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  “A vaporized feed stream would probably be okay,” said Serane. “The HNCO would be the primary reactant, and the NHS would stabilize the trialine product—if any is made.” He fiddled with his porto-control a moment. A series of holo slides now flashed on the panel wall in succession: solubility curves; the equilibrium of trialine and its deamination products with ammonia: trialine’s loss of ammonia at various temperatures. Dr. Quirrel stared, totally hypnotized, and Paul and the others nearly so. In some vague recess of his mind Paul realized that Serane had memorized all these text and journal references and that he was calling them up ad libitum in exactly the right tantalizing sequence for Quirrel, just as a great symphony conductor would work with a brilliant concertist.

  The tempo of the slides stepped up. Paul could no longer follow the rationale. The matter was now entirely between Serane and Quirrel.

  Serane’s tone became soft, seductive. Paul had to strain to hear. Amid the rapidly flip-flopping slides, Serane mentioned all sorts of miscellaneous goodies that might apply to the problem of taking trialine of the catalyst. He applied Pauli’s exclusion principle. He dangled dipole moments. He was genial with the Geiger-Nuttall rule, and he advocated Avogadro’s number.

  “But,” demanded Dr. Quirrel, “does trialine have a substantial vapor tension at three hundred fifty degrees centigrade and atmospheric pressure?”

  “Yes,” said Serane. “Here’s the phase diagram. As you can see, it’s still in the solid phase at that temperature.”

  Paul recognized the figure. It gave the solid-liquid-vapor equilibria at varying temperatures and pressures. He had seen it in the perle files, that first night. Without reference to any kind of cross-index, Serane had instantly pressed the right button sequence in his porto-control. It was an incredible memory feat. Paul was awed.

  The vapor phase of the diagram seemed to float in clouds; the liquid lapped in waves at the intercept, and the solid phase reflected frozen planes, like ice.

  And now the triple point of the diagram formed as three radiant red lines, just in front of Dr. Quirrel. The intersection trembled, flashed, and wavered enticingly in front of his face. His nostrils flared. “Aha,” he breathed as he plucked a plum from Planck’s quantum theory.

  And then still more slides, as Serane grabbed him with Graham’s law of diffusion, lashed him with Loschmidt numbers, and jostled him with the Joule-Thomson effect. “And now back to the basic question,” insisted Serane. “How do we get the trialine off the catalyst without taking the catalyst out of the chamber?”

  “Sublime it off with the ammonia in the vaporized urea feed!” cried Quirrel.

  Serane blew the bugle for Rydberg’s charge. “Do we change the catalyst?”

  Dr. Quirrel scampered across the Periodic Table. “A silica catalyst is still best!” he shrieked. “A special type of porous silica!” Serane had got it out of him again! Would he never learn? With a squeal of frustration he ran from the marveling assembly.

  Serane followed him with admiring eyes. “A truly great scientist,” he murmured. “Does best with a little coaxing, though.”

  As the session broke up, Paul got Serene’s attention. “I think I missed some of that,” he said doubtfully. “Did he mean you can vaporize trialine off the catalyst at atmospheric pressure?”

  “Sure. It sublimes. That’s the way we’ll get it off. It’s formed on the catalyst as a solid, but we can get it off as the vapor, without going through the liquid phase and without disturbing the catalyst. We run the reaction at three hundred fifty and sweep the trialine off the catalyst with ammonia. All we need to do now is find the right kind of silica base and the right mix of oxide activators. But we’re certainly on the right track, and we can start building the urea pyrolyzer.” He was thoughtful. “You know, Paul, I have the strangest feeling that the answer may be staring us in the face, that we now know everything we need to know, if we could only put it all together.”

  Paul was thoughtful, too. The ammonite on his bureau was a type of porous silica. And Billy’s ashes were a mix of oxides—perhaps somewhat carbonated by now. A curious coincidence.

  As he returned to his office he pondered Serane. He knew that he had been in the presence of a master. Serane was to creative chemistry what Michelangelo was to art, Donnator to music, Shakespeare to poetry, Morphy to chess: for his time and place, the absolute best.

