PERMISSION TO SPEAK FREELY

by DAVID WALTON

What to do about those pesky details that always turn up in research? The real world tends to complicate the answer….

I stood watching my friend through the glass, knowing that the thick cable hanging from the back of his head like a samurai’s queue was delivering terrible pain to his nervous system. The technician next to me flipped a switch on her panel, causing a fresh signal to explode up the cable directly into his hypothalamus. He didn’t even flinch.

“Patient thirty-eight,” said the technician, her voice like clear water.

“Patient thirty-eight,” said my friend, Dr. Whittaker Laplace, his immense girth seeming to spill over the sides of the metal chair. “Brain aneurysm, frontal lobe, left side.” His voice was clinical, as if the pain he described had not just stabbed through his body. The only sign of stress was a trickle of sweat running down one cheek.

On the other side of the wall, visible to me but not to Whittaker, sat fifty patients in neat rows, the same cables running from the backs of their heads to tangle and twine on the floor. The cables converged at a switchbox and connected through a large machine before passing through the wall.

“Patient thirty-nine,” said the technician.

“Patient thirty-nine,” Whittaker echoed. “Osteoarthritis of the proximal interphalangeal joints, most prominently in the second and third digits of the right hand.”

The technician shook her head. “Guy’s a machine.” Then, into the microphone: “Patient forty.”

It was amazing … but I couldn’t bury a sense of unease. Sympathology had gained a lot of momentum in the press, and I knew I would be under pressure from the university and its corporate backers. Not to mention from Whittaker himself.

Whittaker had improved his skill since the first time I’d seen him in action—almost five years earlier in Two Goodfellas, a corner tavern on Philadelphia’s Market Street with neon signs, loud music, and posters from gangster movies on the walls. A huge man even then, with a voice to match and a full black beard, Whittaker had waved an early sympathology rig around the room, daring patrons—mostly U. of Penn students—to hook up and feel his kidney stone. Unwilling to be outdone, I had joined the line, but when my turn came, I wished I hadn’t. The pain was intense; if that was really what Whittaker was feeling, he didn’t show it. I suspected a trick.

But it wasn’t a trick. It was a new technology that Whittaker had pioneered. At the time, I was in medical school, planning to go on for a doctorate in radioimmunology. As a result of my friendship with Whittaker, I switched to neuroscience instead.

“Patient fifty: fractured collarbone,” said Whittaker. “And a splinter in the palm of his left hand.”

I heard scattered laughter from those viewing the test.

“That concludes SMP05,” said the technician. “A great thank you to all our volunteers.”

On the patient side of the wall, technicians disconnected the volunteers from their cables. On the other side, Whittaker stood and stretched. His presence had caused something of a stir in the neuroscience lab. Not many remembered when he’d been a student at Penn; all they knew of him was the media coverage. Public interest in sympathology was hot: If your baby woke up screaming inconsolably in the middle of the night, Whittaker could tell you what was wrong. If your loved one had a stroke and couldn’t communicate anymore, Whittaker could tell you if they were feeling any pain. He’d become something of a national celebrity.

The technician ushered Whittaker into the test berth. “Dr. Laplace,” he said and pointed at me, “this is our test director, Peter Atterley.”

Whittaker laughed and gave me a crushing hug. “How have you been, Peter?”

I felt all eyes on me. “Quite a performance you treated us to,” I said. “You always did have a high tolerance for pain.”

He shook a fleshy finger in my face. “Now, now—that’s the critics talking. I feel pain to exactly the same degree as those patients do.”

It was our old argument, and I slipped into it easily. “You only know how you feel. You assume the sensation is the same for them, but there’s a lot more to pain than a signal passing through the spinal gates.”

“I’ve had kidney stones—as you know. I’ve felt patients’ kidney stones. They feel the same.”

“Granted. But all it proves is that your brain reacts the same way to the same stimuli. Not that you have actually shared the patient’s experience.”

He crossed his arms and loomed over me. “And pray, how will you test that, Dr. Peter Atterley?”

I smiled. “The only way we can. You’ll find out tomorrow.”

We agreed to meet for dinner, but before I could leave, I had to report on the day’s testing to Connie Maclaine, chair of the department. I hoped it would be a short conversation; she and I often saw things differently, and I didn’t relish a battle after a long day.

I peeked into her office, a cloth-covered modular unit with walls that stopped three feet short of the drop ceiling. Connie was in her fifties, a dedicated runner with the athletic body to prove it, but with hair going visibly to gray.

