Читать книгу Green Earth - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 27

Anna was pleased to see Frank back in the office, brusque and grouchy though he was. He made things more interesting. A rant against oversized pickup trucks would morph into an explanation of everything in terms of yes or no, or a discussion of the social intelligence of gibbons, or an algebra of the most efficient division of labor in the lab. It was impossible to predict what he would say next. Sentences would start reasonably and then go strange, or vice versa. Anna liked that.

He did, however, seem overly impressed by game theory. “What if the numbers don’t correspond to real life?” she asked him. “What if you don’t get five points for defecting when the other person doesn’t, what if all those numbers are off, or even backwards? Then it’s just another computer game, right?”

“Well—” Frank was taken aback. A rare sight. Immediately he was thinking it over. That was another thing Anna liked about him; he would really think about what she said.

Then Anna’s phone rang and she picked up.

“Charlie! Oh dovelie, how are you?”

“Screaming agony.”

“Oh babe. Did you take your pills?”

“I took them. They’re not doing a thing. I’m starting to see things in the corners of my eyes, crawlies you know? I think the itches have gotten into my brain. I’m going nuts.”

“Just hold on. It’ll take a couple of days for the steroids to have an effect. Keep taking them. Is Joe giving you a break?”

“No. He wants to wrestle.”

“Don’t let him! I know the doctor said it wasn’t transmissible, but—”

“Don’t worry. Not a fucking chance of wrestling.”

“You’re not touching him?”

“And he’s not touching me. He’s getting pretty pissed off about it.”

“You’re putting on the plastic gloves to change him?”

“Yes yes yes yes, tortures of the damned, when I take them off the skin comes too, blood and yuck, and then I get so itchy.”

“Poor babe. Just try not to do anything.”

Then he had to chase Joe out of the kitchen. Anna hung up.

Frank looked at her. “Poison ivy?”

“Yep. He climbed into a tree that had it growing up its trunk. He didn’t have his shirt on.”

“Oh no.”

“It got him pretty good. Nick recognized it, and so I took him to urgent care and the doctor put some stuff on him and put him on steroids even before the blistering began, but he’s still pretty wiped out.”

“Sorry to hear.”

“Yeah, well, at least it’s something superficial.”

Then Frank’s phone rang, and he went into his cubicle to answer. Anna couldn’t help but hear his end of it, as they had already been talking—and then also, as the call went on, his voice got louder several times. At one point he said “You’re kidding” four times in a row, each time sounding more incredulous. After that he only listened for a while, his fingers drumming on the tabletop next to his terminal.

Finally he said, “I don’t know what happened, Derek. You’re the one who’s in the best position to know that … Yeah that’s right. They must have had their reasons … Well you’ll be okay whatever happens, you were vested right? … Everyone has options they don’t exercise, don’t think about that, think about the stock you did have … Hey that’s one of the winning endgames. Go under, go public, or get bought. Congratulations … Yeah it’ll be fascinating to see, sure. Sure. Yeah, that is too bad. Okay yeah. Call me back with the whole story when I’m not at work here. Yeah bye.”

He hung up. There was a long silence from his cubicle.

Finally he got up from his chair, squeak-squeak. Anna swiveled to look, and there he was, standing in her doorway, expecting her to turn.

He made a funny face. “That was Derek Gaspar, out in San Diego. His company Torrey Pines Generique has been bought.”

“Oh really! That’s the one you helped start?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, congratulations then. Who bought it?”

“A bigger biotech called Small Delivery Systems, have you heard of it?”

“No.”

“I hadn’t either. It’s not one of the big pharmaceuticals by any means, midsized from what Derek says. Mostly into agropharmacy, he says, but they approached him and made the offer. He doesn’t know why.”

“They must have said?”

“Well, no. At least he doesn’t seem to be clear on why they did it.”

“But it’s still good, right? I thought this was what start-ups hope for.”

“True …”

“You’re not looking like someone who has just become a millionaire.”

He quickly waved that away, “It’s not that, I’m not involved like that. I was only a consultant, UCSD only lets you have a small involvement in outside firms, and I had to stop even that when I came here. Can’t be working for the feds and someone else too, you know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My investments are in a blind trust, so who knows. I didn’t have much in Torrey Pines, and the trust may have gotten rid of it. I heard something that made me think they did. I would have if I were them.”

“Oh well that’s too bad then.”

“Yeah yeah,” frowning at her, “but that isn’t the problem.”

He stared out the window, across the atrium into all the other windows. There was a look on his face she had never seen before—chagrined—she couldn’t quite read it. Distressed.

“What is then?”

Quietly he said, “I don’t know.” Then: “The system is messed up.”

She said, “You should come to the brown-bag lecture tomorrow. Rudra Cakrin, the Khembali ambassador, is going to be talking about the Buddhist view of science. No, you should. You sound like them, at least sometimes.”

He frowned as if this were a criticism.

“No, come on. You’ll find it interesting, I’m sure.”

“Okay. Maybe. If I finish a letter I’m working on.”

He went back to his cubicle, sat down heavily. “God damn it,” Anna heard him say.

Then he started to type. It was like the sound of thought itself, a rapid-fire plastic tipping and tapping, interrupted by hard whaps of his thumb against the space bar. His keyboard really took a pounding sometimes.

He was still typing like a madman when Anna saw her clock and rushed out the door to try to get home on time.