Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  Of course, she had always known this was coming. Of course, Laura was fighting Borland every step of the way. Robin had tried to steel herself, but in the end, there was really no way to prepare. And it was curious how sharp the pain was, how her own words cut. Who had she been then, when she'd let Cliff wrap himself around her? Who in the world had she been?

  As whistle-blower, she had received her rewards, such as they were. She'd been asked to come to a major biology conference to participate in a panel on research ethics. She had been interviewed by The Boston Globe and photographed, standing rather nervously, on the brick steps in front of the Philpott Institute.

  Tomas had clasped both her hands in his and congratulated her. “I knew you'd win,” he said. “And you know why? Because I never trusted Cliff, but I never said anything because you were together, you know? But the truth will set you free, right? I knew exactly how this would all turn out!”

  “I've got the Times clipping plastered all over my refrigerator,” Nanette told Robin, and she wasn't talking about her fridge at home: she meant her great silver refrigerator at work—the one all the lab techs saw when they came to pick up media.

  Billie had called Robin at home. In her breathy voice she told Robin she was finally leaving the institute to try to cleanse herself of the contaminants in the building, to devote more hours to the Cambridge Task Force on Sick Building Syndrome, and, most urgently, to pursue her claims against the Philpott full-time. “The fact that someone I know has succeeded in the face of all this corruption is very moving to me,” she told Robin. “I want you to know that. I realize we didn't work together very long, but you have been a major influence on me.”

  “Really?” Robin asked. She hadn't meant to be impolite. The slightly horrified question just slipped out.

  “Major,” Billie said. “In fact, when I wrote my letter of resignation, I cited you and your struggles as one of my primary inspirations.”

  How strange the way success and failure contained each other. How close vindication and humiliation had proved. There had been a time when telling the truth seemed necessary, a drastic measure to survive in science. But her ideas and her understanding had been appropriated by others; her notion of professional survival, sadly misplaced. How could she have imagined herself free of Cliff? She was sure now the two of them would drown together. She had overcome him during the inquiry, but during this appeal she felt him pulling her under with even greater force.

  Now she did her penance. Now she began to pay for what she'd done and said. Shouldn't she have considered the price of a scientific war such as she had waged? Shouldn't she have allowed for the fact that words were fungible?

  She had insisted on questioning Cliff's character, and so, in some sense, despite all Laura's objections, it was natural for Cliff's lawyer to turn and question hers as well. She had begun exploring murky moral questions; should she have been surprised at the creatures that lashed out at her in the mud? At her own sharp sentences biting her back?

  “‘Sometimes I wish him harm—physical harm,'” Borland read aloud.

  And, of course, Laura Sabbatini objected again. She asked the distinguished panel to consider what was relevant to the appeal and what was not. She insisted that Borland confine himself to the scientific data. She noted that Borland had argued ORIS invaded his client's privacy, took notes out of context, and defamed his client's name, even while Borland indulged in exactly those tactics in his client's defense. Robin's lawyer objected and insisted, and succeeded in engaging the panel in a full discussion of the acceptable parameters of evidence in such a case. And Robin tried to sit up straight. She tried to look ahead at the appeal board, to study their professorial, kindly faces. “Do you want justice?” Akira had challenged her.

  “Of course,” she'd said.

  “Are you willing to suffer for it?”

  What was justice? An official NIH report? An article in the newspaper? An ethics panel? That kind of justice seemed fleeting, vindication that went quickly out of date. She hardly knew what justice was anymore, but she was suffering.

  Even as his lawyer sparred with Robin's in DC, Cliff was working in the animal facility, dissecting mice. He had sacrificed a new batch, and the rate of remission was still over sixty percent. Still, he was finding more and more recurrences. He stood before the dissecting table and studied the corpses before him and the numbers in his lab book. Hours slipped away and he kept working, plucking up loose skin with his tweezers, examining emerging tumors and then normal mammary glands.

