Cliff's soda went up his nose, and Robin buried her face in his sweater.
“This is the best part!” Aidan whispered furiously, whacking them.
“The best part or the worst part?” Cliff asked.
“Get ahold of yourself,” Aidan demanded, and he was only half kidding. “You're ruining it for me.”
“Don't you think this movie is just a tiny bit stupid?” Cliff asked, and that set Robin off again. There was no way around it; the two of them had the giggles and could not control themselves. Cliff grabbed Robin and they stumbled toward the exit even as Leslie Howard and Vivien Leigh locked lips. People started hissing at them. They were blocking the view of Ashley's fey blond head bent over Scarlett's dark hair.
“Help. Wait,” Robin yelped to Cliff.
Once through the door, they found themselves outside—not just out in the lobby, but outside the theater altogether. They'd ducked through the emergency exit and ended up on the street, clutching their coats in the cold.
“Damn,” said Cliff as they realized they'd left all their candy in the theater. There was nothing for it but to get ice cream. Ever after, whenever someone complained in the lab or made noises about leaving, Cliff and Robin would cry out, “‘There's nothing to keep me here!'” and then Feng and even Aidan would chime in: “‘Nothing? Nothing except honor.'”
Robin's father sounded like that now, carrying on about the time she'd spent, and what a shame it would be for her to quit—as if she'd trained to be a knight, and might now bring shame upon herself. Or would she be dishonoring him? He had always complained about her training because it took so long and paid so little and because no one in the family really understood what she did. On the other hand, he'd boasted, too. He was shocked she might even consider quitting.
But she had not given up. She joked during the day about chucking it all, but she woke up in the night. Like an alarm clock, her imagination rang and rang with possibilities.
In Cambridge, Larry and Wendy told her to be patient, to trust the slow accretion of scientific progress, the natural selection of ideas by which the false and unsupported fell away. “Look, if there's a problem, it'll come to the fore. It's inevitable,” Larry told her as they sipped tea in Tomas's apartment.
“You can only hide it for so long if your work is buggy,” Wendy said.
Tomas looked up from his sketch pad. “All things come to those who wait?” he ventured.
How long? Robin wondered. Eighteen months? Three years? How long before further experiments did not pan out and eager imitators reexamined Cliff's premises and faulty methods? Could Larry and Wendy really expect her to know the truth and suffer in silence?
Robin looked at her friends with some trepidation, then made her announcement. “I've called the Office for Research Integrity at NIH.”
“Good grief!” Larry yelled.
“Oh, please,” said Wendy.
“You called ORIS?” Larry asked as if he loathed the very word.
“Why? What's wrong with that?” asked Robin. “I spoke to Alan Hackett and sent them copies of my stuff.”
“You spoke to Hackett?” Larry exclaimed. “Robin, you have no idea what you're getting into.”
“Why didn't you come to us?” Wendy demanded.
“I hope you didn't tell him anything,” said Larry.
“Why would I speak to him if I didn't want to tell him anything?”
“You are very, very naïve,” Wendy reproved Robin.
“He's an ambulance chaser,” Larry said, “and an extremely dubious character.”
“He's a respected scholar.”
“A respected scholar twenty years ago.”
“He's testified before Congress . . .”
“Ha,” said Larry. “He's a professional ruiner of reputations and of lives.”
“Haven't you read his paper on Dillmore?” Wendy asked.
“No.”
“He spent a year dissecting Richard Dillmore's paper in Science so that he could publish a detailed attack on Dillmore's methods, his data analysis, his supervision of students, and his character.”
“He did one piece of good work,” allowed Wendy. “The exposé of the Fienberg affair . . .”
“Excuse me, what is the Fienberg affair?” Tomas asked.
Wendy turned to him. “You haven't heard of Leonard Fienberg?”
“Actually, you of all people will appreciate this, since you're an artist,” Larry told Tomas. “Leonard Fienberg was a researcher who faked his results by painting his mice. He wanted to show he could graft white skin onto brown mice and brown skin onto white mice, so he painted the animals the appropriate colors.”
