Copyright

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the authors’ imaginations and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011

Copyright © 2011 by The John Michael Crichton Trust.

Cover design by Richard Augustus

Front Cover Image © Shutterstock Book Design by Lucy Albanese Illustrated Maps © 2011 by Rodica Prato

Michael Crichton and Richard Preston assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007350032

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007384358

Version: 2017-05-10

Dedication

Epigraph

MINUTE CREATURES swarm around us…objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a tree.

—E. O. WILSON

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Map of Oahu

Map of The Pali

The Seven Graduate Students

PART I: TENSOR

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

PART II: A BAND OF HUMANS

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

PART III: TANTALUS

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Read on for an extract from the gripping new novel from Michael Crichton:

Bibliography

About the Authors

Also by Michael Crichton

About the Publisher

Introduction

What Kind of World Do We Live In?

In 2008, the famous naturalist David Attenborough expressed concern that modern schoolchildren could not identify common plants and insects found in nature, although previous generations identified them without hesitation. Modern children, it seemed, were cut off from the experience of nature, and from play in the natural world. Many factors were held up to blame: urban living; loss of open space; computers and the Internet; heavy homework schedules. But the upshot was that children were no longer being exposed to nature and no longer acquiring a direct experience of nature. It was ironic that this should be happening at a time when there was in the West an ever greater concern for the environment, and ever more ambitious steps proposed to protect it.

Indoctrinating children in proper environmental thought was a hallmark of the green movement, and so children were being instructed to protect something about which they knew nothing at all. It did not escape notice that this was exactly the formula that had led to well-intentioned environmental degradation in the past—the deterioration of American national parks being a prime example, and the American policy of forest fire prevention, another. Such policies would never have been instituted if people really understood the environments they were trying to protect.

The problem was that they thought they did. One can argue that the new generation of schoolchildren will emerge even more certain. If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon—you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks.

Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and we cannot predict its behavior. It is delusional to behave as if we can, as it would be delusional to behave as if we could predict the stock market, another complex system. If someone claims to predict what a stock will do in the coming days, we know that person is either a crook or a charlatan. If an environmentalist makes similar claims about the environment, or an ecosystem, we have not yet learned to see him as a false prophet or a fool.

Human beings interact with complex systems very successfully. We do it all the time. But we do it by managing them, not by claiming to understand them. Managers interact with the system: they do something, watch for the response, and then do something else in an effort to get the result they want. There is an endless iterative interaction that acknowledges we don’t know for sure what the system will do—we have to wait and see. We may have a hunch we know what will happen. We may be right much of the time. But we are never certain.

Interacting with the natural world, we are denied certainty. And always will be.

How then can young people gain experience of the natural world? Ideally, by spending some time in a rain forest—those vast, uncomfortable, alarming, and beautiful environments that so quickly knock our preconceptions aside.

NOT FINISHED

MICHAEL CRICHTON

August 28, 2008

Map of Oahu

Map of the Pali

The Seven Graduate Students

Rick Hutter Ethnobotanist studying medicines used by indigenous peoples.

Karen King Arachnologist (expert in spiders, scorpions, and mites). Skilled in martial arts.

Peter Jansen Expert in venoms and envenomation.

Erika Moll Entomologist and coleopterist (beetle expert).

Amar Singh Botanist studying plant hormones.

Jenny Linn Biochemist studying pheromones, the signaling scents used by animals and plants.

Danny Minot Doctoral student writing a thesis on “scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation.”

Prologue

Nanigen

9 October, 11:55 p.m.

West of Pearl Harbor, he drove along the Farrington Highway past fields of sugar cane, dark green in the moonlight. This had long been an agricultural region of Oahu, but recently it had begun to change. Off to his left, he saw the flat steel rooftops of the new Kalikimaki Industrial Park, bright silver in the surrounding green. In truth, Marcos Rodriguez knew, this wasn’t much of an industrial park; most of the buildings were warehouses, inexpensive to rent. Then there was a marine supply store, a guy who made custom surfboards, a couple of machine shops, a metalworker. That was about it.

And, of course, the reason for his visit tonight: Nanigen MicroTechnologies, a new company from the mainland, now housed in a large building at the far end of the facility.

Rodriguez turned off the highway, drove down between silent buildings. It was almost midnight; the industrial park was deserted. He parked in front of Nanigen.

From the outside, the Nanigen building appeared like all the others: a single-story steel façade with a corrugated metal roof; in effect, nothing more than an enormous shed of crude, cheap construction. Rodriguez knew there was more to it than that. Before the company erected that building, they dug a pit deep into the lava rock, and had filled it with electronic equipment. Only then did they erect this unprepossessing façade, which was now covered in fine red dust from the nearby agricultural fields.

Rodriguez put on his rubber gloves, and slipped into his pocket his digital camera and infrared filter. Then he got out of his car. He wore a security guard uniform; he pulled his cap down over his face, in case there were cameras monitoring the street. He took out the key that he had taken from the Nanigen receptionist some weeks before, after her third Blue Hawaii had put her out cold; he had had it copied, then returned it to her before she woke up.

From her he had learned that Nanigen was forty thousand square feet of labs and high-tech facilities, where she said they did advanced work in robotics. What kind of advanced work, she wasn’t sure, except the robots were extremely small. “They do some kind of research on chemicals and plants,” she said vaguely.

“You need robots for that?”

“They do, yes.” She shrugged.

But she also told him the building itself had no security: no alarm system, no motion detectors, no guards, cameras, laser beams. “Then what do you use?” he asked her. “Dogs?”

The receptionist shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just a lock on the front door. They say they don’t need any security.”

At the time, Rodriguez suspected strongly that Nanigen was a scam or a tax dodge. No high-technology company would house itself in a dusty warehouse, far from downtown Honolulu and the university, from which all high-tech companies drew. If Nanigen was way out here, they must have something to hide.

The client thought so, too. That’s why Rodriguez had been hired in the first place. Truth be told, investigating high-tech corporations wasn’t his usual line of work. Mostly he got calls from lawyers, asking him to photograph visiting husbands on Waikiki cheating on their wives. And in this case, too, he had been hired by a local lawyer, Willy Fong. But Willy wasn’t the client, and he wouldn’t say who was.

Rodriguez had his suspicions. Nanigen had supposedly spent millions of dollars on electronics from Shanghai and Osaka. Some of those suppliers probably wanted to know what was being done with their products. “Is that who it is, Willy? The Chinese or the Japanese?”

Willy Fong shrugged. “You know I can’t say, Marcos.”

“But it makes no sense,” Rodriguez had said. “The place got no security, your clients can pick the lock and walk in any night and see for themselves. They don’t need me.”

“You talking yourself out of a job?”

“I just want to know what this is about.”

