“Well, I do see,” said Hawking. “I can see that quite clearly. The question is whether the battle is winnable right here, right now, at an institute that has run a deficit for the past three years. The question is whether we have the resources and the time to wage such a war.”
Sandy leaned over the desk and assessed the distinguished, gentlemanly scientist across from him. He had been a wonderful researcher in his day. Now the stubble on his head was white. Hawking was well-spoken, sometimes even wise, but he lacked imagination.
“It's a question of balance,” Hawking said. “It's a matter of considering the other projects and the other grants pursued here. We don't want to find ourselves besieged.”
“But we are besieged. That's just my point,” said Sandy. “A policy of appeasement will never work, because all the projects in this institute, all the grants in the nation, are linked together. Where they question us, they will question other researchers as well. Where they mistrust one result, they'll call other scientists liars too. The whole scientific enterprise is suspect to Redfield and his people. You said it yourself in your open letter,” Sandy added, shrewdly forgetting that he had written the letter himself. “All of science is on trial.”
And Hawking sat back and thought of the institute trustees' meeting later that month, and the negotiations with Harvard, which had stretched on far too long and threatened to break down. He thought of the two senior scientists who were being wooed by pharmaceutical companies, and he could not deny that the Philpott was besieged.
“We have no choice but to fight this battle,” Sandy told him, “and we can absolutely win. They want to talk about ethics? Let's talk ethics. How ethical is ORIS? They want to talk about evidence? They want to talk about suppressing data? They've pursued a hypothesis of guilt based on three scraps of paper. ORIS selects a tiny fraction of R-7 data to use in their own report and they entirely ignore the rest. They take the claims of one disaffected former postdoc and amplify them into a cause célèbre. Where's Hackett and Schneiderman's discussion of Robin's motivations? Where's the disclosure of their political goals?”
“Easy, Sandy, easy,” murmured Hawking.
“Look, I'm just saying what we all know,” Sandy declared. “NIH established ORIS to appease the Committee on Energy and Commerce. Redfield holds the NIH budget in his hands. You and I both know ORIS was built specifically for ritual sacrifices before Congress. It's a forum for public executions. Redfield sits in state and watches ORIS pit the word of one researcher against another. They're brilliant little circuses, aren't they? You've got your young gladiators tearing each other to pieces, titillating the public, terrorizing the scientific community. You've got your senior scientists thrown to the lions. If we don't question this system, then no one is safe. This is not a little battle.”
“No, no. Of course not,” Hawking said.
“It's a huge fight. And we have no choice but to win.”
“Look,” Sandy told Cliff and Marion later that morning in the privacy of the office. “It's better to know exactly where the enemy stands. It's better to know what they think and what they want to do.”
And Cliff had nodded, pale as he stood before the two of them.
“This inquiry has been a farce,” said Sandy. “The House subcommittee was like something from the nineteen fifties. The article leaking the findings—beyond words. It's sad. It's tragic, actually, that the public mistrust of scientists should come to this. It's painful to see journalists and politicians play like this on people's fears. But I can promise you our appeal will get equal press, and our exposé of ORIS will get equal time.”
Unconsciously, Cliff began clicking the button on the pipette he was holding. Click, click, click, he clicked the instrument, as one might click the top of a retractable ballpoint pen.
“I know it's a lot to take in,” said Sandy, looking keenly at Cliff. “I know you just want to be done . . .”
“I just want to keep working,” Cliff said. He didn't realize it, but he'd passed Sandy's test. The determination was still there.
“There is something else,” Marion said.
“The autopsy results.” The words seemed to swell and lodge in Cliff's throat.
“There is no sign of infection,” she told him.
He could breathe again. The colony was safe.
“But there were signs of recurrence,” she said. “Small tumors near the mammary glands and elsewhere.”
That can't be, he protested inwardly. Those mice were in remission. He had treated them with R-7 and they had been healthy. Why were they relapsing? “God, why now?” he murmured.
“Why not now?” she snapped, and he flinched at her sudden anger. This had not been the considered response she was looking for.
A thousand apologies sprang to his lips and died there. He was sorry if he'd sounded so childish. He was sorry for speaking without thinking, for thinking aloud, for the inferior quality of his thoughts. Glass began talking again, but Cliff hardly heard. Sandy's voice seemed small and tinny in the silent snowstorm of Marion's displeasure.
She was the difficult one. She was the one quailing in the office, knitting furiously, consumed with doubt. “I think maybe we should publish a note in Nature, just to speak to some of the issues raised about our paper,” she told Sandy after Cliff had gone.
“We will not!” he said, aghast. “We will do nothing of the kind.”
“I don't mean a retraction,” she told him. “Just an explanation of the data—to address the objections made in the inquiry.”
“We will not retract our paper, and we won't partially retract our paper either,” Sandy said. “We're not going to indulge in any half-assed apologies. We are not going to be cowed by a concerted campaign against us.”
“I think we should clarify our work,” said Marion.
“Our work is perfectly clear,” said Sandy. “Three independent referees and the editors of an academic journal found it perfectly clear and compelling. If it's not clear enough for Redfield, that's a function of his own ignorance and prejudice.”
