What was Omnitech’s reaction? That depends on who in the corporate management you’re talking about. And when.
The first time I mentioned the idea to Johnston, the CEO, was the day I met him at the factory in Yonkers. I visited Momma later that same afternoon.
I drove my own car down to meet Johnston that morning. Usually I enjoyed driving the Infiniti, although the jam-packed morning traffic along the Bronx River Parkway made me wonder why they called it the rush hour. You could hardly move in this snarling, growling jam of automobiles and trucks. The speedometer on the dashboard went up to 160 miles per hour; I remember the salesman at the dealership grinning at me as he pointed out that the government’s safety bureaucrats had insisted the car be redlined at 150, but it would actually go much faster. I felt lucky when the traffic inched up to 40. And most of these poor slobs go through this every day. Every morning and every evening. What a life.
There was nothing to do but sit behind the wheel and listen to Chopin on the CD player. It was going to be a tough day. A meeting with Omnitech’s chief executive officer over a problem that one of the other corporate divisions had run into. He expected me to solve their problems, as if I didn’t have enough of my own. And then a visit with Momma at the nursing home.
And the next day promised to be even tougher. Jess had phoned and invited me to dinner with him and Julia. I accepted, of course. I had to. But I wasn’t looking forward to it. It would be the first time I’d seen Julia since their wedding, except for the humanitarian dinner. I wondered how I would get through it.
Omnitech’s biomanufacturing plant had originally been an old Yonkers factory building, faded stained brick with row after row of little windows. It still looked old and seedy from the outside. But it had been completely gutted inside and rebuilt to house the people and equipment that produced genetically engineered biotechnology products. This was where Omnitech still manufactured the oil-eating bugs that Jesse and I had first developed, back when we were both still students. Still without paying us a penny for them.
When the residents of the neighborhood learned that the factory would be manufacturing “artificial bugs,” they just about went berserk. NIMBY gone wild. There were demonstrations and angry city council meetings. People screamed about “germ warfare” and “mutant monsters.” The mayor made threatening speeches and the TV news shows loved the whole controversy. Omnitech’s public relations staff worked night and day, showing the news media, the mayor, the city council, delegations of worried citizens that the “bugs” to be manufactured could in no way harm human beings. They showed concerned neighborhood citizens the entire blueprints of the plant and pointed out the safeguards that ensured no contamination could get out of the building. None of that helped. At last they promised to hire as many local residents—especially ethnic minorities—as possible. That, and some well-placed emoluments, did the trick.
The city council’s vote was close; Omnitech’s request for building permits and zoning variations squeaked through by one vote. The corporation’s CEO, W. Christian Johnston, congratulated himself in front of the board of directors. “We didn’t buy one single vote more than we had to.”
The factory opened. Omnitech hired some of the locals. No mutant monsters haunted the neighborhood. The furor died away.
Johnston had originally wanted to build the factory in the Bronx and establish a training center for blacks and other ethnic minorities next to it. The thought of the Bronx really shook up the board of directors, though, so they compromised on this location in Yonkers. The battle to open the factory had been bad enough, Johnston conceded. He gave up his idea of helping the Bronx.
Johnston was a big success for Omnitech. He had battled his way out of the black ghetto of West Philadelphia and been hired by one of the corporation’s construction subsidiaries. He moved ahead swiftly on a combination of brains and the willingness to work harder than anybody else, and eventually he rose to the top of the corporate construction division in Pittsburgh. Once promoted to the board of directors, he quickly showed that he was much more than affirmative action window dressing. Within five years of his board membership, his election to CEO was virtually unanimous.
He was a big man. Not much taller than I am, but heavy, ponderous, like a football lineman, with huge hands that were still callused from his years of operating front loaders and construction cranes. He looked younger than his years; his rich baritone voice was still strong enough to shout down obstreperous board members when he had to. The only sign that he was nearing retirement age was his short-cropped hair. It was almost pure white. He called it “Omnitech blond.”
Now he led me down an aisle of gleaming stainless steel biogenerators, heading for the place on the factory floor where they were having trouble, a massive hulking black man in a three-piece Brooks Brothers suit. I was wearing a sports jacket and slacks.
