“Each group has its own warren, like special rabbits,” Hurlbet said. “We keep the strains pure here—and you know what happened to the collie. Its nose got sharper and its head thinner till its brains were pushed out through its ears. A terrible, terrible thing. But what can I do? They’ve all got families to support.”
An intense young man stopped Hurlbet. He was very excited. “Guess what?” he said, like a kid.
“What?” said Hurlbet.
“You’ll never guess,” the young man said.
“What?” said Hurlbet.
“We’ve got the apparatus in the lab set up so we can run six hundred tests a day.” The young man’s eyes gleamed.
“That’s nice. This is Dr. Fairley. Dr. Letter. He’s in charge of our Pure Research.” I said hello, and Letter kept going.
“We used to squeeze out a measly two hundred tests a day using the old spectrograph,” said Letter. “Now we’re up to six hundred a day. Beautiful data. Beautiful.”
“Very nice,” said Hurlbet. “Do you suppose you could ever get up to a thousand tests a day? It would make an interesting paper.” The thought of so many beautiful data threw Letter, and he went mumbling down the hall.
Hurlbet turned on me. “It’s the equipment,” he said. “The damn Research-O-Rama equipment! The minute they’re in a jam, my people scream for fancy instruments and tools, big enough to hide behind.” I laughed because I thought that was what he was after.
“Don’t laugh,” Hurlbet said. “That’s how we get the big government research jobs. Monumental cyclotrons and well-behaved, competent people to use them. God save us from competence! Isn’t there one nut around? I gave a lecture last summer to my staff on the importance of individuality in research. The next morning seven of my people showed up in yachting blazers.” He shut his eyes tight the way he does and led me back into the office.
“Who’s your best man?” I asked. “The hottest?”
“You mean best-known?”
“All right, best-known.”
“Oh, oh! Dr. Fairley, so you don’t think we’ve got any big names?”
I happened to be looking at Hurlbet’s desk. It didn’t have a paper on it. The ashtray was a pond lily sitting on a spotless lake. He noticed my sudden interest in the desk.
“Oh, yes, my secretary read in Fortune that top executives—she loves that word ‘top’—should never look messy-busy.” He leaned over his desk to get nearer me. “About the big names. A couple of years ago at a board of directors meeting— I’m on the board. I’m the dean of research directors, don’t you know that?” I said that I knew that, and he said that was better, because he hoped he hadn’t worked forty years for nothing. After all, what other research director had a clean desk? He winked at me again in that warm style of his, and I would have signed anything.
“At the board meeting,” he went on, “they asked me why I didn’t have any great men around to sort of dress up the lab a bit. They wanted the star system, like the movies. So I hired Cole and Hart, the Nobel Prize winners. Now we have our own private Nobel Prize winners in residence.”
I’d heard of Cole and Hart, About twenty years ago the two of them had done some great hormone work. I remembered seeing their pictures. Beards and vests. Old-school Nobel Prize winners! Venerable—not the young crew cuts you see today. But what the hell were they doing here?
“Aren’t Cole and Hart old men?” I asked.
“They have a little age on them, yes,” said Hurlbet.
“And aren’t they biologists—in this lab?”
“Certainly they’re biologists!” said Hurlbet. “In the first place, what does the board of directors know? In the second place, Cole and Hart were way past their prime, so I got what you might term a good buy. But a funny thing happened, Fairley. The two old codgers are a gold mine.”
I pointed out that Cole and Hart hadn’t published anything in twenty years and wanted to know if they were about to make a breakthrough.
“Of course not,” said Hurlbet. “But look here. This lab is funded from the Defense Department—almost all of it, that is. You must show competence—not brilliance, not commitment, but competence. ‘Competence’ means that in your research stable you have personnel with academic backgrounds in the technical areas implied by a research contract. Never mind whether these personnel bother to roll out of bed in the morning. Their degrees must appear on a laundry list of people who will make up the task force. The Defense Department loves the expression ‘task force.’ They eat it up.”
Hurlbet was climbing away from me again. He kept doing that. “I still don’t see what you need biologists for,” I said.
“Ah, ah!” he said. He put his finger alongside his nose like a mock Santa. “Up there”—he raised his eyes—”there’s the moon. Right?”
“Right,” I said. I really loved this guy.
“Right,” he said. “It’s going to take a long time to get there. Right?”
“Right,” I said. Hurlbet was great. Even if he did have me playing straight man again.
“Right,” he said. “And people have to live, survive, endure. Right?”
I nodded. He lifted his arm. “That’s what I mean. Biology. Those two old Nobel-O-Rama gentlemen have put me over the top on contracts more than once. Star system.” It turns out that with Nobel Prize winners’ names on the billing, Hurlbet snatches the front money. He looked at me hard. “It’s a terrible thing, technical competence. Come on down and meet them, they’re a grand pair.”
Dr. Hurlbet led me out of the office and down the hall. There were loudspeakers squeaking people’s names, but I noticed some men had little units in the breast pockets of their Hollywood white lab jackets.
“What are those little things?” I pointed to a guy with one.
“That’s the latest thing in status around here,” Hurlbet said. “My deputies just sold me on the idea. Research personnel rating as senior staff and above don’t get called on the loudspeaker. They get contacted by their own private intercom. Honest to God, Fairley! They’ve got me. I can’t stop it. You tell me how, and I’ll stop it, but I don’t know how.” He shook his head. I felt sorry for him again, like last night. Here he was, the biggest in his field. He put his hand on a knob of a door with an opaque glass top.
“Get ready. Here are Cole and Hart.”
He opened the door into a room about sixty by thirty feet. Spotless. Ready for an appendectomy. That sterile. And the equipment. A vacuum pump was going phoom, phoom, phoom. And green liquid was having a hell of a trip for itself up and down a row of glass tubes. There was more damn bubbling and complicated splashing than in Jekyll and Hyde. A long row of stainless steel animal cages, doors open. The floor was covered with white mice, a few dogs, and some rabbits.
“Follow me,” said Hurlbet. He waded through the animals to the end of the lab, where there was a kind of tiny living room. A pipe rack, bookcases, easy chairs, and a fireplace. Two old men were sitting next to each other; they both had canes. One of them had a lapful of bread, and he was feeding the animals.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Hurlbet.
The old man with the bread jumped. His body was obese, little and fat, but long, thin legs stuck out from him stiffly. Like a drugged spider.
“Dr. Cole,” said Hurlbet, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Fairley.”