“Hey, man,” Prithwish called out, poking his head into the
pass-through from the kitchen to the dining area. Cliff's heart sank. Prithwish was on the phone again.
“I'm just ordering pizza,” said Prithwish.
“Oh, good,” he called out, for he'd just that moment realized he was famished. “Thank you!”
“Half pepperoni?”
“Yeah.” Cliff swung his backpack onto the floor and stretched out full length on the futon. “God, I'm so tired. What's to become of me?”
“What was that? Anchovy?”
“No. I said, what's to become of me?” Cliff bellowed, with self-mocking drama.
“Oh, is that all? I thought you were changing the order.” Business concluded, Prithwish came around with a couple of beers, tossed one to Cliff, and sank down into the creaky papasan chair.
“Stop being so damn cheerful,” Cliff said, but he appreciated Prithwish's cheerful manner. “Just because you're getting married and moving out—you don't have to gloat.”
“All right.” Prithwish pulled a long face. “What's to become of you?”
“It wasn't a rhetorical question.”
“Well, I don't really think anything terrible is going to become of you,” Prithwish told Cliff more seriously. “Work like yours is going to stand up.”
“I know, I know—if I ever get to finish it.”
“Oh, come on, we'll keep at it.”
“I feel like we had this one perfect, shining paper, and now all that is going to be tarnished.”
“How can it really be tarnished if it's true?” Prithwish asked.
“Jealousy. Politics.”
“Those are always going to be there,” Prithwish said philosophically. “Those are just part of the game.”
“They shouldn't be,” said Cliff.
“But they are, so you have to get used to it,” said Prithwish. “You can't let it get to you.”
“I just want to keep working.” For the first time, Cliff's voice trembled. He hadn't articulated until that moment how desperate he was to keep moving on the project. R-7 was everything he had, and everything he'd ever dreamed: his life, his future, his contribution.
“You can keep working,” said Prithwish. “You will! We won't stop.”
Cliff rolled over and looked at Prithwish. He loved his roommate. He loved Prithwish's loyalty and his trust in R-7. Prithwish had never been jealous of Cliff's success, or if he had been jealous, he'd never let it show. He'd never begrudged Cliff anything. Someday, Cliff thought, he would repay Prithwish. Someday, when Prithwish needed a good word, or a helping hand, or an antibody shipped, Cliff would jump at the chance to help his old friend. Already his imagination was reviving, and he glimpsed himself, as through a doorway, in a senior position capable of largesse. His mind was still limber, flexible enough that he might be doomed one instant and famous the next. First melancholy, and then sentimental, emotion after idea tumbled over Cliff, because he felt so grateful he was not alone. It was not Cliff alone against ORIS, but the whole lab together, and they would keep the faith. They would prevail.
Marion was sure of this as well. Devout pessimist that she was, she knew her own lab and the results in it. She had only to walk into the animal facility to see R-7 in action. A full sixty-five percent of Cliff's experimental mice were responding to the virus. Their tumors had withered away, and in many animals had disappeared entirely. These were tangible, unambiguous results, and she would defend them against all comers. If only Cliff had kept better records.
Meticulous as always, Marion had set about the task of collating and copying all the R-7 materials for ORIS. She had prepared labeled binders full of notes, and zealously annotated pages of raw data.
Sandy was elated by the reams of evidence Marion had compiled. He saw the papers as munitions piles, neatly stacked as sticks of dynamite. “It's like setting a fuse,” he told Marion in the office. “I just can't wait to fire this stuff off.”
“Hmm.” She frowned as she studied the notes in front of her.
“Why so gloomy?”
“If Cliff's notes had been in order, we would never have had this problem. Aidan's records are a mess as well.” She leaned down on her three-hole punch with all her weight, but she'd jammed too much paper into it. She could hardly make a dent.
“Here, let me.” Sandy cracked the hole punch altogether as he tried to do the job.
“Now you've broken it!” Marion cried, aghast.
“So what? Really, Marion, you're blowing everything all out of proportion.”
“I don't think you realize how bad this is going to be.”
“For us or for them?” Sandy asked.
He won a faint smile for this bravado, but Marion was chastened by the tangled mess of notes she had uncovered. All the paperwork relating to R-7 was rushed, disorganized, and sometimes even fragmentary. She'd spent days piecing scraps together. She had become an archeologist of the recent past.
