It was clear that he needed a safe house. And the safest area inside the Collaboratory was, of course, the Hot Zone.

The interior of the Hot Zone was rather less impressive than its towering china-white shell. The Zone was a very odd environment, since every item inside the structure had been designed to withstand high-pressure cleansing with superheated steam. The interior decor consisted of poreless plastics, acid-resistant white ceramic benchtops, bent-tubing metal chairs, and grainy nonslip floors. The Hot Zone was simultaneously deeply strange and profoundly mundane. After all, it wasn't a fairyland or a spacecraft, it was simply a set of facilities where people carried out certain highly specific activities under closely defined and extremely clean circumstances. People had been working in the place for fifteen years.

Inside the dressing room-cum-airlock, Oscar was required to shed his street clothes. He outfitted himself in a disposable paper labcoat, gloves, a bouffant cap, a mask, and sockless ankle-wrapping clean-room booties. Greta Penninger, swiftly appointing herself his unofficial hostess, sent a male lab gofer to take him in hand.

Dr. Penninger possessed a large suite of laboratory offices within a brightly lit warren known as Neurocomputational Studies. A plastic door identified her as GRETA V. PENNINGER, PRINCIPAL INVESTlGATOR, and behind that door was a brightly lit surgical theater. Yards of white tabletop. Safety treading. Drying racks. Safety film. Detergents. Bal-ances, fume hoods, graduated beakers.

Hand pipettes.

Centrifuges.

Chromatographs. And a great many square white devices of utterly unknown function.

Oscar was met by Greta's krewe majordomo, Dr. Albert Gaz-zaniga. Gazzaniga was the exemplar of what Oscar had come to recog-nize as "the Collaboratory look," intense and yet strangely diffuse, like a racquetball player in Lotusland. Gazzaniga spent his working life in clean-room gear, and relaxed outside in rotting sneakers and khaki shorts. Gazzaniga had an eager, honest, backpack-wearing look about him. He was one of the few people in the Collaboratory who identi-fied himself as a Federal Democrat. Most politically active Col-laboratory people tended to be tedious, fuzzy Left Tradition Bloc types, party members of the Social Democrats or the Communists. It was rare to find one with enough grit and energy to take a solidly Reformist stance.

"So, what's become of Dr. Penninger?"

"Oh, you mustn't be offended, but she's running a procedure now. She'll be here when she's good and done. Believe me, when Greta wants to concentrate, it's always best to let her be."

"That's all right. I quite understand."

"It's not that she doesn't take you seriously, you know. She's very sympathetic to your situation. We've had troubles of our own with extremists. Animal rights people, vivisection nuts. . . . I know we scientists lead very sheltered lives compared to you politicians, but we're not entirely out-of-it here."

"I would never think that, Albert."

"I feel personally very sorry that you should be subject to this kind of harassment. It's an honor to help you, really."

Oscar nodded. "I appreciate, that sentiment. It's good of you to take me in. I'll try not to get in the way of your labwork."

Dr. Gazzaniga led him down an aisle past seven bunny-suited workers probing at their jello dishes. "I hope you don't have the im-pression that Greta's lab is a biohazard zone. We never work on any-thing hot in this lab. We wear this clean-gear strictly to protect our cultures from contamination."

"I see."

Gazzaniga shrugged beneath his lint-free labcoat. "That whole gene-technology scare tactic-the giant towers, the catacombs, the airlocks, the huge sealed dome-I guess that made a lot of political sense in the old days, but it was always a naive idea basically, and now it's very old-fashioned. Except for a few classified military apps, the Collaboratory gave up on survivable bugs ages ago. There's nothing growing inside the Hot Zone that could hurt you. Genetic engineer-ing is a very stable field of practice now, it's fifty years old. In terms of bugs, we use only thermo extremophiles. Germs native to volcanic environments. Very efficient, high metabolism, and good industrial turnover, and of course they're very safe. Their metabolism doesn't function at all, under 90 C. They live off sulfur and hydrogen, which you'd never find inside any human bloodstream. Plus, all our stocks are double knockouts. So even if you literally bathed in those bugs-well, you might well get scalded, but you'd never risk infection or genetic bleed-over."

