Howe-DNKnowDo Neanderthals Know?Robert J. HoweFictionwise, Inc.Copyright © 2005 by Robert J. HoweScience Fiction. 10146 words long. First published in Analog, December 2005 Nebula Award Preliminary Ballot NomineeenNovelettext/xml

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Do Neanderthals Know?
by Robert J. Howe
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Science Fiction

Fictionwise, Inc.
www.Fictionwise.com

Copyright ©2005 by Robert J. Howe

First published in Analog, December 2005

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

I was there when Pinky Sills became a proteus. Maybe not at the exact moment—perhaps even Pinky couldn't say when that was—but I was there at the beginning.

We were eating lunch in the fifth floor cafeteria of Ihinger-Ibex's Minnesota campus. It was April, but there was still enough winter in the air to keep us from venturing outside the corporate park. It was our regular threesome for lunch: me, Pinky, and Joyce Gannet, my wife and boss of the Composite Materials Group. We were sitting in the open section of the cafeteria, even though we all had executive-level badges and could have used the dining room with the suits, when Pinky pulled out a plastic zip-lock bag full of lettuce and set it on the table.

Joy and I looked at each other—Pinky was like a lot of geniuses in that he was developmentally arrested at about age eight, and he often did things to get a rise out of us. Pinky took a couple of leaves out of the baggie and placed them neatly between his hamburger patty and bun.

“Tell me,” Joy said, “tell me that you're not brown-bagging your own lettuce."

“Nuh-huh,” he said. “It's from the lab. It's an African plant, Brassica; cabbage family. We're looking at it as an anti-fungal. He took a tidy bite from the burger and chewed it carefully. “Tastes neat."

Joy took a leaf from the baggie and sniffed it.

“Try some, it's fresh,” Pinky said, his mouth full of food.

Joy broke off two pieces and handed me one. The leaves were crisp, with a slight bitterness about them. At least they had a taste, which was more than I could say for the bland iceberg salads the cafeteria usually served.

“It also seems to be a mild hallucinogen,” Pinky offered.

“What?” I spit out the remainder into my napkin. “Lunatic."

“Oh, stop,” he said. “I wouldn't let you eat anything that I hadn't tried myself. You probably wouldn't notice anything unless I mentioned it. The only thing is that I had really vivid daydreams after I ate it."

“Have you tried this out on anyone else?” Joy wanted to know. She looked like she was trying not to laugh.

“Herman, you know him,” Pinky gestured to me, “from FDA applications? He ate a bunch of it one day—he's on that diet, you know, and he'd eat ratshit on toast—he polished off a small bag of it."

“Anything happen to him?” I asked, trying to not be annoyed with Pinky.

“No, I told you. He made a salad out of it with some tomatoes Marybeth had in the break room. Never noticed a thing,” Pinky said.

“All you guys in pharmaceuticals are head cases,” Joy said. “Too much product testing, I think.” She loaded her empty wrappers and juice container onto her tray. “Well, I've got a one o'clock meeting. And I'm going to call you first if I notice any of the guys turning into lizards or anything,” she said to Pinky.

“How would you notice?"

“Yeah, well, there's that.” She gave me an affectionate bump with her hip as she left the table. “See you in the parking lot. Don't let Doctor Strangelove feed you any more mutant lettuce,” she said to me.

“Mutant cabbage,” Pinky called after her.

She shook her head and was gone through the swinging doors.

Pinky's lab was down the corridor from mine on the third floor, and on our way back we engaged in a little character assassination—something we couldn't do in front of Joy, as she was a firm believer in “if you can't say something nice, you're not trying very hard” school of thought. That was easy for her: she had the kind of effortless popularity most of us geeks envied. She didn't have to play office politics, at least not very much, because she was brilliant and well-liked. I also happened to think she was beautiful, but that's neither here nor there. To this day I do not know what the hell she saw in me.

I was about to leave Pinky outside his lab when he grabbed my arm and pulled me off to one side of the corridor. “Sam, do you ever wonder what it would have been like to live in the ocean like the first bony fish? I was thinking about that,” he said. “What the sea would sound like—feeling the pull of the tides in your body...."

The expression on my face must have been priceless, because he didn't continue.

“What brought that on?” I said.

“I don't know. I was looking at the carpet and it just popped into my head,” he answered. He was sort of frowning and looking off into the middle distance. “Don't you ever get a wild hair, Sam?"

I just looked at him.

“Anyway, I do."

“Uh-huh. Well, I've got to get back to the bench,” I said. I gave him a light poke in the chest. “And keep away from the lettuce.” I meant it as a joke, or I thought I did, but it just kind of hung there between us for a minute.

“It's cabbage,” he said, finally. He didn't sound as if he were joking, either.

* * * *

Joy was already at the car when I got there, sitting in the driver's seat, reading a paperback. I told her about my conversation with Pinky, which she listened to while we waited behind a line of cars leaving the campus.

“You think his spaciness has something to do with the cabbage at lunch?” she finally said.

“I don't know. It might. He's drafty enough as it is,” I said. “I guess what worries me is that he's so cavalier about it."

She nodded. “I suppose,” she said. “On the other hand, if he was going to be sampling the wares, I imagine he could lay his hands on much more potent stuff than cabbage."

I made a noncommittal grunt. The truth was, any of us at the mid to top levels of pharma research had access to lots of powerful psychogenic drugs, none of which I'd ever had the slightest reason to suspect Pinky of eating. I was still brooding when I realized that we weren't headed the usual way home.

“Where are we going?"

“Celebrating,” Joy said, smiling at the windshield.

“Big ‘C’ or little ‘C'?"

“Uh, medium. Maybe capital ‘C.’ I've been working on a carbon laminate—I don't know if I talked about it... ?"

“In passing,” I said. “I thought the group was stalled on it."

“Right,” she said. “In fact, Phil had already suggested we drop it for the time being. Anyway, I was sitting in the material safety meeting, kind of listening with half an ear, and I think I came up with a way around the heat curing, which is what had us dead in the water."

“And this means?"

