2
T
HE RUMORS
about her weren't unfounded. She'd cobbled together some part-time tech work in Uppington's lab during the week, and on weekends she took the bus to Portsmouth and helped her father with odd jobs around the house. Her dad didn't climb ladders anymore, so she did a bit of roof work. She cleaned the gutters, although she wasn't quite as dexterous as she had been when she was a little girl. Her arms had been so thin then and her hands so small that she could snake in and out, cleaning debris from the tightest places. She patched slate, as well. She knew how to angle a hatchet to cut the edge accurately, and how to bore a hole in the stone with a punch and hammer. She liked it on the roof, even as the days grew colder. She liked balancing there, close to the November sky. She had worked too long with the animals underground. The views from the roof surprised and delighted her. How colorful and crisp the world looked from above, the gnarled crab apples with their shriveled fruit, the overgrown rhododendrons, the crumpled rivers of dead leaves. On top of the house she allowed herself to think Nanette was right. How little science seemed outside. How paltry the future looked next to the here and now.
“How's it going up there?” her father called from the ground.
“It's great,” she called back. “I've found my true calling. I'm going to be a roofer.”
She thought her father would laugh, but he surprised her with his strong words when she came down. “You aren't going to give up your research after all this time! Not after all the years that you've put in.”
She stood before him in her jeans and dirty sweater, and she shrugged. Her face was windburned and her lips were chapped. “I didn't know you cared so much about my work,” she said.
“All that time,” he reproached her, “all your training. You don't just throw all that away.” His admonition reminded her of the night she and Cliff, Feng and Mei, and Aidan and Aidan's old boyfriend Russell had gone to the Brattle Theater to see
Gone With the Wind.
They sat in the dark theater, nibbling malted milk balls and passing tubs of popcorn between them. She and Cliff had been a little irreverent and snickered at some of the melodramatic parts while Aidan and Feng hushed them. At the moment Scarlett cried to Ashley, “Take me away—there's nothing to keep us here!” Cliff and Robin shook with laughter.
“Shh!” Feng told them.
“Nothing?”
Ashley chided Scarlett, up on screen. “Nothing except honor.”
Cliff's soda went up his nose, and Robin buried her face in his sweater.
“This is the best part!” Aidan whispered furiously, whacking them.
“The best part or the worst part?” Cliff asked.
“Get ahold of yourself,” Aidan demanded, and he was only half kidding. “You're ruining it for me.”
“Don't you think this movie is just a tiny bit stupid?” Cliff asked, and that set Robin off again. There was no way around it; the two of them had the giggles and could not control themselves. Cliff grabbed Robin and they stumbled toward the exit even as Leslie Howard and Vivien Leigh locked lips. People started hissing at them. They were blocking the view of Ashley's fey blond head bent over Scarlett's dark hair.
“Help. Wait,” Robin yelped to Cliff.
Once through the door, they found themselves outside—not just out in the lobby, but outside the theater altogether. They'd ducked through the emergency exit and ended up on the street, clutching their coats in the cold.
“Damn,” said Cliff as they realized they'd left all their candy in the theater. There was nothing for it but to get ice cream. Ever after, whenever someone complained in the lab or made noises about leaving, Cliff and Robin would cry out, “‘There's nothing to keep me here!'” and then Feng and even Aidan would chime in: “‘Nothing? Nothing except honor.'”
Robin's father sounded like that now, carrying on about the time she'd spent, and what a shame it would be for her to quit—as if she'd trained to be a knight, and might now bring shame upon herself. Or would she be dishonoring him? He had always complained about her training because it took so long and paid so little and because no one in the family really understood what she did. On the other hand, he'd boasted, too. He was shocked she might even consider quitting.
But she had not given up. She joked during the day about chucking it all, but she woke up in the night. Like an alarm clock, her imagination rang and rang with possibilities.
In Cambridge, Larry and Wendy told her to be patient, to trust the slow accretion of scientific progress, the natural selection of ideas by which the false and unsupported fell away. “Look, if there's a problem, it'll come to the fore. It's inevitable,” Larry told her as they sipped tea in Tomas's apartment.
“You can only hide it for so long if your work is buggy,” Wendy said.
