Organisms

© Copyright 2011, 2012 Mark Gooding.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.\

Cover photo and design copyright 2011 by Michele Gooding. All rights reserved. Visit us at nonPCfiction.com. Excerpts from Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, translated by Ralph Manheim copyright © renewed 1971 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

isbn: 978-1-4669-5041-2 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-5040-5 (e)

Trafford rev. 07/31/2012

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Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

One World, One View

One

Amid the glitter and gleam of a modern science laboratory, two men sat conversing in quiet tones.

One of the men was black, about sixty years old, around six feet tall with a lean, muscular physique whose muscularity had clearly been enhanced by strenuous physical activity. If you saw him, in fact, you would not be surprised to learn that he spent two hours in the gym every weekday afternoon, and not just on the treadmill, either. He was proud of the fact that the young studs in the weight room regularly paid him homage for the rigor of his weight-training regimen and the results it produced. It would not be misleading to say he defined himself more by the strength of his physical carriage—his lean, hard, athletic body—than by the degrees conferred on him for all his strenuous academic labors. His hair was close cropped, and his face was somewhat long and pinched, including his nose, which was almost Semitic. He wore wire-framed glasses, and because of his pinched features his students, at least the undergraduates, often had trouble determining when he was being serious with them and when he was joking. They couldn’t tell whether his perpetually bemused expression was meant to convey good-natured teasing or genuine ridicule. It didn’t help that he had a low opinion of them, at least in general, often commenting on the superficiality of their ideas and their lack of intelligence. They were too entranced by their electronic gizmos, as he called them—their cell phones and ipods and handheld Web browsers and tiny cameras—to give the world of serious science its due attention. So he told them, scornfully, and he said it straight to their faces. He meant it when he said it, but they doubted that a man of such intellect and erudition would be so openly derisive toward them, and so they didn’t quite know how to take him. They should have taken him at his word.

The other man was white, about the same age, and even taller, but of a completely different physical and emotional disposition. He was neither muscular nor athletic, and he probably hadn’t set foot inside a gym since he left high school. He had the gangly physique of a terminal nerd, an egghead, whose devotion to his intellectual labors had always far outstripped his attention to his physical person. Nonetheless, he spent time outdoors, hiking, always in the interest of observing firsthand the flora of his environment; and so while the physical benefits of his avocation may have been entirely incidental, they had the cumulative effect of keeping him lean and relatively fit, save for a slight pot belly. The man had a round, doughy face, smiling eyes that belied a persistent and sometimes confounding skepticism (it sometimes compelled him to indecision when decisiveness was called for), and a careless tousle of brown hair. Like his colleague, he looked younger than his years, and also like his colleague he viewed students, at least undergraduate students, as a nettlesome but necessary burden on his time. His life was devoted to serious scientific study, and most students who crossed his path and sat in his classrooms were neither serious nor scientific nor studious. But he was less impatient with them than his colleague was, and he had a natural sympathy for them besides; and, perhaps most importantly, he was less demanding of them, more prone to take pity on them when grades were assigned, and so in general they tended to think well of him.

It was late of a spring afternoon, a mild, sunny Friday afternoon when the beach beckoned many students away from the university, and others, many others, disengaged themselves early from academic rigors to get a head start on the pleasures of the weekend. The science building was virtually empty as the time for going home approached. Life in earnest—the real life of relaxation and enjoyment—had already begun for most students, and for many faculty members as well. A few colleagues—a very few colleagues—and a few struggling graduate students as well, suffering the demands that they hoped and prayed would carry them to fruitful careers, still busied themselves in the building’s laboratories and offices. But the halls were quiet. The cleaning crew wouldn’t come in till nearly midnight, and the two scientists could have held their private conversation with the door of the laboratory open without fear of being overheard; but they weren’t sure of that, and so the door was closed. Sunlight found its way into the lab through three square windows in the outside wall, but the windows were small. They were also high, well above eye level—to provide more efficient workspace along the wall, but also to keep the attention of laboratory occupants focused on important matters within the laboratory rather than on aesthetic attractions outside it. Antiseptic, institutional fluorescent light overpowered the sunlight and dominated the room, as did an antiseptic odor that would assuredly, provided your mind was properly disposed, offset any thoughts of the wonderful and alluring smells of life outside the building.

