Chapter 9

I wasn’t even a few hundred feet further before someone called, “Tom, is that you?” I looked around in confusion, not recognizing the voice. I saw a hand raised, across the way. Oh, Stan Wojcik. Was this coincidence or a planned “accidental” meeting?

He came to me. “I was surprised to see you,” he said, “till I remembered you work nearby, don’t you? I’m not usually here at this time, but I had an errand.” He held up the shopping bag. “New shoes. The old ones were overdue to be replaced.”

I nodded, still not quite sure that this was just a casual meeting. “I didn’t notice Canary. He usually stands out.”

“I don’t know where he is. He has his own schedule, he’s in touch only when he has something to pass on. We don’t really hang out. Anyway, I have a job. I told you, I think. I’m on my lunch break, though it’ll be short today because of the errand. Then it’s back to meeting clients.”

“I meant to ask -- last time, I mean -- do you miss not doing biology? You’d said that you couldn’t do it, that your mind didn’t seem to work that way anymore, but do you think about it sometimes?”

He stopped to consider his answer. “I remember the excitement, the rush, when you figured out something new, something no one had seen or done before. But I can’t remember the thought process of working out research problems. It’s like completely foreign to me now. Like there’s some logical links missing or corrupted, the things that would allow me to make inferences, follow a chain of deduction.

“It’s almost like I’d never learned how to do it in the first place, that’s how strange the whole science thing seems to me now. And just as strange is that I now seem to get some satisfaction from selling insurance. I recall having a conversation with some students in grad school about vocations, how people choose what they’re going to do in life.

“And I remember laughing at some of the choices that people had considered before they chose to go to grad school. One guy had considered becoming a stock broker, a woman had thought about being an accountant, and another guy was wavering about going into the insurance business with his old man. I just shook my head at the last one, because I thought that would be the most boring job possible.

“Yet here I am, doing just that, and thinking that life could be worse. I’ve got a job I’m good at, I get paid pretty well and I get some satisfaction from doing it well. On some level I know that could never have happened with the old me, that my old brain just wasn’t wired for it. But the new one is.

“So that’s a long answer. I do think about it sometimes and how odd it feels that I ever did science before, because the art of doing science is a complete unknown to the me that’s standing here now. But I remember that I did like doing it when I was able to. I guess the answer is that yes, I do miss it and I do think about it every so often.”

I thought carefully about what I was going to say next. I wanted to stay on the outside, one of those who might have been affected but who hadn’t discovered what, if anything, had changed.

“There’s an injustice there, and that makes me angry. You told me about some of the more serious incidents, a few who couldn’t do their jobs any more, a few more reduced to catatonia and institutionalized. And those were just the people connected to the lab.

“From what you said about Canary it sounded like he might have identified some more people, perhaps not directly connected to the lab, maybe outsiders who somehow got infected. Did I get that right?”

“More or less,” he said.

“You implied that you’d talked to some of them, the ones that Canary identified. Some didn’t know how they were affected, just that they felt ‘different’ in some way. Others felt no change at all, maybe didn’t understand why you were asking. And a few self-aware enough to know they could do something that they couldn’t before, yes?”

He nodded.

“I’m trying to figure out in what way I’ve been affected. Am I one of the group that felt no change? Is it something that might manifest itself in the future? If I haven’t felt something different about me, is it likely that I’m going to stay the same as I am now?

“I’m stating this badly. I guess I’m trying to figure out what I should be looking for, if I have been changed in some way. What kinds of changes have you been told about when you talked to these people?”

“Um, these things were told to me in confidence, and in most cases only because we’d worked together and had some sort of relationship. I don’t think I could...”

“I’m not asking you to break a confidence. I don’t want names, I just want to know what kinds of changes have shown up in the people affected. Because I might be staring one of those changes in the face soon. I’m concerned.”

Stan was silent for some moments, working the ethics out in his mind. He finally nodded.

“Okay, I can see that. Right. No names, then. I already told you about me, and also the lab tech who now bets on horse races because he ‘feels’ what horse is most likely to win.

“Another guy has found, to his dismay, that he can sense when people are ill, even when they show no symptoms. Too long a story to get into, but he’s detected hidden cancers, failing heart valves, even a cerebral artery that was weak and about to rupture. He has no medical training so when he tries to talk to people about their problems, they get very defensive. It’s messing up his life, though he’s right way more often than he’s wrong.

“A guy who was a chemist at Wanamaker now finds that he knows when people are lying, can even sense if it’s a big lie or just a fib. He doesn’t know how he knows, just that he does. It’s screwed up his marriage because people in relationships tell white lies all the time, it doesn’t mean that they’re trying to put one over on their spouse. But he sees only the lie. He can still do chemistry, by the way.