Forty Signs of Rain (20 page)

He got in his rental car (always the same one, it seemed) and drove out of the lot. North on the freeway, crowded but not impossibly so, people zipping along like starlings, following the flocking rules
keep as far apart from the rest as possible
and
change speeds as little as possible
. The best drivers in the world. Past Mission Bay and Mount Soledad on the left, into the region where every off-ramp had been a major feature of his life at one time or another. Off at Gilman, up the tight canyon of apartments hanging over the freeway, past the one where he had once spent a night with a girl, ah, back in the days when such things had happened to him. Down a hill and onto campus.

UCSD. Home base. The school in the eucalyptus grove. Quickwitted, sophisticated, scarily powerful—even from inside it, Frank remained impressed by the place. Among other things it was a very effective troop of primates, collaborating to further the welfare of its members.

Even after a year in the East Coast’s great hardwood forest, there was something appealing about the campus’s eucalyptus grove—something charming, even soothing. The trees had been planted as a railroad-tie farm, before it was discovered that the wood was unsuitable. Now they formed a kind of mathematically gridded space, within which
the architectural mélange of UCSD’s colleges lay scattered, connected by two broad promenades that ran north and south.

Frank had arranged an afternoon of appointments. The department had given him the use of an empty office facing the Revelle Plaza; his own was still occupied by a visiting researcher from Berlin. After getting the key from Rosaria, the department secretary, he sat at a dusty desk by a functioning phone, and discussed dissertation progress with his four remaining graduate students. Forty-five minutes each, and aware the whole time that he really wasn’t doing them justice, that it had been their bad luck to get him as their advisor, because of his decision to go to NSF for a year. Well, he would try to make up for it on his return—but not all at once, and certainly not today. The truth was that none of their projects looked that interesting. Sometimes it happened that way.

After that there was an hour and a half to go before his meeting with Derek. Parking at UCSD was a nightmare, but he had gotten a pass to a department slot from Rosaria, and Torrey Pines was only a few hundred yards up the road, so he decided to walk. Then, feeling restless, and even a bit jumpy, it occurred to him to take the climbers’ route that he and some friends had devised for a kind of run/climb workout, when they were all living at Revelle; that would nicely occupy the amount of time he had to kill.

It involved walking down La Jolla Shores and turning onto La Jolla Farms Road and heading out onto the bluff of land owned by the university—a squarish plateau between two canyons running down to the beach, ending in a steep three-hundred-and-fifty-foot cliff over the sea. This land had been left in its natural state, more or less—there were some old World War Two bunkers melting away on it—and as they had found seven-thousand-year-old graves on it, likely to stay forever protected in the UC Natural Reserve system. A superb prospect and one of Frank’s favorite places on Earth. He had lived on it, sleeping out there every night and using the old gym as his bathroom; he had had romantic encounters out there; and he had often dropped down the steep surfer’s trail that descended to the beach right at Blacks Canyon.

When he got to the cliff’s edge he found a sign announcing that the route down was closed due to erosion of the cliff, and it was hard to argue, as the old trail was now a kind of gully down the edge of a sandstone buttress. But he still wanted to do it, and he strolled south along the cliff’s edge, looking out at the Pacific and feeling the onshore wind blow through him. The view was just as mind-boggling as ever, despite the gray cloud layer; as often happened, the clouds seemed to accentuate the great distances to the horizon, the two plates of ocean and sky converging at such a very slight angle toward each other. California, the edge of history—it was a stupid idea, and totally untrue in all senses of the word, except for this physical one, and the reach beyond to a metaphorical landscape: it did appear to be the edge of something.

An awesome spot. And the tighter, steeper canyon on the south side of the empty bluff had an alternative trail down that Frank was willing to break the rules and take. No one but a few cronies of his had ever used this one, because the initial drop was a scarily exposed knife-edge of a buttress, the gritty sandstone eroding in the wind to steep gullies on both sides. The drop into the gully to the left was similarly hairy. The trick was to descend fast and boldly and so Frank did that, skidding out as he turned into the gully, and sliding onto his side and down; but against the other wall of the gully he stopped, and was able to hop down after that very quickly and uneventfully.