“You’ve got that look in your eye, Arthur,” Johnston said to me.
“What look?” I said as innocently as I could.
“That look that means you want more money.”
“You’ve been talking to Lowenstein.”
“No, Sid’s been talking to me.”
The factory floor was quiet except for the muted hum of electricity. Off in the distance somebody was playing a country and western radio station, all twanging and wailing. The biogenerators, big ten-foot-tall stainless steel cylinders topped by domes of heat-resistant tempered glass, made hardly any noise at all. The fluorescent lamps high overhead threw curving highlights against the polished steel and glass and made Johnston’s deep black skin shine as if he were perspiring.
“So what is it?” he asked me. His tone was bantering, almost. He was smiling but his dark eyes showed no trace of amusement.
“Oh, just something that Jesse and I have started tinkering with. I can handle it with discretionary funding for the time being.” I was trying to decide how much to tell him. Corporate support is vital to any research program, but if the corporation refuses its support the program dies. No sense risking a refusal so early in the game. I certainly didn’t want to get him worried about stem cell politics.
But Johnston was insistent. “What’s it all about?”
“Well . . .” I drew out the word reluctantly. “If this concept pans out, we might be able to do something about paraplegics.”
“Do what?”
“Get them up and walking, I hope.”
“Like that guy who played Superman?”
It was too late for Christopher Reeve, but at least I had Johnston’s attention. I began explaining as we strode along the factory aisle. On either side of us the biogenerators cultivated silent industrious colonies of genetically altered bacteria that were tirelessly producing more of themselves. The microbes had been designed to digest various forms of industrial wastes, crude petroleum, toxic chemicals. They were harvested and shipped to oil spills, chemical factories, paper mills, municipal landfills. There they gobbled up the wastes and converted them to carbon dioxide, methane, water.
Other processors in the factory were producing agricultural products: bacteria that made potatoes resistant to frosts, microbes that fixed nitrogen from the air for wheat and other cereal grains so that they needed far less chemical fertilizers than previously.
Johnston looked intrigued with my idea about paraplegics, but not happy. “Another medical project. A lot of competition there.”
“Nobody’s doing anything like this,” I said.
“Maybe so. But you’ve got all those goddamned government agencies to deal with. Look what they’re doing to your clinical trials. Lowenstein tells me we’ll hafta send your team to Mexico, for god’s sake. Or maybe Brazil.”
“That’s part of the cost of doing business,” I replied. “You factor that into the price when the product comes on the market.”
“Yeah, and then the goddamned government pressures us to lower the price,” Johnston grumbled.
I kept a straight face. I’d never heard the CEO use the word “government” without “goddamned” in front of it.
“Medical projects are a big pain in the butt, you know.”
“But very profitable,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? You heard what the goddamned Department of Agriculture is doing now? They want us to pay royalties for the genetic materials we use. Royalties to some half-assed Third World countries who claim that the raw materials we use come from their territories. Part of the Biodiversity Treaty, they claim. Royalties, by damn! There go any profits we might make.”
I let him grumble. There were hardly any other people on the factory floor. The equipment churned along unattended, except for the teams sitting in the monitoring stations up on the iron grillwork balcony above us. They watched their gauges and display screens as intently as any NASA mission controllers.
But there were half a dozen men and women in white smocks standing around the conglomeration of pipes and tubing at the end of the row. They all had radiation gauges clipped to the breast pockets of their smocks.
“This is why I asked you to drop by,” Johnston said. “This is where we’re having trouble.”
There were big red DANGER—RADIATION signs plastered on the tubing and walls all around the equipment. I noticed that Johnston stopped a good twenty feet short of the black and yellow warning lines on the wooden floor.
The corporation had other research operations, in addition to my lab. One of them was under way here at the Yonkers plant, a program to engineer a microbe so that it could take dissolved radioactive uranium and thorium out of contaminated water and convert them into solid pellets. The pellets would be much easier to dispose of safely than tons of radioactive water. They were working with a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans, which could withstand enormous amounts of radioactivity, from what I’d read. The engineers called the bug “Conan the Bacterium.” The process was being developed by Omnitech’s nuclear power division. It was not a Grenford Lab program, not my problem. Until now.
