“I wish I could,” he told her, turning away.
She studied him. In all his time at the lab, Feng had never refused to do what she asked. Certainly he'd never denied a direct request.
“I'm beginning new experiments with the bone tumors,” he told her apologetically. “And I'm training Miki.”
Coming from Feng, this was practically insolent. She was growing angry, but she tried not to let it show.
“I think this is vitally important for Cliff—and for the lab,” she said. “We need your help.”
“I don't think I'd be any help to Cliff,” Feng demurred. “I've been away from his work too long. I'm sure I would ruin his experiments, because it's been so many months since I helped him with his project.”
This was not insubordination, or laziness. This was Feng distancing himself from Cliff's work. Feng was making it clear he had severed his connection to R-7 entirely. All through the R-7 publicity, and then during the inquiry, he'd tried to keep his head down. He'd done his part; and when necessary, he'd played along. But she felt now the way Feng used his silences as weapons, how he wielded diffidence in his own defense. He was not going to work on R-7 again. She could order him as much as she wanted, and he would not change his mind. He would never speak against Cliff as a collaborator, or voice doubts if he had any. He was too doubtful of himself, and too private. Still, he wouldn't touch Cliff's work. There was something wrong.
She did not speak of it to Sandy. She did not want him to cheer her, or to soothe her, or to bully Feng. Nor did she unburden herself to Jacob. She needed to think alone. What did Feng know about Cliff? What had he been concealing from her? To hide his doubts about Cliff's work would have been just as bad as lying. To conceal his lack of confidence until now! The very idea infuriated her. Hadn't she approached Feng at the very beginning? Hadn't she asked him to tell her candidly if he felt anything was amiss? Why would he have kept the truth from her? If he'd wanted to distance himself from Cliff, that would have been the time to do it. That would have been his chance. No, he couldn't have known anything then. But did he surmise something now? Over time, had he come to think that Cliff's work was simply too complex, too fraught with difficulties? Had ORIS succeeded in undermining his confidence entirely? This seemed more plausible. As Sandy might have put it, the politics of the situation had frightened Feng away.
The situation
was
frightening. The idea that Cliff might have cheated was foreign to her; the idea that any scientist might cheat, improbable. And yet, at times Cliff's results themselves seemed improbable as well, and fleeting. When she and Sandy stood up together to defend their work, their arguments were adamant, their purpose fixed, the corrupt motives of their enemies quite clear. But when she reflected alone on all that had passed, the lab's success seemed like a brief dream. The way forward scientifically was far from obvious. As for enemies—the lab seemed to be its own worst enemy now, and Cliff's would-be collaborators at Stanford and Cornell were strewing more obstacles in the path for R-7 than anyone on Redfield's subcommittee.
Still, she would not succumb to doubt. She had honed her doubtful instincts once. Doubt had been her scientific ally, the whetstone for her sharpest questions. Now she struggled against doubt as if it were merely an emotion, and not also a kind of intelligence. She fought off doubt as another person might have wrestled with self-pity. As she went about her work, she tried to think as Sandy did, and dismiss the fear and lack of confidence that plagued her. In the animal facility she took out Cliff's animals and held them under the light. Palpating them one by one, she examined those with no tumors left, and those with almost none, and then the few whose tumors had recurred. She held the animals' pink, wriggling bodies and checked their ear tags against the logbook. The records were clear and accurate, Cliff's notations up to date. But then, how would she know if he adjusted or revised the numbers, or sacrificed mice without telling anyone? He could easily have killed those animals that did not conform to the story he wanted told. The postdocs answered to Marion, but she depended on them for the truth of their answers. She could not monitor them every minute of the day.
Jacob was practicing in the back of the apartment when she came home. She heard his weaving melodies and double-stops, but she couldn't face him. Instead, she slipped into Aaron's little room off the hall.
“Hi,” he said as she came in.
Too big for his old desk, Aaron sat hunched over, working out chess problems on paper. His desk light was a translucent world globe, which cast a blue glow over his homework folders and his notebooks. His bunk bed stood against the wall. He'd insisted on getting the bed when he was four years old. Marion had hinted to him then that she didn't think a bunk bed would be necessary, but Aaron wouldn't hear of anything else, arguing, “It'll be useful when I have guests.” Now the lower bed had become a storage area. Gradually Aaron's teddy bears and plush frog had migrated down there, along with his old school notebooks, his Rubik's cubes and spheres and polyhedrons.
