Emperor of Gondwanaland (55 page)

As Lothar microwaved his straight-from-the-freezer supper, he made notes on his PDA about transferring his current project to another staffer.

Lothar had been working on the first canine EndoAgent, which would guard against heartworm. Currently, the pill that did that job had to be administered twice a year, or even monthly in some versions. An EndoAgent would be given once in the dog’s lifetime, then function ever after. (Jackmore had even already arranged with Eukanuba, the dog-food manufacturer, to include the necessary leash-chemical exclusively in their brand of food, for a hefty licensing fee.) Lothar had conceived the project in memory of a pet he had owned as a child, a terrier named Springer. When Lothar succumbed to polio, his parents had returned to the States for his medical treatment, their missionary days ended. But their religious fervor had not abated sufficiently to include being mindful enough to take care of such precautionary measures as giving Springer his anti-heartworm drug, and the dog’s death had been so painful for Lothar that he had never dared have another creature under his care.

But the heartworm EndoAgent project was well advanced, and could safely be handed off.

Now that Lothar had firmly committed himself to a new course of research, he was left only with the problem of Mirelyis.

Retreating to the massage chair that was an essential station in his evening restoration ritual, Lothar carried Mirelyis’s report with him. As the humming, vibrating chair began to ease some of the kinks out of his twisted frame, Lothar commenced reading. Several pages into the report, he recalled previously giving up on the document at this point, and basing his decision on the abstract. Perhaps he had been hasty in his judgment.

Lothar continued to read until sleep overtook him where he sat.

What he experienced next was a lucid dream. Not quite as vivid or as deep as the epiphany that had allowed Kary Mullis to invent the polymerase chain reaction, Lothar’s dream nonetheless registered with some force.

He was roaming the stacks of an enormous library. Amazingly, he was not lame, but sound of body. He noted suddenly that the ranks of books on the library shelves were curiously divided into two types. A small number of the books had informative titles on their spines. But the vast majority of the books featured only blank spines. Yet when Lothar took down one of the blank-spined books and opened it, he discovered text inside that seemed, in the dream anyway, endlessly fascinating.

This dream seemed to occupy hours of exploration of the library, yet when Lothar awoke with a start he saw by his watch that he had been asleep for only twenty minutes. Still half in Morpheus’s realm, he managed to fumble through a shower and get to bed.

The next day Lothar summoned Dr. Mirelyis Sosa to his office first thing.

The beautiful Cuban biologist entered with a stern look on her face and an ultimatum trembling on her lips. But Lothar anticipated and stymied any complaints or demands.

“Dr. Sosa, I’ve doubled your request for additional funding and added three more people to your team. Additionally, I’ve relieved you of certain nonessential responsibilities. The only stipulation is that I want to discuss your findings with you on a daily basis. And I also hope not to hear any more silly talk about leaving Stixrude.”

The startled Spanish exclamation that emerged from Mirelyis’s mouth was the only time Lothar had ever heard her employ her native language in public. And he suspected that the expression she used was not one that she would have blurted out in any polite company that actually could have understood it.

Defeat had never before been a word in Lothar’s vocabulary.

But now, some two months after kicking off the Up! project, he painfully understood numerous subtle and humiliating shadings of that word.

Lothar had enjoyed many successes with his bacillomyces. But in retrospect, all his accomplishments had been quite simplistic. Each EndoAgent had been engineered to produce one or two significant proteins or enzymes or other metabolic factors that the patient had previously lacked, thus curing the disease or condition under attack. But this new project defied such easy strategies.

Male sexual arousal—vasocongestion of the penis—involved the autonomic and somatic nervous systems, the peripheral circulatory system, the spinal cord, the central nervous system, and the endocrine system. And that wasn’t even delving into the brain, where the hypothalamus and limbic system got to work, deluging the body with essential hormones such as oxytocin, FSH and LH. The whole intricate cascade needed to be as orderly as a ballet carried out atop a moving train. And somehow Lothar’s dumb EndoAgents were expected to orchestrate this complex knot of interlocking feedback loops in males whose baseline capabilities were deficient.

