Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  “True,” said Robin.

  “The only question,” said Nanette, “is whether Harvard dismantles us, or we implode from scandal and misspending first. You saw the article in the Globe, didn't you? ‘Philpott Near Empty: Hard Choices at the Cambridge Institute'? Actually, that was just Part I.”

  “I know,” said Robin, who had been contacted for an interview for Part II.

  “Everybody's running scared. I can't tell you. People are starting to hoard media,” Nanette declared, exaggerating just a little. “They're coming in with double orders, upping the amounts so they can run more trials at once. It's a psychological thing, like the way people act before a blizzard, or a war. With the audit and Redfield's shit list and all, people aren't even sure where their next grant is coming from.” Nanette stretched out her legs and rotated her tiny feet slowly. “I'm working ten-hour days. Do you see the swelling in my ankles? My doctor says my job is exacerbating my edema.”

  Robin looked down with some concern. Nanette's ankles were in fact puffing out over her shoes.

  “I'm supposed to keep them elevated, but I have to use the foot pedal.” Nanette shrugged and smiled. “See, I can't wait for the committee hearings. It would really be better for me if the institute went belly-up.”

  “You don't mean that.”

  “Oh, it would be so fascinating. I love to watch chronic overachieving SOBs scramble. The people who never give their underlings the time of day. Little words like please or thank you. All the type As killing their postdocs and ignoring their wives for the sake of science; fighting tooth and nail to get ahead. Everybody and their neuroses just running for cover. I love comeuppance.” She clasped her hands together. “Comeuppance is such a beautiful thing. I just adore it.”

  “But where would I work, then?” Robin asked.

  “Work!” Nanette shrieked. “You'd be writing your tell-all book. You wouldn't ever need to work again.”

  “But I don't want to tell all: Who would hire me? That's the last thing I would ever do,” said Robin. “I love research.” She said it so softly, Nanette had to lean in to hear the words.

  “You what?” Nanette took Robin's hand in hers. “You love what?” She shook her head, mystified. “You poor, poor girl.” Nanette threw up her hands. “She loves research.”

  7

  THE FESTIVITIES in the lounge were for Prithwish and his bride, Sarojini, who had finally returned from Sri Lanka and set up house in an apartment on Elmer Street. There was wine and cheese and there were blue tins of Danish butter cookies. Aidan had rigged up the slide projector to display pictures of the wedding on the wall so that the beige room filled with silk and gold and sun. There was laughter and teasing, and ogling of the banquet, but the party was subdued. Outside, the dirty snow had begun to melt, and each pale evening was strengthening and growing longer. The hearing was twelve days away.

  “It's been a good week,” Sandy insisted to Marion after the others had gone.

  “Good for what?” she asked. “We got almost nothing done.” The pressure of the hearings, the dread of them, had built until the most mundane tasks required almost superhuman concentration.

  “Nothing done? We've got letters of support from the Chinese Consulate, and the Asian Law Caucus, and the ACLU. We've got Houghton-Smith's protest against journalists for colluding in a case against academic freedom. Then there's my letter, of course. Did you see the new draft?”

  He took her hand and pulled her down the hall and into the office. “Sit down. Now, take a look at this.”

  “‘In Defense of Science,'” she murmured. “‘An open letter.'”

  “Read it aloud,” he urged her.

  “‘When the NIH feeds unproved accusations to Congress; when scientific disputes are judged by the representatives of government agencies . . .'” she intoned.

  “No, not like that, Marion. Can't you hear? There's a rhythm to it. Let me.” He snatched the page from her hands. “‘When scientific data are subpoenaed at the will and whim of Congress; when the Secret Service is employed to analyze personal papers; when characters and careers are shattered, and vital publications suspended purely by suspicion; when scientists are attacked, intimidated, and assumed guilty until proven innocent; when the public discourse about science is polluted by assertions of negligence and fraud; when the scientific community is maligned as weak, corrupt, and incapable of regulating itself independent of government interference, then we believe science itself is under siege. The intellectual freedoms we cherish in America are at stake.'” He looked up at her.

