“But the spill in Peabody.”
“There were PCBs in it. I can hear you. And the company misled the public for a couple of days, not that Wall Street didn’t see right through it. Then again, it’s an extremely human response to deny something when you’re embarrassed. Hi, Stan.” Carver aimed her pistol at the doorway, where a man in a pea-green blazer was holding a manila folder. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Renée frowned. A few minutes?
“This hole of yours,” Carver said. “If it was drilled at all, it was supposedly drilled outside Hereford, Massachusetts. In order to make your ‘model’ fit, haven’t you more or less arbitrarily moved a five-mile-deep hole a hundred fifty miles east?”
“Eastern Massachusetts is what it says in Nature. Eastern Massachusetts.”
“Do you have any other references on that?”
“Not—yet.”
“And Nature is a . . . British publication. You know, I hate to say this, but I’m not particularly comfortable with a theory that depends on a British magazine editor’s grasp of American geography.”
Renée’s eyes narrowed.
“Other objections, off the top of my head. Why spend umpteen million dollars on a deep oil well in 1969? Do you know what a barrel of oil cost back then?”
“Yes. I do know. But I can’t believe there wasn’t anybody in America able to see 1973 coming. They had huge profits. They were probably glad to take the write-off.”
“You don’t make money on a write-off. And wouldn’t a company with so much foresight know about induced seismicity too? Anybody who opens an elementary seismology textbook must know about it. But according to you, the earthquakes in 1987 took them by surprise.”
“I assume they’d looked at the Denver study,” Renée said. “In Denver there was some history of earthquakes and the largest induced event was a magnitude 4.6. In Peabody there was no history of earthquakes and no reason to expect any. Plus they were pumping at a small fraction of the rate the Army pumped in Denver. And there’s something else, actually, that I forgot to mention, which is that the operations vice president of Sweeting-Aldren has his house insured against earthquake damage.”
Carver touched the muzzle of her pistol to her lips, as if blowing smoke off it. She smiled at Renée serenely. Was it possible she’d been corrupted by Sweeting-Aldren? Renée dismissed the idea. She could see that the problem here was that Carver simply didn’t like her.
“I take it you’re not a homeowner,” Carver said.
“That’s right. I’m not a homeowner.”
“Nothing wrong with that, of course. However, it may be that you don’t quite understand how much the people who do own homes are concerned about losing them. And that people who’ve been in Boston all their lives might remember the earthquakes in the forties and fifties. Who is that—Dave Stoorhuys?”
She made him sound like somebody she drank beer with. “Yes.”
Carver nodded. “Caution. Caution is the only word for him. Have you met him?”
“I know his son.”
“Yes, but you see I actually deal with these companies on a daily basis. And strange as it may sound, there happen to be some very decent and well-intentioned people in the industry. In fact I’ve seen as much or more self-interest and self-promotion on the academic side of the fence as I’ve seen on the commercial side. Is this what you wanted to hear? Obviously not. But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I think you’re barking up the wrong tree with Dave Stoorhuys and Sweeting-Aldren.”
“What if I found the pumping site myself and brought you pictures?”
“You want permission to spy and trespass? You want Mommy’s approval?” Carver’s eyes glittered. “I suppose if you showed me something more solid than an academic conjecture, I’d have somebody check it out. Although frankly there are a whole lot worse things a company can do with those chemicals than pump them four miles underneath the water table.”
“What if they’d come to you for a license to pump their waste underground. Would you have given it to them?”
“If you’re talking about legal liability for earthquake damage, you should be talking to somebody else.”
“Like who.”
“The press always loves a good story.” Carver looked at her watch. She stood up. “I’ve noticed they’re pretty keen on you too.”
“This is your responsibility,” Renée said. “If they are pumping, the only thing they’re violating is EPA regulations. I think somebody should at least go and see if they have a well on their property. And if they do, it should be seized before they have a chance to shut it down.”
