Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  Larry and Wendy sat on the backseat. They worked at MIT in the computer science department. Larry had a pronounced New York accent, and wore a white cowboy hat and bolo tie, as if to show he came from a part of Brooklyn in the Southwest. He built harpsichords from kits in his spare time, although he played them badly. He and Wendy had lived together for seventeen years, sharing their love for programming and gaming, a taste for Indian food, a voracious appetite for science fiction, classical music, and Scottish country dancing. Harmonious in their enthusiasms, they abhorred together beautifully as well, detesting religions, superstitions, condominiums, and corporations. Larry and Wendy militated to keep software in the public domain and away from greedy profiteers like Lotus and WordPerfect, and their upstart rival, Microsoft. While other people wore FREE MANDELA T-shirts, Larry and Wendy donned shirts emblazoned FREE SOFTWARE. They wore their hair long, in ponytails, and their glasses large. Larry had the broader, beefier face, and when he grinned under his white hat, he looked strangely rabbinical. Wendy was long-faced and long-nosed, her blue eyes set close together. She dressed in denim skirts and, inexplicably, white kneesocks pulled up to her bony knees. She didn't mind looking like an elderly schoolgirl. She liked it. She and Larry each wore NERD PRIDE buttons. The term had been coined by Larry's mentor at MIT, and it suited Larry and Wendy perfectly. They had T-shirts with the slogan as well. NERD PRIDE on the front, and on the back, the legend: A WELL-ROUNDED PERSON IS POINTLESS.

  One year, while hiking, Robin had ventured to Larry, “But you know, you and Wendy are actually very well rounded.”

  “No we're not,” Larry and Wendy retorted instantly, almost in unison.

  Neither Larry nor Wendy could drive, and so they sat in the back of Tomas's Volkswagen Rabbit. Blithely oblivious to Tomas's roaring accelerations and screeching turns, the two of them sat side by side, playing cribbage.

  They parked at a distance from the sandy spit of land they'd come to walk, because the piping plovers were nesting and the beach roads were closed. On foot, Robin and Tomas, Larry and Wendy set out with binoculars and birding guides. Robin carried bottles of water, and Larry sprayed himself up and down with bug spray. He had a phobia of mosquitoes and ticks and convinced himself regularly that he had contracted Lyme disease. Larry sprayed so compulsively that the others didn't bother; they believed walking next to him was protection enough.

  On boardwalks bleached gray they clomped across the beach. The sand rippled under the hot sky, and the scant grass fluttered in long ribbons.

  “Bobolink,” Larry said, and put up his binoculars at once. Wendy had her birding journal open and at the ready, and Tomas his sketchbook, but Robin hung back. She didn't feel like identifying anything.

  “Yellowthroat,” Wendy declared.

  “Where?” Larry demanded.

  Robin and Tomas pushed ahead where the boardwalk cut through bracken and trees twisted with the wind. The branches and tree trunks looked like driftwood, but they were alive, and they tangled together in a little copse. The boardwalk curved in here under the sheltering leaves, and the place was quiet, a dappled refuge from the sandy flats and dunes outside. Sweating and puffing, Tomas found his spot and unloaded his supplies, then unfolded his easel and took paint box, water jars, and brushes from his backpack. His hands were big. Even his fingers were chubby, but when he began to paint, every line on the page was delicate, every wash of color translucent. The branches above them emerged on the page; the rough, weathered bark of the trees. “Don't look,” Tomas said, catching Robin.

  He was shy about his work, and easily discouraged. He often told Robin he wasn't very good—that his painting was just therapy.

  They couldn't see Larry and Wendy, but they heard them in the trees, whispering loudly, deep in conversation.

  “Aren't you going to find some birds?” Tomas asked Robin. “Go. Go.” He waved her off. “Find some birds.”

  “I don't really want to,” Robin said. She wanted to tell him just then. She had to talk to somebody. Still, she could not speak. Her ideas were too confused. Was it her own problem she couldn't reproduce Cliff's results? Or was it, as Jacob hinted, something else? Since she'd spoken to Jacob, Robin's impatient mind had given her no rest. Why had reproducing Cliff's results been impossible for her? What was wrong? Problems with the data? Mistakes in Cliff's analysis? Something Marion might have missed? But Marion did not miss anything. Jacob knew that. He knew Marion best of all.

