Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [151]
“I have to pee,” Yann announced midequation, and they broke for the day. Suddenly it was dinnertime.
“That was good,” Frank said. “Jesus, Yann. I mean, do you know what you’re saying here?”
“Well, I think so. But you tell me. I only learn what this stuff might mean when you tell me. You and Leo.”
“Because it depends on what he can do.”
“Right. Although he’s not the insertion guy, as he’s always saying.”
“Which is what we need now.”
“Well, that’s more Marta and Eleanor. They’re doing their thing, and they’re hooked into a whole network of people doing that.”
“So those nanorods are working?” Frank said, looking at one of the shotgun sequencers.
“Yeah. They’ll tell us about it if we go up to the Paradigms for drinks. The gang usually meets there around this time on Fridays.”
“Nice.”
“But first let’s go talk to Leo, and then we can tell him to join us too.”
“Good idea.”
Leo was in his office reading an online paper with lots of tables and false-color photos. “Oh hi guys, hi Frank. Out here again I see.”
“Yes, I’m doing some other stuff too, but I wanted to check in and see how things are coming along.”
“Things are coming along fine.” Leo had the kind of satisfied, paws-dug-in look of a dog with a bone. Still looking at the screen as he spoke with them. “Eleanor and Marta are putting the triple nanorods through all kinds of trials.”
“So it’s nanotechnology at last.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Although I’ve never seen how nanotechnology isn’t just what we used to call chemistry. But anyway here I am using it.”
“So these nanorods are taking your DNA into mice?”
“Yes, the uptake is really good, and the rods don’t do anything but cross over and give up their attached DNA, so they’re looking like very good insertion agents. The best I’ve seen anyway.”
“Wow.”
Yann described to Leo some of his new work on the algorithm.
“Combine the two advances,” Frank murmured. “And…”
“Oh yeah,” Leo said, smiling hungrily. “Very complementary. It could mean—” And he waved a hand expressively. Everything.
“Let’s go get that drink,” Yann said.
Marta was looking good, although Frank was inoculated. She had been out in the water that day, and it was a truism among surfers that salt water curled hair attractively. Bad hair became good hair, good hair became ravishing. People paid fortunes to salons to get that very look. And of course the sunburn and bleaching, the flush in the skin. “Hi, Frank” she said and pecked him hard on the cheek, like taking a bite out of him. “How’s it going out in the nation’s capital?”
He glowered at her. “It’s going well, thanks,” Ms. Poisoner.
“Right.” She laughed at his expression and they went into the bar.
Eleanor joined them; she too was looking good. Frank ordered a frozen margarita, a drink he never drank more than a mile away from the California coastline. They all decided to join him and it became a pitcher, then two. Frank told them about developments in D.C., and they told him what they had been hearing from Russia, also the lab news, and the latest on North County. Leo took the lead here, being utterly exposed by events; he and his wife lived right on the cliffs in Leucadia, and were embroiled in the legal battle between the neighborhood and the city of Encinitas as to what should be done. The city was a political fiction, made from three coastal villages, Leucadia, Encinitas, and Cardiff, which gloried in the full name of Cardiff-by-the-Sea (now often changed to Cardiff-in-the-Sea, even though only its beach restaurants had actually washed away). Now it was beginning to look like a civic divorce was in order, Leo said. All the cliffside houses in Leucadia had been condemned,