Reunion (11 page)

Jack was immediately put in mind of private prisons and private water supplies: some functions should never be put in the hands of the free market. He was about to raise this with Helen but for the thought of Harry and his power. Why was Harry so interested in her research? And who or what gave him the right to be so interested?

‘Harry's risen in the world,' he said.

Helen shook her head slowly. ‘I think Harry is exactly where he always intended to be.'

2.

Helen should have seen it coming. She was not one of those grown-up innocents who populate some of science's most
revered haunts; she knew about the promises and disappointments of scientific research, she knew about research's unforeseen yields and applications, and she knew about dual-use research. She may well have been working to eliminate shigella infections from the third world, but it didn't take a genius to realise that her work was equally useful to those deliberately wanting to infect a group of healthy people – not to kill, not with shigella or any of the common food bugs, but to create social disruption and widespread alarm. Even the relatively small 1984 Oregon salmonella outbreak, when a group of Rajneeshees deliberately infected salad bars, had resulted in severe strain on the local hospitals and unprecedented levels of fear and anger in the populace.

She should have known.

After leaving Jack, Helen pushed her way through the weekend crowds of Acland Street and headed for home. At Luna Park the big dipper was rising and falling on its scaffolding and the shrieks of the revellers soared over the traffic noise. She had never ridden the big dipper, she had never been to Luna Park; when she was young there had been too little money and when she was older too little time. Even the trip to Disneyland with Luke had been made to coincide with a scientific meeting in Los Angeles. As for Luke himself, if not for a conference in Toronto and a Dutch geneticist on the look-out for some extramarital fun, if not for too much alcohol and too little attention to contraception, her son would never have been conceived.

Science is like that. You put your head down, you do your work and you are not distracted – not even to have a baby. But surely any scientist with a skerrick of social conscience would have been aware of the wider ramifications of her work? And surely any responsible scientist would not have ignored the
unpalatable but obvious fact that when powerful interests foot the bill it is those interests that will decide how research will be applied.

When the early nuclear physicists realised that tampering with the nucleus of matter could lead to weapons the likes of which had never before been imagined, some of the central figures, including Einstein, agitated for social and political restrictions on scientific work. They agitated for what they believed to be right for humankind even though their own science might be curtailed. These were, she had always believed, good scientists, responsible scientists, the sort of scientist she wanted to be, the sort of scientist she assumed she was.

It had been easy to take the high moral ground when the way ahead was unambiguous and all ethical considerations remained theoretical. But now when she was faced with a choice of doing the science of her desire and ignoring some of the possible applications of her work, or giving up her work because it might well be used for immoral ends, what she most wanted was for politics to stay out of the laboratory. To put it bluntly: she wanted to do her science and have all questions of ethics disappear.

She crossed Marine Parade and set off along the beach path at a brisk pace. There was a stiff southerly blowing off the water and whipping up the sand; she pulled her hat lower and shoved her hands in her pockets. To what extent would she compromise her ideals in order to do her science? The scientist who would pose such a question was not the sort of scientist she ever thought she would be. You think you know yourself, you think you understand the passions of your work, and perhaps you do as long as there is a calm and temperate air. But it is the storms that matter, the storms that test you. Yet
would Ava ever be forced to give up writing novels for the greater good? Would Connie have to stop doing philosophy?

Politics and science were an old coupling, as old as biological warfare itself. Nearly two thousand years ago the Scythians dipped their arrowheads into rotting material for a more lethal effect, and back in the fourteenth century Tatars tossed dead bodies infected with plague over the walls of enemy cities. During the Second World War Jews suffered agonising deaths when they were deliberately infected with malaria, typhus, yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, diphtheria. Hitler's scientists emptied the entire bacterial pantry into those poor doomed souls in service to science and the Third Reich. And then there was the German physical chemist Fritz Haber, master of modern dual-use research and the true progenitor of the present-day alliance between science, politics and the military.

Helen had always been fascinated by Haber. Such a brilliant, flawed man, his life in science was a warning to all scientists. He rose to prominence in the years before the Great War, when he devised the process of fixing nitrogen from the air for the commercial production of fertiliser. The same process led to the manufacture of explosives. Both discoveries contributed to Germany's success early in the war – more plentiful food on the one hand, more efficient killing on the other. In those years Haber was a hero in his beloved Germany.

Haber and Einstein met as relatively young men and maintained an unlikely and often strained friendship until Haber's death a year after Hitler assumed power. They shared a few similarities – both were scientists, both were German Jews – but Haber was a great German patriot while Einstein was profoundly suspicious of what he called ‘the blond beast'.
Einstein, with his commitment to humanitarian causes and his advocacy of world government, wanted to keep science independent of national, political and commercial interests.

Haber's science always served the cause of Germany's greatness. After fertiliser and explosives, he went on to spearhead the development, production and delivery of the chlorine gas used by the Germans during the Great War. This cruelly efficient, silent killer shocked the allies, and quite a few Germans too. But for Haber anything was justified if it helped Germany assume its rightful place in the world. Einstein was critical of Haber's bullish patriotism: it compromised the moral obligations of the scientist, he believed. But of the two men, and despite the contemporary reverence accorded to Einstein, Helen was in no doubt Haber would settle more comfortably with today's pragmatic and politicised science.

Helen had never experienced a moment's patriotism – loyalty to an idea of place simply made no sense to her – and she had always admired Einstein, yet now she was being expected to act like Haber. And not for the first time she wondered what choices she would have made if she had been a scientist in Hitler's Germany. What criminal acts might she have committed in order to keep working with her bacteria?

