Forty Signs of Rain

III Intellectual Merit

Water flows through the oceans in steady recycling patterns, determined by the Coriolis force and the particular positions of the continents in our time. Surface currents can move in the opposite direction to bottom currents below them, and often do, forming systems like giant conveyor belts of water. The largest one is already famous, at least in part: the Gulf Stream is a segment of a warm surface current that flows north up the entire length of the Atlantic, all the way to Norway and Greenland. There the water cools and sinks, and begins a long journey south on the Atlantic Ocean floor, to the Cape of Good Hope and then east toward Australia, and even into the Pacific, where the water upwells and rejoins the surface flow, west to the Atlantic for the long haul north again. The round trip for any given water molecule takes about a thousand years.

Cooling salty water sinks more easily than cooling fresh water. Trade winds sweep clouds generated in the Gulf of Mexico west over Central America to dump their rain in the Pacific, leaving the remaining water in the Atlantic that much saltier. So the cooling water in the North Atlantic sinks well, aiding the power of the Gulf Stream. If the surface of the North Atlantic were to become rapidly fresher, it would not sink so well when it cooled, and that could stall the conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream would have nowhere to go, and would slow down, and sink farther south. Weather everywhere would change, becoming windier and drier in the Northern Hemisphere, and colder in places, especially in Europe.

The sudden desalination of the North Atlantic might seem an unlikely occurrence, but it has happened before. At the end of the last Ice Age, for instance, vast shallow lakes were created by the melting of the polar ice cap. Eventually these lakes broke through their ice dams and poured off into the oceans. The Canadian shield still sports the scars from three or four of these cataclysmic floods; one flowed down the Mississippi, one the Hudson, one the St. Lawrence.

These flows apparently stalled the world ocean conveyor belt current, and the climate of the whole world changed as a result, sometimes in as little as three years.

Now, would the Arctic sea ice, breaking into bergs and flowing south past Greenland, dump enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to stall the Gulf Stream again?

Frank Vanderwal kept track of climate news as a sort of morbid hobby. His friend Kenzo Hayakawa, an old climbing partner and grad school housemate, had spent time at NOAA before coming to NSF to work with the weather crowd on the ninth floor, and so Frank occasionally checked in with him to say hi and find out the latest. Things were getting wild out there; extreme weather events were touching down all over the world, the violent, short-term ones almost daily, the chronic problem situations piling one on the next, so that never were they entirely clear of one or another of them. The Hyperniño, severe drought in India and Peru, perpetual lightning fires in Malaysia; then on the daily scale, a typhoon destroying most of Mindanao, a snap freeze killing crops and breaking pipes all over Texas, and so on. Something every day.

Like a lot of climatologists and other weather people Frank had met, Kenzo presented all this news with a faintly proprietary air, as if he were curating the weather. He liked the wild stuff, and enjoyed sharing news of it, especially if it seemed to support his contention that the heat added anthropogenically to the atmosphere had been enough to change the Indian Ocean monsoon patterns for good, triggering global repercussions; this meant, in practice, almost everything that happened. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America, as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in East Africa and in Central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.

“Unbelievable,” Frank would say.

“I know. Isn’t it great?”

Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines, informally called “The Department of Unfortunate Statistics.” Someone had started to tape on the beige walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.

The oldest ones were headlines, things like:

or

Later pages were charts or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles of a quantitative nature out of the scientific literature.

When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:

“I don’t think this can be right,” Edgardo declared.

“How so?” Frank said.

“Because the poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s total capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.”

Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belaboring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up the brief quote: 72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Frank, wanting to bug her, said, “What do you think, Anna?”

“About what?”

Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.

Anna said, “I don’t know. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.”

“Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500 reports?”

Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world in general. He tapped another taped-up page. “The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”

Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”

“Profit,” Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”

Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”

“Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”

“Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?”

“There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”

“Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”

“You work overtime.”

“Yeah but I don’t get paid for it.”

The men laughed at her.

“They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s…” Anna could do calculations in her head. “Sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.”

“What’s the average income?” Edgardo asked. “Thirty thousand?”

“Maybe less,” Frank said.

“We don’t have any idea,” Anna objected.

“Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?”

“About ten? Or is it less?”

Edgardo said, “Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” He grinned at Frank and Anna. “How stupid is that?”

Anna shook her head. “People don’t see it that way.”

“But here are the statistics!”

“People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.”

“They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.”

Even Frank was not willing to go this far. “It’s a matter of what you can see,” he suggested. “You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.”

“But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one earns that much.”

“The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Edgardo said cheerfully. “We are stupid!”

“I’ve got to get back to it,” Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.

Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.

He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out toward the Potomac—a long view and a nice apartment, rented out for the year by a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasilia. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy, and most of the time Frank was home he was asleep anyway, so he didn’t care what it was like.

He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now as he spooned down some cottage cheese he looked again at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he was by the glimpse these pages gave of a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity—a subculture that had understood the implications of the removal of biological constraints in the techno-urban landscape, and were therefore able and willing to create a kind of polymorphous panmixia. Were these people really out there, or was this merely the collective fantasy life of a bunch of lonely souls like himself? He had never contacted any of the people putting in the ads to try to find out. He suspected the worst, and would rather be lonely. Although the sections devoted to people looking for LTRs, meaning “long-term relationships,” went far beyond the sexual fantasies, and sometimes struck him with force. ISO LTR: “in search of long-term relationship.” The species had long ago evolved toward monogamous relationships, they were wired into the brain’s structure, every culture manifesting the same overwhelming tendency toward pair-bonding. Not a cultural imposition but a biological instinct. They might as well be storks in that regard.

And so he read the ads, but never replied. He was only here for a year; San Diego was his home. It made no sense to take any action on this particular front, no matter what he felt or read.

The ads themselves also tended to stop him.

These entries were not going to get a lot of responses. But they, like all the rest, were as clear as could be on the fundamental primate needs they were asking for. Frank could have written the urtext underneath them all, and one time he had, and had even sent it in to a paper, as a joke of course, for all those reading these confessions with the same analytical slant he had—it would make them laugh. Although of course if any woman reading it liked the joke well enough to call, well, that would have been a sign.

