“Upstairs,” Garth murmured, “or it’s going to be the carpet right here. I’ve been wanting you all evening.”
Sabrina laughed. “You were thinking about faked DNA all evening.”
“Part of me was. The other part wanted you. There’s always a part that wants you.” He turned, his arm still around her, and started for the stairs.
“The lights . . .”
“Mrs. Thirkell will get them in the morning. You wanted me to get used to being coddled; look how well I’ve done.”
Sabrina laughed again and Garth heard in her laugh love and contentment and delight, and felt a rush of well-being, that he had brought all that to life. If a man can give that to the woman he loves, he ought to be able to do anything.
Moonlight filled their bedroom, the shadowed corners black against the pure white light, the patchwork quilt on the bed a soft pattern of pastels, the only color in the room. Sabrina threw back the quilt and they lay on the cool sheet in the cool room, their mouths and hands rediscovering each other, and then Garth was inside her, so easily, so naturally it was like a conversation, their bodies weaving together as had their voices in the library. But it is a conversation, Sabrina thought fleetingly. Whatever we do, wherever we are, we’re talking to each other. But it’s complete only when we’re together.
Garth smiled at her and said, “Yes, my love,” and brought his mouth to hers.
They were awake until almost dawn, and all those hours together were, to Garth, another affirmation of his need for her, not only when something terrible happened, but also when everything was good. He held her with a fierceness that came from knowing how devastating it would be to lose her, and he knew from her response that the same lurking possibility also haunted her—that something would separate them: illness, death, or the kind of unforeseen event or mad idea that had brought them together less than a year before. And, caught in the whimsical tangle of chance and probability, they made love with an intensity that seemed greater with each passing week, as the stakes grew higher and their defenses disappeared.
Garth could still feel that intensity and see Sabrina’s smile the next morning as he crossed the campus, lightheaded from lack of sleep, so deeply in love that it seemed impossible that he inhabited a world in which there was fraud and fear and confrontation. And the buying of congressmen, he mused, thinking beyond his meeting with Lu Zhen, in a few minutes, to two weeks ahead when he and Claudia would go to Washington, and then thinking beyond that to the politics of a university, the rituals of grant applications, the research projects that were fruitful and the others that ran aground, the time-consuming needs of students who deserved the best he could give them. All of it was part of the world he and Sabrina inhabited, but none of it, he told himself in what was almost a vow, no major problems or minutiae, would come between them. They would be vigilant, they would be protective, and whatever attention and energy it required, they would not let anything come between them.
He had called earlier, telling Lu to meet him at ten, and when he bounded up the stairs he saw him waiting beside his office door.
“Professor, good morning.” Lu smiled broadly and held out his hand. “Are we going to discuss the note to Science announcing my discovery? I wrote it last night; I have it to show to you. They will publish it in their next issue, yes? And then, later, publish the paper. Of course that should not take long, as you said: major discoveries are published quickly. So”—he took a sheet of paper from his briefcase—“here it is; I think you will find it says everything it should.”
“Perhaps not everything.” Garth unlocked his office door, propped it open, and sat at his desk.
Lu brought a chair close to the corner of the desk, his favorite spot, and leaned forward, still holding his letter, still smiling. “And what is it I have left out?”
“An explanation of how you expect other scientists to replicate your experiment.”
Lu’s eyes widened in surprise. “Replicate? But of course . . .” And then, as Garth gazed at him steadily, the words sank in, and very slowly his smile faded.
Garth unlocked his top drawer and took out the bound copy of Lu’s paper. He went to the refrigerator in the corner of the office and brought to the desk the vials of blood samples he had taken the night before. Finally, he took from a drawer in a file cabinet the computer printout from the blood analyzer. He lined everything up on the blotter on his desk. Lu watched his fingers as he squared them.
“I won’t submit your paper to Science, or the note you’ve written. I’m sure you know why.”
“No. I don’t understand. You put your name on the paper; you said you would submit it on Monday.”
“I also told you I’d go over it this weekend. I read it through last night and something in it bothered me, an assumption about a single gene. We did discuss this, you know, several times, though I didn’t follow it up; I was distracted by other things.”
“But it is a single gene! If you read my paper, you know that I proved it!”
He looked bewildered and painfully earnest, and for a brief second Garth wondered if he could be mistaken: if he had taken blood from the wrong mice, if the blood analyzer had malfunctioned, if Bill Farver had been wrong . . .
Impossible. Every one of those things would have had to occur simultaneously last night, and that was so unlikely as to be impossible. Lu Zhen was a consummate actor; he knew that, too. “I took these blood samples from your mice last night. This is the blood analyzer printout. You know what it says; you’ve probably got stacks of identical ones in your files. Or did you destroy them when they kept showing that your mice were healthy?” There was a silence. “Perhaps you’d like to read this one.” He held out the long sheet of paper for Lu to take.