Tomas looked up from his sketch pad. “All things come to those who wait?” he ventured.
How long? Robin wondered. Eighteen months? Three years? How long before further experiments did not pan out and eager imitators reexamined Cliff's premises and faulty methods? Could Larry and Wendy really expect her to know the truth and suffer in silence?
Robin looked at her friends with some trepidation, then made her announcement. “I've called the Office for Research Integrity at NIH.”
“Good grief!” Larry yelled.
“Oh, please,” said Wendy.
“You called ORIS?” Larry asked as if he loathed the very word.
“Why? What's wrong with that?” asked Robin. “I spoke to Alan Hackett and sent them copies of my stuff.”
“You spoke to Hackett?” Larry exclaimed. “Robin, you have no idea what you're getting into.”
“Why didn't you come to us?” Wendy demanded.
“I hope you didn't tell him anything,” said Larry.
“Why would I speak to him if I didn't want to tell him anything?”
“You are very, very naïve,” Wendy reproved Robin.
“He's an ambulance chaser,” Larry said, “and an extremely dubious character.”
“He's a respected scholar.”
“A respected scholar twenty years ago.”
“He's testified before Congress . . .”
“Ha,” said Larry. “He's a professional ruiner of reputations and of lives.”
“Haven't you read his paper on Dillmore?” Wendy asked.
“No.”
“He spent a year dissecting Richard Dillmore's paper in
Science
so that he could publish a detailed attack on Dillmore's methods, his data analysis, his supervision of students, and his character.”
“He did one piece of good work,” allowed Wendy. “The exposé of the Fienberg affair . . .”
“Excuse me, what is the Fienberg affair?” Tomas asked.
Wendy turned to him. “You haven't heard of Leonard Fienberg?”
“Actually, you of all people will appreciate this, since you're an artist,” Larry told Tomas. “Leonard Fienberg was a researcher who faked his results by painting his mice. He wanted to show he could graft white skin onto brown mice and brown skin onto white mice, so he painted the animals the appropriate colors.”
“He actually painted the tummies of the mice,” said Wendy.
“Paint-by-numbers science,” Tomas said.
“Exactly, and Hackett exposed him, back in eighty, and he's been living off the glory ever since. They gave him a desk at the NIH, and a phone. He's not a researcher, Robin. You know that, right? He's not a thinker. He's just a . . . a . . .”
“A hack,” said Wendy.
“He's like an undertaker. He has no interest in constructive work; he just sits there looking for weaknesses, dissecting journal articles for his postmortems. He sees fraud everywhere. Fraud is his obsession. He actually feeds off the public mistrust of science.”
“He's more like a vampire,” said Wendy.
“Does he sleep in a coffin?” Tomas asked. “Does he wake the dead?” Almost unconsciously he had begun sketching a cadaverous figure, long toothed, with claws for hands, a caped man rising from a tomb, his lips dripping with blood.
“He's not creative,” Wendy declared.
“I disagree,” said Larry. “He's extremely creative. How else could he and Schneiderman come up with all this stuff? I'm telling you, the two of them sit around all day handpicking journal articles so that they can bring the authors down.”
“They sounded completely professional on the phone,” said Robin, “and knowledgeable.”
“Of course they sound professional and knowledgeable,” said Larry. “That's their job. Listen, take my advice. Do not get started with them.”
“But why shouldn't I get started with them?” Robin blurted out. “They aren't some kind of crackpots. They're officials of the NIH.”
“No, no, no,” said Larry. “You don't understand. They are the official crackpots of the NIH. Everybody hates them.”
“Loathes them,” added Wendy.
“They look at you,” said Larry, “and they smell blood.”
“Mendelssohn and Glass?”
“No,
you.
See, you don't get the politics of the situation here. You would be the sacrificial lamb.”
Robin bristled. So Larry was an expert about this, too. He could see dark doings at NIH, even though he'd never done biological research in his life. “How is it you know so much about ORIS?”
“Richard Dillmore is a very close friend of mine,” Larry said. “And unfortunately I have an excellent understanding of what they did to him.”
“It's really Orwellian over there,” said Wendy.
“That isn't my impression,” said Robin.