“I’ll take a look at our records.” Carver was walking to the door now, forcing her visitor to stand up. Every government official knows that people who complain to agencies invariably consider themselves special, and that they become flustered when they finally realize they don’t seem special to the agency. A proud and self-conscious supplicant like Renée was particularly easy to fluster and get rid of. It was therefore a specific meanness on Carver’s part that she took the time to add: “I have to tell you, I’ve heard it all before. I’m afraid you’re tripping on a romance, a little bit.”
“What?”
“You know—a trip. How old are you?”
“I know what the word means.”
“We had an entomologist in here two months ago telling us there were dioxins in a spray the state fights gypsy moths with. He had a nice theory too. The only problem is there aren’t any dioxins in the spray. Last year another academic, from Harvard—Thetford? oceanographer?—talking about mercury on the continental shelf. Malfeasance and conspiracy. I guess I used to think that way myself, a long, long time ago. It’s very satisfying, very romantic. But 99.9 percent of the time it’s not the way the world really works. You might keep that in mind.”
In the street again, Renée held her fold-up umbrella right below its ribs and used her other hand to keep her shoulder bag from slipping off her shoulder as the wind blew and the rain fell. Naturally her bladder was overfull. People dodged irrationally in and out of doors. A young black man loitering at the bottom of the subway stairs pointed at the water on his pants and demanded: “What do you say?”
She skittered sideways.
He pursued her. “What do you say? You say excuse me. You say excuse me, please.”
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Excuse me, please. I’m sorry I splashed water on you. I’m sorry I got your pants wet.”
“I’m sorry I splashed water on you.”
“Thank you,” he shouted after her, over the turnstiles. “Thank you for your apology.”
This exchange echoed in her head until a train came.
A Globe had exploded in her car, covering the floor and collecting under seats. On the front page a headline stamped with a wet footprint read: SECOND ABORTION CLINIC BOMBED IN LOWELL.
At Central Square the local Angry Woman, driven underground by the weather, was cursing the motherfucking men who ruled the world. An old Chinese man carrying two goldfish in a Baggie full of water sat down next to Renée, who smiled at him kindly. “Rain rain rain,” he said.
“Rain rain rain, yeah.”
This exchange echoed in her head all the way to Harvard.
The ground floor of Hoffman Lab was quiet, the large white screens in the Sun room silently spitting up little statements in black as programs ran for students and post-docs eating a late lunch in the Square, the smaller brown screens in the system rooms awaiting log-ons or scrolling in bright green. Renée went straight from the women’s bathroom to a brown screen. While she worked, the phone on the radiator rang itself down several times. Even infrequent users of the computer had been informed by now that human life begins at conception. Nobody answered anymore, but the phone kept ringing.
Towards three o’clock Howard Chun and a Pekingese friend of his returned from lunch, exhaling garlic. Howard in his dripping nylon parka parked himself behind a Tectronix plo
tter. Renée had last seen him sprawled across her bed, snoring brokenly, when she left her apartment after breakfast.
“Why is this machine so slow,” she said to her screen.
“Disk B’s full,” said the Pekingese, furrowing his broad and remarkably expressive forehead. He was a good scientist and Renée liked him.
“Disk B is full. I see. Disk B that I spent half a night backing up four days ago.”
She entered the Operator directory, became SUPERUSER, and saw that in less than a week, users by the name of TERRY, TS, TBS, NBD1, and NBD2 had backed 375 megabytes onto Disk B and another 65 megabytes onto Disk A. All of these users were Terry Snall. His thesis topic was Non-Brittle Deformation. NBD1, an account feared and hated in the system rooms, single-handedly occupied 261 megabytes; this was four times the space taken up by any other student’s files; it was nearly half a disk.
SUPERUSER became SUPEROP. “Do you know what Terry did?” she said.
