Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom Read Free Book Online Page A

golden orb weavers, and her goal was his goal: to manufacture a lightweight protective suit, flexible and effective, in an era of uncertain personal security.
    The prestigious Cornell University, situated in the town of Ithaca, together with the municipality of that same town, in conjunction with other bodies she preferred not to talk about on the Internet, were funding her research. She asked who was funding his research, and he didn’t mind telling her.
    DURING THE PAST terrible week when all his spiders died at once while he was investigating the genome of their silk proteins, he had not spoken to her, because he was afraid she would make fun of him. Everyone knew that the spider was not a social animal, and collecting four thousand of them in a single space, however big, was asking for trouble. He knew this, but for some reason he hoped it would work out, that the spiders would not let him, Dr. Irad Gruber, down. After their death he also asked that the possibility of the spiders having been deliberately gassed be investigated, but he didn’t know if anyone had bothered to check it out.
    In the nights following the death of the four thousand Nephila he suffered from insomnia (exactly like Rod Serling), and on the third night he called her up on the ordinary telephone and told her about the catastrophe. To his astonishment she did not laugh or mock, but listened with empathy, and when he concluded his confession, she went so far as to volunteer to help him and fill him inon all her research findings to date. “You are not alone,” she said to him, and his heart filled with hope. She added, “Get on a plane and come here. You won’t be sorry. It’s a beautiful place too.”
    Gruber didn’t think twice. He would have traveled to any godforsaken hole in the world to save his project from capsizing. He applied to the defense minister to approve a trip to New York State, in order to meet an ex-Israeli American who for mysterious reasons was willing to donate her research findings on the golden orb weaver free, gratis, and for nothing. The defense minister was a forgiving man and he approved the trip, which seemed to him an act of despair and an escape from reality.
    Gruber knew that the ministry had already approached his rivals from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who were working with biophysicists from Munich on producing extremely strong spider webs without spiders. From an article published in Current Biology he learned that the Jerusalemites had succeeded in transferring the web-producing genes, albeit not in commercial amounts, to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster . The flies had begun to produce spider webs from their saliva glands, which are equipped with giant chromosomes.
    Clearly, therefore, the Jerusalemites too were intent on the mass production of spider webs, and in light of the new circumstances, they were likely to get there before him.
    McPhee claimed to have made far more significant progress, but she was not willing to go into detail on the Internet or on the phone, but only face to face. He hoped all this wasn’t some day-dream, even though he was afraid she might be somewhat eccentric, because of her attitude toward Rod Serling, and especially because she was so proud of the fact that for a number of years he had taught communications at one of the excellent colleges in her town, Ithaca. There was something boastful too in her claim that everyone knew that Ithaca provided the best educational services in the world, about which she bragged as if she was one of the founding fathers.
    But he knew that if after he met her and it all turned out to be wishful thinking, he would die in America of a stroke or cardiac arrest. He was already suffering from health problems as a result of the hell of the previous week. An irregular heart beat, an antsy feeling at the tips of his fingers, and shame, great shame. He couldn’t look his biophysicists in the eye. They had spent months prying into the