Just a Couple of Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

in its infancy, is already well larded by a smeary smattering of government agencies, private foundations, and corporate sponsors. Piggish and raised on the blubber of bureaucracy, we show no signs of shedding our baby fat.
    My specialization is recombinant genetics. I have found my tasks challenging, and have gotten a thrill from attracting grant money to the department. Just last year, I received the largest grant yet. The windfall came from a venture capitalist who was financing the formation of a start-up biotechnology corporation. He wanted me to break the thirteen-mile-per-hour barrier in tomato harvesting. The problem was that when corporate agriculturists harvested their still-green tomatoes, they could not shoot them into the truck any faster than thirteen miles per hour without the skins splitting. This constraint incurred significant product loss, not to mention costs in time and ultimate profitability. If we could develop genetically modified tomatoes with more resilient skins and his company could own the patent, he could dominate the market for tomato seeds sold to large-scale agribusiness. We succeeded wildly, pushing tomato skins to withstand sixteen-mile-per-hour collisions, and new strains showed promise of even greater durability.
    Blip scoffed at this project, and accused me of contributing to inappropriate technology. If genetic engineering is only explored for the purpose of making money, he argued, we’ll end up with bigger, longer-lasting, tougher, and less nutritious fruits and vegetables. He’s right, of course. Nutritional content is not a primary profit concern. Size, shelf life, cosmetic appearance, and herbicide tolerance are. I was not unaware of these things, nor was I unaware that the pursuit of knowledge had become more twisted than a double helix. Much to the chagrin of Blip, however, I could not be persuaded to care.
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    7 Such were the hallowed hallways of academia I slithered through daily. On this particular day, I left my meeting with Tynee and drove around half the circumference of the university to the city jail. It was located directly behind the Physical Facilities Department, in a new building. The site had been chosen because little NIMBY resistance was expected from campus-area residents. Indeed, if students knew about it at all, they did not care, since they would be gone in four or five years anyway. The university asked only that the building match the local architecture, and so it looked like any other dormitory but for the exceptionally narrow windows.
    Upon entering, however, all architectural pretensions ceased and were replaced by an unsoothing din of dingy irritability. Owing to the unexpected brevity of my meeting with Tynee, Sophia was nowhere to be seen, so I approached the desk sergeant barricaded behind the fenced-in reception counter. A roundish police officer, wearing a nametag that read wilt, glowered out at me.
    â€œExcuse me,” I cleared my throat. “I’m looking for a Dr. Blip Korterly. He was arrested earlier today.”
    After staring at me for a few seconds, Sergeant Wilt took a deep breath and shoved himself on his wheeled office chair across the room to a computer. “Can you spell his last name?” he hollered at me over his shoulder as if he were saying, “Can you stop putting that blade of grass in my ear?”
    â€œK-O-R-T-E-R-L-Y,” I called back to him loudly.
    After a few moments, he coasted back to the reception desk and said, without looking at me, “I can’t release any information on that arrest.”
    â€œIs there a reason?” I asked, once it became apparent that he wasn’t going to volunteer one. He stopped tapping the stack of papers on his desk and held them in midair for a few seconds before responding.
    â€œI can’t release any information because there isn’t any information to release.” He tossed the stack onto his desk, sending the papers back into