“Have a seat,” she said. I didn’t want to stay long enough to have a seat, but I did anyway.

“Quite a show, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Dr. Laplace, you mean? I didn’t know you were watching.”

“Oh yes. There’s a lot riding on this study; I’m very interested.”

“Riding on it?”

She shrugged. “A favorable recommendation of the procedure from us would go a long way toward establishing sympathology as a viable discipline. Surely you know that.”

“Of course.”

“Synthiac has been on the phone twice, wanting our results. They’re undergoing trials for a commercial version of the machine. They want to synergize our efforts. Benefit on both sides.”

I knew Connie’s political mind, and I could smell a rat. “Benefit? Like funding?”

She sighed theatrically. “Peter, you and I both know that science only continues as long as the grants do, and ours is coming to its end. Synthiac is the biggest medical equipment manufacturer in the country; a partnership with them would mean work for years to come.”

“Great,” I said. “So what’s the catch?”

“No catch. Just an interest from Synthiac in a swift and clear recommendation. And along those lines, I’ve been thinking and I want to cancel the final test.”

I felt my cheeks flush. I stood. “Synthiac wants to buy a rushed recommendation? You don’t call that a catch?”

“Listen, Peter, please. This is not Synthiac’s suggestion; it’s mine. We’re short on funds; I already had to let two of our technicians go. We know the machine is safe; we’ve tested it nine different ways. And after what we saw Whittaker do today, can there be any doubt of the procedure? It was amazing! One hundred percent accuracy.”

“There are wider implications. That’s why we designed tomorrow’s test; our paper won’t just cover the accuracy of diagnosis, but the degree to which pain can be viewed as a measurable quantity. It’s a serious philosophical implication that we can’t ignore.”

“This is a scientific lab, not a philosophy club. We report results.”

I worked hard not to roll my eyes. “That’s naive,” I said. “Science can’t be done in a vacuum. There are social ramifications. Corporate giants throwing money at us won’t change that.”

She donned her martyr’s face and said, “Peter,” in a hurt voice, but I couldn’t handle any more. I walked out.

I’ve wanted to be a scientist for as long as I can remember. Ever since my father hung a model of the solar system on my ceiling, I knew that when I grew up, I would design experiments to be performed on the International Space Station and would eventually—of course—win the Nobel Prize. But after earning my Ph.D., I discovered that to do science, you needed money, and to get money, you needed to publish. The political underworld of grant wrangling, peer reviews, and journal publication took me by surprise. Somehow, I had envisioned scientific exploration as a noble pyramid of minds throughout the ages, each building on the work of the last. Instead, there were turf wars, infighting, political pressure, and institutional mentality.

When I met Whittaker Laplace, it was like a breath of fresh air. He cared about truth and nothing else. In the years since he left Philadelphia, he’d been in private practice in Boston, catapulting himself into the news by using his sympathology machine on his patients. What drew so much attention was not just the new technology, but the questions it raised about the meaning of pain. For years, the medical profession had taught that pain was what the patient said it was. A scale from one to ten was the standard formula, with one being no pain at all and ten being “the worst pain you have ever felt.” Doctors determined how much to medicate not by what they thought patients ought to be feeling, but by how the patients themselves professed to feel. Pain was not considered a measurable quantity, but a subjective brain reaction, different in different people.

Whittaker was trying to change that view.

“It happens all the time,” he said. “Some patients are in the emergency room twice a month, complaining of pain for which there are no clear symptoms. Are they hypochondriacs, or do they have real ailments? How can you tell?”

We sat in the White Dog, a self-consciously political restaurant carved out of three adjacent Victorian brownstones on Sansom Street. They served only organic food, everything preservative free and from sustainable food sources. Whittaker was halfway through a salmon burger; I had a beef salad with avocado, pumpkin seeds, and a tasty sage dressing.

I shook my head. “Does it matter? Certainly, if they have a treatable problem, you want to discover what it is. But if you hook up your machine and feel nothing, does that mean the patient is inventing his pain? Just looking for attention?”

“You don’t think so.”

“I don’t think it’s conclusive. There’s too much about the brain we don’t understand.”

“Permission to speak freely?” he said.

I grinned at him over my salad. In school, years ago, we’d asked that question as a warning that what we were about to say was inflammatory or insulting. Because we valued clear communication over the risk of hurt feelings, the answer was always the same. “Granted.”