  “Trialine end uses . . said Serane on a Friday afternoon in late February. “If we’re going to put up a commercial plant, we’ve got to think ahead to new markets. So let’s get on an antibiotic kick this afternoon.”

  “For openers,” said Razmic Mukerjee, “I’d suggest novarella.”

  “Novarella,” mused Serane. “Now there’s a real killer. Worldwide, three million adult and fetal deaths in an epidemic year, such as we had in ’ninety-six. Another hundred thousand infants were bom alive, with deafness, cataracts, heart disease, mental retardation, and arm and leg defects. In India, right now, the epidemic is moving northward along the east coast. It’s already in Nellore.”

  The Hindu grimaced. “At that rate it will be in my native Calcutta by summer. Yes, a challenge. Will the Animal Bay cooperate?”

  “How do you mean?” asked Serane.

  “Perhaps we could get one of the monkeys pregnant and feed her some trialine,” said Mukerjee. “See if it will protect the fetus against novarella.”

  “You get the monkey pregnant, Mukerjee,” said Art Schirmer, “and we’ll do the rest.”

  “We really ought to try it,” said the Hindu mildly.

  Serane nodded to Mary Derringer. “Add it to the list.”

  Paul listened in silence, almost with detachment. Is this how it was done? A group of brilliant men got together and decided it would be a good idea to try a new drug on a killer disease? And if it had happened ten years ago, would Billy now be alive? Was this the way? He did not know.

  6

  Serane’s Group

  Each man in Serane’s section had his own view of his relationship to the group. Some were grateful to be associated with Serane. Some resented, at least at first, being thrown in with a bunch of lunatics. But not one took the arrangement facetiously.

  There was Art Schirmer, who planned, schemed, burned the midnight oil, so as not to have to do any real work. Serane put him to writing reports for others, including Bob Moulin.

  There was Detlev Diep, who (like certain artists and authors) couldn’t discuss his project until it was successfully concluded; because if he did, the idea would be catharcized, purged, tranquilized, and the emotional drive necessary to bring it to fruition would be lost. Even the reagents would not react! Serane understood this and let him do the work, without any weekly reports, and then at the end—perhaps a year later—report it in triumph.

  There was Dr. Statice. The Chemical Handbook (1989 edition) was his bible. He inscribed the date of his marriage and the names of his children in it. He came early to the office every morning and read ten pages in it. He kept soiled blue ribbons in it as markers. He would not permit things to be put on top of it. He knew that other editions had come and gone, and that the current edition was not even a book but a silly little thing called a perle, no bigger than his thumbnail. He tolerated the existence of these other editions, but he knew his was the only authoritative one. The others could at best be considered well-meaning efforts to change the facts of chemistry, which, as he well knew, could not be done.

  It was said that Mary Derringer, Serane’s secretary, had been a phychology major at Columbia and had originally applied for an opening in Personnel. But when she had finally been given a choice of working for Humbert or being Serane’s secretary, she had chosen Serane.

  Mary wore dark tunics that fell to her knees. She did not appear especially sexy to Paul; yet his eyes seemed of their own volition to seek her out whenever he visited Serane. Sometimes she looked up at him from her typewriter, and each caught the other staring. Then she smiled, and he caught a twinkle in her hazel eye
s. She was a registered bachelor girl. Somebody had told him. Or had he asked?

  Every morning at 8:20 Barbara Moulin drove the little electric into the parking lot and let her husband out at the watchman’s booth. Robert Moulin nodded to the watchman as he entered the South Doorway. Thence he proceeded up the stairs to the Nitrogen Bay. He stopped by the washroom, and by the time he got to his bench in the milling room, Mary Derringer had poured his coffee. He sipped at this while he donned his earpads and set up his equipment. Mr. Moulin was quite skilled in the performance of these milling runs, as indeed he should be. For he had repeated them every working day since that morning two years ago when he had backed his electric over his two-year-old son in his driveway, crushing his skull. He had not spoken since.