“Well, it means Phil will be happy with us—we already sank a lot of hours into it—but I'm pretty pleased about it just because,” she said. “You know."

I knew. Joy did crosswords in pen—nothing rare about that in the circles we traveled in—but on the rare occasion when she couldn't finish one, she neatly clipped it and filed it away to be done later. Not, mind you, after she'd seen the solution: She periodically went to her files and pulled a puzzle at random, working it until she solved it or stalled again, in which case it went back in her files. Joy dropped a line of research about as cheerfully as a pit bull relinquished steak to a poodle.

We discussed her breakthrough over beer and steaks at our traditional birthday, anniversary, just-need-to-get-out restaurant. Half the fun of being married to someone in the research business was getting to brag about our little victories to someone who understood what it meant and who was entirely sympathetic, and our fields were different enough to preclude direct competition.

“You know what's funny?” she said while we were waiting for the coffee. “The solution just popped into my head while I was sitting there. I was thinking about heat curing, and the whole Stanford thing just came out of nowhere."

“That's always the way it is for me,” I said. “I'm either straining too hard for the answer, or it's something obvious that I've overlooked. Once I relax a little—"

“Negatrons,” she said, all of a sudden concentrating. “You know, the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that I never heard of the Stanford process. I mean, I looked it up in the cookbook once the method occurred to me, but I don't think I ever came across it before."

“You might have seen the method without ever hearing the name,” I said. “When you're working on something like this you're always dredging up half-remembered stuff."

“No. I don't have words to describe it; the whole thing popped into my head fully formed—like I suddenly knew just what I needed to know."

Coffee arrived then, and New York cheesecake, which commanded our undivided attention. We didn't come back to the conversation until weeks later.

* * * *

The next month was a busy one for me. We were in secondary trials for an antiviral drug, a big deal for obvious reasons. Phil Nguyen, the VP for new products, was pushing hard for favorable results. Not that Phil would actually come out and say that the results should be favorable—he'd come up the research route himself, and he knew how we'd react to that—but there were plenty of subtle ways to apply the pressure that netted the same effect. During the crunch, Joy and I often took two cars, as I was getting in early and staying late.

I also saw little of Pinky, though he and Joy were still having lunch fairly often. It was after one of those lunches that Joy came up to my lab—something she rarely did, and almost never unannounced. I remember the expression on her face when I saw her from across the room—my first thought was that there'd been a death in her family or mine.

“They just took Pinky to the hospital,” was the first thing she said when she got me alone.

“What? What happened?” I assumed an accident—Pinky's last trip to the hospital was in something like the fourth grade; he suffered from impossibly good health.

“I don't know. He was fine at lunch,” she said. “But Mildred saw the ambulance pull up and saw them walking Pinky out to it."

“Okay,” I said. I had a lot to do that day, but I was already mentally clearing the decks: this was Pinky, after all. “I'll call Gerry and find out what hospital he's at."

What Joy said then gave me a twinge of deep uneasiness. “I asked Gerry where they were taking him: he said nowhere; Pinky was just going home early."

“By ambulance?"

“That's what I said to him."

“And?"

“Gerry didn't say anything. When I asked again, he said I should ask Nguyen."

“What's Phil got to do with it?"

“Who knows?” Joy said, her voice rising in anger. “He's gone for the day. So's his assistant, so's Richard, so's anybody who could give me a straight answer. Phil's not even answering his cellular.” Anybody who knew Phil could easily imagine him sleeping with the cellular phone in the pocket of his PJ's.

My first thought, and no more noble for being correct, was that Pinky had gotten himself into trouble. Of course I thought about the cabbage, and about the way he'd acted that day, many weeks ago. It wasn't something I wanted to discuss at the lab.

Joy and I left. I didn't know where we were going until I was on 205 heading north. “We'll go to Pinky's place."

“Okay,” she said. “You don't think he's there, though?"

“Maybe not, but I don't know where else to start.” I didn't want to say out loud what I was thinking. We had the keys to Pinky's house, and he had the keys to ours, for vacations and emergencies and such. Even if he wasn't home, we might find out more about Pinky's extracurricular activities at his house.

I wasn't the only one who had that idea. When we pulled up to Pinky's place, a two-story Tudor in Sky Lake, there were two unmarked vans in the driveway, and Phil Nguyen's BMW parked on the street.

The front door wasn't locked—I wondered if Phil had gotten Pinky's keys—and when we walked in, two guys in suits who had that institutional cop look about them met us in the hall.

“Excuse me?” one of the suits said, blocking our way. “Something I can help you with?"

“Who are you?” Joy said. “And what are you doing in Dr. Sills’ house?"

The men just looked at us. “We're with security, Miss,” one of them finally said. “I'm afraid you can't come in."

“Security?” Joy said. “What security?"

“Ihinger-Ibex,” the suit said. He showed us an oval badge with the company's stylized ibex on it, in a leather case.

When I thought of security at all, I guess I pictured Walt, at the front gate with his clip-on uniform tie and droopy trousers. These guys looked like FBI agents. I wondered if they carried guns under their jackets.

“This may be a crime scene,” the guy said. “You're not allowed in."

Joy, to her credit, was less impressed by his authority than I was. “Crime scene?” she said. “You're not a cop. Get out of my way."

Just then Phil came from the living room. “Joyce, I thought that was you. Sam, hi. Come in,” he said, gesturing as if it were his house.

The two security guys stepped out of our way, polite smiles on their faces, and we followed Phil into the living room.

He looked tired; his eyes were pouchy and his clothes were rumpled as if he'd been in them a long time.

“Where's Pinky?” I said."

“He's in the hospital. He's fine—he's fine,” Phil said, holding up a hand to forestall the next, obvious question. “It's just a precaution. He was sampling the pharmaceutical wares, Sam.” Phil made a face and took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit up—it was a measure of how shaken he was, I thought, since Phil was very image-conscious and the corporate culture at Ihinger-Ibex was very much anti-smoking. “Do you know anything about it?” he asked tiredly.

I was going to say something about the cabbage, but Joy gave me a subtle nudge. “You look awful, Phil,” she said. “Is everything okay at home?"

