A Scientist's War

      At this moment he was unfortunately called out
by a person on business from Porlock...
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the ending to "Kubla Khan"

      Somewhere, at the back of some corner of my mind, Mary is screaming. I shut my eyes to avoid the stare of the Nobel prize upon my mantelpiece and watch this all begin again. Back then I couldn't see her; my eyes were filled with the magic of The Answer.
      She was so young. So strong, or gave that appearance, anyway. I loved her.
      "Damn you, Will!" she said. "Listen to me for once." I finally turned away from the computer monitor that displayed the culmination of years -- hell, a lifetime -- of work. I couldn't see her features through the haze of complex fullerenes and caged immune cells. Her raging gray eyes framed within that dark hair took on what I imagined to be the expression of NK cells trapped inside a fullerene: natural killers trapped in a man-made bomb casing. I felt like a microbe foreign to the organism of our marriage.
      "What is it?" I demanded, my tone sharper than I had wanted. Immediate regret, not only for causing her pain but for supplying what I belatedly realized was fuel for her fury. Yet I stood at the edge of a great discovery, and it took all my effort to hold onto a glimpse of an ephemeral procedure and the resultant construction which would realize our research.
      A few years before, her interruption would have been a welcome reprieve to hours of hard work. Mary sometimes brought me a tall glass of ice water, or read me a powerful piece of poetry she was teaching part-time at the University, or modeled a new bit of lingerie and lured me away from my dark-paneled office for the night. She was dependable, and I needed her.
      But that a long time before, this was a different night, and the work was more important. Things had soured over the years, tinctured either by my dedication -- or, as she called it, obsession -- to research, her growing disillusionment in our marriage, or both.
      "I've been trying to tell you that I need your attention," she barked. The way she roared her demand made giving her what she wanted the last thing I could do.
      "Mary," I began, taking a deep, calming breath before continuing, "you need to understand that I'm in the middle of something very important. The work we're doing at the Center could save millions of lives, and-"
      Before I could finish came the barrage, the attacks against my preoccupation with work, the bitter personal attacks and emotional siege. Between each word she screamed or wept at me I inserted a new carbon or titanium bond, a further link of complexes that would hold together the bomb-package which would lead to the eradication of AV-1 -- and likely many other evolved viruses, as well -- by injection into the host body. Fighting a battle was easier that way: Occupy yourself creatively while besieged.
      She was waging an intimately familiar battle. And the tragedy was that it always ended the way this one ended: in tears and an admission that all the pain and injury she had inflicted was only a cry for attention, a revelation that she had something important to say. But this time I was unable to fulfill my role, unable to hear the important thing she had to say at the end, unable to take her rage-weakened body into my arms and hold it close as I had so often before. I was unable to let the emotional after-fight insight into ourselves transmute into a fluid bond that often led to passionate lovemaking and tearful reunion, and just as often to my begging for forgiveness and promising to be a better husband now and forever, from that moment on.
      This time, I was far too close to The Answer. I held, nearly within the grip of my mind and its ephemeral epiphany-place, the penultimate stage of our fullerene-M1 (or, as my man Reynolds more accurately termed it, our fullerene or metallo-carbohydrene-M1) cagework and its intimate relation to the cell-package it was to courier to the front lines of the Advanced Virus pandemic:
      We had burned more than two years following up on advances in artificially cleaving the viral envelope glycoprotein gp120 to genetically re-engineered CD4 proteins that captured the AV-1 virus and kept it from budding or manufacturing more virus, but we were left with an organism overburdened by long-chain byproducts that were just as deadly in the long run as the original virus... a case where the cure was nearly as bad as the disease.
      We wasted another two years in an intellectual retrograde into injectable inorganics and inhibitors. When we came to the final, inevitable dead-end and the financial drywell that followed, I'd nearly lost two of the best minds on my research team.
      If it hadn't been for the National Advanced Virus Bureau's panic-spending after the 2007 annual statistics rolled in, revealing that the USA alone had at least 20 million full-blown cases and likely four times that in AV-1 infection, my team at the Center for the Study of Advanced Viruses would have been disbanded along with all the other pure-research facilities then meeting similar fates all around the world. Pure science is always the first casualty of financial depression. Even so, without big headline results, research seldom is able to unfurl the golden public-funds carpet to further results -- and so science continues to fall in a downward spiral to lethargy and more dead ends until there is nothing left but a deadly problem and a public outcry to Solve it! solve it!