  The new supersonic mills were actually designed to run silently. But Serane varied their frequencies so that they would produce shrill rhythmic beats. Because of the noise, nobody ever attempted to engage the miller in conversation.

  The milling room was at the entrance to the bay, and anyone going in had to pass Bob Moulin. They waved at him, and he nodded back. Twice daily he repeated the same experiments. They were simple things, just grinding catalysts in a series of sonic mills. However, it took a lot of vibrating screens, sieves, and other apparatus, and, backed up by the shrieking mills, he looked hard at work. Mr. Hedgewick, on his periodic visits from New York, noted with satisfaction at Staffs that at least one of Serane’s group was always busy when he had been there. Hedgewick routinely approved Moulin’s raises requested by Serane. Serane had the pay credit computed direct to the bank, and Mrs. Moulin drew on a checking account there.

  Sometimes, at the close of one of his Friday lectures, Serane would get his own group together in privacy to discuss the stricken miller.

  “How do we know that this is best for him?” demanded Serane. “Perhaps he should be put in a hospital. Maybe all sorts of tests should be made on him. Has he had a stroke? Maybe he physically can’t talk.”

  “Leave him alone,” said Mary Derringer. “He’s presently in fugue. Eventually, some sort of stimulus will probably break him out of it. For the present, though, he just wants to be here with us. His wife said so, and she knows. They don’t have the money to put him in the kind of hospital that he would really need. She thinks if he can stay here a little longer, he will get well. He knows everybody here. He knows we like him. How would you feel if they put you away where you didn’t know anybody, and nobody liked you?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Serane. “All I did was ask whether we were doing the right thing. Of course he can stay.”

  It might be supposed that Humbert, the personnel officer, rejoiced at Serane’s success with Humbert’s rejects—that Humbert’s heart was made glad to see his worst fears and his gloomiest predictions so roundly refuted. Nay, not so! Humbert saw in this a malicious flouting of authority, a sadistic program engineered by Serane to destroy accepted principles of personnel management. Humbert saw a great formless evil enveloping the lab. When, in ’oh-three, Serane’s group began to turn in invention records at the aggregate rate of one a week—nearly twice the productivity of Kussman’s larger group—Humbert realized he had created a monster. Serane and his mode of operation was a standing insult to rational personnel policy. Serane struck at Humbert’s reason for existence.

  Sometimes Humbert awoke in the middle of the night, and he thought of Drs. Slav, Teidemann, Quirrel, Mukerjee, and the others, and of the reasons why their original group directors had got rid of them. And then he retraced his thinking, as he assigned these men, one by one, to Serane, and how he had a twinge of conscience each and every time. He considered all this, and tended to be bitter in the memory of it, because he might well have spared his conscience. Serane had treacherously converted these losers into what some of the New York vice-presidents considered the best group in the lab. Treacherously, and behind his back. He had intended no harm to Serane; yet Serane had done this to him.

  They should have fired Serane long ago. Was it now too late? Perhaps not. But it would be a lot harder, and take planning. And he would need allies. Which he might get—depending on who got the job of lab director, vacant since Dr. Scrivener’s death. And so thinking, he would finally drift back to a troubled sleep.

  To Paul there was something vaguely familiar about Serane’s handwriting, as though he had seen it long before he had joined the company. The letters were small, and at the start of a given passage the strokes were pretty much vertical. But as the author wanned to his task, the letters began to slant forward, and an occasional enthusiastic passage might slant so far forward as almost to lie down on the lines, and some of the letters would become condensed together, or else omitted. And then Serane’s handwriting became very difficult to read. In fact, Paul was the only one in the group of attorneys who could read all of Serane’s handwriting. Even Mary Derringer used to come to Paul to untangle Serane’s notes for her typewritten reports. Somehow he had the impression he had been exposed to Serane’s handwriting in massive doses over the years. But of course this was impossible.

