by Susy Gage
“Marybeth tried to kill you?” Abby smiled benignly, standing up in the corner, sipping her water. “That doesn’t work, my dear. Your boss, Kuznetsov, says he lectured at length about the building’s infrastructure problems, but you refused to have the labs inspected before you started using them.”
“Kuzno is a liar.” Lori decided to play a card that made her sick, one of Marybeth’s own, hoping that the version of the events she’d gleaned from student gossip wasn’t too far from the truth. “He was sexually harassing Marybeth since she got here—you know that yourself. She filed lawsuits against him more than once.”
It worked, at least a little. Abby stopped frothing and started thinking. “So what is it you want from me?” she inquired, plopping lazily into her leather chair. “I certainly won’t be able to convince the safety committee to re-open that lab any time soon.”
“I don’t care about that,” Lori lied. She leaned in close for dramatic effect, narrowing her eyes at Abby. “I want you to help me figure out who killed Marybeth.”
Abby started to laugh, but it quickly turned into a splutter. She spent a long moment gulping water before she responded. “Ordinarily,” she admitted, “I’d say you were nucking futs.”
Lori waited. “But you know I’m right?” she prompted after a long pause.
“After what happened this morning at the LEPERLab, I’m not so sure.”
Fourteen: On Top of the World
Carol felt about Indian food the same way she did about anal sex—it was gross, but sometimes she put up with it because Bob liked it. When he was really down, nothing cheered him up like greasy, spicy hunks of meat.
The problem was, he didn’t need cheering up. Instead, from the pappadums through the rice pudding, he gloated nonstop about his promotion for saving Jim Kalb’s life.
Maybe she should be happy that he wasn’t fired. At least they weren’t out on the streets looking for new jobs. But something was sketchy, and Bob’s mindless celebration of his reward without stopping to think about it was starting to get annoying.
The mango laasi was good. At least she had that. But everything else at this restaurant was too rich and just a little off—even the water was bad. It had a sort of dishwasher taste; she swore she saw bubbles.
“I don’t trust that guy,” she interjected at last.
“Who?” Bob raised an eyebrow, chomping away.
“That guy you just hired. Kalb. He’s been trying to get this job for years now. Why would he do something so stupid as to sneak in on the weekend and get himself locked in the cold room?”
“That room is not up to code,” sighed Bob. “I knew that. It was just lucky I got to him on time.” He reached over to pat her with a curry-smelling hand. “I’m sure he was trying to impress me, get some work done on his very first day.”
“What kind of work?” Carol asked skeptically. She didn’t want to spoil his dinner, but she wished he’d hurry up. It didn’t feel like much of a celebration somehow. “What was he doing in there?”
Bob shrugged, taking yet another thick slice of garlic naan and sopping it into his leftover red sauce. “Just cleaning up, I guess. Gerson left a real mess in the cold room—samples wrapped in paper all over, poorly labeled, maybe dangerous. Jim got rid of most of it.”
“He threw it out? What if Ben Gerson wants his samples back?”
Bob laughed nastily through a bolus of bread. “There’s no way anyone’s going to let him back on lab after what he did. He’d better find himself some new samples, is all I can say.”
That wasn’t a surprising response. Everybody knew the Gerson story, and there weren’t many who felt sorry for him. He was a big shot from back East who’d been hired to start an Astrobiology program at the LPR Lab, and from the moment he had arrived things had gone wrong. He complained they wouldn’t let him do experiments, or hire graduate students, or do any of the other things important biology professors did. It didn’t seem like such a bad deal—he was essentially being told he didn’t have to work hard and could just travel around and give the lab some credibility in biology. Finally he had left to take a high-ranking position at a university, and his criticisms had leaked around the media no matter how much both the LPR Lab and STI might have tried to cover them up.
The only reason that he’d got away with such vocal complaining was that he’d been a friend of the Chief Scientist. Anyone else would have been given a punishment memo and had his office reassigned to the trailers in the parking lot. Maybe, Carol thought, Bob was being rewarded for purging the last traces of Gerson from the lab.
It still didn’t make sense. By all rights, Bob should be in the trailers too. She’d thought she’d be babying him tonight, not listening to him brag about what a hero he was.