      So the cry to cure the pandemic finally outdecibeled the conservative howl to crush "waste" spending, and CSAV, among other research centers, was infused with millions undreamed-of before. I hired ten more men and women from all spectra of chemiscience: geneticists, organic and inorganic chemists, chemical engineers... name the subfield, it was represented at CSAV. And equipment: electron microimagers, x-ray microcrystallographers, Benson tubes... name the machine, we bought it or borrowed it on sharetime.
      And it so happened that one of the organic chemists teamed with one of the chemical engineers to conjure up the idea of "microscale chemical warfare," and upon studying their research I conceptualized the "fullerene bomb," whereafter Reynolds began to run the track toward designing the perfect bomb-casing that could be externally guided and microcontrolled by hematosurgeons....
      All that good fortune, insight and hard work became focused at my home-office -- small, feeling even more cramped because of reams of research and notes pinned all over the walls -- with me at my computer at 2:35am on a Sunday morning, imagining the scaffolding that would support a bridge to cross the chasm that spanned from the not-good-enough to The Answer on the opposite side. Where was hidden The Cure. That scaffolding and bridge architecture was beginning to fade into mist, and that mist was beginning to scatter with the hot rays of need and anger radiating from Mary.
      I spoke the words.
      "Please, Mary, let me finish what I'm doing here." I smiled an obviously forced and possibly condescending smile -- one I didn't intend -- which only distracted and irritated me more. Quickly I continued:
      "This is really, really important, and-"
      "You always say that," she interrupted as fire re-stoked in that smooth neck like a finely etched marble brazier.
      "This is different," I pressed. "I'm onto The Cure!" Her face didn't reveal anything I had hoped; we'd had this very same argument many times before with only mild permutations on the theme. But this time was different.
      "Please understand," I continued. "The Cure! Nothing is more important than that." Just as the last came out, just as I was about to edit my comment with, But that doesn't mean the marriage isn't important, Mary spoke.
      "Our marriage is important," she said, calmly and slowly, her eyes locked onto mine. Rage shuddered inside her like the potential energy of U235 the moment before it reaches critical mass.
      "Every day, you tell me your work is the most important thing. Enough. You haven't found the cure yet, so a few minutes with me can't make any difference."
      The vastly complicated chemical device I had been working at continuously for 15, maybe 20 hours was flying apart in my brain. Inwardly, I howled in pain. All those years, all those millions of dollars, all those lives that had been lost to the ravenous virus while we had searched blindly. There I stood on the ridge overlooking my bridge, and I was about to forget how to construct it. Damn the human brain for its insubstantiality and lack of co processors! Damn me for my habit of thinking too long without touching keyboard or mouse!
      "Just a minute," I mumbled, realizing that if I didn't type and draw in the bonds and formulae and cell-package that I had mentally joined together into our fullerene-bomb but hadn't yet sketched into the computer's memory, I would lose them in the wisps of snapping synapses. Possibly forever. I couldn't be responsible for forgetting The Answer to The Cure, yet a human mind can only maintain complex, interwoven concepts for so long....
      So I turned silently away from hot-cheeked and white-lipped Mary to tap at the keyboard and push at the mouse. The screen displayed window upon window of intermeshed graphics, formulae, 3D biologics, active cell animators, molecule-builder simulators and so on, all tenuously linked by electrons I could coerce into blending into a single unit for later study and lab testing. I was rapidly forgetting, but the more I got down the more I would be able to pick it up again, and once it was all down I would save it onto disk and hard memory....
      That's when it happened. That's when she did it.
      She pulled the plug.
      She burned the bridge. Cast a plume of flame through the mists hovering at the edge of recognizable form and shoved me twirling down into the gulf between The Question and The Answer.
      The computer's autosave only kicked in every half hour. To be sure, more than twenty minutes had passed from the last save. By the time I retyped and reanimated, the inspiration would be lost. The conclusion would escape.