“They want you to go and find out what’s in that building, and bring them some pictures. That’s all.”

“I don’t like it. I think it’s a scam.”

“Probably is.”

Willy gave him a tired look as if to say, But what do you care? “At least nobody’s going to get up from the dinner table and hit you in the mouth.”

“True.”

Willy pushed back his chair, folded his arms over his ample belly. “So tell me, Marcos. Are you going, or what?”

Now, walking toward the front door at midnight, Rodriguez felt suddenly nervous. They don’t need any security. What the hell did that mean? In this day and age, everybody had security—lots of security—especially around Honolulu. You had no choice.

There were no windows on the building, just a single metal door. Next to it, a sign: NANIGEN MICROTECHNOLOGIES, INC. And beneath it, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

He put the key in the lock and turned it. The door clicked open.

Too easy, he thought, as he glanced back at the empty street, and slipped inside.

Night lights illuminated a glass-walled entry area, receptionist’s desk, and a waiting area with couches, magazines, and company literature. Rodriguez flicked on his flashlight, moved to the hallway beyond. At the end of the hallway were two doors; he went through the first, and came into a new hallway, with glass walls. There were laboratories on both sides, long black benches with lots of equipment, stacks of bottles on the shelves above. Every dozen yards there was a humming stainless refrigerator and something that looked like a washing machine.

Cluttered bulletin boards, Post-its on the refrigerator, whiteboards with scribbled formulas—the general appearance seemed messy, but Rodriguez had the overwhelming sense that this company was real; that Nanigen was actually doing scientific work here. What did they need robots for?

And then he saw the robots, but they were damned strange: boxy silver metal contraptions, with mechanical arms and treads and appendages; they looked like what they send to Mars. They were various sizes and shapes: some the size of a shoebox, and others much bigger. Then he noticed that beside each one was a smaller version of the same robot. And beside that was a still smaller version. Eventually they were the size of a thumbnail: tiny, highly detailed. The workbenches had huge magnifying glasses so the workers could see the robots. But he wondered how they could build anything so small.

Rodriguez came to the end of the hall, and saw a door with a small sign: TENSOR CORE. He pushed it open, feeling a cool breeze. The room beyond was large and dark. To the right, he noticed rows of backpacks, hanging on hooks on the wall, as if for a camping trip. Otherwise the room was bare. There was a loud AC hum, but no other sound. He noticed the floor was etched with deep grooves in a hexagonal shape. Or perhaps they were big hexagonal tiles; in this low light he couldn’t be sure.

But then…there was something beneath the floor, he realized. An enormous, complex array of hexagonal tubes and copper wires, dimly visible. The floor was plastic, and he could look through it to see the electronics that had been buried in the ground.

Rodriguez crouched down to look more closely, and as he peered at the hexagons below, he saw a drop of blood spatter on the floor. Then another drop. Rodriguez stared curiously, before he thought to put his hand to his forehead. He was bleeding, just above his right eyebrow.

“What the—?” He’d been cut, somehow. He hadn’t felt anything but there was blood on his gloved hand, and blood still dripping from his eyebrow. He stood. The blood was dripping onto his cheek, and chin, and onto the uniform. He put his hand to his forehead and hurried into the nearest lab, looking for a Kleenex or a cloth. He found a box of tissues, and stepped to a washbasin with a small mirror over it. He dabbed at his face. The bleeding had already begun to stop; the cut was small but razor-sharp; he didn’t see how it had happened but paper cuts could look like that.

He glanced at his watch. It was twelve twenty. Time to get back to work. In the next moment, he saw a red gash open across the back of his hand, from his wrist to his knuckles, the skin spreading and starting to bleed. Rodriguez yelled in shock. He grabbed more tissues, then a towel hanging from the sink.

He ripped a strip off, and wrapped it around his hand. Then he felt a pain in his leg, and looking down saw that his trousers had been sliced halfway up his thigh, and he was bleeding from there, too.

Rodriguez wasn’t thinking anymore. He turned and ran.

Staggering down the hallway, back toward the front door, dragging his injured leg, aware he was leaving enough evidence to identify him later, but he didn’t care, he just wanted to get away.

Shortly before one a.m., he pulled up alongside Fong’s office. The light on the second floor was still on; Rodriguez stumbled up the back stairs. He was weak from loss of blood, but he was all right. He came in through the back door, not knocking.

Fong was there with another man Rodriguez had never seen before. A Chinese man in his twenties, wearing a black suit, smoking a cigarette. Fong turned. “What the hell happened to you? You look horrible.” Fong got up, locked the door, came back. “You get in a fight?”

Rodriguez leaned heavily on the desk. He was still dripping blood. The Chinese guy in black stepped back a bit, said nothing. “No, I did not get into a fight.”

“Then what the hell happened?”

“I don’t know. It just happened.”

“What you talking?” Fong said angrily. “You talk stink, man. What just happened?”

The Chinese kid coughed. Rodriguez looked over and saw a red arc was sliced beneath his chin. Blood flowed down his white shirt. The kid looked shocked. He put his hand up to his throat, and the blood seeped between his fingers. He fell over backward.

“Holy crap,” Willy Fong said. He scurried forward, looking at the kid on the floor. The kid’s heels were drumming on the ground; he was in spasm. “Did you do that?”

“No,” Rodriguez said, “that’s what I’m telling you.”

“This is a fucking mess,” Fong said. “You have to bring this back to my office? Did you think about it? Because cleaning this up is—”

Blood sprayed up the left side of Fong’s face. The cut artery in his neck pumped in spurts. He threw his hand over the wound, but it spurted through his fingers.

“Holy crap,” he said, and sagged into his chair. He stared at Rodriguez. “How?”

“No damned idea,” Rodriguez said. He knew what was coming. He just had to wait. He barely felt the slice at the back of his neck, but the dizziness came quickly, and he fell over. He was lying on his side, in a sticky pool of his own blood, staring at Fong’s desk. Fong’s shoes under the desk. And he thought, Bastard never gave me my money. And then darkness closed around him.

The headlines read THREE DEAD IN BIZARRE SUICIDE PACT. It was splashed all over the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Sitting at his desk, Lieutenant Dan Watanabe tossed the paper aside. He looked up at his boss, Marty Kalama. “I’m getting calls,” Kalama said. Kalama had wire-framed spectacles and blinked a lot; he looked like a teacher, not a cop. But he was an akamai guy, knew what he was doing. Kalama said, “I hear there’s problems, Dan.”

“With suicide?” Watanabe nodded. “You bet, big problems. Makes no sense at all, if you ask me.”

“So where’d the papers get it?”

“Where they get everything,” Watanabe said. “They made it up.”

“Fill me in,” Kalama said.

