Apart from his giving her the occasional direction, they didn’t talk for a long time. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. She simply seemed as lost in her own thoughts as he in his.
He found himself wondering about her fiancé. She hadn’t mentioned him, despite being so open about her family, brothers, work – almost everything under the sun. Obviously she intended to keep that part of her life private.
They pulled into a parking lot in front of a sleek glass-and-steel, tan building made up of three- and four-story modules, each floor wrapped in black-tinted windows. A modest plaque on the snow-covered grounds near the front entrance read NUCLEUS LABORATORIES.
“The place looks like a cubist’s limousine,” Lucy said. Even at this late hour there were few parking spaces. She pulled into one close to the front door. “What’s a fancy operation like this doing out here?” She reached into a small cooler lodged on the floor of the backseat and retrieved from it the brown paper bag containing a half dozen blood samples they’d drawn from patients over the course of the day. Holding it up between them, she added, “Obviously you don’t keep them in business.”
He grinned, took it from her, and got out of the car. The cold tingled the top of his ears. “Some conglomerate built it about five years ago,” he said, leading the way up a wide set of freshly shoveled stone steps. He gestured to the dark line of thick forest on the perimeter of the property. “Liked the cheap real estate and low taxes, I guess. They mostly do work for insurance companies that underwrite employee health plans for a slew of head offices in New York City. The volume’s huge, and they ship a refrigerator truck worth of samples up here every night of the week. The lab provides state-of-the-art service that does everything from routine bloods to genetic workups for research groups. Even Saratoga General and hospitals in Albany contract out their more exotic testing to them. I’m told that all these things taken together bring in more than enough to pay the heating bills.”
“No offense, but why do they bother with you?”
He winked at her over his shoulder. “Because I know the manager. Come on and see science fiction in the sticks.”
They approached a sliding glass panel that opened automatically and admitted them to a marbled reception area befitting any Park Avenue address. The click of their shoes on the floor echoed like castanets.
“Hi, Doc,” said a spindly, white-haired security guard seated behind a polished curved console with a dozen video screens. He pressed a button that unlocked one of the six mahogany doors behind him with a loud click.
They passed through into a long, white corridor.
Minutes later they shook hands with Victor Feldt, a broad-faced, big-bellied man with a walrus mustache and a complexion that easily flushed. His cheeks glowed as he greeted Lucy. “Welcome to our lab, Dr. O’Connor. May I show you around?”
“Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble-”
“You don’t take the tour, you’ll hurt his feelings,” Mark interrupted. “Victor lives for the chance to show off his pride and joy to visitors, especially ones in the business.”
Victor turned a shade more crimson. “Now that’s not true, Mark. I just thought she’d be interested.”
“And I am, Mr. Feldt. Lead on. This facility looks amazing.”
His cheeks got so red, Mark wondered if he shouldn’t take the man’s blood pressure. He’d been treating his hypertension for years, but Victor kept going off the pills whenever he got a new boyfriend because they affected his sex life. Not that that happened often, Victor being one of the few gay men in Hampton Junction.
Let him have his fun talking shop with Lucy, Mark decided. The blood pressure could wait.
He followed along behind, having received the tour several times during the facility’s first years of operation. Impressive as the layout was – room after room of spinning centrifuges, automated conveyers feeding trays of sample wells into multitask analyzers, chorus lines of pipettes dunking into specimens and sucking them up fifty at a time, then reams of tiny tubing carrying the fluids to more machines that would perform another fifty tests on each of them – it still accomplished nothing more than the basic job of any hospital lab. Break the human body down to a measure of its red cells, white counts, and biochemical ingredients – sodium, potassium, proteins, albumin, and so on. Except this outfit scaled itself to process ten times the load of any single health care institution.
Mark watched Victor animatedly explain the details of the operation to an extent that went far beyond what Lucy could possibly want to know, a mark of his loneliness for intellectual company as much as his enthusiasm for his work. He’d arrived from New York when the lab opened, but gravitated away from Saratoga, unable to afford a place among the rich and famous, yet wary of the homophobia of Hampton Junction. So he’d settled on the no-man’s-land between the two, a pretty but isolated cabin by a lake not far from here, where his lifestyle wouldn’t raise eyebrows. When he wasn’t involved with anyone he substituted the Internet for companionship, and owned one of the most awesome computer setups Mark had ever seen in a private home. Victor approached Mark to be his doctor after several bad experiences with a few general practitioners in Saratoga. “Nothing overt, just that they were old farts and not at ease with handing the potential health problems of someone who’s gay,” he’d explained. “On the other hand, I hear nothing scares you.”
They neared Victor’s pièce de résistance, the section where they did the DNA analyses. Located in an area behind glass windows that could only be accessed through an airlock, some of the machinery looked similar to the other equipment they’d seen, but many pieces were right out of Star Trek, and workers inside wore protective clothing.
“Just like in making CDs, we keep a dust-free environment to reduce the risk of contaminating specimens,” Victor explained. “We have a dozen PCR machines, and three dozen electrophoresis units…”
As Victor expounded on the technology of breaking down DNA and separating out specific genes for identification, Mark noticed a change since he’d last been corralled into a tour. There were far more people working in this unit than he remembered, and now it was after hours. “Business must be good as far as the DNA department goes,” he said jokingly, as they returned to the front entrance.
“Booming,” replied Victor in complete earnestness. “We’re even testing for genes that don’t have a confirmed link to diseases yet, but may be a potential risk.”
“Who wants that information?” Lucy asked.
He shrugged. “The New York corporations that have contracts with us. Seems particularly to be the new wave in executive health plans. And, of course, research labs. But we figure the real up-and-coming market will be aging baby boomers who want to know if they’ve got the gene that killed Mom or Dad. Screening for the mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimer’s – you name it. Real cutting-edge stuff…”
Mark cringed as Victor talked. Unfortunately, his prediction had already begun to materialize. Recently a chain of stores better known for selling soaps and shampoos began to market an expensive screening test to detect genetic defects linked to breast and ovarian cancer, placing the devices on display alongside bath oils and bubble beads. And last month his patients started to bring in magazines normally associated with tips for beautiful homes and fine gardens that now carried ads urging readers to get genetically tuned in to what they should eat and drink by screening for disorders affected by diet. The trouble was, not everyone who has a genetic defect will go on to develop the disease they are at risk for, and at this stage of the game, no one could pick the winners from the losers. Rampant commercialization of the technology would lead to widespread, fruitless, and potentially harmful anxiety, while places like Nucleus Laboratories made a pile of money telling healthy Americans that they were sick. He and Victor had already had heated debates over the issue. But this was Victor’s moment in the sun with Lucy, so Mark held his peace.