Generosity

nature: as stakes rise, even the fearless take cover. History is filled with scientists terrified of publishing big findings. Darwin himself tinkered with his theory for almost two decades before Alfred Wallace’s letter forced his hand.

Some among the senior scientists close to Thomas wonder if his hesitation may even be sociological-just a fear of real-world consequences. From an unsympathetic distance, his reticence looks a lot like nostalgia. How else to explain his continued foot-drag, in the absence of solid objections? He has signed off on the statistical analysis. He’s conceded the results of the index-test method for determining functional differences between the known allelic variations. Still Kurton waits. And he’s begun to repeat with increasing, almost annoying frequency, “All good science pauses.”

No one knows exactly what the chief’s hesitation means. It may be good science; it may be loss of nerve. In practice, it means an extended delay in publishing that any day-given the rate of post-genomic discoveries being plucked daily from the air-could prove fatal. The mastodon will still kill you, whether you charge it or stand stock- still.

Weld consulted with two colleagues first. She tried one of each: stringent Christa Kreuz and expansive Dennis Winfield, the counseling center’s head. Christa was at her hardest-assed. “You’re dating someone who works for the college?”

“He’s not working for the college anymore. And I’m not exactly dating him.”

“He got fired over this incident.”

“He was temporary. They just didn’t renew.”

“It doesn’t feel right, Candace. He comes to talk to you about this student, the student gets raped by another one of his students, and now ”

“She didn’t get raped. She talked her way out.”

“And now you want to sleep with the teacher.”

“I don’t want to sleep with him. I just enjoy his company.”

“Why?”

Weld fell back on that old counseling trick: counting to five. “Because he’s not fatuous and he’s not banal. He feels things. He cares about something other than himself.” She fights off a bizarre impulse to say: He makes me smile. “He thinks. That’s hard to come by, these days.”

“Have you thought about an epistolary relationship? And you might want to keep one copy of everything on file.”

Nor did Dennis Winfield entirely let her off the hook. “In the best world, of course, I’d wish you something less problematical.”

She’d seen it in Dennis’s eye from time to time: in his best world, Dennis wouldn’t be married, she wouldn’t be working for him, and he would be her problem.

“It’s not problematical, Dennis. It’s just companionship.”

“Does he get along with Gabe?”

“I’ve just met him. I only want to be sure I’m not breaking any rules.”

“You’re not breaking any rules. Technically. If you’re sure that you’ve never had a professional relationship with him or the student ” He appraised her. “This is not about some kind of indirect therapy for either one of them, is it?”

She shook her head, exasperated.

“Good. Because you’ve had We’ve been over this in the past. You are a wonderful woman, Candace. But you do need to protect yourself from your best intentions sometimes. Do be careful. Boundaries get blurry so fast.”

She sat still for the justified lecture, and when Dennis encouraged her to come back and talk if she ever felt any uncertainty, she nodded and said she would.

Candace Weld arrives right on time, Saturday night, an experimental tease in her tea-green eyes and a veil of light snow on her hair. She shows up with her chest-high son, who holds out one diffident paw to shake Russell’s. The child has seen this drill before, and places no faith in the latest candidate. As soon as he rescues his hand from Russell’s, he pulls a flashing, bleeping Game Boy back out of his pocket.

Stone ushers them in from the cold. She no longer looks that much like Grace. He was crazy ever to imagine a resemblance. Candace’s features are more fluid and eager. Her eyes don’t have Grace’s webcam look. Her nose twitches like it’s trying to sniff him. She hands him a nice Shiraz, then cups his elbow hello. With her other hand, she shakes a colorful sack of pungent Happy Meal. “For Gabe,” she says.

“I’m carnivorous,” the child at her side explains.

Russell slaps his forehead. “I should have asked.”

The boy shrugs. “Many primates are. But those are cool pictures, anyway.” He points to Stone’s pastels. “Are they like dungeon creatures? Three stars, at least.”

Russell takes a beat. “Thanks, I think.”

Over the meal, he and Candace hunt for a conversation topic other than the only one they’ve ever talked about. Weld is oddly at ease in her awkwardness. She asks about Stone’s magazine editing. He’s too considerate to give her a real answer.

Finally, it’s Stone and the boy who find a theme. Gabe regales his host with tales of an online world called Futopia. The boy raves about his life as a Ranger, discovering ancient artifacts and selling them for tons of gold in cities scattered around virgin continents. Stone marvels to see this sullen child bloom into a full-fledged raconteur, a Marco Polo who can’t get enough of the questions Stone asks.

The mother is embarrassed for the first time all evening. “It’s terrifying. Like there’s a probe directly stimulating the pleasure centers of his brain. He gets ninety minutes a night. I know: it should be zero.”

The kid is all over her in panic. “Mom, no! We’ve talked about this. It’s social. It’s completely social. There’s almost no killing at all.”

After dessert, when the talk runs out, Candace stands and starts stacking dishes. “Leave them,” Russell says. “I’ll get them after you go.” But she insists on helping.

He fills the basin with hot water. She takes a dish towel and stands next to him, snatching dishes as he cleans them. It surprises him to discover how easy she is to be with-just company, just variation, a respite from his own inescapable self. Side by side, five inches from each other, in front of the double basin, he doesn’t even have to look at her to find her painfully pleasing.

She grins, admiring his washing technique. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

Candace Weld is flirting. Russell would like to call it something else, but English won’t cooperate. Chapter four: in any closely observed scene, your key protagonists will have different action objectives, driven by different inner needs.

The boy Gabe sits at the cleared table, flipping through a book that Stone has left out: Emotional Chemistry: How the Brain Lifts and Lowers Us.

“You’re still researching?” she asks.

He twists the sponge into a drinking glass. “Did you know that most people say they are happier than average?”

“I’m not surprised,” she says.

“You’re not?”

“I’m not surprised that that’s what most people say.” She crosses to the cold window casement by the pantry and breathes on the glass. In the condensation, she draws two contentment graphs. The first is a steady, high, straight line. The second is a diagonal, starting at zero and maxing out at the end. She stands aside, a counselor pretending to be an actress playing a schoolteacher. “Which of these two is happier?”

By any measure that Stone can think of, it’s the first.

“Now: which life do most people want to have?”

He stares at his choices. “Are you serious?”

She shrugs. “Number two is a better story. Most people are already pretty happy. What we really want is to be happier. And most people think they will be, in the future. Keeps us in the trenches, I