  The four of them stayed out all afternoon, and followed the boardwalk its entire circuit through the dunes. Larry and Wendy became grumpy for lack of birds. There were supposed to be brown-headed cowbirds and willets and all kinds of warblers flying by, and they had seen only the bobolink and the yellowthroat.

  “I think I've got a bite,” Larry said dolefully, examining his arm.

  “That's impossible with the amount of chemicals you've sprayed on yourself,” said Wendy.

  “Obviously, it is possible,” he snapped. “I have a high susceptibility to insects.” Out of sorts and out of patience with the others, the wounded Larry marched ahead down the boardwalk. Binoculars held high, he looked left and right and far in front of him.

  “A little ice cream might cheer him up,” Tomas mused.

  But there was Larry just ahead, standing with binoculars fixed on a brown speck near the parking lot.

  Wendy rushed forward. “What is it?”

  “Shh. Shh.” He waved her off.

  The three of them put up their binoculars and peered out from behind Larry. Some sort of sandpiper was standing there in the distance, perched on a fence post. It was certainly a sandpiper with its long bill and wiry legs, its mottled brown feathers and small, neat head. But the bird didn't sound like a regular sandpiper at all. It sounded like a child learning to whistle.

  For several long minutes, they stood mesmerized by the leggy bird. They didn't dare move or speak until the odd piper fluttered off its perch and flew away.

  “That,” said Larry, “was an upland sandpiper.”

  “No way,” Wendy protested.

  “It was, it was, it was!” Larry cried with childish glee.

  “Upland sandpipers are very rare here,” said Tomas, riffling through his bird book. “They don't live out here. . . .”

  “It was rare,” cried Larry, jubilant. “It was incredibly rare.”

  “But how do you know?” Robin asked.

  “Didn't you hear it? Didn't you hear the whistle?”

  “It wasn't supposed to be here,” Wendy said in a reproving voice. Whether she was reproving Larry or the bird, Robin and Tomas couldn't tell.

  “But we saw it anyway,” Larry said, scribbling the entry in his book. “I pegged it!”

  There was no arguing with him. Larry didn't know much about birds, but what he did know was indisputable. He'd forgotten his bug bite, and his bad mood, and he pranced away swinging his binoculars by their strap, and trying to whistle as the bird had. Robin trudged along, bemused. Such small things, such tiny victories—whether finding birds, or winning at cribbage—made Larry so enormously happy. He pitched his cowboy hat back off his sweaty face and took Wendy's hand in his, and he grinned until his eyes were slits of pleasure, and then he shouted into the big empty sky, “Ha!” Because he'd pulled a bird out of that long empty afternoon. Not just any bird, but a rare find.

  And then Robin saw it; she saw the expression on Larry's face, and knew she'd seen that look before. That look of triumph, that giddy smile, silly with happiness. That was Cliff with the mice; that was the look she'd seen in Cliff's eyes when she'd watched him through the window. She shook herself and blinked, but all she saw was Cliff, holding a mouse up by the tail. Her nose brushed the red glass as she watched him moving busily about the room, carrying cages from rack to counter. He plucked a mouse out of its cage and put it in the isolator, and then turned the CO2 spigot at the wall. That was odd. She'd thought so at the time. Marion did not allow her researchers to gas experimental mice. Why would he bend the
protocol like that? She closed her eyes and tried to reconstruct what had happened next, but she could not. All she could remember was Cliff, and his face—lit up, jubilant, blissful, arrogant, all at once.

  2

  IN THE lab the next day, Robin realized, with some embarrassment, that she was the only one who'd gotten any sun over the weekend. Telltale freckles dotted her arms and face, while everyone else looked pale as before. She half expected the others to ask her where she'd been and tease her about slacking off, but they scarcely looked up. Cliff and Feng were working on Cliff's virus, preparing batches to ship to labs at Stanford and Cornell. They'd been freezing one-milliliter aliquots of virus in lysate solutions and filling out forms all weekend. She glanced at Cliff uneasily. He was completely absorbed in the paperwork in front of him.