You worked with Garrett Willard, didn’t you, Arnold? the white man asked his colleague.

Is that what you’ve been angling at, Chad? You could’ve just come right out and asked me; I would have told you.

They were sitting on adjacent stools between two of the four long, gleaming Formica-topped counters that spanned the room from just inside the hallway door to within a few feet of the opposite wall, the wall that separated the laboratory from the great outdoors. Arnold—Dr. Arnold Johns—sat with his back against one of the counters, feet sprawled on the floor in front of him, elbows behind him on the counter top. His colleague and friend, Chad Kinman, also a biologist by training, sat facing him, feet planted, knees slightly bent and spread, hunched forward, forearms on his inner thighs, hands loosely interlocked between them. It was the pose of a supplicant, and that, for all intents and purposes, is what he was.

It isn’t like that, he said. And you know it. But the man is probably the foremost virologist in the country.

"The whole world, maybe. Knew God’s own amount about genetics, too. Man was a regular storehouse of scientific knowledge. A regular encyclopedia."

"And?"

And what?

I just wanted to know what you thought of him.

Kinman had that sheepish smile on his face that Arnold Johns didn’t like very much. It was, in Johns’ estimation, a wheedling smile, the smile of a man who wanted a favor but didn’t have the backbone to come right out and ask for it. Johns always hated seeing that smile; and he saw it more often than he cared to from Chad Kinman. As a matter of fact, he saw it more often than he cared to from a number of his colleagues. The place where they worked seemed inordinately disposed to wheedling and other forms of conniving. That’s how Arnold Johns felt, anyway, and he realized that he no longer drew the satisfaction from his work that he once had drawn. He realized, in fact, that he was merely biding his time till retirement. He had not entirely lost his passion for science, but he had lost his passion for work of most any kind, and in particular any kind of work that involved groveling, self-abasement. And all work in the public sector, it now seemed to him after a long career in that sector, involved self-abasement. Most of all, though, he had lost his passion (if passion he’d ever felt) for the people he worked with. What he felt for them now was more like disdain. At the very least it was indifference. He simply did not think that well of people who showed, in his view, insufficient self-respect. Give him the rugged individualist, the self-made man. That was a timbre that he could both understand and respect. He had less respect, much less, for people who made their living by begging for endless handouts. And those people were his colleagues—and, at one time, he acknowledged, had been himself. But he no longer had patience with the species, and he was anxious—sometimes even desperate—to dissociate himself from it.

And so he responded to his colleague’s backhanded appeal for a favor with the sort of sarcasm he felt it deserved. Thought his breath stank; that’s what I thought of him.

Come on.

Come on, nothin’. Man had a serious case of halitosis. Coulda made a career out of studying his own mouth.

But as a scientist?

As a scientist, he knew his business. I already told you that. He knew a hell of a lot more’n I knew—or know now, or probably ever will know. Are you satisfied now?

And he’s approachable?

I’ll call him for you.

The smile on Kinman’s face now was more in his eyes than in his mouth, and it was no longer a smile of supplication. Now it was a smile of boyish enthusiasm. This could be big, Arnold, he said.

Could be, I guess. But what the hell do I know? I study bugs for a living.

A virus is a bug.

Not one of mine, it ain’t. I can’t tell you what that thing of yours is. I’m not sure I even wanna know.

Kinman was still smiling that irritating smile, and Johns couldn’t resist needling him again. Maybe you discovered a new strain of HIV, he said. You’ll be the bane of the gay community. You’ll have a whole new set of protestors outside your window this time. Or the same protestors, but with different signs.

This is something new, I’m telling you. It’s not in the databases.

I hate to think what-all might not be in the databases.

It’s something new, Kinman repeated confidently.

An anomaly.

No. I’m telling you.

A mutation.

Maybe. But that wouldn’t make it any less new. Or any less exciting. Besides, it doesn’t look like a mutation to me. This looks like something new.

I’m glad to see you’re all worked up about it.

Willard’s endorsement would give me validation. Not to mention it would draw attention to the whole discovery. Widespread attention.

Publicity whore.

