are you doing, Vergil?”
Vergil removed his glasses and wiped them with the placket of his lab coat. Abruptly, he sneezed—loud and wet.
Harrison looked faintly disgusted. “We only broke the code yesterday. By accident, almost. Why did you hide it? Is it something you’d rather we didn’t know?”
Without his glasses, Vergil looked owlish and helpless. He began to stammer an answer, then stopped and thrust his jaw forward. His thick black brows knit in painful puzzlement.
“It looks to me like you’ve been doing some work on our gene machine. Unauthorized, of course, but you’ve never been much for authority.”
Vergil’s face was now deep red.
“Are you all right?” Harrison asked. He was deriving a perverse pleasure from making Vergil squirm. A grin threatened to break through Harrison’s querying expression.
“I’m fine,” Vergil said. “I was…am…working on biologics.”
“Biologics? I’m not familiar with the term.”
“A side branch of the biochips. Autonomous organic computers.” The thought of saying anything more was agony. He had written Bernard—without result, apparently—to have him come see the work. He did not want to hand all of it over to Genetron under the provisions of the work-for-hire clause in his contract. It was such a simple idea, even if the work had taken two years—two secret and laborious years.
“I’m intrigued.” Harrison turned the VDT around and scrolled through the file. “We’re not just talking proteins and amino acids. You’re messing with chromosomes here. Recombining mammalian genes; even, I see, mixing in viral and bacterial genes.” The light went out of his eyes. They became rocky gray. “You could get Genetron shut down right now, this minute, Vergil. We don’t have the safeguards for this kind of stuff. You’re not even working under P-3 conditions.”
“I’m not messing with reproductive genes.”
“There’s some other kind?” Harrison sat forward abruptly, angry that Vergil would try to bullshit him.
“Introns. Strings that don’t code for protein structure.”
“What about them?”
“I’m only working in those areas. And…adding more non-reproductive genetic material.”
“That sounds like a contradiction in terms to me, Vergil. We have no proof introns don’t code for something.”
“Yes, but—”
“But—” Harrison held up his hand. “This is all quite irrelevant. Whatever else you were up to, the fact is, you were prepared to renege on your contract, go behind our backs to Bernard, and try to engage his support for a personal endeavor. True?”
Vergil said nothing.
“I assume you’re not a sophisticated fellow, Vergil. Not in the ways of the business world. Perhaps you didn’t realize the implications.”
Vergil swallowed hard. His face was still plum red. He could feel the blood thudding in his ears, the sick sensation of stress-caused dizziness. He sneezed twice.
“Well, I’ll lay the implications out for you. You are very close to getting your ass canned and sold for bully beef.”
Vergil raised his eyebrows reflexively.
“You’re important to the MABs project. If you weren’t, you would be out of here in a flash and I would personally make sure you never work in a private lab again. But Thornton and Rothwild and the others believe we might be able to redeem you. Yes, Vergil. Redeem you. Save you from yourself. I haven’t consulted with Yng on this. It won’t go any further—if you behave.”
He fixed Vergil with a stare from beneath lowered eyebrows. “Stop your extracurricular activities. We’ll keep your file here, but I want all non-MABs experiments terminated and all organisms that have been tampered with destroyed. I’ll personally inspect your lab in two hours. If this hasn’t been done, you’ll be fired. Two hours, Vergil. No exceptions no extensions.”
“Yessir.”
“That’s all.”
CHAPTER TWO
Vergil’s dismissal would not have unduly distressed his fellow employees. In his three years at Genetron, he had committed innumerable breaches of lab etiquette. He seldom washed lab glassware and twice had been accused of not wiping up spills of ethidium bromide—a strong mutagen—on lab counters. He was also not terribly cautious about radionucleides.
Most of the people he worked with made no show of humility. They were, after all, top young researchers in a very promising field; many expected to be wealthy and in charge of their own companies in a few years. Vergil didn’t fit any of their patterns, however. He worked quietly and intensively during the day, and then worked overtime at night. He was not sociable, though neither was he unfriendly; he simply ignored most people.
He shared a lab space with Hazel Overton, as meticulous and clean a researcher as could be imagined. Hazel would miss him least of all. Perhaps it was Hazel who had penetrated his file—she was no slouch