Forty Signs of Rain Read Online Free PDF

turn into something more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns—not to mention the impacts on health of course!
    When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.
    “Good morning guys.”
    “Hey Leo.” Marta aimed her pipette like a Power-Point cursor at the small window on a long low refrigerator. “Ready to check it out?”
    “Sure am. Can you help?”
    “In just a sec.” She moved down the bench.
    Brian said, “This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.”
    Leo was startled to hear this. “No. You’re kidding.”
    “I’m not kidding.”
    “Oh not really. Not really.”
    “Really.”
    “How
could
he?”
    “Press release. Also calls to his favorite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.”
    “Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.”
    “Sorry, but you know Derek.” Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. “It’s all over.”
    Leo squinted at a screen. “It wasn’t on
Bioworld Today
.”
    “It will be tomorrow.”
    The company website’s BREAKING NEWS box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep—lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease …
    “Oh my God,” Leo muttered as he read. “Oh my God.” His face was flushed. “Why does he
do
this?”
    “He wants it to be true.”
    “So
what?
We don’t
know
yet.”
    With her sly grin Marta said, “He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Road Runner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.”
    “But it never works! He always falls!”
    Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. “Come on,” she said. “This time we’ll do it.”
    Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, “Yeah, right, you’re good,” and started to put on rubber gloves.
    “Remember the time he announced that we had hemophilia A whipped?” Brian said.
    “Please.”
    “Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand rpm to show how well our therapy worked?”
    “The guillotine turntable experiment?”
    “Please,” Leo begged. “No more.”
    He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject—alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think, whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. “Why does he
do
this, why why why?”
    It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was implacable: “I tell you—he thinks he can
make
us do it.”
    “It’s not
us
doing it,” Leo protested, “it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get into the cell we’re trying to target.”
    “You’ll just have to think of something that will work.”
    “You mean like, build it and they will come?”
    “Yeah. Say it and they will make it.”
    Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Road Runner.
Meep-meep! Meep-meep!
They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of an automated teller—like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big wad of twenties rolling out