Of the Genetron founders, only Harrison and William Yng had stayed long enough to see the labs begin work. Both were more oriented toward business than research, though their doctorates hung on the wood panel wall.
Harrison leaned back in his chair, arms up and hands clasped behind his neck. Vergil noticed the merest hint of sweat stains in each armpit.
“Vergil, that was very embarrassing,” he said. His white-blond hair was artfully arranged to disguise premature thinning.
“Sorry,” Vergil said.
“No more than I. So you asked Mr. Bernard to visit our labs.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought he would be interested in the work.”
“We thought so, too. That’s why we invited him. I don’t believe he even knew about your invitation, Vergil.”
“Apparently not.”
“You went behind our backs.”
Vergil stood before the desk, looking glumly at the back of the VDT.
“You’ve done a great deal of useful work for us. Rothwild says you’re brilliant, maybe even invaluable.” Rothwild was the biochips project supervisor. “But others say you can’t be relied upon. And now… this.”
“Bernard—”
“Not Mr. Bernard, Vergil. This.” He swung the VDT around and pressed a button on the keyboard. Vergil’s secret computer file scrolled up on the screen. His eyes widened and his throat constricted, but to his credit he didn’t choke. His reaction was quite controlled. “I haven’t read it completely, but it sounds like you’re up to some very suspect things. Possibly unethical. We like to follow the guidelines here at Genetron, especially in light of our upcoming position in the marketplace. But not solely for that reason. I like to believe we run an ethical company here.”
“I’m not doing anything unethical, Gerald.”
“Oh?” Harrison stopped the scrolling. “You’re designing new complements of DNA for several NIH-regulated microorganisms. And you’re working on mammalian cells. We don’t do work here on mammalian cells. We aren’t equipped for the biohazards—not in the main labs. But I suppose you could demonstrate to me the safety and innocuous nature of your research. You’re not creating a new plague to sell to Third World revolutionaries, are you?”
“No,” Vergil said flatly.
“Good. Some of this material is beyond my understanding. It sounds like you might be trying to expand on our MABs project. There could be valuable stuff here.” He paused. “What in hell 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 bio-logics.”
“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. Re-combining 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.”
2
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 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.