Darwin’s Radio

‘Christ, I’m sorry, Kaye,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘Do you know how that makes me feel?’

‘What?’

‘Having my wife experience something like that.’

‘You knew about my taking criminal medicine at SUNY.’

‘It makes me feel funny, even so,’ Saul said.

‘You want to protect me,’ Kaye said, and put her hand over his, rubbing his fingers. He withdrew his hand slowly.

‘Against everything,’ Saul said, sweeping the hand over the table, taking in the world. ‘Against cruelty and failure. Stupidity.’ His speech accelerated. ‘It is political. We’re suspect. We’re associated with the United Nations. Lado can’t go with us.’

‘It didn’t seem to be that way, the politics, in Georgia,’ Kaye said.

‘What, you went with the UN team and you didn’t worry it could hurt us?’

‘Of course I worried!’

‘Right.’ Saul nodded, then waggled his head back and forth, as if to relieve tension in his neck. ‘I’ll make some more calls. Try and learn where Lado is taking his meetings. He apparently has no plans to visit us.’

‘Then we go ahead with the people at Evergreen,’ Kaye said. ‘They have a lot of the expertise, and some of their lab work is –’

‘Not enough. We’ll be competing with Eliava and whoever they go with. They’ll get the patents and make it to the market first. They’ll grab the capital.’ Saul rubbed his chin. ‘We have two banks and a couple of partners and … lots of people who were expecting this to come through for us, Kaye.’

Kaye stood, her hands trembling. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but that grave – they were people, Saul. Someone needed help finding out how they died.’ She knew she sounded defensive, and that confused her. ‘I was there. I made myself useful.’

‘Would you have gone if they hadn’t ordered you to?’ Saul asked.

‘They did not order me,’ Kaye said. ‘Not in so many words.’

‘Would you have gone if it hadn’t been official?’

‘Of course not,’ Kaye said.

Saul reached out his hand and she held it again. He gripped her fingers with almost painful firmness, then his eyes grew heavy-lidded. He let go, stood, poured himself another cup of coffee.

‘Coffee doesn’t work, Saul,’ Kaye said. ‘Tell me how you are. How you feel.’

‘I feel fine,’ he said defensively. ‘Success is the medication I need most right now.’

‘This has nothing to do with business. It’s like the tides, Saul. You have your own tides to fight. You told me that yourself, Saul.’

Saul nodded but would not face her. ‘Going to the lab today?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll call from here after I make my inquiries. Let’s put together a bull session with the team leaders this evening, at the lab. Order in pizza. A keg of beer.’ He made a valiant effort to smile. ‘We need a fallback position, and soon,’ he said.

‘I’ll see how the new work is going,’ Kaye said. They both knew that any revenue from current projects, including the bacteriocin work, was at least a year down the road. ‘How soon will we –’

‘Let me worry about that,’ Saul said. He sidled over with a crablike motion, waggling his shoulders, self-mocking in that way only he could manage, and hugged her with one arm, dropping his face to her shoulder. She stroked his head.

‘I hate this,’ he said. ‘I really, really hate being like this.’

‘You are very strong, Saul,’ Kaye whispered into his ear.

‘You’re my strength,’ he said, and pushed away, rubbing his cheek like a little boy who has been kissed. ‘I love you more than life itself, Kaye. You know that. Don’t worry about me.’

For a moment, there was a lost, feral wildness in his eyes, cornered, nowhere left to hide. Then that passed, and his shoulders drooped, and he shrugged. ‘I’ll be fine. We’ll prevail, Kaye. I just have to make some calls.’

Debra Kim was a slender woman with a broad face and a smooth bowl of thick black hair. Eurasian, she tended to be quietly authoritarian. She and Kaye got along very well, though she was prickly with Saul and most men.

Kim ran the cholera isolation lab at EcoBacter with a glove of velvet-wrapped steel. The second largest lab in EcoBacter, the isolation lab functioned at level 3, more to protect Kim’s super-sensitive mice than the workers, though cholera was no joke. She used Severe Combined Immunodeficient or SCID mice, genetically shorn of an immune system, in her research.

Kim took Kaye through the outer office of the lab and offered her a cup of tea. They engaged in small talk for several minutes, watching through a pane of clear acrylic the special sterile plastic and steel containers stacked along one wall and the active mice within.

Kim was working to find an effective phage-based therapy against cholera. The SCID mice had been equipped with human intestinal tissues, which they could not reject; they thus became small human models of cholera infection.

The project had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and had produced slim results, but still, Saul kept it going.

‘Nicki down in payroll says we may have three months left,’ Kim said without warning, setting down her cup and smiling stiffly at Kaye. ‘Is that true?’

‘Probably,’ Kaye said. ‘Three or four. Unless we seal a partnership with Eliava. That would be sexy enough to bring in some more capital.’

‘Shit,’ Kim said. ‘I turned down an offer from Procter and Gamble last week.’

‘I hope you didn’t burn any bridges,’ Kaye said.

Kim shook her head. ‘I like it here, Kaye. I’d rather work with you and Saul than almost anyone else. But I’m not getting any younger, and I have some pretty ambitious work in mind.’

‘So do we all,’ Kaye said.

‘I’m pretty close to developing a two-pronged treatment,’ Kim said, walking to the acrylic panel. ‘I’ve got the gene connection between the endotoxins and adhesins. The cholera attach to our little intestinal mucus cells and make them drunk. The body resists by shedding the mucus membranes. Rice-water stools. I can make a phage that carries a gene that shuts down pilin production in the cholera. If they can make toxin, they can’t make pili, and they can’t adhere to mucus cells in the intestine. We deliver capsules of phage to cholera-infected areas, voilà. We can even use them in water treatment programs. Six months, Kaye. Just six more months and we could hand this over to the World Health Organization for seventy-five cents a dose. Just four hundred dollars to treat an entire water purification plant. Make a very tidy profit and save several thousand lives every month.’

‘I hear you,’ Kaye said.

‘Why is timing everything?’ Kim asked softly, and poured herself another cup of tea.

‘Your work won’t stop here. If we go under, you can take it with you. Go to another company. And take the mice. Please.’

Kim laughed, then frowned. ‘That’s insanely generous of you. What about you? Are you just going to bite the bullet and sink under the debts, or declare bankruptcy and go to work for the Squibb? You could get work easily enough, Kaye, especially if you strike before the publicity dies down. But what about Saul? This company is his life.’

‘We have options,’ Kaye said.

Kim drew the ends of her lips down in concern. She put her hand on Kaye’s arm. ‘We all know about his cycles,’ she said. ‘Is this getting to him?’

Kaye half-shuddered, half-shivered at this, as if to throw off any unpleasantness. ‘I can’t talk about Saul, Kim. You know that.’