I thought that odd, given the context, and so did Phil, apparently, since he gave Joy a sidelong look before answering.

“Everything at home is fine,” he said. “But the office is in absolute chaos; Sills has been freelancing, and into the product. He's been unbelievably irresponsible, Joyce—the kind of stuff that could bring the FDA in and shut us down."

Phil was a driven man, and he did worry more than the rest of us about politics, but that was his job. And he wasn't an alarmist. I wondered what Pinky had gotten into that had Phil so visibly shook.

“Did either of you know he was self-testing the product?"

“Are you sure?” Joy said. “Pinky can be difficult, but, really, Phil—as a researcher he's the last one you'd call irresponsible. This is the man who rewrote the Milsam because the old one was too lax."

Joy made a good advocate. Milsam, MLSAM: the Manual of Laboratory Safety and Management was the company's technical procedural bible, and Pinky had rewritten it, not too many years earlier, because a technician had contaminated an important experiment of his. Ihinger-Ibex had even received a positive citation from OSHA over the new rules. If I hadn't seen Pinky eat that cabbage myself, I would have been swayed.

“I don't know what I know, Joyce,” Phil said. He sounded disconsolate. “All I can point my finger at is the dozen-odd setups in his lab that weren't in the logbook, and that nobody else knew about. And Sills won't discuss them—he's adamant. What am I supposed to think?"

The rest of the conversation was like that. Joy tried to pump Phil for information while he tried to pump us. No, we couldn't know what hospital Pinky was in; he'd insisted on privacy. No, we didn't know where Pinky might have kept his own files. And so on. When we left, Phil went back to what he was doing—apparently ransacking Pinky's computer for clues to his extra-curricular activities.

I sat behind the wheel of the car, not sure what to do next. “Phil seems pretty shook,” I said. “Are you sure it was a good idea not to mention the cabbage?"

“Don't waste too much energy feeling bad for Phil,” Joy said with uncharacteristic sharpness. “He's lying through his teeth."

“What?"

“Pinky's not in the hospital; he's at Phil's house,” she said. “Phil doesn't care about Pinky's privacy: Phil, or someone higher up, doesn't want us talking to Pinky."

This was out of deep left field, both that my wife would think Pinky was being held at his boss's house, and that she'd be so sure of her hunch. Joy was nothing if not an empiricist. I trod carefully.

“Is that why you asked him about home, to get a rise out of him?” I said.

“So to speak.” Her expression was opaque.

“What makes you think he's there? Wouldn't it make more sense for him to be somewhere on the campus—"

“He's there, Sam. I don't think he's there, I know. Do you remember where Phil's house is, or should I drive?"

We'd been to Phil and Nancy's house a dozen times over the years—the usual holiday socializing, mostly. Joy drove over while I thought out loud.

“There's probably going to be more security guys over there, if Pinky is at Phil's house,” I said. Joy nodded, angry. “Look, if that's the case, you have to avoid glaring at them—in fact, the only way we're going to get to see Pinky is if they believe Phil sent us. We have to give the impression we're on their side—"

“What side is that?” Joy said, cutting me off.

“From their point of view, Pinky is some dangerous loose cannon—I don't know why—so we have to give the impression that we're there on Phil's behalf,” I said. “That means treating the security guys as if they're doing you a favor by watching Pinky."

“My husband, James Bond,” Joy said, but she smiled.

“I'm glad you're amused,” I said.

“I just didn't know you had such a devious streak. Hidden depths,” she said. “I think you're right—needless to say."

“Well, he's probably not there,” I said. I didn't know where Joy's fey mood had come from, but I was troubled by it, and by what we were about to do if Pinky was indeed being held at Phil's house. It all seemed so unlikely and melodramatic.

* * * *

The Nguyens’ housekeeper answered the door—they lived in a huge old Victorian in Northfield—and we asked for Nancy. We waited in the foyer for a minute and Nancy appeared with a guy in a suit—more security. Up to that point I'd felt foolish, showing up at Phil's house. How were we going to explain that if Pinky wasn't there? Now it looked like Phil was the one who'd have some explaining to do.

“Hi, Nancy. Phil sent us over to talk to Pinky,” Joy said in a funereal tone. The impression was that we were dragooned into this unpleasant duty because of our friendship with Pinky.

“They're in the den,” she said, looking terribly uncomfortable about the whole thing; understandable, given the corporate goon at her elbow. “Mr. Freeman?” she nodded to the goon.

Mr. Freeman showed no inclination to let us in. “When did you talk to Dr. Nguyen?” he asked.

“We just came from Dr. Sills’ house,” I said. “Nothing there. Dr. Nguyen should be right behind us—they were just locking up when we left.” I used Pinky's professional title deliberately: I wanted the security man to feel as though this was high-level stuff, and not some office wretch making off with a box of pencils.

I must have hit the right note, because he led us upstairs, to Phil's den. I'd never been in that room before. It looked like a set for Masterpiece Theatre: deep leather club chairs, an antique desk with brass fittings, and leather-bound books in dark wood bookcases. It struck me as totally unlike Phil, who, whatever his faults, was not a pretentious man. It took a few seconds to register that there was no computer on the huge mahogany desk. It was probably a showcase never used by Phil, but put together by a designer, or by Nancy, about whose tastes I knew far less.

There, being watched by two more guys in suits, was Pinky, looking childlike and pathetic in an oversized wing chair. He was clutching a Byerly's shopping bag in his lap.

“What do you want?” Pinky said, looking from me to Joy. To say I was taken aback would be an understatement—it didn't occur to me that Pinky would immediately identify us with his captors.

“You're in a lot of trouble, Erik,” Joy said. Pinky's real name sounded strange on her lips. “What the hell is wrong with you?"

“I guess you talked to Phil. Nothing's wrong with me,” Pinky sounded like a surly teenager. “These Gestapo agents pulled me out of my own lab, in the middle of the day, without any explanation. Phil is convinced I'm freelancing—that's what happens when you become a bean-counter, I guess; you start getting paranoid."

