Five years ago National Geographic had published an article about Larsen in which they had estimated that his discoveries and his outreach programs had saved upward of a hundred million people from starvation, all around the globe. The regents had paid for this page of the magazine to be blown up to the size of a sheet of plywood and then engraved on a slab of solid bronze, which was now embedded in the wall of the entrance hall.
Kevin Vandeventer was entering the Rainmaker’s kingdom at five-forty on a Friday night, a TV dinner from the local Quik Trip in hand, because he had experiments that needed tending every few hours, around the clock, for months at a time. Whenever he came in to tend them, he found that there was agreat deal of other work that needed doing—writing and editing reports, coding computer programs, and simply straightening up around the lab.
He had to smile when he thought that he was basically there because he hated physical labor. Dad had given up on him at the age of twelve and accepted that he just wasn’t cut out for the farming business. Big sister Betsy was clearly destined for higher things, and so the title of heir apparent to the Vandeventer family potato empire had fallen onto the shoulders of Bob, the youngest, who was perfectly happy with it.
Kevin did have one feature useful on a farm: he liked animals. He was always tending to them, even learning how to shoe their three horses. So when Kevin began pulling down straight A’s in science courses, his dad was pretty proud. Perhaps he’d amount to something, after all. Kevin had 4.0’d himself through Boise State University, and then, after maxing the GREs, had received a full-ride research fellowship to work with Dr. Larsen—which, as he soon learned, meant working several layers beneath Larsen in the research hierarchy. But he didn’t really care; he had continued to shine in the laboratory as he had in the classroom and was now rounding the turn for the home stretch on his dissertation.
He followed a maze of ground-level corridors into the Sinzheimer Biochemistry Wing and then took the elevator up to the third floor. He went to his lab in 302, put his supper in the fridge, and sat down on a high stool for a minute, collecting his thoughts, getting organized. Kevin had the gift of concentration, but it took a conscious effort to turn it on sometimes. He ate a candy bar, knowing that if he didn’t, his stomach would soon begin to distract him from his work.
Then, suddenly, it was nine-thirty. Four hours had gone by as he had concentrated on pipettes and the digital readouts of his machines. His stomach had digested the candy bar and was requesting further input. He got his El Toro Beef and Beans Tostada Supper out of the fridge and headed for the microwave, four doors down the hall.
This place had been his home for four years—he kept a sleeping bag and foam pad rolled up in a cabinetand frequently slept on the floor. As one of the oldest veterans of the Sinzheimer Wing, and the onlyresident American citizen on the floor, he had become its unofficial mayor.
He liked the wing and its inhabitants. There were no undergrads—no female bow-heads, no young men who believed that Bud Light advertisements were cinema verité. There were none of the social-sciences professors whose development had been arrested around the time of Woodstock. This place worked twenty-four hours a day. The professors looked rumpled and tired, as if they really labored and were thinking about things. Mostly, Kevin knew, they were thinking about how to replace all of the DARPA soft money now that the Cold War was over. They drove themselves and their graduate students hard, because eighty percent of their salaries came from grants. The grad students came from other countries where leisure time was scarce and not yet considered an inalienable right. They rarely complained.
Even now, late on a Friday night, the place was alive. Most of the professors were gone, and the boomboxes in various labs were cranked up, filling the corridor with a cacophony of sound—mostly American pop music, but also multiethnic stuff in a variety of languages.
The door to 304 was wide-open, which was unusual; the grad students there were Arabs who usually kept to themselves. Even more unusual, an oom thumpy oom thumpy bass beat was blaring out of the open door. Kevin looked into the lab as he passed by. The windows were open to let in the fresh springair, and at least half a dozen people were in there, all men, all Arabs, all holding paper cups filled with something bright purple. Kevin recognized it instantly: grape Kool-Aid, almost certainly mixed with pure-grain alcohol from the laboratory stocks.