Watanabe didn’t have to consult his notes. Days later, the scene remained vivid in his mind. “Willy Fong has an office on the second floor of one of those small buildings on Pu‘uhui Lane, off of Lillihi Street north of the freeway. Wooden building, kind of ratty, got four offices in it. Willy’s sixty, probably you knew him, defends DUIs for locals, small stuff, always been clean. Other people in the building complain of a smell coming from Willy’s offices, so we go up there and find three deceased males. ME says dead two to three days, can’t estimate closer than that. Air-conditioning was off, so the room got ripe. All three died of knife wounds. Willy got a cut carotid, bled out in his chair. Across the room is a young Chinese guy, no ID yet, he might be a national, throat cut both jugulars, bled out quick. Third vic is that Portugee with the camera, Rodriguez.”

“The one who photographs guys out cheating with their secretaries?”

“That’s him. Kept getting beat up. Anyway, he’s there too, and he’s got cuts all over his body—face, forehead, hand, legs, back of the neck. Never seen anything like it.”

“Test cuts?”

Watanabe shook his head. “No. Examiner says no, too. The injuries were done to him, and done over some period of time, maybe an hour. We got his blood on the back stairs, and his bloody footprints walking up. Blood in his car parked beside the building. So he was already bleeding when he walked in the door.”

“Then what do you think happened?”

“I got no idea,” Watanabe said. “If this is suicide, it’s three guys without notes, and nobody ever heard of that. Plus no knife, and we turned the place upside down looking, I can tell you. Plus it was locked from the inside, so nobody could have left. Windows were closed and locked, too. We dusted around the windows for prints anyway, just in case somebody entered by a window. No fresh prints around the windows, just a bunch of dirt.”

“Somebody flush a blade down the toilet?” Kalama asked.

“No,” Dan Watanabe answered. “There wasn’t any blood in the bathroom. Means nobody went in there after the cutting started. So we got three dead guys slashed to death in a locked room. No motive, no weapon, no nothing.”

“Now what?”

“That Portugee PI came from somewhere. He already got cut up somewhere else. I figure try to find out where that happened. Where it started.” Watanabe shrugged. “He had a gas receipt from Kelo’s Mobil in Kalepa. Filled the tank at ten p.m. We know how much gas he used, so we can get a radius of where he could drive from Kelo’s to his destination and then back to Willy’s.”

“Big radius. Must cover most of the island.”

“We’re chipping away. There’s fresh gravel in the tire treads. It’s crushed limestone. Good chance he went to a new construction site, something like that. Anyway, we’ll run it down. It may take us a while, but we’ll get that location.” Watanabe pushed the paper across the desk. “And in the meantime…I’d say the papers got it right. Triple suicide pact, and that’s the end of it. At least for now.”

Chapter 1

Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

18 October, 1:00 p.m.

In the second-floor biology lab, Peter Jansen, twenty-three, slowly lowered the metal tongs into the glass cage. Then, with a quick jab, he pinned the cobra just behind its hood. The snake hissed angrily as Jansen reached in, gripped it firmly behind the head, raised it to the milking beaker. He swabbed the beaker membrane with alcohol, pushed the fangs through, and watched as yellowish venom slid down the glass.

The yield was a disappointing few milliliters. Jansen really needed a half-dozen cobras in order to collect enough venom to study, but there was no room for more animals in the lab. There was a reptile facility over in Allston, but the animals there tended to get sick; Peter wanted his snakes nearby, where he could supervise their condition.

Venom was easily contaminated by bacteria; that was the reason for the alcohol swab and for the bed of ice the beaker sat on. Peter’s research concerned bioactivity of certain polypeptides in cobra venom; his work was part of a vast research interest that included snakes, frogs, and spiders, all of which made neuroactive toxins. His experience with snakes had made him an “envenomation specialist,” occasionally called by hospitals to advise on exotic bites. This caused a certain amount of envy among other graduate students in the lab; as a group, they were highly competitive and quick to notice if anyone got attention from the outside world. Their solution was to complain that it was too dangerous to keep a cobra in the lab, and that it really shouldn’t be there. They referred to Peter’s research as “working with nasty herps.”

None of this bothered Peter; his disposition was cheerful and even-handed. He came from an academic family, so he didn’t take this backbiting too seriously. His parents were no longer alive, killed in the crash of a light plane in the mountains of Northern California. His father had been a professor of geology at UC Davis, and his mother had taught on the medical faculty in San Francisco; his older brother was a physicist.

Peter had returned the cobra to the cage just as Rick Hutter came over. Hutter was twenty-four, an ethnobotanist. Lately he had been researching analgesics found in the bark of rain-forest trees. As usual, Rick was wearing faded jeans, a denim shirt, and heavy boots. He had a trimmed beard and a perpetual frown. “I notice you’re not wearing your gloves,” he said.

“No,” Peter said, “I’ve gotten pretty confident—”

“When I did my field work, you had to wear gloves,” he said. Rick Hutter never lost an opportunity to remind others in the lab that he had done actual field work. He made it sound as if he had spent years in the remote Amazon backwaters. In fact, he had spent four months doing research in a national park in Costa Rica. “One porter in our team didn’t wear gloves, and reached down to move a rock. Bam! Terciopelo sunk its fangs into him. Fer-de-lance, two meters long. They had to amputate his arm. He was lucky to survive at all.”

“Uh-huh,” Peter said, hoping Rick would get going. He liked Rick, but the guy had a tendency to lecture everybody.

The person in the lab who really disliked Rick Hutter was Karen King. Karen, a tall young woman with dark hair and angular shoulders, was studying spider venom and spiderwebs. She overheard Rick lecturing Peter on snakebite in the jungle, and couldn’t stand it. She had been working at a lab bench, and she snapped over her shoulder, “Rick—you stayed in a tourist lodge in Costa Rica. Remember?”

“Bullshit. We camped in the rain forest—”

“Two whole nights,” Karen interrupted him, “until the mosquitoes drove you back to the lodge.”

Rick glared at Karen. His face turned red, and he opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t. Because he couldn’t reply. It was true: the mosquitoes had been hellish. He’d been afraid the mosquitoes might give him malaria or dengue hemorrhagic fever, so he had gone back to the lodge.

Instead of arguing with Karen King, Rick turned to Peter: “Hey, by the way. I heard a rumor that your brother is coming today. Isn’t he the one who struck it rich with a startup company?”

“That’s what he tells me.”

“Well, money isn’t everything. Myself, I’d never work in the private sector. It’s an intellectual desert. The best minds stay in universities so they don’t have to prostitute themselves.”

Peter wasn’t about to argue with Rick, whose opinions on any subject were strongly held. But Erika Moll, the entomologist who’d recently arrived from Munich, said, “I think you are being rigid. I wouldn’t mind working for a private company at all.”

Hutter threw up his hands. “See? Prostituting.”

