Julia and the Dream Maker by P. J. Fischer

Author:P. J. Fischer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minted Prose LLC
Published: 2003-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Lunch with the Girls

The stroll up University Avenue usually relaxed Eli. Elms towered like hundred-year-old elders on each side of the street, stately reminders of yesteryear. The avenue had been closed to traffic as long as anyone could remember, and the hydrangeas were in bloom, sending their soft scents through the air. All this was a palliative to the headache that had made her oversleep and come in at 11:00 A.M. instead of the usual 9:00 A.M. Not that anyone expected her in at all, what with the party being the talk of the lab.

The labs were always short of money, so the workdays of Saturday and Sunday were alternated in order to benefit from the lower weekend computer and power rates (when the university’s general usage was down). For Eli, the first order of business was to check into the status of her grant applications. Eli didn’t know the exact course she and Steven would follow after his graduation, and wanted to make sure she had a few options. Steven was going to defend his dissertation soon, and she had to assume that, in spite of the usual vagaries, he was going to get it done and get through the process. That being the case, the two of them would be seeking academic or research positions for next year. She had been asking around, going to conferences, and otherwise looking for the scoop on what the chances were for them to land other postdoc research or teaching positions, or other possibilities. She was open to a lot of things, but whatever they ended up doing, she did want to get on with it. That was probably going to mean convincing Steven to leave the Farm—something she would have to work on.

The fallback, if she needed one, was to continue her work on biomechanical feedback loops in multicellular organisms here. This was a field in which she was now being published, and she was fast becoming a leader in the field of machine interfaces with cells at the molecular level. Organelles, specialized parts of a cell, could be made to mimic mechanical operations; indeed, the cell could produce individual proteins, which were themselves shaped like simple little machines. Cellular and mechanical operations merged, making the distinction between men and machines irrelevant as they flowed into one another. It was serious work, and no one knew more about it than Eli.

So Eli was applying for another year’s extension on her grant here at the university, too. She figured she was pretty much of a shoo-in, but the politics were ferocious, so nothing could be taken for granted. That was one reason to be discreet about Steven with the faculty. His problems with one or two of the professors were becoming serious, and the spillover effect for her could be disastrous.

She went to her office and tried to get a little work done for an hour. It was unusually quiet around the place until noon, when her student colleagues finally roused themselves and began to trickle in.

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