“Robin, you've been living in a lab for ten years,” Larry admonished her. “You play with mice all day. You know nothing about the politics of science in this country.”
“It's really all about Big Brother watching you,” Wendy said.
“Excuse me.” Robin's cheeks burned with indignation. “If there were no ORIS, what recourse would I have? What could anyone ever do?”
“I'm sorry, but clearly you have no understanding of how ORIS works,” Larry said.
“Stop it, you guys. Stop!” Tomas cried out. “Stop picking on Robin. If she wants to bust someone for cheating, then let her!”
For a moment the other three sat in stunned silence. They had never heard Tomas raise his voice before. Even Tomas seemed surprised. “She can do what she wants.”
“We aren't picking on Robin,” Wendy said.
“We're trying to protect you,” Larry told her.
“Thank you, but I think I can take care of myself,” Robin said.
“Have you met with them face-to-face?” Larry asked. “Do you have a lawyer? Do you really have advisors? Have you done your homework?”
She'd known Larry and Wendy would disapprove, but she was shaken by their vehemence. How could she have known the two of them were experts on ORIS and its doings? Robin looked away, and caught the expression on Tomas's face—at once tender and frustrated. He wished he could help her, but he knew nothing about the NIH or scientific fraud. It was for Robin to defend her decision to Larry and Wendy, and especially to herself.
Larry and Wendy knew everything, but they did not understand her position. She had no money, no savings, scarcely any way to make her rent and keep her apartment. She had no standing in the scientific world, not even a proper affiliation anymore. She had only her discovery, her sole piece of intellectual property, the gap between Cliff's raw data and his published work. This was not jealousy, or falling out of love. This was knowledge of Cliff and what he'd done. They could warn her all they wanted; she'd broken through to her own chamber of discovery; she knew what she knew. She was no longer suffocating, weak and anguished with his success, but moving freely, beyond his gravitational field, fired by convictions of greater force. She knew he had misrepresented his findings, and even if that knowledge was awkward and inelegant, unacceptable, she would still trust and use her intuition.
She listened to her neighbors' dire warnings, and tried to remember Hackett's telephone voice: slightly metallic and precise, nerdy, much like Larry's own voice, in fact. He'd spoken to her with slight self-mockery.
“Well,” he'd told Robin after he'd received the photocopies she'd sent him, “this is all very interesting, of course. And I guess the best thing I can tell you is that we'll just have to wait and see what Jonathan says when he comes back to the office next week.”
“Jonathan Schneiderman,” she said.
“Yeah, that's right, Schneiderman. He tends to have a good nose for these things.”
“Akira probably mentioned me to him.”
“Ah, yes, Akira.” Hackett sighed.
Robin listened intently. She cared a great deal about what that sigh meant.
“He was a sad case,” said Hackett.
“He felt that Glass and Mendelssohn were trying to destroy him,” Robin said cautiously.
“Mmm, that's right. He did. But they weren't. He's a lovely guy, and we still talk now and again. Unfortunately, his view of the world is so conspiratorial, you have to take him with a grain of salt. To tell the truth, I didn't pay any attention when he called us about you.”
Robin's confidence in Hackett rose tenfold. “Do you have a sense of what might be going on in my case?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said laconically. “I mean, I have a
sense,
but you learn pretty early on in this business to look before you leap.”
Schneiderman was the forthcoming one. He had a deep, burly voice and a direct, pugnacious manner, magnified by the fact that he and Hackett used a speakerphone. Schneiderman sounded like a big bear at the bottom of a deep pit. “We'd like to meet with you,” he told Robin when he called the following week. “We'd like to set a date.”
“Do you ever come to Boston?” she asked.
“Do we ever come to Boston? We should. We should be traveling to Boston all the time. And to New York, and Pasadena, and everywhere in between. Unfortunately, we don't have the funds.”
“Ha.” That was Hackett in the background. “Just to be clear: this is a shoestring operation. We are engaging in ethics on a budget.”
“Is that possible?” Robin asked. “To do what you need to do?”
“It's necessary,” Schneiderman said firmly.
“If you'd asked me ten years ago whether this office was probable I would have said no,” said Hackett. “Now it turns out the improbable has become our area of expertise.”