None of this was making sense to me: not Joy's abrasive tone, nor Pinky's defensiveness. The security guys seemed unruffled, however. I briefly thought it might be an act on Pinky's part—Joy was almost certainly acting, though I didn't know to what end—but there was no way Pinky could have caught on before Joy had said a word.

“Pinky, we're just trying to help,” I said. “Something's going on..."

Pinky ignored me, staring morosely at the Byerly's bag in his lap.

“Come on,” Joy said to me, “this is a waste of time."

“Wait a minute.” We hadn't found out anything yet. I wanted to talk to Pinky alone, without the security men listening. Otherwise, the whole exercise of coming to Phil's house—likely to get us in hot water as soon as Phil found out—was futile.

“Pinky, will you tell me what happened?” I asked, sitting in the chair opposite him. “Would you feel more comfortable talking if these other guys left the room?"

Pinky just retreated further inward.

I turned to the older of the security guys. “You know, he might be a little more reasonable if you gave us a minute or two,” I said. My tone was peremptory, but I tried to indicate by facial expression that I was humoring Pinky.

“No can do, Dr. Krase,” he said.

“Come on, Sam. There's nothing we can do here,” Joy said, rather bleakly, I thought. “Let's go back to campus and get started on the files Phil asked us about."

Well, that was clear enough. Phil hadn't asked us about any files—Joy had her reasons for wanting us out of there, and seeing as how we weren't going to get Pinky alone, and given his uncommunicative state, there was nothing else for me to say. Still, I had to play out the act for the security men.

“Dr. Nguyen has my cellular number,” I said to them, getting up. “He can call me if he needs anything.” I felt utterly transparent, playing the charade, but the security guys seemed to buy it. It made me wonder how good they really were at their jobs.

* * * *

“What was that all about?” I said, as soon as we were in the car.

“Let me think for a minute,” Joy said. This was a habit—she liked to work things through in her head before she hashed them out with me. I had learned, after a few unproductive arguments, to wait until she was ready to talk.

Joy drove. I was busy fretting, primarily about what was going to happen when Phil heard of our visit; my worries about what was going to happen to Pinky were a distant second. I realized, after a few minutes, that we were heading back to Pinky's neighborhood.

Joy still had her do-not-disturb expression on. I didn't say anything until we pulled into the parking lot of a Byerly's.

“What's going on?"

“A hunch,” she said. “I think Pinky left something for us here."

We went in, and Joy steered us straight to the produce section. There, in the display case along with several different kinds of lettuces, were three heads of Pinky's cabbage.

I'd only seen a few individual leaves; never a whole head. They looked like spinach more than anything—deep green, but with reddish veins.

Joy gathered them up and put them in a transparent plastic produce sack.

“That's not going to work,” I told her. “The cashiers aren't going to recognize it; they're going to look for a produce code and not find one."

“I thought we'd just bluff through it,” Joy said. “They won't refuse to sell it to us."

“No, no they won't,” I said. But I was uneasy about it. It didn't come to me in so many words, but the feeling I had was that I didn't want any of the cashiers to be able to connect us with those particular greens.

“Let's buy a bunch of other stuff,” I said. “We'll throw these in the bag with lettuce—maybe Romaine, they're close."

Joy gave me a peculiar look, but she went along with my idea. We ended up getting lettuce, radishes, onions, and two bell peppers. We'd be eating salad for days. My excessive caution paid off: the cashier hardly glanced at the odd greens, ringing them up as lettuce.

Our drive home seemed prolonged by the edgy silence. There were a number of questions I was itching to ask Joy. How had she known Pinky was being held at Phil's house? How had she known we'd find the cabbages at that Byerly's? What was the act at Phil's all about, and for that matter, how were we going to explain our presence there to Phil when we saw him at the lab?

And the big question: what was Pinky up to—or at least how much did Joy know about it?

In the kitchen, Joy didn't bother putting the other groceries away; she took out the cabbages and tore a few leaves off one.

“Here,” she said. “Try these."

I didn't say anything.

“I know my behavior seems strange to you,” she said, putting the leaves on a square of paper towel. “This cabbage isn't going to hurt you, though. Eat some and then we'll talk about it."

“How about we talk now, Joy?” I said. I had a sick feeling in my stomach, as if I knew some horrible news was coming. “I already ate as much of these as I'm going to, that day in the cafeteria. What the hell is going on? Have you been eating these cabbages?"

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you and Pinky both nuts? Jesus!” I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. “Tell me what's going on."

Joy just stared at me, her expression unhappy.

“Why is Pinky in trouble?” I asked when she didn't say anything.

“In the short term, because Phil thinks he's whacked out from sampling the product,” she said. “In the long term, because you can't patent a naturally occurring plant."

“You mean the cabbage?” I shook my head. “What's one fungicide, more or less?"

Antifungal drugs were big moneymakers because immune-suppressed people who survived everything else often succumbed to fungal infections. But Phil, and by extension the big shots he answered to, were grownups—they knew that not every avenue led to pay dirt. And Pinky had made them enough money to spend the rest of his career sleeping in his office, if he wanted to.

“You don't understand,” Joy said, looking pained.

“No, I guess I don't.” I was starting to get irritated. It seemed to me that Joy was holding out on me. That was less scary than thinking she was losing her grip on reality.

“Why don't you stop tap dancing and tell me what the hell's going on, Joy?"

“It's not the cabbage's antifungal properties that have Phil's shorts in a bunch,” she said. “It's what Pinky called the cabbage's mild hallucinogenic properties that's gotten him into hot water."

“Hot water?"

She sat at the counter and pressed her palms together as if she were praying. It was the same nervous gesture she made when she told me that her mother's estate had left us a quarter of a million dollars richer, and when she told me that the house had been burglarized and she thought she'd left the door unlocked.

“First,” she said, “it's not a hallucinogen, mild or otherwise. It's sort of a neurotransmitter—well, a neuroamplifier."

“Pinky isolated the compound?” I said.

“Yes, but the optimum dose is obtained by eating the leaves—the neurological effect is achieved by about thirty-nine discrete compounds: the raw leaves deliver a perfectly titrated dose. Very complex molecules."