Male Homo sapiens desires company of female Homo sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behaviors, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast.

But no one had replied.

He went out onto the bas-relief balcony, into the sultry late afternoon. Another two months and he would be going home, back to resume his real life. He was looking forward to it. He wanted to float in the Pacific. He wanted to walk around beautiful UCSD in its cool warmth, eat lunch with old colleagues among the eucalyptus trees.

Thinking about that reminded him of the grant application from Yann Pierzinski. He went inside to his laptop and Googled him to try to learn more about what he had been up to. Then he reopened his application, and found the section on the part of the algorithm to be developed. Primitive recursion at the boundary limit…it was interesting.

After some more thought, he called up Derek Gaspar at Torrey Pines Generique.

“What’s up?” Derek said after the preliminaries.

“Well, I just got a grant proposal from one of your people, and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.”

“From one of mine, what do you mean?”

“A Yann Pierzinski, do you know him?”

“No, never heard of him. He works here you say?”

“He was there on a temporary contract, working with Simpson. He’s a post-doc from Caltech.”

“Ah yeah, here we go. Mathematician, got a paper in Biomathematics on algorithms.”

“Yeah that comes up first on my Google too.”

“Well sure. I can’t be expected to know everyone who ever worked with us here, that’s hundreds of people, you know that.”

“Sure sure.”

“So what’s his proposal about? Are you going to give him a grant?”

“Not up to me, you know that. We’ll see what the panel says. But meanwhile, maybe you should check it out.”

“Oh you like it then.”

“I think it may be interesting, it’s hard to tell at this stage. Just don’t drop him.”

“Well, our records show him as already gone back up to Pasadena, to finish his work up there I presume. Like you said, his gig here was temporary.”

“Ah ha. Man, your research groups have been gutted.”

“Not gutted, Frank, we’re down to the bare bones in some areas, but we’ve kept what we need to. There have been some hard choices to make. Kenton wanted his note repaid, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Coming after that stage two in India it’s been tough, really tough. That’s one of the reasons I’ll be happy when you’re back out here.”

“I don’t work for Torrey Pines anymore.”

“No I know, but maybe you could rejoin us when you move back here.”

“Maybe. If you get new financing.”

“I’m trying, believe me. That’s why I’d like to have you back on board.”

“We’ll see. Let’s talk about it when I’m out there. Meanwhile, don’t cut any more of your other research efforts. They might be what draws the new financing.”

“I hope so. I’m doing what I can, believe me. We’re trying to hold on til something comes through.”

“Yeah. Hang in there then. I’ll be out looking for a place to live in a couple of weeks, I’ll come see you then.”

“Good, make an appointment with Susan.”

Frank clicked off his phone, sat back in his chair thinking it over. Derek was like a lot of first-generation CEOs of biotech start-ups. He had come out of the biology department at UCSD, and his business acumen had been gained on the job. Some people managed to do this successfully, others didn’t, but all tended to fall behind on the actual science being done, and had to take on faith what was really possible in the labs. Certainly Derek could use some help in guiding policy at Torrey Pines Generique.

Frank went back to studying the grant proposal. There were elements of the algorithm missing, as was typical. That was what the grant was for, to pay for the work that would finish the project. And some people made a habit of describing crucial aspects of their work in general terms when at the prepub stage, a matter of being cautious. So he could not be sure about it, but he could see the potential for a very powerful method there. Earlier in the day he had thought he saw a way to plug one of the gaps that Pierzinski had left, and if that worked as he thought it might…

“Hmmmm,” he said to the empty room.

If the situation was still fluid when he went out to San Diego, he could perhaps set things up quite nicely. There were some potential problems, of course. NSF’s guidelines stated explicitly that although any copyrights, patents, or project income belonged to the grant holder, NSF always kept a public-right use for all grant-subsidized work. That would keep any big gains from being made by an individual or company on a project like this, if it was awarded a grant. Purely private control could only be maintained if there had not been any public money granted.

Also, the P.I. on the proposal was Pierzinski’s advisor at Caltech, battening off the work of his students in the usual way. Of course it was an exchange—the advisor gave the student credibility, a sort of license to apply for a grant, by contributing his name and prestige to the project. The student provided the work, sometimes all of it, sometimes just a portion of it. In this case, it looked to Frank like all of it.

Anyway, the grant proposal came from Caltech. Caltech and the P.I. would hold the rights to anything the project made, along with NSF itself, even if Pierzinski moved afterward. So, if for instance an effort was going to be made to bring Pierzinski to Torrey Pines Generique, it would be best if this particular proposal were to fail. And if the algorithm worked and became patentable, then again, keeping control of what it made would only be possible if the proposal were to fail.

That line of thought made him feel jumpy. In fact he was on his feet, pacing out to the minibalcony and back in again. Then he remembered he had been planning to go out to Great Falls anyway. He quickly finished his cottage cheese, pulled his climbing kit out of the closet, changed clothes, and went back down to his car.

The Great Falls of the Potomac was a complicated thing, a long tumble of whitewater falling down past a few islands. The complexity of the falls was its main visual appeal, as it was no very great thing in terms of total height, or even volume of water. Its roar was the biggest thing about it.

The spray it threw up seemed to consolidate and knock down the humidity, so that paradoxically it was less humid here than elsewhere, although wet and mossy underfoot. Frank walked downstream along the edge of the gorge. Below the falls the river re-collected itself and ran through a defile called Mather Gorge, a ravine with a south wall so steep that climbers were drawn to it. One section called Carter Rock was Frank’s favorite. It was a simple matter to tie a rope to a top belay, usually a stout tree trunk near the cliff’s edge, and then rappel down the rope to the bottom and either free-climb up, or clip onto the rope with an ascender and go through the hassles of self-belay.

One could climb in teams too, of course, and many did, but there were about as many singletons like Frank here as there were duets. Some even free-soloed the wall, dispensing with all protection. Frank liked to play it just a little safer than that, but he had climbed here so many times now that sometimes he rappelled down and free-climbed next to his rope, pretending to himself that he could grab it if he fell. The few routes available were all chalked and greasy from repeated use. He decided this time to clip onto the rope with the ascender.

