Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [66]
“Do what you can to get some funding to tide you over a bit longer,” Frank suggested as he got up to leave.
“Oh I will. I always am.”
Outside, Frank sighed. Torrey Pines was looking like a thin reed. But it was his reed, and anything might happen. Derek was good at keeping things afloat. But Sam Houston was a loss. Derek needed Frank there as scientific advisor. Or consultant, given his UCSD position. And if they had Pierzinski under contract, things might work out. By the end of the year the whole Torrey Pines situation might be turned around. And if it all worked out, the potential was there for it to do very well indeed.
Frank wandered down to Leo’s lab. It was noticeably lively compared to the rest of the building—people bustling about, the smell of solvents in the air, machines whirring away. Where there’s life there’s hope. Or perhaps they were only like the musicians on the Titanic, playing on while the ship went down.
This, however, represented an attempt to bail the ship out. Frank felt encouraged. He went in and exchanged pleasantries with Leo and his people, feeling that it was easy to be friendly and encouraging. This was the guts of the machine, after all. He mentioned that Derek had sent him down to talk about their current situation, and Leo nodded noncommittally and gave him a rundown, truncated but functional.
Frank regarded him as he spoke, thinking: Here is a scientist at work in a lab. He is in the optimal scientific space. He has a lab, he has a problem, he’s fully absorbed and going full tilt. He should be happy. But he isn’t happy. He has a tough problem he’s trying to solve, but that’s not it; people always have tough problems in the lab.
It was something else. Probably, that he was aware of the company’s situation—of course, he had to be. Probably this was the source of his unease. The musicians feeling the tilt in the deck. In which case there really was a kind of heroism in the way they played on, focused to the end.
But for some reason Frank was also faintly annoyed by this. People plugging away in the same old ways, trying to do things according to the plan, even a flawed plan: normal science, in Kuhnian terms, as well as in the more ordinary sense. All so normal, so trusting that the system worked, when obviously the system was both rigged and broken. How could they persevere? How could they be so blinkered, so determined, so dense?
Frank slipped his content in. “Maybe if you had a way to test the genes in computer simulations, find your proteins in advance.”
Leo looked puzzled. “You’d have to have a, what. A theory of how DNA codes its gene expression functions. At the least.”
“Yes.”
“That would be nice, but I’m not aware anyone has that.”
“No, but if you did…Wasn’t George working on something like that, or one of his temporary guys? Pierzinski?”
“Yeah that’s right, Yann was trying some really interesting things. But he left.”
“I think Derek is trying to bring him back.”
“Good idea.”
Then Marta walked into the lab. When she saw Frank she stopped, startled.
“Oh hi Marta.”
“Hi Frank. I didn’t know you were going to be coming by.”
“Neither did I.”
“Oh no? Well—” She hesitated, turned. The situation called for her to say something, he felt, something like Good to see you, if she was going to leave so quickly. But she said only, “I’m late, I’ve got to get to work.”
And then she was out the door.
Only later, when reviewing his actions, did Frank see that he had cut short the talk with Leo—and pretty obviously at that—in order to follow Marta. In the moment itself he simply found himself walking down the hall, catching up to her before he even