Blood Music - By Greg Bear Page 0,3

on the computers and she might have gone looking for something to get him into trouble. But he had no evidence for that, and there was no sense being paranoid.

The lab was dark as Vergil entered. Hazel was performing a fluorescent scan on a gel electrophoresis matrix with a small UV lamp. Vergil switched on the light. She looked up and removed her goggles, prepared to be irritated.

“You’re late,” she said. “And your lab looks like an unmade bed. Vergil, it’s—”

“Kaput,” Vergil finished for her, throwing his smock across a stool.

“You left a bunch of test tubes on the counter in the share lab. I’m afraid they’re ruined.”

“Fuck ’em.”

Hazel’s eyes widened. “My, aren’t you in a mood.”

“I’ve been shut down. I have to dear out all my extracurricular work, give it up, or Harrison will issue my walking papers.”

“That’s rather even-handed of them,” Hazel said, returning to her scan. Harrison had shut down one of her own extracurricular projects the month before. “What did you do?”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be alone.” Vergil glowered at her from across the counter. “You can finish that in the share lab.”

“I could, but—”

“If you don’t,” Vergil said darkly, “I’ll smear your little piece of agarose across the floor with my wingtips.”

Hazel glared at him for a moment and surmised he wasn’t kidding. She shut off the electrodes, picked up her equipment, and headed for the door. “My condolences,” she said.

“Sure.”

He had to have a plan. Scratching his stubbly chin, he tried to think of some way to cut his losses. He could sacrifice those parts of the experiment that were expendable—the E. coli cultures, for example. He had long since gone beyond them. He had kept them as memorials to his progress, and as a kind of reserve in case work had not gone well in the next steps. The work had gone well, however. It was not complete but it was so close that he could taste success like a cool dean swallow of wine.

Hazel’s side of the lab was neat and tidy. His was a chaos of equipment and containers of chemicals. One of his few concessions to lab safety, a white absorbent mat to catch spills, hung half-off the black counter, one corner pinned by a jar of detergent.

Vergil stood before the white idea board, rubbing his stubbly beard, and stared at the cryptic messages he had scrawled there the day before.

Little engineers. Make the world’s tiniest machines. Better than MABs!

Little surgeons. War with tumors. Computers with hu-capac.

(Computers=“spec” tumor HA!) size of volvox.

Clearly the ravings of a madman, and Hazel would have paid them no attention. Or would she? It was common practice to scribble any wild idea or inspiration or joke on the boards and just be prepared to have it erased by the next hurried genius. Still…

The notes could have aroused the curiosity of someone as smart as Hazel. Especially since his work on the MABs had been delayed.

Obviously, he had not been circumspect.

MABs—Medically Applicable Biochips—were to be the first practical product of the biochip revolution, the incorporation of protein molecular circuitry with silicon electronics. Biochips had been an area of speculation in the literature for years, but Genetron hoped to have the first working samples available for FDA testing and approval within three months.

They faced intense competition. In what was coming to be known as Enzyme Valley—the biochip equivalent of Silicon Valley—at least six companies had set up facilities in and around La Jolla. Some had started out as pharmaceutical manufacturers hoping to cash in on the products of recombinant DNA research. Nudged out of that area by older and more experienced concerns, they had switched to biochip research. Genetron was the first firm established specifically with biochips in mind.

Vergil picked up an eraser and rubbed out the notes slowly. Throughout his life, things had always conspired to frustrate him. Often, he brought disaster on himself—he was honest enough to admit that. But not once had he ever been able to carry something through to completion. Not in his work, not in his private life.

He had never been good at gauging the consequences of his actions.

He removed four thick spiral-bound notebooks from his locked desk drawer and added them to the growing pile of material to be smuggled out of the lab.

He could not destroy all the evidence. He had to save the white blood cell cultures—his special lymphocytes. But where could he keep them—what could he do outside the lab?

Nothing. There was