An uneasy energy had settled over the lab. Bad waves of paranoia. Fear and loathing. A thickness that made for labored breathing and sluggish thoughts. The days turned unproductive, the nights black and restless. All dreams had fled. We were a city abandoned after the battle line had passed through, nothing left behind but wind and torn sheets. Signs of a fierce struggle and "Ichabod" written above the gates. It was Berlin 1945, that brief May interlude when the Red Army had yet to pull the noose closed but the pointless bacchanalia had run its course.
I walked the place knowing our fate was sealed but saying nothing. Counterfeit smiles for the damned. Give them a few more days of happiness, I thought. My postdoc had begun bringing up the grad student. Tips for navigating his degree requirements. How to give a good journal club talk. The most likely hospital dumpsters to find discarded Luer locks. The cafeteria selections offering minimal risk of Hep C. I hadn't counted on this, finding my postdoc in some kind of preternatural courtship.
How long could I put on a good face? I wondered. How long this charade?
How long could I maintain?
I could no longer maintain. It was time to break the bad news. I found them at the bench, huddled over a power supply one of the other labs had thrown out. They had removed the cover and were debating the finer points of Ohm's law.
"Listen," I said. "I may as well come out with it. The fascists have cut our funding. It wasn't your fault. But I'm afraid it falls on you. Congress is looking for innocents to liquidate, and you're it. Think of the NIH as a grand blimp, and we need to lighten up if we're going to clear the church spires."
I explained the future. The lab would probably be converted into a remedial reading room for the athletes. Storage space for livestock husbandry, perhaps, or a model train display. Or simply sealed and filled with Shotcrete. Archaeologists digging through the sad ruins millennia later would find its once-proud contents frozen in permanent defiance.
Only I would remain. Made an example, a warning to the others. Without grant money to barter, I would be yoked to an ever-heavier course load until my back was broken. A thoroughbred shackled to the plow. Like Papillon arriving at the penal colony resolute and feisty, his jailers increasing their savagery until he was brought to heel. It doesn't matter who you are. In this business, everyone starts eating centipedes eventually.
It's how the world works, I told them. All energy flows according to the great payline. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing.
They took it rather well, all things considered.
"Maybe we could hold a bake sale?" the grad student asked, grasping for a lifeline. "Or sell plasma?"
"We should offer ourselves to be hunted for sport," my postdoc countered. He touched the glowing tip of his soldering iron to a Lucky Strike hanging from the corner of his mouth. Say what you will about the man, he had a flair for realpolitik.
"No, this is bigger than the three of us," I said. "A solution requires a referendum on national character. A change in the big picture."
"I could get the Carcano out of storage."
"None of that," I quickly replied, quashing the idea before it got unfortunate legs. My postdoc rolled his eyes and walked into the other room.
"What about me?" the grad student asked, his bottom lip starting to quiver beneath his freckles. "What will I do? Where will I go?"
Where, indeed. The lights were going out all over academia. In the old bad times, they fled to America. A long tradition of experimentation and discovery was concentrated and lifted to brilliant heights in the gleaming laboratories of the new world.
A post-war Congress giddy from VJ day made a covenant with the academics who had brought the country victory. Every university would be a shining city on the hill. They were the way up, the path forward. The very engines of creation. We didn't need manufactured heroes in those days -- real ones were all around us. They walked the quad and stood in the classroom. Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Edwin Jaynes, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Lynn Margulis, Jonas Salk, Linus Pauling, Vernon Mountcastle, Rita Levi-Montalcini, John von Neumann, Dennis Ritchie, Benoit Mandelbrot, Stan Ulam, Glenn Seaborg, Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Stepan Timoshenko, Jacob Den Hartog. Foreign scholars flocked to all corners of our shores. Paul Dirac set up shop in Florida. Emmy Noether in Pennsylvania. George Gamow in Colorado. Francis Crick in California.
