by Susy Gage
“Why?” Lou sounded distracted, occupied with navigating the paving stones. It took him a second to realize the implication and ask, “Did you talk to him this weekend? What did he say?”
“He feels terrible about what happened, and in some way responsible, which he is. He bailed Kalb out of jail more than once, and he knew about Kalb’s pathological hatred for you.”
Lou pulled off the trail, locked his brakes, and closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again, they were fixed on Ben. “You’re saying that Kalb did more than kill Marybeth.”
“I’m saying it’s very possible,” Gerson admitted, seeming pleased that Lou had caught on without histrionics.
Lori knew Lou well enough by now that she could tell when he was emotional—his voice got very quiet, and if it was especially bad, he used too many weird French cognates.
So far, he didn’t seem upset at all, just disbelieving. “Ben, we’re physicists! We don’t murder each other.”
“Happened when I was in grad school,” said Lori, bending to examine a lotus flower. “Some squalid love triangle. They let the guy finish his degree in prison, too.”
“It gets hushed up, in general,” Gerson agreed. “Why do you think STI students are no longer terminated based upon the qualifying exam? And Lori, what was that incident in Montreal?”
“Which one? The rejected student who killed fourteen women just because they were women? Or the professor who didn’t get tenure and shot all of his colleagues?”
It was like Strip Integration. Ben was not to be outdone. “Then there was the one in Iowa, which actually should win some kind of award, as it’s the highest body count by an actual physics grad student.”
“Virginia Tech, highest body count total!” Lori rejoined.
“You’re making me wish I had failed geometry and gone to work for the movie industry,” Lou grumbled. “I’d still be living in Malibu with my girlfriend. Do you honestly think it was Dim Bulb? What did I ever do to him?”
“He was expelled from grad school,” Gerson reminded him, “and apparently he always blamed you, claiming he was forced out so you could be hired.” He held up a hand before Lou could interrupt. “I know, it has no basis in reality. It also seems he was jealous of your success with the opposite sex.”
“That has even less basis in reality,” Lou informed him with a dry laugh.
“Kalb had his issues,” Ben admitted. “I have bailed my students out on occasion, but not for the sorts of crimes Kalb was accused of—assault and attempted rape.”
“Ew!” Lori groaned, making the others turn around as if they had forgotten she was there. A bunch of pieces fell together in her mind at once. “Oh my God. Jim Kalb is the guy with the fingernails.” She found herself telling the story of the guy on the train, who had hated Lou then. Had he come to STI as a technician in order to concoct some sort of twisted and horrible revenge? “I never noticed his face on the train, or learned his name, and here he always had,” she paused to shudder, feeling queasy, and then said, “those mittens.”
Lou shut his eyes again. His face was so full of pain and horror that Lori couldn’t bear it and closed hers too. When he spoke, his voice sounded hollow, as if he were speaking in a dream. “He is an evil, stupid, moronic fool,” he began, drawing a deep breath. “If he wanted to take advantage of me and fuck up my life, there are plenty of ways he could have done it. He could have just put his name on my proposal—I would have been too flaky to figure it out. He could have taken 90% before I would have noticed. There’s so much fun he could have had, and I would have had fun figuring it out. It’s not revenge, what he did, it’s just monstrosity.”
Lori peeked at him to see that he had folded his arms across his lap and was gazing up into the leaves. “We’re going to get him,” she promised, sitting down to take off her backpack. It was full of photographic equipment Lou had asked her to bring, but her laptop was in there too, and she pulled up the photos she’d taken of the torn-up rubber gasket on the bottom of the door. Shielding the screen from the sun under a rubber tree, she showed them the pictures of the gouges in the rotten wood. “At least we can prove he was responsible for the yellow fever leak,” she suggested.
“But why would he lock himself in a different clean room? To divert attention?”
“That’s exactly the sort of thing he would do,” snorted Ben. “Too stupid to leave well enough alone. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.”
Lou looked at the ground, stopped Lori as she was about to pack up the equipment, and gestured silently for her to hand him the camera and a wide-angle lens. It was a fancy SLR that looked brand new, and he caressed them for a long while in silence before he spoke. “You guys go ahead,” he murmured at last. “I want to be alone for a little while, commune with a tree, and pretend I don’t belong to the human race.”
“Promise you won’t hurt yourself,” Lori demanded before she could help it.
He glanced at her with a little smile, not at all angry. The dry air had turned his curls into a dandelion-like frizz that suddenly made him seem innocent, like a blond young Einstein. “Promise. I don’t know if I’ll be coming back in to work today, though.”
“If the cops won’t arrest Dim Bulb, I’ll kill him myself,” Lori reassured.
Mentally unstable, Lou was not, so they left him there among the thirsty-looking gardenias and finished descending the hill into the rose garden. Lori knew that this had to be one of the hardest days of her colleague’s life and that she, too, should mourn to some extent, but what she mainly felt was relief. She was thrilled to have met someone she could look up to at last, someone who at sixty had never grown up and who had made science into the great adventure it was supposed to be.
