Trent was a great putterer, around the house and in the garden. It often fell to Jane to finish projects, like getting the trestles up, but he tended the tomatoes and the orange trees, the roses and the rosemary. For remembrance, Daria would say sometimes, but on the whole they were for distance—quiet and separation from the Normandy coast, more than earned.
The two houses were adjacent and communicated by the garden path that the trellises shielded from view. They were more modest than Tom could afford, since he'd reconciled with his father well enough to come into the Sloane money. But his life as a student had broken him of extravagant tastes, and none of the other members of their odd quartet had had the opportunity to develop such appetites in the first place. Tom had taken an administrative job at Pacific Tech. There was no way that Daria could teach there officially, even with Los Alamos in her background, but she could advise the ones who ran the calculating machines, and instruct the ex-Wrens to maintain and program the new CALIVAC prototype.
Daria had come back from Japan with a taste for spaghetti naporitan and for grilled sweet potato with mock eel sauce. And with a ruined knee and inflammatory problems that the doctors could only shrug at. She tinkered and she calculated to keep her mind off the pain.
Jane strolled the garden path, let herself into the Sloane house, and knocked on Daria's office door. "Evening, cherryblossom," she said softly. "Dinner time."
"Jane? Come in."
Jane found Daria at her desk, as usual, massaging the tension around her bad knee with one hand and scribbling with the other, also as usual. She brought Daria's dinner on a tray covered by a cloche.
"What's this?" inquired Daria. "Looks fancy."
"Ta-da!"
"A green chili cheeseburger with fries?"
"Figured it's been too long."
Daria fell upon the sandwich and took the biggest bite her jaws could allow. Her eyes closed and she fell back in her chair, chewing in contentment, a moment of perfection.
"Thanks, love," she said at last. "I kind of forgot to have lunch."
"I kind of figured."
"Did you make something for Tom?"
"Tom is entertaining Farley Granger again tonight," Jane reminded her.
"Oh, right, right."
"Y'know, I bet most women keep track when their husbands are having an affair with another man."
"Most husbands aren't happy when their wives are sleeping with a beautiful woman."
"Oh, I'm beautiful now, am I? Well, I do declare, Mrs. Sloane..." Jane crouched down to cuddle into Daria's shoulder from behind.
"I wish I could be Mrs. Lane," Daria said quietly.
"I would have liked to be Jane Morgendorffer," Jane replied, no more loudly.
"Daria Lane is snappier."
"Mmm. I yield. How about you get a little more food into yourself while you flatter me, then."
"Aren't you eating?"
"Had a burger myself a bit ago. But half of those fries are mine."
"Mmm. Tom and Farley... do you think that will last?"
"With an actor? Hmph. I just hope they're happy while it does." Jane stood behind Daria and draped her arms around Daria's shoulders. "I used my darkroom for its intended purpose today," she said. "I developed those pictures from the last time we played dress-the-Daria-like-a-movie-star."
"I hope it wasn't a total waste of film."
"Oh no. The ones where you wore the zippered boots were particularly... effective."
"Mmmm."
"Don't believe me? Need a little more empirical evidence?"
"Tonight. If I feel well enough."
Jane kissed the back of her neck. "Deal. How goes the adventure in number-land?"
"Like shit, is how it goes. No one can get anywhere understanding how Godzilla's genetic structure could withstand that radiation or regenerate its flesh or anything else, because we don't know the damn basics of what genetic structure is in the first place."
Jane caressed Daria's shoulders, lightly. A heavier touch was too much, particularly while she ate. "You don't have to be the one who cracks it open, you know."
"I know. But if I stop working, the pain is worse. And then I'm worse for you." She reached for the fries, scooped up a handful, brought them towards her mouth, and stopped. "Zippers," she said.
"Huh?"
"How is heredity supposed to work in the first place? A molecular pattern in the parent has to repeat itself in the child. How do molecules do that? The structure of one must serve as a template to build a copy of itself... or a mirror image. Like a photo negative. From the positive, make a negative, then a new positive again..." She dropped the fries back onto the plate and pressed her knucles to her forehead. "Nucleic acid," she said. "When I visited New York, Charlotte Green told me—"
When they had visited New York, the stress of travel had brought the pain on, as hard as it had been in Tokyo and Okinawa. There had been tears. Not all of them Daria's.
"She told me about her work in Chargaff's lab. They were finding that the amount of... the amount of adenine was always almost the same as the amount of thymine, and the guanine was almost equal to the cytosine. Take the simplest course. Assume that allowing for experimental error the quantities are exactly equal. How does that happen? One molecule of one kind always pairs with exactly one of the other." She began sketching, bringing feverish intensity to interlocking polygons. "A hydrogen there and there, across from, yes, yes, that might fit. But it's flat." She lifted the paper as though there might be more drawings on the blank page beneath. "So they stack," she declared. "With the phosphates—they stack and they turn. Each chain is, yes, for the other, exactly."
"Daria?"
She flipped to a new page and began penciling equations. She raised a finger. "Quiet! I'm Fourier-transforming."
Jane stepped back, then reached over and took a few fries for herself. Daria didn't notice.
After filling two pages: "Yes. I think the structure would be observable. But who..." She rose—and collapsed with a yelp of pain. Jane caught her.
"Just gonna ease you back into your chair, then. Do you need any—"
"Filing cabinet," Daria said, her breath ragged but strong. "Middle filing cabinet, probably top drawer. There's a woman who did X-ray tests on Godzilla scales. Works in Paris. But might be English."
Jane patted Daria's flushed cheek and went to the cabinet. Handing over folders of mimeographs and typescripts. "No..." Daria said. "No... Aha! Yes." She rolled her chair to her typewriter, then felt one hand with the other, began massaging the joints. "Take a letter, Miss Lane."
Jane fetched another chair and settled herself at the typewriter. Paper in, fingers over keys. "Ready."
"Dear Dr. Franklin," Daria began. "I am writing to suggest a hypothesis for the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid that should be amenable to proof or disproof by X-ray crystallography. In summary, the proposed structure is a polymer with two chains, each chain comprising a phosphate-sugar backbone, and the two chains joined by purine-pyrimidine hydrogen bonds on the interior. Steric considerations indicate that the chains are both helical in conformation...."
"Senator, until this moment, I did not fully appreciate the hopelessness and the pettiness of your crusade. You have utterly failed at insinuating that the scion of a Cape Cod old-money family was some kind of Stalinist. And now you bring his wife into this after all. We had spoken about this lady, Senator, but until this moment I did not believe that you would truly use her as an implement of assassination. And on what grounds, Senator? Daria Sloane served this country in the war as few women or men could. Two years later, she put herself on the front line, at great personal cost, against a catastrophe the likes of which the world had never seen. She has been an ornament to American science, one of the pioneers who make American science the envy of the world, yes, even of the Soviets. Do you think the Lysenkoists in Moscow have any love for the leading lady of American genetics? And now you go back on your word and dare to impugn Daria Sloane for what she has done, in her own home, for nothing but love? What would you next, Senator? Make her wear a pink triangle? And then perhaps a yellow star for her father's name? Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"