"That sounds very reassuring."

"Greta's a professional. She's a stickler for good lab procedure. No, more than that-the lab is where she really shines personally. She's very strong in neurocomputational math, don't get me wrong there-but Greta's one of the great hands-on lab fiends. She can do stuff with STM probes like nobody else in the world. And if we could just get her hands on some decent thixotropic centrifuges in-stead of this Stone Age rotor crap, we'd be really kicking ass in here."

Gazzaniga was on a roll now. He was visibly trembling with passionate commitment. "In publishable papers per man-hour, this is the most productive lab in Buna. We've got the talent, and Greta's lab krewe is second to none. If we could only get proper resources, there's no telling what we could accomplish here. Neuroscience is really breaking open right now, the same way genetics did forty years ago, or computers forty years before that. The sky's the limit, really."

"What is it, exactly, that you're doing in here?"

"Well, in layman's terms . . . "

"Never mind that, Albert. Just tell me about your work."

"Well, basically, we're still following up her Nobel Prize results. That was all about glial neurochemical gradients evoking attentional modulation. It was the biggest neurocognitive breakthrough in years, so there's a lot of open field for us to run in now. Karen there is working on phasic modulation and spiking frequency. Yung-Nien is our token cognition wizard in the krewe, she does stochastic resonance and rate-response modeling. And Serge over yonder is your basic receptor-mechanic, he's working on dendritic transformer up-takes. The rest of these people are basically postdoc support staff, but you never know, when you work with Greta Penninger. This is a world-famous lab. It's a magnet. It's got the right stuff. By the time she's fifty or sixty, even her junior co-authors will be running neuro labs. "

"And what is Dr. Penninger working on?"

"Well, you can ask her that yourself!" Greta had arrived. Gaz-zaniga tactfully absented himself.

Oscar apologized for having interrupted her work.

"No, that's all right," Greta said serenely. "I'm going to make the time for you. I think it's worth it."

"That's very broad-minded of you."

"Yes," she said simply.

Oscar gazed about her laboratory. "It's odd that we should meet inside a place like this. . . . I can tell that this locale suits you per-fectly, but for me, this has such a strong personal resonance. . . . Can we talk privately here?"

"My lab is not bugged. Every surface in here is sterilized twice a week. Nothing as large as a listening device could possibly survive in here." She noticed his skeptical reaction, and changed her mind. She reached out and turned a switch on a homogenizer, which began to make a comforting racket.

Oscar felt much better. They were still in plain sight, but at least the noise would drown audio eavesdropping. "Do you know how I define 'politics,' Greta?"

She looked at him. "I know that politics means a lot of trouble for scientists."

"Politics is the art of reconciling human aspirations." She considered this. "Okay. So?"

"Greta, I need you to level with me. I need to find some reason-able people who can testify in the upcoming Senate hearing. The standard talking heads from senior management just won't do any-more. I need people with some street-level awareness of what's really going on at this facility."

"Why ask me? Why don't you ask Cyril Morello or Warren Titche?

Those guys have tons of time for political activism."

Oscar was already very aware of Morello and Titche. They were two of Collaboratory's grass-roots community leaders, though as yet they were quite unaware of that fact. Cyril Morello was the assistant head of the Human Resources Department, a man who through his consistently self-defeating, anti-careerist actions had won the trust of the Collaboratory rank and file. Warren Titche was the lab's vociferous token radical, a ragged-elbowed zealot who fought for bike racks and cafeteria menus as if failure meant nuclear holo-caust.

"I'm not asking you for a list of specific gripes. I have a long list of those already. What I need is, well, how shall I put this . . . . The spin, the big picture. The pitch. The Message. You see, the new Con-gress has three brand-new Senators on the Science Committee. They lack the in-depth experience of the Committee's very, very long-serving former chairman, Senator Dougal of Texas. It's really an en-tirely new game in Washington now."

Greta glanced surreptitiously at her watch. "Do you really think this is going to help anything?"