“You’re caught in the emotional trap of a society too politically correct to validate one perception of reality over another. If there is zero neurological evidence of a pain stimulus, then what the patient is experiencing is not pain. There may be a strong belief in pain, just as a patient may believe he is Napoleon or that the year is 1890. But treatment for such a belief will be different than the treatment for pain.”

I considered what he said. We often encountered men whose sense of toughness caused them to downplay their pain, while others exaggerated tiny hurts. On a completely subjective standard, depending on the patient, you might end up giving morphine for a hangnail and aspirin for first-degree burns. But could there be a totally objective treatment?

“What about beta-endorphins?” I asked. “Surely you have different endorphin levels in your brain than the patient does. Wouldn’t that change your perception of pain?”

Whittaker smiled. “Certainly. But beta-endorphins come into play in the hypothalamus—our shunt intercepts the signal above that point, so the endorphin effect has already been realized.”

I decided to change the subject. “Can you guess what tomorrow’s test will be?”

Whittaker chewed his sandwich thoughtfully. Crumbs stuck in his beard. “I imagine you’ll have a battery of sympathologists, including me and some other doctors with no experience on the machine at all. A group of patients will rate their pain on the standard ten-point scale and the doctors will do the same. You’ve already shown that the type of pain is felt equally by the patient and the sympathologist; tomorrow you hope to test if the degree of pain is equally felt.”

I was crestfallen. “So much for my surprise.”

“It’s the obvious approach,” he said, and then a mischievous smile quirked his lips. “Want me to tell you the results, too?”

I folded my arms. “The great doctor has turned to witchcraft?”

“Simple deduction, my dear Watson. Though in this case it should be induction.” He waved his arms over his coffee and consulted its depths. “I predict,” he said grandly, “that I will, on average, rate pain a point or two lower than the patients, and inexperienced docs will, on average, rate it several points higher.”

“How do you know?”

He leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and arched one eyebrow. “Witchcraft,” he said.

Of course he was right. The test was performed, the results tallied and sliced from every angle. The summary graphs showed exactly the pattern Whittaker predicted.

“I’m not prophetic,” he said. “It just stands to reason. To me, most patients’ pain is unremarkable, because I’ve experienced the worst that’s out there. To the patients themselves, with only their own experience to draw from, it’s decidedly worse. But for the inexperienced, the pain of a suffering patient is often worse than any they’ve known.”

I flipped through the graphs on my computer. “Doesn’t this shake your belief in pain as a measurable quantity?”

“It’s the same pain. It’s the scale that varies from person to person.”

I barely heard him. My attention was captured by the last graph in the collection. “This can’t be right.”

“What can’t?”

The graph plotted the probability distribution of the results, a roughly bell-shaped curve. I pointed to it.

“What do you mean? Test results like this are almost always Gaussian,” Whittaker said.

“Gaussian, sure. But look how far out these outliers are.” I clicked on a data point and the computer displayed the underlying result. “This woman reported her pain as a nine. The other doctors judged it to be between eight and ten. But you reported a three.”

Whittaker shrugged. “As I said, I’ve felt a lot more pain than…”

“Wait,” I said. I brought the original graph back up and clicked on a data point at the other end of the curve. “Here the patient reported a two. The other doctors ranged between one and four. But you judged it a seven. There are other discrepancies as well, with other doctors.”

“There’s a problem with your data then,” he said. “It’s not matched up properly.”

“The bell shape belies that conclusion—most of the time, you’re tracking just below the trend. It’s just on these few.”

“Then those few are the ones that are wrong. Check your data.”

I shook my head. “Not possible. We cycled the patients through twice to filter out miskeying or gaps in attention. You gave it a seven both times.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying we have to rule out the possibility that the machine doesn’t consistently transmit pain stimuli.”

“Peter, I’ve been using this machine for three years now. You can trust me, it consistently transmits pain. Either the data was mixed up, or the patients are lying, or…”

“Permission to speak freely,” I said.

He glared at me. “Granted.”

“You’re too prejudiced on this subject to judge fairly. Trust me to conduct the test scientifically and keep your personal experience out of it.”

For a second, I thought he was going to hit me. Then he laughed. “Good old Peter,” he said. But his knuckles were white.

I spread out hardcopies of the graphs on Connie’s desk. “You see the problem.”