Lu’s hands remained in his lap. He gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “Well, but you know, Professor, it doesn’t matter. Somewhere in going through the experiment, I made a mistake. That was not good, I acknowledge that, but it was only procedural. Of course it affected my results, but not the research project itself; all I have to do is repeat the experiment correctly and the results will be exactly as my paper says. And other scientists will be able to replicate it and see its truth. Professor, I know I am right, and that is what is important: the theory and the experiment, not my procedural mistakes. So you see, there is nothing to worry about.”
Garth was stunned into silence. He contemplated Lu Zhen as if trying to identify a new species. Lu gazed back at him confidently, one scientist to another. The silence lengthened. A ball thumped against the building just below the office window; students clattered past the open door on their way to the laboratories at the end of the corridor. There was no other sound. It was Saturday; most students were studying; most professors were mowing lawns or doing errands or lying in a hammock with a beer and a book: for them it was a normal weekend. But for Garth it was the end of a dream, and the pain and anger he had felt the night before stabbed at him again.
He showed none of that. He sat motionless, and the minutes passed, and soon Lu could not endure the silence. “So you will send in the paper. And the note.”
“No, of course not; you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve written a fairy tale and called it a scientific paper and called yourself a scientist. You’re not a scientist; you have no right to be part of the scientific community. We spend our lives dedicated to research, with absolute fidelity to that which can be proven; we search for connections—cause and effect, beginning and ending, living and dying—and follow them wherever they lead us, and if they take us down blind alleys we look for other paths, and when we find what we’re looking for, or come upon something serendipitously, we stay with it until we’ve proven and proven again that it works, that it’s correct and others can follow us, that we’ve made an advance, however small, in the long journey of science and a new beginning for—”
“Professor, this is the talk you give to freshmen; I’ve heard you. It is also in the introduction to your book. It’
s very impressive. But very little in the real world is so clear-cut. You know this; you deal with politicians and businesspeople and they always bend the rules. I bent some information, that is all, because I know my experiment will work; I know the results will be found by others. This is my truth and I am a scientist and I am as serious about it as you say all scientists should be.”
“You would throw science out the window,” Garth said evenly, though his anger was growing, more so since he had been caught repeating himself, something every professor dreads. “You’d publish a lie because of a crazy arrogance that you know the truth in spite of experimental findings that show you’re wrong.”
“I’m not wrong! Professor, Professor, this works! You have been so excited . . . and now it will bring great glory to you and your institute . . . you will be famous! Even the Nobel Prize!”
Garth felt a flash of contempt. “I called Bill Farver last night, in Berkeley. He’s been working on the same premise as you; remember we talked about that? He and his team have concluded that there must be at least two genes, perhaps more . . .” He laid it out, describing other theories and experiments, each deliberate word carefully chosen to leave no doubt. When he finished, Lu was looking past him, out the window, his face drawn, his cheeks hollow, as if he had grown old while listening.
“I had no evidence of that,” he murmured. “All the steps I went through, and there was no sign . . .”
“There were signs, and we talked about them,” Garth said flatly. “You chose another direction.”
“All scientists do that.” Lu looked at Garth, and now he was pleading. “We decide what we’ll pay attention to and what we’ll ignore. I did the same thing every scientist does. Professor, I can use so much of what I’ve done; it wouldn’t take me long to go back and develop a new approach. I know I could find the answer and beat those people in Berkeley; I know more than they do—”
“You don’t know a damn thing. You’ve got a good mind, Lu, but you’re driven by arrogance and ambition and fear, and even the best mind isn’t a match for all that. You’re right: we do decide what we’ll focus on, but we don’t do it at the beginning; we do it when we know more about our options. You were in a hurry, so you decided at the beginning what you’d find and then you tailored your experiments to find it. And when it didn’t work, you wrote down a bunch of fake blood-test results and let me put my name on it.”
“But I thought . . . when I did it again, without whatever mistakes I’d made—”
“The whole goddam project was a mistake! Don’t you understand that? And what the hell does that have to do with letting me put my name on a paper that was full of faked numbers? Even if you were right and the experiment worked the next time, I’d be listed as advisor and coauthor of a fraud. That was the bonus you were going to leave me with when you went back to China.”
Lu’s eyes narrowed. “You’d survive. You’re famous. Everyone says you’re one of the best, and you’ve got your institute and your family . . . you’ve got everything. But if you don’t send in my paper, you rob me of everything. I couldn’t go home; I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t even get a job without a reference from you. I’d have nothing!”
Troubled by the desperation and resentment in Lu’s voice, Garth said, “I think you should go back to China. You have your doctorate; you can get a job there. Perhaps some of your other professors will give you a reference. I won’t pursue you or tell anyone what you’ve done, but if anyone—”
“You mean you’ll write a reference for me?”
“Good God, after today? I said perhaps others would. If you go back to China I won’t publicize what you’ve done. But if others ask me, I won’t lie.”
“You don’t have to tell them. No one would be forcing you.”
“Science would force me, my belief in science and in myself as a scientist. If you understood that, none of this would have happened.” He stood up. “I have to leave now; I promised my family I’d spend the afternoon with them. Here’s your paper, there are a number of things in it that you can use again, especially in the first half of the experiment. You did that part well. I admired you. I’m sorry”—he cleared his throat—“I’m sorrier than you will ever know that you couldn’t be the kind of scientist I thought you were.”