Erika had slept with several people in the biology department, and didn’t seem to care who knew. She gave him the finger and said, “Spin on it, Rick.”

“I see you’ve mastered American slang,” Rick said, “among other things.”

“The other things, you wouldn’t know,” she said. “And you won’t.” She turned to Peter. “Anyway, I see nothing wrong with a private job.”

“But what is this company, exactly?” said a soft voice. Peter turned and saw Amar Singh, the lab’s expert in plant hormones. Amar was known for his distinctly practical turn of mind. “I mean, what does the company do that makes it so valuable? And this is a biological company? But your brother is a physicist, isn’t he? How does that work?”

At that moment, Peter heard Jenny Linn across the lab say, “Wow, look at that!” She was staring out the window at the street below. They could hear the rumble of high-performance engines. Jenny said, “Peter, look—is that your brother?”

Everyone in the lab had gone to the windows.

Peter saw his brother on the street below, beaming like a kid, waving up at them. Eric was standing alongside a bright yellow Ferrari convertible, his arm around a beautiful blond woman. Behind them was a second Ferrari, gleaming black. Someone said, “Two Ferraris! That’s half a million dollars down there.” The rumble of the engines echoed off the scientific laboratories that lined Divinity Avenue.

A man stepped out of the black Ferrari. He had a trim build and expensive taste in clothes, though his look was decidedly casual.

“That’s Vin Drake,” Karen King said, staring out the window.

“How do you know?” Rick Hutter said to her, standing beside her.

“How do you not know?” Karen replied. “Vincent Drake is probably the most successful venture capitalist in Boston.”

“You ask me, it’s a disgrace,” Rick said. “Those cars should have been outlawed years ago.”

But nobody was listening to him. They were all heading for the stairs, hurrying down to the street. Rick said, “What is the big deal?”

“You didn’t hear?” Amar said, hurrying past Rick. “They’ve come here to recruit.”

“Recruit? Recruit who?”

“Anybody doing good work in the fields that we’re interested in,” Vin Drake said to the students clustered around him. “Microbiology, entomology, chemical ecology, ethnobotany, phytopathology—in other words, all research into the natural world at the micro- or nano-level. That’s what we’re after, and we’re hiring now. You don’t need a PhD. We don’t care about that; if you’re talented you can do your thesis for us. But you will have to move to Hawaii, because that’s where the labs are.”

Standing to one side, Peter embraced his brother, Eric, then said, “Is that true? You’re already hiring?”

The blond woman answered. “Yes, it’s true.” She stuck out her hand and introduced herself as Alyson Bender, the CFO of the company. Alyson Bender had a cool handshake with a crisp manner, Peter thought. She wore a fawn-colored business suit with a string of natural pearls at her neck. “We need at least a hundred first-rate researchers by the end of the year,” she said. “They’re not easy to find, even though we offer what is probably the best research environment in the history of science.”

“Oh? How is that?” Peter said. It was a pretty big claim.

“It’s true,” his brother said. “Vin will explain.”

Peter turned to his brother’s car. “Do you mind…” He couldn’t help himself. “Could I get in? Just for a minute?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

He slipped behind the wheel, shut the door. The bucket seat was tight, enveloping; the leather smelled rich; the instruments were big and business-like, the steering wheel small, with unusual red buttons on it. Sunlight gleamed off the yellow finish. Everything felt so luxurious, he was a little uneasy; he couldn’t tell if he liked this feeling or not. He shifted in the seat, and felt something under his thigh. He pulled out a white object that looked like a piece of popcorn. And it was light like popcorn, too. But it was stone. He thought the rough edges would scratch the leather; he slipped it into his pocket and climbed out.

One car over, Rick Hutter was glowering at the black Ferrari, as Jenny Linn admired it. “You must realize, Jenny,” Rick said, “that this car, squandering so many resources, is an offense against Mother Earth.”

“Really?” Jenny said. “Did she tell you that?” She ran her fingers along the fender. “I think it’s beautiful.”

In a basement room furnished with a Formica table and a coffee machine, Vin Drake had seated himself at the table, with Eric Jansen and Alyson Bender, the two Nanigen executives, placed on either side of him. The grad students clustered around, some sitting at the table, some leaning against the wall.

“You’re young scientists, starting out,” Vin Drake was saying. “So you have to deal with the reality of how your field operates. Why, for example, is there such an emphasis on the cutting edge in science? Why does everybody want to be there? Because all the prizes and recognition go to new fields. Thirty years ago, when molecular biology was new, there were lots of Nobels, lots of major discoveries. Later, the discoveries became less fundamental, less groundbreaking. Molecular biology was no longer new. By then the best people had moved on to genetics, proteomics, or to work in specialized areas: brain function, consciousness, cellular differentiation, where the problems were immense and still unsolved. Good strategy? Not really, because the problems remain unsolved. Turns out it isn’t enough that the field is new. There must also be new tools. Galileo’s telescope—a new vision of the universe. Leeuwenhoek’s microscope—a new vision of life. And so it continues, right to the present: radio telescopes exploded astronomical knowledge. Unmanned space probes rewrote our knowledge of the solar system. The electron microscope altered cell biology. And on, and on. New tools mean big advances. So, as young researchers, you should be asking yourselves—who has the new tools?”

There was a brief silence. “Okay, I’ll bite,” someone said. “Who has the new tools?”

“We do,” Vin said. “Nanigen MicroTechnologies. Our company has tools that will define the limits of discovery for the first half of the twenty-first century. I’m not kidding, I’m not exaggerating. I’m telling you the simple truth.”

“Pretty big claim,” Rick Hutter said. He leaned against the wall, arms folded, clutching a paper cup of coffee.

Vin Drake looked calmly at Rick. “We don’t make big claims without a reason.”

“So what exactly are your tools?” Rick went on.

“That’s proprietary,” Vin said. “You want to know, you sign an NDA and come to Hawaii to see for yourself. We’ll pay your airfare.”

“When?”

“Whenever you’re ready. Tomorrow, if you want.”

Vin Drake was in a hurry. He finished the presentation, and they all filed out of the basement and went out onto Divinity Avenue, to where the Ferraris were parked. In the October afternoon, the air had a bite, and the trees burned with orange and russet colors. Hawaii might have been a million miles from Massachusetts.

Peter noticed Eric wasn’t listening. He had his arm around Alyson Bender, and he was smiling, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

Peter said to Alyson, “Would you mind if I took a family moment here?” Grabbing his brother’s arm, he walked him down the street away from the others.

Peter was five years younger than Eric. He had always admired his brother, and coveted the effortless way Eric seemed to manage everything from sports to girls to his academic studies. Eric never strained, never seemed to sweat or worry. Whether it was a playoff game for the lacrosse team, or oral exams for his doctorate, Eric always seemed to know how to play things. He was always confident, always easy.