“And it acts on what sites?"

“All of them,” Joy said. “I know"—she held up a hand, palm out—"it sounds bizarre. Its surface is sort of a molecular skeleton key, though."

Something nagged at me. “How long has Pinky been working on this?"

“Since the summer."

“But—"

“I know,” she said, “it's years’ worth of work, isolating compounds out like that. That's point number two—it's a neuroamplifier that lets you read, for lack of a better word, atomic structures."

The sick feeling in my stomach was getting worse. “What do you mean? How is that possible? It's like ... reading the data on a magnetic disc with something the size of a skyscraper—no, more! The scales are hugely different."

“The strings that make up subatomic particles—they aren't really strings in any meaningful sense, but never mind that—are arranged in configurations that you could call an alphabet. There are more than twenty-six characters, but that's the basic idea: the particular configuration of the neuroamplifier's own subatomic particles in the cabbage amplifies the signals, for lack of a better word, coming from all the other particles that constitute your body, including those you ingest in food, respiration, and transdermally."

She looked at me anxiously, and it broke my heart a little: whatever else was going on in Joy's head, she was scared.

“In effect,” she said, “it's a window into the history of every atom you're exposed to. Everything that's happened to that atom, from its creation in the heart of a star on down through time, leaves a mark on it, and those marks can be read."

My heart sank then. Pinky had gone over the edge, and he'd taken Joy with him. I didn't know where to start the next thing I knew I had to say, so I just blurted it out.

“Joy, you've got to go to the hospital."

“I knew that was going to be your reaction,” she said, with what I thought was bitterness. None of this made a lot of sense to me.

“Joy, look,” I said, groping for the words to reach her. “What's the most likely conclusion here; that Pinky has discovered a new super-neurotransmitter and reformed subatomic physics, or that the cabbage is a hallucinogen, and that he, and you, are suffering from its effects?"

“I know.” She nodded briskly. “It all sounds delusional. I would say the same thing if I were in your shoes."

Rather than reassuring me, her brightly rational demeanor made me more uneasy.

Joy drummed her fingers on the countertop. “Okay, let me ask you a question: how do you think I knew Pinky was being held at Phil's house? Or that the cabbages were at Byerly's?"

“You said yourself the Byerly's thing was a hunch,” I said. “Pinky had a Byerly's bag and we went to the store closest to his house. You knew he had more of the cabbages; how much of an intellectual leap did it take?"

“Okay, then what about Phil's?"

“What about it?” I said, exasperated by her reasonable tone.

“Wouldn't it make more sense if they held him at the campus?” she said.

“Yes. And?"

“Just that it's not the first thing you'd think of—Pinky being at Phil's house."

“No, agreed,” I said.

Joy took a deep breath, preparing herself for a dive into deep water. “The air molecules that Phil breathed out, when we were at Pinky's house, had passed through Pinky's lungs and Nancy's,” she said. “It had to be Phil's home."

I got a phone call one night, two years after we'd been married, from a nurse in the emergency room at Hennepin County Medical Center: Joy had been in a car crash. It turned out to be a minor accident, but I died in the five seconds it took for the nurse to put Joy on the line. I had the same feeling of dread now—my wife had gone crazy. Of course she instantly saw the fear in my face.

“All right,” she said, her voice sharp, “today you had a root beer with lunch. Lunch was a salad and a salami sandwich on whole wheat bread, with mustard. You got your watch battery replaced. You bought a newspaper and coffee at the little Greek place with the roaches. You were using Ginny's computer sometime today or yesterday and Bill Mason had at least two beers at lunch with you. A shingle on the garage roof is worn through at its bottom edge, and water is leaking into the loft, though it hasn't seeped through the insulation yet. You used my toothpaste this morning ... Oh, hell, you get the idea."

She looked at me—I must have had a priceless expression—and said in a much softer tone, “I could go on."

I didn't want her to go on. I was confused by how much Joy knew: some of the things she could have guessed by knowing my daily routine and preferences, but not all of them, but I still couldn't buy her explanation. I was used to my wife being a rational person—sometimes too rational—and now I had the feeling that she'd swum too far from shore, and I couldn't reach her.

“Joy, you're scaring the hell out of me,” I finally said, blurting out the truth because I couldn't think of anything else to say.

“I know.” She looked sad.

“I need to think about this,” I said. “I'm going to go upstairs for a while."

“All right. I'll fix some dinner, meanwhile. I hope you're in the mood for salad.” She managed a wan smile that made me feel worse.

I closed my office door and lay down on the couch. I tried to make sense of what Joy told me—what I knew about subatomic particles and string theory wasn't much—and I tried to find an explanation that was neither drug-induced psychosis nor a new insight into neurochemistry and particle physics. But every time I tried to focus on Joy's seemingly supernatural perception, my mind skipped off the issue like a flat rock skimmed across the surface of a pond. My own anxiety was keeping me trapped above the surface of the problem.

The truth was, I wanted to do anything but think about it. I wanted to pull the covers over my head, go to sleep, and wake up back in the rational world. It was the first time, in ten years of marriage, that I felt truly lonely. I fell asleep into a brown morass of emotional fatigue and self-pity.

* * * *

There was a note taped to my door when I arrived at the lab the next morning: SEE ME. PHIL.

The boom was about to be lowered, I thought. I dropped my briefcase and coat off in my office and went up to see Phil.

“Where's Joyce?” was the first thing he said.

“We took separate cars. She should be here soon."

“Okay. I left a note on her door, and with Phyllis.” He sat down on the leather couch and gestured to one of the soft chairs grouped around his coffee table.

“Pinky wasn't freelancing,” he said. “And he wasn't sampling the pharmaceuticals."

If Phil's intent was to surprise me, it worked. A dozen possible responses went through my head—jamming each other in the doorway, so to speak. I didn't say anything.

“He hasn't done anything illegal, or unethical, or even against company policy,” Phil continued, “and as of this afternoon, he'll be back in his lab, unless he decides to take the rest of the day off."

