Kevin shrugged. “He’s just curious. Most people have never been inside a working laboratory. I remember he noticed that I had a box of latex surgical gloves in my drawer, and he asked me whether that was a common thing.”
“Shit,” Larsen said, and spent a full minute staring out the window in silence.
“Well,” Larsen finally said, “your research.”
Kevin stepped forward to place two documents on Larsen’s desk: a thin one and a thick one.
“The thin one is mostly graphics,” Kevin said. “If you flip through it, it’ll give you a general sense of the key milestones we’ve passed and the key challenges we face.” “Milestones” and “challenges” were two of the primary Larsen buzzwords. “The thick one is a complete report on the progress of the research todate, for your files.”
Larsen picked up the thin one and opened it. A loose sheet of paper slid out into his lap. “That’s kind of like the executive summary of the executive summary,” Kevin explained. “A bullet chart of milestones and challenges, and some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the body uncount.”
“Body uncount” was the ultimate Larsen buzzword. He had become obsessed with it during the run-up to the National Geographic article, when he had spent many a long night and weekend cracking the whip over his graduate students, getting them to work up an estimate of how many lives he had saved, which they could feed to the university public-relations department, which could feed it in turn to the reporter who was writing the article. So the body uncount had officially started five years ago at a round hundred million and had been climbing steadily since then. It was now a part of standard operating procedure with all of the Rainmaker’s projects that his lieutenants had to keep a running tab on the body uncount as they went along—how many lives they could save by developing and implementing whatever new idea they were working on. Anything less than ten million was considered not worth the overhead.
The number on the summary sheet was twenty-five million. Larsen pulled a face and nodded appreciatively, then flipped through the thin document. “Holy cow,” he blurted, and flipped through it again. The graphics were computer generated, three-dimensional, in vivid color.
Kevin shrugged. “I was playing with some new graphics packages on my Mac. Hooked it up to a color printer down at Kinko’s. Hope you don’t think it’s too, uh—”
“Too what?” Larsen said.
Kevin had gone and got himself into a tight spot. He squirmed and said nothing.
“It looks fine to me. Hell, it looks better than fine,” Larsen said. “This is exactly why I like you, Kevin, is that in addition to being a fine scientist you have a creative flair—you can actually communicate your results. Believe you me, that is an unusual trait.”
“Thank you, Dr. Larsen.”
A phone call came through. Larsen picked up the handset and said, “Yep,” six times in a row, then hung up. “By the way,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, “thanks for being understanding on the tax thing and for not making waves. It was a bookkeeping screwup.”
One of Larsen’s flock of secretaries scurried in and gave him a letter, which he signed. Then Larsen gave his full attention to Kevin. “When you were waiting to come in here, what kind of folks did you see in the waiting room?”
“My fellow graduate students.”
“Notice anything about them?”
“They’re all really smart.”
“C’mon, man, what color were they?”
Kevin shrugged uneasily. “A variety of browns.”
“Do you realize that you’re the only American doing work for me?”
“Well, no, but now that you mention it…”
“The shithead high-school system in this country produces such wretched products that the universities have to spend all their time bringing them up to what used to be a senior in high school in Little Dixie.” After this burst of eloquence Larsen shut down for a minute or so, took another cryptic phone call, stood up, and looked out the window. “Kevin,” he said, “I want you to be my special assistant.”
Kevin had no idea what that meant; he imagined fetching coffee, or running a copy machine. “What do you want me to do?”
“Run the shop for me here when I’m in Washington, or go to Washington in my place when I’m running the shop.”
Kevin laughed nervously. “Dr. Larsen. What do you mean, ‘run the shop’?”
“Oh, come on, now. You sit here and you look at three things: milestones, challenges, and body uncount. You’ve got that down pat, it’s all right there!” He flicked his fingers at Kevin’s summary sheet. Then he took a step closer to Kevin and lowered his voice. “Look, let’s not bullshit around. My Asian kids are first-rate. They’re great scientists. But I can’t send them back to work the Hill, the NSF, Ag. But you—you’re young, personable, you know your science, you can make pretty graphs, and, not to put too fine a point on it, you’re a white man who speaks English. Will you do it?”