Emperor of Gondwanaland (54 page)

Thus, some twenty years after his unfortunate contact with a bad old bug, Lothar had secured his first patent on a good new one. (All the novel organism did was cure toenail fungus, but it earned Lothar his first few millions.)

Lothar’s parents perished while their son was still at Cal Tech, lost to a flash flood in a sub-Saharan region that had been drought-stricken for ten years. (Various global-warming-remediation efforts had been rather less predictably successful than Lothar’s own pursuits.) Lothar missed his folks in a cool, abstract fashion. They had never exhibited much interest in him or his career choice, although they had supported his schooling. But he did wish sometimes that they had lived to see his triumphs.

In his office, Lothar exchanged his sports jacket for his lab coat in a burst of optimism. Perhaps seeing him suited up for action, Mirelyis and Jackmore would take the hint and keep their interviews short. Maybe Lothar could wrap up his boring duties by noon and hit the sequencers and stringers for a productive few hours.

By the time he had caught up on his email and read a few online abstracts in Cell and Proteome, it was time to meet Jackmore.

Lothar arrived at the designated conference room first. The walls held framed blow-ups of STM shots of ribosomes and other cellular machinery at work. He had just settled his aching bones in a chair when Jackmore showed up.

Today the dapper young president for marketing wore a trendy new Gehry suit cut from Baseman fabric. The combination of asymmetrical shoulders, bulbous swallowtails, pleated trousers and eye-popping cartoon characters hurt Lothar’s eyes. Ninety-nine out of a hundred men who wore such a suit would look absurd. But Jackmore, with his Byronic good looks and megalomaniacal self-assurance, was able to carry off the ensemble. His glossed fingernails and the wing of dark hair across his brow bespoke as much time spent in front of the mirror as Lothar spent interpreting electrophoresis charts.

“Lothar, good morning!” Jackmore’s glad-handing exuberance, so effective when dealing with customers and the media, seemed superfluous in intracompany situations. But the man apparendy could not turn it off. “No, don’t get up, I’ll just slide in next to you.”

Lothar had made no move to rise. He expected that Jackmore’s comment was nothing but a gratuitous highlighting of Lothar’s disability, a kind of deliberate biting of the hand that fed, in order to assert some kind of spurious independence. Alien. Truly alien.

Jackmore carried a shiny disc in a translucently tinted case. Lothar cringed inwardly, knowing he had been ensnared for a presentation.

“Rand, I’ve only scheduled this room for an hour, and I need to spend time with Dr. Sosa at ten-thirty.”

Rand was already slotting the disc into the tabletop media player that powered the big screen across the room. “Antisensical, Doc.” Rand was prone to use faddish jargon he half understood, another trait that baffled Lothar. “This whole show will only take half that time. But it’s really going to leaven your loaf. This brainstorm of mine is guaranteed to boost Stixrude to a whole new level of fame and sales.”

Jackmore brought the lights down and launched the presentation. The first image on the screen revealed a group of nearly naked women engaged in a game of beach volleyball, the whole reminiscent of a beer commercial. Lothar felt the familiar pain of his eternally nonexistent sex life strike deep into his gut. The camera next focused on an appreciative male watcher. Soon the man had joined the game, which rapidly deteriorated—or improved, depending on one’s sensibilities—into the R-rated beginnings of a veritable orgy.

“Rand, I don’t have a morning to waste watching sheer pornography—”

“No, no, Doc, this is just the tease. Here comes the pitch.”

A voice-over announcer spoke up for the first time. “Every guy can use a little help now and then. But sometimes taking a pill and waiting an hour just won’t cut it. That’s where SEA’s Up! comes to your rescue. SEA’s Up! is the first male-performance enhancer that is available twenty-four seven, because the lusty little critters that manufacture SEA’s Up! live right inside you! They know when they’re needed, and respond at once.”