The river and its gorge created a band of open sky that was unusually big for the metropolitan area. This as much as anything else gave Frank the feeling that he was in a good place: on a wall route, near water, and open to the sky. Out of the claustrophobia of the great hardwood forest, one of the things about the East Coast that Frank hated the most. There were times he would have given a finger for the sight of open land.

Now, as he rappelled down to the small tumble of big boulders at the foot of the cliff, chalked his hands, and began to climb the fine-grained old schist of the route, he cheered up. He focused on his immediate surroundings to a degree unimaginable when he was not climbing. It was like the math work, only then he wasn’t anywhere at all. Here, he was right on these very particular rocks.

This route he had climbed before many times. About a 5.8 or 5.9 at its crux, much easier elsewhere. Hard to find really hard pitches here, but that didn’t matter. Even climbing up out of a ravine, rather than up onto a peak, didn’t matter. The constant roar, the spray, those didn’t matter. Only the climbing itself mattered.

His legs did most of the work. Find the footholds, fit his rock-climbing shoes into cracks or onto knobs, then look for handholds; and up, and up again, using his hands only for balance, and a kind of tactile reassurance that he was seeing what he was seeing, that the footholds he was expecting to use would be enough. Climbing was the bliss of perfect attention, a kind of devotion, or prayer. Or simply a retreat into the supreme competencies of the primate cerebellum. A lot was conserved.

By now it was evening. A sultry summer evening, sunset near, the air itself going yellow. He topped out and sat on the rim, feeling the sweat on his face fail to evaporate.

There was a kayaker, below in the river. A woman, he thought, though she wore a helmet and was broad-shouldered and flat-chested—he would have been hard-pressed to say exactly how he knew, and yet he was sure. This was another savannah competency, and indeed some anthropologists postulated that this kind of rapid identification of reproductive possibility was what the enlarged neocortex had grown to do. The brain growing with such evolutionary speed, specifically to get along with the other sex. A depressing thought given the results so far.

This woman was paddling smoothly upstream, into the hissing water that only around her seemed to be re-collecting itself as a liquid. Upstream it was a steep rapids, leading to the white smash at the bottom of the falls proper.

The kayaker pushed up into this wilder section, paddling harder upstream, then held her position against the flow while she studied the falls ahead. Then she took off hard, attacking a white smooth flow in the lowest section, a kind of ramp through the smash, up to a terrace in the whitewater. When she reached the little flat she could rest again, in another slightly more strenuous maintenance paddle, gathering her strength for the next salmonlike climb.

Abruptly leaving the strange refuge of that flat spot, she attacked another ramp that led up to a bigger plateau of flat black water, a pool that had an eddy in it, apparently, rolling backward and allowing her to rest in place. There was no room there to gain any speed for another leap up, so that she appeared to be stuck; but maybe she was only studying her way, or waiting for a moment of reduced flow, because all of a sudden she attacked the water with a fierce flurry of paddle strokes, and seemingly willed her craft up the next pouring ramp. Five or seven desperate seconds later she leveled out again, on a tiny little bench of a refuge that did not have a pushback eddy, judging by the intensity of her maintenance paddling there. After only a few seconds she had to try a ramp to her right or get pushed back off her perch, and so she took off and fought upstream, fists moving fast as a boxer’s, the kayak at an impossible angle, looking like a miracle—until all of a sudden it was swept back down, and she had to make a quick turn and then take a wild ride, bouncing down the falls by a different and steeper route than the one she had ascended, losing in a few swift seconds the height that she had taken a minute or two’s hard labor to gain.

“Wow,” Frank said, smitten.

She was already almost down to the hissing tapestry of flat river right below him, and he felt an urge to wave to her, or stand and applaud. He restrained himself, not wanting to impose upon another athlete obviously deep in her own space. But he did whip out his cell phone and try out a GPS-oriented directory search, figuring that if she had a cell phone with a transponder in the kayak, it had to be very close to his own phone’s position. He checked his position, entered thirty meters north of that; got nothing. Same with the position twenty meters farther east.

“Ah well,” he said, and stood to go. It was sunset now, and the smooth stretches of the river had turned a pale orange. Time to go home and try to fall asleep.

“In search of kayaker gal, seen going upstream at Great Falls. Great ride, I love you, please respond.”

He would not send that in to the free papers, but only spoke it as a kind of prayer to the sunset. Down below the kayaker was turning to start upstream again.

It could be said that science is boring, or even that science wants to be boring, in that it wants to be beyond all dispute. It wants to understand the phenomena of the world in ways that everyone can agree on and share; it wants to make assertions from a position that is not any particular subject’s position, assertions that if tested for accuracy by any sentient being would cause that being to agree with the assertion. Complete agreement; the world put under a description—stated that way, it begins to sound interesting.

And indeed it is. Nothing human is boring. Nevertheless, the minute details of the everyday grind involved in any particular bit of scientific practice can be tedious even to the practitioners. A lot of it, as with most work in this world, involves wasted time, false leads, dead ends, faulty equipment, dubious techniques, bad data, and a huge amount of detail work. Only when it is written up in a paper does it tell a tale of things going right, step-by-step, in meticulous and replicable detail, like a proof in Euclid. That stage is a highly artificial result of a long process of grinding.

In the case of Leo and his lab, and the matter of the new targeted nonviral delivery system from Maryland, several hundred hours of human labor and many more of computer time were devoted to an attempted repetition of an experiment described in the crucial paper, “In Vivo Insertion of cDNA 1568rr into CBA/H, BALB/c, and C57BL/6 Mice.”

At the end of this process, Leo had confirmed the theory he had formulated the very moment he had read the paper describing the experiment.

“It’s a goddamned artifact.”

Marta and Brian sat there staring at the printouts. Marta had killed a couple hundred of the Jackson labs’ finest mice in the course of confirming this theory of Leo’s, and now she was looking more murderous than ever. You didn’t want to mess with Marta on the days when she had to sacrifice some mice, nor even talk to her.

Brian sighed.

