Intuition

  “What do you mean?” he asked her.

  “You know what I mean.” She waited across the desk.

  Still, he did not wither under her glare. He did not turn away or look furtively at the floor.

  “I want to know exactly what you did with R-7. I want to understand exactly why two major laboratories cannot reproduce your results.”

  “If I knew why, I'd tell you. If I understood the problem, I'd be on the phone to Agarwal and Hughes right now.”

  She knit her fingers together. “I'll tell you what I think,” she said. “I think your claims are unfounded—or at the very least, exaggerated. I think your record keeping, your—”

  He threw up his hands and said, “I've had every accusation thrown at me, and now this new theory that because two labs haven't yet reproduced my results, I'm guilty in retrospect. But I've answered every question about my procedure and my experiments, I've discussed every scrap of paper with ORIS. I don't know what else I can do. Either you believe me or you don't.”

  “We have believed you, and we've defended you,” Marion said. “We've staked our reputations on you. Why didn't you show us all your data?”

  “You saw everything.”

  She looked him in the face. “No, I don't think so.”

  He was pale, frustrated, indignant. “I don't know what else I can say to you; you'll think whatever you want to think.”

  “I do not think whatever I want to think,” she countered, “and that's the difference between us. Why didn't you publish all your data?”

  “I did.”

  “Everything.”

  He practically shouted, “Yes. Yes! Every single scrap of relevant data.”

  “Ah.” She sat back sharply in her chair.

  “No, I misspoke.”

  She caught her breath. She had him. Not in the angry outburst, as he thought, but in the wavering afterward. She gazed at him as though she'd just made a bloody discovery.

  He was floundering. He heard his own voice, and the words spilled out in his defense, but for a moment even he heard his sentences as hollow formulas. His credo was rehearsed; his passion credible, but a performance all the same. “When I said relevant, I meant relevant to those particular experiments on that date.”

  She fixed her eyes on him in chilling fascination. “No. Relevant to the results you wanted.”

  “Not true. Not true at all,” he protested.

  But she'd found the equivocation she had been listening for, the willful confusion in his mind, the root of so many beautiful unfounded ideas. There it was; she'd caught him out. “Don't you see?” she told him. “Can't you see? The work isn't good. It isn't right.”

  He didn't see. His guard was up again. Once more he maintained he had done nothing wrong. She wanted a confession, but he had nothing to confess. After all, he could not confess to Marion what he would not confess to himself. What he told himself about his work was not exactly what he had done. What he had done, not exactly what it should have been. Still, Cliff's own perceptions of his actions were coherent, internally consistent. He clung to his defense for safety.

  Perhaps his work with R-7 had been more about ideas than concrete facts; perhaps his findings had been intuitive rather than entirely empirical. He had not followed every rule. Strictly speaking, he had not broken the necks of all his mice, but gassed them, instead. He had not dissected every animal. He had not chosen to discuss every piece of data, but had run ahead with the smaller set of startling results he'd found. Still, aspects of his data were so compelling that in his mind they outweighed everything else. He had sifted out what was significant, and the rest had floated off like chaff.

  “I never thought you would allow public opinion to influence you,” he said.

  “Not opinion,” she told him. “Reality.”

  “I thought you were patient,” he countered.

  “You don't know what patience is,” she said.

  His voice trembled with frustration. “How can you say that? I've been working night and day. . . .”

  “Doesn't matter,” she told him almost tauntingly. “Doesn't matter if it isn't right. We're going to retract the Nature paper.”

  He started, aghast. He had never dreamed Marion could be so fickle—especially after defending him so staunchly before. He could certainly imagine Sandy lashing out at him in anger, or turning against him, but not Marion. She had been both employer and teacher, unwavering in her support. “You're going to let them win. You're going to let Redfield make the calls for you,” he said.

  “No, I make my own calls. And I don't think your results are sound, or your conclusions true.”

  “You can't retract my work,” he burst out, but of course his work belonged to her and Sandy. The paper was the property of the lab, and they could do exactly what they wanted with it.

  “I don't publish flawed results,” she said.

  “They aren't flawed.”

  “I don't believe that anymore.”

  “Do you really think I based all this work on lies?” he asked desperately. “Can you really sit there and . . .”

  “It's bad science,” she said. “I can't support it, and I cannot continue working with you.”

  “You mean you can't be seen working with me,” he retorted.

  She didn't deign to answer that. In the fluorescent office light, her dark eyes took him in with such ferocity, he could scarcely breathe. Then, suddenly, she dropped him. She turned back to the paperwork on her desk.

  “What about the work I'm doing now?” he asked.

  She didn't answer.

  “What about my funding?”

  “That money's already spent,” she murmured.

  “Are you asking me to leave today?”

  She shrugged. “It doesn't matter.” She didn't bother to look up. “You can come in or not. You can finish out the year or not. It makes no difference to me. I will not be working with you.”

  Her disavowal echoed in his ears. She'd cut him off. In his worst moments, he felt that she—not ORIS, not Representative Redfield, not Robin, but Marion herself—had stolen his future. How could he possibly become a scientist now? How would he even have the heart?