I knew that Pinky had been eating that damn cabbage—so had Joy. Maybe it wasn't illegal, or unethical—but it had to be against company policy. What was I supposed to say to that?

“Why this sudden change of heart?” I said. “Yesterday you had him under house arrest."

“Yes, about that,” Phil said. “What was that yesterday, you and Joyce showing up at my house?"

I was at a loss for words again—the last thing I wanted to talk about was Joy's newfound “intuition,” doubly so with Phil. I was even more confused that morning because I'd checked the worn shingle in the garage and found it exactly as Joy had said it would be. How did she know? Smell, taste, some other sense? The shingle was invisible from the ground; the drop ceiling, dry to the touch and covered in undisturbed dust, also gave no clue. Until I'd stuck my hand up into the fiberglass wool and felt the wetness, I was sure Joy was wrong.

Phil was staring at me, waiting for an answer. I was never good at hiding my feelings, though, and some of my confusion and doubt must have shown on my face.

Phil leaned forward in his chair. “What's going on, Sam? You look miserable."

“Oh, the whole thing's upsetting,” I said. I wanted to tell someone—Joy's mental state, and the considerable question of her involvement in Pinky's problems, weighed heavily on me. I felt cut off from her in a way I hadn't felt since we'd been together. A part of me knew Phil was a very poor choice of confessors, but I think I might have told him anyway, not meaning to reveal everything, of course. I was saved by Joy's dramatic entrance into Phil's office.

“You son of a bitch!” Joy said, staring at Phil. She had a memo in her fist, and when I started to ask what was going on, Joy thrust it angrily into my hands.

It was a notification that Joy was required to appear at a hearing before the company's Professional Standards Committee—the disciplining body for the research workers at Ihinger-Ibex. Pinky's name was also listed as one of the subjects of the hearing. So was I. Until then we were all suspended.

“Well, Phil,” I finally said, “this is very nice."

He had trouble meeting my eyes. His hands, seemingly given marching orders by his anxiety, passed over the objects on his desk while he tried not to respond to the anger in my voice.

I left his office, glancing back before I closed the door. He looked like a man who couldn't find his house keys.

* * * *

In retrospect, I can see that Joy was already cut loose from the moorings of conventional society before we walked out of Phil's office. I planned to fight Phil's maneuvering, of course, but it hadn't occurred to me to do so from outside the system. Joy was already operating out of the blue and into the black, thank you Neils Young and Armstrong.

Had I tried to do it my way, things would have certainly ended up differently. I would probably be in a white-collar prison, somewhere in the Minnesota countryside, making thirty-five cents an hour washing institutional linens.

Sometimes I think that would have been an easier fate to comprehend.

* * * *

During that time, what I now think of as The Beginning of The End, the subject of the cabbage came up only once. I walked into the kitchen while Joy was shredding some leaves into a bowl, and she started as though I'd surprised her with a lover. After a second's pause, she got a defiant look on her face and continued shredding.

“So you're going to continue with this,” I said, trying not to sound angry.

“I am. And I'm going to ask you again if you won't give it a try,” she said. “I won't beg, though."

“What if you're wrong, Joyce?” I asked her. “It's a lot to ask."

She put the leaves down and wiped her hands on a paper towel. “So far we've got two hypotheses working here,” she said. “Either you're right, and the Brassica is making me deranged, or I really am seeing deeper into the nature of the universe because of its neuroamplifying properties. That I can tell you things I shouldn't know—about your doings out of my sight and other testable propositions—supports my hypothesis, rather than yours. Okay: can you suggest a third hypothesis?"

Of course I couldn't. I'd thought of little else since our suspension, and I couldn't imagine that Joy's insights, for lack of a better word, were lucky guesses. Moreover, on the one occasion I'd seen Pinky, he'd displayed the same abilities—though he seemed to care less whether I was convinced. He'd been eating the cabbage longer than my wife, and he'd retreated further into his own world.

“I don't have another hypothesis, no,” I said, “but I can't believe your explanation is right, either. Just because I can't think of a simpler explanation doesn't mean one doesn't exist."

“Well, that's a dilemma for you, isn't it?” Joy said.

I started to make a furious retort when I realized she was on the verge of crying. Her mouth was set in a firm line, but her eyes were wet with unshed tears. I stood there thinking, Why is she upset? I'm the one who's left behind.

* * * *

Joy, Pinky, and I were all suspended, with pay, for the three weeks until the hearing. It was an unpleasant indication of how seriously the company was taking things.

It was the first time in several years that Joy and I been thrown together all day, every day, and the contact soon began to rub both of us raw. I wanted to do something about the situation, but there was nothing to be done. Conversation about the problem was stillborn, the one or two times I attempted it, because there was nothing new to say.

Worst of all, Joy spent an alarming amount of time around the house with the lights dimmed, just staring into space, as if she were watching a private screening of the world's longest movie. It seemed more and more difficult to engage her, and after a certain point I was damned if I was going to chase her down whatever neurological rabbit hole she'd disappeared into.

Ten days into this sentence of enforced passivity, Pinky showed up at our door at eleven at night with a bottle of red table wine and two pizzas that were ice-cold from being driven around in the passenger seat of his car since dinnertime.

I didn't know whether to be relieved or annoyed that Joy came out of her trance at Pinky's arrival. She heated the pizzas while I opened the bottle of Corvo, an inexpensive Sicilian wine that I happened to like. The choice was uncharacteristic of Pinky, who rarely drank, and whose attention to other people's tastes was legendarily deficient.

We ate in the kitchen, and at first the memories of numerous other nights around the table lightened my mood. But Joy and Pinky seemed to be making an effort to include me in the conversation—for the first time in my marriage, and in my friendship with Pinky, I felt condescended to.

After the pizza Pinky got around to the reason he'd come by.

“Joyce said you're still not convinced,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Though I can't offer a better hypothesis than yours..."

“I won't appeal to your empirical instincts,” Pinky said, smiling. “Let me remind you of a story, instead. It starts, In the beginning ... Does that ring a bell?"

“What are you talking about, Pinky?” I said.

