Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  ‘You’re wrong about Harry.’ Jack spoke more loudly than he intended. ‘Eccentrics are imaginative, but Harry’s the sort of person who can listen to Shakespeare and hear only rhyme and metre. Whole pools of meaning dry up in the glare of his type of appreciation. Harry has the mind, the soul, the ear of an engineer. His heart exists solely to pump the blood around his body.’

  Helen stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Ava’s been married to Harry for decades. He’s her anchor, Jack, and whether you like it or not, he’s permanent.’ She gave his arm a squeeze before pulling away. ‘Ava might well choose the dance steps but Harry chooses the ballroom and he always has. Ava needs him, from the beginning she needed him, but I –’ and a smile flickered over her face as if the idea had only just occurred to her, ‘but I don’t.

  ‘In fact,’ she continued, ‘it’s people like Harry I’m desperate to escape. Men in suits who dole out money to scientists like me for projects that they, the suits, deem important.’ She stabbed at a piece of latke. ‘I’ve no intention of staying the term of the fellowship with Harry’s precious NOGA. But I’ll leave in my own good time.’ She waved the impaled food through the air as if to ward off any opposition. ‘Meanwhile I’ll do the work I choose and Harry be damned.’ With that, she popped the food in her mouth.

  Across the table Jack was thinking how wonderful it would be to possess her confidence. Just this morning he’d taken a phone interview, an early current affairs program on commercial radio before the weekend sport took hold. He had been questioned about Indonesia and Islam, just a skimming of the surface and well within his competence, but because Islam in the Asia–Pacific was not his primary specialty he felt as if he were speaking under false pretences. Even when he was treated as an acknowledged expert, even when he experienced that comforting buffer between himself and others which admiration and expertise construct, he could never know the confidence which Helen applied so naturally.

  ‘So what happened with Harry last night?’ he asked again in a deliberate shift to safer ground. ‘Why’s he so concerned about your work?’ And, as a private afterthought: how does he know so much about your work?

  Helen put her fork down and pushed her plate aside. ‘Have you heard of dual-use research?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘But I expect it refers to the same piece of research having two different applications.’

  ‘Exactly. What I’m working towards, as against what other people might want me to do, is to bring about immunity to shigella, all the shigellas.’ And anticipating his question: ‘There are four major types. In the course of my research, quite a complicated process I should add, I need to create a new organism.’

  ‘So you’re playing God?’

  ‘But doing a far better job,’ she said, smiling. ‘If God were a scientist I’d find him a great deal more credible.’

  She took a pen from her bag and drew a few snake-like marks on a serviette – ‘The shigella chromosomes,’ she said, pointing to them. ‘And they don’t occur in pairs as they do in human cells so every gene counts.’ She looked up at Jack. ‘I like that about bacteria. In fact, I like everything about bacteria. And I like shigella most of all.’ She returned to her squiggles. ‘The deeper we travel into the molecular structure of shigella the more likely we are to find its virulence mechanism, or rather mechanisms – the same, I’m convinced, for all the shigellas.’

  She continued to explain her work, and Jack marvelled as he listened, he marvelled at her. You associate major scientific advances with the likes of Macfarlane Burnet, with Fleming and Florey, or Helen’s own idol, Barbara McClintock, people of almost mythological status known the world over. And here was Helen convinced she would eventually have the solution to one of the major causes of diarrhoeal disease. His old friend Helen who had got stoned with him, swum naked with him, who now sat across a table in a restaurant she knew only because of him. Hard to equate the worldly scientist with the far more domestic friend.

  ‘Now over here,’ Helen drew another squiggle, ‘we have a harmless E. coli.’

  Jack pulled his attention into line. ‘I’m surprised there are harmless E-coli.’

  ‘There are lots of them, a good many we know about and others we’re bound to discover. All told, there are hundreds of strains of E. coli and they’ve been the target of extensive study. This means their genetic make-up is largely known and it makes them ideal for my type of research. My aim is to find shigella’s virulence genes, separate them from the rest of the organism, then splice them into a harmless E. coli and if all goes according to plan, cause a specific antibody response. And from there,’ she smiled wryly, ‘it’s only about forty more steps before we have an effective vaccine.’

  ‘So what’s the problem? Where’s the dual research?’

  ‘When I splice the shigella genetic material into a harmless E. coli, I could create a nasty new E. coli.’ She shrugged. ‘I already have.’

  ‘And people want to make use of these new bugs?’

  ‘At this very moment, an organism I’ve created is being tested for toxicity and durability. And the testing’s happening in my own lab. My own lab where I’m supposed to be in charge.’

  ‘And this dual research spinning off from your own, has it got much muscle?’

  ‘Of the steroid-enhanced variety,’ she said grimly. ‘Of course, this sort of work isn’t new. We know that during the Cold War the Soviets tampered with anthrax and created a much more virulent form.’ (Jack couldn’t help but wonder about this ‘we’.) ‘And we know there are stockpiles of bacteria lying around in the former USSR. What we don’t know is where they are and the exact organisms involved. But I guarantee there’s enough to kill the entire population of the planet several times over and all of it could fit in an area the size of your kitchen.’