  Recurrence was an intriguing finding in itself. What did it mean about the interplay of virus and immune system and cancerous cells? How were cancer cells cropping up again? How might they regenerate after wholesale extermination? On the one hand, he was fascinated by the phenomenon. And on the other, he was almost out of his mind with anxiety. He had feared a viral outbreak in the colony. That would have been a terrible setback, but this was devastating. This wasn't just bad luck; this was the failure of R-7 itself.

  He had been a talented but sloppy student. He'd excelled in high school, and even in college, relying more on memory and wit than understanding. It wasn't until graduate school that he began to dedicate himself fully to his work, and even then, he'd been flippant, taken each publication as his due, his beginner's luck as his just reward. Only with R-7 had he begun to learn what work was. He was careful now, dedicated almost to the exclusion of all else. How, then, could these experiments and these animals fail him when he had learned so much?

  One by one, he opened up his animals and gazed inside. There were the mammary glands, the first pair almost up at the neck of each mouse. There were the red blood vessels threading through pink skin. A good many animals were still cancer free. He told himself the healthy ones were still in the majority. He had teased this pattern out himself until the results made sense and random observations resolved themselves into a profound design. But scientific designs were unforgiving; such schemes as his were hungry for more and yet more evidence, ravenous for facts. And what if his results were only temporary? He shuddered at the question. He had not appreciated research before, its value or its real heartbreak. How strange that even with all his animal work, and all the sacrifices, he'd never understood that this was life and death.

  “Don't desert me now,” he whispered to the tiny corpses on the table.

  On a crisp October afternoon, Sandy bounded into the office, fresh off the shuttle from DC, and declared, “We're winning.”

  “Really?” Marion asked drily.

  He waved her off. The lab was no longer on the defensive. The lawyers were prosecuting the appeal brilliantly. And so, naturally, Marion was unhappy.

  “But you're never happy,” he pointed out.

  She was complaining about the research time she'd lost to the appeal. She bemoaned every hour and every day away from the lab.

  “But you always do,” he said.

  “Sandy.” She spoke in such a voice that he stopped teasing, at least temporarily.

  Chagrined, he saw how pale and tired she'd become. The inquiry and controversy had worn away at her. He had not shielded her well enough from the petty world outside.

  “You're right,” he said. “You've lost too much time. You should be working. Let's not waste any more thought on this.”

  “That's easy for you to say,” she murmured as she rose to walk down the hall.

  “I mean it.” He opened the office door for her. “Go on.” He gave her a little push, as though to shoo her back into the lab. “Go back in there. I promise you, we won't even speak of the appeal again.”

  “Don't make promises you can't keep,” she told him.

  “How do you know whether or not I can keep my promises?”

  “I think I know you pretty well,” she said.

  “So don't always assume the worst.”

  Then she kidded him, with a straight face. “The worst is usually a safe assumption.”

  “Don't be safe,” he said, and he
was perfectly serious, even though he was smiling. He spoke entirely from his heart. “Don't let all this political nonsense frighten you away.”

  Still, she worried. The labs at Stanford and Cornell were not getting the results they'd been looking for with R-7. At Cornell, P. K. Agarwal had had some initial success, but nothing on the scale of Cliff's results. At Stanford, Richard Hughes had run into numerous technical problems with the virus, and concluded that the sample Cliff had sent had partly thawed in shipping. Cliff was preparing new samples for Hughes, and had spoken extensively to Agarwal on the phone about the correct methods and conditions for replicating the R-7 experiments. Of course, repeating experiments in different labs could not happen overnight. Marion had no right to hope for results just to assuage her own anxiety or impress the appeals board at NIH. She knew better than anyone that scientific results did not pop up on demand, and so she tried to suppress her longing for confirmation of Cliff's work.

