– 15 –
Back at the USGS, I got to work. I spoke with Miles Guffey and made a list of all scientists who were in any way connected to the project, and then interviewed a few of them so I could make thumbnails summarizing each investigator’s involvement, both by specialty and by degree of professional commitment. If someone’s career was hanging on the line, I wanted to know it. If someone was trying to discredit someone else, I wanted to make a mark by that name. If someone was feeding me a ration of shit, I most certainly wanted to know it and document it and understand what that meant, especially if that someone was Miles Guffey. Or Olivia Carmen “Puru” Rodréíguez Garcia, God bless her many names.
A ration of shit. Shit was the word. Don’t ever ask a girl raised on a ranch in Wyoming to confuse a cow flop with a cherry pie. And this was not your lone meadow muffin lying all by itself out there on the range; no, this was the whole pile of manure stacked up in the feedlot with steers stomping around in it snorting and mooing. I had not asked to go there, not really, but as long as I was now up past my belt buckle in it, I was going to take control of it or go down trying.
And somewhere out there, doing something that neither he nor Tom in their infinite wisdom had deigned to tell me about, Jack was languishing in the same pile of shit. To stretch the metaphor just a little farther, he may have climbed into this shit thinking he could transform it into something useful like compost, but by the time he had turned up at Nancy Wallace’s, he’d gotten it all over him, and it did not look or sound or smell good. No mira, oye, o huele.
So I sat on a stool at the big drafting table in Miles Guffey’s office as he ran around the building harassing his underlings, and I contemplated shit. I reminded myself that I had to use my brains as much as my sensory organs. I could not wade into the pile of shit past my eye sockets, or I’d be no good to Jack and no good to myself.
I was reasonably sure that some of the shit belonged to the fabled not-doctor Guffey himself, regardless of his reputation as a top scientist, and I was not convinced for a minute that things were “essackly” as they were being represented.
I was running on raw intuition, which by my lights is something that pops up where experience meets information. Geology is a highly intuitive science, because geologic information—the data we collect, or phenomena we observe—are fragmental, incomplete, discontinuous, and often downright ambiguous. Slavish adherence to the scientific method alone does not get the job done. We must constantly run our data through a fey part of our mental machinery, matching it to previously observed patterns, moving back and forth with it in time and space until the themes and variations emerge. We compare what’s happening now with evidence of past events and project these patterns into the future. Geology is thus an historical science, and as with any study of history, the context of events is everything, and as context evolves, so does our understanding of it.
There was obviously some history involved in this crime, both geological and personal. Usually, the span of time considered in historical analysis and prediction amounts to eons—hundreds of millions, even billions, of years—and the subject of observation is something inspiring and uplifting, a grand synthesis that dwarfs the petty scurry of human events. But here I was dealing with something that was occurring within a very short time scale, geologically speaking—a drought in Africa spanning only a few decades, narrowing down to present-time occurrences, topped with the raw stink of something critical that was going to occur within a matter of days. And I was analyzing something that looked and smelled as base and familiar as … well, shit, to stay with the metaphor. Or simile, or whatever it was.
Miles had gone on walkabout somewhere else in the building. I sat at the drafting table in his office staring at my page of notes, my mind clicking along in a groove. I was thinking on the fly, moving fast, sucking up information like a dry/wet vacuum. In the back of my mind, I could see that Tom had, as usual, teased and manipulated me into—to throw out just one more metaphor—putting my shoulder to this wheel, or, at least, putting my brain on the project. His penchant for messing with my head had, in the past, always put me into a fair snit of indignation and insubordination, but this time I chose not to waste the energy a snit would consume. It struck me that I must have come to trust Tom, because I felt content to do what I did best and let him feed me what I could handle when I could handle it. And just so long as what he fed me wasn’t a shit sandwich, I felt confident that we would, somehow, get the job done.
But what was the job?
I started over again, approaching through the lens of my specialty, forensic geology. I define that term to encompass two activities: 1) analysis of geologic materials collected at a crime scene, and 2) application of knowledge of the business of geology to understand the context of the crime. In the past, I had focused on the second activity. This time, Tom seemed to be steering me into the first. So I would do both.
