The Flicker Men Read Free

atmosphere in the lab is relaxed; you can take naps if you want. There is no outside pressure to work. It is a strictly Darwinian system—you compete for your right to be there. The only pressure is the pressure you put on yourself, because everyone knows that the evaluations come every four months, and you’ve got to have something to show. The turnover rate for probationary researchers hovers around 25 percent. Friendships with new hires can be fleeting.
    Satvik works in circuits. He told me about it during my second week when I found him sitting at the SEM. “It is microscopic work,” he explained.
    I watched him toggle the focus, and the image on the screen shifted. I’d used an SEM in grad school, but this one was newer, better. As close to magic as I’d ever seen.
    A scanning electron microscope is a window. Put a sample in the chamber, pump to vacuum, and it’s like looking at another world. What had been a flat, smooth sample surface now takes on another character, becomes topographically complex.
    Using the SEM is like looking at satellite photography—you’re up in space, looking down at this elaborate landscape, looking down at the Earth, and then you turn the little black dial and zoom toward the surface. Zooming in is like falling. Like you’ve been dropped from orbit, and the ground is rushing up to meet you, but you’re falling faster than you ever could in real life, faster than terminal velocity, falling impossibly fast, impossibly far, and the landscape keeps getting bigger, and you think you’re going to hit, but you never do, because everything keeps getting closer and sharper, and you never hit the ground—like that old riddle where the frog jumps half the distance of a log, then half again, and again, and again, without ever reaching the other side. That’s an electron microscope. Falling forever down into the picture. And you never do hit bottom.
    I zoomed in to 14,000X once, like God’s eyes focusing. Looking for that ultimate, indivisible truth. I learned this: there is no bottom to see.
    *   *   *
    Satvik and I both had offices on the second floor of the main building, a few doors down from each other.
    Satvik was short and thin, somewhere in his forties. His skin was a deep, rich brown. He had an almost boyish face, but the first hints of gray salted his mustache. His narrow features were balanced in such a way that he could have been alleged the heir to any number of nations: Mexico or Libya or Greece or Sicily—until he opened his mouth. When he opened his mouth and spoke, all those possible identities vanished, and he was suddenly Indian, solidly Indian, completely, like a magic trick, and you could not imagine him being anything else.
    The first time I met Satvik, he clamped both hands over mine, shook, then said, “Ah, a new face in the halls. How are you doing, my friend? Welcome to research.” And that’s how the word was used— research —like it was a location. A destination that could be arrived at. We were standing in the main hall outside the library. He smiled so wide it was impossible not to like him.
    It was Satvik who explained that you never wore gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. “You must be sure of it,” he said. “Because the gloves will get you burned.”
    I watched him work. He filled the SEM’s reservoir—icy smoke spilling out over the lip, cascading down the cylinder to drip on the tile floor.
    Liquid nitrogen doesn’t have the same surface tension as water; spill a few drops across your hand, and they’ll bounce off harmlessly and run down your skin without truly wetting you—like little balls of mercury. The drops will evaporate in moments, sizzling, steaming, gone. But if you’re wearing gloves when you fill the reservoir of the SEM, the nitrogen could spill down inside the glove and be trapped against your skin. “And if