Bruce Sterling - Distraction

She sank back, crushed, against the pillow. “Look, I just want to work in my lab.”

“That’s not an option.”

“It’s very important work.”

“I know it is, but that’s just not an option.”

“You don’t really believe in anything, do you?”

“Yes I do,” he said passionately. “I believe that smart people working together can make a difference in this world. I know you’re very smart, and if we work together, then maybe I can help you. If you’re not with me, then you’re on your own.”

“I’m not helpless. I have friends and colleagues who trust me.”

“Well, that’s lovely. You can all be helpless together.”

“No, it’s not lovely. Because you’re sleeping with me. And you’re telling me you’re going to destroy everything I work for.”

“Look, it’s the truth! Would it be better if I slept with you and didn’t tell you what was going on? Because the possibility distinctly occurred to me. But I don’t have the heart.”

“You have the wrong person for this. I hate administration. I can’t take power. I’m no good at it.”

“Greta, look at me. I could make you good at it. Don’t you understand that? I run political campaigns, I’m an expert. That’s my job.”

“What a horrible thing to say.”

“We could do it, all right. Especially if you weighed in with us, if you’d let us advise you and help you. My krewe and I, we took an architect who had five percent approval ratings and we made him Senator from Massachusetts. Your sad little fishbowl has never seen people like us.”

“Well…” She sighed. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“Good. You do that. I’ll be gone for a while. Washington, Bos-ton… Give the subject some serious thought.” His stomach rum-bled. “After all that ranting, I’m not a bit sleepy. Are you sleepy?”

“God, no.”

“I’m starving. Let’s go get something to eat. You brought a car, right?”

“It’s a junker car. Internal combustion.”

“It’ll get us into a real town. I’ll take you out tonight. We’ll go out somewhere, we’ll paint the town together.”

“Are you nuts? You can’t do that. Crazy people are trying to kill you.”

He waved a hand. “Oh, who cares? We can’t live that way. What’s the use? Anyway, the risk is minimal here. It would take a major-league intelligence operation to track us down here in this dump. I’m much safer at some random restaurant than I’ll be in Wash-ington or Boston. This is our only night together. Let’s be brave. Let’s find the nerve to be happy.”

They dressed, left the beach house, got into the car. Greta started it with a metal key. The engine growled in ugly piston-popping fashion. Then Greta’s phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Oscar said.

She ignored him. “Yes?” She paused, then handed it over. “It’s for you.”

It was Fontenot. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Are you still awake? We’re going out for dinner.”

“Of course I’m awake! I was up as soon as you left the safe house. You can’t leave Holly Beach, Oscar.”

“Look, it’s the middle of the night, nobody knows we’re here, we’re in a rented car with no history, and we’re picking a town at random.”

“You want to eat? We’ll bring you in some food. What if you get pulled over by a parish sheriff? They’ll punch you into the state police net. You think that’ll be a fun experience for a Yankee who’s crossed Green Huey? Think otherwise, pal.”

“Should that happen, I’ll lodge a complaint with the American embassy.”

“Very funny. Stop being stupid, okay? I finessed the Holly Beach thing for you, and that wasn’t easy. If you depart from the itinerary, I can’t be responsible.”

“Keep driving,” Oscar told Greta. “Jules, I appreciate your pro-fessionalism, I really do, but we need to do this, and there’s no time to argue about it.”

“All right,” Fontenot groaned. “Take the highway east and I’ll get back to you.”

Oscar hung up and gave Greta her phone. “Did you ever have a bodyguard?” he said.

She nodded. “Once. After the Nobel announcement. It was me and Danny Yearwood. After the big news broke, Danny started getting all these threats from the animal rights people … Nobody ever threatened me about it, and that was so typical. They just went after Danny. We shared the Nobel, but I was the one doing all the labwork… We had some security during the press coverage, but the stalkers just waited them out. Later they jumped poor Danny out-side his hotel and broke both his arms.”

“Really. ”

“I always figured it was the fetal-tissue people who were the real anti-science crazies. The righters mostly just broke into labs and stole animals. ”

She peered carefully into the moving pool of headlights, grasping the wheel with her narrow hands. “Danny was so good about the credit. He put my name first on the paper — it was my hypothesis, I did the labwork, so that was very ethical, but he was just such an angel about it. He just fought for me and fought for me, he never let them overlook me. He gave me every credit that he could, and then they stalked him and beat him up, and they completely ignored me. His wife really hated my guts.”

“How is Dr. Yearwood, these days? How could I get in touch with him?”

“Oh, he’s out. He left science, he’s in banking now.”

“You’re kidding. Banking? He won the Nobel Prize for rnedicine.”

“Oh, the Nobel doesn’t count so much, since those Swedish bribery scandals… A lot of people said that was why we got the Prize in the first place, a woman still in her twenties, they were trying some kind of clean-slate approach. I don’t care, I just enjoy the labwork. I like framing the hypothesis. I like the procedures, I like proper form. I like the rigor, the integrity. I like publishing, seeing it all there in black and white, all very tight and straight. It’s knowledge then. It’s forever.”

“You really love your work, Greta. I respect that.”

“It’s very hard. If you get famous, they just won’t let you work anymore. They bump you up in the hierarchy, they promote you out of the lab, there’s a million stupid distractions. Then it’s not about science anymore. It’s all about feeding your postdoc’s children. The whole modern system of science is just a shadow of what it was in the Golden Age — the First Cold War. But…” She sighed. “I don’t know. I did all right personally. Other people have had it so much worse.”

“Such as?”

“There was this woman once. Rita Levi-Montalcini. You know about her?”

“I’ll know if you tell me.”

“She was another Nobelist. She was Jewish, in the 1930s, in Italy. A neuro-embryologist. The Fascists were trying to round her up, and she was hiding in this village in a shack. She made dissection tools out of wire and she got these hen’s eggs … She had no money, and she couldn’t show her face, and the government was literally try-ing to kill her, but she got her lab results anyway, major results… She survived the war and she got away. She ran to America, and they gave her a really great lab job, and she ended up as this ninety-year-old famous world-class neuro person. She’s exactly what it’s all about, Rita was.”

“You want me to drive a little now?”

“I’m sorry that I’m crying.”

“That’s all right. Just pull over.”

They stepped out in the darkness and switched positions in the car. He drove off with a loud crunch of roadside oyster shells. It had been a long time since he’d done any of his own driving. He tried to pay a lot of attention, as he was anxious not to kill them. Things were becoming so interesting. The sex had been a debacle, but sex was only part of it anyway. He was getting through to her now. Getting through was what counted.