“Does Habermeir know you’ve asked me to look into his work?” I asked, keeping my voice low enough so that the technicians attending the apparatus couldn’t hear me.
Johnston made a snorting noise that might have been a laugh. “I told him I was doing it. He wasn’t happy about it, but what the hell.”
I nodded. I didn’t like stepping on the toes of other scientists in the Omnitech family. But I needed Johnston’s support for my own programs and to keep that support I had to keep the CEO happy. Politics. There was no way around it, you had to be good at politics to get to do the science you wanted to do.
Still, I couldn’t help muttering, “How can you expect anything but trouble, dealing with radioactive material?”
Johnston fixed me with a stern gaze. “There’s a lot of money to be made in cleaning up nuclear wastes. And it’s a good thing to do, Arthur. You’re always telling me we should be doing good things, aren’t you?”
“I know, but—”
“Well, cleaning up the environment from radioactive wastes is as good as they come, I think. So does the PR department. We could get a lot of happy mileage out of this, once it works right.”
“If it can ever be made to work right.”
Johnston smiled with a mouthful of teeth. “You’re the scientist, Arthur. I’m just a money-grabbing corporate executive.”
“Sure you are.”
The black man laughed. “You going to help us out on this one?”
“I’ll try,” I said, with what I felt was the right amount of reluctance. Let him know I’m doing him a favor and he owes me one in return. “I’ll talk to the technicians. And I’ll need to see all the reports the project engineers have written.”
Johnston beamed at me and clapped me on the back hard enough to stagger a moose.
“Regrow nerve cells so paraplegics can be cured, huh?” he said. “Could put us into a whole new business line. Maybe I could use it to hold off the goddamned Germans and their buyout attempt.”
That surprised me. “The Germans are back?”
“They never left, Arthur. And now they’ve got a whole goddamned consortium of European firms with them. This time it’s going to be rough. Really rough.”
So I left Johnston worrying about a hostile takeover and drove up to the nursing home in White Plains with a boxful of reports on the nuclear waste project denting the back seat of my car.
Visiting Momma was never easy. We both knew she was dying and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it. Me, the big-time scientist, and I had to sit there just as awkward and helpless as some peasant from the Middle Ages.
Momma had always been a fighter. When the auto accident took Dad’s life and both her legs, she battled back from her wheelchair, fought the doctors and lawyers and insurance companies and the entire care-giving bureaucracy of New York to stay in her own home and maintain control of her two sons. Gertrude Marshak did not admit defeat, not to anyone.
As the elder son, I became the man of the house, the responsible one who fixed the plumbing and did the grocery shopping and took odd jobs while attending school and studying for scholarships. Jesse could have a more normal life; he was outgoing, gregarious. He kept our apartment in Brooklyn Heights lively with friends and music and his own irrepressible charm.
“Watch out for your brother,” Momma told me time and again. “Jesse has no common sense, you’ll have to take care of him.”
I did that, without resentment, without stint. When Momma had her first stroke Jesse was spending the weekend at a friend’s house and I couldn’t find him because he and his friend had decided to take the subway out to Jones Beach and they hadn’t come back yet. I was all of fourteen years old. I was frantic, trying to track him down while the ambulance crew wheeled Momma out of the apartment. Even in the hospital, waiting up all night to hear if Momma would live to see the sunrise, I kept telephoning every half hour to see if Jess and his friend had come home yet. It wasn’t until the next morning that Jess showed up at the hospital with a single daisy in his fist that he had picked from the hospital’s front lawn.
Well, that was Jesse.
Now I climbed the creaking stairs of the Sunny Glade Nursing Home, heading for the corner room on the second floor that had been Momma’s home for the past four years. A young attendant in whites smiled at me as she passed me on the bare wooden stairs. I smiled back automatically. I was thinking ahead, beyond this visit with Momma, worrying about tomorrow night’s dinner and Julia.
It was hard to think of the pitiful shriveled thing sitting up in the hospital bed as the woman who had been my mother. It looked more like the dried and wrinkled husk of some discarded marionette, its strings long cut, its usefulness long over. An oxygen tube was taped to one nostril. Her once-luxuriant hair was dead white and so sparse her scalp showed through. A faded baby blue nightgown hung limply on her emaciated frame.