“Alyson seems nice,” Peter said. “How long have you been seeing her?”

“Couple of months,” Eric said. “Yes, she’s nice.” Somehow, he didn’t sound enthusiastic.

“Is there a but?”

Eric shrugged. “No, just a reality. Alyson’s got an MBA. Truth is, she’s all business, and she can be tough. You know—Daddy wanted a boy.”

“Well, Eric, she’s very pretty for a boy.”

“Yes, she’s pretty.” That tone again.

Feeling around, Peter said, “And how’re things with Vin?” Vincent Drake had a somewhat unsavory reputation, had been threatened twice with federal indictments; he had beaten back prosecutors both times, although no one knew quite how. Drake was regarded as tough, smart, and unscrupulous, but above all, successful. Peter had been surprised when Eric first signed on with him.

“Vin can raise money like nobody else,” Eric said. “His presentations are brilliant. And he always lands the tuna, as they say.” Eric shrugged. “I accept the downside, which is that Vin will say whatever he needs to say to get a deal done. But lately he’s been, well…more careful. More presidential.”

“So he’s the president of the company, Alyson’s the CFO, and you’re—?”

“Vice president in charge of technology,” Eric said.

“Is that okay?”

“It’s perfect. I want to be in charge of the technology.” He smiled. “And to drive a Ferrari…”

“What about those Ferraris?” Peter said, as they approached the cars. “What’re you going to do with them?”

“We’ll drive them down the East Coast,” Eric said. “Stop at major university biology labs along the way, and do this little song-and-dance to drum up candidates. And then turn in the cars in Baltimore.”

“Turn them in?”

“They’re rented,” Eric said. “Just a way to get attention.”

Peter looked back at the crowd around the cars. “Works.”

“Yes, we figured.”

“So you really are hiring now?”

“We really are.” Again, Peter detected a lack of enthusiasm in his brother’s voice.

“Then what’s wrong, bro?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Eric.”

“Really, nothing. The company is underway, we’re making great progress, the technology is amazing. Nothing’s wrong.”

Peter said nothing. They walked in silence for a moment. Eric stuck his hands in his pockets. “Everything’s fine. Really.”

“Okay.”

“It is.”

“I believe you.” They came to the end of the street, turned, headed back toward the group clustered around the cars.

“So,” Eric said, “tell me: which one of those girls in your lab are you seeing?”

“Me? None.”

“Then who?”

“Nobody at the moment,” Peter said, his voice sinking. Eric had always had lots of girls, but Peter’s love life was erratic and unsatisfactory. There had been a girl in anthropology; she worked down the street at the Peabody Museum, but that ended when she started going out with a visiting professor from London.

“That Asian woman is cute,” Eric said.

“Jenny? Yes, very cute. She plays on the other team.”

“Ah, too bad.” Eric nodded “And the blonde?”

“Erika Moll,” Peter said. “From Munich. Not interested in an exclusive relationship.”

“Still—”

“Forget it, Eric.”

“But if you—”

“I already did.”

“Okay. Who’s the tall, dark-haired woman?”

“That’s Karen King,” Peter said. “Arachnologist. Studying spider web formation. But she worked on the textbook Living Systems. Kind of won’t let anybody forget it.”

“A little stuck-up?”

“Just a little.”

“She looks very buff,” Eric remarked, still staring at Karen King.

“She’s a fitness nut. Martial arts, gym.”

They were coming back to the group. Alyson waved to Eric. “You about ready, honey?”

Eric said he was. He embraced Peter, shook his hand.

“Where now, bro?” Peter said.

“Down the road. We have an appointment at MIT. Then we’ll do BU later in the afternoon, and start driving.” He punched Peter on the shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger. Come and see me.”

“I will,” Peter said.

“And bring your group with you. I promise you—all of you—you won’t be disappointed.”

Chapter 2

Biosciences Building

18 October, 3:00 p.m.

Returning to the lab, they experienced that familiar environment as suddenly mundane, old-fashioned. It felt crowded, too. The tensions in the lab had been simmering for a long time: Rick Hutter and Karen King had despised each other from the day they had arrived; Erika Moll had brought trouble to the group with her choice of lovers; and, like so many grad students everywhere, they were rivals. And they were tired of the work. It seemed they all felt that way, and there was a long silence as they each returned to their lab benches and resumed work in a desultory way. Peter took his milking beaker off the ice block, labeled it, and put it on his shelf of the refrigerator. He noticed something rattling around with the change in his pocket, and, idly, he took the object out. It was the little thing he’d found in his brother’s rented Ferrari. He flicked it across the bench surface. It spun.

Amar Singh, the plant biologist, was watching. “What’s that?”

“Oh. It broke off my brother’s car. Some part. I thought it would scratch the leather.”

“Could I see—?”

“Sure.” It was a little larger than his thumbnail. “Here,” Peter said, without looking at it closely.

Amar put it in the flat palm of his hand, and squinted at it. “This doesn’t look like a car part to me.”

“No?”

“No. I’d say it’s an airplane.”

Peter stared. It was so small he couldn’t really make out details, but now that he looked closely, it did indeed appear to be a tiny airplane. Like something from a model kit, the kind of kits he’d made as a boy. Maybe a fighter jet to glue onto an aircraft carrier. But if so, it was like no fighter jet he had ever seen. This one had a blunted nose, an open seat, no canopy, and a boxy rear with tiny stubby flanges: no real wings to speak of.

“Do you mind…”

Amar was already heading for the big magnifying glass by his workbench. He put the object under the glass, and turned it carefully. “This is quite fantastic,” he said.

Peter pushed his head in to look. Under magnification, the airplane—or whatever it was—appeared exquisitely beautiful, rich with detail. The cockpit had amazingly intricate controls, so minute it was hard to imagine how they had been carved. Amar was thinking the same thing.

“Perhaps laser lithography,” he said, “the same way they do computer chips.”

“But is it an airplane?”

“I doubt it. No method of propulsion. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just some kind of model.”

“A model?” Peter said.

“Perhaps you should ask your brother,” Amar said, drifting back to his workbench.

Peter reached Eric on his cell phone. He heard loud voices in the background. “Where are you?” Peter said.

“Memorial Drive. They love us at MIT. They understand what we’re talking about.”

Peter described the small object he had found.

“You really shouldn’t have that,” Eric said. “It’s proprietary.”

“But what is it?”

“Actually, it’s a test,” his brother said. “One of the first tests of our robotic technology. It’s a robot.”

“It looks like it has a cockpit, with a little chair and instruments, like someone would sit there…”

“No, no, what you’re seeing is the slot to hold the micro-power-pack and control package. So we can run it remotely. I’m telling you, Peter, it’s a bot. One of the first proofs of concept of our ability to miniaturize beyond anything previously known. I was going to show it to you if we had time, but—listen, I’d prefer you keep that little device to yourself, at least for now.”