She tried to be conversational, but the instant they got home, she locked herself in the bedroom with her laptop and started searching.
When she first pulled up Jim Kalb’s history, her instinct was There but for the grace of God.
Kalb was a boson among bosons. He’d spent longer than she had in graduate school, being expelled for being too slow and having to change schools. Anger and frustration were understandable—Carol still remembered stealing packets of mustard and ketchup to season their ramen noodles. If she’d been single, slightly older, or uglier, what a nightmare. They all started grad school so hopeful. None of them, except possibly Lori, really understood that the PhD was only the beginning of a long, hard road.
All her potential sympathy vanished when she followed Kalb’s record to his new school in Alaska. He had had sexual harassment charges filed against him several times and been arrested once for indecent exposure, and it didn’t sound like an innocent sunbathing or pee-in-the-bushes type of incident. She was starting to think he’d been kicked out of Chicago for reasons other than the slow pace of his thesis research.
When Bob went to take a shower, Carol quickly dialed Lori’s number, but of course there was no response and she didn’t have a cell. Unable to bear the suspense any longer, Carol tried Abby.
“Oh no,” groaned the sleepy voice on the other end. Abby sounded as if she were splashing in the bathtub. “Who put you up to this?”
“No one,” Carol insisted. “Well… unless you count Bob. He got a weird promotion and it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I can’t talk about it.” Abby emphasized her words with a pull of a plug and a vortex of water. “This is my job, and I’ll be damned to hell if that woman is going to ruin my career a second time.”
“I’m sorry,” Carol blurted automatically, shocked to hear Abby swear, but her words were to the ether. Abby had already hung up.
There was only one thing to do. If Lori hated phones so much, she was going to get a personal visit. Carol told Bob that she needed to run to the pharmacy for “something personal” and clutched her tummy, ensuring that he would ask no questions, and got in her car with her GPS.
Lori’s address was already in the STI directory, and only a few miles away. It was up a street Carol had never seen before, with a driveway so steep she didn’t dare take her aging Honda up it. Bob was always on her case to get a new car, but she was attached to the old gray Civic that had taken her away from postdoc hell into the land of—well, if not milk and honey, at least Soy Delicious and HFCS.
She hid the car behind an overgrown podocarpus and walked up the hill, bent over like the Missing Link, wondering how Lori managed to navigate it on any of her preferred means of transport.
A huge, twisted pine tree obscured the house. Carol reached into her purse for a small flashlight, only to jump as it reflected off a pair of eyes high in the tree. A raccoon, she told herself, heart thumping as she sidled up to the door.
But this wasn’t the house—it was a garage. There was another building down a broken brick staircase, obscured by sharp vines that grabbed at her clothes as she felt her way down carefully wth her feet. An old oak and a thick, overgrown bougainveilla obscured the front door until she was right in
front of it.
She knocked—timidly at first, then like she meant it. Lori finally appeared, still sweaty and in lycra even though it was nearly ten o’clock. “Oh, hi,” she said blandly, not seeming in any way surprised. “What’s up?”
“Bob got a promotion at the LEPERLab.”
“Oh, really?” Lori scratched her head, puzzled.
“But it’s bad. I think.”
“Uh huh. Come on in and have a drink.”
Carol wasn’t quite sure what “have a drink” would mean, since Lori had never had a drop of alcohol or commercial soda in her life. She sat at the kitchen table and waited, mildly curious, until she was presented with a fresh, homemade, thoroughly undrinkable lemonade.
“Auugh!” she spluttered, as the acidic liquid burned her already curry-assaulted lips.
The New Lori was empathic enough to hand her a glass of plain water and a vial of a viscous substance she claimed was glucose syrup. “It’s the same one I use for electron microscopy—well, not exactly the same one,” she amended as Carol grimaced. “Same recipe, though.” She started to babble about the relative solubility of sugars, but Carol was too impatient for that tonight.
“Bob hired this guy Jim Kalb who worked for Dr. van Gnubbern,” she began, adding a bit of lemonade and a generous serving of glucose to the water. It was actually good this way. “The first weekend he was on lab, Jim got trapped in the cold room. They took him away in an ambulance this morning, but instead of punishing Bob, the Colony Manager promoted him.”