In the Tectronix corner, behind partitions, Howard’s keyboard clicked obliviously. The room was becoming murky with garlic vapors. SUPEROP addressed the Pekingese. “He brought back every single one of his program files. There are seventy megabytes of program files on this disk. It’s taking me twenty minutes to run a one-minute program and he has seventy megabytes of program files.”
“Cancel ’em,” the Pekingese recommended.
“I’m going to do just that.”
Program files were needed only when a program was actually being run, and could be re-created in minutes. SUPEROP zapped every one of Terry’s.
“Oh, much better,” the Pekingese said.
“Eight megabytes free on a 600-meg disk. Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he understand?”
Howard stepped out of his corner and moved from console to console, logging onto each. Even when he was working for just a few minutes he didn’t feel comfortable if he wasn’t logged on from at least three or four. Some late nights he logged on from ten of them. All but the one he was using automatically went dim to save wear on the pixels.
In a new log-on announcement, SUPEROP stressed that files not needed immediately should not be backed onto the disk. Everyone knew who wrote these announcements, so she didn’t sign it. She became RS again.
“You get your message?” the Pekingese asked her.
“Somebody actually took a message for me?”
“Charles.”
“Oh.”
Across the hall, beneath her shoulder bag and damp jean jacket, she found a number and the message: MRS. HOLLAND CALLED. YOU MAY CALL COLLECT.
She dropped the message in the trash and returned to her console. The Pekingese had left the room. “Howard?” she said.
A parka rustled, but Howard didn’t answer. Behind the partition, she found him slouching and staring at a bright green seismic spectrum, his ankles crossed on a bed of cables, the keyboard on his lap.
“Do you still know somebody with a pilot’s license?” she said.
He shook his head and worked the keyboard.
“Didn’t you have a friend who used to take you up?”
A new spectrum blossomed on the screen. He shook his head. Renée frowned. “Are you mad at me?”
He shook his head.
She threw a cautious glance through the hall doorway. “Come on,” she whispered. “Don’t be mad at me. I really need you not to be mad at me.”
He blinked at the screen, resolutely ignoring her. With another glance into the hall, she knelt and put her hands on his chest. “Come on. Please. Don’t be mad at me now. Please.”
He tried to roll his chair away from her.
She took his hand and put her cheek against his chest. It was the first time she’d ever touched him inside the lab, and as soon as she did it she heard a rustle of clothing right behind her. A sense of inevitability enveloped her like dread as she turned and saw Terry Snall spinning around and heading back up the hallway.
She jumped to her feet. “Shit!” She began to follow Terry but came back to the Tectronix. “Shit! Shit!” She pulled on her hair. “What did I do to you?”
Howard typed casually on his keyboard.
“Oh God, this is going to finish me. This is really going to push me over.” She crouched by Howard again. “Just tell me what I did to you.”
He made a hideous face, all gums and stretched nostrils. “What I do to you?” he mocked. “What I do to you? What I do to you?”
“I let you sleep with me,” she whispered fiercely. “I let you sleep with me a lot.”
“I let you seep with me I let you seep with me.”
She stared at him, mouth trembling.
“Rouis, Rouis,” he said. “A rill bit pinch me hit me hit me.”
“Oh God.” She backed away from him and looked for a place to run but there was no place. Rounding the corner into the hall, she almost collided with Charles, one of the department secretaries. He was tall and balding and was writing a novel in his off hours. He wore suspenders instead of belts. “Melanie Holland,” he said. “She’s on the phone again.”
“Tell her I’m gone.”
“She wants to know where she can reach you.”
“Tell her to try me at home.”
“She already has been.”
“Tell her I’m out of town.”
“Oh, Renée.” Charles shook his head. “I’m not paid to lie for people. If you don’t want to talk to her, the honest thing is to tell her that. Then she won’t keep calling here and interrupting me and I won’t have to keep coming down two flights of stairs and bothering you.”
Renée pointed at the street door. “I’m leaving.”