  She leaned forward, her eyes bright behind her glasses. ‘We humans are cream puffs when compared with bacteria.’

  Power, politics, weapon stockpiles. ‘Are you very important?’ Jack asked.

  She nodded and shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but not primarily for the work that matters to me.’

  ‘And Harry?’

  ‘Harry, like a lot of powerful people, is far more interested in the bioweapons applications of my research than the shigella vaccine. A new organism for which there’s no treatment, produced for targeted delivery to recalcitrant populations,’ she raised her eyebrows. ‘For certain groups, it’s like winning the lottery.’

  This powerful Harry whom Helen was talking about and he, himself, had observed at the NOGA cocktail party, when exactly had he emerged? Jack simply could not get a grip on the new Harry Guerin.

  He looked across the table at Helen. ‘So who funds your current research?’

  ‘The US military – but it’s not as you might think. Bioweapons aside, a shigella vaccine is in the military’s interest. Soldiers in the field, even those on the side of right and might, are susceptible to shigella infections.’

  ‘Although surely less so these days with food security so tight.’

  Helen let out a derisive snort. ‘Food supply to the military is now contracted out to private suppliers,’ she said. ‘Political favours are not unknown. And even if the company is competent, its main purpose is to turn a decent-sized profit. Cut some of the invisible corners – like food sourcing, like quality control – and the profits go up.’

  Jack was immediately put in mind of private prisons and private water supplies: some functions should never be put in the hands of the free market. He was about to raise this with Helen but for the thought of Harry and his power. Why was Harry so interested in her research? And who or what gave him the right to be so interested?

  ‘Harry’s risen in the world,’ he said.

  Helen shook her head slowly. ‘I think Harry is exactly where he always intended to be.’

  2.

  Helen should have seen it coming. She was not one of those grown-up innocents who populate some of science’s most revered haunts; she knew ab
out the promises and disappointments of scientific research, she knew about research’s unforeseen yields and applications, and she knew about dual-use research. She may well have been working to eliminate shigella infections from the third world, but it didn’t take a genius to realise that her work was equally useful to those deliberately wanting to infect a group of healthy people – not to kill, not with shigella or any of the common food bugs, but to create social disruption and widespread alarm. Even the relatively small 1984 Oregon salmonella outbreak, when a group of Rajneeshees deliberately infected salad bars, had resulted in severe strain on the local hospitals and unprecedented levels of fear and anger in the populace.

  She should have known.

  After leaving Jack, Helen pushed her way through the weekend crowds of Acland Street and headed for home. At Luna Park the big dipper was rising and falling on its scaffolding and the shrieks of the revellers soared over the traffic noise. She had never ridden the big dipper, she had never been to Luna Park; when she was young there had been too little money and when she was older too little time. Even the trip to Disneyland with Luke had been made to coincide with a scientific meeting in Los Angeles. As for Luke himself, if not for a conference in Toronto and a Dutch geneticist on the look-out for some extramarital fun, if not for too much alcohol and too little attention to contraception, her son would never have been conceived.

  Science is like that. You put your head down, you do your work and you are not distracted – not even to have a baby. But surely any scientist with a skerrick of social conscience would have been aware of the wider ramifications of her work? And surely any responsible scientist would not have ignored the unpalatable but obvious fact that when powerful interests foot the bill it is those interests that will decide how research will be applied.

  When the early nuclear physicists realised that tampering with the nucleus of matter could lead to weapons the likes of which had never before been imagined, some of the central figures, including Einstein, agitated for social and political restrictions on scientific work. They agitated for what they believed to be right for humankind even though their own science might be curtailed. These were, she had always believed, good scientists, responsible scientists, the sort of scientist she wanted to be, the sort of scientist she assumed she was.

  It had been easy to take the high moral ground when the way ahead was unambiguous and all ethical considerations remained theoretical. But now when she was faced with a choice of doing the science of her desire and ignoring some of the possible applications of her work, or giving up her work because it might well be used for immoral ends, what she most wanted was for politics to stay out of the laboratory. To put it bluntly: she wanted to do her science and have all questions of ethics disappear.

  She crossed Marine Parade and set off along the beach path at a brisk pace. There was a stiff southerly blowing off the water and whipping up the sand; she pulled her hat lower and shoved her hands in her pockets. To what extent would she compromise her ideals in order to do her science? The scientist who would pose such a question was not the sort of scientist she ever thought she would be. You think you know yourself, you think you understand the passions of your work, and perhaps you do as long as there is a calm and temperate air. But it is the storms that matter, the storms that test you. Yet would Ava ever be forced to give up writing novels for the greater good? Would Connie have to stop doing philosophy?

  Politics and science were an old coupling, as old as biological warfare itself. Nearly two thousand years ago the Scythians dipped their arrowheads into rotting material for a more lethal effect, and back in the fourteenth century Tatars tossed dead bodies infected with plague over the walls of enemy cities. During the Second World War Jews suffered agonising deaths when they were deliberately infected with malaria, typhus, yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, diphtheria. Hitler’s scientists emptied the entire bacterial pantry into those poor doomed souls in service to science and the Third Reich. And then there was the German physical chemist Fritz Haber, master of modern dual-use research and the true progenitor of the present-day alliance between science, politics and the military.