Kinman seemed not to hear the sarcasm because he was suddenly distracted by a thought that had just occurred to him. He sat up quickly, and his features showed the faintest trace of alarm. But the smile was still in his eyes—the deceptive smile was always in his eyes. And it was at the corners of his mouth. How ethical is Garrett Willard?

I know what you’re thinking, Arnold Johns said. Whatsamatter, you afraid he’ll come out here and steal your great discovery?

Kinman was a tad embarrassed at being read so easily. He had heard more than once in his life that his face was an open book—but still, he wasn’t that transparent, was he? It wasn’t as though people could actually read his thoughts in his expression. Could they?

He was perhaps a tad embarrassed as well at being so suspicious in the first place. He was, after all, a scientist. Wasn’t knowledge the goal of science? Should it matter, then, who takes credit for the new discovery? Wasn’t it enough to contribute in some small way to human knowledge—even without having your name on radio and TV for it—and thus perhaps contribute in some small way to the safety, the comfort, the convenience, maybe the productivity of humankind? But he was human, too, and so he was fallible. He could, in his own estimation, be forgiven a tiny indulgence of his ego.

Willard is a quirky bastard, Arnold Johns was saying. Enigmatic. Even secretive. He’s got, just… this strange way about him. Like he’s got a bug up his behind most of the time.

"Now there’s a scientific phrasing. And a heck of an image, to boot. But at least it has something to do with bugs, I suppose. Your area of specialization."

Can’t help it, Arnold Johns shrugged. "I only had personal contact with him for a few days—at least personal contact of any length. And I felt creepy the whole time. Man’s got no sense of humor. He’s not irritable, exactly, and I never saw him angry—he’s just so serious. In a strange way, I mean. Seems incapable of finding any joy or humor in life. It was like he was perpetually engaged in responding to some emergency. Couldn’t joke around. Couldn’t stop to smell the roses. He shrugged. I don’t know. He just gave me the creeps, that’s all."

Well, it’s his expertise I’m interested in—not his personality.

"It’s his reputation you’re interested in. His name. Remember who you’re talking to here."

Kinman’s endless smile turned sheepish, and he looked at the floor for a moment; but he was not really ashamed. At any rate, he wasn’t ashamed enough to be bothered by it. He was too thrilled at the prospect of substantial notoriety in his future to be bothered by a little shame.

I’ll talk to him, Arnold Johns said. And he stood up straight, clearly with the intention of ending their conversation and his own work week. The gym awaited him. See if he remembers me.

How could he forget the greatest scientist CTI has ever produced? It was flattery coming from Chad Kinman’s mouth, and flattery did not generally sound good coming from him. Nor did humor. The flattery always sounded much too much like what it was, instead of what it was intended to sound like, and therefore was correctly understood as insincere and even patronizing; and the humor always sounded much too much like what it wasn’t, instead of what it was intended to sound like, and therefore was taken seriously when it shouldn’t be. In either case, Kinman often did not get the reaction he wanted.

I’ll call him, Arnold Johns repeated somewhat impatiently.

No email?

No email. I’ll use the telephone.

That’s good. Emails are easily ignored. Kinman stood up too, but he did not appear eager to leave the company of Arnold Johns, whom he considered his best friend, or the place where he spent by far most of his waking hours.

You goin’ to the Tulewskis’ tomorrow night? Johns had already started toward the hall door, and he turned around to ask the question. He did not want to start up a new conversation, just to finish this old one. He wanted to get back up to his office and then straight out of the building and away from the campus. The gym awaited him.

I don’t think so, Kinman replied. But he was squeamish about it. He was a good deal more concerned about his career, and thus more concerned about campus politics, than his friend was. He would pass up a chance to rub elbows with his colleagues—and more importantly with the administrators who controlled the university purse strings—but he would not be complacent about it. In fact, he would fret about it as if he had forgotten some important family occasion—his daughter’s birthday, perhaps—and knew it would be held against him. "Tell me you’re not going," he said suddenly, almost in a panic.

"Are you kidding me? And put up with that crowd for a whole Saturday night? He waved a hand. Bad enough I gotta put up with ’em here."

In that case, I probably won’t hear from you this weekend?