The stench that was rising off the controversy over Miles Guffey’s project belonged with 2) business, a perfect example of why it took a geoscience insider to figure out what was going on in a situation like this. For instance, the outside observer might not understand that it was abundantly unusual for a Center Chief like Olivia Rodríguez to speak to me the way she had at lunch. Her maneuvers had been entirely political and not in the least bit motivated by science. Likewise, Miles Guffey’s grandstanding attempts to gain publicity for his project while trying to answer the question of what had become of Calvin Wheat went far outside the typical avenues of scientific research. Something was rotten in the state of the science, and I wanted to know what it was, if only to know how to dodge around it and save my own professional skin. Because Olivia Rodríguez had a point: There were rules of decorum within the scientific community, and it was important to avoid coming off looking like a pawn on someone else’s chessboard.
About as I thought that thought, Miles Guffey swaggered back into the room, hands in pockets, eyes wide with some kind of mischief. “Hoo-ee!” he expostulated. “Ol’ Waltrine’s got her undies in a bundle now! You shoulda seen her! She’s going off like Mount Vesuvius!”
I swung around, ready to listen.
Guffey said, “You heard of Chip Hiller’s work?”
Hadn’t Dr. Rodríguez mentioned his name at lunch? “Uh … He’s another dust expert?”
Guffey’s eyes popped with suppressed laughter. “Ah, yeah, I suppose you’d have to call him that. Well, okay, he’s a dust guy all right, but I mean … he’s like a little old lady, fussin’ and fumin’ over how he’s the only one who knows how to work with the stuff. Hell, his sampling protocol is like hitting a piano with a sledgehammer and expecting to get music, but to go and criticize ours—”
Just then Waltrine Sweet marched into the room, her brows down like a visor, neck stiff with rage, fists balled. “I want that man’s testicles on a platter!” she roared.
Guffey told me, “Here’s where you ask, ‘What man’s testicles, Waltrine?’”
I said, “What man’s testicles, Waltrine?”
Waltrine threw back her head and roared. “Chip fucking Hiller’s balls, that’s whose! I want them in a vice! I want to slam them in a car door! I want to serve them to him for dinner with greens and some of the bullshit he is trying to feed me! That sumbitch thinks he can rip me off like this he’s got—” She drew in a breath. “Another—think—COMING!”
Now I had another reason not to throw any snits: Waltrine’s made mine look amateurish. “He get into your data or something, Waltrine?”
Waltrine leaned toward me, bending almost ninety degrees at the hip. “Data? Did you say raw data? Chip Hiller? Oh, no, you don’t get the picture. This fucker stole whole paragraphs of my PAPER!”
I turned to Miles Guffey to get this translated. He said, “Waltrine submitted a paper to a prestigious microbiology journal. The Chipper is trying to scoop her by putting one in first. Only trouble is that it’s a small poof of specialists in this field, so her paper was sent to him
for review. So the stupid fucker’s lifted her introductory paragraph just about verbatim, even swiped some of her finer idioms, and he thinks his data refute her findings. Only problem is he’s a congenital half-wit who can’t spot a correlation if it ran up and kicked him in the ass.”
“Only problem,” Waltrine seethed. “Only problem! This is theft ! Theft of intellectual property! You think I’m going to sit around and take this? That motherfucker’s got another thing coming, let me tell you! Where I come from, we stick pins into funny little dollies look like sumbitches like him!”
Miles chuckled appreciatively. “And he told Waltrine’s thesis advisor that if she went to work for me, she’d be ‘falling under a bad influence.’ Huh! What’s he call his action? Goody Two-shoes goes to church?”
I made my hands into a T to call time. “Hey, bring me up to speed on something here. What’s this guy Hiller’s overall position on the dust? Is he calling it sterile?”
Waltrine flung her arms out in wild arcs. “He’s got to be snorting some kind of dust up his nose the way he goes on! He claims there are no live pathogens on the dust! But of course he ain’t finding none! He goes out there and sucks the little fuckers so hard he blows them right out the back of the filter paper! He—”
Miles cut in. “Waltrine’s a little upset. You see, the Chipper’s figgered out some way of getting funding. We haven’t. He’s really only interested in the dust as an abstraction, an intellectual exercise. He’s a linear thinker, can’t see the correlations or the possibilities. He’s been out there in the islands hanging out with his rum buddies, publishing his little papers in some forgotten scientific journal on what little minerals he’s finding on a Monday or a Tuesday, and now we come along and make it into front-page news. Messed up his whole day.”