  But what if the troubles at Stanford and Cornell were not easily solved? These were not, in fact, the first attempts to reproduce his work, and the thought of Robin's failure haunted her. Of course, there had been extenuating circumstances. Robin had never been an impartial judge of Cliff's results. Marion deeply regretted setting Robin the task of replicating them. But how embarrassing, how potentially devastating, if two respected investigators at other institutions could not replicate Cliff's work either.

  And then there were the recurrences. Ordinarily, she would have looked into a phenomenon like this with intense curiosity and undiluted pleasure. But now? Why now? Cliff had asked, and she had jumped on him for reacting so childishly. Still, privately, as more animals grew sick, she began to echo his foolish question. Why now, indeed? She could not help dreading another public disaster.

  But Sandy was right; this was no way to think. She was a researcher, not a politician or a press agent. She could not allow the ORIS inquiry to creep further inside her. She walked down the corridor and looked into the lab where Prithwish was working with the two new postdocs, Mikiko and Nir. She peeked into the cold room and the lounge, and finally discovered Feng in the stockroom.

  “I've got a job for you,” she told him.

  He turned to her, surprised she'd go to the trouble of buttonholing him among the shelves of clear glassware.

  “I want you to look into the new recurrences with Cliff,” she said.

  He scarcely blinked.

  “We need to understand what's going on with the recurring tumors,” she told him. “He's begun; he's working around the clock, but he's got his hands full. He's going to need help.”

  “I'm sorry,” Feng said.

  He'd answered so quietly that for several moments she didn't realize that he had refused her.

  “I wish I could,” he told her, turning away.

  She studied him. In all his time at the lab, Feng had never refused to do what she asked. Certainly he'd never denied a direct request.

  “I'm beginning new experiments with the bone tumors,” he told her apologetically. “And I'm training Miki.”

  Coming from Feng, this was practically insolent. She was growing angry, but she tried not to let it show.

  “I think this is vitally important for Cliff—and for the lab,” she said. “We need your help.”

  “I don't think I'd be any help to Cliff,” Feng demurred. “I've been away from his work too long. I'm sure I would ruin his experiments, because it's been so many months since I helped him with his project.”

  This was not insubordination, or laziness. This was Feng distancing himself from Cliff's work. Feng was making it clear he had severed his connection to R-7 entirely. All through the R-7 publicity, and then during the inquiry, he'd tried to keep his head down. He'd done his part; and when necessary, he'd played along. But she felt now the way Feng used his silences as weapons, how he wielded diffidence in his own defense. He was not going to work on R-7 again. She could order him as much as she wanted, and he would not change his mind. He would never speak against Cliff as a collaborator, or voice doubts if he had any. He was too doubtful of himself, and too private. Still, he wouldn't touch Cliff's work. There was something wrong.

  She did not speak of it to Sandy. She did not want him to cheer her, or to soothe her, or to bully Feng. Nor did she unburden herself to Jacob. She needed to think alone. What did Feng know about Cliff? What had he been concealing from her? To hide his doubts about Cliff's work would have been just as bad as lying. To conceal his lack of confidence until now! The very idea infuriated her. Hadn't she approached Feng at the very beginning? Hadn't she asked him to tell her candidly if he felt anything was amiss? Why would he have kept the truth from her? If he'd wanted to distance himself from Cliff, that would have been the time to do it. That would have been his chance. No, he couldn't have known anything then. But did he surmise something now? Over time, had he come to think that Cliff's work was simply too complex, too fraught with difficulties? Had ORIS succeeded in undermining his confidence entirely? This seemed more plausible. As Sandy might have put it, the politics of the situation had frightened Feng away.

  The situation was frightening. The idea that Cliff might have cheated was foreign to her; the idea that any scientist might cheat, improbable. And yet, at times Cliff's results themselves seemed improbable as well, and fleeting. When she and Sandy stood up together to defend their work, their arguments were adamant, their purpose fixed, the corrupt motives of their enemies quite clear. But when she reflected alone on all that had passed, the lab's success seemed like a brief dream. The way forward scientifically was far from obvious. As for enemies—the lab seemed to be its own worst enemy now, and Cliff's would-be collaborators at Stanford and Cornell were strewing more obstacles in the path for R-7 than anyone on Redfield's subcommittee.

