A Tangled Web (49 page)

“He's been working with other scientists; he's very smart. He knew.”

“But when you talk to him, you might try to find out what he was thinking, instead of straight out accusing him. He may not have thought it through. I just can't believe he'd purposely put you in danger.”

Garth thought about it. “I don't know. Maybe. More likely he knew what he was doing and regretted it, but whatever he felt for me wasn't strong enough to overcome the pressures from his family and his government. Well, I'll know tomorrow morning.” He took her in his arms. “Do you know, the only thing that cut through my anger tonight was knowing I could come home to you. No one else helps make my world as clear as you do. It's hard to keep believing that we can create order when things get messy, but somehow you do that for me; you help me believe it—”

As
no one else has ever done.
He thought that but could not say it, could never say it. He could never say that he and Stephanie had lost their way so long ago that for years they had been unable to make for each other, as he and
Sabrina had done, a place to belong and a sense of self that was fixed and solid in a shifting world.

“—and I keep wanting to thank you,” he said, “to tell you what you give me each day, every day . . .”

“But you do the same for me. And it always seems new and wonderful and even surprising, and then I feel so grateful, because I'm where I want to be, and I'm with you, and I never want to be with anyone else, and it is so good to love you—”

His mouth met hers, and Sabrina closed her eyes as her arms curved around the familiar shape of his shoulders and his body fitted itself to hers. It was all familiar now, as welcoming as the rooms and lighted windows of their home, and they grew more confident in their coming together with each week and month of knowing that what they had was solidly theirs, not something balanced precariously on the edge of a deception. They kissed and held each other with the effortless merging of a swimmer slipping through water, weightless, almost without form, but at the same time sharply aware of an individual self, exultant and powerful, independent but still buoyed up and stronger for what was shared.

“Upstairs,” Garth murmured, “or it's going to be the carpet right here. I've been wanting you all evening.”

Sabrina laughed. “You were thinking about faked DNA all evening.”

“Part of me was. The other part wanted you. There's always a part that wants you.” He turned, his arm still around her, and started for the stairs.

“The lights . . .”

“Mrs. Thirkell will get them in the morning. You wanted me to get used to being coddled; look how well I've done.”

Sabrina laughed again and Garth heard in her laugh love and contentment and delight, and felt a rush of well-being, that he had brought all that to life.
If a man can give that to the woman he loves, he ought to be able to do anything.

Moonlight filled their bedroom, the shadowed corners
black against the pure white light, the patchwork quilt on the bed a soft pattern of pastels, the only color in the room. Sabrina threw back the quilt and they lay on the cool sheet in the cool room, their mouths and hands rediscovering each other, and then Garth was inside her, so easily, so naturally it was like a conversation, their bodies weaving together as had their voices in the library. But it is a conversation, Sabrina thought fleetingly. Whatever we do, wherever we are, we're talking to each other. But it's complete only when we're together.

Garth smiled at her and said, “Yes, my love,” and brought his mouth to hers.

They were awake until almost dawn, and all those hours together were, to Garth, another affirmation of his need for her, not only when something terrible happened, but also when everything was good. He held her with a fierceness that came from knowing how devastating it would be to lose her, and he knew from her response that the same lurking possibility also haunted her—that something would separate them: illness, death, or the kind of unforeseen event or mad idea that had brought them together less than a year before. And, caught in the whimsical tangle of chance and probability, they made love with an intensity that seemed greater with each passing week, as the stakes grew higher and their defenses disappeared.

Garth could still feel that intensity and see Sabrina's smile the next morning as he crossed the campus, lightheaded from lack of sleep, so deeply in love that it seemed impossible that he inhabited a world in which there was fraud and fear and confrontation. And the buying of congressmen, he mused, thinking beyond his meeting with Lu Zhen, in a few minutes, to two weeks ahead when he and Claudia would go to Washington, and then thinking beyond that to the politics of a university, the rituals of grant applications, the research projects that were fruitful and the others that ran aground, the time-consuming needs of students who deserved the best he could give them. All of it was part of the world he and Sabrina inhabited, but none
of it, he told himself in what was almost a vow, no major problems or minutiae, would come between them. They would be vigilant, they would be protective, and whatever attention and energy it required, they would not let anything come between them.

He had called earlier, telling Lu to meet him at ten, and when he bounded up the stairs he saw him waiting beside his office door.

“Professor, good morning.” Lu smiled broadly and held out his hand. “Are we going to discuss the note to
Science
announcing my discovery? I wrote it last night; I have it to show to you. They will publish it in their next issue, yes? And then, later, publish the paper. Of course that should not take long, as you said: major discoveries are published quickly. So”—he took a sheet of paper from his briefcase—“here it is; I think you will find it says everything it should.”

“Perhaps not everything.” Garth unlocked his office door, propped it open, and sat at his desk.

Lu brought a chair close to the corner of the desk, his favorite spot, and leaned forward, still holding his letter, still smiling. “And what is it I have left out?”

“An explanation of how you expect other scientists to replicate your experiment.”

Lu's eyes widened in surprise. “Replicate? But of course . . .” And then, as Garth gazed at him steadily, the words sank in, and very slowly his smile faded.

Garth unlocked his top drawer and took out the bound copy of Lu's paper. He went to the refrigerator in the corner of the office and brought to the desk the vials of blood samples he had taken the night before. Finally, he took from a drawer in a file cabinet the computer printout from the blood analyzer. He lined everything up on the blotter on his desk. Lu watched his fingers as he squared them.

“I won't submit your paper to
Science,
or the note you've written. I'm sure you know why.”

“No. I don't understand. You put your name on the paper; you said you would submit it on Monday.”