And make no mistake, the EndoAgents were dumb. This was not nanotech Lothar was working with, that perpetually receding Holy Grail of molecular manipulation. No, Lothar’s bugs were simply tricked-out gut flora which in their millions had about as much processing power as a fistful of earthworms.

Lothar could not simply create a bug which pumped out Viagra, Levitra, Bonerol, or one of the other performance enhancers, since these were proprietary formulations, jealously guarded by Stixrude’s competitors. And even if he could have licensed access to such a drug, there would still have remained the problem of having the bugs initiate the production based solely on subjective stimuli.

So unless Lothar could both tie in his bugs to the higher neuronal functions and increase their own brainpower, the Up! project looked doomed.

The first task was what he was concentrating on today. While it was not possible for EndoAgents actually to inhabit the brain—such an infestation was commonly called spinal meningitis—there were several ways of transmitting information between gray matter and the bugs. Reviewing the latest trials in mice, Lothar experienced a little hope that this particular aspect of the project could be achieved.

But as for the processing power—

Hopeless.

The day went by swiftly for the crook-backed scientist. His lunch arrived, thanks to the ministrations of Celeste Foy, who made sure Lothar received a hot meal each day from the company cafeteria. By late afternoon, the final item on his agenda was his daily meeting with Dr. Mirelyis Sosa.

Lothar had hoped, in the back of his mind, that by granting Mirelyis her wishes and supporting her research to the fullest, he would earn her gratitude and, perhaps, even a certain closeness. He knew nothing like romance could ever transpire between them. But even simple camaraderie had not been forthcoming. For over forty meetings, Mirelyis had maintained a completely businesslike, stoic, and dispassionate demeanor between herself and her boss. Nonetheless, Lothar continued to dream that each new day might bring a softening of her attitude.

Alas, today was not to be that day.

On the point of closing out her report, delivered in the most neutral tones possible, Mirelyis said, “And in conclusion, the results seem to indicate that introns have the capacity to function as two- way transcriptional units—”

Lothar felt a jolt go through him. “Transcriptional units? Do you think then that I could somehow make introns act like logic units for my bacillomyces? Treat them like registers or gates?”

For once Mirelyis seemed discomposed. Her neatly scribed eyebrows crept skyward. “Why, I don’t know. That seems far-fetched. We don’t really understand what role introns play in cellular mechanics. Interfering with them would—”

“Mirelyis, thank you so much. You’ve justified every penny you’ve spent! I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Right now I need to get into the lab.”

Mirelyis made to leave, obedient if somewhat bewildered. But before she could fully exit the office, Rand Jackmore arrived. Today the marketing man wore a D-squared suit fashioned from the newest processed seaweed fabric. He resembled a kelp-covered merman. Lothar experienced an instant flashback to that seminal day weeks ago when these two significant figures in his life had last intersected in his office.

“Why, it’s Dr. Sosa,” Jackmore smoothly oozed. “I thought for a moment that the Doc was getting a visit from Jennifer Lopez herself.”

Mirelyis’s haughty disdain would’ve frosted an autoclave. Lothar was secretly pleased to see that at least one person ranked lower in her esteem than he himself.

Once Mirelyis was gone, Jackmore turned to Lothar. “Doc, I need some good news on SEA’s Up! to feed the investors. What’ve you got?”

“Please, just Up!, if you recall our discussion.”

Lothar had been the first to realize that “SEA’s Up!” sounded like the phrase “seize up,” not the most desirable connotation for a sexual booster.

“Oh, right, plain old Up! Well, what’s up with Up!?”

“If you had asked me half an hour ago, I would have said nothing. But I’ve just had an excellent inspiration that might solve all our technical impediments. You’d better dust off your ad campaign.”

