beer. Me and this friend of mine… you'd like him. A dude named Ford. He's got a little lab, and he'd probably let you use it when you got the urge."
Kern touched the power button of the Genesis machine, and it began the slow work of cycling temperature up, then down, in preface to decoding the basic life structure of nineteen ancient lives. As he sat himself in the chair, Kern smiled a little and said softly, "Same old Tomlinson."
Four hours later, Tomlinson was taking a break. Sitting on the floor outside Room C, going through the papers he'd received from Ford that afternoon. Among the papers was the memoir of Do. d' Escalante Fontaneda, copied in the original archaic Spanish. In 1545, at the age of thirteen, Fontaneda had been shipwrecked off the southwest Florida coast and captured by the indigenous peoples-indios, or yndios, Fontaneda called them, though they later became known as the Calusa, or Caloosa, for they were dominated by a warrior chief the Spaniards called King Carlos. These were the people who had built the mounds.
Fontaneda lived among Carlos's people for seventeen years before he was finally rescued. Returned to Spain, he had produced the thin monograph from which Tomlinson's copy had been transcribed.
Through other reading, Tomlinson knew that Fontaneda had spent time on the mounds near what was now Mango-if not Mango itself, for it was possible that Mango had been that ancient nation's small capital, and home to Carlos. What Tomlinson wanted to determine was the approximate population of the Calusa in the year's Fontaneda had lived among them. Kern had hammered at the problem of crossbreeding, how it muddled up the genetic flags. Tomlinson hoped to present him with evidence that, year to year, the population of the Calusa was small, probably not more than a few thousand. Which meant there had to be a lot of inbreeding, generation after generation. To a geneticist, that would be good news. Maybe it would help renew Kern's interest in the project-the man seemed so irritable lately.
Legs crossed on the floor, Tomlinson translated as he read, going very, very slowly, sometimes checking other reference books to help him transcribe a line or a single unfamiliar word. Fontaneda had been a bright man, but he'd had little formal education because of the shipwreck, and, worse, he didn't have a writer's sense of sentence. The memoir was convoluted, a bear to read. So far, there had been no estimate of the population, only long lists of the food the Calusa ate (they were hunters and fishermen and divers, not farmers) and descriptions of the thatched common houses built atop the mounds-houses with woven walls upon which were hung the bizarre-looking masks of Calusa demons. It made Tomlinson smile, thinking that atop one mound a thatched house decorated with demons had been replaced by Tucker Gatrell's little ranch house with its rickety porch, brass spitoons, and empty beer bottles. Where the only demons on the wall were a few old photographs-one, a photograph of Marion Ford as a high school football player.