“He actually painted the tummies of the mice,” said Wendy.
“Paint-by-numbers science,” Tomas said.
“Exactly, and Hackett exposed him, back in eighty, and he's been living off the glory ever since. They gave him a desk at the NIH, and a phone. He's not a researcher, Robin. You know that, right? He's not a thinker. He's just a . . . a . . .”
“A hack,” said Wendy.
“He's like an undertaker. He has no interest in constructive work; he just sits there looking for weaknesses, dissecting journal articles for his postmortems. He sees fraud everywhere. Fraud is his obsession. He actually feeds off the public mistrust of science.”
“He's more like a vampire,” said Wendy.
“Does he sleep in a coffin?” Tomas asked. “Does he wake the dead?” Almost unconsciously he had begun sketching a cadaverous figure, long toothed, with claws for hands, a caped man rising from a tomb, his lips dripping with blood.
“He's not creative,” Wendy declared.
“I disagree,” said Larry. “He's extremely creative. How else could he and Schneiderman come up with all this stuff? I'm telling you, the two of them sit around all day handpicking journal articles so that they can bring the authors down.”
“They sounded completely professional on the phone,” said Robin, “and knowledgeable.”
“Of course they sound professional and knowledgeable,” said Larry. “That's their job. Listen, take my advice. Do not get started with them.”
“But why shouldn't I get started with them?” Robin blurted out. “They aren't some kind of crackpots. They're officials of the NIH.”
“No, no, no,” said Larry. “You don't understand. They are the official crackpots of the NIH. Everybody hates them.”
“Loathes them,” added Wendy.
“They look at you,” said Larry, “and they smell blood.”
“Mendelssohn and Glass?”
“No, you. See, you don't get the politics of the situation here. You would be the sacrificial lamb.”
Robin bristled. So Larry was an expert about this, too. He could see dark doings at NIH, even though he'd never done biological research in his life. “How is it you know so much about ORIS?”
“Richard Dillmore is a very close friend of mine,” Larry said. “And unfortunately I have an excellent understanding of what they did to him.”
“It's really Orwellian over there,” said Wendy.
“That isn't my impression,” said Robin.
“Robin, you've been living in a lab for ten years,” Larry admonished her. “You play with mice all day. You know nothing about the politics of science in this country.”
“It's really all about Big Brother watching you,” Wendy said.
“Excuse me.” Robin's cheeks burned with indignation. “If there were no ORIS, what recourse would I have? What could anyone ever do?”
“I'm sorry, but clearly you have no understanding of how ORIS works,” Larry said.
“Stop it, you guys. Stop!” Tomas cried out. “Stop picking on Robin. If she wants to bust someone for cheating, then let her!”
For a moment the other three sat in stunned silence. They had never heard Tomas raise his voice before. Even Tomas seemed surprised. “She can do what she wants.”
“We aren't picking on Robin,” Wendy said.
/> “We're trying to protect you,” Larry told her.
“Thank you, but I think I can take care of myself,” Robin said.
“Have you met with them face-to-face?” Larry asked. “Do you have a lawyer? Do you really have advisors? Have you done your homework?”
She'd known Larry and Wendy would disapprove, but she was shaken by their vehemence. How could she have known the two of them were experts on ORIS and its doings? Robin looked away, and caught the expression on Tomas's face—at once tender and frustrated. He wished he could help her, but he knew nothing about the NIH or scientific fraud. It was for Robin to defend her decision to Larry and Wendy, and especially to herself.
Larry and Wendy knew everything, but they did not understand her position. She had no money, no savings, scarcely any way to make her rent and keep her apartment. She had no standing in the scientific world, not even a proper affiliation anymore. She had only her discovery, her sole piece of intellectual property, the gap between Cliff's raw data and his published work. This was not jealousy, or falling out of love. This was knowledge of Cliff and what he'd done. They could warn her all they wanted; she'd broken through to her own chamber of discovery; she knew what she knew. She was no longer suffocating, weak and anguished with his success, but moving freely, beyond his gravitational field, fired by convictions of greater force. She knew he had misrepresented his findings, and even if that knowledge was awkward and inelegant, unacceptable, she would still trust and use her intuition.