“Oh, come on, no lab is going to have totally transparent records,” Sandy said. “No one is going to be coherent in the middle of making groundbreaking discoveries. These are private notes here!” He picked up a sheaf of papers in Cliff's handwriting. “They weren't written for submission to some kind of trumped-up interrogation. And you should be careful, Marion, not to organize them so well. You rearrange and annotate them too much, and ORIS will hold that against you.”
She looked up, startled, because Jacob had made exactly the same point a few nights before. He'd added, “Cliff should be the one pulling together his notes, not you.”
“No, ultimately, they're my responsibility,” Marion had told him stoically.
“I disagree,” said Jacob. “You're losing too much sleep over this. You're trying to cover for Cliff when you should be moving ahead.”
“I can't move ahead without defending the work we've done,” Marion retorted, and she said as much to Sandy now, adding, “I have to pull the record together and make it coherent.”
“Just don't make it too pretty,” said Sandy.
“Pretty? There's no danger of that.” She sighed and went back to work, sorting photocopies into one set of binders, and original notes into another.
“Everything's going to be all right,” Sandy told her softly. “You'll see.”
She looked at him with a mixture of irritation and affection.
“I know you just want to get this over with,” he said.
“Do you know what I want?” she said. “I want the originals of the three pages Robin found.”
“Doesn't Cliff have those?”
“He thought he did, but somehow they've disappeared. We have several sets of photocopies and no originals. This is what I'm dealing with, Sandy, so don't tell me everything's all right.”
“
Going
to be all right.”
“Ah, so you admit things are not exactly going well right now.”
“I admit nothing. I have nothing to hide, and nothing to declare,” said Sandy, “and neither should you. Stop acting guilty when you're not. Stop dreading everything when you have nothing to fear.” He took Marion gently by the shoulders, as if to shake the self-criticism and second-guessing right out of her. “Buck up.”
Despite herself, she felt a little better to hear Sandy speak this way. He had such complete faith in their work and in her that she might have given up her own agnosticism if he could have produced the originals of those three pages. She had hunted for them, and Feng had searched. Cliff had spent the greater part of a day looking for them, but they were nowhere to be found.
4
T
HEY DIDN'T
look like monsters. Their whiteboard was covered with jottings and sketches, their office filled with academic journals and squat computer monitors and dead plants, just as if Hackett and Schneiderman were really scientists, and not creatures gone over to the dark side, as Larry and Wendy had suggested. They were big men, but big in different ways. Alan Hackett was in his sixties, well over six feet tall, but baby-faced and gangly. His brown hair was cut boyishly and his ears stuck out. His blue eyes were oversize as well, as if to make him extra-alert. He chewed gum constantly, working his bony jaw as he talked so that he chewed his words, and then slowly drew them out again to examine and even laugh at, as if his ideas were half-ridiculous, ripe for cracking. Jonathan Schneiderman, on the other hand, was perhaps fifty, barrel-chested, entirely bald, with a full beard. His arguments were detailed and rapid, and all his sentences punctuated with an earnest resonance.
“Well, you know,” Hackett began with his usual diffidence, “we can never predict how these will play out . . .”
“You have one of the strongest cases we've seen,” finished Schneiderman. “We've read the paper closely, reviewed your materials, begun to analyze theirs. The discrepancies between the raw data and the published work are staggering. As you might imagine, the interviews have not shed light on this at all.”
“More heat than light,” drawled Hackett.
“You've interviewed Cliff?”
Hackett stared at her in mock surprise, and she was mortified. She hadn't meant to sound so eager, yet her overriding concern slipped out. How would he try to cover now? Could ORIS pin him down even a little?
“We're in the process of interviewing everyone by phone,” said Schneiderman.
“But the documents are the core of the investigation,” said Hackett. “We start from the published work and then trace our way backward. It's a kind of reverse engineering, if you see what I mean. But you'll be pleased to know that just as you suggested, the data gets more and more spotty as we proceed.”
“Well, I'm not
pleased
to know it,” said Robin.
Hackett grinned.
“You've brought the three pages with you?” Schneiderman asked.
She hesitated, her hand on the handle of her briefcase. It was a slim maroon leather briefcase in perfect condition. Her father and stepmother had bought it for her when she got her doctorate, imagining she'd need it for job interviews or formal presentations. She felt the irony that until now the briefcase had never been used.
