Untitled fr12, p.7
Untitled.FR12, page 7
His face was grim, white. He said thickly, “We are not going to give them the pleasure of finding you dead out here.”
She shuddered, then wiped at her eyes with her free hand. Passively, she let him take the pill from her palm and grind it into the floor with his heel.
“Now then,” he said, “we have to decide what to do with you. Should I take you to the hospital or to your apartment?”
“I want to go home.”
“I’ll get one of the girls to stay with you.”
“No. I don’t want anybody.”
“Will you behave yourself?”
“Yes. Just don’t tell Dr. Serane.”
“Okay. Til just tell him you were sick, and I took you home.”
It was all over the lab within the hour. Serane was on the skids. He no longer had the power to protect his people.
Actually, Mary stayed with the company. Serane got her a job with a vice-president in the Public Relations Division in New York, and she moved to Manhattan. Nobody asked Humbert anything, even though he kept her file out on his desk for two weeks and would have been only too happy to answer questions about her.
Oh, how wonderful it is, thought Kussman. Serane was seated in front of the desk, in the chair that Kussman had put there for underlings. It was the armless chair under the spotlight, with the metal seat slanting forward. Serane’s face was generally noncommittal, but had intimations of gloom. He was not sitting on the edge of the chair, nor leaning respectfully forward, as etiquette required, but it did not really matter. There was immense satisfaction to have him in here, in that chair, under any conditions. Oh, Serane, l beat you out. 1 won. You’re in the junk heap. You are going to be sorry you were ever bom.
“I will resign quietly,” said Serane. “I will leave it up to you to say when. If you like, it can be effective as of this moment.”
Kussman frowned. This was not working out as he had expected. He did not like the way Serane had come straight to the point. For what he had in mind it was essential that Serane stick around several weeks longer. If Serane left immediately, his very carefully planned vengeance was shot to hell. He leaned forward. “Do you have another job already?”
“No. Of course not I have not even started looking yet.”
Kussman relaxed. He smiled. It was a good smile, full of optimistic introspection. He looked out across the wide lawns, over to the traffic on the Post Road. “I am sorry it has come to this. But you know best where your future lies. We can give you a reasonable time to look—say up to six weeks. It creates a rather awkward situation, you know. I will have to put someone else in as group leader. And find something for you to do. Actually, you and your people are several weeks behind in writing up your project reports. If you could take on that chore, I will find a quiet place for you to work. Write up the reports in longhand, and Mrs. Pinkster will find someone to type them.”
13
The Hole
Serane was assigned to temporary quarters in a little office on the second floor adjoining the HCN room. This space was used from time to time by chemists soon to leave employment in the lab. It had a name: The Hole.
Occupancy in The Hole often helped define who you are and where you have been. It was the last stop on the Nowhere Road.
Paul had seen the place. He knew its reputation. He now paid it a brief but solemn visit.
He had heard the stories. Some years ago this had been the office of old Dr. Krug, manager of the little HCN Group. One morning he had been found slumped over his desk (this very same desk), face and fingers a delicate blue. No one had ever been able to determine how the HCN got out of the HCN room and into the adjacent office, but it was quite clear that it had.
The safety officer remedied the situation by removing both corpse and door, so that the little office was now wide open to the world, and no gases could collect within its minuscule confines.
The equipment in The Hole consisted of desk, chair, visi, and ashtray.
The drawers of the desk would not open. There was a window, but it had no shade or blind. The sun came in, hot on the occupant’s face. There was neither air conditioning nor radiant heating. The window would not open, and in summer the room temperature might easily rise over one hundred degrees in the afternoon. In winter it was generally necessary for the occupant to wear a couple of sweaters. In the big snow storm of 1997 someone had left a bottle of drawing ink on the desk. It had frozen and broken, and the desk top was still discolored from the ink.
Paul looked at this place, and his heart sank.
Serane did not complain. He broke the desk open and cleaned it thoroughly. Then he swabbed every reachable square inch of his little cell with disinfectant. He cleaned the window, installed a Venetian blind and borrowed another chair from storage.
He seemed to show no awareness of his degradation. For the first few days Kussman used to come by to say good morning. But Serane was always so cheerful that the lab chief finally delegated this chore to Humbert.
Paul was among the several visitors of the first morning after Serane moved in. He smiled crookedly. “Will they let you play chess?”
Serane grinned back. “If they don’t like it, they can fire me. Join me here at noon.”
Paul hesitated. “John, how long do you have … ?”
“Six weeks. Provided I sit here quietly and write up reports. I can’t do anything at the bench. I can’t touch even a test tube. If I behave myself, I have six weeks.”
In the second week, Kussman had the visi taken out and passed the word that people were to stop bothering Serane so he could concentrate on his reports.
Paul was an official exception. The word had come down that the Patent Section should go through Serane’s lab notebooks and make sure that all of his inventions were properly covered by patent applications. Paul dutifully drew out the notebooks from the library safe and started through them one by one.
As Paul turned the pages, he knew he had never seen them before. But at the same time these books seemed familiar. Where? When?
