The animals stood as still as sculpture, their heads turned toward the Studebaker, as if they had been waiting for it, aware that it was en route, though most likely they had paused in their crossing when they heard the approaching engine.
“Magnificent,” said Wyatt.
“Mule deer,” Hector said.
“Why mule? They look nothing like mules.”
“Their big ears. Other deer don’t have ears so big.”
The deer regarded them with what seemed to be solemn curiosity.
Wyatt said, “Seems like they don’t spook easily.”
“Toot the horn,” said Hector, “and they’ll scoot.”
Two short honks of the horn had little effect. The buck raised its head higher, and the two fawns ventured a few steps closer to the pickup, as if the sound appealed to them.
“Lay on it hard,” Hector advised.
A long, strident blast had even less effect than two short ones.
Opening the passenger door, Hector said, “I’ll shoo them off.”
“Wait a second. Is that wise?”
“They’re just deer. Isn’t any fight in them.”
Having lowered its head, the buck was pawing at the pavement with one hoof, as though warning or challenging them.
Under his sport coat, in a hip holster, Wyatt carried the Heckler & Koch .45. He would never shoot one of the deer, but a round fired in the air might cause them to bolt in case Hector couldn’t shoo them away.
He put the truck in park, engaged the hand brake, and got out to accompany the old man.
The fat sun hung far in the west, and the shadows of the nearby forest pooled toward the east, as if the substance of the pines were melting into tar. In the northwest, an armada of dark clouds moved southward in a slow but threatening procession.
As Wyatt and Hector approached the animals, the only sounds were the hollow, lonely voice of the freshening wind and the scrape of the male deer’s hoof on the blacktop.
The wicked points on the buck’s antlers gave Wyatt pause, and he put his right hand on the grip of the pistol.
50
The bandwidth of the interstate highway was inadequate to the volume of data moving on it, the data being traffic, but behind the wheel of the Pontiac GTO, Kenny Deetle slalomed through real space with the same bravado with which he raced through cyberspace. He never used the horn, though other drivers hammered theirs to express outrage at the panache with which he weaved sharply from lane to lane, treating their vehicles as a downhill racer would treat the poles that marked the course of a ski run. They thought his maneuvers were reckless, but Kenny knew them to be the consequence of exquisite calculation—or at least strongly believed that they were, which was nearly the same thing in a quantum universe where the Uncertainty Principle held, in part, that nothing was anywhere until it was observed, or something like that.
In the front passenger seat, Leigh Ann was braced as if she were aboard a plummeting airliner. At first she punctuated her speech with the S-word and the F-word to such an extent that her meaning was at times difficult to decipher. Soon, however, she exhausted her capacity for indelicate language, and Kenny was able to bring her up to speed regarding Ganesh Patel.
“He’s three kinds of genius in a single package,” Kenny said.
“There’s more than one kind?”
“Scientific genius, finished college at twelve, doctorate at seventeen, has beaucoup patents for bioprinting technology.”
“Which is what?”
“He’s made it easier to use bioinks, which contain cells and collagen and other stuff, to print layers of artificial tissues, even organs, especially capillaries. Capillaries were a bitch to bioprint before Ganesh.”
“This sounds like sci-fi.”
“It’s not. He also has patents on processes to recellularize donor organs before they’re transplanted.”
“Give it to me in English.”
“They strip cells out of the organ and repopulate it with new cells from the person receiving the transplant. Far less chance of the organ being rejected.”
“Repopulate, huh?”
“And organs once unsuitable for transplant can now be used. The decellularized organ is like a natural scaffold for the new cells.”
“Decellularized scaffold,” she said.
“Exactly,” Kenny said as three motorists angrily horned him at the same time.
“What second kind of genius is this guy?”
“A genius investor. If he puts money into a techie start-up, you can bet your ass the company’s going to make big money.”