The screen showed the same formerly besieged male back in his kitchen, opening a standard prescription container of nutriceutical yogurt labeled “SEA’s Up!” The orgiast-to-be gleefully downed several spoons of the bacillomyces-laced dairy product. The announcer continued, “One swallow, and you’re set for life. So long as your little hidden friends get their daily leash-supplement once a day. And that’s an easy pill to swallow, because you can take it at any time of the day or night—not when you’re at your busiest.” Animation of the happy iconic EndoAgents at work in a simulated body filled the screen. “And best of all, no one but you need ever know you’ve got a little help down where it counts. You’re just a natural stud, thanks to SEA’s Up!”

The lucky SEA’s Up! user reappeared among the volleyball players, this time assured and virile and equal to the task, before the screen faded to black and filled with small-print copyright and disclaimer notices. The announcer’s parting words: “From the same trusted firm that brought you such superior and effective products as Gout-B-Gone and Ulcer Buster.”

Lothar sat stupefied while Jackmore beamed expectantly at him. Finally the inventor said, “Rand, words fail me.”

Jackmore slapped the tabletop. “I knew you’d be bowled over by the brilliance of the concept, Doc. This is the one area where we’ve lagged behind the competition. All the other biofirms have their own performance enhancers, but none of them are endogenous like ours will be. We’ll blow them all off the map. This is a category-killer application.”

“No, Rand, you misunderstand me. I am absolutely dead-set against this. I’m not letting Stixrude EndoAgents become known as a panderer for casual sex. And since when did marketing drive research anyway? Besides, such a product is against all the high principles I’ve always striven to maintain.”

“Uh, Mister Stixrude, sir—this firm’s first product was that anti-toenail-fungus stuff, remember?”

“True. And that application was hardly life-altering or dramatic or even particularly noble. But it offered a cure for an actual disease, not some—some frivolous enhancement for a recreational pursuit.”

“You’re not saying that impotence isn’t a disease, are you? The AMA would certainly disagree.”

“All right, then, it’s a bona fide disease. But still, out of all the physiological problems that bedevil humanity and that are yet to tackle, it’s low on my personal list of issues.”

Jackmore made no reply to this statement, but merely looked at his elegant shoes and coughed discreetly.

Lothar was brought up sharply against his own words, forced to examine his own motives for rejecting Jackmore’s proposal out of hand. Was he subconsciously prejudiced against the notion solely because of his own private sexual abstinence? As one of the country’s wealthiest men, Lothar could surely have found a hundred floozies who would have been glad to offer sex in return for a pampered life. But he refused to follow such a mercenary route to sexual satisfaction, awaiting some moment when a woman would approach him with love in her eyes and heart. But his crippled appearance and time- consuming dedication to his work militated against any such love affair, leaving him a celibate monk of the labs. What good would a product like the hypothetical SEA’s Up! do him? Nothing. Yet was his own set of limitations reason to deny the rest of humanity such a boon, which they obviously craved?

Lothar was not convinced yet that Jackmore’s proposal had any merit. But it had suddenly become harder to argue against it on purely philosophical grounds.

“All right,” Lothar said, “maybe this could be a legitimate area of research. But you set the bar too high when you made the claim in your ad that any such agent would kick into gear at will. Do you have any notion of how complex the chain of events connected with human sexual response is? Why, the hormones alone—”

Jackmore jumped to his feet. “Doc, if there’s anyone who can make it work, it’s you! You provide the genius and I provide the flash. You’re the steak and I’m the sizzle. Once you start focusing on how to make this a reality, it’ll happen for sure. Wow, look at the time! I’d better leave now. I’ve got to email the members of the board of directors about this exciting new field the company is moving into.”

“Rand, no—”

But Jackmore was already heading toward the door. When he opened it, the figure of Dr. Mirelyis Sosa was revealed.

As usual, Mirelyis presented a studiously neutral countenance to the world, beneath her high-piled tawny hair. Tall and slim, alluringly streamlined, her complexion a Caribbean melange of genetic confluences, the woman struck mute notes of mixed anguish and desire in Lothar’s breast. Mirelyis had earned her doctorate in Castro’s Cuba and achieved a sterling international reputation in the dictator’s bioengineering industry. (Perhaps, thought Lothar, those authoritarian conditions had taught her to shield her innermost thoughts from the world.) When Castro had died and Cuba had become a territory of the USA on a legal par with Puerto Rico, Mirelyis had taken the first opportunity to relocate to America.

