“Because you study improbable results,” Robin said, catching on.
“No,” Hackett demurred. “We're anthropologists, really. We study people, is all.”
“We study data,” Schneiderman told Robin, and his voice rumbled reassuringly like the idling motor of a car.
“But in fact, it comes down to human error,” Hackett said drily. “Human error, human intentions.”
“Our job,” said Schneiderman, “is to investigate possible misconduct, misrepresentations, and data manipulations, and this is where I think it would be extremely valuable for us to sit down with you, Robin, and really take apart your data.”
Your data,
she thought. How strange that now Cliff's data was in some respect hers.
Schneiderman continued, “I think that a face-to-face meeting on this could be of real value.”
There. He'd said it, and she held the word close. There was value in this enterprise. Her cause was not hopeless, or ill-founded, or imaginary. Hackett and Schneiderman were willing to meet with her—even they, who'd seen it all. She did not deceive herself that working with them would be easy, and yet she was hopeful at the prospect. She might gain a correction to the published journal article, or even an apology from Mendelssohn and Glass. There would be some value in saving time for other scientists who tried to reproduce Cliff's results. Saving them time, she might make a small contribution of her own. She could not be angry and alone forever. She would not let Marion write her off as incompetent even as Cliff fabricated his success. No, she would justify herself. And if she was naïve and foolish, if her actions were irresponsible, she would fight anyway.
“You have no idea what you're in for,” Larry warned her now, in Tomas's apartment. “They're just looking for new troublemakers, and if they take you on, you'll never be anything else. They'll ruin your life.”
Well, what if they did? Robin asked herself defiantly. Even then, she felt she could do worse than championing the truth.
3
A
S THE
weather grew colder, jollification in the lab increased. After Thanksgiving, Aidan and Natalya found a box of old pipettes and strung them up for the holidays. Blue, green, red, and orange, the pipettes dangled festively from the ceiling. Prithwish was going home to Sri Lanka in December to get married, and the others teased him mercilessly about it. They teased him about the girl, whom he scarcely seemed to know, about his telephone bills, about his journey home, even about the date set for the wedding. “How do we know you didn't pick the date to get out of work?” Cliff asked him.
“I told you I had nothing to say on the matter,” Prithwish replied airily. “Our parents chose the date and there was nothing we could do about it.”
“Yeah, but how did
they
pick the date?” Cliff asked with mock suspicion.
“Actually, it was our grandparents,” Prithwish corrected himself. “They chose the date according to our horoscopes.”
“You don't believe in horoscopes, do you?”
“No, of course not,” said Prithwish. “My parents don't either. They're both physicists, and they find horoscopes quite inconvenient.”
“So why use them, man?” Aidan burst out.
“My mom thinks that we should use the horoscopes just in case,” Prithwish said. “She thinks they are highly unlikely to be true, but she follows them on the off chance that they are.”
“You make no sense whatsoever,” said Cliff. “One day you're single, and then you come in with no warning, announce that you're engaged and I have to look for a new roommate.”
“Now you admit this is what you really care about,” Natalya told Cliff waspishly from the doorway. “You will have to look for someone else to share your rent. Selfish.”
“Thanks a lot,” Cliff retorted easily. He hadn't been thinking of his rent. He and Prithwish had lived together in cheerful squalor for three years, and Cliff really was going to miss his roommate. He had offered to share the apartment with Prithwish and his bride when she arrived—at least until the couple found a place of their own, but Prithwish didn't seem too eager, and continued to pore over rental ads in the newspapers spread across his bench top. “You'll leave me recipes, right?” Cliff asked plaintively.
The others laughed. Everyone knew Prithwish couldn't cook.
“What is it?” Feng asked as he came up from the animal facility.
Cliff and Prithwish laughed harder. Aidan wiped his eyes. It was so easy to laugh when the work was going well. A second major article on R-7 was well under way, a new expanded experimental group of mice had been injected in the facility below. Cliff was their leader now, and a tireless, gracious leader at that. He pitched in on all the scut work himself, and volunteered for the most tedious tasks. He stayed late to finish paperwork and came in early for procedures with the mice. His enthusiasm was infectious. Prithwish and Aidan and Natalya shared Cliff's jubilant spirits, just as each shared in his results. Even Feng seemed gently optimistic. The media flurry had passed, and Feng was making headway with the bone tumor project. He and Cliff were working happily in parallel.
Where the lab had once reflected the somber, earnest caution Marion cultivated, the place was now attuned to Sandy's vivacious imagination. Always, before, the future had seemed dreadful, cold and steep, almost impossible to summit. Now the view was dazzling.
“Where's Billie?” Aidan asked Feng.
“Downstairs,” said Feng.
“You got her to stay down there?”
“Sure,” said Feng.