When she had decided to specialise in food-borne diseases, it was a patch of science so unfashionable that her professors had tried to dissuade her. But she was already smitten. Salmonella, campylobacter, cholera, shigella – the names were flamboyantly lyrical – how she admired these bugs with their truculent vanity, their stubbornness to survive. Bacteria, the first of life and so deceptively simple, would outlive all other creatures. But with molecular biology now the new physics, and the military people mad for new ‘biological strategies'
(defensive rather than offensive, according to them, but Helen didn't believe anything they said any more), where she had started and where she now found herself were very different places indeed.

Science is a calling and the scientist compelled to find order, sense and truth in a type of God search, whether Kepler seeking the geometrical underpinnings to the earth or Einstein and his doomed unified field theory. And it is a jealous calling, an all-consuming calling: when you are grappling with a scientific problem it will not let you go. Science had given her a life and given generously, her work had mattered – her own voice of reason argued her case; but now she felt caught, not because science had betrayed her but because of the particular circumstances that currently shaped the practice of science.

It was this notion of a calling that she, the scientist, and Ava, the would-be writer, had recognised in each other when they first met.

‘Fiction found me. Fiction found
me
,' Ava had once called out across the water of Sydney Harbour. And science had found Helen. But now she wondered if original work were possible any more. The teams of scientists like her own in Maryland were brought together to work on specific projects, and their discoveries, it seemed to her, were pre-ordained. These days fear, myopia and a sturdy line of command tethered scientists far from the anarchic fringes of surprising originality.

She stopped on the path and turned to face the bay. The sea was dark and rough, the foam was muted in the leaden light. She leapt over the low wall and walked down to the shoreline. The waves scrambled up the beach heaping one over another. The sand whipped and swirled. The heaving waves, the choppy seas, the shallows murky with sand, all was chaos.

She stood motionless at the water's edge. The noise slammed into her, the wind rocketed through her; she lingered until her thoughts were still. Then slowly she wandered back up the beach and made her way home.

3.

Helen settled at the kitchen table to read what she hoped was the finished version of a paper she'd been working on since her arrival back in Australia. Work was her solution to most problems – even work problems. Luke was still asleep, and how anyone could sleep for twelve hours straight she would never understand. She had always resented sleeping as so much time wasted. She would hear people say how much they loved it, but to love sleeping was, as far as she was concerned, as ludicrous as loving breathing or defecation or any essential bodily function.

She was nearing the end of the paper when she heard stirrings from Luke's bedroom. Then followed some half-hearted coughing and some full-bodied groaning, the squeak of the bathroom door, the toilet flushing, and there he was in the doorway, already connected to his iPod, his head faintly nodding to the music. He had pulled on a football jumper – blue and white, she noticed, the colours of his grandparents' team; his sweat pants could do with a wash. As he leaned down and pecked her cheek she felt the startling brush of bristles and a whiff of something stale and sleepy. The whole feel of her son had changed; all angles and bones, Luke was now taller than she was. His voice, a flattened bass for more than a year, still sounded strange.

He pulled out one of his earplugs and nodded at her paper. ‘So you're going ahead with it?'

‘I'm told it's not up to me, that I do not own the laboratory nor do I pay to use it.' She assumed a blank-faced authority and an American accent. ‘I've been further reminded that while the research was made possible by money awarded to me in my capacity as leader of the team, the team itself is not employed by me, nor do I pay for the materials, nor any of the equipment or the lab utilities.' Now she allowed herself to smile, although it was more in the way of a grimace.

Luke mumbled something that she interpreted as sympathy before attending to his breakfast. He filled a mixing bowl with cereal, added the better part of a litre of milk and joined her at the table. With his head bent over the bowl and his hand in a steady spooning, he smoothed the edges of his hunger. A couple of minutes later he lowered his spoon and pulled out the other earplug – totally disconnected, Helen found herself thinking.

‘Stop beating up on yourself, Mom. You need to chill a bit. And you're far too hung up on ideals. Get rid of them or upgrade.' He replaced his earplugs and returned to his cereal.

As if it were so simple. And while the scientist and citizen in her wanted to argue with him, the mother would not; there was time enough for him to oscillate, to lose his footing on the uncertainties of life. She wanted him to be happy, she wanted him to be successful, she wanted to ease his passage into maturity, guard him from hurt, from disappointment, from suffering – all those experiences that would help prepare him to tackle life's uncertainties. And yes, she was aware of the contradictions, but she would do anything to protect him from unhappiness.

Fritz Haber had been a neglectful father to his three children and a failure as a husband. His first wife, the brilliant chemist
Clara Immerwahr, became a housewife when she married; she shot herself with her husband's service revolver in 1915 soon after she learned of his work with chlorine gas. And after a decade of marriage, Haber's second wife, Charlotte, chose to be divorced rather than ignored.

Haber's two loves had been science and Germany; Helen's were science and her son, with science the less complicated until recently. Luke at sixteen cared nothing for science, he preferred virtual friendships to real ones, there were a few essentials – computer, cell phone, iPod and a few other electronic excrescences – and most other things he could take or leave. She had tried to interest him in science, but he was easily bored – boredom, she decided, was the defining trait of his generation. In so many ways Luke was different from her, yet bound so close that the love and the anxieties pulled tight enough for pain.

She was in her late twenties when she discovered she was pregnant. At that stage she had not given any thought to motherhood, yet when it became a possibility she realised she wanted a child and the chance might never come again. The decision was clear, spontaneous and immune to argument. The Dutch geneticist, with a wife and children in Rotterdam, wanted nothing to do with a baby, indeed Roeland wanted there to be no baby. And if it had concerned only Helen, there would have been no identifiable father; but she believed her unborn child had a right to two parents. Roeland fought her throughout the pregnancy and for the first year of Luke's life. And then – reluctantly – he agreed that if in the future the boy wanted to contact him he would comply. He demanded discretion, he stipulated conditions, a document was drawn up and duly signed.