At the sight of the beautiful researcher, Jackmore ramped up his unbearable charm even higher. “Ah, Dr. Sosa, you make that simple white lab coat look like a Zuzul original gown.”

Mirelyis’s only reaction to this compliment was a dangerous intensification of the gleam in her obsidian eyes. She marched past the undaunted Jackmore, who smiled, shrugged for Lothar’s benefit, then made a graceful exit, closing the door behind him.

Mirelyis wasted no time with ceremony. Her impatience and frustration evidenced itself in the slight resurgence of her normally suppressed accent. “Dr. Stixrude, I demand to know why you turned down my request for increased funding. Have you even read my latest report on epigenetic coding among introns?” Still standing, Mirelyis slapped down a bound document she had been carrying.

Lothar winced, his feelings hurt. How had he ever gotten into such a position, when all he wanted to do was string together novel base pairs resulting in useful long-chain molecules? Perhaps a little humor would alleviate the tense situation. “Dr. Sosa, that’s a baseless accusation—if you’ll forgive the pun. You know that I am extremely attentive to all the material from my staff, especially your findings. Your track record has been exemplary. Why, just your work on the diabetes project alone earned you a special status within the firm. But I simply cannot countenance devoting additional funds to this highly speculative quest of yours for meaning in ‘junk’ DNA. Everyone knows that introns are simply accumulated archaic genetic sludge, without any functionality. While I’m willing to indulge your theories at the current funding levels, as a sideline to your other projects, I cannot justify pouring extra funds down this particular rat hole.”

Lothar hoped he hadn’t been too forceful. But he had to put his foot down, or lose all credibility with his subordinates.

Mirelyis glared silently for several seconds at her boss then said, “Even uttering the phrase ‘everyone knows such and such to be true’ is the mark of a fossilized mind, Dr. Stixrude. I had expected much better of you. But your remarks are forcing me to reevaluate my position with Stixrude. While I do that over the next few days, I suggest you try looking at my research again, but this time with an open mind.”

And with that parting ultimatum, Mirelyis left.

What a horrible morning! Lothar felt as if he were being stretched through a pipette. What had he accomplished, except to please a fellow he disdained while alienating a woman he … admired. Oh, well, he could hardly undo what had been done. His only recourse, as always, was to lose himself in his lab. Levering himself painfully out of the chair, he made his way to his yeast-redolent sanctuary.

By the end of the long day, Lothar’s crippled body was so weary—although his mind continued to race—that he had to commandeer one of the company’s indoor Segways to travel from lab to front door. In the half-darkened atrium, he was surprised to see Celeste Foy still at her station. Lothar halted his Segway.

“Celeste, what are you doing here at this hour?”

“I don’t like to leave until you do, Dr. Stixrude. What if you needed something?”

Lothar didn’t know quite what to say. He had never really questioned such unremarked diligence and devotion on the part of his receptionist before. He had always assumed someone else had given her a task that demanded overtime.

“Uh, well, thank you, Celeste. I’m done for the night now. Let’s both get some rest.”

“See you first thing tomorrow, Dr. Stixrude.”

“Of course.”

Lothar’s car featured both hand-activated accelerator and brake controls to compensate for his disabilities and supplement the sophisticated autopilot functions. He was able to get home easily paying only half a mind to the traffic. The other half was busy with Jackmore’s new product idea. And on the seat beside him lay Mirelyis’s intron report.

By the time he pulled into the driveway of his modest Viridian house (built over a hot spring, with wind- and solar-power adjuncts), Lothar had become fully engaged with the notion of crafting EndoAgents that would catalyze tumescence with no more input than standard audiovisual and pheromonal excitatory triggers. The challenge of the task intrigued him. And the prospect of putting SEA on an even more solid financial footing was appealing as well. The more corporate liquidity, the more projects could be tackled.