“You really are a genius,” said Cliff.
Feng grinned. He had no trouble working with Billie. She thought him rude and taciturn, and he did not disabuse her of that notion. He'd explained that he had no interest in feng shui, trained her to do exactly what he wanted, and then left her to it.
“I just have one question for you,” Aidan told Feng. “How's your chi?”
“Who knows?” Feng said.
“How are your mice?” Cliff asked.
“Not great,” Feng said.
“Which means . . .” Cliff looked up at the ceiling for inspiration. “The mice are dying because their bone tumors are so big, because you've actually gotten Robin's tumor promoter to work. Which means you've got a publication! Ergo, ‘not great' is yet another synonym for ‘breakthrough'! Am I good or what?” He reached up and swatted the dangling pipettes with his hand.
“Ah, there you are,” said Marion from the doorway. “Cliff and Feng, may I see you for a minute?”
Sandy Glass was in the office, but that didn't surprise Cliff, because it was almost lunchtime. The two of them often called him in these days. They had begun to treat him more like a junior colleague, and less like a glorified student.
“What's up?” Cliff swung himself up and took a seat on the end of Marion's desk, while Feng politely took as little space as possible by the door.
Marion swept the two of them with one of her critical glances. She looked pale, Cliff noticed suddenly, and sad, and fierce. “We've received a request for information from ORIS,” she told him, and passed him a piece of NIH letterhead. “They're auditing the lab.”
Cliff stared at the letter in confusion. The words were right there in front of him, but he could not comprehend them. He passed the letter to Feng. “What do you mean?”
“See, they've named you and Feng specifically,” said Sandy, pointing to the place, “in a complaint brought by Robin Decker, for investigation of possible fraud.”
Feng did not look up. He was devouring the paragraphs before him.
“This is unreal,” Cliff whispered. “Robin did this? I can't believe she'd do something like this.”
“Yeah, good for her,” Sandy said darkly. “I always said she was a go-getter.”
“But what does it mean?” asked Cliff.
“Ha. What does it mean?” Sandy asked with rhetorical flair. “It means that when Robin left the lab she didn't really go away. It means she's fallen in with vicious characters who will use every opportunity to exploit her and her so-called cause.”
“Vicious!” Cliff exploded. “It's a violation. I can't believe she'd do something like this. It's such a violation of trust.”
“And what it means,” Sandy continued, “is that Marion and I are going to have to divert our time to mounting a defense of everything we've done with R-7, during which we'll lose ground on all the progress we've made. It means a public inquest at the NIH and a shadow of guilt on all our work, even while we prove our integrity to our own colleagues in the field.”
Cliff looked at Feng. “Why did she name you?” he asked. Robin had never before directed her suspicions toward Feng.
“That's something I'm curious to find out,” said Sandy. “I suspect it's something Alan Hackett and Jonathan Schneiderman contributed. A general broadening of the complaint to make it appear less like a personal vendetta.”
“Will I be sent home?” Feng asked. His voice was so calm, and in contrast to Cliff's horrified exclamations, the question was so practical, that Sandy and Marion didn't even register it at first.
“Pardon me?” said Marion.
“Could I be sent home?” Feng asked.
“You mean deported? No, of course not,” Marion declared. She spoke with complete conviction, although she knew nothing about deportation, green cards, or student visas.
“Look, enough of the doomsday prophecies,” Sandy said. “Will the audit be unpleasant? Yes. Will an investigation hamper our research? Undoubtedly. But the question is who will prevail, and there is no doubt of that at all. We'll crush them, because we have the results and the documentation to do so, and that's all there is to it. Marion and I have spoken to Peter Hawking and we have his assurance that every resource at the institute will be available to us. Peter is well aware of the situation with Robin. He is very adept with these sorts of claims, and he knows how to fight them.” Sandy wasn't just speaking figuratively here. Hawking knew how to marshal institute funds to fight necessary battles. He was a master of the art of indirect cost, managing and channeling expenditures, even billing grants for legal fees. “He did a terrific job with Akira O'Keefe, for example,” Sandy said. “Peter has, unfortunately, dealt with things like this before.”
Magically, before their eyes, Sandy took up his spear and cudgel and sat before them at his desk in full battle mode. His voice seemed to expand until it squeezed out any doubt or fear in that little room. And it was extraordinary how cheerful he sounded, how his blue eyes sparkled. They'd known his temper and his infectious optimism, but they had never experienced Sandy managing a major crisis. They had not seen him with his patients in the hospital. For a moment, even in their confusion and distress, Marion and Cliff and Feng looked at him in awe. For a fleeting instant they almost relished the thought of following Sandy Glass into battle against the disbelievers and vengeance seekers, the barbarians at the scientific gate.