  The Seranes had two children. Serane had met his wife, Alessa, at Brooklyn Poly, during his postdoctoral. She was in the middle of her master’s. She was so busy typing his thesis to make a June IS deadline that she failed to finish her own. They sometimes joked about it. She did not care.

  Paul found himself transfixed when he was introduced to her. For this very handsome woman had to be the ex-Mrs. King, the former registered wife of his former professor of patent law at George Washington University. Even then King had been a high official in the United States Patent Office. Thank God King was on the Board of Interference Examiners and no longer had anything to do with the examination of Serane’s patent applications. On the other hand, if Serane ever got in interference with some other inventor in the Patent Office, they had all better hope the case wouldn’t come before King for decision. (He thought of the Korium interference. Fortunately, it had been settled and never went up for decision before the Interference Board.)

  Vincent Viturate, the Fiber group leader, had it straight from New York. The executive committee was meeting sometime this week. On the agenda was the question of lab director. “You fellows look gloomy,” he complained to the attorneys at table in the company cafeteria, “and you don’t even report to the lab director. How about us! How do you think we feel?”

  “Now, Vince,” said Marggold mildly. “You’re jumping to conclusions. It doesn’t have to be Kussman.”

  “No. It doesn’t. But it will be.”

  After they dropped their dishes into the disposal chute at the side of their lunch table, Marggold and Paul walked back to their offices.

  “Vince talks too much,” muttered the older attorney.

  Paul didn’t reply. Already, he was having premonitions.

  7

  The Computer

  Paul and Serane sat at Serane’s computer console.

  “I check the Central Data Bank about once a week for anything new on trialine,” explained the chemist. “Care to try it yourself?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Have you ever used this thing before?”

  “No. Though I’ve heard about it.”

  “Well, it’s simple. The questions go to Lawrence, Kansas, where they’re unscrambled, analyzed, fed into the Central Data Bank to get answered, then scrambled up again and fed back to us. First, you tell him whether you want a printout or a voice report.” He handed the telephone handset to Paul.

  “Him?”

  “Sure. The console can report in the voice of its originator, Peter Lindstrom.”

  “Well, HI be danged. I thought Lindstrom was dead.”

  “He is and he isn’t. I guess you could say he sort of lives on in his brainchild. Go ahead. It’s on.”

  “Okay. Machine, my name is Paul Blandford. I have some questions.”

  Zat!

  The console had instantly printed out lines on the message sheet: Hello, Paul Bland
ford. I am ready for your questions.

  Paul frowned, then turned to Serane. “How do I get voice?”

  The chemist grinned and pointed to another switch, marked Voice Report.

  Paul flipped the switch. He said, “Given the equation six urea yields one trialine plus six ammonia plus three carbon dioxide, what is the highest recorded percent yield of theory?”

  “Twenty-two,” replied the console in a resonant baritone.

  “Conditions?”

  “Temperature, three hundred degrees centigrade; pressure, two thousand pounds per square inch, in a stainless-steel autoclave; reaction time, thirty minutes. Serane, J.S., U.S. Patent 5,601,432, 2003.”

  “Highest yield at atmospheric pressure?” asked Paul.

  “Five point six percent.”

  “Conditions?”

  “Temperature, three hundred twenty-five degrees centigrade; reaction time, ten minutes; quartz tube, over silica catalyst. Serane, J.S., U.S. Patent 5,997, 306, 2004.”

  “At atmospheric pressure, what is the maximum theoretical yield?”

  “Ninety-eight percent.”

  He exchanged glances with Serane.

  “Refer to Serane 5,997,306. I direct you to modify conditions to achieve maximum theoretical yield.”

  “Sorry, data insufficient.”

  “Would a substantially different temperature significantly increase the yield in 5,997,306?”

  “No.”

  “Would a substantially different reaction time increase the yield?”

  “No.”

  “Would a substantially different catalyst significantly increase the yield?”

  The machine seemed to pause. “This might depend on your definition of ‘substantially different catalyst.’ ” “A catalyst which is not silica.”