“Great! I have this one spot in mind that features the Olsen Twins—”

“Wonderful, wonderful, now if you’ll please excuse me, I have important work to do—”

Lothar spent the entire night in his lab, all his customary aches and pains forgotten, as he furiously made great headway in conceptualizing the intron-baccilomyces connection, laying down nucleotide schematics and proteomic loops on his RiboCad.

When he finally Segwayed out to the Stixrude atrium at dawn, he encountered Celeste Foy asleep at her station, face down on her work surface. In addition to her plain looks, she apparently possessed a tendency to produce memorandum-rattling snores.

Lothar gently shook the receptionist awake.

“Celeste, you can go home now. My work on Up! is over for today.”

Celeste groggily replied, “Huh? Up is over? ’Zat mean down is under?”

Six months later, Lothar was nearly ready to begin human trials of Up!. The simian experiments had been most encouraging, if rather embarrassing to view in mixed company. And of course Dr. Sosa
would
have to insist on being present, since so much of Lothar’s success relied on her ground-breaking work with introns. (With Jackmore irremovably on hand as well, the uneasy atmosphere in the lab was similar to that of a middle-school assembly accidentally subjected to a pornographic video.) Using humanity’s vast stretches of unallocated archaic DNA as organic logic processors was a monumental leap in biotechnology. Already Lothar could foresee any number of new products flowing from this one technique.

Just a few more refinements to the instruction set guiding the EndoAgents, and the first human subject would scarf down a spoonful of pharmaceutical-grade yogurt loaded with Up!.

Stixrude’s stock was already trading 15 percent higher than a few months ago, solely on the basis of Jackmore’s press releases. Everyone was happy, especially Lothar.

Until the day he burst in unexpectedly on Rand Jackmore.

Jackmore’s office assistant was away from her desk outside Jackmore’s corner sanctum, so Lothar let himself in, excitedly carrying news about the latest tweak to Up!.

Most of Dr. Mirelyis Sosa’s clothes were scattered across the room. The curvaceous researcher herself was to be seen recumbent on a couch, mostly obscured by a semi-naked Rand Jackmore, whose boxer shorts, hanging around his ankles, displayed the D&V logo that stood for the fashionable hybrid firm Dolce and Versace. The two former antagonists were imitating the frenetic upstroke/down-stroke motion of certain bacterial cilia.

Lothar grunted as if tackled by an invisible linebacker. Mirelyis yelped, and Jackmore exclaimed, “Wha—?” Pivoting to rush out, Lothar whacked a pedestal with one of his canes and sent an expensive vase crashing to the floor.

Half an hour later, Lothar had calmed down enough to address both of his disheveled employees in person in his office. After upbraiding them for unprofessional behavior, he assured them both that their unfortunate physical interlude would have no impact on their employment or careers, so long as they moderated such behavior in the future.

Once, in high school, Lothar had acted the part of a wheelchair-bound FDR in a school play (the only role a conventionally minded drama teacher had seen fit to give him). Today’s job of acting like a dispassionate employer was infinitely harder than impersonating a president.

Jackmore’s attitude was, if not flippant, then at least unrepentant. “Sure thing, Doc. It’s just that all this tumescence stuff got to us. But Mirry and I are a solid item. Have been for a while now. This is no office fling. Isn’t that right, dear?”

Mirelyis’s normally haughty and confrontational demeanor appeared to have evaporated, along with her English. “
S
í
, es verdad, Se
ñ
or Stixrude.
”

After Mirelyis and Jackmore had left, Lothar wanted to scream or weep or break something. With
Jackmore
! How could she? For five minutes he raged silently. Then acknowledgment of his folly overcame him. Not how
could
she, but why
wouldn’t
she? By comparison, what could Lothar offer such a woman? Any woman?

Feeling utterly empty, Lothar decided to go home.

Passing through the lobby, he neither heard nor responded to Celeste’s Foy’s worried inquiry about his anomalous departure.