  “Was that the preamble?”

  “Exactly.” He was as proud of that letter as he'd been of anything in his life. “But look at the end. Look at the signature.”

  “Peter Hawking.”

  “You can say it,” he told her. “I'm brilliant.”

  She shook her head at him. The signature was a stroke of genius. He'd crafted a Jeffersonian defense of science that the director of an embattled institute could champion with dignity—and disseminate among his colleagues.

  “We've got the signatures of eleven Nobel laureates, counting Peter,” he told her. “I'm shooting for twenty. Then we start publishing in the major newspapers.”

  “Sometimes I think you're actually enjoying this,” she said.

  “False accusations? Attempts to bring us down?” he shot back. “Absolutely not. But if you're talking about fighting the good fight, and tackling the other side—then, yes, I admit I do enjoy that. I will enjoy it.” He placed his manifesto on her desk. “And I'm sure,” he said softly, “you worry enough for both of us.”

  Cliff was the last one in the lab that night. Sometime after midnight he began packing up. He perched on his stool and rummaged through the papers on his bench top until he turned up the book that had arrived that day. The volume was a paperback copy of Bleak House, which had come with a message: “Dear Cliff: If any novel reflects the times we live in, this is it.” Kate had sent the book and the brief note—the drafts had been much longer. She'd thought and thought about what she could do, and then settled on the book because he'd always asked her for some piece of literature. Cliff smiled faintly and opened the little paperback to Chapter One. “London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets . . .” His eye skipped down. “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping . . .”

  Kate had begun to write: “I hadn't understood before that American bureaucracy could act in such Dickensian ways, crushing innocent people in its path.” And then she'd crumpled up the paper and written: “The machinery of government and its self-serving ends, added to the ignorance of bureaucrats swayed by irresponsible accusations, make Charles Dickens seem prescient, to say the least.” But that managed to sound stentorian and prissy at the same time. She had wanted to say that she trusted and believed everything would be all right—without sounding Pollyannaish. She'd wanted to tell him what she knew about her father, but it was hard to put into words. She knew that, difficult as he could be, her father was just too clever to lose a battle like this one. She knew that he would protect Cliff in the pinch, that in the end her father was the one you wanted on your side.

  Sandy Glass was much on his daughters' minds. The girls had often fretted about his sharp words and demanding expectations, but they had never felt protective of him before. Now, as the time came for Sandy to travel down to Washington, his daughters began to worry. Louisa made her way down MIT's Infinite Corridor, lined with club posters and classrooms and computer labs, and office doors windowed with old-fashioned white glass, and she imagined him coming under fire, attacked for supporting his young postdocs' work. She had often been annoyed by her father, and frustrated by him, but she was surprised now by
how proud she was of him. He could have distanced himself from his postdocs' work. Instead, he chose to champion Cliff and Feng and rally other scientists around their cause.

  Her father was loyal. Marion was loyal, too, of course, but as always, Sandy was the active, vocal one. He was the one on the front lines, championing his postdocs' work—defending Marion, as well. What would she have done without him?

  Louisa longed to go to the hearing, to sit in her father's corner. Characteristically, however, Sandy dismissed the idea. “I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. You will not be missing classes for this particular exercise in futility, and I am not going to have this whole family at the beck and call of Mr. Redfield.”

  He was so brave. Would he go to the Capitol and get ambushed there? Would he say something impolitic? He was fond of the beau geste and, Louisa fretted, more of a debater than a strategist. She did not speak of her concern, however. If Louisa had her mother's tender nature, she had her father's impenetrably cheerful manner, as well. She deflected any questions from friends with a laugh and a wave of the hand.

  Louisa could avoid the subject, but up the river at Harvard, Charlotte did not have the luxury. Just days before her father flew to Washington, she sat down for dinner with Jeff in the dark-paneled Dunster House dining hall, and he said, “We got a pass to attend the hearings.”

