drinks afterward, he began, “Penny, the thing between us, it’s complicated…” She replied, “No, it’s complex.” He hesitated and murmured, “Well, okay, but…” She said sharply, “There’s a difference.” And for some reason that made him angry. He decided to shut up, let the evening go on in the mindless, evening-out-with-the-wifey way she seemed to like. It was odd how she could be a very intelligent, uncompromising literature student one moment, and then in the next come on as ordinary, middle-America, relentlessly oatmeal. Maybe she was part of this time, of things changing.
They danced only to the slow numbers. She moved deftly, lightly, in a slim pink dress. He wore heavy black shoes left over from New York and now and then would miss the beat. The male vocalist sang, in a bluesy voice, “People stay, just a little bit longer. We wanna play, just a little bit more.” Penny suddenly hugged him to her with remarkably strong arms. “Sam Cooke,” she murmured into his ear. He didn’t know what she meant. The idea of knowing who had composed a certain pop song seemed, well, faintly incredible.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
THE NOISE LEVEL IN THE NMR MEASUREMENTS began to rise. Each day it was a little higher. Usually Gordon would notice the change in the first data-taking of the morning. He attributed it at first to the slow failure of a component. Repeated checking of the obvious points in the circuitry turned up nothing. Testing of the nonobvious didn’t help, either. Each day the noise was worse. At first Gordon thought this might be a new sort of “spontaneous resonance” effect. The signal was too choppy to tell, though. He spent more time trying to lower the signal/noise ratio. Gradually it came to take up most of his working day. He began to come in nights. He would sit before the on-line oscilloscope and watch the traces. Once, when he had a meeting early the next morning, he slept overnight in the lab. A Fourier decomposition of the noise spectrum showed certain harmonic components, but this clue led nowhere. Meanwhile, the phase-averaged noise level rose.
“Gordon? This is Claudia Zinnes.”
“Oh, hello. I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.”
“We have had some delays. This’s and thats’s. Nothing fundamental, but I wanted you to know we should be on the air within a week.”
“Good. I hope…”
“Yes. Yes.”
A Santa Ana wind was blowing outside. It pushed with a dry, heavy hand through the low coastal mountain passes, bringing the desert’s prickly touch. Brush fires broke out in the hills. The red wind, some natives called it. To Gordon, sealed in his air-conditioned lab, it was a mild surprise as he left for home late at night; the air seemed thick and layered, ruffling his hair.
He remembered this hot, dry touch the next day as he walked across to the chemistry building. Ramsey, unable to reach him in his office, had left a message with Joyce, the department secretary. Gordon crossed between the buildings on the ornate hexagonal tiered bridge. Entering the land of chemistry brought a sweet-sour aroma, too strong and many-flavored for the air system’s whine to banish. He found Ramsey in a forest of flasks and tubes, talking quickly and precisely to a graduate student. Ramsey titrated a solution as he spoke, pointing out color shifts, adding a drop of milky stuff at a crucial moment. Gordon found a welcome chair and sagged into it. This jungle of clamps and slides and retorts seemed possessed of more life than a physics lab; the knocking of pumps and ticking of timers was a complicated heart, pacing Ramsey’s earnest search. On the wall hung a chart of the gigantic molecular chain that carbon dioxide descends to become carbohydrate; a ladder forged by photons. A liquid scintillation counter muttered, tocktocking through a series of isotopically labeled flasks. Gordon shifted, finding a ledge to lean on, and toppled a Lily cup. Nothing spilled. He inspected it and found a sludge of coffee, thick as glue and mottled by mold. All things here were alive. He had a sudden vision of this glassy palace as a wilderness of nucleic acids, responding to the dry brush of red wind outside. His NMR lab seemed silent and sterile by comparison. His experiments were insulated from the pulse of the world. For the biochemists, though, lite cooperated in the study of itself. Ramsey himself looked more vital, squinting and hovering and talking, an animal padding through the lanes of this chemical jungle.
“Sorry, Gordon, had to finish that—say, you look kinda worn out. This weather got you down, fella?”
Gordon shook his head and rose, following Ramsey to a side office. A slight giddiness swarmed through him.
Ramsey was already several sentences ahead of him before Gordon registered the fact. “What?” he said, his voice a croak from the dryness.
“I said, the clues were all there. I was just too blind to see them.”
“Clues?”
“At first I was just looking for preliminary data. You know, something to kick off a grant, get the funding agencies interested. Defense, I guess. But that’s the point, Gordon—this is bigger than DOD now. NSF should go for it.”
“Why?”
“It’s
“Could you find the labeling numbers the message gave?”
Ramsey frowned. “Nope, that’s the puzzler. This buddy of mine says they don’t have anything’ called that. And Springfield claims they don’t have an AD45 pesticide, either. Your signal must’ve got messed up there.”
“So you couldn’t duplicate it.”
“Not exactly—but who needs exactly? What these long-chain babies are is
“How can you be—”
“Look, I took the batches down to Scripps. Took Hussinger out to lunch, talked up the project. Got him to give me some sea water testing troughs. They’re first class—constant temperature and salinity, steady monitoring, the works. Lots of sunlight, too. And—” he paused, compressing a smile—“the whole damn thing came true. Every bit.”
“The diatom bloom part, you mean?”
“Sure, only that’s a later stage. Those long-chain bastards go like Poncho, I tell ya. That sea water started out ordinary, super-saturated with oxygen. After two months we started getting funny readings on the oxygen column. That’s a measurement of the oxygen budget in a vertical column of water, maybe thirty meters high. Then the plankton started to go. Just crapped out on us—dead, or funny new forms.”
“How?”
Ramsey shrugged. “Your message says ‘virus imprinting.’ Mumbo-jumbo, I think. What’s virus got to do with sea water?”
“What has a pesticide got to do with plankton?”
“Yeah, good point. We don’t know. That other phrase you had—’can then convert plankton neuro jacket into its own chemical form using ambient oxygen content until level falls to values fatal to most of the higher food chain’—sounds like somebody knows, right?”
“Apparently.”
“Yeah, ’cause that’s smack on what we found.”
“It scavenges the oxygen?”
“And how.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Spreads like a sonofabitch, too. That mixture turns the plankton into