Leo said, “It only works if you pump the mice full of the stuff til they just about explode. I mean look at them. They look like hamsters. Or guinea pigs. Their little eyes are about to pop out of their heads.”

“No wonder,” Brian said. “There’s only two milliliters of blood in a mouse, and we’re injecting them with one.”

Leo shook his head. “How the hell did they get away with that?”

“The CBAs are kind of round and furry.”

“What are you saying, they’re bred to hide artifacts?”

“No.”

“It’s an artifact!”

“Well, it’s useless, anyway.”

An artifact was what they called an experimental result that was specific to the methodology of the experiment, but not illustrating anything beyond that. A kind of accident or false result, and in a few celebrated cases, part of a deliberate hoax.

So Brian was trying to be careful using the word. It was possible that it was no worse than a real result that happened to be generated in a way that made it useless for their particular purposes. Trying to turn things that people have learned about biological processes into medicines led to that sort of result. It happened all the time, and all those experimental results were not necessarily artifacts. They just weren’t useful facts.

Not yet, anyway. That’s why there were so many experiments, and so many stages to the human trials that had to be so carefully conducted; so many double blind studies, held with as many patients as possible, to get good statistical data. Hundreds of Swedish nurses, all with the same habits, studied for half a century—but these kinds of powerful long-term studies were very rarely possible. Never, when the substances being tested were brand-new—literally, in the sense that they were still under patent and had brand names different from their scientific appellations.

So all the little baby biotechs, and all the start-up pharmaceuticals, paid for the best stage-one studies they could afford. They scoured the literature, and ran experiments on computers and lab samples, and then on mice or other lab animals, hunting for data that could be put through a reliable analysis that would tell them something about how a potential new medicine worked in people. Then the human trials.

It was usually a matter of two to ten years of work, costing anywhere up to five hundred million dollars, though naturally cheaper was better. Longer and more expensive than that, and the new drug or method would almost certainly be abandoned; the money would run out, and the scientists involved would by necessity move on to something else.

In this case, however, where Leo was dealing with a method that Derek Gaspar had bought for fifty-one million dollars, there could be no stage-one human trials. They would be impossible. “No one’s gonna let themselves be blown up like a balloon! Blown up like a goddamn bike tire! Your kidneys would get swamped or some kind of edema would kill you.”

“We’re going to have to tell Derek the bad news.”

“Derek is not going to like it.”

“Not going to like it! Fifty-one million dollars? He’s going to hate it!”

“Think about blowing that much money. What an idiot he is.”

“Is it worse to have a scientist who is a bad businessman as your CEO, or a businessman who is a bad scientist?”

“What about when they’re both?”

They sat around the bench looking at the mice cages and the rolls of data sheets. A Dilbert cartoon mocked them as it peeled away from the end of the counter. It was a sign of something deep that this lab had Dilberts taped to the walls rather than Far Sides.

“An in-person meeting for this particular communication is contraindicated,” said Brian.

“No shit,” Leo said.

Marta snorted. “You can’t get a meeting with him anyway.”

“Ha ha.” But Leo was far enough out on the periphery of Torrey Pines Generique’s power structure that getting a meeting with Derek was indeed difficult.

“It’s true,” Marta insisted. “You might as well be trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment.”

“Which is stupid,” Brian pointed out. “The company is totally dependent on what happens in this lab.”

“Not totally,” Leo said.

“Yes it is! But that’s not what the business schools teach these guys. The lab is just another place of production. Management tells production what to produce, and the place of production produces it. Input from the agency of production would be wrong.”

“Like the assembly line choosing what to make,” Marta said.

“Right. Thus the idiocy of business management theory in our time.”

“I’ll send him an e-mail,” Leo decided.

So Leo sent Derek an e-mail concerning what Brian and Marta persisted in calling the exploding mice problem. Derek (according to reports they heard later) swelled up like one of their experimental subjects. It appeared he had been IVed with two quarts of genetically engineered righteous indignation.

“It’s in the literature!” he was reported to have shouted at Dr. Sam Houston, his vice president in charge of research and development. “It was in The Journal of Immunology, there were two papers that were peer-reviewed, they got a patent for it! I went out there to Maryland and checked it all out myself! It worked there, damn it. So make it work here.”

“‘Make it work’?” Marta said when she heard this story. “You see what I mean?”

“Well, you know,” Leo said grimly. “That’s the tech in biotech, right?”

“Hmmm,” Brian said, interested despite himself.

After all, the manipulations of gene and cell that they made were hardly ever done “just to find things out,” though they did that too. They were done to accomplish certain things inside the cell, and hopefully later, inside a living body. Biotechnology, bio techno logos; the word on how to put the tool into the living organism. Genetic engineering meant designing and building something new inside a body’s DNA, to effect something in the metabolism.

They had done the genetics; now it was time for the engineering.

So Leo and Brian and Marta, and the rest of Leo’s lab, and some people from labs elsewhere in the building, began to work on this problem. Sometimes at the end of a day, when the sun was breaking sideways through gaps in the clouds out to sea, shining weakly in the tinted windows and illuminating their faces as they sat around two desks covered by reprints and offprints, they would talk over the issues involved, and compare their most recent results, and try to make sense of the problem. Sometimes one of them would stand up and use the whiteboard to sketch out some diagram illustrating his or her conception of what was going on, down there forever below the level of their physical senses. The rest would comment, and drink coffee, and think it over.

For a while they considered assumptions the original experimenters had made:

“Maybe the flushing dose doesn’t have to be that high.”

“Maybe the solution could be stronger, they seem to have topped out kind of low.”

“But that’s because of what happens to the…”

“See, the group at UW found that out when they were working on…”

“Yeah that’s right. Shit.”

“The thing is, it does work, when you do everything they did. I mean the transference will happen in vitro, and in mice.”

“What about drawing blood, treating it and then putting it back in?”

“Or hepatocytes?”

“Uptake is in blood.”

“What we need is to package the inserts with a ligand that is really specific for the target cells. If we could find that specificity, out of all the possible proteins, without going through all the rigamarole of trial and error…”

“Too bad we don’t still have Pierzinski here. He could run the array of possibilities through his operation set.”

“Well, we could call him up and ask him to give it a try.”

