3
rking in a man's world and they know what that means. They tell each other the stories, true ones: about Rosalind Franklin not getting the Nobel for her x-ray work on DNA, Candace Pert not getting the Lasker for the first confirmation of opiate receptors in the brain. And so they learn the truth: In most kinds of science, there are few women, and they have to work harder and do better to get the same credit as men, and they know it. That's the way things are.
Carol Hendrix looked pale and tired, young and vulnerable-not at all what I'd expected. She was small, thin-boned, and her hair was clipped short. She wore faded blue jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and sandals over bare feet.
"I didn't have time to get in touch with you," she said. Then she laughed, and her voice had a ragged, nervous edge to it. "No, that's not true. I didn't get in touch with you because I knew how busy you were, and you might have told me to come back later. I can't do that. We need to talk, and I need your help ... now-before you do your first full-beam runs."
"What kind of help?" I asked. Already, it seemed, the intimacy of our letters was being transformed-into instant friendship in realtime.
"I need Q-system time," she said. She meant time on QUARKER, the lab's simulation and imaging system. She said, "I've got some results, but they're incomplete-I've been working with kludged programs because at Los Alamos we're not set up for your work. I've got to get at yours. If my simulations are accurate, you need to postpone your runs."
I looked hard at her. "Right," I said. "That's great-just what Diehl wants to hear. That you want precious system time to confirm a hypothesis that could fuck up our schedule."
"Diehl is a bureaucrat," she said. "He doesn't even understand the physics."
Yeah, I thought, true, but so what?
Roger L. Diehl: my boss and everyone else's at the lab, also the SSC's guardian angel. He had shepherded the accelerator's mammoth budgets through a hostile Congress,