She listened to her neighbors' dire warnings, and tried to remember Hackett's telephone voice: slightly metallic and precise, nerdy, much like Larry's own voice, in fact. He'd spoken to her with slight self-mockery.
“Well,” he'd told Robin after he'd received the photocopies she'd sent him, “this is all very interesting, of course. And I guess the best thing I can tell you is that we'll just have to wait and see what Jonathan says when he comes back to the office next week.”
“Jonathan Schneiderman,” she said.
“Yeah, that's right, Schneiderman. He tends to have a good nose for these things.”
“Akira probably mentioned me to him.”
“Ah, yes, Akira.” Hackett sighed.
Robin listened intently. She cared a great deal about what that sigh meant.
“He was a sad case,” said Hackett.
“He felt that Glass and Mendelssohn were trying to destroy him,” Robin said cautiously.
“Mmm, that's right. He did. But they weren't. He's a lovely guy, and we still talk now and again. Unfortunately, his view of the world is so conspiratorial, you have to take him with a grain of salt. To tell the truth, I didn't pay any attention when he called us about you.”
Robin's confidence in Hackett rose tenfold. “Do you have a sense of what might be going on in my case?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said laconically. “I mean, I have a sense, but you learn pretty early on in this business to look before you leap.”
Schneiderman was the forthcoming one. He had a deep, burly voice and a direct, pugnacious manner, magnified by the fact that he and Hackett used a speakerphone. Schneiderman sounded like a big bear at the bottom of a deep pit. “We'd like to meet with you,” he told Robin when he called the following week. “We'd like to set a date.”
“Do you ever come to Boston?” she asked.
“Do we ever come to Boston? We should. We should be traveling to Boston all the time. And to New York, and Pasadena, and everywhere in between. Unfortunately, we don't have the funds.”
“Ha.” That was Hackett in the background. “Just to be clear: this is a shoestring operation. We are engaging in ethics on a budget.”
“Is that possible?” Robin asked. “To do what you need to do?”
“It's necessary,” Schneiderman said firmly.
“If you'd asked me ten years ago whether this office was probable I would have said no,” said Hackett. “Now it turns out the improbable has become our area of expertise.”
“Because you study improbable results,” Robin said, catching on.
“No,” Hackett demurred. “We're anthropologists, really. We study people, is all.”
“We study data,” Schneiderman told Robin, and his voice rumbled reassuringly like the idling motor of a car.
“But in fact, it comes down to human error,” Hackett said drily. “Human error, human intentions.”
“Our job,” said Schneiderman, “is to investigate possible misconduct, misrepresentations, and data manipulations, and this is where I think it would be extremely valuable for us to sit down with you, Robin, and really take apart your data.”
Your data, she thought. How strange that now Cliff's data was in some respect hers.
Schneiderman continued, “I think that a face-to-face meeting on this could be of real value.”
There. He'd said it, and she held the word close. There was value in this enterprise. Her cause was not hopeless, or ill-founded, or imaginary. Hackett and Schneiderman were willing to meet with her—even they, who'd seen it all. She did not deceive herself that working with them would be easy, and yet she was hopeful at the prospect. She might gain a correction to the published journal article, or even an apology from Mendelssohn and Glass. There would be some value in saving time for other scientists who tried to reproduce Cliff's results. Saving them time, she might make a small contribution of her own. She could not be angry and alone forever. She would not let Marion write her off as incompetent even as Cliff fabricated his success. No, she would justify herself. And if she was naïve and foolish, if her actions were irresponsible, she would fight anyway.
“You have no idea what you're in for,” Larry warned her now, in Tomas's apartment. “They're just looking for new troublemakers, and if they take you on, you'll never be anything else. They'll ruin your life.”