“The Old Testament, specifically the Judeo-Christian notion of The Fall of Man."

“Yes?"

“Where do you think that story comes from—eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge?” he said. “I mean, if you accept that the account is not divinely inspired, but is a myth written to explain historical, or pre-historical events. What does that bring to mind?"

“I'm not reassured, Pinky, that you need to bolster your case with Biblical citations,” I said. “Whatever the genesis, pardon the pun, of the mythic Fall, I don't buy that it's related to your cabbage."

“No, how about this?” he said. “Here's a plant indigenous to the middle of Africa, including the Great Rift Valley, at least fifteen million years ago, later spreading to the rest of Africa and Asia Minor—fossil evidence is solid on this point."

“Circumstantial at best, Pinky,” I said. “You still have to go a long way to show a causal relationship."

“I know, I know,” he said. “But the only proof is experiential. I know the causal relationship is there, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Don't you think it's the first thing I went looking for? In an experiment without external controls, I had to find some framework to test my hypothesis against.

“Sam, we evolved with this plant, and for millions of years our way of knowing the world was informed by its use. Why do you think written language evolved so late? It wasn't necessary; there didn't have to be written records when everyone could know, directly from nature, everything they needed to know."

He looked off into space for a moment. “I can't even imagine what it must be like to access these perceptions from birth,” he said. “I suspect finding this Brassica at our age is like learning a new language in your fifties: once you're past that age of maximum neural plasticity, it takes much greater effort to achieve more modest fluency."

“That's very lyrical,” I said, “but then why did written language evolve at all? Why wasn't knowledge of the plant passed down through historical times?"

“Why else?” Pinky said. “Power."

His face was flushed from the wine and the prodigious amounts of red pepper he heaped on his pizza. I wish I could say that he seemed imbalanced; that he had the delusional affect of a zealot, but the truth is that Pinky seemed as normal to me then as he had a hundred other times, arguing some theory over a friendly meal.

“What were the first written records?” he went on. “Accounts. Laws. Who got what from whom; who was allowed to do what to, and with, whom. As long as everyone could know things for themselves—know God, if you want to extend the Judeo-Christian metaphor—as long as there were no intermediaries, everyone was more or less equal.

“But we evolved from killer apes, Sam, and it's in our genes to covet everything we see. Some people more so than others. As long as everyone had access to the plant, there wasn't a way to know more than anyone else, but if you took their access away by force, you could make them know less than you. And that's the way it's been ever since—imbalances in power enforced by a monopoly on knowledge.

“It also explains, by the way, some of the forkings in the evolutionary bush. Like Neanderthal extinction. Neanderthal brain size, though less than ours, wasn't crucial; brain chemistry was. They didn't have receptors for the plant."

Pinky took a sip of his wine. “Not to belabor the point, Sam, but the New Testament, and its notion of redemption, has its roots in the suppressed knowledge of this strain of Brassica. And the same is true for every other belief system you care to name. I know; I checked. They all spring from the same fundamental conflict."

“So you're saying that the status quo is maintained by a global conspiracy to prevent people from eating this plant..."

“No, no, no!” Pinky cut me off. “The Fall of Man is a good metaphor for what's happened: we don't know what we've lost, other than in a deep, unconscious way. I think the yearning for what we lost drives the universal impulse toward spirituality in humans, but no one is deliberately suppressing the knowledge today; the world just is what it is."

It all sounded highly improbable to me, yet, again, I didn't have the words to rebut Pinky's assertions. Something else occurred to me then. “What about the unlogged setups in your lab? What do they have to do with the cabbage?"

“Nothing,” Pinky said. “When I realized I'd been indiscreet about the Brassica, I threw together some apparatus to make it look as though I was distilling a compound from the leaves. Completely worthless."

I looked from him to Joy. “So Phil doesn't know you're eating the leaves? What does he think—what did you say to Phil that made him shut down your lab and drag you off the campus?"

“You have to understand, I was very distracted,” he said. For just a moment, this was the old Pinky, confessing to some gaffe he'd made in front of the brass. “I told him he had lung cancer, small cell carcinoma, which he already knew..."

“What?” I said.

“Yes,” Joy said, “Mildred knew, too, because she had to make his chemo appointments, but otherwise Phil played it very close to the vest."

“I feel bad—I got Mildred in trouble because he thought she told me about the cancer,” Pinky said. “Anyway, that wasn't what kicked over the termite heap."

“What did it?” I asked.

“I told him I cured him,” Pinky said. “I blurted it out without thinking. Naturally Phil thought I was stoned on something I'd either gotten my hands on or cooked up in the lab. And of course he'd already heard about the cabbage.... He's going to be very surprised at his next checkup."

I don't know if I believed Pinky in the moment, but certainly my ability to feel surprise had been cauterized. I looked over at Joyce: obviously none of this was news to her. I thought I sounded calm when I asked him how he'd cured Phil's lung cancer.

“Trivially easy,” Pinky said, dismissing it with a tired wave. “It's—"

He stopped, apparently lost for words. He looked at me and his expression was sad. I was getting tired of that look.

“You know,” he finally said, “when a student who doesn't have any mathematics asks a question that can only be answered mathematically? I can tell you how I did it metaphorically, but unless you know the way I know, it's just going to sound off the wall."

I was too numb and exhausted for even my pride to be stung. Either my wife and best friend were on the fast track to the paper slipper academy, or the world as I understood it had ceased to exist.

“I'll have to think about it,” I finally said. It sounded lame, even to me.

“I know,” Pinky sighed. “I'll say just one more thing. I don't want you to feel as if I'm pushing you into anything, but you can change your mind anytime. I have plenty more of the Brassica."

“I thought they took everything from your lab?” I said.

“Yeah, but I'm growing them in a few other places, and I have tons of seed—that's how we had them shipped to the company, as seed—it looks almost like beach sand. Ten grams is enough to plant two or three acres. Anyway, just ask, all right?"

I said that I would, and Pinky took that as enough of an answer. The three of us polished off the rest of the wine, and talked about getting lawyers and what would probably happen at the hearing.