It was a fecund coupling of curiosity and purpose. America invented the transistor. Stopped polio. Explained superconductivity. Broke the sound barrier. Went to the moon. We had all of the momentum. Not in a mean or selfish way. Anyone with drive and smarts was welcome to pitch in. Their discoveries shared with all, the world lit with reason. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. It would take us all the way to the stars. There were no limits, no end to the possibilities.
Now, just a few short decades later, there was no America left to go to. She was eating her children. The universities had become a punching bag, a convenient scapegoat to provide cover while jackals raided the treasury. The rich were taking whatever wasn't nailed down and selling it for scrap. A return to the Gilded Age. Darkness, superstition, barbarism. The rest of us would simply have to burn what we could to stay warm, starving in the intellectual winter they had called down.
I tried to comfort the boy. "Strike out for more welcoming climes," I said. You're young. And supple. There's a home out there for you. I'm sure of it. How's your Mandarin?"
My postdoc returned with an Axoclamp slung over his shoulder. The device had an oppressive collection of lights and dials that I would never understand.
"I took a position at Max Planck," he explained and waggled his cell phone.
"I don't blame you," I said. What else could I say? His allegiance had always been fluid.
"I need to get to the airport," he added.
"Don't look at me," I said. "I need to start shredding documents."
"I'll take you," the grad student offered. "I've never missed a flight."
My former postdoc disappeared out the door, the grad student chasing after him like a lost puppy. There he goes, I thought. A free agent. Ronin. Some kind of high-powered mutant never considered for mass production, surviving in the academic hinterlands by cunning, sheer force of will, and lack of a permanent address. Too weird to live, and too smart to die.
We're all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the funding that fueled the optimism. The grand expansion was over. That was the fatal flaw of it, the defective keystone in the whole edifice. A failure to acknowledge the possibility that at any moment the covenant could be broken. A failure to evolve the political muscle necessary to push back against the forces of evil, to keep the lights turned on and the machine turning. Ignoring the grim meat hook reality lying in wait for those left stranded by budget cuts. But the NIH's failure is ours too. What's been lost is the lifestyle extramural funding helped create. Now there's nothing left but a generation of permanent cripples, failed job seekers, adjuncts and part-time instructors who continue to cling to the central mystic fallacy of academia. The Great Axiom. The desperate assumption that somewhere out there, somebody -- or at least some force -- is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
I never saw either of them again.
I walked the place knowing our fate was sealed but saying nothing. Counterfeit smiles for the damned. Give them a few more days of happiness, I thought. My postdoc had begun bringing up the grad student. Tips for navigating his degree requirements. How to give a good journal club talk. The most likely hospital dumpsters to find discarded Luer locks. The cafeteria selections offering minimal risk of Hep C. I hadn't counted on this, finding my postdoc in some kind of preternatural courtship.
How long could I put on a good face? I wondered. How long this charade?
How long could I maintain?
I could no longer maintain. It was time to break the bad news. I found them at the bench, huddled over a power supply one of the other labs had thrown out. They had removed the cover and were debating the finer points of Ohm's law.
"Listen," I said. "I may as well come out with it. The fascists have cut our funding. It wasn't your fault. But I'm afraid it falls on you. Congress is looking for innocents to liquidate, and you're it. Think of the NIH as a grand blimp, and we need to lighten up if we're going to clear the church spires."
I explained the future. The lab would probably be converted into a remedial reading room for the athletes. Storage space for livestock husbandry, perhaps, or a model train display. Or simply sealed and filled with Shotcrete. Archaeologists digging through the sad ruins millennia later would find its once-proud contents frozen in permanent defiance.
Only I would remain. Made an example, a warning to the others. Without grant money to barter, I would be yoked to an ever-heavier course load until my back was broken. A thoroughbred shackled to the plow. Like Papillon arriving at the penal colony resolute and feisty, his jailers increasing their savagery until he was brought to heel. It doesn't matter who you are. In this business, everyone starts eating centipedes eventually.
It's how the world works, I told them. All energy flows according to the great payline. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing.
They took it rather well, all things considered.
"Maybe we could hold a bake sale?" the grad student asked, grasping for a lifeline. "Or sell plasma?"