Lori gave her a look of absolute incredulity, as if Carol had transformed into a werewolf in front of her eyes. She missed her own mouth with her glass, spilling lemonade on her cheek, and seemed utterly incapable of speech.
Finally she found something to say. “Is Jim dead?”
“Dead?” Carol wondered. “No, of course not. He’s in the hospital, but he’ll be just fine.” She giggled nervously. “I think Bob would really be in trouble if Jim had died.”
“But don’t you know…?” Lori broke off, got a bit unsteadily to her feet, and lurched off to the dark living room. She returned after a few seconds with an open laptop, typing as she walked. “You don’t know,” she concluded, then typed again. “No, you really don’t.” She placed the computer on the table, then collapsed into a chair. Her computer was battered at the edges, its screen filthy. “Jesus Christ on a stick. I always thought the Coverups Office was my friend.”
It was Carol’s turn to be incredulous as she learned that a graduate student on campus had suffered the same fate as Jim—only she, unlike Jim, had died. There was nothing in the papers about the deaths, the poor girl had no family or friends, and so the whole thing was about to disappear down the collective memory hole.
“Dim Bulb had been harassing her, apparently,” Lori mused, “which really throws a monkey wrench into the hypotheses.”
“Who is Dim—?” Carol began, then realized: Jim Kalb—Dim Bulb. Always you and your epithets, she thought, growing angry at Lori. “But Kalb was a victim, too, right?”
“Maybe. Maybe he set himself up in a similar way to divert attention. It still doesn’t make any sense, because everyone seems content to believe Marybeth’s death was an accident. Unless Kuzno tried to kill them both, and failed with Jim?”
“Who’s Kuzno?” Carol wondered.
Lori gave her a look of supreme scorn, as if campus intrigues should be known to all. “Who’s Kuzno? Only the worst department head the STI physics department has ever seen. Murder is the only thing he hasn’t done—or at least been caught doing. Maybe he hired Jim and used him to kill Marybeth, then tried to off him to shut him up.”
“It was Dr. van Gnubbern who hired Jim,” Carol protested.
Lori jumped up and took the lemonade things, returning them to the kitchen. With her head in the fridge, she called back, “I forbid you to imply anything bad about Dr. van Gnubbern.”
“Well…” Carol couldn’t resist twisting the knife a little. “You have to admit, he is known for hiring freaks and misfits.”
Lori pulled her head out. The fridge gaped open, empty. “Dr. van Gnubbern saved me from a life as a crack whore. If he hired Dim Bulb to give him a chance, that’s fine. But if he’s seen anything evil going on, I know he would have stopped it.”
Carol knew it was futile to argue, and for now she didn’t have any other ideas. Her phone vibrated in her bag and she leapt up, not wanting to have to explain what had taken her so long. To the list of Jim Kalb, Dr. van Gnubbern, and the mysterious Kuzno, she would have to add Bob as someone who wasn’t acting right and who, just possibly, knew too much.
Fifteen: My Fellow LEPERs
“I would rather break rocks in Siberia than have anything to do with the LEPERLab.”
Ben Gerson’s voice carried dangerously in the near-silence of the public gardens. It wasn’t safe to talk in the physics building, so they had decided to clear their minds of death and freezing by taking a walk in the most extensive botanical garden in Southern California. Lori, Lou, and Ben appeared to be the only ones here, at the top of the steep trail that terminated in a Zen rock garden and bonsai display, and Ben made no effort to whisper as they stood on the stone path and waited for Lou to make his way up the gravel. It was a hot and windy day, small stones dancing on the path at their feet.
“And I mean that literally,” the ex-LEPER continued with a hearty laugh. “Last year I got to break rocks in Siberia! A very adventuresome Russian postdoc took me to drill permafrost cores in the Arctic. Can you imagine, forty thousand years of microbial history, and you can hold it in your hand!”
Ben was exactly what Lori wanted to be when she grew up. He had the energy and enthusiasm of a boy one-quarter of his age, not to mention the crude sense of humor and the potty mouth. He was charming, personable, by far the best explainer she had ever met. A mere two hours after they’d started this afternoon, she felt as though the entire realm of astrobiology was within her grasp.
