Hulk (7 page)

The frog exploded.

Harper let out a tragedy-soaked cry as the amphibian’s little innards splashed all over the inside of the container. Betty emitted a frustrated,
“Oh!”
Bruce, as was his habit, didn’t let any of his disappointment show on his face, but he felt his shoulder muscles bunching up as they tended to do whenever he was faced with a tense situation. He forced himself to relax, but he could practically taste the feeling of disappointment. Other frogs had suffered “grievous setbacks,” that is, died horribly, far faster, leading him to think that maybe Freddie—
Number Eleven, dammit
—was going to beat the odds.

He looked at the others in the lab, sighed, and said, “Lunch break.”

“Oh, good,” Harper said, sounding queasy as he surveyed the frog’s remains trickling down the sides of the container, “because, y’know, strapping on the feed bag is exactly what I feel like doing right now.”

There was a lab cafeteria and also some decent restaurants in the area, but Bruce usually chose to eat at his desk. Knowing this, Betty fell into step behind him as he headed toward the lab refrigerator.

“Saw my father in the news,” she said.

“Oh?” The comment surprised him. Betty very rarely made any mention of her father.

“Uh-huh. Getting some medal or something from the president.” She shrugged. “He’s got so many hanging on his uniform already, I’m not sure where he’ll put it.”

“Are you going to call and congratulate him?”

“I was thinking about it.”

That stopped him for a moment as he turned and saw an impish expression on her face. “Really? That would be unusual.”

“Well, you know, he
is
my father, and since I actually know that, I figured maybe I might be able to lead by example.”

At first Bruce had no idea what she was talking about, but then he understood. He sighed and reached into the refrigerator, pulling out a small paper bag. “Are we back on that subject again?” he asked with a tired playfulness in his voice as they walked back toward his desk.

“Yes, that subject again,” she replied with a fair imitation of his voice. “Just give it some thought. Don’t you want to know about your birth parents, where you come from? It’s not that hard to unseal adoption papers these days. It might open you up to more feelings.”

“And do I want more feelings?” asked Bruce, feeling like the tin woodsman from
The Wizard of Oz
.

Betty’s response, in a surprisingly serious tone, caught him off guard. “I can wish, can’t I?”

He felt a flicker of guilt when she said that, and some of that must have shown through on his face despite his best efforts, because she looked immediately contrite, as if sorry that she’d said anything at all. He wanted very much to ignore it, but it had been said, and it was out there, which meant it was going to be like the proverbial elephant seated at the table that no one could pretend wasn’t there.

With great sadness and feeling more wistful than he would have thought himself capable of, he said gently, “I do wish I were someone who could feel more, express more. If I were, we’d still be together, wouldn’t we?”

“I don’t know,” said Betty. She looked down, leaning against his desk. “I guess it’s none of my business anymore. I’m just having a hard time, us being apart but still seeing you every day, working together. It makes me feel more lonely than ever.” She sighed. “But what can you do?”

“I can still appreciate you,” said Bruce, “admire you, be a friend—” Then he paused, thinking,
My God, you’re giving her the “We’ll always be friends” speech. How pathetic is that?

Betty didn’t seem put off by it; just a bit sadder. “I wish I could say it’s enough,” she said.

Never had Bruce felt a greater, more gaping emptiness in himself than he did at that moment. He wanted to reach over to her, to hold her, to tell her all manner of things and share feelings and emotions with her. The problem was he didn’t truly know if he’d be saying things he actually felt . . . or just uttering the things he thought she wanted to hear.

Instead, he forced a smile and said, in as light a manner as he could, “Well, there is one thing.”

She raised an eyebrow questioningly as, with a flourish, he opened the paper bag and pulled out a container. “Chocolate, chocolate chip,” said Bruce.

Betty smiled, a smile as radiant as gamma rays . . .

As gamma rays? Good Lord, can I ever turn off being a scientist?

The problem was he knew the answer to that as soon as he thought it.

Betty hated the dog and pony show.