“He’s not with the Survey?” I asked.
“Oh, hell no. He used to be with a university. Little tenure, little grants, little mind.” Miles wiped a tear of mirth of his cheek. “They forced him into early retirement. Now he’s with what we politely call an independent institution.”
“What’s his agenda?” I asked.
“His agenda? Oh, hell, I guess his agenda would be to blow me and my little ideas out of the water at any cost. Twenty years he’s been catching dust, and it never occurred to him to look for germs in it. Ol’ Johnny-come-lately Guffey come in and turn his whole world upside down.”
“So who exactly is he working for?” I asked.
Miles stopped laughing.
I asked again. “Where’s he getting his funding?”
Again Miles did not answer. I made a mental note to check Chip Hiller out on my own.
Miles said, “I’m sorry, Em, I shouldn’t go on like this about a colleague. Chip and I go way back. We get along. We—”
Waltrine drew in a big breath, preparatory to venting further rage. “You may go back, but I do not go back. Cal Wheat does not get a chance to go ‘way back.’ Cal Wheat got thrown off a fucking ship before he got to shove that bastard’s face into his rotten data! And I am not going to take this sitting still! I am going to go over to NASA tomorrow and blow the lid off his petty little sampling protocol! I am going to publish my paper, and the next conference, I’m going to stand up there in front of all our august colleagues and personally trim his male appendages down to a nub, if in fact they are large enough to locate without a microscope!”
Miles broke into another fit of giggles. “Okay, Waltrine, okay!” He winked at me. “Gives the term ‘microbiologist’ a whole new meaning, huh?”
I said, “So Calvin Wheat had a personal gripe with this guy?”
Miles glanced out the window. Waltrine stared at the floor and tapped her foot. Miles said, “It’s still hard to hear him spoken of in the past tense … .”
Trying to be consoling, I said, “Maybe he’s still alive.”
Waltrine kept her gaze aimed on the floor. Her foot tapping continued.
I asked, “Did Calvin ever work with Chip Hiller?”
Miles said, “Oh, hey, Waltrine! Remember to take Em with you tomorrow.” He grinned. “We got this little buzz going with NASA. We’re using their space imagery to track the dust, and here they’ve got some jockeys going to fly high-altitude missions. We want to put some sampling devices in those aircraft, prove once and for all that the microbes we’re finding aren’t coming from the wet hanky some tourist threw off a passing ship.”
Waltrine clenched her teeth and said, “The wonderful Chip Hiller has the gall to suggest that our data come from foliage surrounding our sampling site. He says that because his is on the upwind end of the island, and ours is on the downwind—”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re sampling on the downwind end of an island? Why not the upwind? Why not avoid controversy ?”
Waltrine made a gesture like she was plucking a recalcitrant chicken. “Another one! I will not drive clear across Florida with a skeptic!”
Miles said, “Our sampling station is on the downwind end of the island because that is where our sampling station attendant lives. We are doing this with volunteers. It’s pretty hairy trying to do this with no funding, let me tell you! Now, if we could kiss butt like Chip Hiller …”
Waltrine screamed, “We would all have oral herpes!”
I glanced out the open office door. A few colleagues had gathered in the hallway, smiling, as if enjoying having ringside seats to an especially good fight. Evidently Waltrine’s outburst was not counted as a surprise.
Miles said, “Spoken like a true microbiologist, Waltrine. But give Em a chance. Take her along tomorrow. Y’all’ll get along like a couple hogs in the mud.”
Waltrine shrugged a shoulder. “Sure, if you say so.” She looked at me, her face suddenly back in control. “Can you be ready to go by eight? It’s a two and a half hour drive, and our meeting is at eleven.”
Miles sniggered. “Em, be sure to bring your crash helmet. Most people allow an hour or so longer than that.”