  Helen had always been fascinated by Haber. Such a brilliant, flawed man, his life in science was a warning to all scientists. He rose to prominence in the years before the Great War, when he devised the process of fixing nitrogen from the air for the commercial production of fertiliser. The same process led to the manufacture of explosives. Both discoveries contributed to Germany’s success early in the war – more plentiful food on the one hand, more efficient killing on the other. In those years Haber was a hero in his beloved Germany.

  Haber and Einstein met as relatively young men and maintained an unlikely and often strained friendship until Haber’s death a year after Hitler assumed power. They shared a few similarities – both were scientists, both were German Jews – but Haber was a great German patriot while Einstein was profoundly suspicious of what he called ‘the blond beast’. Einstein, with his commitment to humanitarian causes and his advocacy of world government, wanted to keep science independent of national, political and commercial interests.

  Haber’s science always served the cause of Germany’s greatness. After fertiliser and explosives, he went on to spearhead the development, production and delivery of the chlorine gas used by the Germans during the Great War. This cruelly efficient, silent killer shocked the allies, and quite a few Germans too. But for Haber anything was justified if it helped Germany assume its rightful place in the world. Einstein was critical of Haber’s bullish patriotism: it compromised the moral obligations of the scientist, he believed. But of the two men, and despite the contemporary reverence accorded to Einstein, Helen was in no doubt Haber would settle more comfortably with today’s pragmatic and politicised science.

  Helen had never experienced a moment’s patriotism – loyalty to an idea of place simply made no sense to her – and she had always admired Einstein, yet now she was being expected to act like Haber. And not for the first time she wondered what choices she would have made if she had been a scientist in Hitler’s Germany. What criminal acts might she have committed in order to keep working with her bacteria?

  When she had decided to specialise in food-borne diseases, it was a patch of science so unfashionable that her professors had tried to dissuade her. But she was already smitten. Salmonella, campylobacter, cholera, shigella – the names were flamboyantly lyrical – how she admired these bugs with their truculent vanity, their stubbornness to survive. Bacteria, the first of life and so deceptively simple, would outlive all other creatures. But with molecular biology now the new physics, and the military people mad for new ‘biological strategies’ (defensive rather than offensive, according to them, but Helen didn’t believe anything they said any more), where she had started and where she now found herself were very different places indeed.

  Science is a calling and the scientist compelled to find order, sense and truth in a type of God search, whether Kepler seeking the geometrical underpinnings to the earth or Einstein and his doomed unified field theory. And it is a jealous calling, an all-consuming calling: when you are grappling with a scientific problem it will not let you go. Science had given her a life and given generously, her work had mattered – her own voice of reason argued her case; but now she felt caught, not because science had betrayed her but because of the particular circumstances that currently shaped the practice of science.

  It was this notion of a calling that she, the scientist, and Ava, the would-be writer, had recognised in each other when they first met.

  ‘Fiction found me. Fiction found me,’ Ava had once called out across the water of Sydney Harbour. And science had found Helen. But now she wondered if original work were possible any more. The teams of scientists like her own in Maryland were brought together to work on specific projects, and their discoveries, it seemed to her, were pre-ordained. These days fear, myopia and a sturdy line of command tethered scientists far from the anarchic fringes o
f surprising originality.

  She stopped on the path and turned to face the bay. The sea was dark and rough, the foam was muted in the leaden light. She leapt over the low wall and walked down to the shoreline. The waves scrambled up the beach heaping one over another. The sand whipped and swirled. The heaving waves, the choppy seas, the shallows murky with sand, all was chaos.

  She stood motionless at the water’s edge. The noise slammed into her, the wind rocketed through her; she lingered until her thoughts were still. Then slowly she wandered back up the beach and made her way home.

  3.

  Helen settled at the kitchen table to read what she hoped was the finished version of a paper she’d been working on since her arrival back in Australia. Work was her solution to most problems – even work problems. Luke was still asleep, and how anyone could sleep for twelve hours straight she would never understand. She had always resented sleeping as so much time wasted. She would hear people say how much they loved it, but to love sleeping was, as far as she was concerned, as ludicrous as loving breathing or defecation or any essential bodily function.

  She was nearing the end of the paper when she heard stirrings from Luke’s bedroom. Then followed some half-hearted coughing and some full-bodied groaning, the squeak of the bathroom door, the toilet flushing, and there he was in the doorway, already connected to his iPod, his head faintly nodding to the music. He had pulled on a football jumper – blue and white, she noticed, the colours of his grandparents’ team; his sweat pants could do with a wash. As he leaned down and pecked her cheek she felt the startling brush of bristles and a whiff of something stale and sleepy. The whole feel of her son had changed; all angles and bones, Luke was now taller than she was. His voice, a flattened bass for more than a year, still sounded strange.