“That doesn’t make us some kind of ‘oppressed class.’ We’re an elite cadre of highly educated experts.”
“So what? Your situation stinks! You have no power to make your own decisions about your own research. You don’t control the purse strings. You don’t have tenure or job security. You’ve been robbed of your peer review traditions. Your traditional high culture has been crushed underfoot by ignoramuses and fast-buck artists. You’re the technical intelligentsia all right, but you’re being played for suckers and patsies by corrupt pols who line their pockets at your expense.”
“How can you say that? Look at this amazing place we live in!”
“You just think that this is the ivory tower, sweetheart. In reality, you’re slum tenants.”
“But nobody thinks that way!”
“That’s because you’ve been fooling yourselves for years now. You’re smart, Greta. You have eyes and ears. Think about what you’ve been through. Think about how your colleagues really have to live now. Think a little harder.”
She was silent.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Take your time, think it through.”
“It is true. It’s the truth, and it’s awful, and I’m very ashamed of it, and I hate it. But it’s politics. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “Let’s move on into the speech.”
“Okay.” She wiped her eyes. “Well, this is the really sick and painful part. Senator Dougal. I know that man, I’ve met him a lot of times. He drinks too much, but we all do that nowadays. He’s not as bad as all this.”
“People can’t unite against abstractions. You have to put a face on your troubles. That’s how you rally people politically. You have to pick your target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Dougal’s not your only enemy, but you don’t have to worry about that. The rest of them will come running out of the woodwork as soon as you nail him to the wall.”
“But he built everything here, he built this whole laboratory!”
“He’s a crook. We’ve got chapter and verse on him now. Nobody dared to cross him while he was in power. But now that he’s shipping water and going down fast, they’ll all rat him out. The kickbacks, the money laundering…You’re in charge of Instrumentation. Dougal and his cronies have been skimming your cream for years. You’ve got a legal and moral obligation to jump on him. And best of all, jumping on Dougal is a free ride politically. He can’t do a thing about it. Dougal is the easy part.” Oscar paused. “It’s Huey that I’m really worried about.”
“I don’t see why I have to be so nasty.”
“You need an issue, and there’s no such thing as a noncontroversial issue. And ridicule is the radical’s best weapon. The powers that be can stand anything but being laughed at.”
“It’s just not me.”
“Give it a chance first. Try the experiment. Launch one or two of those zingers, and see how your audience responds.”
She sniffed. “They’re scientists. They’re not going to respond to partisan abuse.”
“Of course they are. Scientists fight like crazed weasels. Look at your own history here at the lab! When Dougal got this place built, he had to cash in a lot of favors. He needed the Christian fundie vote before he could build a giant gene-splicing lab in the East Texas Bible Belt. That’s why the Collaboratory used to have its own Creation Science department. That setup lasted six weeks! There were fistfights, riots, and arson! They had to call in the Texas Rangers to restore order.”
“Oh, the creation-science problem wasn’t all that bad.”
“Yes it was! Your little society has blocked out that memory because it was so embarrassing. That wasn’t the half of it. Next year they had a major brawl with the Buna residents, regular town-gown riots…And it really hit the fan during the economic war. There were federal witch-hunts for foreign science spies, there was hyperinflation and lab guys living on bread crusts…See, I’m not a scientist like you. I don’t have to take it on faith that science is always a noble endeavor. I actually look these things up.”
“Well, I’m not a politician like you. So I don’t have to spend my life digging up ugly scandals.”
“Darling, we’ll have a little chat sometime about your twentieth-century Golden Age—Lysenkoism, atom spies, Nazi doctors, and radiation experiments. In the meantime, though, we need to stick to your speech.”
She gazed at her laptop. “It just gets worse and worse. You want me to cut our budget and get people fired.”
“The budget has to be cut. Cut drastically. People have to be fired. Fired by the truckload. The lab’s sixteen years old, it’s full of bureaucratic deadwood. Get the deadwood out of here. Fire the Spinoffs department, they’re all Dougal’s cronies and they’re all on the take. Fire the lab procurement drones and put the budgets back into the hands of researchers. And, especially, fire the police.”
“I can’t possibly fire the police. That’s crazy.”
“The police have to go as soon as possible. Hire your own police. If you don’t control your own police, you live on sufferance. The police are the core of any society, and if you don’t have them on your side, you can’t hold power. Huey knows that. That’s why Huey owns the cops in here. They may be feds officially, but they’re all in his pockets.”
The car jostled with a thump and a creak. Oscar yelped. A shapeless black beast was bumping and clawing at the hood.
“It’s a lemur,” Greta said. “They’re nocturnal.”
The lemur stared through the windshield with yellow eyes the size and shape of golf balls. Pressed flat against the glass, its eldritch protohuman mitts gave him a serious turn. “I’ve had it with these animals!” Oscar shouted. “They’re like Banquo’s ghost, they never let us alone! Whose bright idea was this anyway? Wild animals loose in a science lab? It doesn’t make any sense!”
“They are ghosts,” Greta said. “We raised them from the dead. It’s something we learned how to do here.” She opened her door and stepped half out, waving one arm. “Go on. Shoo.”