  He no longer worked to ignore her. He had actually turned his mind elsewhere. Over weeks and months, she had been the unforgiving one, the silent historian of their ruined friendship, and conservator of their heartbreak. He lacked her perfect recall of every argument. Nor did he possess her hair-trigger imagination, her ability to find a slight in every interaction. He was not unfeeling; he felt a great deal, but he rode emotions like horses until he wore them out. He accepted their breakup. He had stormed and grieved at the time, but he was only as lonely as he wanted to be, and, Robin observed, he was hardly alone for long. There was already someone new, a lab tech from the second floor named Nella. Catching them flirting by the bike racks, she'd turned away, hurt, and at the same time fiercely glad Cliff was as callow as she'd thought.

  All that summer, Cliff labored steadily. Flare-ups over space or lab chores, or requests for information, were now increasingly rare. Robin kept to herself, and only seethed from a distance. In July, Marion began allowing her to work part-time on the bone tumor project, although, like everyone else, she was expected to continue supporting Cliff.

  The days were stifling, but Cliff liked the suffocating afternoons and long, still sunsets. At last, in August, the journal article was published; his claim was made. His data flew into the world. Now all he had to do was work relentlessly to follow up. Natalya went to the Cape for a week, and Aidan spent ten days at a music festival in Maine, but Cliff didn't want to go away. The only breaks he took were to play volleyball at the Harvard bio labs. He'd go in the evenings with Prithwish, and they'd play pickup games against anyone they could find. They'd spike and set and dive for the ball until they dripped with sweat and dirt.

  One August night after a game, Cliff sat on the steps with Jeff Yudelstein. A few months before, no one in the lab had had the time or patience for a student newspaper, but now that the initial media flurry was over, and the photo shoots and phone calls had died off, it was amusing to sit back and answer questions from the Harvard Crimson reporter, who happened to be Charlotte Glass's boyfriend. She was serving as photographer, and Cliff couldn't help wondering whether she was using her father's camera.

  “Xiang Feng isn't here?” Jeff asked. He had a folder full of press clippings.

  “Nope,” said Cliff.

  Jeff frowned and fussed with his tape recorder, consulted his notes, and then asked rather plaintively, “Were you there when Xiang Feng made the discovery?”

  “The discovery?” said Cliff, slightly annoyed. “It was my discovery. They were my experiments.”

  “What do you mean?” Jeff asked.

  “Well, let's start from the beginning,” Cliff said coolly. “Let's start from the virus. Respiratory syncytial virus.”

  “Could you spell that?”

  “Sure.” Cliff began to tell Jeff about his work modifying the virus, and his application of the work to breast cancer tumors in mice. He did not leave out Feng's observations, but he did not begin there either. He told his story patiently, explaining the context of Feng's dramatic observation one weekend. It was just a student newspaper, but Jeff was eager enough, and quick enough to take everything down.

  “Is this too much detail for you?”

  “No, not at all,” said Jeff. The Crimson came out only once a week in the summer; campus news was slow, and Jeff had plenty of space for a feature article.

  Of course, Cliff didn't bring up everything. He did not confide in Jeff about his long walk that night in December, or his sudden rehabilitation in the lab. He did not mention that he'd despaired of science, or talk about the way the work consumed him in the winter. He spoke instead of the years he'd spent on the work, and his hopes for the research now that it was public.

  Listening to all this, Charlotte lolled on the steps, slightly disaffected, waiting for the interview to end. She wore small squinty glasses and a halter dress from Oona's in the Square. She was not as tall as Louisa, or as pretty as Kate, but she was more audacious than either. She was long past hating that, like her sisters, she was named after a Great Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer. She wore her ruffled peony of a name with flair, as she might pin a large silk flower onto a vintage black overcoat. She had style, and she could barely bring herself to watch as Jeff grubbed and snuffed, scribbling in his steno notebook. Jeff was funny and even lighthearted when he forgot that he wanted to be editor of the Crimson and get a Rhodes scholarship, and go to law school, and clerk for the Supreme Court. He was witty among friends, but right now Jeff sounded both obsequious and aggressive, and she couldn't wait to get him out of there.