“I don’t really give a flying fuck about Dim Bulb,” Gerson confessed as they passed under the trellis into the roses. The sun baked the sandy garden, and the fragrance from the crawling, climbing, and shrub roses was almost overwhelming. Dozens of overhead misters tried to combat the desert air, but the wind carried most of the water onto the few visitors, who hurried along the path. “He needs to stop killing off the good people, but that’s not why I’m here. I need you to analyze these ice cores and win this PIP proposal so that the LEPERs lose.”
Gerson talked nonstop as he trotted, growing increasingly furious as he told Lori how he had become a LEPER. It took a lot to convince someone to leave an endowed professorship, and the LEPERLab had turned on all of its powers of seduction to recruit him. They had flown him out to LA no fewer than five times, showing him off to schools in the area like a trophy as he described the experiments his group would do that were designed to quantify how bacteria had reshaped the Earth in macroscopic ways: from the pillars in Mono Lake to the multicolored strata in Death Valley, microorganisms had changed the geology and geography of the planet, even when they had long since gone extinct. Ben’s goal was to extrapolate their observations to other planets in the Solar System, looking for signs of bacterial activity on Mars, Venus, or the moons of Jupiter from orbiting satellites that could survey them entirely. He would go down in history as the man who discovered the first known extraterrestrial life.
His nasty surprise had started less than a week after his arrival. Rather than the fully supported research group he had been promised, he found himself in a soft-money position worse than that of an assistant professor. He was expected to abandon all of his people and write grant proposals for his own salary, laboring under the burden of a 250% overhead. “Pardon me, but I’m too goddamn old to do that shit again. Those first six years are hell.”
“I understand,” Lori agreed. “I’m almost through with them, and I know I couldn’t do it again.” They finally left the cloying sweetness of the roses and entered into the cooling shade of eucalyptus. The path was sandy, and she thought that one reason Lou had let them go on was so they wouldn’t see him struggle. If he had any idea how she’d crashed, wept, and bled her way through Montreal while learning how to roller
blade, he wouldn’t be embarrassed around her.
“That was not the worst part,” Ben continued. “It was insulting, humiliating, and it pissed me off, but it was by far not the worst part. False modesty aside, I’m a good enough grant writer that I can pull in enough money to support myself, my whole group, and a bunch of shit-for-brains who sit around and smoke pot all day to get the inspiration for their newest acronyms. No, the worst part is that they didn’t want me to do experiments. They wanted me to talk about them.” He bent down and scooped up a handful of eucalyptus acorns, tossing them one by one to emphasize his next words. “Actually doing a damn thing in that fucking place is against the rules.”
His anger was refreshing, and Lori really wanted to get him to name names but was afraid of making him clam up. “Is it the whole place, or just a few bad managers?” she prompted.
“The whole motherfucking place.” Ben tried to stomp his feet but almost slipped on the leaves and acorns. “I would have given my right arm for a beautiful little containment lab like you have, Lori. I have been a practicing microbiologist for forty years, and I tried to grow a simple plate of Staph aureus while I was there. Ever have a zit? Ever blow your nose? Staph aureus. But it’s a BSL-2 organism, so their ‘safety’ committee dragged me into a punishment room where some pipsqueak who had failed Micro 101 lectured me for five hours about how I was putting all their lives in danger. That leper of a Colony Manager, Tripp, made me walk to work for two weeks wearing some kind of Unclean sticker, and he would have done worse if I wasn’t friends with the Chief Scientist. It was like that day after day, week after week, until all I could do was spend 100% of my time driving around the area looking for other jobs.”
A row of century plants of all different ages grew at the entrance to the gardens, swaying in the wind. The youngest looked like nothing more than overgrown aloe vera; as they moved along the row, a few brave specimens were shooting up their twenty-foot stalks, which would bloom in early spring. The plants nearest the entrance were dead, but their flowers still stood, dried and brown and curving over the entryway like a gate.
The campus was hidden from view by the immense trees of the movie-star neighborhood; Lori paused before they began their two-block journey home to say, “I don’t have that containment lab any more, you know. Until we get Dim Bulb arrested, Marybeth was my fault.”
Ben put his hand on her shoulder and for the first time spoke in a whisper. “I hear that you’re not discouraged by something so minor as a padlock.”
“You’re right, but sneaking into the lab won’t work. If we want to submit a proposal, Kuzno has to sign off on it, which of course he won’t do if we were in the lab against the rules. And what if…” She didn’t want to sound paranoid, but it had to be said. She stayed rooted to the spot, delaying their return to where the walls and rosebushes had ears, and whispered, “What if Dim Bulb wasn’t acting alone? What if Kuzno put him up to it?”
“Well.” Ben seemed to consider this seriously. “You have a point. There was a bomb placed in my car while I was interviewing, and this was before Dim Bulb was hired.”