When Pinky left, his convertible top still down, it was four in the morning and cold. The air was very still and clear, and outside the range of our porch light, the Milky Way was a white band across the sky. I stood outside as long as I could in my shirtsleeves, trying not to feel the Earth shifting under my feet.

* * * *

That Ihinger-Ibex had a corporate security infrastructure larger than a few uniformed guards on the edge of retirement was obvious, and unsurprising in retrospect: it was a huge company with profits in the hundreds of millions that depended heavily upon proprietary information. Until the knock came the morning after Pinky's visit, it never would have occurred to me that we were under surveillance.

The corporate attorney and security men were accompanied by a city marshal who was apologetic but businesslike: pursuant to a civil warrant, designees of Ihinger-Ibex were empowered to search the premises, blah, blah, blah...

“No one expects to find any corporate property here, at least none that isn't appropriate to your work for the company,” the attorney said, once we'd heard the judge's order. “But it's one of the steps we have to take, legally speaking, to make sure you and Dr. Sills are afforded due process at the professional standards hearing."

“So you're doing this for our benefit,” Joy said.

“Of course not,” the lawyer said, not missing a beat. “We all know I'm here to protect the company's proprietary interests. But frankly, I don't think we're going to find as much as a box of company paper clips; and that will only reflect to your advantage at the hearing."

“Well, that's a bit self-serving,” Joy said, “whether it happens to be true or not."

The lawyer flipped through a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “I'm not the cause of your problem,” he said distractedly. “But if you want to be mad at me because your colleague is irresponsible, and because you've given your division head reason to worry, then go ahead."

And the truth was, the whole process was as impersonal as hell. We were wearing the wrong uniform, and that was all the storm troopers cared about. We were now the other side.

They left, after turning our house, garage, and grounds completely inside-out. They left empty-handed, which didn't seem to surprise them, but surprised me a great deal. Some of the incriminating cabbages had been in our refrigerator that morning.

“Now what?” I said to Joy, once they were gone.

She gave me the kind of fey look I'd been seeing more and more lately. “Why are you asking me?” she said.

Her question, and more her tone, pierced a weak place in me, which is why I responded the way I did.

“Why? Because you and the genius started all this,” I said, gesturing around at the house turned upside-down by the search. “Because we are, very probably, going to lose our jobs, our careers, the house.... Because Pinky finally let his adolescent rebelliousness get the better of him, and you went along with him!"

I was shaking with anger and fear that I didn't realize I'd been holding in. I was enraged at the way my house had been casually and impersonally violated, and terrified about what was coming next.

“Another thing,” I said, warming to my anger, “what did you do with the cabbages? How did you know to hide them? Where did you hide them?"

“I didn't hide them,” she said. “I ate them. This morning."

“All of them? Are you kidding?"

“Of course all of them,” she said. “They didn't find any, did they?” Joy tossed the cushions back on the living room sofa, then sat down. “Don't worry about the hearing."

“What?"

“If you're worried about the hearing, don't be,” she said. “You'll be fine unless you incriminate yourself. You didn't eat any of the leaves; you were against the whole thing. You can say that truthfully."

“Why do I get the impression you're angry about that?” I said. “You're asking me to take a lot on trust—"

“It's not that you didn't trust me,” she said, cutting me off. “Not mostly. It's that you want to be right more than you want to be with me."

That stopped me cold. Wherever my wife, and Pinky, had gone, I didn't want to follow. It didn't matter whether the end of the trail was a locked ward or a world I couldn't imagine, nothing was going to make me step across that threshold. Not even Joy.

She looked at me, and she knew: her expression miserable and guileless as a little girl's. It was the worst moment of my life.

I put my arms around her while she cried. I thought about how bitter it was that the only connection we seemed to have then was pain. In that moment of heartsickness and grief maybe I grew a very little, and I knew what I had to do.

* * * *

We hired lawyers for the hearing because the company expected it. In the week beforehand, we packed up what Joy would need in her new life—very little in the way of material things, as it turned out. Lots of Brassica seed, though. As far as I know, Joy didn't speak directly to Pinky all week, but at 8 o'clock on the Friday before the hearing, he showed up at the door: two days would be more than enough lead time for them to make their getaway. They didn't take a car, and whoever was watching the house, if they still were, didn't see Joy and Pinky climb over our back fence and disappear into the night.

I couldn't have been the only one who wasn't surprised that they didn't show up for the hearing. I know I was the only one who was surprised by my arrest.

My lawyer had me out in a few hours: according to her, the trumped-up corporate theft charges would go away as soon as Ihinger-Ibex was convinced I couldn't lead them to Joy and Pinky.

I took polygraphs. The detective tried, in an embarrassingly familiar man-to-man way, to insinuate that Joy and Pinky were lovers, and that I owed neither of them any loyalty. I was threatened with prison: “Forget what you heard about country club prisons, Doc. All prison time is hard time."

After a month, the charges were dropped. The company hearing, rescheduled, rescheduled again, and rescheduled a third time, was finally cancelled altogether. Everyone, it seemed, was more concerned with returning to the status quo ante bellum than in looking too closely at what had happened.

Phil left the company about the same time his lung cancer went into “spontaneous remission.” If any further work was done on Pinky's cabbages, no word of it reached me. After four months in a kind of caretaker position in my own lab, I applied for and received early retirement.

If retirement is slow, it has its compensations. I have time to think and read and follow my own informal lines of research. The newspapers deliver interesting items almost every day: a sixteen-year-old in Albuquerque who published a brilliantly original paper on neutron decay in her high school newspaper; a San-Francisco waiter who's become a millionaire investing tip money in the stock market; two college athletes from Boston who, within a week of each other, set new international records in the hundred and six-hundred meter times; a Florida woman whose homemade herbal tea appears to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's Disease.

For every article that appears, I'm sure there are dozens, maybe hundreds of other micro-revolutions in human events taking place, springing up in the wake of a non-descript, middle-aged couple's travels.

I'm relatively young, and in good health. It is possible I'll live long enough to be the last Neanderthal.

THE END

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