“Sure, but who’s got time for that kind of thing?”

“He’s still working on a paper with Eleanor over on campus,” Marta said, meaning UCSD. “I’ll ask him when he comes down.”

Brian said, almost as if joking, “Maybe you could try to make the insertion in a limb, away from the organs. Tourniquet a lower leg or a forearm, blow it up with the full dose, wait for it to permeate the endothelial cells lining the veins and arteries in the limb, then release the tourniquet. They’d pee off the extra water, and still have a certain number of altered cells. It wouldn’t be any worse than chugging a few beers, would it?”

“Your hand would hurt.”

“Big fucking deal.”

“You might get phlebitis if it was your leg. Isn’t that how it happens?”

“Well use the hand then.”

“Interesting,” Leo said. “Heck, let’s try it at least. The other options look worse to me. Although we should probably try the mice on the various limits on volume and dosage in the original experiment, just to be sure.”

So the meeting petered out, and they wandered off to go home, or back to their desks and benches, thinking over plans for more experiments. Getting the mice, getting the time on the machines, sequencing genes, sequencing schedules; when you were doing science the hours flew by, and the days, and the weeks. This was the main feeling: there was never enough time to do it all. Was this different from other kinds of work? Papers almost written were rewritten, checked, rewritten again—finally sent off. Papers with their problems papered over. Lots of times the lab was like some old-fashioned newspaper office with a deadline approaching, all the starving journalists churning out the next day’s fishwrap. Except people would not wrap fish with these papers; they would save them, file them by category, test all their assertions, cite them—and report any errors to the authorities.

Leo’s THINGS TO DO list grew and shrank, grew and shrank, grew and then refused to shrink. He spent much less time than he wanted to at home in Leucadia with Roxanne. Roxanne understood, but it bothered him, even if it didn’t bother her.

He called the Jackson labs and ordered new and different strains of mice, each strain with its own number and bar code and genome. He got his lab’s machines scheduled, and assigned the techs to use them, moving some things to the front burner, others to the back, all to accommodate this project’s urgency.

On certain days, he went into the lab where the mouse cages were kept, and opened a cage door. He took out a mouse, small and white, wriggling and sniffing the way they did, checking things out with its whiskers. Quickly he shifted it so that he was holding it at the neck with the forefingers and thumbs of both hands. A quick hard twist and the neck broke. Very soon after that the mouse was dead.

This was not unusual. During this round of experiments, he and Brian and Marta and the rest of them tourniqueted and injected about three hundred mice, drew their blood, then killed and rendered and analyzed them. That was an aspect of the process they didn’t talk about, not even Brian. Marta in particular went black with disgust; it was worse than when she was premenstrual, as Brian joked (once). Her headphones stayed on her head all day long, the music turned up so loud that even the other people in the lab could hear it. Terrible, ultraprofane hip-hop rap whatever. If she can’t hear she can’t feel, Brian joked right next to her, Marta oblivious and trembling with rage, or something like it.

But it was no joke, even though the mice existed to be killed, even though they were killed mercifully, and usually only some few months before they would have died naturally. There was no real reason to have qualms, and yet still there was no joking about it. Maybe Brian would joke about Marta (if she couldn’t hear him), but he wouldn’t joke about that. In fact, he insisted on using the word “kill” rather than “sacrifice,” even in write-ups and papers, to keep it clear what they were doing. Usually they had to break their necks right behind the head; you couldn’t inject them to “put them to sleep,” because their tissue samples had to be clear of all contaminants. So it was a matter of breaking necks, as if they were tigers pouncing on prey. Marta was as blank as a mask as she did it, and very deftly too. If done properly it paralyzed them so that it was quick and painless—or at least quick. No feeling below the head, no breathing, immediate loss of mouse consciousness, one hoped. Leaving only the killers to think it over. The victims were dead, and their bodies had been donated to science for many generations on end. The lab had the pedigrees to prove it. The scientists involved went home and thought about other things, most of the time. Usually the mice deaths occurred in the mornings, so they could get to work on the samples. By the time the scientists got home the experience was somewhat forgotten, its effects muted. But people like Marta went home and dosed themselves with drugs on those days—she said she did—and played the most hostile music they could find, 110 decibels of forgetting. Or went out surfing. They didn’t talk about it to anyone, at least most of them didn’t—this was what made Marta so obvious, she would talk about it—but most of them didn’t, because it would sound both silly and vaguely shameful at the same time. If it bothered them so much, why did they keep doing it? Why did they stay in that line of business?

But—that line of business was doing science. It was doing biology, it was studying life, improving life, increasing life! And in most labs the mouse-killing was done only by the lowliest of techs, so that it was only a temporary bad job that one had to get through on the way to the good jobs.

Someone’s got to do it, they thought.

In the meantime, while they were working on this problem, their good results with the HDL “factory cells” had been plugged into the paper they had written about the process, and sent upstairs to Torrey Pines’ legal department, where it had gotten hung up. Repeated queries from Leo got the same e-mailed response: still reviewing—do not publish yet.

“They want to find out what they can patent in it,” Brian said.

“They won’t let us publish until we have a delivery method and a patent,” Marta predicted.

“But that may never happen!” Leo cried. “It’s good work, it’s interesting! It could help make a big breakthrough!”

“That’s what they don’t want,” Brian said.

“They don’t want a big breakthrough unless it’s our big breakthrough.”

“Shit.”

This had happened before, but Leo had never gotten used to it. Sitting on results, doing private science, secret science—it went against the grain. It wasn’t science as he understood it, which was a matter of finding out things and publishing them for all to see and test, critique, put to use.

But it was getting to be standard operating procedure. Security in the building remained intense; even e-mails out had to be checked for approval, not to mention laptops, briefcases, and boxes leaving the building. “You have to check in your brain when you leave,” as Brian put it.

“Fine by me,” Marta said.

“I just want to publish,” Leo insisted grimly.

“You’d better find a targeted delivery method if you want to publish that particular paper, Leo.”