Lu gave him a long look of pure hatred. He took the bound pages from Garth’s hand and left.
Garth let out his breath and realized he was shaking. Damn him, he thought; damn him for the brutality of his stupidity and arrogance. But stupidity and arrogance were always brutal; Garth knew that. He just had not expected it in a young man of such brilliance.
He returned the blood samples to the refrigerator and locked it, then locked his office door. Outside, the heat rose up like a wall to meet him. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, and before he reached the campus gate they were wet. It was like swimming underwater, and he imagined himself doing a butterfly stroke, pushing the humid air aside so that he could reach his home.
And forget Lu, he thought, at least for a while. Forget the disappointment and my own failures, and how close I came to disaster. He walked down the somnolent streets. The houses and trees seemed to fade away in the heat, and Garth felt like a ghost in an abandoned town. He met no one else on his walk, though he heard shouts and laughter and splashes from backyard swimming pools, and a few blocks ahead he saw the mail truck making its slow way toward him. He turned up the walk to his house and opened the front door. Cool air curled about him, drawing him inside. What a good place to be, he thought as he closed the door. In so many ways.
He passed Mrs. Thirkell, humming in the kitchen, and went to the second floor. Young voices came from Penny’s room. He glanced inside and saw Barbara Goodman and Penny facing each other cross-legged on the floor between the twin Jenny Lind beds, so absorbed they did not look up. A few feet away, Sabrina was sitting on the curved window seat in the round turret at the end of the hall, partially hidden behind a folding screen. She put her finger to her lips and he walked quietly to her and kissed her.
“Was it very hard?” she asked, her voice low.
“Sad and infuriating. Are you eavesdropping on Penny and Barbara?”
“Yes.” She moved over so he could sit beside her. “I couldn’t get her to talk about the party last night, and then I heard them—”
“—Tinkertoys,” Penny was saying. “You know, gears and wheels and stuff, but nothing inside.”
Barbara giggled, then her voice came, as earnest as Penny’s. “But they’re not really like that; they look fantastic, and they wear, you know, these great clothes that my mom won’t buy for me, and they do everything! Nobody stops them the way everybody stops us!”
“I know. Except that . . . well, it’s like nobody’s paying any attention to them.”
“Right! They’re so lucky . . . I mean, don’t you hate it when people are always telling you what to do and when to be home and whatever they want?”
“Well, yes, but . . . well, you know . . . maybe nobody cares about what they do. Or cares about them. Or loves them.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Well, their parents.”
“Oh, sure they do. Parents always love their kids. It’s in the genes. Ask your dad.”
“But my mom says they’re like Tinkertoys because they’re sort of empty inside. And she says they don’t know anything.”
“Oh, come on, Penny, they know everything! And they have all the fun, and you know it. I mean, didn’t you want to go upstairs with them at the party last night?”
There was a pause. “Sort of.”
“You did! I saw you watching them. And when they asked you, you said you’d be up later.”
“Well, you know, if you say no, they make fun of you. And I didn’t tell my mom and dad that they were going to be at the party. I mean, I just said you were going. So I thought . . . if something happened, I couldn’t talk to my mom about it. I mean, if I did, she’d know I lied—”
“You didn’t lie, you just didn’t tell her everything. You shouldn’t tell her everything anyway; it’s babyish.”
“It’s not! I tell you things!”
“It’s different with friends.”
“Well, she’s my friend, too. She always says the right thing.”
“Yeh, like Tinkertoys.”
“Well, it made sense when she said it. Why wouldn’t you tell me last night what they were doing upstairs?”
“ ’Cause you didn’t come up and I wanted you to. I mean, I went up there when they asked me and you said you would and then you didn’t. It was like you didn’t care about me.”
“I kept thinking about it . . . I wanted to but I didn’t want to, I mean, I really wanted to, but they scare me, you know, I can’t help it. They talk so loud and they tell jokes I don’t get and they make me feel stupid. What were they doing!”
“Oh, lying around on those leather couches and sort of sliding off them and laughing and telling jokes and drinking beer and stuff, and the TV was on. They were in that little room, you know, with all that leather furniture.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“And Arnie and Vera had sex.”
“They did? Right there?”
“No, of course not. I mean, somebody said they should, but they said they weren’t into that. They went into one of the bedrooms.”
“I hate Arnie. He was one of the ones who threw me around that day at recess. I hate Vera, too. She laughs at me. What . . . what did you do upstairs?”
There was a silence.
“Barbara! You didn’t!”
“No. I really wanted to, you know, see what it’s like—I mean, it’s all they talk about, practically—and they only like the kids who do it, but Joey started pulling me out, you know, to this bedroom, and then he, uh, put his hand here and he stuck his tongue in my mouth and it was so awful, he tasted like beer and he was sucking and I thought he’d pull my tongue out . . . yech! I hated it!”
A Tangled Web Page 37