“How are you?” Marion asked Aaron.
“Good.”
“And how was school?”
“Fine,” he said.
“What did you do today?”
“Nothing much.”
She looked over his shoulder at the printed chess diagram on the desk. Only six weeks into the new school year, he did not find eleventh grade terribly interesting.
“Does Dad know you're home?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Could you tell him? He's been working on that piece a
very
long time.”
“All right,” she said, but she didn't go, and he looked up at her briefly, owlish but unsuspecting.
“What would you do if someone cheated while you were playing chess?” she asked him.
“No one would do that,” he said with rational innocence.
“But just suppose someone did.”
“No one I know would do that.” He knit his brow and squinted, trying to wrap his head around such a counterintuitive idea—someone playing chess, where the rules were absolutely the pleasure of the game, and then breaking them.
“What would you do?”
“I guess I'd have to ask him why.”
2
“W
HAT DO
you care what your neighbors think?” Nanette asked Robin as they stood in line at the Janus Cinema.
Robin ducked her head down. “I see them all the time at the mailboxes, or even in the elevator. As soon as Larry or Wendy comes near me, it's as though I don't exist. I disappear.”
“Please,” said Nanette. “I had a
boss
who didn't talk to me for three years. We hated each other so much we communicated solely through graduate students.”
“For three years?”
“Well, maybe it wasn't three years. I guess it was more like three months.”
“How did you keep your job?”
“Oh, he fired me. But the point is, I didn't let it get to me.”
“But I have to live with these people,” said Robin, stuffing her hands deep into her jacket pockets.
“So, I had to live with my boss, too. It's the same thing,” said Nanette.
“Maybe I should move,” Robin said.
Nanette dismissed this. “Your problem is you have a thin skin. You're overly sensitive. I've always said that. You've got to be tough. Do your thing and ignore everyone else. You're good at the first part, but then you still want everyone to like you. Give it up.”
“I don't need everyone to like me,” Robin retorted. “I just miss my friends.”
“They couldn't have been real friends,” said Nanette.
“They were,” Robin said sadly. They had been real friends, but she had offended their deepest beliefs. She was a heretic, for she'd lost her faith in the natural selection of ideas.
“Two for
The Witches of Eastwick,
” said Nanette, and then, to Robin, “Who are you kidding? You can't move; you've got a rent-controlled apartment.”
“I don't know if I'm going to have a job much longer, either.”
“What, Uppington's firing you?”
“No, but I don't think he can come up with a full-time position for me.”
“Didn't he promise?”
She shook her head. He'd hinted, he'd suggested—he'd apologized, of course. “I'm terribly sorry, Robin,” he'd told her. “But I just don't have the funding for you right now.” And she was beginning to understand that he never would.
“Stop moping,” Nanette ordered. “One large popcorn,” she told the kid at the candy counter. “Of
course
with topping. Do you want a drink?” she asked Robin, and then, “Do you have any cash?”
Carrying their popcorn, icy drinks, and straws, they padded down red-carpeted passageways into the underground theater and found two seats close to the screen.
“Why don't you just wear glasses?” Robin grumbled as they sank down into their chairs.
“Why don't you just apply for a new position and get it over with?” Nanette retorted. “And by the way,” she added, “I don't need glasses. I prefer to sit close so that I will be enveloped by the picture.”
“Yeah, right,” said Robin.
“Ginsburg has a job opening,” Nanette said. “Akira told me he's looking for a new postdoc.”
“Do you get all your information from Akira?”
“Well, he should know,” said Nanette, eyes on the screen as she watched the trailer for
Raising Arizona
. “Let's go see that.”
“What do you mean, he should know?”
“Well, he lives with the man. He should know if he's hiring.”
“He lives with him? He lives with Ginsburg?”
“Shh! You didn't know that?”
“No, you never told me that.”
“Oh, Robin.” Nanette sighed. “Do I have to spell it all out for you?”
“I'm sorry, I thought he was just—”
“Hey, keep your voice down,” whispered Nanette, who had great reverence for the movies. “It's starting.”
“He is so creepy,” Robin whispered back. “I could never work for him.”