The tumors were eating her up, consuming her body and wasting what little strength she had remaining. The strokes had paralyzed her left side and taken away her ability to speak. Yet the fire of life burned in her eyes. Even through her contorted face I could see that Gertrude Marshak was still fighting, still clinging to existence. It was almost as if the pain were the only thing she had left, the only reminder that she was still alive.
I hesitated at the door to her tiny room. It was barely large enough for her bed, a chair, and the bureau on the opposite wall that held a television set. The window was sealed shut and grayed with years of soot and grime from the nearby highway. There was little to see out there anyway except one forlorn maple struggling to survive in a field that had been paved over and turned into a parking lot. The only bright spot in the room was the vase of flowers standing beside the TV.
Momma stirred. Her bed had been cranked up and she could see the doorway. One corner of her mouth twitched in what might have been an attempt to smile.
I stepped into the room, feeling as awkward and helpless as I always did.
“Hi, Momma,” I said as brightly as I could manage.
Her eyes shifted to the swivel table beside her bed. The laptop computer I had bought her rested on it, with the oblong black TV remote control unit beside it. I swung the table in front of her and lifted her right hand to the keyboard.
HELLO DARLING, she typed slowly. Momma had been an office manager before the accident, and an excellent touch typist. Now, with only one hand working, it was more difficult.
I pulled the chair to where I could see the blue screen with its white letters and sat down. “How’re you feeling?” I asked.
HOW SHOULD I FEEL? It was her feeble attempt at humor.
“You look pretty good,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. “Better than last week, I think.”
FEEL ABOUT SAME
“The flowers look nice.”
THEY BRING NEW ONES EVERY OTHER DAY
THANKS FOR THEM VERY THOUGHTFUL OF YOU
Her hand looked like a bird’s claw. No flesh on it at all. Skin mottled and gray. But her mind was still alert. I couldn’t help thinking that Momma’s true essence was really in the computer more than the frail dying husk of her body.
I said, “I had lunch with Jesse last week, the day after his award dinner.”
I could see her eyes brighten. Quickly she typed, BEST NEWS IN A YEAR!!!
“Has he been to see you?”
LAST MONTH
I made a point of visiting Momma every week or so.
JESS VERY BUSY, she typed. ALWAYS ON CALL
Very busy, I thought. Sure. Like I’m not. Then I said, “I’m having dinner with him and Julia tomorrow night.”
WONDERFUL
The wooden chair felt hard and uncomfortable. I confessed, “I’m kind of scared about it, Momma. I don’t know how I’ll get through the evening.”
YOU CANT AVOID THEM ALL YOUR LIFE
“I know,” I said. “But still . . .”
YOU STILL LOVE HER
“I don’t know, Momma. I don’t know if it’s love or hate or what. It hurts, whatever it is.”
IS SHE COOKING
“No, we’re going to a restaurant. Someplace Jesse’s picked out.”
GOOD
“Still, it’s not going to be easy.”
BRING A DATE
“Huh?”
BRING A DATE DONT GO ALONE
“You think I should?”
DEFINITELY
“I don’t know if I can find someone on such short notice.”
FIND SOMEBODY
I grinned at her. “I suppose I could rent a date if I had to.”
DONT BE FUNNY
“I’ll see what I can do.”
LOVE YR BROTHER
“I do love him, Momma. In spite of everything. It felt great to see him again. We’re trying to get past this chasm that’s grown between us. But it isn’t easy.”
COME SEE ME WITH JESS
“The two of us together?”
I wanted to reply that she wasn’t going to die for a long time, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Momma had never hidden behind phony words.
“I’ll tell him tomorrow night. It’s a good idea, both of us coming to see you together.”
GOOD NOW FIND A DATE
“You’re tired? You want me to leave?”
YES
I got up from the chair slowly. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can get for you?”
NEW HEART, she typed. Her hand hesitated a moment, then pecked out, NEW LEGS TOO
“I wish I could, Momma,” I said as I bent to kiss her forehead. Her skin felt dry and cold, lifeless, like parchment. “I wish I could.”