“Sure, okay.” No point in telling him about Amar.

“Bring it with you when you come to visit us,” Eric said, “in Hawaii.”

The head of the lab, Ray Hough, came in and spent the rest of the day in his office, reviewing papers. By general agreement it was considered poor form for the graduate students to discuss other jobs while Professor Hough was present. So around four o’clock they all met at Lucy’s Deli on Mass Ave. As they crowded around a couple of small tables, a lively discussion ensued. Rick Hutter continued to argue that the university was the only place where one could engage in ethical research. But nobody really listened to him; they were more concerned with the claims that Vin Drake had made. “He was good,” Jenny Linn said, “but it was a sales pitch.”

“Yes,” Amar Singh said, “but at least one part of it was true. He’s right that discoveries do follow new tools. If those guys have the equivalent of a new kind of microscope, or a new PCR-type technique, then they’re going to make a lot of discoveries quickly.”

“But could it really be the best research environment in the world?” Jenny Linn said.

“We can see for ourselves,” Erika Moll said. “They said they’d pay airfare.”

“How’s Hawaii this time of year?” Jenny said.

“I can’t believe you guys are buying into this,” Rick said.

“It’s always good,” Karen King said. “I did my tae kwon do training in Kona. Wonderful.” Karen was a martial arts devotee, and had already changed into a sweat suit for her evening workout.

“I overheard the CFO say they’re hiring a hundred people before the end of the year,” Erika Moll said, trying to steer the conversation away from Karen and Rick.

“Is that supposed to scare us or entice us?”

“Or both?” Amar Singh said.

“Do we have any idea what this new technology is they claim to have?” Erika said. “Do you know, Peter?”

“From a career standpoint,” Rick Hutter said, “you’d be very foolish not to get your PhD first.”

“I have no idea,” Peter said. He glanced at Amar, who said nothing, just nodded silently.

“Frankly, I’m curious to see their facility,” Jenny said.

“So am I,” Amar said.

“I looked at their website,” Karen King said. “Nanigen MicroTech. It says they make specialized robots at the micro- and nano-scale. That’s millimeters down to thousandths of a millimeter. They have drawings of robots that look like they’re about four or five millimeters long—maybe a quarter of an inch. And then some that are half that, maybe two millimeters. The robots seem very detailed. No explanation how they could be made.”

Amar was staring at Peter. Peter said nothing.

“Your brother hasn’t talked to you about this, Peter?” Jenny asked.

“No, this has been his secret.”

“Well,” Karen King continued, “I don’t know what they mean by nano-scale robots. That would be less than the thickness of a human hair. Nobody can fabricate at those dimensions. You’d have to be able to construct a robot atom by atom, and nobody can do that.”

“But they say they can?” Rick said. “It’s corporate bullshit.”

“Those cars aren’t bullshit.”

“Those cars are rented.”

“I have to get to class,” Karen King said, standing up from the table. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. Nanigen has kept a very low profile, but there are a few brief references in some business sites, going back about a year. They got close to a billion dollars in funding from a consortium put together by Davros Venture Capital—”

“A billion!”

“Yeah. And that consortium is primarily composed of international drug companies.”

“Drug companies?” Jenny Linn frowned. “Why would they be interested in micro-bots?”

“The plot thickens,” Rick said. “Big Pharma behind the curtain.”

“Maybe they expect new delivery systems?” Amar said.

“Nah, they have that already, with nano-spheres. They don’t need to spend a billion dollars on that. They must be expecting new drugs.”

“But how…” Erika shook her head, puzzled.

“There’s more,” Karen King said, “from the business websites. Not long after they got the funding, Nanigen was challenged by another micro-robotic company in Palo Alto, saying Nanigen had made false representations to raise money and they didn’t really have the technology they said they did. This other company was also developing microscopic robots.”

“Uh-huh…”

“What happened?”

“The threatened lawsuit was withdrawn. The Palo Alto company declared bankruptcy. And that was the end, except the head of their company was quoted as saying Nanigen did have the technology, after all.”

“So you think this is real?” Rick said.

“I think I’m late for class,” Karen said.

“I think it’s real,” Jenny Linn said. “And I’m going to Hawaii to see for myself.”

“I am, too,” Amar said.

“I don’t believe this,” Rick Hutter said.

Peter walked down Mass Avenue with Karen King toward Central Square. It was late afternoon, but the sun still felt warm. Karen carried her gym bag in one hand, keeping the other hand free.

“Rick gives me a pain,” she said. “He acts like he’s being ethical when he’s really just lazy.”

“How do you mean?”

“Staying in the university is safe,” Karen said. “A nice life, comfortable and safe. Except he won’t admit that. Do me a favor,” she added, “and walk on the other side of me, okay?”

Peter moved to Karen’s left side. “Why?”

“So my hand is free.”

Peter looked at her right hand. She held her car keys in her fist, the key shaft protruding from between her knuckles like a knife blade. Hanging from the key chain was a canister of pepper spray, close to her wrist.

Peter couldn’t help smiling. “You think we’re at risk here?”

“The world is a dangerous place.”

“Mass Ave? At five in the afternoon?” They were in the heart of Cambridge.

“Colleges don’t report the actual number of rapes in their communities,” Karen said. “It’s bad publicity. Wealthy alumni won’t send their daughters.”

He kept looking at her clenched fist, the key poking out. “What will you do with the keys you’re holding that way?”

“Straight hit to the windpipe. Instant crippling pain, maybe puncture the trachea. If that doesn’t take him down, spray full in the face close-range. Kick down hard on the kneecap, break it if you can. By then he’s down, and he’s not going anywhere.”

She was serious, almost grim. Peter suppressed an urge to laugh. The street before them was familiar, mundane. People were getting off work, heading home for dinner. They passed a harried-looking professor in a wrinkled corduroy jacket, clutching a stack of blue exam papers, followed by a little old lady with a walker. A group of joggers up ahead.

Karen reached into her purse, pulled out a small folded knife, flipped open the thick serrated blade. “Got my Spyderco knife, I can gut a bastard if it comes to that.” She glanced up, saw his expression. “You think I’m ridiculous, don’t you?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just—you’d really gut someone with a knife?”

“Listen,” she said. “My half-sister is a lawyer in Baltimore. She’s walking to her car in the garage, two o’clock in the afternoon, and she’s attacked by some guy. Knocked down, hits the concrete, loses consciousness, beaten and raped. When she comes to, she has retrograde amnesia, she can’t remember anything about the attacker, how it happened, what he looks like. Nothing. One day in the hospital and they send her home.