“It's very important that we have the originals,” Schneiderman said.
“The materials your former colleagues sent were rather misleading, to say the least,” said Hackett.
“What do you mean?” Robin lifted her briefcase onto her lap.
“They were put together in the most artful way. I think it was Marion Mendelssohn who wrote the notes and constructed the binders.” Hackett gestured to a low bookcase stacked with huge three-ring binders. With a pang Robin recognized Marion's neat print labeling the spines. “They're very well done,” said Hackett. “Particularly the notes intended to fill in lacunae in the data sets.”
Schneiderman leaned in toward Robin. “We've got an extensive pattern of deception here.”
“Marion would never try to deceive anyone,” said Robin. “I want to be clear about that. I've made a very specific complaint about a very specific line of inquiry.”
“Understood,” said Schneiderman firmly. “Unfortunately, these complaints sometimes lead us to larger problems, further questions that result in greater implications for the lab as a whole.”
“Narrow inquiries will broaden over time,” said Hackett. “Despite our best efforts, they will do that. It seems to be the nature of the beast.”
“It's the nature of all research,” said Schneiderman. “And in this case, what we have is a careful collaboration to cover up some initial interpolations and data manipulations, or in layman's terms, lies.”
Robin's hand brushed the clasp of her briefcase. She hugged the smooth leather to her with its precious contents, the original three pages of Cliff's notes.
“May we have them?” Hackett asked.
She shook her head slightly.
“Our methods are forensic,” Schneiderman explained. “Our objective is to find out exactly what happened to this data, but at this point we're working from dim photocopies arranged and edited by the very people we're investigating, and introduced by the director of the institute himself.” He handed Robin a formal letter from Peter Hawking on institute stationery. “I'm sure you'll understand our desire to get our hands on original notes—the raw data, if you will.”
The investigators were dizzying her with layers and connections she had never considered. Marion covering up problems. Feng colluding to manipulate the data. She had come forward with a simple complaint against Cliff—an accusation of dishonesty. Hackett and Schneiderman seemed intent on finding a web of deceit throughout the lab, extending outward through the institute. Was one small set of untruths really so telling? Did the fault lines in Cliff's work really extend so far? She did not want to think that way. But then how else could scientific liars prosper, except with the tacit consent of the community around them—a heedless will to believe, on the part of peers, collaborators, and mentors alike? The scope of this speculation fascinated and repulsed her. She looked hard at the ethics watchdogs before her, no longer truly scientists, but anti-scientific sentries. She had no trouble imagining them demolishing years of work.
“We should have the original materials you found,” Hackett insisted. “We need our ‘primary sources,' if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” said Robin, “but I'm not sure I'm going to give them to you.”
Schneiderman looked disappointed, and Hackett seemed genuinely surprised to be denied like this.
“I'm just not sure that when we're talking about the possibility of fraud, we're talking about the same thing,” said Robin.
“Generally, if you want answers, you don't limit your questions,” Hackett said testily. “We'll need the originals.”
Robin flushed at this presumption. “I'm not giving them to you.”
“All right,” said Schneiderman.
But Hackett smiled at her and said, “You will.”
The offices of Paul Redfield (D-Ill.), were spacious but plain, the furniture square, sharp cornered, and heavy. The receptionist herself seemed like a period piece, with her contralto smoker's voice and glasses on a chain.
“You're here to see Ian Morgenstern?”
“Yes.”
“One moment and I'll let him know that you've arrived.”
Robin sat down and waited for several minutes, and the receptionist smiled beneficently. “These are all Illinois artists,” she explained as Robin glanced nervously at the art on the walls. “They are from the Depression era, and most of them were created under the auspices of the Federal Art Project. This bridge here is by Emil Armin. This woodcut is by Todros Geller.”
Robin stood and examined the woodcut of two men laboring in the shadows of looming smokestacks. The image looked as though it had been drawn in soot and sweat and tears. But the cheerful assistant who came to get her didn't give the artwork a second glance as he ushered Robin into an interior office.
“Here you are,” he said, delivering Robin to an office with no art or Craftsman-style furniture, just piles and piles of papers and a television and a computer and a dot-matrix printer spewing a daisy chain of pages onto the floor.
“Welcome.” Ian Morgenstern stood up and leaned over his desk to shake her hand.
