Distraction - Bruce Sterling [22]
Oscar looked up from his laptop screen. The nine people on the soundstage had suddenly fallen silent. They were looking at him.
The Collaboratory’s Director and his nine functionaries seemed oddly spellbound for a moment. They formed a little Rembrandtesque tableau under their media lighting. Oscar knew all their names—Oscar never forgot names—but for the moment he had mentally labeled the nine local functionaries as “Administrative Support,” “Computing & Communications,” “Contracts & Procurement,” “Financial Services,” “Human Resources,” “Information Genetics,” “Instrumentation,” “Biomedicine,” and last but not least, the ditzy crew-cut thug from “Safety & Security.” They had noticed him and—Oscar realized this suddenly—they were all afraid of him.
They knew that he had the power to do them harm. He had infiltrated their ivory tower and was judging their work. He was very new to them, he owed them nothing at all, and they were all guilty.
The stares of strangers never bothered Oscar. He had grown up in a celebrity childhood. Human attention fed something in Oscar, a deep dark psychic entity that thrived and grew with the feeding. He wasn’t cruel by nature—but he knew that there were moments in the game that required direct and primal acts of intimidation. One of those moments had just arrived. Oscar flicked his gaze upward from his laptop screen and he gave the people on the board his best—his lethal—I Know All look.
The Director flinched. He grappled for his agenda, and moved on to the pressing subject of quality assessment in the technology transfer office.
“Oscar,” Audrey whispered.
Oscar leaned over casually. “Yes?”
“What’s going on? Why is Greta Penninger staring at you like that?”
Oscar glanced back up at the soundstage. He hadn’t noticed that “Instrumentation” was staring at him, and yet she clearly was. All of them had been staring at him, but Greta Penninger hadn’t stopped. Her pale and narrow face had an absent, intent cast, like a woman watching a wasp on a windowpane.
Oscar gazed back solemnly at Dr. Greta Penninger. Their eyes met. Dr. Penninger was chewing meditatively at the end of a pencil, gripping the yellow wood with her blue-knuckled, spidery, surgical fingers. She seemed to look right through him and five miles beyond. After a very long moment, she tucked the pencil in the dark ponytailed hair behind her ear, and returned her limpid gaze to her big paper notepad.
“Greta Penninger,” Oscar said thoughtfully.
“She’s really bored,” Argow offered.
“You think so?”
“Yeah. Because she’s a genuine scientist. She’s famous. This administrative crap is boring her to death. It’s boring me to death, and I don’t even work here.”
Audrey swiftly conjured Greta Penninger’s dossier onto her laptop. “I think she likes you.”
“Why do you say that?” Oscar said.
“She keeps looking your way and twisting her hair on her finger. I think I saw her lick her lips once.”
Oscar laughed quietly.
“Look, I’m not being funny. She’s not married, and you’re the new guy in town. Why shouldn’t she be interested? I know I would be.” Audrey paged a little deeper into her file of oppo data. “She’s only thirty-six, you know. She doesn’t look that bad.”
“She does look bad,” Argow assured her. “Worse than you think.”
“No, she could look okay if she tried. Her face is kind of lopsided, and she doesn’t do her hair,” Audrey noted clinically. “But she’s tall and she’s thin. She could carry clothes. Donna could make her look good.”
“I don’t think Donna wants to work that hard,” Argow objected.
“I have a girlfriend already, thank you,” Oscar said. “But since you’ve got your screen up: what exactly does Dr. Penninger do?”
“She’s a neurologist. A systemic zoo-neurologist. She won a big award once for something called ‘Radioligand Pharmacokinetics.’ ”
“So she’s still a working researcher?” said Oscar. “How long has she been in administration?”
“I’ll check,” Audrey said readily, tapping keys. “She’s been here in Buna for six years.… Six years working inside this place, can