Forty Signs of Rain. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ sat down at his desk. He had angled his computer screen away from the window so that when necessary he could focus on it, but now he sat in his chair and gazed out across the atrium. He was near the end of his year-long stay at NSF, and the workload, while never receding, was simply becoming less and less important to him. Piles of articles and hard-copy jackets lay in stacks on every horizontal surface, arranged in Frank’s complex through-put system. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked out the window.

      The colourful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in primary colours, very like an infant’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need to make to climb the mobile. There were some hard sections, but it would make for a fun route.

      Past the mobile, he could see into one hundred and eight other rooms (he had counted). In them people typed at screens, talked in couples or on the phone, read, or sat in seminar rooms around paper-strewn tables, looking at slide-shows, or talking. Mostly talking. If the interior of the National Science Foundation were all you had to go on, you would have to conclude that doing science consisted mostly of sitting around in rooms talking.

      This was not even close to true, and it was one of the reasons Frank was bored. The real action of science took place in laboratories, and anywhere else experiments were being conducted. What happened here was different, a kind of meta-science, one might say, which coordinated scientific activities, or connected them to other human action, or funded them. Something like that; he was having trouble characterizing it, actually.

      The smell of Anna’s Starbuck’s latte wafted in from her office next door, and he could hear her on the phone already. She too did a lot of talking on the phone. ‘I don’t know, I have no idea what the other sample sizes are like … No, not statistically insignificant, that would mean the numbers were smaller than the margin of error. What you’re talking about is just statistically meaningless. Sure, ask him, good idea.’

      Meanwhile Aleesha, her assistant, was on her phone as well, patiently explaining something in her rich DC contralto. Unravelling some misunderstanding. It was an obvious if seldom-acknowledged fact that much of NSF’s daily business was accomplished by a cadre of African-American women from the local area, women who often seemed decidedly unconvinced of the earth-shattering importance that their mostly Caucasian employers attributed to the work. Aleesha, for instance, displayed the most sceptical politeness Frank had ever seen; he often tried to emulate it, but without, he feared, much success.

      Anna appeared in the doorway, tapping on the doorjamb as she always did, to pretend that his space was an office. ‘Frank, I forwarded that jacket to you, the one about an algorithm.’

      ‘Let’s see if it arrived.’ He hit CHECK MAIL, and up came a new one from [email protected]. He loved that address. ‘It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.’

      ‘Thanks.’ She turned, then stopped. ‘Hey listen, when are you due to go back to UCSD?’

      ‘End of July or end of August.’

      ‘Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go. I know it’s nice out there, but we’d love it if you’d consider putting in a second year, or even think about staying permanently, if you like it. Of course you must have a lot of irons in the fire.’

      ‘Yes,’ Frank said noncomittally. Staying longer than his one-year stint was completely out of the question. ‘That’s nice of you to ask. I’ve enjoyed it, but I should probably get back home. I’ll think about it, though.’

      ‘Thanks. It would be good to have you here.’

      Much of the work at NSF was done by visiting scientists, who came on leave from their home institutions to run NSF programmes in their area of expertise for periods of a year or two. The grant proposals came pouring in by the thousand, and programme directors like Frank read them, sorted them, convened panels of outside experts, and ran the meetings in which these experts rated batches of proposals in particular fields. This was a major manifestation of the peer review process, a process Frank thoroughly approved of – in principle. But a year of it was enough.

      Anna had been watching him, and now she said, ‘I suppose it is a bit of a rat race.’

      ‘Well, no more than anywhere else. In fact if I were home it’d probably be worse.’

      They laughed.

      ‘And you have your journal work too.’

      ‘That’s right.’ Frank waved at the piles of typescripts: three stacks for Review of Bioinformatics, two for The Journal of Sociobiology. ‘Always behind. Luckily the other editors are better at keeping up.’

      Anna nodded. Editing a journal was a privilege and an honour, even though usually unpaid – indeed, one often had to continue to subscribe to a journal just to get copies of what one had edited. It was another of science’s many non-compensated activities, part of its extensive economy of social credit.

      ‘Okay,’ Anna said. ‘I just wanted to see if we could tempt you. That’s how we do it, you know. When visitors come through who are particularly good, we try to hold on to them.’

      ‘Yes, of course.’ Frank nodded uncomfortably, touched despite himself; he valued her opinion. He rolled his chair towards his screen as if to get to work, and she turned and left.

      He clicked to the jacket Anna had forwarded. Immediately he recognized one of the investigators’ names.

      ‘Hey Anna?’ he called out.

      ‘Yes?’ She reappeared in the doorway.

      ‘I know one of the guys on this jacket. The PI is a guy from Caltech, but the real work is by one of his students.’

      ‘Yes?’ This was a typical situation, a younger scientist using the prestige of his or her advisor to advance a project.

      ‘Well, I know the student. I was the outside member on his dissertation committee, a few years ago.’

      ‘That wouldn’t be enough to be a conflict.’

      Frank nodded as he read on. ‘But he’s also been working on a temporary contract at Torrey Pines Generique, which is a company in San Diego that I helped start.’

      ‘Ah. Do you still have any financial stake in it?’

      ‘No. Well, my stocks are in a blind trust for the year I’m here, so I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so.’

      ‘But you’re not on the board, or a consultant?’

      ‘No no. And it looks like his contract there was due to be over about now anyway.’

      ‘That’s fine, then. Go for it.’

      No part of the scientific community could afford to be too picky about conflicts of interest. If they were, they’d never find anyone free to peer-review anything; hyper-specialization made every field so small that within them, everyone seemed to know everyone. Because of that, so long as there were no current financial or institutional ties with a person, it was considered okay to proceed to evaluate their work in the various peer-review systems.

      But Frank had wanted to make sure. Yann Pierzinski had been a very sharp young bio-mathematician – he was one of those doctoral students whom one СКАЧАТЬ