"We should offer ourselves to be hunted for sport," my postdoc countered. He touched the glowing tip of his soldering iron to a Lucky Strike hanging from the corner of his mouth. Say what you will about the man, he had a flair for realpolitik.
"No, this is bigger than the three of us," I said. "A solution requires a referendum on national character. A change in the big picture."
"I could get the Carcano out of storage."
"None of that," I quickly replied, quashing the idea before it got unfortunate legs. My postdoc rolled his eyes and walked into the other room.
"What about me?" the grad student asked, his bottom lip starting to quiver beneath his freckles. "What will I do? Where will I go?"
Where, indeed. The lights were going out all over academia. In the old bad times, they fled to America. A long tradition of experimentation and discovery was concentrated and lifted to brilliant heights in the gleaming laboratories of the new world.
A post-war Congress giddy from VJ day made a covenant with the academics who had brought the country victory. Every university would be a shining city on the hill. They were the way up, the path forward. The very engines of creation. We didn't need manufactured heroes in those days -- real ones were all around us. They walked the quad and stood in the classroom. Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Edwin Jaynes, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Lynn Margulis, Jonas Salk, Linus Pauling, Vernon Mountcastle, Rita Levi-Montalcini, John von Neumann, Dennis Ritchie, Benoit Mandelbrot, Stan Ulam, Glenn Seaborg, Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Stepan Timoshenko, Jacob Den Hartog. Foreign scholars flocked to all corners of our shores. Paul Dirac set up shop in Florida. Emmy Noether in Pennsylvania. George Gamow in Colorado. Francis Crick in California.
It was a fecund coupling of curiosity and purpose. America invented the transistor. Stopped polio. Explained superconductivity. Broke the sound barrier. Went to the moon. We had all of the momentum. Not in a mean or selfish way. Anyone with drive and smarts was welcome to pitch in. Their discoveries shared with all, the world lit with reason. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. It would take us all the way to the stars. There were no limits, no end to the possibilities.
Now, just a few short decades later, there was no America left to go to. She was eating her children. The universities had become a punching bag, a convenient scapegoat to provide cover while jackals raided the treasury. The rich were taking whatever wasn't nailed down and selling it for scrap. A return to the Gilded Age. Darkness, superstition, barbarism. The rest of us would simply have to burn what we could to stay warm, starving in the intellectual winter they had called down.
I tried to comfort the boy. "Strike out for more welcoming climes," I said. You're young. And supple. There's a home out there for you. I'm sure of it. How's your Mandarin?"
My postdoc returned with an Axoclamp slung over his shoulder. The device had an oppressive collection of lights and dials that I would never understand.
"I took a position at Max Planck," he explained and waggled his cell phone.
"I don't blame you," I said. What else could I say? His allegiance had always been fluid.
"I need to get to the airport," he added.
"Don't look at me," I said. "I need to start shredding documents."
"I'll take you," the grad student offered. "I've never missed a flight."
My former postdoc disappeared out the door, the grad student chasing after him like a lost puppy. There he goes, I thought. A free agent. Ronin. Some kind of high-powered mutant never considered for mass production, surviving in the academic hinterlands by cunning, sheer force of will, and lack of a permanent address. Too weird to live, and too smart to die.
We're all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the funding that fueled the optimism. The grand expansion was over. That was the fatal flaw of it, the defective keystone in the whole edifice. A failure to acknowledge the possibility that at any moment the covenant could be broken. A failure to evolve the political muscle necessary to push back against the forces of evil, to keep the lights turned on and the machine turning. Ignoring the grim meat hook reality lying in wait for those left stranded by budget cuts. But the NIH's failure is ours too. What's been lost is the lifestyle extramural funding helped create. Now there's nothing left but a generation of permanent cripples, failed job seekers, adjuncts and part-time instructors who continue to cling to the central mystic fallacy of academia. The Great Axiom. The desperate assumption that somewhere out there, somebody -- or at least some force -- is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
I never saw either of them again.
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