      The Answer had vanished at the pale white hands of a woman I once had loved unconditionally, whom I once had pledged to love forever before a church full of 200 friends and relatives. Momentarily, an image of her passed before the eye of my memory: She in pure white, brocade, pearl, diamond; almost-black hair framing a porcelain face like a dollop of cream in a cup of coffee. A smile in vivid coral lipstick. I could sense the emotion of that day, of those early years....
      Mary's eyes flashed remorse; this was not something she had done before, the unforgivable. Her lips parted to frame what I know now would have been an apology.
      But I reacted first, and violently: My trembling hand hurled a dry coffee cup at a paneled wall, smashing the cup, denting the paneling, and sending several tacked-up sheets in flight to the carpet. I spat words and phrases at my wife, things beyond our traditional plane of battle. She listened, wide-eyed, for much too long. I raved as a man torn from the deepest of concentration and insight at the moment of culmination. If only she had waited another half hour, another ten minutes.... Damn her anger, and damn mine!
      She absorbed it all. One-third of my mind writhed in bitter hate, one-third in agonied frustration, one-third in unbearable remorse. The whole of it in confusion and defeat, and loss.
      She merely reiterated what she had stated before:
      "Nothing is more important than our marriage. Your work can wait until tomorrow morning. It always does." The response words leapt to my lips, unbidden in the mindless rush of battle:
      "Don't you understand? I was on the verge of discovering what might be the cure for these quick-evolving viruses! That's vastly more important than two tiny lives."
      "It's more than that..." she began. Burning, I waited only moments before demanding what that was supposed to mean. Her response was simply to fade, alone, from my presence into another room, the bedroom I suppose. I don't know because I plugged the computer back into the surge box and immediately re-immersed myself into my work. Guilt and anger lay heavy on my shoulders.
      The Answer was far off by then. It had scattered in the rays of Mary and the explosions of Will, been obliterated from view. By the time I returned to CSAV and led the Monday morning synthesis-group discussion, I was light-years from where I had gotten before the struggle with Mary. I was weeks behind.
      That's when I fought a new battle. On the one side, marriage and the love and joy it sometimes provided; on the other, the productivity of work, the happiness and fulfillment it offered through its species-wide effects. I had trouble concentrating at the Center and couldn't hope to do so at home with the heavy and loud cloud of silence hovering there. I couldn't turn to anyone for the answer to my small, personal question: I had watched my mom and dad carve each other into filets during their twenty years of marriage; their example held no answer. I had watched my few personal friends pass from single to married to single again, or from single to married and full of conflict. Dedicated scientists don't make good spouses or spouse-models, and I have always had difficulty embracing non-scientists as friends. There was no wisdom available.
      The question in my life was multiplied by The Question. The product equaled unproductiveness and a downward crash of emotion that further interfered with the progress -- or, better, lack of it -- in our marriage and at work, and so on, like an interminable viral life-cycle, slippery to identify yet obvious in retrospect....
      It became clear that I must choose between marriage and work. One held love, the other achievement and hope for humanity. And what are two people in the death-shadow of millions? What good would those lives be if the Advanced Viruses evolved completely out of control and consumed everyone?
      So it became clear that I had to stay away from her until I had re-realized the vision. I had to choose work, if only for a few weeks or months until The Answer reappeared. It would serve as a cooling-off period, and I called her and said as much. She answered that it was best I remain at the lab until I was ready to work on "us."
      How could I have known that, in choosing one or the other, all was lost for me? But a scientist must keep in mind the big picture. The problem is that a man is not a man without love -- not even a scientist -- nor is he a man without accomplishing great work if he is capable of it.
      So I remained at the Center, slept and breathed The Question. I bore scars of pain and regret from words received and spoken, and they cataracted my inner eye so that any progress I made came at a slow crawl and with great effort.
      I saved, into the Center's big computer, every little step upward that led toward what felt like the peak I had reached previously -- saved religiously onto tape in fear that some new hand would pull the computer's plug or that the facility would experience a brown-out, despite our emergency generators. Paranoia, but conditioned paranoia.
      I got closer. The team got closer, and their insights led me closer still, and together we plodded on, lured by a bait suspended in the past. The AV's claimed more lives. Reynolds often worked through the night with me, his solemn and confident presence an inspiration and anchor for me. We spoke, not of regret nor nostalgia nor the past, but of molecular bonds and induced apoptosis; we talked of epic wars whose casualties, we hoped, would number billions... not in human lives, but in AV-1 viruses bombed and fooled into martyring themselves into oblivion. We theorized and hypothesized, microfactured and tested.
