Green Earth

A few days after Frank dropped by, Leo turned on his computer when he came in to the lab and saw there was an e-mail from Derek. He opened and read it, then the attachment that had come with it. When he was done he forwarded it to Brian and Marta. When Marta came in about an hour later she had already done some work on it.

“Hey Brian,” she called from Leo’s door, “come check this out. Derek has sent us a new paper from that Yann Pierzinski who was here. He was funny. It’s a new version of the stuff he was working on when he was here. It was interesting.”

Brian had come in while she was telling him this, and she pointed to parts of the diagram on Leo’s screen as he caught up. “See what I mean?”

“Well, yeah. It would be great. If it worked … Maybe crunch them through this program over and over, until you see repeats, if you did … then test the ones with the ligands that fit best, and look strongest chemically.”

“And Pierzinski is back to work on it with us!”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, he’s coming back. Derek says we’ll have him at our disposal.”

“Cool.”

Leo checked this in the company’s directory. “Yep, here he is. Rehired just this week. Frank Vanderwal came by and mentioned this guy, he must have told Derek about it too. Well, Vanderwal should know, this is his field.”

“It’s my field too,” Marta said sharply.

“Right, of course, I’m just saying Frank might have, you know. Well, let’s ask Yann to look at what we’ve got. If it works …”

Brian said, “Sure. It’s worth trying anyway. Pretty interesting.” He googled Yann, and Leo leaned over his shoulder to look at the list.

“Derek obviously wants us to talk to him right away.”

“He must have rehired him for us.”

“I see that. So let’s get him before he gets busy with something else. A lot of labs could use another biomathematician.”

“True, but there aren’t a lot of labs. I think we’ll get him. Look, what do you think Derek means here, ‘write up the possibilities right away’?”

“I suppose he wants to get started on using the idea to try to secure more funding.”

“Shit. Yeah, that’s probably right. Unbelievable. Okay, let’s pass on that for now, damn it, and give Yann a call.”

Their talk with Yann Pierzinski was indeed interesting. He breezed into the lab just a few days later, as friendly as ever, and happy to be back at Torrey Pines with a permanent job. He was going to be based in George’s math group, he told them, but had already been told by Derek to expect to work a lot with Leo’s lab; so he arrived curious, and ready to go.

Leo enjoyed seeing him again. Yann still had a tendency to become a speed-talker when excited, and he still canted his head to the side when thinking. His algorithm sets were works in progress, he said, and underdeveloped precisely in the gene grammars that Leo and Marta and Brian needed from him; but that was okay, Leo thought, because they could help him, and he was there to help them. They could collaborate, and Yann was a powerful thinker. Leo felt secure in his own lab abilities, devising and running experiments, but when it came to the curious mix of math, symbolic logic, and computer programming that biomathematicians dove into, he was way out of his depth. So Leo was happy to watch Yann sit down and plug his laptop into their desktop.

In the days that followed, they tried his algorithms on the genes of their “HDL factory” cells, Yann substituting different procedures in the last steps of his operations, then checking what they got in the computer simulations, and selecting some for their dish trials. Pretty soon they found one version of the operation that was consistently good at predicting proteins that matched well with their target cells—making keys for their locks, in effect. “That’s what I’ve been hunting for the past year at least!” Yann said happily after one such success.

As they worked, Pierzinski told them some of how he had gotten to that point in his work, following aspects of his advisor’s work at Caltech and the like. Marta and Brian asked him where he had hoped to take it all, in terms of applications. Yann shrugged; not much of anywhere, he told them.

“But Yann, don’t you see what the applications of this could be?”

“I guess. I’m not really interested in pharmacology.”

Leo and Brian and Marta stood there staring at him. Despite his earlier stint there, they didn’t know him very well. He seemed normal enough in most ways, aware of the outside world and so on. To an extent.

Leo said, “Look, let’s go get some lunch, let us take you out to lunch. I want to tell you more about what all this could help us with.”

The lobbying firm of Branson & Ananda occupied offices off Pennsylvania Avenue, near the intersection of Indiana and C Streets, overlooking the Marketplace. Charlie’s friend Sridar met them at the front door. First he took them in to meet old Branson himself, then led them into a meeting room dominated by a long table. Sridar got the Khembalis seated, then offered them coffee or tea; they all took tea. Charlie stood near the door, bobbing mildly about to keep Joe asleep on his back, ready to make a quick escape if he had to.

“So you’ve been a sovereign country since 1960?” Sridar was saying.

“The relationship with India is a little more … complicated than that. We have had sovereignty in the sense you suggest since about 1993.” Drepung rehearsed the history of Khembalung, while Sridar took notes.

“So—fifteen feet above sea level at high tide,” Sridar said at the end of this recital. “Listen, one thing I have to say at the start—we are not going to be able to promise you anything much in the way of results on the global warming side of things. That’s been given up on by Congress—” He glanced at Charlie: “Sorry, Charlie. Maybe not so much given up on, as swept under the rug.”

Charlie glowered despite himself. “Not by Senator Chase or anyone else who’s really paying attention. And we’ve got a big bill coming up—”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Sridar said, holding up a hand to stop him before he went into rant mode. “You’re doing what you can. But quite a few members of Congress think of it as being too late to do anything.”