"I'll cut to the chase. Let me put a simple question to you. Let's assume you have absolute power over federal science policy, and can have anything you please. Give me the blue-sky version. What do you want?"

"Oh! Well!" She was interested now. "Well, I guess . . . I'd want American science to be just like it was in the Golden Age. That would be in the Communist Period, during Cold War One. You see, back in those days, if you had a strong proposal, and you were ready to work, you could almost always swing decent, long-term federal fund-ing. "

"As opposed to the nightmare you have now," Oscar prompted. "Endless paperwork, bad accounting, senseless ethics hassles . . ." Greta nodded reflexively. "It's hard to believe how far we've fallen. Science funding used to be allocated by peer review from within the science community. It wasn't doled out by Congress in pork-barrel grants for domestic political advantage. Nowadays, scien-tists spend forty percent of their working time mooching around for funds. Life in science was very direct, in the good old days. The very same person who swung the grant would do her own benchwork and write up her own results. Science was a handicraft, really. You'd have scientific papers written by three, four co-authors-never huge krewes of sixty or eighty, like we've got now."

"So it's economics, basically," Oscar coaxed.

She leaned forward tautly. "No, it's much deeper than that. Twentieth-century science had an entirely different arrangement. There was understanding between the government and the science community. It was a frontier mentality. Those were the gold-rush days. National Science Foundation. NIH. NASA. ARPA .... And the science agencies held up their end of the deal. Miracle drugs, plastics, whole new industries . . . people literally flew to the moon!"

Oscar nodded. "Producing miracles," he said. "That sounds like a steady line of work."

"Sure, there was job security back then," Greta said. "Tenure was nice, in particular. Have you ever heard of that old term 'tenure'?"

"No," Oscar said.

"It was all too good to last," Greta said. "National government controlled the budgets, but scientific knowledge is global. Take the Internet-that was a specialized science network at first, but it ex-ploded. Now tribesmen in the Serengeti can log on directly over Chi-nese satellites."

"So the Golden Age stopped when the First Cold War ended?" Oscar said.

She nodded. "Once we'd won, Congress wanted to redesign American science for national competitiveness, for global economic warfare. But that never suited us at all. We never had a chance."

"Why not?" Oscar said.

"Well, basic research gets you two economic benefits: intellectual property and patents. To recoup the investment in R&D, you need a gentlemen's agreement that inventors get exclusive rights to their own discoveries. But the Chinese never liked 'intellectual property.' We never stopped pressuring them about the issue, and finally a major trade war broke out, and the Chinese just called our bluff. They made all English-language intellectual property freely available on their satel-lite networks to anybody in the world. They gave away our store for nothing, and it bankrupted us. So now, thanks to the Chinese, basic science has lost its economic underpinnings. We have to live on pure prestige now, and that's a very thin way to live."

"China bashing's out of style this year," Oscar said. "How about bashing the Dutch?"

"Yeah, Dutch appropriate-technology. . . . The Dutch have been going to every island, every seashore, every low-lying area in the world, making billions building dikes. They've built an alliance against us of islands and low-lying states, they get in our face in every interna-tional arena . . . . They want to reshape global scientific research for purposes of ecological survival. They don't want to waste time and money on things like neutrinos or spacecraft. The Dutch are very troublesome."

"Cold War Two isn't on the agenda of the Senate Science Com-mittee," Oscar said. "But it certainly could be, if we could build a national security case."

"Why would that help?" Greta shrugged. "Bright people will make huge sacrifices, if you'll just let them work on the things that really interest them. But if you have to spend your life grinding out results for the military, you're just another cubicle monkey."

"This is good!" Oscar said. "This is just what I was hoping for-a frank and open exchange of views."

Her eyes narrowed. "You want me to be really frank, Oscar?"

"Try me."

"What did the Golden Age get us? The public couldn't handle the miracles. We had an Atomic Age, but that was dangerous and poisonous. Then we had a Space Age, but that burned out in short order. Next we had an Information Age, but it turned out that the real killer apps for computer networks are social disruption and soft-ware piracy. Just lately, American science led the Biotech Age, but it turned out the killer app there was making free food for nomads! And now we've got a Cognition Age waiting."