  “What?” She drew back.

  “We got a press pass at the Crimson,” he told her.

  They were sitting at a long trestle table, their green cafeteria trays resting on polished wood. Portraits of former house masters lined the vaulted hall, along with the stuffed head of an unfortunate moose.

  “I want to go,” he said.

  “No you don't,” she told him.

  “I really do,” he confessed. Ever since he'd interviewed Cliff, he'd followed the story of R-7. He'd read all the articles about Feng, and gazed, fascinated, as one might ponder the portrait of a serial killer, at the black-and-white photo of Robin in The Boston Globe.

  “You do not want to go,” Charlotte said, aghast. “It's a conflict of interest, for one thing, and you know it.”

  “I wouldn't write the story,” he said, hedging. “It's just that I have all the background on the research. Actually, it turns out I did practically the only extensive interview of Cliff Bannaker before the inquiry. My story is pretty much the only record of his side of—”

  “What are you thinking?” Charlotte demanded. “It would be totally unethical for you to go to the hearing. I can't believe you're even suggesting it. No journalist would do something like that.”

  “Well . . .” he began, but the conversation was going badly, and he didn't want to upset her more. He refrained from telling her he had been contacted by several publications interested in his perspective, his insights about where the ORIS investigation might lead.

  “This is my father we're talking about,” said Charlotte, half rising in her seat.

  “I know,” said Jeff. “I know it's your father.”

  “Right, of course you know. How else would you have gotten the interview with Cliff in the first place?”

  “I only said I wished I could go,” he said. “I didn't say I was going.”

  “I can't believe you would even suggest going down there to DC—to watch.”

  “I'm sorry,” he told her, and he meant it, but the undergraduate in him, a little too young, a little too eager, couldn't help adding, “It's just . . . it's going to be a great story.”

  “I'm sure you'd love it,” Charlotte burst out. “I'm sure you'd love a ringside seat. What is wrong with you?”

  “I'm not going,” he said. “I am absolutely not going, and I apologize.”

  But it was too late. Self-promotion had yielded to self-preservation too late. Charlotte sprang up in a fury, tray in hand. Her uneaten Salisbury steak, twice-baked potatoes, and green beans sloshed together on her plate. Astonished and aggravated at her father's prescience about her boyfriend, she slammed her tray onto the table and tossed her cranberry juice straight into Jeff's face.

  Loud cheers from a table of rugby players followed Charlotte as she left the dining hall, and the hapless Jeff Yudelstein behind.

  Of course, he understood her point of view much better in retrospect, and regretted every word he'd said. But Jeff had not yet learned to feign sensitivity before he felt any, nor did he know how to pretend diffidence. He couldn't help looking forward to the subcommittee hearings. He had worked and slept in the little brick Crimson building for nights on end, and he'd been bitten by the bug, the intense desire to divulge, to tap and crack the events of the day. As young scientists thrill at possible discoveries, and young painters open their eyes to the infinite shades and colors of light, so Jeff had awakened to the world of politics and public affairs. That world was so complex and new to him, its power struggles, its adjudications, its dissemblings so enticing, how could he not want to go to Washington, to attend the hearings there?

  All the rest of that week he walked through the Yard hating himself, cursing his stupidity. He sat in darkened lecture halls composing apologies, utterly distracted by regret for what had passed, and yet, even then, he could not stop thinking about the hearings. Heartsick though he was, he could not suppress his curiosity.

  8

  THEY SAT in silence in the back of their taxi. The traffic ebbed and flowed around them as they inched past fountains bordered with spring pansies, statues, limestone edifices, the national associations of nearly everything.

  “What is it, Sandy?” Ann asked at last.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Of course not,” he snapped. Still, he looked strangely subdued, almost defeated in his dark suit and yellow tie.

  “What is it, then?” she pressed him.