  He went in every day. Silently he went through the motions, culturing cells from the new tumors on his mice. As they had long before, the other postdocs watched him, and worked silently around him. He told himself that Marion didn't matter, but he knew that wasn't true.

  When the mail arrived, he scarcely noticed the small brown package addressed to him. Then he saw the return address and slit the packing tape.

  Kate had sent him a new book, a paperback copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He flipped through the pages, but there was no note. Gently he put the book down and threw away the cardboard wrapping. Wilde's tale of the beautiful young Dorian and his dissembling might have been the last stake through Cliff's heart, except that, fortunately, he was unfamiliar with the novel.

  3

  MARION PUSHED the bedcovers off, and then pulled them on again. She flipped her pillow over to no avail. Despite Sandy, she had let Cliff go. She'd spoken to him so directly even he would find no hope or ambiguity in her words. She had no idea what he would do, and she didn't care. In a few months he would be gone and she would be starting over. She'd already begun with Nir and Miki, and they were promising. Nir came highly recommended from the Weitzman Institute, and was already a presence in the lab with his big opinions and big hands. Miki was from UCLA, and a little dynamo. But, of course, who knew how these two would turn out? Miki could be brilliant, or just as easily turn out pedestrian results. Nir could be a breath of fresh air, or he might become a bully. It would take months and years to know; it took that long to find out about people.

  The time was what she regretted most, for she looked back at all of Cliff's work as lost time. Amazingly, Sandy did not see this yet. When Marion spoke of retracting Cliff's paper, he still talked about waiting for the results of the appeal, and then suggested simply writing a n
ote about the ambiguities in the paper. He refused to face the fact that there was nothing salvageable in this situation. She could scarcely face the idea herself, but there it was. They would have to start over. And there was something else. She had come to see that starting over meant letting go of Sandy himself. He was completely tangled in Cliff's faulty work. Sandy's name, his face, his every interview was tied to R-7. He had been the prime spokesman for the research, Cliff's most vocal defender, and now he was utterly unapologetic, unconscionably optimistic, even in defeat. To begin again would mean to divorce herself from everything Sandy had worked for, and every Pyrrhic victory Sandy had won. To begin again would mean asserting her own voice, and her own name, to devise a new research program, and a new approach. It would mean rebuilding her reputation for consistency and care, and slow, meticulous lab work. It would mean working again without any thought of glory, following small observations instead of imposing grand ideas. It would mean thinking small.

  This was the long route, and it was the way forward; the only way for her. She knew she must give up Sandy and all his schemes for shortcuts, his visions of a northwest passage, his dreams of flight. But she had no words to tell him. She could not find the time or place.

  The day came in February; the city was piled in ashen snow. Feng and Nir and Miki and Prithwish were all at work in the lab, and Nir was asking why he and Miki had to maintain the colony records downstairs.

  “We are not slaves,” he declared. “This is the work of lab techs. This is absurd.”

  “Oh, stop complaining,” Prithwish said. He spoke playfully, but Nir was not amused. Nir wasn't tall, but somehow he took up a huge amount of lab space. He looked like a wrestler, with his broad shoulders and thick, muscular neck. He had served in the Israeli army, and couldn't talk about what he'd done there.

  “I want to understand why this job is given to us,” Nir insisted.

  “Actually, it doesn't bother me all that much,” piped up Miki.

  Nir glared at the tiny traitor next to him.

  “I could tell you the truth, but you won't like it,” Prithwish said.

  “Well . . .”

  “It's just because you're new. That's all.”

  “In other words, a lab tech is more senior than me,” said Nir.

  Feng suppressed a smile as he stood waiting for the centrifuge, reading the book he'd found. “‘Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known,'” he read. “‘We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed . . .'” He snapped shut The Picture of Dorian Gray, opened the centrifuge, and took out his colored tubes. How odd to tire of the world because it did not change. Feng himself had always appreciated waking up in the morning to find everything just as he had left it. He had always particularly enjoyed the fact that no matter how frantic you were looking for something, objects could not get up and move on their own from place to place. There was such satisfaction that your books or keys were often exactly where you'd put them. He wondered, in his self-satirizing way, if he was stuck with bench work because he enjoyed that sort of mundane order. He would never find research enchanting. Cliff had once recorded in his lab book Feng's definition of experiment as “a series of humiliations.” Everyone laughed at that, because it was true. Science was all about failure, and bench work consisted primarily of setbacks. Conducting biological research was like climbing up a downward-moving escalator that then multiplied and divided and unzipped itself into a thousand new mutating walkways. The challenge was not to move upward or forward, but often only to stay upright. How satisfying, then, and how amusing when objects stayed in the same place, and forms and colors suddenly behaved predictably. These were the unexpected rewards of scientific life, the odd consistencies.