The lemur sidled off reluctantly.
Oscar had broken into a cold sweat. His hair was standing on end and his hands were shaking. He could actually smell his own fear: a sharp pheromonal reek. He crossed his arms and shivered violently. His reaction was all out of whack, but he couldn’t help it: he was very inspired tonight. “Give me a minute…Sorry…Where were we?”
“I can’t stand up in public and start screaming for people to be fired.”
“Don’t prejudge the evidence. Try it out first. Just suggest that a few of these creeps should be fired, and see what the public response is.” He drew a breath. “Remember the climax—you do have a final ace to play.”
“Where I say that I refuse my own salary.”
“Yeah, I thought voluntarily cutting it in half might be good—I’d like to see the Collaboratory’s budget cut about in half—but it’s a better and stronger gesture if you just refuse your pay altogether. You refuse to take government pay until the lab is put back in order. That’s a great conclusion, it shows you’re really serious and it gets you out with a punch, and a nice hot sound bite. Then you sit back and watch the fireworks.”
“I sit back, and the Director fires me on the spot.”
“No, he won’t. He won’t dare. He’s never been his own man, and he’s just not bright enough to react that quickly. He’ll stall for time, and he’s all out of time. Getting the Director out of office is not a problem. The next big step is getting you in as Director. And the real challenge will be keeping you in office—long enough for you to push some real reforms through.”
She sighed. “And then, finally, when that’s all over, do I get to go back and do my labwork?”
“Probably.” He paused. “No, sure, of course. If that’s what you really want.”
“How am I supposed to eat with no salary?”
“You’ve got your Nobel Prize money, Greta. You’ve got big piles of Swedish kron
or that you’ve never even touched.”
She frowned. “I kept thinking I would buy new equipment with it, but the lab procurement people wouldn’t let me do all the paperwork.”
“Okay, that’s your problem in a nutshell. Fire all those sorry bastards first thing.”
She shut her laptop. “This is serious. When I do this, it will make a terrible stink. Something will happen.”
“We want things to happen. That’s why we’re doing all this.”
She turned in her seat, anxiously poking him with a kneecap. “I just want to be truthful. Not political. Truthful.”
“This is an honest political speech! Everything there can be documented.”
“It’s honest about everything but you and me.”
Oscar exhaled slowly. He’d been expecting this development. “Well, that’s where we have to pay the price. After tomorrow, you’re on campaign. Even with the best will and intention, we won’t have any time for ourselves anymore. When we had our stolen moments, we could meet in Boston or Louisiana, and that was lovely, and we could get away with that. But we lose that privilege from now on. This is the last time that you and I can meet privately. I won’t even be in the audience when you speak tomorrow. It mustn’t look like I’m prompting you.”
“But people know about us. A lot of people know. I want people to know.”
“All political leaders lead double lives. Public, and private. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just reality.”
“What if we’re outed?”
“Well, there’s two ways to play that development. We could stonewall. That’s simplest and easiest—just deny everything, and let them try to prove it. Or, we could be very coy and provocative, and say that we’re flattered by their matchmaking. We could lead them on a little, we could be sexy and glamorous. You know, play it the good old Hollywood way. That’s a dangerous game, but I know that game pretty well, and I like that one better, myself.”
She was silent for a moment. “Won’t you miss me?”
“How can I miss you? I’m managing you. You’re the very center of my life now. You’re my candidate.”
__________
Oscar and Yosh Pelicanos were enjoying a healthful stroll around the china tower of the Hot Zone. Pelicanos wore a billed hat, khaki walking shorts, and a sleeveless pullover. Two months inside the dome had caused almost all of Oscar’s krewe to go native. Oscar, by stark contrast, wore his nattiest suit and a sharp new steam-blocked hat. Oscar rarely felt the need of serious exercise, since his metabolic rate was eight percent higher than that of a normal human.
Their walk was a deliberate and public promenade. The Collaboratory’s board was meeting, Greta was about to speak, and Oscar was very conspicuously nowhere near the scene. Oscar was especially hard to miss when publicly trailed by his bodyguard: the spectral Kevin Hamilton, parading in his motorized wheelchair.
“What is it with this Hamilton guy?” Pelicanos grumbled, glancing over his shoulder. “Why on earth did you have to hire some Anglo hustler? His only credential is that he limps even worse than Fontenot.”
“Kevin’s very gifted. He got that netwar program off my back. Besides, he works cheap.”
“He dresses like a loan shark. The guy gets eighteen package deliveries a day. And that headphone and the scanning gear—he’s sleeping in it! He’s getting on our nerves.”
“Kevin will grow on you. I know he’s not the standard team player. Be tolerant.”
“I’m nervous,” Pelicanos admitted.
“No need for that. We’ve laid all the groundwork perfectly,” Oscar said. “I’ve got to hand it to the krewe, you’ve really done me proud here.” Oscar’s mood was radiant. Unbearable personal tension, stress, and agonizing suspense always brought out his boyish, endearing side. “Yosh, you did first-class work on those audits. And the push-polling was superb, you handled that beautifully. A few dozen loaded questions on the Science Committee letterhead, and the locals are hopping like puppets, they’re gun-shy now, they’re ready for anything. It’s been a tour de force all around. Even the hotel’s making money! Especially now that we lured in all those expense-account headhunters from out of state.”