So they continued to work on the Urtech method. The new experiments slowly yielded their results. The volumes and dosages had sharp parameters on all sides. The “tourniquet injection” method did not actually insert very many copy DNAs into the subject animals’ endothelial cells, and a lot of what was inserted was damaged by the process, and later flushed out of the body.

In short, the Maryland method was still an artifact.

By now, however, enough time had passed that Derek could pretend that the whole thing had never happened. It was a new financial quarter; there were other fish to fry, and for now the pretense could be plausibly maintained that it was a work in progress rather than a total bust. It wasn’t as if anyone else had solved the targeted nonviral delivery problem, after all. It was a hard problem. Or so Derek could say, in all truth, and did so whenever anyone was inconsiderate enough to bring the matter up. Whiners on the company’s website chat room could be ignored as always.

Analysts on Wall Street, however, and in the big pharmaceuticals, and in relevant venture capital firms, could not be ignored. And while they weren’t saying anything directly, investment money started to go elsewhere. Torrey Pines’ stock fell, and because it was falling it fell some more, and then more again. Biotechs were fluky, and so far Torrey Pines had not generated any potential cash cows. They remained a start-up. Fifty-one million dollars was being swept under the rug, but the big lump in the rug gave it away to anyone who remembered what it was.

No. Torrey Pines Generique was in trouble.

In Leo’s lab they had done what they could. Their job had been to get certain cell lines to become unnaturally prolific protein factories, and they had done that. Delivery wasn’t their part of the deal, and they weren’t physiologists, and now they didn’t have the wherewithal to do that part of the job. Torrey Pines needed a whole different wing for that, a whole different field of science. It was not an expertise that could be bought for fifty-one million dollars. Or maybe it could have been, but Derek had bought defective expertise. And because of that, a multibillion-dollar cash-cow method was stalled right on the brink; and the whole company might go under.

Nothing Leo could do about it. He couldn’t even publish his results.

The Quiblers’ small house was located at the end of a street of similar houses. All of them stood blankly, blinds drawn, no clues given as to who lived inside. They could have been empty for all an outsider could tell: no cars in the driveways, no kids in the yards, no yard or porch activity of any kind. They could have been walled compounds in Saudi Arabia, hiding their life from the desert outside.

Walking these streets with Joe on his back, Charlie assumed as he always did that these houses were mostly owned by people who worked in the District, people who were always either working or on vacation. Their homes were places to sleep. Charlie had been that way himself before the boys had arrived. That was how people lived in Bethesda, west of Wisconsin Avenue—west all the way to the Pacific, Charlie didn’t know. But he didn’t think so; he tended to put it on Bethesda specifically.

So he walked to the grocery store shaking his head as he always did. “It’s like a ghost town, Joe, it’s like some Twilight Zone episode in which we’re the only two people left on Earth.”

Then they rounded the corner, and all thought of ghost towns was rendered ridiculous. Shopping center. They walked through the automatic glass doors into a giant Giant grocery store. Joe, excited by the place as always, stood up in his baby backpack, his knees on Charlie’s shoulders, and whacked Charlie on the ears as if he were directing an elephant. Charlie reached up, lifted him around and stuffed him into the baby seat of the grocery cart, strapped him down with the cart’s little red seat belt. A very useful feature, that.

Okay. Buddhists coming to dinner, Asians from the mouth of the Ganges. He had no idea what to cook. He assumed they were vegetarians. It was not unusual for Anna to invite people from NSF over to dinner and then be somewhat at a loss in the matter of the meal itself. But Charlie liked that. He enjoyed cooking, though he was not good at it, and had gotten worse in the years since the boys had arrived. Time had grown short, and he and Anna had both cooked and recooked their repertoire of recipes until they were sick of them, and yet hadn’t learned anything new. So now they often did takeout, or ate as plainly as Nick; or Charlie tried something new and botched it. Dinner guests were a chance to do that again.

Now he decided to resuscitate an old recipe from their student years, pasta with an olive and basil sauce that a friend had first cooked for them in Italy. He wandered the familiar aisles of the store, looking for the ingredients. He should have made a list. On a typical trip he would go home having forgotten something crucial, and today he wanted to avoid that, but he was also thinking of other things, and making comments aloud from time to time. Joe’s presence disguised his tendency to talk to himself in public spaces. “Okay, whole peeled tomatoes, pitted kalamatas, olive oil extra virgin first cold press—it’s the first press that really matters,” slipping into their friend’s Italian accent, “now vat I am forgetting, hm, hm, oh, ze pasta! But you must never keel ze pasta, my God! Oh and bread. And wine, but not more than we can carry home, huh Joe.”

Groceries tucked into the backpack pocket under Joe’s butt, and slung in plastic bags from both hands, Charlie walked Joe back along the empty street to their house, singing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” one of Joe’s favorites. Then they were up the steps and home.

Their street dead-ended in a little triangle of trees next to Woodson Ave, a feeder road that poured its load of cars onto Wisconsin south. It was a nice location, within sight of Wisconsin and yet peaceful. An old four-story apartment block wrapped around their backyard like a huge brick sound barrier, its stacked windows like a hundred live webcasts streaming all at once, daily lives that were much too partial and mundane to be interesting. No Rear Window here, and thank God for that. The wall of apartments was like a dull screensaver, and might as well have been trees, though trees would have been nicer. The world outside was irrelevant. Each nuclear family in its domicile is inside its own pocket universe, and for the time it is together it exists inside a kind of event horizon: no one sees it and it sees no one. Millions of pocket universes, scattered across the surface of the planet like the dots of light in nighttime satellite photos.

On this night, however, the bubble containing the Quiblers was breached. Visitors from afar, aliens! When the doorbell rang they almost didn’t recognize the sound.

Anna was occupied with Joe and a diaper upstairs, so Charlie left the kitchen and hurried through the house to answer the door. Four men in off-white cotton pants and shirts stood on the stoop, like visitors from Calcutta; only their vests were the maroon color Charlie associated with Tibetan monks. Joe had run to the top of the stairs, and he grabbed a banister to keep his balance, agog at the sight of them. In the living room Nick was struck shy, his nose quickly back into his book, but he was glancing over the top of it frequently as the strangers were ushered in and made comfortable around him. Charlie offered them drinks, and they accepted beers, and when he came back with those, Anna and Joe were downstairs and had joined the fun. Two of their visitors sat on the living room floor, laughing off Anna’s offer of the little couches, and they all put their beer bottles on the coffee table.