  Still, she would not succumb to doubt. She had honed her doubtful instincts once. Doubt had been her scientific ally, the whetstone for her sharpest questions. Now she struggled against doubt as if it were merely an emotion, and not also a kind of intelligence. She fought off doubt as another person might have wrestled with self-pity. As she went about her work, she tried to think as Sandy did, and dismiss the fear and lack of confidence that plagued her. In the animal facility she took out Cliff's animals and held them under the light. Palpating them one by one, she examined those with no tumors left, and those with almost none, and then the few whose tumors had recurred. She held the animals' pink, wriggling bodies and checked their ear tags against the logbook. The records were clear and accurate, Cliff's notations up to date. But then, how would she know if he adjusted or revised the numbers, or sacrificed mice without telling anyone? He could easily have killed those animals that did not conform to the story he wanted told. The postdocs answered to Marion, but she depended on them for the truth of their answers. She could not monitor them every minute of the day.

  Jacob was practicing in the back of the apartment when she came home. She heard his weaving melodies and double-stops, but she couldn't face him. Instead, she slipped into Aaron's little room off the hall.

  “Hi,” he said as she came in.

  Too big for his old desk, Aaron sat hunched over, working out chess problems on paper. His desk light was a translucent world globe, which cast a blue glow over his homework folders and his notebooks. His bunk bed stood against the wall. He'd insisted on getting the bed when he was four years old. Marion had hinted to him then that she didn't think a bunk bed would be necessary, but Aaron wouldn't hear of anything else, arguing, “It'll be useful when I have guests.” Now the lower bed had become a storage area. Gradually Aaron's teddy bears and plush frog had migrated down there, along with his old school notebooks, his Rubik's cubes and spheres and polyhedrons.

  “How are you?” Marion asked Aaron.

  “Good.”

  “And how was school?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “What did you do today?”

  “Nothing much.”

  She looked over his shoulde
r at the printed chess diagram on the desk. Only six weeks into the new school year, he did not find eleventh grade terribly interesting.

  “Does Dad know you're home?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Could you tell him? He's been working on that piece a very long time.”

  “All right,” she said, but she didn't go, and he looked up at her briefly, owlish but unsuspecting.

  “What would you do if someone cheated while you were playing chess?” she asked him.

  “No one would do that,” he said with rational innocence.

  “But just suppose someone did.”

  “No one I know would do that.” He knit his brow and squinted, trying to wrap his head around such a counterintuitive idea—someone playing chess, where the rules were absolutely the pleasure of the game, and then breaking them.

  “What would you do?”

  “I guess I'd have to ask him why.”

  2

  “WHAT DO you care what your neighbors think?” Nanette asked Robin as they stood in line at the Janus Cinema.

  Robin ducked her head down. “I see them all the time at the mailboxes, or even in the elevator. As soon as Larry or Wendy comes near me, it's as though I don't exist. I disappear.”

  “Please,” said Nanette. “I had a boss who didn't talk to me for three years. We hated each other so much we communicated solely through graduate students.”

  “For three years?”

  “Well, maybe it wasn't three years. I guess it was more like three months.”

  “How did you keep your job?”

  “Oh, he fired me. But the point is, I didn't let it get to me.”

  “But I have to live with these people,” said Robin, stuffing her hands deep into her jacket pockets.

  “So, I had to live with my boss, too. It's the same thing,” said Nanette.

  “Maybe I should move,” Robin said.

  Nanette dismissed this. “Your problem is you have a thin skin. You're overly sensitive. I've always said that. You've got to be tough. Do your thing and ignore everyone else. You're good at the first part, but then you still want everyone to like you. Give it up.”