“Yeah, you’ve got us all working like mules—you don’t have to tell me that. The question is, is it enough?”
“Well, nothing’s ever enough…Politics isn’t precision machinery, it’s a performance art. It’s stage magic. It’s a brand-new year, and now the curtain’s going up. We’ve got our plants primed in the audience, we’ve got scarves and ribbons up our sleeve, we’ve saturated the playing field with extra hats and rabbits…”
“There’s way too many hats and rabbits.”
“No there aren’t! Can’t have too many! We’ll just use the ones that we need, as we need them. That’s the beauty of multitasking. It’s that fractal aspect, the self-similarity across multiple political layers…”
Pelicanos snorted. “Stop talking like Bambakias. That highbrow net-jive gets you nowhere with me.”
“But it works! If the feds somehow fail us, we’ve got leaks in at the Texas comptroller’s office. The Buna city council loves us! I know they’re not worth much politically, but hey, we’ve paid more attention to them in the past six weeks than the Collaboratory has paid them in fifteen years.”
“So you’re keeping all your options open.”
“Exactly.”
“You always say that you hate doing that.”
“What? I never said that. You’re just being morose. I feel very upbeat about this, Yosh—we’ve had a few little setbacks, but taking this assignment was a wise decision. It’s been a broadening professional experience.”
They paused to let a yak cross the road. “You know what I really like about this campaign?” Oscar said. “It’s so tiny. Two thousand political illiterates, sealed inside a dome. We have complete voter profiles and interest-group dossiers on every single person in the Collaboratory! It’s so sealed off and detached—politically speaking, there’s something perfect and magical about a setup like this.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”
“I’m determined to enjoy this, Yosh. We might be crushed here, or we might soar to glory, but we’ll never have the chance to do something quite like this again.”
A supply truck lumbered past them, laden with mutant seedlings. “You know something?” Pelicanos said. “I’ve been so busy playing the angles that I never got the chance to understand what they actually do in here.”
“I think you understand it a lot better than they do.”
“Not their finances, I mean the actual science. I can understand commercial biotech well enough—we were in that business together, in Boston. But the real cutting edge here, those brain people, the cognition people…I know I’m missing something important there.”
“Yeah? Personally, I’ve been trying to get up to speed on ‘amyloid fibrils.’ Greta really dotes on those things.”
“It’s not just that their field is technically difficult to grasp. It is, but I also have a feeling they’re hiding something.”
“Sure. That’s science in its decadence. They can’t patent or copyright their findings anymore, so sometimes they try for trade secrets.” Oscar laughed. “As if that could really work nowadays.”
“Maybe there’s something going on in this place that could help Sandra.”
Oscar was touched. His friend’s dark mood was clear to him now, it had opened up before him like an origami trick. “Where there’s life, there’s hope, Yosh.”
“If I had more time to figure it out, if there weren’t so many distractions…Everything is hats and rabbits now. Nothing’s predictable, nothing makes sense anymore, it’s all rockets and potholes. There’s no foundation left in our society. There’s no place left for us to take a stand. There’s a very dark momentum going, Oscar. Sometimes I really think the country’s going mad.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, just look at us. I mean, look wha
t we’ve been dealing with.” Pelicanos hunched his head and began counting off on his fingers. “My wife is a schizophrenic. Bambakias has major depression. Poor Moira finally cracked in public, and pitched a fit. Dougal is an alcoholic. Green Huey is a megalomaniac. And those sick lunatics trying to kill you—there was an endless supply of those people.”
Oscar walked on silently.
“Am I reading too much into this? Or is there a genuine trend here?”
“I’d call it a groundswell,” Oscar said thoughtfully. “That accounts for those sky-high poll ratings ever since Bambakias’s breakdown. He’s a classic political charismatic. So even his personal negatives boost his political positives. People just sense his authenticity, they recognize that he’s truly a man of our time. He represents the American people. He’s a born leader.”
“Does he have it together to take action for us in Washington?”
“Well, he’s still a name for us to conjure with…But practically speaking, no. I’ve got good backchannel from Lorena, and frankly, he’s really delusionary now. He’s got some weird fixation about the President, something about hot-war with Europe…He sees Dutch agents hiding under every bed…They’re trying him out with different flavors of antidepressant.”
“Will that work? Can they stabilize him?”
“Well, the treatments make great media copy. There’s a huge Bambakias medical fandom happening, ever since his hunger strike, really…They’ve got their own sites and feeds…Lots of get-well email, home mental-health remedies, oddsmaking on the death-watch…It’s a classic grass-roots phenomenon. You know, T-shirts, yard signs, coffee mugs, fridge magnets…I dunno, it’s getting kind of out of hand.”
Pelicanos rubbed his chin. “Kind of a tabloid vulture pop-star momentum there.”
“Exactly. Perfect coinage, you’ve hit the nail on the head.”
“How bad should we feel about this, Oscar? I mean, basically, this is all our fault, isn’t it?”
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