Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [61]
“Wow. Now that would be cool.”
And on it went. Leo was clearly very interested. He seemed to be suggesting in his manner that insertion was the last remaining problem. If this were true, Frank thought…for a while he was lost in a consideration of the possibilities.
Leo followed Yann better than Frank had. Frank was used to thinking of Leo as a lab man, but then again, lab work was applying theory to experiments, so Leo was in his element. He wasn’t just a tech. Although he was obviously confident of his ability to work the lab as such, to design experiments expressly for his machinery and schedule. Sometimes he stopped and looked around at all the new machinery as if he were in the dream of a boy on Christmas—everything he ever wanted, enough to make him suspicious, afraid he might wake up any second. Cautious enthusiasm, if there could be such a thing. Frank felt a pang of envy: the tangible work that a scientist could do in a lab was a very different thing from the amorphous, not to say entirely illusory, work that was consuming him in D.C. Was he even doing science at all, compared to these guys? Had he not somehow fallen off the wagon? And once you fell off, the wagon rolled on; again and again as the minutes passed he could barely follow what they were saying!
Then Marta walked in the room and he couldn’t have followed them even if they had been reciting the periodic table or their ABCs. That was the effect she had on him.
And she knew it; and did all she could to press home the effect. “Oh hi, Frank,” she said with a microsecond pause discernible only to him, after which she merrily joined the other two, pushing the outside of the discussion envelope, where Frank was certain to be most uncomprehending.
Irritating, yes. But then again this was stuff he wanted to know. So he worked on focusing on what Yann was saying. It was Yann who would be leading the way, and emphasizing this truth with his attentiveness was the best way Frank had of sticking it back to Marta, anyway.
So they jostled each other like kids sticking elbows into ribs, as Yann invented the proteomic calculus right before their eyes, and Leo went deep into some of the possible experiments they might run to refine their manipulation of the biochemistry of cell wall permeability.
A very complicated and heady hour. RRCCES was off to a good start, Frank concluded at the end of this session, despite his sore ribs. Combine the efforts of this place with UCSD and the rest of the San Diego biotech complex, not to mention the rest of the world, and the syncretic result could be something quite extraordinary. Some newly powerful biotech, which they would then have to define and aim somehow.
Which was where the work at the White House would come in. There had to be some place where people actually discussed what to do with the advances science continually made. Somewhere there had to be a way to prioritize, a way that didn’t have to do with immediate profit possibilities for outside investors. If it took ten more years of unprofitable research to lift them into a realm of really robust health care, leading to long, healthy lives, shouldn’t there be some place in their huge economy to fund that?
Yes.
Which was why he did not have to feel superfluous, or on the wrong track, or that he was wasting his time, or fooling around. As Marta was implying with all her little digs.
But then she said, offhandedly, and almost as if trying to be rude, “We’re going to go out to dinner to celebrate the lab getting back together. Do you want to join us?”
Surprised, Frank said, “Yeah, sure.”
Ah God—those two words committed him to an awkward evening, nowhere near as serene as eating tacos on the edge of Black’s Cliffs would have been. Decisions—why be so fast with them? Why be so wrong? Now he would be pricked and