“So there’s a guy in the firm, a partner, he has scratches on his throat, and she thinks maybe it’s him. Some guy in her own firm, followed her out and raped her. But she doesn’t remember, she can’t be sure. And she’s just so uncomfortable. Eventually she leaves the firm, moves to DC, has to start again at a lower-paying job.” Karen held up her fist. “All because she didn’t carry her keys like this. She was too nice to protect herself. Bullshit.”

Peter was trying to imagine whether Karen King would really stab someone with the key, or gut them with a knife. He had the uneasy feeling that she would. In a university setting, where so many people just talked, it seemed she was ready for action.

They came to the storefront martial arts studio, the windows papered over. He could hear shouts in unison from inside. “Well, this is my class,” she said. “I’ll see you later. But listen: if you talk to your brother, ask him why drug companies put up so much money for micro-botics, okay? I’m curious.” And she went through the swinging door, into the class.

Peter returned to the lab that evening. He had to feed the cobra every three days, and he usually did it at night, since cobras were by nature nocturnal. It was eight p.m., and the lab lights were low, when he lowered a squirming white rat into the cage and slid the glass shut. The rat scampered to the far side of the cage, and froze. Only its nose twitched. Slowly the snake turned, uncoiled, and faced the rat.

“I hate to see that,” Rick Hutter said. He had come up behind Peter.

“Why?”

“So cruel.”

“Everybody’s got to eat, Rick.”

The cobra struck, burying its fangs deep in the rat’s body. The rat shivered, stayed on its feet, then collapsed. “That’s why I’m a vegetarian,” Rick said.

“You don’t think plants have feelings?” Peter said.

“Don’t start,” Rick said. “You and Jenny.” Jen’s research involved communication among plants and insects via pheromones, chemicals released by organisms to trigger responses. The field had made enormous advances over the last twenty years. Jenny insisted that plants had to be seen as active, intelligent creatures, little different from animals. And Jenny enjoyed annoying Rick. “It’s ridiculous,” Rick said to Peter. “Peas and beans don’t have feelings.”

“Of course not,” Peter answered, with a smile. “It’s because you’ve already killed the plant—heartlessly dispatched it for your own selfish meal. You just pretend the plant didn’t scream in agony when you killed it, because you don’t want to face the consequences of your cold-blooded plant murder.”

“Absurd.”

“Speciesism,” Peter said. “And you know it.” He was smiling, but there was truth to what he was saying. Peter was surprised to see that Erika was in the lab, and so was Jenny. Few of the graduate students worked at night. What was going on?

Erika Moll stood at a dissecting board, carefully cutting open a black beetle. Erika was a coleopterist, meaning an entomologist with a special interest in beetles. As she said, that was a conversation-stopper at cocktail parties. (“What do you do?” “I study beetles.”) But, in fact, beetles were very important to the ecosystem. A quarter of all known species were beetles. Years ago, a reporter had asked the famed biologist J. B. S. Haldane what could be deduced about the Creator from the creation, and Haldane had answered, “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

“What have you got there?” Peter said to Erika.

“This is a bombardier beetle,” she said. “One of the Australian Pheropsophus that sprays so effectively.”

As she spoke, she returned to her dissection, shifting her body so she was touching his. It seemed to be an accidental contact; she gave no indication that she had even noticed. But she was a notorious flirt. “What’s special about this bombardier?” Peter said.

Bombardier beetles got their name from their ability to fire a hot, noxious spray in any direction from a rotating turret at the tip of their abdomen. The spray was sufficiently unpleasant that it stopped toads and birds from eating them, and it was toxic enough to kill smaller insects immediately. How bombardier beetles accomplished this had been studied since the early 1900s, and by now the mechanism was well understood.

“The beetles produce boiling-hot benzoquinone spray,” she explained, “which they make from precursors stored in the body. They have two sacs in the rear of the abdomen—I’m cutting them open now, there, you see them? The first sac contains the precursor hydroquinone along with the oxidant, hydrogen peroxide. The second sac is a rigid chamber, and contains enzymes, catalases, and peroxidases. When the beetle is attacked, it muscularly squeezes the contents of the first sac into the second, where all the ingredients combine to produce an explosive blast of benzoquinone spray.”

“And this particular beetle?”

“It adds something more to its armamentarium,” she said. “It also produces a ketone, 2-tridecanone. The ketone has repellent properties, but it also acts as a surfactant, a wetting agent that accelerates the spread of the benzoquinone. I want to know where the ketone is made.” She rested her hand lightly on his arm for a moment.

Peter said, “You don’t think the beetle makes it?”

“Not necessarily, no. It might have taken on bacteria, and let the bacteria make the ketone for it.” That was a fairly common event in nature. Making chemicals for defense consumed energy, and if an animal could incorporate bacteria to do the work on its behalf, so much the better.

“This ketone is found elsewhere?” Peter said. That would suggest it was of external bacterial origin.

“In several caterpillars, yes.”

“By the way,” he said, “why are you working so late?”

“We all are.”

“Because?”

“I don’t want to fall behind,” she said, “and I assume I’ll be gone next week. In Hawaii.”

Jenny Linn held a stopwatch while she watched a complex apparatus: leafy plants under one large flask were being eaten by caterpillars, while an air hose connected the first flask to three more flasks, each with more plants but no caterpillars. A small pump controlled air flow among the flasks.

“We already know the basic situation,” she said. “There are 300,000 known species of plants in the world, and 900,000 species of insects, and many of them eat plants. Why haven’t all the plants vanished, chewed down to the ground? Because all plants long ago evolved defenses against insects that attack them. Animals can run away from predators, but plants can’t. So they have evolved chemical warfare. Plants produce their own pesticides, or they generate toxins to make their leaves taste bad, or they release volatile chemicals that attract the insect’s predators. And sometimes they release chemicals that signal other plants to make their leaves more toxic, less edible. Inter-plant communications, that’s what we are measuring here.”

The caterpillars eating the plants in the first flask caused the release of a chemical, a plant hormone, that would be carried to the other flasks. The other plants would increase their production of nicotinic acid. “I’m looking to measure the rate of response,” she said. “That’s why I have three flasks. I’ll be cutting leaves from various places to measure nicotinic acid levels in them, but as soon as I cut a leaf from the next plant…”

“That plant will act like it’s under attack, and it will release more volatiles.”

“Right. So the flasks are kept separate. We know the response is relatively rapid, a matter of minutes.” She pointed to a box to one side. “I measure the volatiles with ultra high-speed gas chromatography, and the leaf extraction is straightforward.” She glanced at her stopwatch. “And now if you’ll excuse me…”

She lifted the first flask, and began cutting leaves from base upward, setting each aside in careful order.