That’s what she called the semiannual gatherings of the board of directors, when she and Bruce and whoever was working for the lab would be forced to try to explain in words of one syllable just what it was they were doing, and all the “practical applications.” That was the phrase that drove her the most insane, the one she heard so often she had occasionally been known to mutter it in her sleep. They always wanted to know about “practical applications,” which of course translated to, “How can we make some fast money off this latest experiment?”

They didn’t understand that it wasn’t that easy. Many of the most significant advances in science, the most “practical” and useful developments in the history of mankind, had been incidental discoveries that were offshoots of other studies. Experimentation was about possibilities, discovery was about “what if.” While opponents of the space program were howling about the waste of money entailed in landing a man on the moon, they were utterly oblivious to the many practical aspects of everyday life that had their origins in technology developed while putting men into space. Everything from voice-responsive software to athletic shoes to water purifiers to thermal insulation for the home had all resulted from the space program.

But go explain that to number crunchers searching for some sort of mythical bottom line, as if one could put a price tag on progress.

These meetings were the only time that Betty envied Bruce his emotional detachment. She always maintained a cool demeanor when dealing with these people, but it required tremendous effort. Bruce accomplished the same thing but made it look easy . . . probably because, for him, it was. Betty gave herself a mental, if ironic, pat on the back. It took some kind of woman to find a silver lining to a character trait that effectively torpedoed a relationship.

She let none of what was going through her mind show in her presentation, of course. She was far too professional for that. Instead, she watched the fifteen or so men—all in their cookie-cutter suits and neckties—grouped around the table, studying the results and charts she had provided them on the well-founded assumption that they wouldn’t have a clue what she and her colleagues did without visual aids. She was walking them through it, reminding herself that she shouldn’t have any resentment toward them simply because at least half of them knew nothing about science, and only understood dollars and cents. They were . . . a necessary evil.

With a pleasant smile affixed to her face, Betty continued, “To distance the cells we subject them to gamma radiation.” Behind her on a projection board mounted on the wall, there were clear color representations of the cells agitating and unraveling. “Our little molecular machines—the nanomeds—are inhaled into the organism and spread through its tissues. They remain inert until we awaken them with gamma radiation. Once awakened, they instantly respond to the cellular distress signals—from a wound, for example—making copies of healthy cells and breaking down the damaged ones.” She paused to see if they comprehended. It was darker in the room than she would have liked, and it wasn’t easy to discern their faces, but she thought they got it. In the meantime, the image on the board displayed the nanomeds at work.

“The main problem,” she continued, “is figuring out how a living body can withstand the help our nanomeds provide so vigorously. We’ve yet to find anything that can survive not only the energy flux of such swift cellular replication, but the discharge of the waste products, mainly water and carbon dioxide, created as damaged cells are dismantled.”

Puckishly, she’d wanted to include a graphic of an exploding frog, just to see their reactions. The humorous notion had been vigorously vetoed by Bruce and Harper, and so instead the board members only witnessed a cellular explosion. “We’re trying to balance these two functions,” said Betty. “If we succeed, we may someday realize the promise of near-instantaneous bodily repair.” She looked to Bruce as she thought,
There. Near-instantaneous bodily repair. That should be practical application enough for them
. “Dr. Krenzler.” She gestured and Bruce rose and stepped up as she moved to one side.

She found to her surprise that she had to fight a reflex to reach up and squeeze his arm. It would have been meant in the simplest “go get ’em” terms, but she was worried it might be read as more than that—and, for all she knew, it was more than that. So she kept her hand at her side and just nodded to Bruce in a vague show of support. He returned the nod and stepped up to the small podium that had been erected.

“Thank you, Dr. Ross,” Bruce said, looking out over the room. He smiled slightly. Betty couldn’t help but think that this was exactly the sort of situation in which Bruce was the most comfortable. No emotions, no personal interplay. Pure lecture. He’d probably make a hell of a teacher. He tapped for a moment thoughtfully on the podium, and then said, “We’ve been thinking a lot lately, in the lab, about memory and forgetting, about the role they play in living and dying. Death, you might say, is a kind of forgetting.”