      Even in the bright light cast by such lofty and heroic concepts, progress was slow. So much depended on me, on what I could remember and re-conjure. The team I led was, individually, rather splintered and divergent, though genius. I was the binding force, the energy between the disparate and essential units of the group. If I became mired in emotional sludge, I mired the team and splattered that sludge across their microscope lens to The Answer. They lacked only direction, my job.
      Two months passed. When Mary called, I realized I had seen her only a handful of times since our big fight, since I had lost The Answer to The Cure. Most of those brief meetings had come during the few days after I left her for CSAV.
      "We need to talk," she said matter-of-factly. Talking on the phone was safe, and we usually did that once every couple days.
      "Okay," I replied, my brain battling between giving her my full attention and completing the complex chain I had been building on the animator.
      "No," she said, "we need to talk," with tears in her words. I was too blind to hear the tears.
      "Go ahead." My impatience glared. I bit my lip and lost whatever insight I'd had before she called. I slapped the save key and turned away from the mocking monitor. "I'm sorry. You have my full attention."
      "Not here, not on the phone," she snapped. "Come home. I need to tell you something."
      "But I'm in the mid-" Although I tried to cut the sentence short, it came out far enough. The damage was done.
      "Never mind." The phone fell dead, soon replaced by a wavering dial-tone. Her last words hung heavy and timeless in that white-silence, weaving a pattern from its monotony; they were spoken as if by a machine. Slow. Tired. Unemotional.
      I knew I had to go home. Had to race into her arms, throw mine around her, pull her close to mine and repeat over and over that she would be the most important thing in my life as soon as I found The Cure -- from then on. I could resign my position at CSAV, since the man heading the team who formulated The Cure would forever live comfortably and secure. He could, in all eyes and opinions, rest unashamedly upon his laurels. Pasteur needed only to create one process to impress himself upon history, Lister only his antiseptics. I would make it up to her for all the long nights in the den at home, the long months at the Center.
      But not until we had realized The Cure. So I ran nowhere.
      A few days later, a neighbor called. She informed me in gasping breaths that my little vinyl-sided house in the suburbs was surrounded by police cars and ambulances, and that the local news team was setting up lights on our plot of dandelion-crowded lawn.
      Ignoring the minor progress I had made that night, I ran out to my car and drove toward that hub of panic at speeds well exceeding the posted limits. If flashing lights and a siren had halted me during that 20-minute odyssey home, if I had been stopped and detained for just a few minutes, I may never have seen what I needed to see that night. The Answer would have long remained a mystery, buried beneath the dirt and weeds of a mind gone to seed, dead, empty. But I made it home through the darkness, drove too quickly over potholes and curbs, through our sun-faded fence, over the grass and weeds grown well beyond the manicure Mary desired but so seldom saw without doing it herself, almost to the cement front steps and nearly over the TV crew whose lights glared sterile white.
      If the cop at the front door hadn't realized I was the spouse of the victim, I would have surely been arrested. The gods or demons of Research cleared a path into the house, past a constellation of uniforms and a locker-room of body odors, through once-familiar hallways that seemed suddenly alien and foreboding, into the bedroom.
      Mary was there. On the bed.
      It seems odd to explain all that I saw. I witnessed the coming-together of The Answer. That, I imagine, was far easier to see than the solid, hair-and-blood reality.
      Laid out on that bed was the greatest pair of questions ever posed to me... yet also The Answer. Not just any answer. Certainly not the answer I had sought to the question about our marriage. And an extra question, one brought up by a naked abdomen swollen tight like a loaf of bread, full of something unexpected. And its answer, as well, one tattled by laws forbidding nonessential abortions: a bloodied wire hanger on the ivory carpet beside the bed. The coroner later stated that Mary had inflicted her internal injuries nearly an hour before the external ones that ended her life.