“The outliers?” she asked, her tone plainly incredulous. I’d caught her coming back from a run before she’d had a chance to shower, but she’d wanted to hear my results right away. She wore a blue tracksuit and had tied her hair back in a severe ponytail. Her cheeks and neck were flushed.

“The outliers are significant,” I said.

She shuffled the papers. “Let’s start with the averages. If I’m reading this right, the average pain reported by the patients was 5.7.”

“True. But…”

“And the average pain reported by the sympathologists was 5.5. This is cause for celebration! Go get yourself a beer. Write it up tomorrow.”

This was not going well. I tried to keep my voice civil, to explain rather than get annoyed. “The question is whether the difference in those means is important—whether the machine, or which person is feeling the pain, has a statistically significant effect on the results.”

“It’s a bell curve,” she said, scratching at her neck. “A bell curve has outliers. It always does. I’m not interested in six sigma cases here, Peter. I’m interested in the trend.”

“We did a paired t-test on the data,” I told her. I explained how a t-test could determine if the means of two normally distributed populations were distinct.

“You’re telling me a .2 difference is significant?”

I nodded. “It’s not just the mean that matters. It’s the deviation.”

Connie was quiet a long time. “All right, Peter,” she said finally. “I believe you. So what should we do?”

“We need another test.”

“To accomplish what?”

“We’ll repeat the same basic procedure, with a new battery of patients, but including the outlier patients from last time. If the same discrepancies reappear with the same patients, we’ll know we have a problem we can’t ignore.”

“We can’t afford another test.”

“We need to. Or else I’ll have to include those outliers in my paper and let them speak for themselves.”

A lock of hair strayed from Connie’s ponytail and stuck to her forehead. She brushed it back. “It’s a diagnostic tool. What does it matter if the doctor feels the full severity of the pain?”

“It does matter,” I said. “People believe what doctors tell them. If a family hears that their crying child’s pain is slight, they may not seek a solution to a real problem. We can’t control how the technology will be used. What if hospitals start dispensing morphine based not on patient request, but on sympathologist recommendation?”

I saw the martyr’s look creep back into her face. “I’ll say it again,” she said. “We can’t afford another test. We just don’t have the money. Now maybe, in another few months, if Synthiac gives us the grant we hope…”

“We’ll have other projects and other priorities. It’ll never get done.”

Connie took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “A few years ago, when my daughter was only a baby, she had a molar coming in sideways, pinching a nerve. Caused her terrible pain, but she couldn’t tell us where it hurt. They missed it on the x-rays, and of course blood work showed nothing. It was a week before we figured it out. A sympathologist could have told us in minutes.

“This is primarily a diagnostic tool. As such, it’s passed every test brilliantly. We have no money for another test. So what’s it going to be? Are you going to hold up production of an obviously valuable diagnostic tool that, to some patients, could mean the world? Or can you report what we know and leave the philosophical question for another day?”

I sat gazing at my feet. “I don’t know.”

“Figure it out. If you can’t write this paper, I’ll have to find someone who can.” She swiped her palms together as if washing them and stood up. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a shower.”

“She threatened to fire me,” I said. We were back at the White Dog. I had suggested a cheaper venue, but Whittaker offered to spring for the check, and that was enough for me.

He took a huge bite of his leg of lamb and wiped grease from his mustache with a napkin. “There are other universities.”

“My grandfather went to Penn. My father spent his whole career as a researcher at Penn. I practically grew up here. This isn’t just a job for me; it’s my home.” I stared at my Kung Pao tofu, cheeks resting in both hands. “Why does everything have to be about money?”

“You mean, why can’t you pursue science at society’s cost but with no limits or accountability?”

I threw a toasted peanut at him. It missed and bounced onto the floor. “It stops sounding noble when you put it that way.”

“It is noble. Just not realistic.”

“Why not? Sympathology is going to change the practice of medicine in significant ways. Why can’t the world pay to make sure it changes in the right ways?”

Whittaker shook his head. “I’m with you completely—except in this circumstance. Sympathology works, Peter. I’ve been doing it for five years.”

“Data doesn’t lie. You used to believe that.”

“Of course it does. Data lies all the time. It just depends on how you slice it. The trick is to look beyond the data to the truth it represents. Yes, it would be nice to prove out the truth with test after test, but cost forces us to efficiency.”

“To expediency, you mean.”

He put down his fork. “Listen, Peter. Sympathology hinges on trust. If people don’t believe it works, they won’t accept their diagnoses.”