“Better late than never!” Charlie insisted, almost waking Joe.

“We understand,” Drepung said to Sridar, after a glance at Rudra. “We won’t have any unrealistic expectations of you. We only hope to engage help that is experienced in the procedures used. We ourselves will be responsible for the content of our appeals to the reluctant bodies.”

Sridar kept his face blank, but Charlie knew what he was thinking. Sridar said, “We do our best to give our clients all the benefits of our expertise. I’m just reminding you that we are not miracle workers.”

“The miracles will be our department,” Drepung said.

Charlie thought, these two jokers might get along fine.

Slowly they worked out what they would expect from each other, and Sridar wrote down the details of an agreement. The Khembalis were happy to have him write up what in essence was their request for proposal. Sridar remarked, “A clever way to make me write you a fair deal.”

Later that day Sridar gave Charlie a call. Charlie was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle, feeding Joe a bottle and watching two of the local chess hustlers practice on each other. They played too fast for Charlie to follow the game.

“Look, Charlie, this is a bit ingrown, since you put me in touch with these guys, but really it’s your man that the lamas ought to be meeting. The Foreign Relations Committee is one of the main ones we’ll work on, so it all begins with Chase. Can you set us up with a good chunk of the senator’s quality time?”

“I can with some lead time,” Charlie said, glancing at Phil’s master calendar on his wrist screen. “How about next Thursday?”

“Perfect.”

Here in the latter part of his third term, Senator Phil Chase had fully settled into Washington, and his seniority was such that he had become very powerful, and very busy. He had every hour from 6 A.M. to midnight scheduled in twenty-minute units. It was hard to understand how he could keep his easy demeanor and relaxed ways. It was partly that he did not sweat the details. He was a delegating senator, a hands-off senator, as many of the best of them were. Some senators tried to learn everything, and burned out; others knew almost nothing, and were in effect living campaign posters. Phil was somewhere in the middle. He used his staff well—as an exterior memory bank, as advice, as policy makers, even occasionally as a source of accumulated wisdom.

His longevity in office, and the strict code of succession that both parties obeyed, had landed him the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a seat on Environment and Public Works. These were A-list committees, and the stakes were high. The Democrats had come out of the recent election with a one-vote advantage in the Senate, a two-vote disadvantage in the House, and the President was still a Republican. This was in the ongoing American tradition of electing as close to a perfect gridlock of power in Washington as possible, presumably in the hope that nothing further would happen and history would freeze forever. An impossible quest, like building a card house in a gale, but it made for tight politics and good theater.

In any case, Phil was now very busy, and heading toward reelection himself. His old chief of staff Wade Norton was on the road now, and though Phil valued Wade and kept him on staff as a telecommuting advisor, Roy and Andrea had taken over executive staff duties. Charlie did their environmental research, though he too was a part-timer, and mostly telecommuting.

When he did make it in, he found operations had a chaotic edge which he had long ago concluded was mostly engendered by Phil himself. Phil would seize the minutes he had between appointments and wander from room to room, looking to needle people. “We’re surfing the big picture today!” he would exclaim, then start arguments for the hell of it. His staff loved it. Congressional staffers were by definition policy wonks; many had joined their high school debate clubs of their own free will, so talking shop with Phil was right up their alley. And his enthusiasm was infectious, his grin like a double shot of espresso. He had one of those smiles that invariably looked as if he was genuinely delighted. If it was directed at you, you felt a glow inside. In fact Charlie was convinced that it was Phil’s smile that had gotten him elected the first time, and maybe every time. What made it so beautiful was that it wasn’t faked. He didn’t smile if he didn’t feel like it. But he often felt like it. That was very revealing, and so Phil had his effect.

With Wade gone, Charlie was now his chief advisor on climate. Actually Charlie and Wade functioned as a sort of tag-team telecommuting advisor, both of them part-time, Charlie calling in every day, dropping by every week; Wade calling in every week, and dropping by every month. It worked because Phil didn’t always need them for help when environmental issues came up. “You guys have educated me,” he would tell them. “I can take this on my own. So don’t worry, stay at the South Pole, stay in Bethesda. I’ll let you know how it went.”

That would have been fine with Charlie, if only Phil had always done what Charlie and Wade advised. But Phil had pressures from many directions, and he had his own opinions. So there were divergences. Like most congresspeople, he thought he knew better than his staff how to get things done; and because he got to vote and they didn’t, in effect he was right.

On Thursday at 10 A.M., when the Khembalis had their twenty minutes with Phil, Charlie was very interested to see how it would go, but that morning he had to attend a Washington Press Club appearance by a scientist from the Heritage Foundation who was claiming rapidly rising temperatures would be good for agriculture. Assisting in the destruction of such people’s pseudoarguments was important work, which Charlie was happy to do; but on this day he wanted to be there when Phil saw the Khembalis, so when the press conference was over and Charlie’s quiver empty, he hustled back and arrived right at 10:20. He hurried up the stairs to Phil’s offices on the third floor. At 10:23 A.M., Phil ushered the Khembalis out of his corner office, chatting with them cheerfully. “Yes, thanks, of course, I’d love to—talk to Evelyn about setting up a time.”