At the same time, there was something merciless about him that poor souls like van Gnubbern could never achieve. Lori got the impression that he had stabbed quite a few van Gnubberns in the back in order to get everything he’d had: an endowed chair at a big-name university back East, a research group of forty students and postdocs, and sponsored fieldtrips that spanned the globe from pole to pole. His group had been to Siberia, Antarctica, the Galapagos, the Falkland Islands, Hawaii, Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska—and those were just the places he’d mentioned within the last hour.
“Tell me, Ben,” Lou demanded when he had finally made it up the hill, “do your students love you or hate you for dragging them off to Siberia?” There was a nasty edge to his voice that Lori had never heard before.
“It depends on their temperament,” Gerson replied solemnly. “Of course, I will not take anyone on fieldwork who is disruptive or mentally unstable. There have been incidents, but no one has ever been seriously injured or died in my group. This is in part because I have zero tolerance for sociopaths like James Kalb.”
“Did you know him?” Lori asked quickly, before Ben could have a chance to censor his thoughts.
Ben hesitated, glanced at Lou, nodded. “I suppose I owe you the whole story… Do you want to sit under a tree while I dredge my poor old memory for the details?”
“You owe me nothing,” Lou growled, “and I don’t want to sit. Is this the top already?”
They were, indeed, at the highest point of the gardens, and spread out below were a dozen acres representing almost every flora on earth. The mild California climate was kind to everything except the true tropicals, like cacao, and cold-loving species like the quaking aspen. To their right were the zones comparing Africa and South America, the succulents of remarkably similar shapes and sizes despite being genetically unrelated. Australia was just below them, mostly shielded by a forest of eucalyptus that rustled in the hot breeze. Leading off to the left were a series of traditional gardens from all of the major nations of Europe. The
y were standing in Japan, having passed up the path through China, and down the other side would take them through Thailand and India and finally to the rose garden that had helped make their city famous.
“Shall we visit Thailand, then?” Ben mopped his forehead with an embroidered handkerchief and started down the trail with a spring in his step. All that fieldwork had made him as fit and sure-footed as a bighorn sheep; even Lori could barely keep up on the downhill. He was clearly stalling for time, giving them anecdotes about various scientists who had gone mad in the field while debating which real subject to broach next. It was testimony to his charm that he was able to make Lou laugh merrily at the image of a Bulgarian geologist hallucinating on a cinder cone, throwing his crampons at imaginary Martian attackers.
Standing under a mini-plantation of rubber trees, Ben grew sober again and admitted, “Kalb has a reputation everywhere. Lou, I warned your advisor many years ago about him—I think it was even before you started graduate school. Far be it from me to tell someone how to run a research lab, but I let him know in no uncertain terms that I did not want that guy around my people at the South Pole.”
They continued down the hill, Gerson a bit more relaxed as he changed the subject from Dim Bulb to the South Polar Station. He himself had never spent the winter there—“and nothing could induce me to do so!”—but for a while he had had students there every year. “The Pole is not ordinary fieldwork,” he explained as a fragrance of sandalwood welcomed them to India. Lori didn’t have to read the sign to recognize this one; Radi had introduced her to it in Hawaii. “It drives even good men and women batshit. The altitude is the equivalent of eleven thousand feet, so you spend your days in a constant state of mountain sickness, your hair and nails don’t grow, you become forgetful and moody. People imagine that they will be spending a cozy winter among colleagues—this is an error. The researchers are a small minority, and the support staff despise them. Think of all of the administrators and secretaries and other fools we scarcely tolerate on a daily basis. Now imagine that they are somewhat more misanthropic and anti-social, enough so that they feel a compelling need to spend a year away from civilization. Now spend your days and nights locked under a dome with them, with walls the thickness of cardboard and no sight of the sun for three solid months. It is no place for either alcoholics or teetotalers, since taking refuge in booze is one of the sanest approaches to surviving August, which they call One Long Fucking Month. I would never send a student there twice, and never under any circumstances make a trip there either a punishment or a reward. Kalb was a recipe for disaster. But Lou, I have to tell you it was a mistake not to speak with your advisor earlier.”