“My paper will show that it works,” I said. “As far as diagnosis is concerned, the tests were perfect. But don’t you think I should include my reservations regarding the degree of pain felt?”

“No. You know how it goes. A scientist writes a paper saying Procedure X is 99.9 percent reliable, except for a few complications in one case. Then the media gets a hold of it.” He waved a hand in the air as if throwing words up on a screen. “‘Breaking news! Scientists say Procedure X may harm your children! Full story at 11:00!’ Ten people read the original paper; ten thousand hear it on the news. That’s the data, but it sounds like a lie to me.”

“I know it,” I said. “But what else can I do?”

“You can tell the truth. Tell them that sympathology works.”

I didn’t go home that night. It was September, the evening cloudless and cool, so I wandered down the university streets until I ended up on the South Street Bridge. Halfway across—arguably the best place in the city to see the Philly skyline at night—I stopped and leaned on the rail, trying to clear my thoughts. A few runners passed me, but otherwise the bridge was deserted. I heard the city sounds that usually go unnoticed: the buzz of traffic on I-76, the clang of a Dumpster lid, the moan of a distant siren.

The bridge was an ancient edifice, over one hundred years old, and I kicked crumbling bits of concrete off the edge, watching them tumble into the dark river below. What to do? I had been arguing against Connie and Whittaker’s points, but the truth was, I believed in sympathology, too. The machine worked; the procedure worked. It would be a great help to the medical field, particularly for those too young or ill to communicate. And Whittaker was right about the delay a mixed recommendation would cause. I’d known people in the past who were too concerned with ethics—so afraid of being blamed for doing the wrong thing that they did nothing at all. Was that how I was acting now?

Despite the hour, I walked back to the lab to write up my report, still not knowing what it was going to say. The test berth was empty, my office dark. I worked with only the light of my computer screen, typing, deleting, revising, then deleting again. In the end, I wrote two papers. The first contained everything: the outliers, the paired t-test, all of my concerns for how sympathology would be used. The second contained the simple truth of the reliability of the procedure that the testing had, on the whole, revealed.

At four thirty in the morning, I printed out both versions, stapled them, and laid them side by side on my desk. There was no point in going home. I propped my feet up, leaned back in my chair, and tried to sleep. I was exhausted, but my mind was like a dog with a bit of rag—it had something to chew on and it wouldn’t let go. The same old arguments spun round and round in my head, made less coherent by weariness. If I submitted paper one, I would possibly lose my job, but more likely just be barred from doing any research that mattered until I quit out of boredom. If I submitted paper two, it was possible that nothing bad would happen at all. But it was also possible that the medical profession would replace true sympathy with sympathology. If the machine could give a skewed result, it was my duty to report it.

And yet. Many scientists greater than me had bent their principles to keep their jobs. Some said it was more a question of “when” than of “if.” There were peer reviews and boards of ethics to watchdog the profession—was it really my job?

When the staff began to arrive for the day, I still had not slept, nor had I decided. I chugged a cup of coffee for concentration, tucked both papers under my arm, and went to see Connie.

Her hair was neatly pinned up, and she wore a white blouse with a blue pinstriped skirt and jacket. She greeted me with a cheery smile, as if she had slept soundly with nothing on her mind.

“Peter,” she said warmly. Then she saw the papers under my arm. “Done already? My goodness, didn’t you sleep?”

After the agony I’d been putting myself through, her manner shocked me. I suddenly saw my dilemma from her point of view, and I almost laughed. It was ridiculous, all this drama about a few isolated data points. Even Whittaker, whom I respected above anyone else I knew, had tried to tell me. What a fool I’d been.

Imitating her nonchalance, I said, “You know me. Can’t stay away from the lab.” I felt a huge sense of relief—I’d come so close to throwing away my career. I selected paper two from under my arm and tossed it on her desk.

She picked it up. “It’s all here?”

“Everything you wanted.”

“Glad to hear it.” She examined my face, noticed my rumpled clothes from the day before. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

“I think I will.”

I walked to the door, a lightness in my step. The ordeal was over.

“Peter?”

I turned.

“I talked to Synthiac again. If we give sympathology our full backing, they’ve all but guaranteed us a multiyear grant.” She waved the paper I’d just given her. “If this says what I think it does, it’ll be in the bag. Not only that, but they’re considering us for their Researcher of the Year award. That would be you—not just you, of course, but as the team lead, you’d be front and center. It’s a monetary award, too, and though it’s no Nobel Prize, I hear it’s a significant amount.” She smiled. “Just a little cherry for your sundae. Congratulations.”

