Nano

CHAPTER 29

Zach Berman felt he was just about over his latest bout of jet lag. No matter how much sleep he got on a flight, no matter how diligent he was about taking his melatonin supplements, which he was convinced helped, and not sleeping during daylight on his return to Colorado, he was always knocked off center a little for a few days after flying home.

He had been back in Boulder by the time the first stage of the Giro d’Italia — a short time trial — was held on Saturday. The next day there was a longer stage, more than two hundred kilometers. Berman followed the team’s progress on the Internet. He was pleased to see the Azerbaijani team’s riders had performed decently without being embarrassingly bad or improbably good. Although Berman had no control over the team leader’s performance, he was pleased to see he lay in thirtieth place overall; his Chinese riders finished each day in the middle of the peloton, the main group of supporting riders, which was just as it should be. Berman was looking forward to being back in Milan on the twenty-seventh for the end of the race, even if he had to travel there via China. But the long trip would be well worth it if the latest training results were replicated over the course of the next couple of weeks.

On Sunday Berman had forced himself to pay another painful visit to his mother at the Valley Springs Assisted Living home in Louisville. Each time he went, he thought he detected a tangible decline in his mother’s capabilities. On this occasion, she was just a little more belligerent toward him, and just a little less capable of completing a coherent sentence. The inexorable decay was frightening, not for his mother, as he had given up any hope of stemming her disease, but for himself.

He felt his going there was like those juvenile-offender programs in which at-risk teens are sent to a hard adult jail in the hope that they’ll be scared straight. Except Berman was trying to make sure he worked even harder to make sure his Nano team had the funds to make progress with the science. His ability to comprehend the technical aspects of the program had long ago been left behind by the advances his scientists were making, but he kept on top of it the best he could. What Berman could do was ensure he secured the money.

To that end, he closeted himself away for hours in the nerve center of Nano with his senior scientist, Allan Stevens, and his small inner circle, the molecular manufacturing guys, listening in as the team revised the scientific protocols over and over again. The margins they were working with seemed minute: in the nano universe, an infinitesimal number of molecules, too few or too many, could lead on the one hand to underperformance and on the other hand to overwhelming stress on the body and, potentially, catastrophic failure. That much had become clear. It was a tightrope walk.

The bulk of his time Berman spent with Whitney Jones, being debriefed about the intelligence she had gleaned from the latest group of Chinese dignitaries and their competitive nationalistic mind-set, and combing over the Nano strategy for the upcoming weeks. From what Whitney and Berman could divine, the huge injection of financing to take the microbivores project to the next level, namely the move to mammal and then human safety studies, was still on track, and once that had taken place, the sharing of the advances in nanotechnology would begin in earnest. But the performance criteria remained as challenges that Nano had to meet. For that reason, Berman spent more time with the premier athletes still in training, and through interpreters he tried to get a fix on their psyches. Were they going to be ready to assume the responsibility that was being placed on them? Could he trust they would act as instructed? Some of the expendables obviously hadn’t, although ultimately they had contributed in unexpected but valuable ways.

Berman was consumed by his work. The preparations were meticulous in every detail, and Berman was on hand for each and every aspect of their development. He could leave nothing to chance. He undertook a monkish existence, rising even earlier, working even harder. For these few weeks, Berman needed his head to be as clear as it could be. He was a grown man; he could delay his inevitable gratification till the time he could truly appreciate it. So he made a pact with himself. No red meat; no alcohol; no cigars. And no Pia. She was simply too much of a distraction.