  “It's not what I envisioned,” he murmured.

  “What? Washington?”

  They had been to DC a hundred times before, but she didn't understand. This was not how he had envisioned his congressional debut. Secretly he'd always meant to arrive in the Capitol a conquering hero, or rather a co-hero with Marion. He'd planned for ribbons and ceremonial picture taking, festive garden parties at the National Academy of Sciences, where he and Marion would nibble strawberries dipped in chocolate and hobnob with their senators under white tents. He'd intended formal dinners and testimonials, certificates calligraphed in vermilion, lapis blue, and gold. He'd imagined entering the city in its grandest, most expansive form. Instead he'd been summoned to an anthill of bureaucrats and bean counters. He'd arrived shackled with prohibitions from his lawyer. Reduced to defending the lab, he'd fantasized about leading thousands of scientists marching on the Hill. But the reality was different. He carried in his briefcase a written statement defanged by Houghton-Smith. His hands were tied.

  Ann gazed at her husband. He looked almost ill in the lurching cab. His shoulders slumped, his eyes were pained and tired. She could see he had a headache, although she knew he would deny it. She wanted to reassure him, but what could she say? He knew every trick; he was the master at restoring confidence in friends and patients. What could she possibly say, now that it was finally time to reassure him?

  “We'll get through this,” she said.

  Turning to the half-open window, he murmured, “This is not how it was meant to be.”

  The hearing room was cheap and small, a shoe box stuffed with slick tables, angular chairs, video equipment, and clunky microphones trailing thick black cords. A handful of reporters crouched between the second row of chairs and the back wall. Scruffy and eager, they rustled in the back. Yudelstein! With a little shock of surprise and hatred, Sandy saw Yudelstein among the rodents. The jolt was painful, but it shook Sandy alert. Animosity surged through his melancholy body as he whipped around and faced forward. Bristling, he took his seat and looked straight ahead into the face of Representative Redfield.

  Paul Redfield was nearly seventy years old. His eyes were pale, keen, an
d blue. He had a sharp nose and thin, smooth-shaven cheeks. He was in the pink of health; the kind of man who outlived all his doctors. He had served in the navy in the Second World War, supported his family as a newspaperman and then a trial lawyer. After five terms in the House, two children, and five grandchildren, and forty-nine years of marriage to Mrs. Redfield (Shirley), he was known in his district as the Rock. He was steadfast, and as his opponents pointed out, he was hard. When he spoke—and he spoke at length—he hammered out opinions set in stone.

  “At its best,” Redfield read from his typed opening statement, “the scientific community in America dedicates itself to the health and well-being of the populace, the prosperity and security of the nation. We, the taxpayers, entrust the NIH and the research programs it funds to address the medical problems plaguing our society: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other ailments that tear apart so many families and destroy so many lives. We, the family members, the caregivers, and the patients suffering, have waited patiently for progress, and new hope where there has been none. We, the taxpayers, foot the six-billion-dollar bill. How distressing—how appalling, then, to find, in recent years, a growing number of scientific scandals violating the trust of the community. How shocking to uncover a culture of deception corrupting the very research programs to which we have entrusted our tax dollars and our hopes.” Redfield looked up from his text and gazed across the narrow chasm between the congressional table and the table of researchers called to testify.

  They were all quite still, Cliff and Tim Borland, Feng and Byron Zouzoua, and, of course, Marion, who was listening with idle hands, her half-knit fisherman's sweater stored safely at the hotel. Meek, and mute, Sandy took his medicine as Ann watched, along with Jacob and Mei in the second row of chairs. Everyone was there except the instigator. Ann was relieved she didn't have to look Robin in the face. Her ingratitude, her lack of common decency! She was nothing less than an arsonist, setting her own lab on fire with furious sparks, then watching the conflagration spread throughout the institute—in fact, fanning the flames. Thankfully, Robin was absent, having finished her testimony the day before, detailing what Redfield termed her ordeal.