She pursed her lips and bent over her tight stitches.
“Marion,” he said. “If you know the truth, you have to fight for it.”
“I just don't want there to be any doubt about our research,” she said.
“But you know what we've done,” he told her. “This is just politics. You can't lose sight of that.” He shook his head. “I think sometimes I trust you more than you trust yourself. Listen to me. We know what we've done; we know our results. Nothing can change that.”
Gratefully, she allowed his resolve to calm her. After the shock of the news, after the long, wearying morning in which nothing had been right, she began to feel herself again.
“I'm glad I have him,” she told Jacob on the phone.
Jacob could have reminded her that Sandy had gotten her into this mess, rushing the grant proposal out. He could have pointed out that Sandy had opened the door to ORIS, when he urged Marion to let Cliff run wild with his R-7 experiments. There were many things Jacob might have told her, but he was quiet. He would not risk sounding supercilious about Marion's troubles, or resentful of Sandy. He would not wound Marion at a time like this.
“He's been extraordinary,” she told Jacob, and her praise was heartfelt, for the way Sandy buoyed her. He was an evangelist, she thought. An evangelist of the most remarkable sort, for he could bring you all the way around to your original position. What was the name for an evangelist like that? Someone who could convert you to yourself. Someone who would not let you waver, who brooked no doubts, but held fast to your first idea.
Kate was not herself at all. She was irresponsible and self-indulgent. She and Stephen had skipped out for the afternoon. She, who had practically never broken a school rule, was wandering the city streets and wasting time. How wonderfully delinquent; they could go anywhere. The Public Garden, or Chinatown, or the shops on Newberry Street. She felt out of place. They both did, away from Hill, with its geome
try exams and Tacitus translations, its prim steepled church crowned by a gold rooster weather vane. Kate nearly jumped whenever anybody glanced their way. She'd almost expected to be arrested for truancy when she and Stephen stepped off their bus. She was sure now that Charlotte was right about Stephen. He was bad news, but then, Kate was bad too. She'd just never realized it before.
They took the Green Line out to Huntington Avenue. If they were caught, they'd probably be suspended, and then they'd be wasting thousands of dollars of tuition, missing school.
“But they won't catch us,” Stephen said with an experienced air, and she wondered if he did this kind of thing all the time. She hoped he couldn't tell her heart was pounding. She had never acted so sixteen, so melodramatically disenchanted. She clutched her newfound anomie as tightly as her purse. And yet she felt intensely happy; she could scarcely remember her conversation with her mother and her anguish for her father; she'd nearly frightened herself out of her own feelings. She had not known this calculus before, combating great troubles with small. With a sense of serious decadence, she followed Stephen inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
They checked their coats and left the cool spring day behind. Tree ferns and potted lilies, orchids, ginger, and flowering trees filled the glass-roofed court. The inner walls were pink as the interior of a seashell, and rose up four stories on marble pillars and Moorish arches. As they walked along the edges of the courtyard, Kate and Stephen passed stone chairs and friezes, metalwork from churches and from royal beds in France. Tapestries of noble ladies hung in colonnaded hallways, and the staircases were adorned with Japanese panels of inlaid wood.
“I'd like to have a house like this,” Stephen said, as they walked into a room hung with vestments and solemn-faced Madonnas.
Kate almost laughed.
“The problem is, you can't get paintings like this anymore.” He spoke earnestly, as if he had actually considered acquiring some. They passed into a red room with full-length portraits of young men in armor, and then into a pale green salon adorned with tapestries and silver mirrors partly tarnished. There were collections of lace and rosaries, and an enameled litter fit for a princess.
“This place is such a fairy tale,” said Kate.
They'd come to a great coffered hall, the walls lined with forbidding Dutch oils. A young Rembrandt stood there in his self-portrait, and he seemed utterly bored by the dour, ruffed gentlemen and iron-faced women all around him. Kate stopped to look at him with his plumed hat, and faint mustache, and small, insouciant eyes. But Stephen walked right up to the Vermeer, The Concert, propped on a low table.
“This is the one I love,” he told Kate. “Look at that composition on the diagonal.”
She was conscious he was showing off for her, and she was flattered, and then dismayed. Was this how she had sounded when she'd read Donne to Cliff—so academic and so eager?
She gazed deep into the Vermeer, with its black-and-white tile floor, its three figures at the clavier, playing and singing before its painted lid. “It looks so peaceful and so far away, and harmonious,” she said. “It's all about balance.”
“No it's not. It's all about sex,” said Stephen. “See the painting on the wall above their heads? That's The Procuress. And see how the man and the woman on the right are joined by that black shadow? And look at that cello in the foreground, lying there on the floor like the naked body of a woman.”
Kate tried to make out the shadowy figures of The Procuress; she stared at the curving form of the cello on the floor. “You have a dirty mind,” she said.
“It's not me, it's the painting.”
“You make Vermeer seem so devious.”
“That's what I like about him,” said Stephen impishly, and he took off his gold-rimmed glasses and cleaned them on the bottom of his sweater. “It's all there—sex, deception, betrayal—hidden in plain sight.”