I’ll call Willard, Johns said. But not till Monday.

That’s not what I meant. I just—I guess I won’t see you till Monday.

Probably not. But I’ll be here then, I promise. You can count on me.

Kinman let it go at that. Another person might have been offended by the persistent insinuation that all he wanted from his friend was yet another small favor. But Kinman was not offended, and the thought that he should be offended barely flitted through his mind, at the moment. He was often slow to recognize things, many different things, but especially things about interpersonal relationships, and nobody knew it better than he did. So he accepted his personal shortcoming and tried not to let it bother him. It did bother him, just the same, but it did not bother him enough to spoil the excitement of the moment. Springing from the science building into the glorious outdoors that early evening he felt a grand sense of exhilaration and anticipation, a gladness to be alive suggestive of a sustained endorphin rush.

Two

The rush, however, was still mitigated by a nagging sense of self-questioning, and even mild self-chastisement. Walking home, he felt bothered again, vaguely troubled by the annoying quirks in his own personality that made him, for better or for worse, who he was. He felt put off—yet again—by the impression of himself that he knew he had made on his colleague and friend. He liked Arnold Johns, after all, and he respected him. He wanted to be liked and respected by Johns in return. Now that he was alone with his own thoughts, the thought returned to pester him that yes, once again, and probably for the umpteenth time in their long acquaintance, he had left Arnold thinking of him more as a cloying opportunist than a trustworthy friend. What a way to be perceived by a man he so highly esteemed! He should be ashamed of himself; he should be truly ashamed—but shame just wasn’t much in his nature. His renewed discomfit remained for only a very short time, and then Arnold Johns departed his mind entirely, for the time being, along with all other traces of self-doubt about his motives, his actions, or his character. Before the science building was out of sight behind him his spirits soared again. Ah, the vicissitudes of emotional life! And all in a single afternoon! In no time at all he was feeling as high on himself and the world as he had the moment he swung open the doors of the building and tasted the evening air.

In part the mood swing resulted from his virtually complete self-absorption. As much as he wanted other people to think well of him, especially certain other people—Arnold Johns being one of those certain other people—he was ultimately far too wrapped up in himself to let another person’s low opinion of him trouble him for very long. His ego was easily bruised, but it was a powerful ego and healed quickly. What he needed from Johns now was important to him, and one of the many things life had taught him was that persistence can sometimes be ingratiating. When one wants something important and is determined to pursue it, one sometimes hurts others’ feelings and has his own feelings hurt in return.

In part, too, the mood swing was a product of the walk itself. At certain times of the year, especially, Chad Kinman could not make that walk without pondering the totality of his life with elation. Who wouldn’t want such a life? He was securely tenured at a major university, a university known not only for its contributions to the welfare of humankind but also for its enviable location near the glorious Pacific Ocean—within close striking distance of the quasi-pristine wilderness, to the north and east, and yet equally close to a thriving modern metropolis, with all of its urban amenities and attractions, just to the south and east. Moreover, the campus itself was a benign and beautifully tended sanctuary from both the roar and clatter of the city and the humdrum banality of the suburban sprawl around it. Tucked away in the foothills of a large mountain chain, with its carefully blended mix of architectural styles, from the neoclassical to the modern to the postmodern; laced with broad walkways to facilitate the movement of hordes of students, and with narrow, winding, cloistered footpaths to permit occasional escape to well-placed secluded nooks for contemplation; it was a tree-shrouded, vine-covered, flower-perfumed homage to the vision and foresight of the philanthropists who had willed its existence, and to the planners who had turned that will into gorgeous reality. Walking down around the corner of the science building, past the science library and toward Dogwood Mall, Kinman made it a point to let his eyes feast on the magnificent profusion of color and his nose imbibe the magnificent profusion of fragrances that encompassed his work environment and seemed to buffer it from all that was harsh, unpleasant, discordant, or even merely pedestrian in the world beyond the campus. He was a lucky man indeed to work in such a place, far luckier than his immigrant forbears, who had spent their days and many of their nights inhaling the poisonous air of noisy, filthy steel mills and factories.

What’s more, he was married to a fellow professor, also tenured, and equally secure in her place at the university. It was not rare to find married couples teaching at the same university,