Doctors in both Shanghai and Boulder had spent days poring over MRIs of Han’s legs taken well before his injury when he was being considered to be a subject, but found no minute tear that might have caused the rupture, or any other structural weakness. Eventually the Chinese and American scientists agreed that his injury was an unhappy fluke. “Shit happens” was how the phlegmatic, down-home Victor Klaastens had put it, and Berman finally had to agree that it applied in this case, just as it did in the rest of life.
Jimmy had gotten Liang holed up in an apartment somewhere in Milan. Berman didn’t know where it was, he only knew that Liang had flown back to Milan in the same Chinese plane that had taken Han to Colorado, and that he was being attended to by a Chinese doctor who had spent the past two years at Nano. The Chinese were leaving nothing to chance, or leaving nothing to the Americans, which might be the same thing as far as they were concerned.
“How is Liang?” asked Berman as Jimmy got his things together.
“Liang is well. He feels strong and wants to start racing. Despite his situation, it turns out he enjoys this.”
Berman preferred not to think too much about the “situation” of the people brought in from China to be trained at Nano.
“He knows if he succeeds, he can win freedom for himself and for his family.”
Berman smiled at Jimmy.
“Of course. That is a great incentive for him.”
“Fear of failing is a better incentive, don’t you think,” said Jimmy, making a statement rather than asking a question, and Berman didn’t have an answer for him before the two split up. Berman watched Jimmy head off before he himself hustled toward the crowd grouped around the riders. He wanted to have a few words with Victor Klaastens.
CHAPTER 36
Before the accident, and for most of her adult life, Pia always had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. She would read too late at night, and her sleep would frequently be interrupted by nightmares, so invariably when her alarm went off, she wasn’t rested and the temptation to grab another hour was often too much to resist. But in the weeks since she had been released from the hospital, she’d woken up at six o’clock, seven days a week, ready and eager to start her rehab work.
For Pia, being out of action was torture. Other than her slight problem in getting out of bed in the morning, she hated inactivity, as it never failed to awaken her latent sense of vulnerability. Vacations were a pointless waste of time, as far as she was concerned. They allowed too much time to think. Pia needed to have a purpose in her life, a reason to get out of her warm and cozy bed and something to keep her going though the day. And now, following the car crash, she had two.
One was that she wanted to get back to work. After being emancipated from foster care, Pia always had work. First it was getting her high school equivalency and her chores at the convent. Then it was college, and finally medical school and her brush with death. After Pia’s sojourn away from civilization, it was Nano that dominated her life for eighteen months, and even after she started to have questions about Nano and what might be going on there, she remained totally absorbed by keeping her work separate from concerns of what other people there might be up to. She was absolutely sure that what she had been doing was honorable and ethical and might even serve to help her friend Will. So she wanted to get back to work. She wanted to find out what had happened with the compatibility experiments with mice: if the results had been the same as with the roundworms — that is, if her idea of incorporating the polyethylene glycol into the microbivores’ diamondoid outer shell had continued to solve the immunological problems.
On top of that was the flagellum issue. Had the programmers looked at her idea of writing code that would cause microbivores to tumble a flagellated bacteria over and over on itself, thereby rolling up the flagellum before the bacteria were drawn into the digestion chamber?
Pia was excited to answer these questions. But there was a problem, a major problem. When she was still in the hospital after the accident, Mariel had called Pia and told her that she would not be permitted to return to Nano even for a visit until she had been completely and totally cleared by her general surgeon, the hospital physical therapy team, and her orthopedic surgeon. It had not been a discussion. In her usual harsh manner, Mariel had told her not to show up or call until she was completely over the sequelae of the accident with letters from her physicians to that effect.
Even though Pia was used to being on her own and liked it, her forced separation from Nano bothered her more than she had expected, making her realize she was not quite the introvert she thought she was. She had come to count on the minor interactions she had with other people in the course of a regular day, a circumstance that without Nano had to be fulfilled by visits to her physical therapist. Unfortunately that didn’t do the trick. In her small, ten-unit apartment building, she knew no one by name and only a couple of the other residents by sight.
Her only visitors were Paul, whom she saw regularly, and the physical therapist who came to Pia’s home until she was well enough to drive over to the gym to work out on her own. Paul had been a godsend to Pia in many ways. He had even arranged to borrow his parents’ second car for Pia to use. The VW was destroyed, and Pia wasn’t in a position where she could ask Nano for a replacement.
The second major motivation in Pia’s restricted life to get her out of bed in the morning was Berman. Whenever she was lying there, reluctant to get up, as she was that morning, she thought of him. When her broken arm ached, as it did at that moment, or her ribs hurt, or her splenectomy incision burned, she pictured Berman. Pia wanted answers from him, answers to her original questions about Nano and, more pressing to her, answers about the car accident.
Paul confirmed to Pia that in her feverish near-waking state, she had seen Zach Berman in her hospital room. It was awkward, Paul admitted, but Berman had tried to give off the air of a concerned boss coming to visit a colleague. Paul hadn’t bought it. He actually told her what he had really thought, namely that Berman was a predator and that she should stay the hell away from him.
“You mean a sexual predator?” Pia had asked.
“Of course a sexual predator.”
“What made you think that, not that I don’t believe you?” In her mind’s eye Pia could see Berman trying to force his way into her apartment.
“His attitude and his person,” Paul said with a shake of his head. “It’s too bad, because he’s a nice-looking guy.”
As Paul Caldwell suspected, Pia was totally convinced that their accident had not in fact been accidental, even though she had total traumatic amnesia about the event. What swayed her was that she knew herself: there was no way under the sun that she would simply drive off the road. In her mind, the only explanation was that the VW had been run off the road, and Pia wondered how the authorities could even suggest otherwise.
Paul told Pia that he had been interviewed, and the incident was officially described as an accident, caused in part by Pia’s excessive speed. He said the police had come to this conclusion even though he had told them, despite his own memory problems, that he vaguely recalled the involvement of another vehicle behind them just before the accident. When Pia had heard this, she insisted on talking to the officers who had interviewed Paul. But in spite of her protestations, they said there was nothing to investigate, a recommendation that was accepted all the way down the official line. They said that their examination of the mangled car revealed no suggestion that another vehicle had been involved. There were plenty of scrapes and dents but no other paint and no damage that couldn’t be explained by the multiple rollovers the car had experienced.