And was it all here? Somehow, something seemed to be missing. Had the series actually been started before 1996? No, that could not be right. On January 3, 1996, appeared the entry, My first day … And then he had it. How stupid of him! Serane still had the 2006 volume. The tenth. And Paul was not going to ask him for it.
Even so, there was still something mysterious about the whole thing.
The pages went by slowly, and there were a number of unfamiliar entries. Work had been done that had never been written up in the routine circulation lab reports, and which probably had never been processed for patent applications. Paul assembled a complete set of Serane’s old lab reports and slowly made a correspondence between notebooks and reports. There were dozens of gaps.
He brought Marggold in to look at the documents spread out over his desk. Marggold was unperturbed. “I never thought it likely that the Patent Section would ever catch up with Serane. But at least you seem to have defined our part of the job. It is a lot of work, but I would suggest that you go over it with Serane, book by book.”
“Will I get him in trouble? Kussman has him writing up reports.”
“I’ll tell Kussman. You go ahead. Do it on a reasonable basis, say about an hour a day.”
And so there then ensued a kind of orgy. The discussion with Serane the first thing in the morning. Planning the work. Chess at noon. Dictating the patent application in the afternoon. It was a drunken, manic phase for Paul. And he had the impression it made life almost bearable for Serane.
Serane’s old group slowly wasted away, mostly by transfers. Serane watched the process in anguish.
Dr. Quirrel was assigned to Urea Production. He studied the plant layout for three days and nights. He quickly grasped the problems, and he thought he could offer some solutions. He waited and waited, but the process manager never asked him anything. Whenever the man passed his desk, Quirrel would shrink down into his papers, hoping (yet dreading) to be coaxed out into the open and there be ecstatically mistreated, Serane-fashion. But it never happened. Something began to wither inside him. Serane finally got him an instructorship at Stamford Community College, where all he had to do was grade Chem I papers and collect notes for his next phys chem text.
Kussman transferred Dr. Slav to Agricultural and Dr. Teidemann to Metallurgical: the physical and philosophical antipodes of the laboratory. The Ag group leader gave Dr. Slav a project memo with the stated objective of finding an ecologically acceptable insecticide for the tent caterpillar. After a couple of weeks he called the silent Slav into his office and asked him in a friendly way how the project was coming along. The chemist simply stared at him, bewildered, then finally turned his back on the astonished supervisor and shuffled away. That afternoon the supervisor got a call from Teidemann recommending that trialine might be useful in control of the cotton boll weevil. The supervisor was shaken. He could see that something was greatly awry, but he found himself unable to bring the situation into focus. It was beyond him. He put Slav in the greenhouse and forgot about him.
Robert Moulin was asked to grind phosphate rock
for flotation experiments. Serane showed him how to make the switchover. After that it was exactly the same, day after day. The mills continued their shrill threnody.
Dr. Mukerjee was transferred to the Animal lab, where he was placed in charge of rats, mice, and dogs, and especially in charge of a female gibbon. He suffered least of all in the Serane diaspora.
14
The Last Lecture
Serane bounced into Paul’s office, grinning.
“You got a job!” cried Paul.
“Yep. And a good one. Research director for a lab in Pittsburgh. They want me right away. Also, I have an offer on my house. Everything is working.”
Paul looked at his calendar. “When is your last day here?”
“Let’s make it next Friday.”
“I will pass the word. We will have a little get-together at Halfway House.”
“See you.” Serane left with buoyant strides.
Paul watched him go, then looked through the door for a long time.
There was a dull dreamlike quality about the next sequence of events. It was like making all the arrangements for a funeral. First he had to make sure that the other possible contenders for emcee would let him do it. It was no surprise to him that the members of Serane’s old group were agreeable. They were all willing to come, but they were obviously relieved that Paul had volunteered to handle the banquet. Next the question of a gift; and collecting for the dinner; and arranging to get Johnnie there and then home afterward.
He had to think. And it was hard to think. How many would come? Probably a rather large number. It might well be, he suspected, the largest turnout for this kind of thing in the history of the lab. It would take the entire main dining room at Halfway House.
Serane called Paul at ten that Friday morning. “I’m down in Nitrogen Derivatives. Or what used to be. And I’m lining everybody up for a lecture. Come join the fun!”
“Right away.”
The first Friday lecture in nearly six weeks. And the last, forever.
Somehow the word had gotten around. It wasn’t just the old Nitrogen crew. One by one, chemists and group leaders from other parts kept joining the audience. The listeners overflowed the bay and out into the hall.
Finally Serane held up his hand, and they all became very quiet.
The only sound was Bob Moulin’s mills, somewhere in the distance.
“Thank you for coming,” said Serane. “Of course, this is not the last time I expect to see you. We’ll all be at the dinner this evening, and I’ll be running into each of you from time to time in the years to come. So there’s no final farewell.
“Today I’m going to talk about catalysts. Now, what is a catalyst? There are a dozen good definitions, all different, all slightly inconsistent. We won’t use them. We’ll consider the matter inductively, and then we’ll make up our own definition.
“Take the simplest case.