      Amid the rumpled bedding, the brown-spotted sheets... laid out before me and my disbelieving brain was not Mary, no, something else and somehow much more. Mary was long gone, two days the coroner's judgment, and the thing inside gone an hour longer. Spelled out to me was the carbon and titanium shell complex, the T- B- NK- and plasma-cell charge contained within... the genetically specified, induced apoptosis "AV guided missile," as the newspapers would later term it. The Cure.
      The mind is capable of genius when faced by the unbearable, capable of seeing and creating anything in a desperate effort to escape.
      The skewed and pale shell of Mary, the hollow eyes and dull hair, the dried blood clots spattered all around her on the once white sheets where free-flowing wrists and torn insides had drawn diagrams in unwieldy red -- all combined into a moment of epiphany recollected in a deafening tranquillity induced by the overwhelming pressure that room held bottled up in a delayed explosion. I was the trigger.
      Boom, said Mary. Boom, said the sheets. Boom, says the guided missile.
      Mary once told me that she married me because "...I know you're going to do great things!"
      Boom, boom, boom; the walls of my life fell and crumbled to dust.
      We talked of children during the first few years of our marriage. Before my bigamous marriage to Chemistry became dominant.
      Boom, boom, boom; eons and generations passed in my mind, civilizations rising and collapsing beneath their weight.
      When we were first dating, we used to dance to Renaissance Ragtime, on the radio, at her apartment, barefoot.
      Boom, boom, boom; I closed my eyes, or a veil fell across them. Viruses mutated until they became unrecognizable. Strings of molecules leading from the basest of base, free carbon, through the heaviest metals, stretched off into infinity in all directions, a vast network of interlocking helixes composed of keys and lockholes. Keys and lockholes. And filling the void within flowed the ether of life, spelled out in the coinage and form of blood, for life in the battle against the virus means death from our enemy-within's point of view.
      I heard The Answer in words whispered by the room's vacuation of two souls, by the end of a life I once knew and another I hadn't known and which hadn't, itself, known life, in the silence of still lungs, of shrinking skin. Spelled out in dried blood.
      For blood contains The Answer, of course. The pattern Mary's fleeing blood left on the sheets triggered an image in my mind, one which had been lost the evening when she stormed into my study: a simple molecular pattern, one we hadn't investigated at the Center. The process of ensnarement so simple, NK cells embodied by Mary, her thrashing-traces the fullerene-casing. The horror on that bed forced my mind to conjure the only image powerful enough to distract me during my moment in hell.
      The Answer, so simple. I'm told I laughed at that point.
      My psychologist informs me laughter was a defense mechanism. It was much more complex than that, but how could I explain all this to him? I hadn't the energy. How does a man face the realization that what he sought so desperately was such a simple deviation on a theme he had worked over so thoroughly? How does he face the realization that he paid such a dear price for his answer? And how does he face the realization that he knew it all along, and the only thing hiding it was anger, was himself?
      Naturally, The Cure itself took some time to develop. It required a vast, dedicated, and focused effort. I led the team onward, raced out onto our bridge a step ahead of each solid, experimentally verified plank they hammered down. My dedication inspired them, they say. So they say. I believe it was sheer terror that made them realize my vision, for if they hadn't....
      Tom Brokaw last night informed me that my evolved compound -- he calls it by my name, as well as by the more prosaic term -- has saved thousands already. Perhaps millions by this time next year, and countless billions when looking forward at the ranks and files of descendants who have been given the opportunity to be conceived, incubated, and born in a world where the antibiotics of old no longer have any effect.
      Certainly that is why members of the Foundation chose to award me the Nobel.
      What both destroyed Mary and presented the insight necessary for acquiring this prize was my little Grim Reaper. Someone else on my team, Reynolds perhaps, should own this Nobel, not I. I can't stand the sight of it, a thing to glare forever at me like a gilded corpse, a grinning reminder of regret that will outlive me by at least a generation.
      What if I had completed my work earlier? What if I hadn't lost the insight I let Mary steal from me? Would she still be alive? Would we now be a family of three?
      What must a man do for the salvation of humanity? Can he create a cure that will end anything but another external threat? Can he stand before a pulpit or podium and preach or legislate a New Age where the only enemies are viruses? Can he even raise one small baby who will maybe one day become someone's best friend or lover, and maybe those two will do great things? And to what ends are such things done?
      These are not answers. There are no more answers in me. There are only questions.