Down to the salt roar of the beach, the surf louder here because of the tall cliff leaping up from the back of the beach. He walked north down the strand, enjoying yet another familiar place. Blacks Beach, the UCSD surfers’ home away from home.

The ascent to Torrey Pines Generique reversed the problems of the descent, in that here all the problems were right down on the beach. A hanging gully dripped over a hard sill some forty feet up, and he had to free climb the grit to the right of the green algal spill; then just scramble up that gully, to the clifftop near the hang-glider port. At the top he discovered a sign that declared this climb too had been illegal.

Oh well. He had loved it. He felt refreshed, awake for the first time in
weeks somehow. This was what it meant to be home. He could brush his hands through his slightly sweaty and seaspray-dampened hair, and walk in and see what happened.

Onto the parklike grounds of Torrey Pines Generique, through the newly beefed-up security gates. The place was looking empty, he thought as he entered the main building and walked down its halls to Derek’s office. They had definitely let a lot of people go; several labs he passed stood empty and unused.

Frank entered the reception room and greeted Derek’s secretary, Susan, who buzzed him in. Derek got up from his broad desk to shake hands.

“Good to see you again, how are you?”

“Fine, and you?”

“Oh, getting by, getting by.”

His office looked the same as the last time Frank had visited: window view of the Pacific; framed copy of Derek’s cover portrait on a
U.S. News & World Report;
skiing photos.

“So, what’s new with the great bureaucrats of science?”

“They call themselves technocrats, actually.”

“Oh I’m sure it’s a big difference.” Derek shook his head. “I never understood why you went out there. I suppose you made good use of your time.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re almost back.”

“Yes. I’m almost done.” Frank paused. “But look, like I said to you on the phone, I did see something interesting come in from someone who has worked here.”

“Right, I looked into it. We could still hire him full-time, I’m pretty sure. He’s on soft money up at Caltech.”

“Good. Because I thought it was a very interesting idea.”

“So NSF funded it?”

“No, the panel wasn’t as impressed as I was. And they might have been right—it was a bit undercooked. But the thing is, if it did work, you could test genes by computer simulation, and identify proteins you wanted, even down to specific ligands, so you could get better attachments to cells in vivo. It would really speed the process. Sharpen it.”

Derek regarded him closely. “You know we don’t really have any funds for new people.”

“Yeah I know. But this guy is a postdoc, right? And a mathematician. He was only asking NSF for some computer time really. You could hire him full-time for a starter salary, and put him on the case, and it would hardly cost you a thing. I mean, if you can’t afford that … Anyway, it could be interesting.”

“What do you mean, ‘interesting’?”

“I just told you. Hire him full-time, and get him to sign the usual contract concerning intellectual property rights and all. Really secure those.”

“I get that, but ‘interesting’ how?”

Frank sighed. “In the sense that it might be the way to solve your targeted delivery problem. If his methods work and you get a patent, then the potential for licensing income might be really considerable. Really.”

Derek was silent. He knew that Frank knew the company was nearly on life support. That being the case, Frank would not bother him with trifles, or even with big deals that needed capital and time to get going. He had to be offering a fix of some kind.

“Why did he send this grant proposal to NSF?”

“Beats me. Maybe he was turned down by one of your guys when he was here. Maybe his advisor at Caltech told him to do it. It doesn’t matter. But have your people working on the delivery problem take a look at it. After you get this guy hired.”

“Why don’t you talk to them? Go talk to Leo Mulhouse about this.”

“Well …” Frank thought it over. “Okay. I’ll go talk to them and see how things are going. You get this Pierzinski back on board. Call him today. We’ll see what happens from there.”

Derek nodded, still not happy. “You know, Frank, what we really
need here is you. Like I said before. Things haven’t been the same in the labs since you left. Maybe when you get back here we could rehire you at whatever level UCSD will allow.”

“I thought you just said you didn’t have any money for hires.”

“Well that’s true, but for you we could try to work something out, right?”