Still, the shock was terrible. Within the hour, the others in the lab all knew; in half a day, the rest of the institute knew as well. Peter Hawking was said to be drafting a secret memo to ORIS on the subject. Sandy was supposed to have retained the services of Leo Sonenberg, defense attorney to the stars, counsel to indignant politicos and the embattled rich, as well as sometime Harvard law professor. Neighboring researchers on the third floor declared the Mendelssohn-Glass lab in crisis, and techs from other labs came through regularly on little errands upstairs. Aidan, Natalya, and Billie were accosted for information. “No comment,” Aidan tossed over his shoulder as he ascended the stairs. “I know nothing about this,” said Natalya. But Billie described Robin's breakdown in the animal facility to anyone who would listen.
“She started screaming,” Billie told a bunch of researchers in the lounge, “and then I tried to calm her down and she ran away.” Billie sighed. She was only a little pleased by the attention she was getting talking about the situation. Her eyes widened behind her glasses, and her soft graying hair fluttered around her shoulders like a half-blown dandelion puff. Softly, earnestly, Billie let the seeds of new rumors fly. “I think she was really suffering here. It was the animal facility, and especially the mice. She couldn't take it anymore.”
There were those who imagined Robin had grown hysterical, or even suicidal. There were those who began to think Robin had joined forces with Billie to demand an investigation of work conditions in the Mendelssohn-Glass lab. And there were even some who had heard Robin was in the early stages of some kind of class action suit against the institute. There was no evidence for this, except that Glass and Mendelssohn were closeted together in Peter Hawking's office. Successive new speculations chased each other down the corridors and into every stairwell. The Philpott was aflutter with diagnoses, dismay, and glee.
Inside the windowless media room, with the door locked, a breathless Nanette phoned Robin, but only reached her answering machine.
“Call me!” Nanette whispered. “All hell is breaking loose, and I'm convinced you're going to bring the lab down! You sneaky, sneaky girl—why didn't you tell me you were starting an investigation? Call me please and tell me everything!”
But there was no word from Robin all that day, and no explanation was forthcoming.
At lunchtime, Feng walked over to the Harvard bio labs. Softly, he opened the door to the huge, high-ceilinged Krakauer lab, where six postdocs and four graduate students were studying algae. “What's wrong?” Mei called out in Chinese, as soon as she saw him. He never came over so early in the day.
Feng hurried over to her lab bench and answered in Chinese as well. “The government's Office of Research Integrity is auditing our lab. They're investigating me and Cliff.”
Mei gasped. “But why?” Her colleagues were working all around them, but by speaking their own language they were entirely alone, their conversation nothing more than background music or birdsong to the others.
He told her everything that had happened, but he was just as confused as he had been before. He could not quite believe Glass when he said the lab would prevail. Nor did he entirely trust Marion's assurances that he would not be penalized because he was foreign, and a Chinese citizen, at that. And yet, even in his anxiety, the violence of Robin's action overshadowed everything else. To go to the highest authorities and press charges on Cliff's data! She might as well have come into the lab with a knife and ripped Cliff's notes to shreds, and smashed the glassware, and seized the poor mice and thrown them against the wall. She sought to destroy her own colleagues' work, their word, their reputation. To do all that, and to spit in the face of her own mentors. What had influenced her to act this way? Whose spell had she come under? “Glass and Mendelssohn think they just added my name to mask the fact she's really after Cliff,” Feng told Mei.
“She must have felt he stole her position from her,” Mei said, thinking aloud. “When Cliff had his success, she must have felt that he humiliated her somehow—because she had been the most senior postdoc.”
“Maybe,” Feng said. “Who knows why she did it?”
Mei frowned. “I'm sure he does.”
Cliff was numb. That strangling paralysis was setting in, the desperation Cliff had vanquished just a year before. His luck had changed again, and despite all his accomplishments, and all Marion's and Sandy's protestations of support, he could not shake the melancholy that crept inside him. He could already sense the fates turning against him, and his good fortune withering away.
Robin had set her dogs on him, and Cliff knew they would not rest until they found some fault. His work had been brilliant, but already he knew the inquiry would tarnish his results. ORIS would broadcast Robin's suspicions publicly. He might dart to left or right. He might escape their grasp, but he would be marked. Already he could hear the world whispering around him. In that respect he was helpless. He was doomed.
At the end of the day, a scant handful of snowflakes floated in the air like dust motes. He thought for a moment of walking down to the river, but this time he didn't want to be alone. He unlocked his bike and began riding home to Somerville, back to his brick building with its ugly wrought iron balconies. The neighbors had strung up Christmas lights, red, green, and gold, spelling
JOY, PEACE,
and
LOVE
. He hoisted his bike and carried it up the stairs to the apartment.