  She was bored, Cliff assumed, looking at her. She'd done Jeff a favor by coming along with the camera, and maybe by convincing her dad to arrange the interview. This was going on too long; Cliff was growing a bit tired of Jeff as well. He was glad when the hour was done and he could say good-bye. He shook hands with both Jeff and Charlotte and sauntered up the steps into the grand old building as casually as if the institute were his own house, then ran up the flights of stairs to the third floor. The empty lab no longer seemed a prison, but his own sanctuary. In the past, he'd hated to work late, alone, but now he loved evenings here. He had all the equipment to himself.

  Without looking, he reached for his lab book. Twice he ran his fingers along the empty metal shelf above his bench before he realized his book was missing. Where was it? He always put it there. He scanned the cluttered bench tops and then padded into the stockroom. Swinging open the door, he heard a gasp.

  “You scared me,” Robin accused him, and clutched a stack of books and papers to her chest.

  “Sorry. I didn't know you were here. What's going on?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was just looking up some stuff.” She wanted to get by. She was in a terrible hurry to leave.

  “Why were you looking up stuff in here?” he asked, puzzled. And then he saw his lab book in her arms. “What are you doing with that?”

  She handed it to him.

  “Why did you take my lab book in here?”

  He was much bigger than Robin. Fleetingly she remembered the way he had once stood in a doorway, barring the way until she tried to duck under his arm and he caught and kissed her. That had been more than a year ago. Cliff stood before her now, indignant, blocking the only way out.

  “I'm doing bookkeeping for the colony. I needed your tag numbers,” she lied.

  “Why didn't you ask?”

  She couldn't look him in the face.

  “Robin?”

  “Could you just let me by?”

  “You were sneaking around behind my back.” He was amazed that she would pry into his lab book and then try to cover it up like a kid shoplifting. He was shocked she might be that petty, and that dishonest.

  “I'm sorry.” Somehow she squeezed past him and escaped into the hall. She could not explain. She just couldn't. She couldn't say, even to herself, what she was doing with Cliff's lab book, or what she was searching for. She ran down the hall to the stairwell, then, closing the fire door behind her, ran down a flight of stairs for good measure and sank down on the bottom step. What had she been after? There was nothing wrong with Cliff's lab book, at least not in any of the entries she'd had time to
read. There was no smoking gun in his notes.

  She leaned over, resting her head on her knees. She hated herself for looking at what wasn't hers; she despised her own suspicions because they were secretive and speculative. There was nothing wrong with Cliff's work—except that it was so much better than hers. Wasn't that the problem? She closed her eyes and forced herself to face the question. Where did these doubts come from, if not from her jealous imagination? No, she protested within herself, she had reason for skepticism. Her efforts to reproduce Cliff's results had been meticulous; in fact, she was far more conscientious in the lab than he. Her work with R-7 had been more than competent. Jacob himself had suggested she was not the problem. She reminded herself of all this. Still, her conscience pricked her and provoked her, and she was ashamed.

  She forced herself upstairs again and back into the lab, where Cliff perched on a stool, his lab book in front of him.

  “What the hell is going on with you?” Cliff demanded.

  “I was out of line.”

  “Look,” he told her. “If you have a question about my numbers, ask, okay? Come to me, and I'll give them to you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I will.”

  “I'll give you the tag numbers now.” He dragged over a stool. “Just sit down and look at them. Can we do this? Can we have a truce here?” He put his arm around her shoulders. He didn't mean anything by it, just an attempt at normalcy. He was a tactile person, as quick to hug his women friends as he was to smile. He gave away glances and gestures, and he was charming that way, or incorrigible, depending on how you looked at it.

  Robin flinched, and he let go. “I know it's been bad between us, but I can't take this animosity.”

  “I'm sorry,” she said as Cliff opened up his lab book for her. Still, despite her apology, despite all her resolutions, curiosity drew her further. She had been struggling with her doubts for so many days, she thirsted for answers. Almost inaudibly, she asked, “Why didn't you break your animals' necks?”