I stared at her, trying to process her words. My brain must have stalled for longer than I realized, because she chuckled faintly and waved her hand in front of my eyes. When I strode forward suddenly, she jerked back, startled. I took the paper out of her hands.

“Peter? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing at all,” I said, swapping the paper with the one under my arm. “I just gave you the wrong report.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

Whittaker ripped off a meaty chunk of Philly cheesesteak, heedless of the Velveeta dripping on the table. “Do you regret what you did?”

“Not really. But I know what you think, and I don’t want to argue about it.”

Whittaker chewed, then swallowed with an audible gulp. After a sip of iced tea, he said, “Permission to speak freely.”

“No. Permission denied. That’s what I’m saying. It’s already done, and I don’t want to hear what you think.”

“Yes, you do. I was an idiot.”

“What?”

“More specifically, I was ‘too prejudiced to judge fairly.’ Just as you said.”

“Then—you don’t think I made the wrong choice?”

Whittaker shook his head. “I do think you made the wrong choice. I think you unnecessarily delayed the full acceptance of sympathology into medical practice. But I’m embarrassed that I tried to get you to go against your conscience. I was too emotionally attached to the results and you called me on it. You stuck to your principles and preserved your respectability. You should be proud.”

I sighed. “And for that, I’ll lose my job.” I remembered how cheerful I’d felt when I’d chosen the other course. “If I did the right thing, why do I feel so miserable?”

A corner of Whittaker’s mouth twitched. As I watched, his lips curled and twitched again until he broke into a wide, involuntary grin.

“What is it?”

“I have news.”

“What kind of news?”

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’ve been invited to join the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. NASA thinks sympathology is the answer to their remote medical monitoring problems.”

I stared at him. “You’re going to Cleveland?”

“I leave next week.”

I set my sandwich back on my plate without taking a bite. NASA. Whittaker was going to work for NASA. I knew I should be happy for him—but couldn’t he have waited another day or two to tell me? I had just dug my career into a pit, and now he was getting a chance I would have killed for. Glenn Research Center was the real thing—enough money to run a dozen full-time labs, cutting-edge research, the leading wave of humanity’s bid for the stars.

“Congratulations,” I said, trying to swallow my jealousy. I really was glad for him, and I couldn’t think of anyone more perfect for the job. “Isn’t the machine too big to be used in space?”

He pointed a finger at me. “Bingo. That’s why it’s a multiyear project. We need a miniature, spaceworthy device that can do just enough processing to signal to the ground. If we can do it, and show it to be reliable, it’ll replace a dozen different devices they use today.”

I started picking my bun into little pieces. “I suppose it will be important to NASA to know about the outliers in our results.” The bitterness crept into my voice. I couldn’t help it.

“Peter,” he said. “That’s not all the good news.”

I tried to laugh goodnaturedly, but it came out wrong. “There’s more?”

“Listen.” He unfolded a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, smoothed out the creases, and began to read. “‘Given the importance of absolute reliability in space technology, we want researchers with an eye to detail, a commitment to thoroughness, and complete scientific integrity. As such, although first selection is yours, a board of senior staff members must review and approve each applicant.’”

The hair on my arms prickled. “You get to handpick your team.”

He grinned at me. “They want someone with ‘scientific integrity.’”

“Anybody you want.”

He shrugged. “If I can find anyone suitable. Do you know anyone with a ‘commitment to thoroughness’?”

“Tell it to me straight,” I said.

He coughed into his hand and adopted an official tone. “Peter Atterley, despite your adamant refusal to agree with me on every issue, you are hereby offered a place on my staff at the soon-to-be-created Sympathology Lab at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. And you’re not allowed to say no.”

I fell against the back of my chair and laughed for real this time, panting in relief. “You jerk,” I said. “You strung me along.”

He shook his head, his great frame shaking. “You should have heard yourself—’I suppose NASA will want to know about those outliers…’”

I didn’t have any peanuts this time, so I threw my whole sandwich at him. Sliced meat and Velveeta exploded over his shirt and onto the floor. The manager came over to see what was the matter, and we couldn’t answer him, we were both laughing so hard. When we finally apologized and walked out, leaving a 50 percent tip on the table, I put my hand on Whittaker’s shoulder.

“Permission to speak freely?”

“Always,” he said, returning the gesture. “Always.”

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