“Then let’s talk about how you should say it. After all, you’re the speaker — you’re the one who has to reach the audience, not me. Let’s go over your talking points.”
She scrolled up and down fitfully, and sighed. “All right. I guess this is the worst part, right here. This business about scientists being an oppressed class. ‘A group whose exploitation should be recognized and ended.’ Scientists rising up in solidarity to demand justice — good Lord, I can’t say that! It’s too radical, it sounds crazy!”
“But you are an oppressed class. It’s the truth, it’s the central burning truth of your existence. Science took the wrong road some-where, the whole enterprise has been shot to hell. You’ve lost your proper niche in society. You’ve lost prestige, and your self-respect, and the high esteem that scientists once held in the eyes of the public. Demands are being made of you that you’ll never be able to fulfill. You don’t have intellectual freedom anymore. You live in intellectual bondage.”
“That doesn’t make us some kind of ‘oppressed class.’ We’re an elite cadre of highly educated experts.”
“So what? Your situation stinks! You have no power to make your own decisions about your own research. You don’t control the purse strings. You don’t have tenure or job security. You’ve been robbed of your peer review traditions. Your traditional high culture has been crushed underfoot by ignoramuses and fast-buck artists. You’re the technical intelligentsia all right, but you’re being played for suckers and patsies by corrupt pols who line their pockets at your expense.”
“How can you say that? Look at this amazing place we live in!”
“You just think that this is the ivory tower, sweetheart. In reality, you’re slum tenants.”
“But nobody thinks that way!”
“That’s because you’ve been fooling yourselves for years now. You’re smart, Greta. You have eyes and ears. Think about what you’ve been through. Think about how your colleagues really have to live now. Think a little harder.”
She was silent.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Take your time, think it through.”
“It is true. It’s the truth, and it’s awful, and I’m very ashamed of it, and I hate it. But it’s politics. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “Let’s move on into the speech.” “Okay.” She wiped her eyes. “Well, this is the really sick and painful part. Senator Dougal. I know that man, I’ve met him a lot of times. He drinks too much, but we all do that nowadays. He’s not as bad as all this.”
“People can’t unite against abstractions. You have to put a face on your troubles. That’s how you rally people politically. You have to pick your target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Dougal’s not your only enemy, but you don’t have to worry about that. The rest of them will come running out of the woodwork as soon as you nail him to the wall.”
“But he built everything here, he built this whole laboratory!”
“He’s a crook. We’ve got chapter and verse on him now. No-body dared to cross him while he was in power. But now that he’s shipping water and going down fast, they’ll all rat him out. The kick-backs, the money laundering… You’re in charge of Instrumenta-tion. Dougal and his cronies have been skimming your cream for years. You’ve got a legal and moral obligation to jump on him. And best of all, jumping on Dougal is a free ride politically. He can’t do a thing about it. Dougal is the easy part.” Oscar paused. “It’s Huey that I’m really worried about.”
“I don’t see why I have to be so nasty.”
“You need an issue, and there’s no such thing as a noncontrover-sial issue. And ridicule is the radical’s best weapon. The powers that be can stand anything but being laughed at.”
“It’s just not me.”
“Give it a chance first. Try the experiment. Launch one or two of those zingers, and see how your audience responds.”
She sniffed. “They’re scientists. They’re not going to respond to partisan abuse.”
“Of course they are. Scientists fight like crazed weasels. Look at your own history here at the lab! When Dougal got this place built, he had to cash in a lot of favors. He needed the Christian fundie vote before he could build a giant gene-splicing lab in the East Texas Bible Belt. That’s why the Collaboratory used to have its own Creation Science department. That setup lasted six weeks! There were fistfights, riots, and arson! They had to call in the Texas Rangers to restore order. ”
“Oh, the creation-science problem wasn’t all that bad.”
“Yes it was! Your little society has blocked out that memory because it was so embarrassing. That wasn’t the half of it. Next year they had a major brawl with the Buna residents, regular town-gown riots… And it really hit the fan during the economic war. There were federal witch-hunts for foreign science spies, there was hyperin-flation and lab guys living on bread crusts… See, I’m not a scien-tist like you. I don’t have to take it on faith that science is always a noble endeavor. I actually look these things up.”
“Well, I’m not a politician like you. So I don’t have to spend my life digging up ugly scandals.”
“Darling, we’ll have a little chat sometime about your twentieth-century Golden Age — Lysenkoism, atom spies, Nazi doctors, and ra-diation experiments. In the meantime, though, we need to stick to your speech.”
She gazed at her laptop. “It just gets worse and worse. You want me to cut our budget and get people fired.”
“The budget has to be cut. Cut drastically. People have to be fired. Fired by the truckload. The lab’s sixteen years old, it’s full of bureaucratic deadwood. Get the deadwood out of here. Fire the Spin-offs department, they’re all Dougal’s cronies and they’re all on the take. Fire the lab procurement drones and put the budgets back into the hands of researchers. And, especially, fire the police.”
“I can’t possibly fire the police. That’s crazy.”
“The police have to go as soon as possible. Hire your own po-lice. If you don’t control your own police, you live on sufferance. The police are the core of any society, and if you don’t have them on your side, you can’t hold power. Huey knows that. That’s why Huey owns the cops in here. They may be feds officially, but they’re all in his pockets.”
The car jostled with a thump and a creak. Oscar yelped. A shapeless black beast was bumping and clawing at the hood.
“It’s a lemur,” Greta said. “They’re nocturnal.”
The lemur stared through the windshield with yellow eyes the size and shape of golf balls. Pressed flat against the glass, its eldritch protohuman mitts gave him a serious turn. “I’ve had it with these animals!” Oscar shouted. “They’re like Banquo’s ghost, they never let us alone! Whose bright idea was this anyway? Wild animals loose in a science lab? It doesn’t make any sense!”
“They are ghosts,” Greta said. “We raised them from the dead. It’s something we learned how to do here.” She opened her door and stepped half out, waving one arm. “Go on. Shoo.”
The lemur sidled off reluctantly.
Oscar had broken into a cold sweat. His hair was standing on end and his hands were shaking. He could actually smell his own fear: a sharp pheromonal reek. He crossed his arms and shivered violently. His reaction was all out of whack, but he couldn’t help it: he was very inspired tonight. “Give me a minute … Sorry … Where were we?”
“I can’t stand up in public and start screaming for people to be fired.”
“Don’t prejudge the evidence. Try it out first. Just suggest that a few of these creeps should be fired, and see what the public response is.” He drew a breath. “Remember the climax — you do have a final ace to play.”
“Where I say that I refuse my own salary.”
“Yeah, I thought voluntarily cutting it in half might be good — I’d like to see the Collaboratory’s budget cut about in half — but it’s a better and stronger gesture if you just refuse your pay altogether. You refuse to take government pay until the lab is put back in order. That’s a great conclusion, it shows you’re really serious and it gets you out with a punch, and a nice hot sound bite. Then you sit back and watch the fireworks.”