"And what will that bring us-your brand-new Cognition Age?"

"Nobody knows. If we knew what the outcome would be in advance, then it wouldn't be basic research."

Oscar blinked. "Let me get this straight. You're dedicating your life to neural research, but you can't tell us what it will do to us?"

"I can't know. There's no way to judge. Society is too complex a phenomenon, even science is too complex. We've just learned so in-credibly much in the past hundred years. . . . Knowledge gets frag-mented and ultraspecialized, scientists know more and more about less and less. . . . You can't make informed decisions about the social results of scientific advances. We scientists don't even really know what we know anymore."

"That's pretty frank, all right. You're frankly abandoning the field, and leaving science policy decisions to the random guesses of bureaucrats."

"Random guesses don't work either."

Oscar rubbed his chin. "That sounds bad. Really bad. It sounds hopeless."

"Then maybe I'm painting too dark a picture. There's a lot of life in science-we've made some major historic discoveries, even in the past ten years."

"Name some for me," Oscar said.

"Well, we now know that eighty percent of the earth's biomass is subterranean. "

Oscar shrugged. "Okay."

"We know there's bacterial life in interstellar space," Greta said. "You have to admit that was big."

"Sure. "

"There have been huge medical advances in this century. We've defeated most cancers. We cured AIDS. We can treat pseudo-estrogen damage," Greta said. "We have one-shot cures for cocaine and heroin addiction."

"Too bad about alcoholism, though."

"We can regenerate damaged nerves. We've got lab rats smarter than dogs now."

"Oh, and of course there's cosmological torque," Oscar said. They both laughed. It seemed impossible that they could have over-looked cosmological torque, even for an instant.

"Let me switch perspectives," Oscar said. "Tell me about the Collaboratory. What's your core competency here in Buna-what does this facility do for America that is unique and irreplaceable?"

"Well, there's our genetic archives, of course. That's what we're world-famous for."

"Hmmm," Oscar said. "I recognize that gathering all those spec-imens from all around the world was very difficult and expensive. But with modern techniques, couldn't you duplicate those genes and store them almost anywhere?"

"But this is the logical place for them. We have the genetic safety vaults. And the giant safety dome."

"Do you really need a safety dome? Genetic engineering is safe and simple nowadays."

"Well, sure, but if America ever needs a Class IV biowar facility, we've got one right here." Greta stopped. "And we have first-class agricultural facilities. A lot of crop research goes on here. Overclass people still eat crops. They love our rare animals, too."

"Rich people eat natural crops," Oscar said.

"Our biotech research has built whole new industries," Greta insisted.

"Look at what we've done to transform Louisiana."

"Yeah," Oscar said. "Do you think I should emphasize that in the Senate hearings?"

Greta looked glum.

Oscar nodded. "Let me level with you, Greta, just like you did with me. Let me tell you about the reception you might expect in today's Congress. The country's broke, and your administrative costs are through the roof You have well over two thousand people on the federal payroll here. You don't generate any revenue yourselves-out-side of winning the favor of passing celebrities with nice gifts of fluffy rare animals. You have no major military or national security interests. The biotech revolution is a long-established fact now, it's not cutting edge anymore, it's become a standard industry. So what have you done for us lately?"

"We're protecting and securing the planet's natural heritage," Greta said.

"We're conservationists."

"Come on. You're genetic engineers, you have nothing to do with 'nature.' "

"Senator Dougal never seemed to mind a steady flow of federal funds into Texas. We always have state support from the Texas delega-tion. "

"Dougal is history," Oscar said. "You know how many cyclo-trons the U.S. used to have?"

" 'Cyclotrons'?" Greta said.

"Particle accelerator, a kind of primitive, giant klystron," Oscar said.

"They were huge, expensive, prestigious federal laboratories, and they're all long gone. I'd like to fight for this place, but we need compelling reasons. We need sound bites that the layman can under-stand. "