Nanette shook her head and reached for more popcorn. She adored Robin, but her friend had a deficiency—she lacked a certain cynical gene. She couldn't just laugh or excuse people for what they'd done. Of course, this cynical deficiency had enabled Robin to bring an entire laboratory to its knees. Nanette highly respected and enjoyed her for that. Robin's judicial experiments were brilliant, and they wouldn't have worked for a normal person. A researcher with an ordinary tolerance for absurdity, injustice, and dissembling never could have pushed her case so far. But how Nanette wished she could supply Robin with some cynicism, how she wished she could just help Robin lighten up and laugh.
“Oh, don't be ridiculous,” she told Robin now. “No one ever said you had to live with him too.”
That fall, whispering ruffled Cliff everywhere he went. Of course, there had been whispering before, but the jealous talk was latent. Now, in the aftermath of the ORIS inquiry, without confirmation of his findings in other labs, dry rumors and withered expectations brushed him at every turn. There was trouble with R-7 at Stanford and Cornell. In other labs, in other hands, his glorious results were just not panning out. Surely there was something wrong. Weren't his results supposed to be the next big thing? Or had there been a grain of truth in Robin's accusations? Beth had heard some people speaking snidely about his work. Prithwish nearly came to blows defending him against a couple of guys from the second floor.
“How's the paper coming?” sniped one of the postdocs as they unlocked their bikes from the racks in front of the building.
“Just wait,” Prithwish shot back.
“Don't answer them,” Cliff warned.
“Wait for what?”
“How long?”
“You'll see,” Prithwish shouted, and got a little tangled in his tenses, as he did when he was angriest. “And we will see who will be laughing now.”
If only “now” would finally arrive. Cliff longed to silence all his critics with some new success. He was miserable with his need for new results, but he could not produce them from thin air; he could not solve every problem instantaneously.
He willed himself success even greater than he'd had before, but suddenly every aspect of his work was problematic, from the new cell line he was using to the size of his needles. The woman who had replaced Billie was young and inexperienced, and he continually did her work over again. When he complained of Francesca's incompetence, however, Marion responded with stony silence.
She and Sandy no longer treated him like a junior colleague. They rarely called him into their office to discuss R-7 anymore. Their public loyalty had been unflagging, but the two of them were weary now, and far less generous in private than they had been during the hearings. Marion was particularly cold, and he suffered from her terse commands. She asked him to do myriad small tasks, even while she expected him to continue and somehow solve all the open questions raised by his past research.
“If the mice are relapsing,” she snapped, “it's up to you to find out why.”
“I realize that,” he told her, “but it's going to take time. My cells aren't ready, I've had almost no support for the past six weeks—”
“I don't care,” she said. They were standing together next to a microscope and she spoke in a low voice so that Francesca couldn't hear. “I don't want to hear excuses.”
“You told me Feng was going to help me,” Cliff protested. “Where is he?”
He hadn't meant to anger her, only to defend himself, but when he mentioned Feng she turned on him. “This is your work,” she hissed. “This is your project, and you had no trouble acknowledging that when the work was going well. This is your discovery, and your career.”
“I realize that.”
“And therefore . . .”
He stood before her in confusion. Did she mean for him to finish her sentence? She left him hanging, but he dared not speak.
“Therefore,” she said,
“you are responsible.”
“He has not been all he could have been,” Marion told Sandy. They were walking again, up and down Oxford Street. The sky was overcast on that November day, and Marion had insisted on bringing her umbrella, which, as Sandy said, never failed to ward off showers. “He has not done everything I might have hoped.”
Sandy shrugged. “Well, could have been, should have been—it's no use wasting time on that.”
“No, I don't think you understand,” she said slowly. “I've given this a lot of thought. I've considered all the problems and confusions and ambiguities in his work. I've gone over everything in my mind—and I think Cliff's results were rushed, and that our conclusions were aggressive. We published too soon; there wasn't enough there. His findings were too thin to support such an ambitious research program.”
“His findings got us major funding,” Sandy reminded her.
“And given the current situation, I'm not sure they deserved a federal research grant.”
“Well, the NIH thought otherwise,” Sandy said. “Even if they'd like that money back again.”
“Maybe we should give them the money back,” said Marion.
“What are you talking about? This is a research grant for open-ended work, not a government contract for manufacturing widgets. Research means risk; it means exploration, not delivery of specified results. We presented Cliff's work as an example of the kind of thing we might achieve.”
“But we didn't know enough—he didn't know himself how much R-7 could do. There were too many questions.”
