It was an ideal philosophy of life for a bootlegger, but Arthur Larsen found that it worked even better in the academic world—even as early as grade school. He was valedictorian of his high-school class, not because he was the smartest but because he had sussed out the system and had no qualms about manipulating it. He found his way to Oklahoma State University, where he worked a full-time job and still managed to complete the B.S. and vet-med requirements in six years. His record was so outstanding that Cornell gave him a full E-ticket ride for his Ph.D. studies in veterinary pathology.
By this point he was doing serious science. You couldn’t fake that. But as long as that one rule was followed, you could dodge within that system as well as any other. Larsen developed a shrewd sense of just how little substance you could put into a research paper and still get it published. His first efforts were not well received, but he kept cranking them out anyway, and after a few years the minuscule flakes of data began to pile into drifts. By the time he got his Ph.D., the snow job was complete. He moved to Eastern Iowa University and, having conquered the research racket, turned his attention full-time to what would become his crowning achievement: supreme mastery of the black art of grantsmanship.
And where grants weren’t enough, he found other ways of making money. Larsen and the Iowa State treasurer ran a four-hundred-head herd of Black Angus as an experiment, sold the proceeds—sans taxation—and cleared a small fortune. By the time 1990 had rolled around, Arthur Larsen had raised two monuments to his achievements: one, the Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center, and two, a research park south of town that served as home for two dozen small high-tech start-ups. At least half were spin-offs of Larsen-sponsored research and had Larsen on their board of directors. The research park was a small masterpiece in and of itself; it was built with state money on university land and lavished with tax breaks and sweetheart loans by the state legislators, whom Larsen herded through the place like so many Black Angus, dazzling them with visions of a Silicon Barnyard.
What he could do within the framework at EIU he did at Scheidelmann, and what he couldn’t he did in his spin-offs. These were the two pillars of the Larsen colossus, a fabulously complex web that occupied a six-person law firm full-time just to keep all the taxes paid and all the important laws more or less unbroken.
Kevin Vandeventer had plenty of time to review these facts and statistics in his mind as he sat in the waiting room of Professor Larsen’s office suite one morning in early May, waiting for a ten A.M. appointment that kept getting pushed back, five and ten and fifteen minutes at a time. He was slowly working his way up a queue consisting of some half a dozen other graduate students—all South Asians and Africans. Each of them, including Kevin, was responsible for some of Larsen’s grant money—half a million here, three million there. Each was responsible for making sure that those dollars were reprocessed and converted into a certain number of published research papers, and, wherever possible, press releases extolling the lifesaving benefits of modern agricultural technology. Each had to check in with Larsen every few weeks and brief him on recent progress. Larsen tended to schedule all such appointments in a block so that he could sacrifice a whole day to it and keep other days free for golfing with the board of regents, piloting his Beechcraft to Taos, hornswoggling venture capitalists, taping interviews with national news programs, or jetting off to China or India to be feted by the highest echelons of those governments. Those things were the fun part of being the Rainmaker. Managing these grants, and grinding out Ph.D.’s, were like the compulsory figures in an ice-skating competition.
There was not much friendly small talk in the waiting room. These people had been sent there because they were smart, not because of their social skills. Many of them were probably competing against each other for the pool of grant money hauled down by the Rainmaker, and those who weren’t might be from nations that were mutually hostile, or even at war. The receptionist’s intercom chirped. Kevin blinked and tried to shake off the midafternoon lethargy; he was at the top of the queue.
The receptionist spoke on the phone for a few moments, looking straight through Kevin, and then hung up. “He apologizes again—a call just came in from New Delhi that he absolutely has to take—just a few more minutes.”
Kevin made himself comfortable and did not fret about it. His role in life was to get shunted from one grant to the next, a pawn on Larsen’s giant board, filling whatever roles Larsen needed filled at the moment. Now it was his role to wait.