Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Mitch felt sick to his stomach. He pressed the rewind button on the answering machine tape. As it whirred back onto its spool, the phone chimed and Mitch answered.

“Excuse me,” a tenor male voice said in English. “Is this Mitch Rafelson?”

“The very one,” Mitch said.

“I just tell you this, then good-bye. Maybe you recognize my voice, but…no matter. They have found your bodies in the cave. The University of Innsbruck people. Without your help, I assume. They do not tell anybody yet, I don’t know why. I am not joking and this is no prank, Herr Rafelson.”

There was a distinct click and the line went dead.

“Who was it?” Sam asked.

Mitch sniffed and tried to relax his jaw. “Fuckers,” he said. “They’re just messing with me. I’m famous, Dad. A famous crackpot chucklehead.”

“Bullshit,” Sam said again, his face sharp with disgust and anger. Mitch stared at his father with a mix of love and shame; this was Sam at his most involved, his most protective.

“Let’s get out of this rat hole,” Sam said in disgust.

Kaye made Saul breakfast just after sunrise. He seemed subdued, sitting at the knotty pine table in the kitchen, slowly sipping a cup of black coffee. He had had three cups already, not a good sign. In a good mood — Good Saul — he never drank more than a cup a day. If he starts smoking again…

Kaye delivered his scrambled eggs and toast and sat beside him. He leaned over, ignoring her, and ate slowly, deliberately, sipping coffee between each bite. As he finished, he made a sour face and pushed the plate back.

“Bad eggs?” Kaye asked quietly.

Saul gave her a long look and shook his head. He was moving slower, also not a good sign. “I called Bristol-Myers Squibb yesterday,” he said. “They haven’t cut a deal with Lado and Eliava, and apparently they don’t expect to. There’s something political going on in Georgia.”

“Maybe that’s good news?”

Saul shook his head and turned his chair toward the French doors and the gray morning outside. “I also called a friend of mine at Merck. He says there’s something cooking with Eliava, but he doesn’t know what it is. Lado Jakeli flew to the United States and met with them.”

Kaye stopped herself in the middle of a sigh, let it out slowly, inaudibly. Walking on eggshells again…The body knew, her body knew. Saul was suffering again, worse even than he appeared. She had been through this at least five times. Any hour now he would find a pack of cigarettes, inhale the hot acrid nicotine to straighten out some of his brain chemistry, even though he hated smoking, hated tobacco.

“So…we’re out,” she said.

“I don’t know yet,” Saul said. He squinted at a brief ray of sun. “You didn’t tell me about the grave.”

Kaye’s face flushed like a girl’s. “No,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t.”

“And it didn’t make the newspapers.”

“No.”

Saul pushed his chair back and grabbed the edge of the table, then half-stood and performed a series of angled pushups, eyes focused on the table top. When he finished, having done thirty, he sat down again and wiped his face with the folded paper towel he was using as a napkin.

“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. 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 Kirn 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 Kirn’s supersensitive 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.