“Water is formed from its elements, which are hydrogen and oxygen, and this has been known since the experiments of Priestley. Yet it isn’t all that simple. If pure oxygen and pure hydrogen are mixed together by themselves in a closed vessel, with nothing else present, nothing happens. No water is formed. But when one exposes this mixture to a little spongy platinum, the reaction is instantaneous, even explosive. The platinum is a catalyst. It increases the rate of a reaction that would otherwise proceed very slowly. A great many processes of industrial chemistry require a catalyst. And frequently the catalyst is highly specific. The best catalyst for one reaction might be the worst catalyst for another.
“So. A catalyst is anything that speeds up a chemical reaction. Note we don’t say it’s present in minute quantities, or that it’s recoverable in its starting form.” “Sounds like Ostwald’s definition,” said Art Schirmer.
“Very observant. What did the old boy say?”
“I can’t remember exactly. Something like, ‘A catalyst is something that alters the velocity of a chemical reaction without appearing in the end products …* ” “I would buy that. Ostwald, 1900. By then he had the benefit of a lot of theory and industrial use. In 1836 when Berzelius coined the term catalysis, he thought it applied to some special force outside the laws of chemistry. Ostwald knew that wasn’t so.”
“But Berzelius should have known better,” said Dr. Mukerjee. “Catalysis was used in industry even before his time. Industrial catalysis dates from 1746, the lead chamber process for sulfuric acid, where nitric oxide is added to accelerate the oxidation of sulfur dioxide to sulfur trioxide.”
“Quite so,” agreed Serane. “Anybody know when the next big one came along?”
“The Deacon process?” said Sam Quirrel.
“That’s right. For the catalytic oxidation of HC1 to chlorine and water. In 1860, I think. Then … ?” “Sabatier, hydrogenation of fats with nickel, 1900,” said Dr. Statice.
“Then back to Ostwald,” said Serane. “Nineteen five. Oxidation of ammonia over platinum to nitric acid. Followed closely by Haber in Germany, for the synthesis of ammonia from the nitrogen of the air, followed immediately by the first synthetic ammonia plant. England cut off Germany’s supplies of Chile nitrates in 1915. No nitrates, no gunpowder or explosives. It was Haber’s synthetic ammonium nitrate plant that enabled Germany to stay in World War One. Haber tried many thousands of catalysts before deciding on iron promoted with metallic oxides. So we should not be discouraged merely because we’ve tried a few dozen in search of an atmospheric trialine process.”
He always comes back to atmospheric trialine, thought Paul. If he’s finally got the solution, why doesn’t he take it with him? It would serve the company right.
He looked about him, furtively, at the quiet intent faces. There was something unique about this Friday lecture. He searched for analogies. It was like Anatole France’s “The Last Lesson,” where the French grammarian in the elementary school in Strasbourg is giving his last lesson in French before Alsace is officially ceded to Germany. And it was like the Phaedo, where Socrates tried to give a last hour of wisdom to his pupils before drinking the hemlock. And it had a touch of Petronius, dining quietly with his friends, veins slowly draining, to cheat Nero’s assassins.
Serane continued: “In 1925 the Germans synthesized methanol over zinc and chromic oxides. In the thirties they catalyzed the polymerization of butadiene to make synthetic rubber. Catalysis enabled them to stay in business in both wars. The fifties brought the polyolefin catalysts, the seventies introduced the coal hydration catalysts that broke the Arab oil monopoly, and the nineties gave us the soil nitrification catalyst, which has revolutionized agriculture.”
“And in 2006,” said Tom Oldham, “Serane catalyzed trialine at atmospheric pressure.”
“Well, Tom, I do have some ideas about the catalyst. One day you fellows may be able to try them out. First, in mechanical structure, the catalyst base has to be porous, honeycombed with tiny holes, microchambers, if you will. The urea vapor products are collected in these holes. They will be catalyzed by what they find there, to split out water and form trialine.”
The Luminex wall and ceiling panels lit up in wavering blotches. “Porous silica,” explained Serane. “Lots of open cells. Look at that—” He expanded the display on the front panel and projected it forward in sharp tri-di. “As you can see, each cell is like a tiny autoclave, because the cell aperture is so tiny it holds its contents by capillary attraction. When the trialine is made, there is enough ammonia in the atmosphere over the catalyst to displace it, so that it is swept out in the effluent, where it can be chilled, condensed, and collected.
“Actually, I cheated a little. True, that was a microsection of porous silica, but it was industrial silica gel, totally inorganic. We can do better.” The screens faded. Now Serane showed a pencil sketch, enlarged to fill the far panel. “That’s a hypothetical cell of a hypothetical porous biological silica. Note that I've postulated oxygen spacings in the wall of this cell pretty much in the same plane. They’re spaced so that they force the amino groups to form on the same side of the trialine ring. If the new catalyst really works, you ought to get a much higher yield, and the trialine should be biologically active. Like so.” He showed the final sketch, a structural formula. Paul recognized it as a trialine molecule, but it looked strange. The three amino groups thrust forward from the hexatomic ring, on the same side of the molecule.
“That’s what we might get with properly activated biological silica,” said Serane, “and in yields as high as ninety to ninety-five percent.”
For a moment the group stared in wonder.
Finally Paul asked, “What exactly do you mean by ‘biological’ silica?”
