The Curiosity Read Online Free PDF Page A

media.”
    Dr. Kate has closed her eyes and I can imagine the wheels turning. Then she turns to a technician across the room. “Please inform the captain that we are harvesting from this berg immediately. Someone call Carthage to keep him posted.”
    Gerber snorts. “Always we must feed the beast.”
    But if she hears, it does not show when she pauses at the door. It’s a thing you can observe, how Dr. Kate calms herself. Like soothing a baby, maybe, or comforting a dog in a thunderstorm, she pulls herself together. But this time it doesn’t work. The excitement is heightened by her restraint. And it is nothing but lovely.
    â€œOne more thing. Tell the galley to start feeding everyone ice cream. We are going to need a ton of freezer space.”
    She hurries out, I can hear her footsteps on the steel floor, and I’m left wondering: How did she know to come to the bridge right when the ice turned up? How did she know to wear diving clothes before the scans had begun? Usually Billings supervises the scans from the control room. Why did she send him out tonight instead?
    Gerber plays his cursor back and forth over the red blocks. “Come out, come out, whatever you are.”
    I move next to him. “Any guesses?”
    â€œNone.” He scratches his head. “Hell of a big shrimp?”
    â€œI’m going to make coffee,” I say, and stroll off toward the galley—only partly because I want to keep alert. Truth be told, a trip to the galley also means I’ll pass the suiting room, maybe glimpse the good doctor wrestling her sweet bones into a nice, snug dive outfit.
    I mean, it’s not like she’s given me anything else to think about.

CHAPTER 3
    Not Bad
    (Erastus Carthage)

    Y ou stand at the railing knowing that they do not believe you: scientists, researchers, lab rats from across the country. Funders, bless their wallets. Underlings, too, those predoctoral peons who serve well as exploitable implements but get underfoot like so many neglected cats. And the media, any demonstration would be wasted without at least a few reporters to gawk and scrawl.
    â€œAre we ready?” you call in the direction of the speakerphone.
    â€œJust one moment more, Dr. Carthage,” replies the chief postdoctoral fellow, a red-haired Yalie whose future depends on situations like this. If there is any benefit to life in the academy, it is the subservience of young men and women who know that a single letter of concern in their file, one rumor of falsified lab results, so much as a whisper of faint praise by you at the major conventions, and their career at this scientific altitude is over. Instead of working with leading minds in splendid labs, they’ll be teaching freshman biology at some dead-end college in nowhere America. For those with lofty aspirations, anxiety about your whims is a splendid motivator; their fear is your security.
    The team works behind glass that runs the width of the room. It was costly, that window, but you designed this lab as much for display as for research. You imagined a day like this, you dreamed of it. Yet now that it has arrived, it feels less like a granted wish than like an inevitability. Reason and inquiry prevail once again.
    Some tasks take place under lab hoods, because one can never be certain which germs might also enjoy reentering the living world. Team members wear white coats, per your instructions, but since the staff labors in jeans on ordinary days, the coats are purely for show. But then, the whole exercise serves that same purpose—this morning’s demonstration, the conference this afternoon with you delivering the keynote. Until your ideas take firmer hold in the public mind, and funding becomes reliably perpetual, everything is for effect. After all, once the discovery occurs, science is mostly theater.
    You are not remotely nervous. The lab has replicated this process nine times in front of an audience. Plus