“I also told you I'd go over it this weekend. I read it through last night and something in it bothered me, an assumption about a single gene. We did discuss this, you know, several times, though I didn't follow it up; I was distracted by other things.”

“But it is a single gene! If you read my paper, you know that I proved it!”

He looked bewildered and painfully earnest, and for a brief second Garth wondered if he could be mistaken: if he had taken blood from the wrong mice, if the blood analyzer had malfunctioned, if Bill Farver had been wrong . . .

Impossible. Every one of those things would have had to occur simultaneously last night, and that was so unlikely as to be impossible. Lu Zhen was a consummate actor; he knew that, too. “I took these blood samples from your mice last night. This is the blood analyzer printout. You know what it says; you've probably got stacks of identical ones in your files. Or did you destroy them when they kept showing that your mice were healthy?” There was a silence. “Perhaps you'd like to read this one.” He held out the long sheet of paper for Lu to take.

Lu's hands remained in his lap. He gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “Well, but you know, Professor, it doesn't matter. Somewhere in going through the experiment, I made a mistake. That was not good, I acknowledge that, but it was only procedural. Of course it affected my results, but not the research project itself; all I have to do is repeat the experiment correctly and the results will be exactly as my paper says. And other scientists will be able to replicate it and see its truth. Professor, I
know
I am right, and that is what is important: the theory and the experiment, not my procedural mistakes. So you see, there is nothing to worry about.”

Garth was stunned into silence. He contemplated Lu Zhen as if trying to identify a new species. Lu gazed back
at him confidently, one scientist to another. The silence lengthened. A ball thumped against the building just below the office window; students clattered past the open door on their way to the laboratories at the end of the corridor. There was no other sound. It was Saturday; most students were studying; most professors were mowing lawns or doing errands or lying in a hammock with a beer and a book: for them it was a normal weekend. But for Garth it was the end of a dream, and the pain and anger he had felt the night before stabbed at him again.

He showed none of that. He sat motionless, and the minutes passed, and soon Lu could not endure the silence. “So you will send in the paper. And the note.”

“No, of course not; you don't know what you're talking about. You've written a fairy tale and called it a scientific paper and called yourself a scientist. You're not a scientist; you have no right to be part of the scientific community. We spend our lives dedicated to research, with absolute fidelity to that which can be proven; we search for connections—cause and effect, beginning and ending, living and dying—and follow them wherever they lead us, and if they take us down blind alleys we look for other paths, and when we find what we're looking for, or come upon something serendipitously, we stay with it until we've proven and proven again that it works, that it's correct and others can follow us, that we've made an advance, however small, in the long journey of science and a new beginning for—”

“Professor, this is the talk you give to freshmen; I've heard you. It is also in the introduction to your book. It's very impressive. But very little in the real world is so clear-cut. You know this; you deal with politicians and businesspeople and they always bend the rules. I bent some information, that is all, because I
know
my experiment will work; I know the results will be found by others. This is my truth and I
am
a scientist and I am as serious about it as you say all scientists should be.”

“You would throw science out the window,” Garth
said evenly, though his anger was growing, more so since he had been caught repeating himself, something every professor dreads. “You'd publish a lie because of a crazy arrogance that you know the truth in spite of experimental findings that show you're wrong.”

“I'm not wrong! Professor, Professor, this works! You have been so excited . . . and now it will bring great glory to you and your institute . . . you will be famous! Even the Nobel Prize!”

Garth felt a flash of contempt. “I called Bill Farver last night, in Berkeley. He's been working on the same premise as you; remember we talked about that? He and his team have concluded that there must be at least two genes, perhaps more . . .” He laid it out, describing other theories and experiments, each deliberate word carefully chosen to leave no doubt. When he finished, Lu was looking past him, out the window, his face drawn, his cheeks hollow, as if he had grown old while listening.

“I had no evidence of that,” he murmured. “All the steps I went through, and there was no sign . . .”

“There were signs, and we talked about them,” Garth said flatly. “You chose another direction.”

“All scientists do that.” Lu looked at Garth, and now he was pleading. “We decide what we'll pay attention to and what we'll ignore. I did the same thing every scientist does. Professor, I can use so much of what I've done; it wouldn't take me long to go back and develop a new approach. I know I could find the answer and beat those people in Berkeley; I know more than they do—”

“You don't know a damn thing. You've got a good mind, Lu, but you're driven by arrogance and ambition and fear, and even the best mind isn't a match for all that. You're right: we do decide what we'll focus on, but we don't do it at the beginning; we do it when we know more about our options. You were in a hurry, so you decided at the beginning what you'd find and then you tailored your experiments to find it. And when it didn't work, you wrote
down a bunch of fake blood-test results and let me put my name on it.”

“But I thought . . . when I did it again, without whatever mistakes I'd made—”

“The whole goddam project was a mistake! Don't you understand that? And what the hell does that have to do with letting me put my name on a paper that was full of faked numbers? Even if you were right and the experiment worked the next time, I'd be listed as advisor and coauthor of a fraud. That was the bonus you were going to leave me with when you went back to China.”

Lu's eyes narrowed. “You'd survive. You're famous. Everyone says you're one of the best, and you've got your institute and your family . . . you've got everything. But if you don't send in my paper, you rob me of everything. I couldn't go home; I couldn't go anywhere. I couldn't even get a job without a reference from you. I'd have nothing!”

Troubled by the desperation and resentment in Lu's voice, Garth said, “I think you should go back to China. You have your doctorate; you can get a job there. Perhaps some of your other professors will give you a reference. I won't pursue you or tell anyone what you've done, but if anyone—”