Well, what if they did? Robin asked herself defiantly. Even then, she felt she could do worse than championing the truth.
3
AS THE weather grew colder, jollification in the lab increased. After Thanksgiving, Aidan and Natalya found a box of old pipettes and strung them up for the holidays. Blue, green, red, and orange, the pipettes dangled festively from the ceiling. Prithwish was going home to Sri Lanka in December to get married, and the others teased him mercilessly about it. They teased him about the girl, whom he scarcely seemed to know, about his telephone bills, about his journey home, even about the date set for the wedding. “How do we know you didn't pick the date to get out of work?” Cliff asked him.
“I told you I had nothing to say on the matter,” Prithwish replied airily. “Our parents chose the date and there was nothing we could do about it.”
“Yeah, but how did they pick the date?” Cliff asked with mock suspicion.
“Actually, it was our grandparents,” Prithwish corrected himself. “They chose the date according to our horoscopes.”
“You don't believe in horoscopes, do you?”
“No, of course not,” said Prithwish. “My parents don't either. They're both physicists, and they find horoscopes quite inconvenient.”
“So why use them, man?” Aidan burst out.
“My mom thinks that we should use the horoscopes just in case,” Prithwish said. “She thinks they are highly unlikely to be true, but she follows them on the off chance that they are.”
“You make no sense whatsoever,” said Cliff. “One day you're single, and then you come in with no warning, announce that you're engaged and I have to look for a new roommate.”
“Now you admit this is what you really care about,” Natalya told Cliff waspishly from the doorway. “You will have to look for someone else to share your rent. Selfish.”
“Thanks a lot,” Cliff retorted easily. He hadn't been thinking of his rent. He and Prithwish had lived together in cheerful squalor for three years, and Cliff really was going to miss his roommate. He had offered to share the apartment with Prithwish and his bride when she arrived—at least until the couple found a place of
their own, but Prithwish didn't seem too eager, and continued to pore over rental ads in the newspapers spread across his bench top. “You'll leave me recipes, right?” Cliff asked plaintively.
The others laughed. Everyone knew Prithwish couldn't cook.
“What is it?” Feng asked as he came up from the animal facility.
Cliff and Prithwish laughed harder. Aidan wiped his eyes. It was so easy to laugh when the work was going well. A second major article on R-7 was well under way, a new expanded experimental group of mice had been injected in the facility below. Cliff was their leader now, and a tireless, gracious leader at that. He pitched in on all the scut work himself, and volunteered for the most tedious tasks. He stayed late to finish paperwork and came in early for procedures with the mice. His enthusiasm was infectious. Prithwish and Aidan and Natalya shared Cliff's jubilant spirits, just as each shared in his results. Even Feng seemed gently optimistic. The media flurry had passed, and Feng was making headway with the bone tumor project. He and Cliff were working happily in parallel.
Where the lab had once reflected the somber, earnest caution Marion cultivated, the place was now attuned to Sandy's vivacious imagination. Always, before, the future had seemed dreadful, cold and steep, almost impossible to summit. Now the view was dazzling.
“Where's Billie?” Aidan asked Feng.
“Downstairs,” said Feng.
“You got her to stay down there?”
“Sure,” said Feng.
“You really are a genius,” said Cliff.
Feng grinned. He had no trouble working with Billie. She thought him rude and taciturn, and he did not disabuse her of that notion. He'd explained that he had no interest in feng shui, trained her to do exactly what he wanted, and then left her to it.
“I just have one question for you,” Aidan told Feng. “How's your chi?”
“Who knows?” Feng said.
“How are your mice?” Cliff asked.
“Not great,” Feng said.
“Which means . . .” Cliff looked up at the ceiling for inspiration. “The mice are dying because their bone tumors are so big, because you've actually gotten Robin's tumor promoter to work. Which means you've got a publication! Ergo, ‘not great' is yet another synonym for ‘breakthrough'! Am I good or what?” He reached up and swatted the dangling pipettes with his hand.
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