The oldest monk and the youngest one leaned back against the radiator, down at Joe’s level, and soon they were engaged with his vast collection of blocks—a heaping mound of plain or painted cubes, rhomboids, cylinders and other polygons, which they quickly assembled into walls and towers, working with and around Joe’s Godzilla-like interventions.

The young one, Drepung, answered Anna’s questions directly, and also translated for the oldest one, named Rudra Cakrin. Rudra was the official ambassador of Khembalung, but while he was without English, apparently, his two middle-aged associates, Sucandra and Padma Sambhava, spoke it pretty well—not as well as Drepung, but adequately.

These two followed Charlie back out into the kitchen and stood there, beer bottles in hand, talking to him as he cooked. They stirred the unkilled pasta to keep the pot from boiling over, checked out the spices in the spice rack, and stuck their noses deep into the saucepot, sniffing with great interest and appreciation. Charlie found them surprisingly easy to talk to. They were about his age. Both had been born in Tibet, and both had spent years, they did not say how many, imprisoned by the Chinese, like so many other Tibetan Buddhist monks. They had met in prison, and after their release they had crossed the Himalayas and escaped Tibet together, afterward making their way gradually to Khembalung.

“Amazing,” Charlie kept saying to their stories. He could not help but compare these to his own relatively straightforward and serene passage through the years. “And now, after all that, you’re getting flooded?”

“Many times,” they said in unison. Padma, still sniffing Charlie’s sauce as if it were the perfect ambrosia, elaborated. “Used to happen only every eighteen years or about, moon tides, you know. We could plan it happening, and be prepared. But now, whenever the monsoon hits hard.”

“Also every month at moon tide,” Sucandra added. “Certainly three, four times a year. No one can live that way for long. If it gets worse, then the island will no longer be habitable. So we came here.”

Charlie shook his head, tried to joke: “This place may be lower in elevation than your island.”

They laughed politely. Not the funniest joke. Charlie said, “Listen, speaking of elevation, have you talked to the other low-lying countries?”

Padma said, “Oh yes, we are part of the League of Drowning Nations, of course. Charter member.”

“Headquarters in The Hague, near the World Court.”

“Very appropriate,” Charlie said. “And now you are establishing an embassy here…”

“To argue our case, yes.”

Sucandra said, “We must speak to the hyperpower.”

The two men smiled cheerily.

“Well. That’s very interesting.” Charlie tested the pasta to see if it was ready. “I’ve been working on climate issues myself, for Senator Chase. I’ll have to get you in there to talk to him. And you need to hire a good firm of lobbyists too.”

“Yes?” They regarded him with interest. Padma said, “You think it best?”

“Yes. Definitely. You’re here to lobby the U.S. government, that’s what it comes down to. And there are pros in town to help foreign governments do that. I used to do it myself, and I’ve still got a good friend working for one of the better firms. I’ll put you in touch with him and you can see what he tells you.”

Charlie slipped on potholders and lifted the pasta pot over to the sink, tipped it into the colander until it was overflowing. Always a problem with their little colander, which he never thought to replace except at moments like this. “I think my friend’s firm already represents the Dutch on these issues—oops—so it’s a perfect match. They’ll be knowledgeable about your suite of problems, you’ll fit right in there.”

“Do they lobby for Tibet?”

“That I don’t know. Separate issues, I should think. But they have a lot of client countries. You’ll see how they fit your needs when you talk to them.”

They nodded. “Thank you for that. We will enjoy that.”

They took the food into the little dining room, which was a kind of corner in the passageway between kitchen and living room, and with a great deal of to-and-froing, all of them just managed to fit around the dining room table. Joe consented to a booster seat to get his head up to the level of the table, where he shoveled baby food industriously into his mouth or onto the floor as the case might be, narrating the process all the while in his own tongue. Sucandra and Rudra Cakrin had seated themselves on either side of him, and they watched his performance with pleasure. Both attended to him as if they thought he was speaking a real language. They ate in a style that was not that dissimilar to his, Charlie thought—absorbed, happy, shoveling it in. The sauce was a hit with everyone but Nick, who ate his pasta plain. Joe tossed a roll across the table at Nick, who batted it aside expertly, and all the Khembalis laughed.

Charlie got up and followed Anna out to the kitchen when she went to get the salad. He said to her under his breath, “I bet the old man speaks English too.”

“What?”

“It’s like in that Ang Lee movie, remember? The old man pretends not to understand English, but really he does? It’s like that I bet.”

Anna shook her head. “Why would he do that? It’s a hassle, all that translating. It doesn’t give him any advantage.”

“You don’t know that! Watch his eyes, see how he’s getting it all.”

“He’s just paying attention. Don’t be silly.”

“You’ll see.” Charlie leaned into her conspiratorially: “Maybe he learned English in an earlier incarnation. Just be aware of that when you’re talking around him.”

“Quit it,” she said, laughing her low laugh. “You be aware. You learn to pay attention like that.”

“Oh and then you’ll believe I understand English?”

“That’s right yeah.”

They returned to the dining room, laughing, and found Joe holding forth in a language anyone could understand, a language of imperious gesture and commanding eye, and the assumption of authority in the world. Which worked like a charm over them all, even though he was babbling.

After salad, and seconds on the pasta, they returned to the living room and settled around the coffee table again. Anna brought out tea and cookies. “We’ll have to have Tibetan tea next time,” she said.

The Khembalis nodded uncertainly.

“An acquired taste,” Drepung suggested. “Not actually tea as you know it.”

“Bitter,” Padma said appreciatively.

“You can use as blood coagulant,” Sucandra said.

Drepung added, “Also we add yak butter to it, aged until a bit rancid.”

“The butter has to be rancid?” Charlie said.

“Traditional.”

“Think fermentation,” Sucandra explained.

“Well, let’s have that for sure. Nick will love it.”

A scrunch-faced pretend-scowl from Nick: Yeah right Dad.

