Distraction - Bruce Sterling [44]
“Never mind that, Albert. Just tell me about your work.”
“Well, basically, we’re still following up her Nobel Prize results. That was all about glial neurochemical gradients evoking attentional modulation. It was the biggest neurocognitive breakthrough in years, so there’s a lot of open field for us to run in now. Karen there is working on phasic modulation and spiking frequency. Yung-Nien is our token cognition wizard in the krewe, she does stochastic resonance and rate-response modeling. And Serge over yonder is your basic receptor-mechanic, he’s working on dendritic transformer uptakes. The rest of these people are basically postdoc support staff, but you never know, when you work with Greta Penninger. This is a world-famous lab. It’s a magnet. It’s got the right stuff. By the time she’s fifty or sixty, even her junior co-authors will be running neuro labs.”
“And what is Dr. Penninger working on?”
“Well, you can ask her that yourself!” Greta had arrived. Gazzaniga tactfully absented himself.
Oscar apologized for having interrupted her work.
“No, that’s all right,” Greta said serenely. “I’m going to make the time for you. I think it’s worth it.”
“That’s very broad-minded of you.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
Oscar gazed about her laboratory. “It’s odd that we should meet inside a place like this.… I can tell that this locale suits you perfectly, but for me, this has such a strong personal resonance.… Can we talk privately here?”
“My lab is not bugged. Every surface in here is sterilized twice a week. Nothing as large as a listening device could possibly survive in here.” She noticed his skeptical reaction, and changed her mind. She reached out and turned a switch on a homogenizer, which began to make a comforting racket.
Oscar felt much better. They were still in plain sight, but at least the noise would drown audio eavesdropping. “Do you know how I define ‘politics,’ Greta?”
She looked at him. “I know that politics means a lot of trouble for scientists.”
“Politics is the art of reconciling human aspirations.”
She considered this. “Okay. So?”
“Greta, I need you to level with me. I need to find some reasonable people who can testify in the upcoming Senate hearing. The standard talking heads from senior management just won’t do anymore. I need people with some street-level awareness of what’s really going on at this facility.”
“Why ask me? Why don’t you ask Cyril Morello or Warren Titche? Those guys have tons of time for political activism.”
Oscar was already very aware of Morello and Titche. They were two of Collaboratory’s grass-roots community leaders, though as yet they were quite unaware of that fact. Cyril Morello was the assistant head of the Human Resources Department, a man who through his consistently self-defeating, anti-careerist actions had won the trust of the Collaboratory rank and file. Warren Titche was the lab’s vociferous token radical, a ragged-elbowed zealot who fought for bike racks and cafeteria menus as if failure meant nuclear holocaust.
“I’m not asking you for a list of specific gripes. I have a long list of those already. What I need is, well, how shall I put this.… The spin, the big picture. The pitch. The Message. You see, the new Congress has three brand-new Senators on the Science Committee. They lack the in-depth experience of the Committee’s very, very long-serving former chairman, Senator Dougal of Texas. It’s really an entirely new game in Washington now.”
Greta glanced surreptitiously at her watch. “Do you really think this is going to help anything?”
“I’ll cut to the chase. Let me put a simple question to you. Let’s assume you have absolute power over federal science policy, and can have anything you please. Give me the blue-sky version. What do you want?”
“Oh! Well!” She was interested now. “Well, I guess … I’d want American science to be just like it was in the Golden Age. That would be in the Communist Period, during Cold War One. You see, back in those days, if you had a strong proposal, and you were ready to work, you could almost always swing