“Hey, hey, hey, what is going on here?” Danny Minot entered the lab, waving his hands. Red-faced and rotund, he was dressed in a tweed sport coat with elbow patches, a rep tie, and baggy slacks, and looked for all the world like an establishment English professor. Which was not far wrong. Minot was getting a doctorate in science studies, a mélange of psychology and sociology, with liberal doses of French postmodernism thrown in. He had degrees in biochemistry and comparative literature, but the comparative literature had won out; he quoted Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others who believed that there was no objective truth, only the truth that’s established by power. Minot was here in the lab to complete a thesis on “scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation.” In practice it meant he made a pest of himself, bothering people, recording conversations with the other grad students as they did their work.

They all despised him. There were frequent discussions about why Ray Hough had let him in the lab in the first place. Finally somebody asked Ray about it, and he said, “He’s my wife’s cousin. And nobody else would take him.”

“Come on, people,” Minot said, “nobody works this late in this lab, and here you all are.” Waving his hands again.

Jenny snorted disdainfully. “Hand-waver.”

“I heard that,” Minot said. “Meaning what?”

Jenny turned her back on him.

“Meaning what? Don’t turn your back on me.”

Peter went over to Danny. “A hand-waver,” he said, “is somebody who hasn’t worked out his ideas and can’t defend them. So when he presents at a colloquium, and he comes to the parts he hasn’t worked out, he starts waving his hands and talking fast. Like the way someone waves their hands and says, ‘Et cetera, et cetera.’ In science, hand-waving means you don’t have the goods.”

“Not what I am doing here,” Minot said, waving his hand. “The semiotics are completely garbled.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But as Derrida said, techno-translation is so difficult. I am attempting to indicate all of you in a gestural mode of inclusiveness. What’s going on?”

“Don’t tell him,” Rick said, “or he’ll want to come.”

“Of course I want to come,” Minot said. “I am the chronicler of life in this lab. I must come. Where are you going?”

Peter briefly told him the entire story.

“Oh yes, I am definitely coming. The intersection of science and commerce? The corruption of golden youth? Oh definitely—I’ll be there.”

Peter was getting a cup of coffee from the machine in the corner of the lab when Erika walked over. “What are you doing later?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“I thought maybe I could stop by tonight.”

She was staring right at him. Something about the directness of her manner put him off. “I don’t know, Erika,” he said, “I might be working here late.” Thinking: I haven’t seen you for three weeks, since the last time.

“I’m almost finished, myself,” she said. “And it’s only nine o’clock.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“It doesn’t appeal to you, my offer?” She was still staring at him, scanning his face.

“I thought you were seeing Amar.”

“I like Amar, very much. He is very intelligent. I like you too. I always have.”

“Maybe we’ll talk later,” he said, pouring milk in his coffee, and moving away so quickly that it spilled a little.

“I hope so,” she said.

“Trouble with your coffee?” Rick Hutter said, glancing up at Peter and grinning. Under a halogen lamp, Rick was holding a rat upside down, measuring its swollen rear paw with a small caliper.

“No,” Peter said, “I was just, uh, surprised at how hot it was.”

“Uh-huh. I’d say, surprisingly hot.”

“Is that a carageenen prep?” Peter said, changing the subject. Carageenen was the usual method to produce edema in the paw of a lab animal. It was a standardized animal model for edema, employed in labs around the world to study inflammation.

“Correct,” Rick said. “I injected carageenen, making the paw swollen. Then I wrapped the foot in an extract from the bark of Himatanthus sucuuba, a medium-size rain-forest tree, and now we are—hopefully—demonstrating its anti-inflammatory properties. I already demonstrated it for the tree’s latex. Himatanthus is an extremely versatile tree, it heals wounds and cures ulcers. The shamans in Costa Rica say this tree also has antibiotic, anti-fever, anti-cancer, and anti-parasite qualities, but I haven’t tested those claims yet. Certainly the bark extract has reduced this rat’s swelling remarkably fast.”

“You determined what chemicals are responsible for the anti-inflammatory response?”

“Researchers in Brazil attribute it to alpha-amyrin cinnamate and other cinnamate compounds, but I haven’t verified that yet.” Rick finished measuring the rat, set it down in the cage, and typed in a measurement and time in his laptop. “Tell you one thing, though: extracts from the tree appear to be completely nontoxic. One day you might even be able to give this to pregnant women. Huh, look at that.” He pointed to the rat as it moved around the cage. “It’s not limping at all anymore.”

Peter slapped him on the back. “Better be careful,” he said, “or you’ll have some pharmaceutical company beating you to your results.”

“Hey, I’m not worried. If those guys were really in the business of developing drugs, they’d already be working on this tree,” Rick said. “But why should they take the risk? Let the American taxpayer fund the research, let some graduate student spend months to make the discovery, and then they swoop in and buy it up from the university. And then they sell our discovery back to us, at full price. Sweet deal, huh?” He was starting to wind up for one of his tirades. “I tell you, these Goddamned pharma—”

“Rick,” Peter said, “I’ve got to go.”

“Oh sure, yeah. Nobody wants to hear it, I know.”

“I have to spin down my naja venom.”

“No problem.” Rick hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at Erika. “Listen, it’s none of my business—”

“That’s right, it’s not—”

“But I hate to see a good guy like you fall into the clutches of somebody who is…well…Anyway, you met my friend Jorge, who does computer science at MIT? If you want to know what’s really going on with Erika, call this number—” he handed Peter a card—“and Jorge will access her phone records, including voice and text messages, and you can find out the truth about her, uh, promiscuous ways.”

“Is that legal?”

“No. But it’s damn useful.”

“Thanks anyway,” Peter said, “but—”

“No, no, keep it,” Rick insisted.

“I won’t use it.”

“You never know,” Rick said. “Phone records don’t lie.”

“Okay.” It was easier to keep the card than argue. He slipped it in his pocket.

“By the way,” Rick said, “about your brother…”

“What about him?”

“You think he’s on the level?”

“About his company?”

“Yeah, Nanigen.”

“I think so,” Peter said. “But to be honest I don’t know a lot about it.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He’s been pretty secretive about the whole thing.”

“But you think it’s innovative?”

Yes, I think it’s innovative, Peter thought, peering through the scanning microscope. He was looking again at the white pebble, or micro-bot, or whatever the thing was. Trying to account for his brother’s explanation that it wasn’t a cockpit but just a slot for a micro-power-pack, or a control unit. It didn’t look like a slot for anything. It looked like a seat facing a tiny, highly detailed control panel.

He was still puzzling over this when he became aware that the lab around him had become absolutely silent. He looked up, and saw that the microscope was also displaying on a large flat-panel screen mounted on the wall. Everybody in the lab was staring at it.

“What the hell is that?” Rick said.

“I don’t know.” Peter flicked off the monitor. “And we’re not going to find out, unless we go to Hawaii.”

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