Rudra Cakrin sat again with Joe on the floor. He stacked blocks into elaborate towers. Whenever they began to sway, Joe leaned in and chopped them to the floor. Tumbling clack of colored wood, instant catastrophe: the two of them cast their heads back and laughed in exactly the same way. Kindred souls.

The others watched. From the couch Drepung observed the old man, smiling fondly, although Charlie thought he also saw traces of the look that Anna had tried to describe to him when explaining why she had invited them to lunch in the first place: a kind of concern that came perhaps from an intensity of love. Charlie knew that feeling. It had been a good idea to invite them over. He had groaned when Anna told him about it, life was simply Too Busy for more to be added. Or so it had seemed; though at the same time he was somewhat starved for adult company. Now he was enjoying himself, watching Rudra Cakrin and Joe play on the floor as if there were no tomorrow.

Anna was deep in conversation with Sucandra. Charlie heard Sucandra say to her, “We give patients quantities, very small, keep records, of course, and judge results. There is a personal element to all medicine, as you know. People talking about how they feel. You can average numbers, I know you do that, but the subjective feeling remains.”

Anna nodded, but Charlie knew she thought this aspect of medicine was unscientific, and it annoyed her as such. She kept to the quantitative as much as she could in her work, as far as he could tell, precisely to avoid this kind of subjective residual in the facts.

Now she said, “But you do support attempts to make objective studies of such matters?”

“Of course,” Sucandra replied. “Buddhist science is much like Western science in that regard.”

Anna nodded, brow furrowed like a hawk. Her definition of science was extremely narrow. “Reproducible studies?”

“Yes, that is Buddhism precisely.”

Now Anna’s eyebrows met in a deep vertical furrow that split the horizontal ones higher on her brow. “I thought Buddhism was a kind of feeling, you know—meditation, compassion?”

“This is to speak of the goal. What the investigation is for. Same for you, yes? Why do you pursue the sciences?”

“Well—to understand things better, I guess.”

This was not the kind of thing Anna thought about. It was like asking her why she breathed.

“And why?” Sucandra persisted, watching her.

“Well—just because.”

“A matter of curiosity.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“But what if curiosity is a luxury?”

“How so?”

“In that first you must have a full belly. Good health, a certain amount of leisure time, a certain amount of serenity. Absence of pain. Only then can one be curious.”

Anna nodded, thinking it over.

Sucandra saw this and continued. “So, if curiosity is a value—a quality to be treasured—a form of contemplation, or prayer—then you must reduce suffering to reach that state. So, in Buddhism, understanding works to reduce suffering, and by reduction of suffering gains more knowledge. Just like science.”

Anna frowned. Charlie watched her, fascinated. This was a basic part of her self, this stuff, but largely unconsidered. Self-definition by function. She was a scientist. And science was science, unlike anything else.

Rudra Cakrin leaned forward to say something to Sucandra, who listened to him, then asked him a question in Tibetan. Rudra answered, gesturing at Anna.

Charlie shot a quick look at her—see, he was following things! Evidence!

Rudra Cakrin insisted on something to Sucandra, who then said to Anna, “Rudra wants to say, ‘What do you believe in?’”

“Me?”

“Yes. ‘What do you believe in?’ he says.”

“I don’t know,” she said, surprised. “I believe in the double blind study.”

Charlie laughed, he couldn’t help it. Anna blushed and beat on his arm, crying “Stop it! It’s true.”

“I know it is,” Charlie said, laughing harder, until she started laughing too, along with everyone else, the Khembalis looking delighted—everyone so amused that Joe got mad and stomped his foot to make them stop. But this only made them laugh more. In the end they had to stop so he would not throw a fit.

Rudra Cakrin restored his mood by diving back into the blocks. Soon he and Joe sat half-buried in them, absorbed in their play. Stack them up, knock them down. They certainly spoke the same language.

The others watched them, sipping tea and offering particular blocks to them at certain moments in the construction process. Sucandra and Padma and Anna and Charlie and Nick sat on the couches, talking about Khembalung and Washington D.C. and how much they were alike.

Then one tower of cubes and beams stood longer than the others had. Rudra Cakrin had constructed it with care, and the repetition of basic colors was pretty: blue, red, yellow, green, blue, yellow, red, green, blue, red, green, red. It was tall enough that ordinarily Joe would have already knocked it over, but he seemed to like this one. He stared at it, mouth hanging open in a less-than-brilliant expression. Rudra Cakrin looked over at Sucandra, said something. Sucandra replied quickly, sounding displeased, which surprised Charlie. Drepung and Padma were suddenly paying attention. Rudra Cakrin picked out a yellow cube, showed it to Sucandra and said something more. He put it on the top of the tower.

“Oooh,” Joe said. He tilted his head to one side, then the other, observing it.

“He likes that one,” Charlie noted.

At first no one answered. Then Drepung said, “It’s an old Tibetan pattern. You see it in mandalas.” He looked to Sucandra, who said something sharp in Tibetan. Rudra Cakrin replied easily, shifted so that his knee knocked a long blue cylinder into the tower, collapsing it. Joe shuddered as if startled by a noise on the street.

“Ah ga,” he declared.

The Tibetans resumed the conversation. Nick was now explaining to Padma the distinction between whales and dolphins. Sucandra went out and helped Charlie a bit with the cleanup in the kitchen; finally Charlie shooed him out, feeling embarrassed that their pots were going to end up substantially cleaner after this visit than they had been before; Sucandra had been expertly scrubbing their bottoms with a wire pad found under the sink.

Around nine-thirty they took their leave. Anna offered to call a cab, but they said the Metro was fine. They did not need guidance back to the station: “Very easy. Interesting too. There are many fine carpets in the windows of this part of town.”

Charlie was about to explain that this was the work of Iranians who had come to Washington after the fall of the Shah, but then he thought better of it. Not a happy precedent: the Iranians had never left.

Instead he said to Sucandra, “I’ll give my friend Sridar a call and ask him to meet with you. He’ll be very helpful, even if you don’t end up hiring his firm.”

“I’m sure. Many thanks.” And they were off into the balmy night.