  He was preparing a job talk for an interview at Rice University. There was an opening at Columbia as well, but the head of biology at Rice was pursuing Feng and hinting strongly that he would also find a position for Mei. Feng was wistful at the thought of New York. When he'd gone to Manhattan to speak and seen the trains and the museums and the restaurants, when he'd rushed through the streets with the assistant department head whistling for a yellow cab, he'd longed to move to that great city. But Marion said accepting the position at Rice, particularly if there was a job for Mei, would be the prudent thing to do. Of course, he agreed with her. He and Mei had no money at all, and as Marion pointed out, Rice would help them obtain their green cards. Two tenure-track jobs, and the university's legal department might make permanent residency in the States possible.

  Still, Feng wondered, if circumstances had been different, would Marion have pushed him to go to Columbia? She was certainly eager to see him settled, but she might have been more ambitious for him if he hadn't angered her with his silence about Cliff's work. She had asked his opinion, demanded he take sides, and he'd abstained. She'd insisted he help her investigate what was going wrong, and he'd refused. He did not regret opposing her. Perhaps his thinking had been isolationist. How could he help it? She had power, and he had none. He told himself, defensively, the lab was hers, not his. It was up to Marion to decide what she believed and what to do. If she had a fault, it was this—her uncertainty about her own judgments, her need to lean on other people to ratify her own conclusions. Always she pretended she didn't care, but the pretense didn't hold. She cared too much. For her the lab was life and death, every decision fraught, every disappointment a personal betrayal. She was a romantic, always striving; she had no sense of humor when it came to her work, no sense of the cosmic joke.

  She was sitting in the office, editing her formal retraction of the R-7 paper, when Sandy bounded in, his face flushed with pleasure. He was grinning, practically laughing. She hadn't seen him look so happy in months. “We creamed 'em,” he told her. “Thayer called me, and we've won the appeal. We got the judgment against ORIS, a rebuke to Redfield's subcommittee, a call to reform ethics oversight at NIH. We got everything!”

  Sybil Halbfinger had already called. Marion turned to him gravely and said, “I know.”

  This time no findings had been leaked to the press. Mysteriously, the conclusions of the appeals board had not reached the public at all—but Sandy would take care of that. The statement by the distinguished panel could not have been stronger. The poorly handled inquiry, the invasion of privacy, the intimidation that Sandy, Marion, and Cliff had suffered, the troubling use of Secret Service agents, the leaking of documents, and ORIS's willful, at times entirely fanciful, extrapolation from problematic evidence—all these aspects were detailed in the appeal board's forty-seven-page statement. The board's conclusions were unequivocal. Despite irregularities in the R-7 data, there was no clear evidence of fraud.

  “‘Poor record keeping does not necessarily indicate a desire to mislead,'” Cliff read as he sat with Tim Borland at their celebratory lunch in Romagnoli's. “‘Inconsistent scientific results are not necessarily commensurate with data manipulation. Faulty or even false conclusions do not necessarily connote fraudulent claims.'”

  “But this is the best part.” Borland leaned across the table and flipped several pages. “Did you see? ‘This panel recommends an immediate external review of the structures and processes used for ethical oversight at the NIH, with particular emphasis on the relationship between ORIS and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.'”

  Cliff shook his head.

  “How does it feel?” Borland asked him.

  “I don't know,” Cliff said truthfully. “It hasn't hit me yet.”

  Borland laughed. “It will. It will.”

  Still, Cliff felt slightly dazed as he left Romagnoli's. He wandered toward the Park Street Station and th
en through the Public Garden, with its bare twisting trees, its swan boats in storage, its flower beds covered with mulch and a dusting of snow. On the frozen Frog Pond, skaters whirled and lumbered, slid and spun, and fell on the white ice. He could take the T back to Cambridge, or he could rent skates for the afternoon. He was free, no longer encumbered with accusations from ORIS or from Marion. Free of blame, and free of Robin. With a rush of joy, he realized that he could work again with a clear name.

  He had been spared, and he was chastened, humbled by the victory. As one who survives a shipwreck, or a terrible disease, he asked God for strength and wisdom, and resolved to make a better start. He had made serious mistakes; he acknowledged that much to himself. There had been missteps. He had lost years of work; he would have to begin again on some fresh project. He had been battered and abused, and yet he was not disillusioned, even now. Not sorry, or sad, but eager to begin again. Out of this experience he'd discovered what he'd never fully known before: he loved science, the slow, exhausting work, the rush of discovery. He could never give that up.

  And so he walked along, his shoes squeaking on the snowy path, and after long months of torment he felt his spirit revive. He had a great gift—this talent for restoration, this ability to see himself as a character in a bildungsroman. With just a little encouragement, Cliff's doubt and confusion melted away. Given grounds for hope, he saw the future stretching out before him, no obstacles to block his way, but glorious possibilities at every turn.

  Now Robin saw that her own work had been in vain. Despite ORIS, despite the failure to reproduce Cliff's work in other labs, he'd won. She spoke to her own lawyer and heard the appeals board's decree. “Their attorneys turned this into a referendum on procedures and practices,” Laura Sabbatini told Robin that morning on the phone. “Unfortunately, we were unable to move the appeals board to consider the merits of the case.”

  Robin listened carefully, but she said nothing. What was there to say? This was how the matter stood, and there was nothing she could do. There was no way for her to appeal the appeals board's decision.