“Maybe. But let’s not talk about that now. I need to get out of NSF first, and see what the blind trust has done with my stock. I used to have some options here.”

“You sure did. Hell, we could bury you in those, Frank, I’d love to do that.”

Giving people options to buy stock cost a company nothing. They were feel-good gestures, unless everything went right with the company and the market; and with NASDAQ having been in the tank for so long, they were not often seen as real compensation anymore. More a kind of speculation. And in fact Frank expressing interest in them had cheered Derek up, as it was a sign of confidence in the future of Torrey Pines Generique. Also a sign of Frank’s interest in taking part in it, on his return.

“Do what you can to get some funding to tide you over a bit longer,” Frank suggested as he got up to leave.

“Oh I will. I always am.”

Outside, Frank sighed. Torrey Pines was looking like a thin reed. But it was his reed, and anything might happen. Derek was good at keeping things afloat. But Sam Houston was a loss. Derek needed Frank there as scientific advisor. Or consultant, given his UCSD position. And if they had Pierzinski under contract, things might work out. By the end of the year the whole Torrey Pines situation might be turned around. And if it all worked out, the potential was there for it to do very well indeed.

Frank wandered down to Leo’s lab. It was noticeably lively compared to the rest of the building—people bustling about, the smell of solvents in the air, machines whirring away. Where there’s life there’s hope. Or perhaps
they were only like the musicians on the
Titanic
, playing on while the ship went down.

This, however, represented an attempt to bail the ship out. Frank felt encouraged. He went in and exchanged pleasantries with Leo and his people, feeling that it was easy to be friendly and encouraging. This was the guts of the machine, after all. He mentioned that Derek had sent him down to talk about their current situation, and Leo nodded noncommittally and gave him a rundown, truncated but functional.

Frank regarded him as he spoke, thinking: Here is a scientist at work in a lab. He is in the optimal scientific space. He has a lab, he has a problem, he’s fully absorbed and going full tilt. He should be happy. But he isn’t happy. He has a tough problem he’s trying to solve, but that’s not it; people always have tough problems in the lab.

It was something else. Probably, that he was aware of the company’s situation—of course, he had to be. Probably this was the source of his unease. The musicians feeling the tilt in the deck. In which case there really was a kind of heroism in the way they played on, focused to the end.

But for some reason Frank was also faintly annoyed by this. People plugging away in the same old ways, trying to do things according to the plan, even a flawed plan: normal science, in Kuhnian terms, as well as in the more ordinary sense. All so normal, so trusting that the system worked, when obviously the system was both rigged and broken. How could they persevere? How could they be so blinkered, so determined, so dense?

Frank slipped his content in. “Maybe if you had a way to test the genes in computer simulations, find your proteins in advance.”

Leo looked puzzled. “You’d have to have a, what. A theory of how DNA codes its gene expression functions. At the least.”

“Yes.”

“That would be nice, but I’m not aware anyone has that.”

“No, but if you did … Wasn’t George working on something like that, or one of his temporary guys? Pierzinski?”

“Yeah that’s right, Yann was trying some really interesting things. But he left.”

“I think Derek is trying to bring him back.”

“Good idea.”

Then Marta walked into the lab. When she saw Frank she stopped, startled.

“Oh hi Marta.”

“Hi Frank. I didn’t know you were going to be coming by.”

“Neither did I.”

“Oh no? Well—” She hesitated, turned. The situation called for her to say something, he felt, something like Good to see you, if she was going to leave so quickly. But she said only, “I’m late, I’ve got to get to work.”

And then she was out the door.

Only later, when reviewing his actions, did Frank see that he had cut short the talk with Leo—and pretty obviously at that—in order to follow Marta. In the moment itself he simply found himself walking down the hall, catching up to her before he even realized what he was doing.

She turned and saw him. “What,” she said sharply, looking at him as if to stop him in his tracks.

“Oh hi I was just wondering how you’re doing, I haven’t seen you for a while, I wondered. Are you up for, how about going out and having dinner somewhere and catching up?”