“Oh, Renée. I advise you not to. Not if you ever want to use my copier again or have me take messages from other institutions or borrow my paper cutter. Are you interested in ever borrowing my paper cutter again?”
Without a word, she stalked up the hall towards the stairwell. “Don’t think I’m blackmailing you,” Charles said, following her. “This is a matter of courtesy and professionalism. I let you use my paper cutter as a courtesy. I’m not required to let you use it, you know.”
Her voice reverberated in the concrete-clad stairwell. “You are so.”
He followed her up the stairs. “You used to be so courteous, Renée. You used to be the most courteous person in this building. Do you know how many clicks I’ve given you on the copy counter? The copy counter that’s for department business only? Renée? Are you listening to me? Sixty-five hundred clicks!”
She stepped into the office of the absent department chairman and closed the door in Charles’s face. The office was dark and cool and agreeably odorless. She always enjoyed being here. The shelves held bound volumes of all the major journals dating back to the forties. There were file cabinets bursting with reprints, softcover proposals for interesting and useful multinational research initiatives, whole unbroken packages of colored pens and other scarce office supplies. In a few years she too would have an office like this, and some young fool like herself would run a computer system for her, and people would have to include her whenever major seismological doings were discussed. It would matter that she’d studied with X, Y and Z at Harvard—a university which, as she always remembered when she entered this office, could boast of a small but outstanding program in geophysics. Bad memories of the system rooms would fade. Trees would sway outside her window.
“Renée? Melanie Holland. Listen, I don’t want to take up your time while you’re at work, but I’m very interested in talking to you again and I wonder if you’d let me take you to lunch tomorrow. It being a Saturday. There’s a lovely restaurant in the Four Seasons, I’d love to take you there.”
“What for?” Renée said rudely. “I mean—that’s very nice of you.”
“Wonderful. You’ll come.”
“No. No, I won’t come. I mean, I can’t.”
“Oh, well, I’m not wedded to the day and hour, if you had other plans. We could brunch on Sunday, have dinner tomorrow night.
Tonight even. It would be so nice if you would.”
“What is it that you want to talk to me about?”
“Everything and nothing. I think it would be very good for both of us to get acquainted. I’m calling you as a friend. Please have lunch with me, Renée.”
She frowned so hard it hurt. “What for?”
“Oh, really, let’s not be silly. Can I take you to lunch tomorrow or can’t I? Yes or no. It would mean a great deal to me. Tell me one good reason why you shouldn’t let me.”
Melanie could make her voice beautiful when she chose. It was like a brook in a valley running in and out of the sunshine and pooling among willows, the clear kind of brook you want to plunge your hands into and drink from and forget about the deer carcasses and feedlots upstream, which may not even be there anyway.
“Let me get back to you,” Renée said.
“I know. You’re busy busy busy. Do I need to be blunt? There is no one in the world more interested in seeing you than I am. No one in the world. Please come to lunch with me.”
Renée wandered dizzily around the chairman’s office, gripping the telephone. “Won’t you tell me what this is about?”
“Tomorrow. Is twelve-thirty fine with you? The restaurant’s called Aujourd’hui.”
Beyond thin lines of rain joining and breaking apart and descending on the window, a knot of Japanese tourists beneath identical umbrellas approached the entrance to the Peabody Museum, whose gorgeous collection of glass flowers, created a hundred years earlier by German glassblowers to reveal the structure and variety of the world’s flora to Harvard botany students, was the most popular tourist attraction in Cambridge. Renée had never seen it. The Japanese umbrellas stooped to the level of the sign on the museum door; rotating uncertainly, they conferred and scattered. Others surged up to the sign, which said that owing to recent earthquake damage the glass flowers were in storage until a safer means of displaying them could be found. To console themselves, the Japanese photographed one another by the sign, the white of their flashes lighting the wet asphalt and nearer trees. Two lung-shaped patches of breath and above them a fainter fog outline of a forehead stayed on the chairman’s window for several minutes after Renée had gone back downstairs.
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