“Marion, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you try to answer every question before presenting your work or publishing or applying for funding, you will get absolutely nothing done.”
She prodded the sidewalk with the tip of her umbrella. “This was too quick, Sandy. We were opportunistic in our approach.”
“Marion.”
“I blame myself for putting so much pressure on Cliff to produce.”
“He put pressure on himself,” Sandy countered.
“He lied.”
At last she'd said it. She'd said the words aloud. She and Sandy stood face-to-face with the accusation between them. She knew he would object and chide her for losing faith. She knew he'd think she was a coward, and dreaded his reproach for caving to the forces arrayed against them. She hated to leave him standing alone in support of a research program increasingly unpopular and unworkable. Still, she had to speak. He was her closest friend, her partner, and if they were to work together, she could not keep ideas from him. They could not strategize or collaborate at all if she did not confess her change of heart. “I think he may in fact have suppressed some data,” she said, “and exaggerated in other cases. He may have cut corners in his procedures, and particularly his dissections. I think his record keeping might have been poor because at times there was nothing there to record.”
“It's all possible,” Sandy conceded coolly.
She studied his face. She imagined this was one of his rhetorical gambits, and waited for him to continue and tell her how in fact this could not have been the case. But he paused, and she realized to her surprise that he was not far from agreeing with her. “We have to let him go,” she said.
He nodded, and she sighed with relief. He was with her, then. The tension left her face as she allowed herself her beautiful, rare smile.
“But,” he added, “he will not leave until we win our appeal.”
“You aren't serious,” she said.
“I'm completely serious. How do you think it would look if we let him go now? We'd be conceding everything to ORIS—allowing them to ride roughshod over our good name, and those of any other researchers that take their fancy.”
“No,” she said.
“Marion, Redfield doesn't care for subtleties. He doesn't make distinctions between one misleading postdoc and wholesale fraud. He wants us as his test case for scientific corruption in America, and he won't have us. We don't deserve it. We won't be punished for being lied to.”
“We are responsible for what happens in our own lab,” said Marion.
“Maybe our postdoc was unworthy of our trust. Maybe he didn't deserve our defense,” Sandy told her. “Those are still open questions. The point is, he stays until the end of the inquiry. After that, the decisions we make about him are our business.”
How cold he was. His pragmatism stunned her. Had he always been so single-minded and calculating? She could not help thinking less of Sandy to hear him talk this way. But then she thought less of herself, as well, for engaging in such a conversation, for listening to him and scarcely arguing. She wondered how much she'd ever truly argued with him. She'd always enjoyed their debates, but in the end, who dominated their decisions? Hadn't he used her all these years? Hadn't he appropriated her research program? If that was true, she confessed to herself that she had used him as well. She'd depended on him to do the dirty work she wouldn't deign to touch herself: the politics, the scientific skirmishing, and ultimately, the ambitious overreaching for hot topics and newsworthy results. Agnostic that she was, she'd leaned on him for his scientific faith. She had never considered how pure that faith had been, flaming so strong with such scant data to support him.
“Don't look at me like that,” he said.
He knew she disapproved of him for speaking frankly, and he was sorry, but abandoning ship was not an option. He simply could not allow Marion an admission of defeat. She was impractical—and this was both her strength and her weakness. She never considered appearances. She was angry at him, but he was the one who had to make the best of the situation. He was the one who would salvage what they had and prepare the lab for future work.
All that cold, drizzling month Sandy went about his business, meeting with Houghton-Smith, soothing Peter Hawking, waiting busily for the results of the appeal. He was good at shielding himself from unpleasant emotions, but not from Marion. They'd been too close, and he admired her too much; he was devastated to lose her good opinion.
A chill came over them. When they were alone, they had trouble speaking to each other. They had worked together so long and survived so much, that they had never imagined anything would change. Now this conflict over Cliff finally estranged them. Silently they opposed each other: Marion insisting they confront Cliff, Sandy insisting that they wait. Their partnership was such that neither openly struck out at the other. Sandy never chastised Marion publicly, and Marion did not castigate Cliff in private. Their position was already precarious, and Sandy and Marion knew their strength as a united front. They would not betray the rift between them. They were so careful with each other that their new postdocs scarcely noticed anything was wrong. Only the old hands, Cliff and Feng and Prithwish, Aidan and Natalya, felt the stiffness and the strain.