“Do you think his sitters had any idea?” asked Kate.
“I'm sure they did afterward.”
“But that would be defamation of character.”
“Maybe they enjoyed it,” said Stephen.
Angry tears started in Kate's eyes. “They did not enjoy it,” she said.
“They were probably just hired models,” he told her, stricken to see her so upset.
She glared at him.
“All right, no more Vermeer for you.” He steered her by the shoulders into the pale green salon, with its carved wooden chests the size of coffins, and its altarpieces, its flat processions of robed figures. Kate stared at a pair of angels on a wood panel. The gold around them was crazed and worn and reddish like old cracked leather.
“I'm sorry,” Stephen whispered.
She didn't answer.
“Did you see the Titian?”
“Shh,” she said.
And then he stopped talking. They stood together before the angels and the saints, and they just looked.
To be believed; to see her knowledge public, her understanding ratified! Robin practically danced into work that afternoon. She would have a life again, and a chance for a scientific future. Cliff's lies had been exposed, and she was no longer incompetent, or hysterical with jealousy, but vindicated by ORIS itself.
In the hallway, Uppington bustled up to her and stammered with surprise. “It's a most . . . most . . . very impressive finding,” he said to Robin privately, “but I do hope for your—for everyone—for all of us, that we can—that we will—arrive at an end to this . . . if you know what I mean.”
This was not exactly a ringing endorsement, and she heard him out with secret indignation. Uppington had treated her benevolently when she was in need, but even he found her victory difficult to swallow. She had attacked when she might have been demure; she had not only doubted, but advertised her doubts. She had involved herself with people of whom few scientists could approve, consorted with the enemy and scored points out of bounds.
Who had really cheated, then? Not Cliff, but Robin. Cheater. Cheater. She entered the lab and not one of Uppington's students deigned to look at her. Proudly, she kept on working, held her head up, recalled all the telephone calls she'd fielded that morning, the requests for interviews. Outside this building, in public, in DC, and surely in some other laboratories, there were people who read the newspapers and applauded her. She told herself that she had worked alone before and she was strong enough to keep on that way. Still, she hungered for some word of validation, some small sign from Uppington's grim graduate students and wary postdocs. She caught Simone's eye at the next lab bench, but Simone was suddenly engrossed in the cells before her, and she turned away.
Part VI
Open Questions
1
ROBIN SAT in the blue-carpeted hearing room of the NIH Appeal Board, and she saw that amateur night was over. The floor belonged to Houghton-Smith, and Borland, and Halbfinger, and Zouzoua. Philosophical declarations about truth and evidence, and political stands on public accountability, had all yielded to procedural arguments. The fact that the Secret Service analysts had no real scientific background, the fact that copies of their findings were withheld from the researchers' lawyers but freely given to Redfield's staff, the fact that ORIS's findings were leaked to The New York Times but mysteriously delayed from arriving in Boston, the fact that several pages of those findings were missing from the copies when they were finally mailed to Boston, due to what was termed a “clerical oversight”—these facts were the building blocks of Cliff's appeal. But, of course, there was more, as well. For Cliff's appeal hinged on discovery of Robin's character, Robin's motives. In the spring, the pressure had been on Cliff, but now the August heat had returned, and Robin was the one on trial.
How naïve and reckless she had been, trying to call Cliff to account. Hadn't Larry and Wendy warned her months ago not to get involved with ORIS? Hadn't they told her she would be the sacrificial lamb? ORIS had published its findings, but the conclusion of fraud was like a message scribed in sand. No final judgment, but
an opening, instead, for resounding action, vicious attacks on Cliff's behalf. She watched the three distinguished scientists of the appeals board as they sat in patient judgment. They were an eminent physicist, an infectious disease specialist, and a high-ranking NIH administrator, a woman of color, with a degree in public health. All took notes, all listened intently to Tim Borland's slick, sophomoric voice.
“‘Probably a bad idea,'” Borland read aloud from his photocopy of Robin's diary. “‘But I let him—'”
“I'm sorry,” Robin's lawyer interrupted. “You've just asserted that your main concern is the course of events from January through May. This is an entry from the previous summer.”
“I think the background here is essential,” Borland countered, “if we are to understand exactly when and how Robin Decker turned against my client.”
“I disagree,” Laura Sabbatini shot back. “And I think you should reconsider what I believe is an extremely dangerous approach.”
“Dangerous for whom?” Borland asked.
But I let him kiss me, Robin remembered, as the two lawyers argued, and the chair of the appeals board, the lively, balding, physicist, tried to mediate. Cliff would have a separate hearing. There was no one in the room but Robin and the two lawyers and the three distinguished scientists. That was quite enough. Together, they made up a quorum for humiliation. Even through all the arguments and interruptions, Robin heard her words exposed. She tried not to hear them, but she heard anyway. She knew exactly what she had written, and she could see precisely where Borland was going. He was following her up the stairs to her apartment.
“‘Let him kiss me and come up. We burnt the toast this morning and ran out of bread. Then we tried cereal and ran out of milk but he said he didn't really want to eat. . . .'”