Betty glanced around the room. They seemed to be hanging on his words. Meanwhile, Bruce, warming to his topic, continued. “Each time a human cell replicates, it loses a little more DNA from the end of its chromosomes, eventually forgetting so much it forgets its function, its ability to cope with trauma, to continue to reproduce. Whereas life, life is the ability to retrieve and act on memory.” He moved slightly away from the podium, leaning against it on one elbow, looking very casual.
He’s so much more comfortable with science than people
, Betty sighed mentally, as Bruce said, “Now if our work succeeds, and our nanomeds begin to take over more and more of this process, you’ll have to ask is it
you
that’s alive, or is it the billions of artificial creatures inside you?”

He paused. The interest from the men at the board table was palpable, and Betty could almost sense their next question:
When would it be ready? When would it be available to distribute to hospitals and doctors and think tanks so we can make a ton of money off it?
Bruce apparently sensed that, as well, for he drew a cautionary line in the sand.

“For now, our nanomedical cures have been more deadly than the diseases they treat,” he admitted. “Maybe that’s because they remember their instructions too well. Perhaps, to stay in balance and alive, we must forget as much as we remember.”

There was a pause. Then, from the darkness, one of the men said, “All right, doctors, thank you for your thoroughly professional update. We’ll be evaluating the data and giving our recommendations.”

Betty stifled a laugh. Oh yes, their recommendations would be ever so helpful. Why, it might open up entirely new directions that never would have occurred to them in a million years. Or, at the very least, more trees would die in vain so the board members could expend paper upon their recommendations. But Bruce, unflappable as always, just nodded and said, “Thank you. We’d appreciate that.”

Moments later they were in the hallway, and Betty was looking incredulously at him. “‘We’d appreciate that’?” she asked.

Bruce just shrugged. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Bruce! They’ll have nothing of use to contribute! You know that. They’ll suggest things we tried six months ago. Their idea of advice is laughable.”

“Very true,” Bruce replied. “But laughter is beneficial in a variety of ways, and anyone who provides the opportunity for others is to be appreciated.”

She tried to have a comeback to that, but instead all she could do was chuckle when she saw the mock seriousness on his face. She bowed slightly and said, “I am dazzled by your intellect and insight.”

“As well you should be,” he said gravely.

“You coming back to the lab?”

“In a few minutes. I want to go to my office, make a few calls. You go ahead, if you’re so inclined. Or perhaps you want to take the rest of the day off to recover from our—what is it again—”

“Dog and po—”

“Right, right, dog and pony show.” He looked askance. “So would I be the dog or the pony?”

“The latter.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve always wanted a pony.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. He smiled in spite of himself, and then gestured in the general direction of his office as he started to back away. “I’ll . . . be making some calls. . . .”

“I’ll be in the lab, blowing up frogs.”

“Betty,” he said reprovingly.

“I’m hoping to work my way up to blowing up other things. Like alligators.”

Bruce stared at her appraisingly. “Okay, now. That was a joke, wasn’t it?”

With a flounce of her hair, Betty said, “Drop by the lab and find out. You may want to bring your galoshes.”

And as she walked away, she heard Bruce mutter behind her, “Galoshes? Who says ‘galoshes’ anymore?”

She stopped briefly at the snack machine, gave it a solid punch in exactly the right place, and scooped up a bag of Doritos. So practiced was she that she barely had to pause for more than a few moments before continuing on her way. She nodded to workers as she passed, one of whom pointed at her in congratulations and said, “I heard you killed at the meeting.”

“I wish,” she said cheerily.

She rounded a corner, and a voice called from behind her that she didn’t recognize instantly—but only because she didn’t want to.

“Betty,” came the voice, “Betty Ross!”

Her mind turned it over and over, refusing to believe it. Slowly she pivoted on her heel and stared. “Glen?” she said.

Sure enough, there was Glen Talbot, almost exactly as Betty remembered him. His face was a bit more full, but it added maturity and even a bit of character to him. His hair had grown out since the army-reg do he had sported back in the days when they were dating, but that canniness in his eyes—and that way he had of taking in the entirety of her with a glance which she found ever so slightly chilling—that was still there. What she was most surprised to see was that he was wearing a sharply styled blue suit, crisp salmon-colored shirt, and what appeared to be—yes, she could see the initials—a Pierre Cardin necktie.