I was somewhat frazzled by the extremity of Waltrine’s outburst. I had heard plenty of foul language in my day, but hers had surprised me. I felt like something had just gotten past me here, just as the pathogens on the dust had gotten past Chip Hiller. No matter, I’d have a long car drive with Waltrine during which I could get to know her better and try to figure out what she was hiding in plain sight. “Okay,” I said, folding my list and putting it in my pocket where no one could stumble upon it accidentally and know what I was really up to. “I’ll be here.”
– 16 –
Back at Nancy’s, I took a quick swim to try to build up my tolerance to the idea of water, then went and found Tom.
He was back in the guesthouse, studying something on the screen of his notebook computer. He looked up at me over his half glasses as I came in and quickly folded the screen down flat so I couldn’t see it. Faye, who was lolling naked on the couch doing her impression of a streamlined Venus of Willendorf, batted her eyelashes and said, “You try being pregnant in summer sometime.” She looked tired.
I turned to Tom. “Lots to report.”
“Spill.”
“First I want to use your computer to look something up on the Internet.”
“It’s all yours,” he said, moving out of his chair.
I sat down and brought up a search engine, and tapped in CHIP HILLER. It took me a while to crack a location for him, because of course Chip was a nickname, but I kept at it and eventually dug him up through HILLER + DUST. His full name was Wilbert Higby Hiller (if it were me, I’d go for a nickname, too), and he had previously published from a small university, as Miles had said. Currently, he held the lofty title of Director and Chief Scientist, Royal Caribbean Institute of Atmospheric Science, and it gave an address in the Bahamas. The Web page for the institute seemed so puffed up and nonspecific that I wondered if it really amounted to much. “How do you figure out who’s funding an institute?” I asked, now typing in BENJAMIN FARNSWORTH, the anthrax researcher Calvin Wheat had known, figuring
to round out my list of names.
Tom grew impatient. He said, “Drat. This guy I can’t find.”
“His name is Ben Farnsworth, and he’s a microbiologist. I’m not finding anything on him in here.”
Tom said testily, “It would help to know what you’re looking for.”
“Okay, I’ll report. Well, there’s trouble in paradise. Miles Guffey is pissing off half the profession, and the other half are standing outside his door laying bets on who wins which rounds. He’s got a second microbiologist working for him, a woman named Waltrine Sweet who could cuss the bolts out of a battleship, and reading between the lines, she’s under some pressure to come up with positive results for her doctoral dissertation. There’s an antagonist named Chip Hiller in some other shop who’s kicking up a major turf war; he says Guffey’s ideas are hogwash. This Farnsworth guy knew Calvin Wheat at school. And I had lunch with the Center Chief, a woman who’s playing the feminist card as a way to get me off the project. And I’m tagging along with Waltrine tomorrow to see the NASA guys at Kennedy.”
Tom gave me a lips-only smile. “My, but you have been busy.”
“Better’n sitting around.”
Faye mumbled, “You’re going clear over to Kennedy? We should go to the Dali museum. It has better air-conditioning.”
Ignoring that, I asked, “You hear anything more from Jack?”
Tom shook his head. “Tell me more about your time with Miles Guffey.”
“Oh, we tossed around some ideas about what part of the pie I might work on. I was appalled by how much there is to do. I wandered around there, talking to all the different experts that have a piece of the game, each one of them giving a little time to Guffey off the meter, because their time’s really paid for by other projects. The scope of the dust project is huge—trying to document what-all’s coming over here in those dust clouds, and exactly where some of it’s coming from and going to. They have high arsenic levels in the cisterns out on the islands, for instance, and that can’t be explained unless it’s coming from the dust. So where’s that at? Are the winds carrying away the spoils piles from mining operations? And we’re talking the cradle of humanity here: Africa has mines that go back several millennia, piles of crud all over the place, and even today’s mines aren’t operated by the standards of environmental safety we have here in the U.S. And then there’s the fact that most peoples who live there are living hand-to-mouth. One person I spoke to said that their idea of solid waste management is to pile up the camel dung and human feces right where the wind will pick it up and carry it off toward us, and do you know what they do with plastic bags and spent tires? They pile them up and burn them. She said the air quality in Mali, for instance, where ninety percent of the population lives on two percent of the land, right along the banks of the Niger River, is so bad, so full of petrochemicals and their daughter products, that she got a ripping sinus infection when she went over there to set up a sampling station.”
Killer Dust Page 14