He seemed even younger than he'd sounded in their conversations on the phone. Morgenstern was strong nosed and slight in build, with sandy blond hair curling up over his forehead in a near pompadour. His eyes were steely blue, his tie hung loose around his neck. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up, but his suit jacket was placed carefully over the back of his chair. She took a seat and watched him. She would be careful.
“I'm sure you know how grateful we are that you were willing to come,” he told Robin. “As you know, science and scientific conduct are two areas upon which Representative Redfield has focused over the past several years—”
“Why?” Robin asked.
“What was that?” Startled by the interruption, he nearly lost his train of thought.
“Why is he interested in science?” Robin tested him.
“Ah. Why science? Why scientific misconduct? Why do they come under the purview of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce? Very simply: tax dollars. The National Institutes of Health received six
billion
dollars last year. That was not money pouring into our primary schools, or for the homeless, et cetera, but money spent entirely on research. There are people in the scientific community who take that appropriation as their divine right. Representative Redfield begs to differ. In a year when every national program—from services for the aged to support for the arts—is under scrutiny, if not constant attack, he feels that someone has got to step up to the plate and say: ‘Just where is that six billion dollars going?'” As he grew excited, Morgenstern's speech accelerated and his voice pitched higher. “Here we are, sacrificing scarce resources to fund research that we hope will better our lives. Does this mean we give the NIH carte blanche? For three years now, we have been publishing an annual list of awards designed to spotlight waste in government-funded science. Have you seen it? Here's a copy. It's called the Redfield List of Wasteful and Decadent Research Appropriations, or the Red List, for short. Every month, we choose a grant or project for red-listing, as a way of spotlighting where exactly our federal research funds are going.”
Robin had hoped to probe Redfield's motivation, to qualify his interest, but now she sat back with the Red List in her hands, stunned by this barrage of words. Clearly, Morgenstern was no mere staff member, but Redfield's speechwriter, aide-de-camp, and cavalry all in one. Even later that night as she slept on the train, Robin heard Morgenstern's quick, high-pitched voice, his words pinging in her mind relentlessly, like the hoofbeats of a thousand tiny horses.
He pointed to an entry on the Red List. “Here, you see, we have a study of obesity in urban pigeons. That's one of my favorites. And this one: a grant to teach children to watch television better. Isn't that great? We're going to teach kids to watch TV! And here's one I love: a grant to conduct a comparative ethnography of UFO sightings in immigrant communities. This is a federally funded study of how we feel about phenomena that do not exist! But this isn't why we've asked you here today. In the past year, Representative Redfield has grown increasingly concerned about the specter of fraud in the scientific community—incidents that highlight a culture of deception in many federally funded projects. Your own experience as a whistle-blower at a prestigious institute, your observations, and particularly the evidence you have compiled, lead us to believe you would be a compelling witness.” Ian Morgenstern's face glowed with pleasure as though he were congratulating Robin, indeed offering her a crown of laurels. “We would like to invite you to testify before the Subcommittee on Science and Technology.”
Calm descended on the office. Robin realized with some surprise that it was her turn to speak. “This is interesting,” she said. “But as I've said before, my complaint is very limited, and I think you'll find it very technical. I'm not sure it's really appropriate for this sort of testimony.”
“Oh, I very much disagree,” Morgenstern said.
“As for my observations and my documentation, I want to make it clear that they were planned for a limited audience of scholars and ORIS investigators only. I never intended to display them in such a public forum . . . and I don't think it's necessary to—”
“Ah, but a public forum is necessary, if we are talking about the public good,” parried Morgenstern.
“I am not talking about the public good,” Robin replied deliberately.
Morgenstern frowned. She'd silenced him, and she enjoyed the sensation. He was far too smooth, too quick, much too eager to enlist her in his master's political cause. “I know myself,” she said, “and I am not at all sure I want to testify.”
“But you should,” said Morgenstern encouragingly, as if she were simply shy. “And we can subpoena you, in any case.”
Her heart jumped. The sober distance she thought she'd achieved was gone. She'd thought she'd been so careful coming here. She'd told herself she would test the waters, and suddenly she was flailing and thrashing, and she had no idea where the bottom was. She burned with anger and dismay. Pride alone compelled her to speak. She said, “I can't continue this conversation without representation.”