Lori couldn’t believe Ben had kept an item so juicy from them this whole time. She was opening her mouth to shout when he interrupted.
“Do recall that the Enemy School is located in South Central. The police refused to take it too seriously, saying it was a local punk. But it’s thanks to the fact that the bomb was made by an idiot that I’m here talking to you today.”
“Honestly, I don’t have much desire to do experiments until these people are locked up.”
“Hmph.” Ben looked disappointed. “Well, if you want to get Kalb off the streets, I think you need to use the LEPERs for that one.”
Sixteen: Skeletons in the Closet
Bob wasn’t the only one to have received a mysterious LEPER promotion. Jim Kalb had been promoted, too, and now he was Carol’s boss.
First he took her to task for her lack of productivity. He told her to stop trying to get administrative SLAPs and to do “what she’d been hired to do,” which was lab work.
There was nothing she would have liked better, but there wasn’t any lab work to do. Jim reassigned her office to a dusty nook next to what used to be the electron microscopy room, and told her she was now the “imaging technician.” There was no desk except the one the microscope was supposed to sit behind—the microscope itself was being used to prop open the door. Dozens of dusty old posters hung from the walls, showing close-ups of insect heads, mineral grains, or miniature electronics.
Jim didn’t offer to help with getting the room back in order. What he did give her was a wrung-out, reeking parka “in case it gets cold in here.”
She didn’t like Jim, but honestly, this wasn’t the worst thing that had happened at the LEPERLab. If she could drum up some business here at her “imaging center,” maybe she’d be back on track to being a scientist again instead of just a secretary.
This brief surge of optimism rapidly evaporated as she called around to the technical groups she knew, asking if they needed any electron microscopy. Everyone—absolutely everyone—told her to try back in three months after the big proposal had gone in. Even the people who usually welded parts for the Rovers were all on board for the Astrobiology effort, writing or proofreading or running budgets. No doubt Jim had known this; he had probably deliberately set Carol up to be laid off when she couldn’t get a SLAP.
She also wasn’t sure if the microscope worked—or even if there was electricity in the room. The lamp she unearthed in the corner didn’t respond when plugged in, and neither did her cell phone charger. After dozens of calls to Facilities, a pimply teenager dropped by with an Ethernet cable and explained to her thoroughly and at length how it should be plugged into her computer and into the wall, but that was it. She was still sitting in the dark with a two-ton instrument as a doorstop.
At least she had internet. It wasn’t long until she gave in to the temptation to try to find out more about the people who knew too much.
The thing she found the most horrible was that no one seemed to care about the dead graduate student, Marybeth Coleman—Carol made a point to remember her name. There had been absolutely nothing in any of the papers, or on the TV news, or anywhere. Even if the university didn’t want to publicize the accident, there should have been someone somewhere who wanted to celebrate her life.
Or not. She was just another failure. With a pang of guilt, Carol thought back to when there had been a shooting in their class in Minneapolis—everyone was just relieved that Absinthe wasn’t the one who died. The guy who’d been killed had been a boson with too much interest in a woman way beyond his reach, and people had cared more that Lori would be arrested than about him. Carol had to admit she, too, always forgot his name. One of the apostles, wasn’t it? John, or Matthew… she hadn’t much cared for him either, but no one deserved to end up dead.
Marybeth didn’t seem to have had a web presence, either personal or professional. A search on her name showed that she had been an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz and that her STI thesis advisors were first Kuznetsov, then Maupertuis, and finally van Gnubbern.
Van Gnubbern’s webpage was nothing more than the institutional front page with his picture and a “recent publication” with himself and Lori Barrow in 1988. Lori’s web site wasn’t much more informative: a few links to her site in Canada and a page about the class she was teaching. When she went to the Maupertuis site, she stopped and gaped, not sure which image affected her more.
No matter what Abby said about Maupertuis now, the old version of him was exactly her type, except maybe for the dorky T-shirt with Maxwell’s equations on it. Tall and almost unbelievably good-looking, he wore tight jeans, an earring in one ear, and a smile saying Don’t you all wish you were me, suckers? He had his hands on the shoulders of two equally tall guys next to him, and the shorter members of his group—an Asian guy and a round little nerd—crouched in front looking so much less cool.
Thre
e feet to one side stood the strangest woman Carol had ever seen. When she moused over the figure, hovertext confirmed that this was none other than the poor frozen Marybeth. Everything about her seemed incongruous and wrong. She was at least in her mid-twenties and had a drawn look and big circles under her eyes that made her look even older. But she had her hair in little pigtails and was clutching a pink cylindrical pencil bag and a stuffed salamander. Her dress was a cross between a bathrobe and a nineteenth-century ball gown, made of flimsy cotton that revealed she wore no bra (but needed one) and ringed with lace at the wrists, neck, and ankles. Where had she even found such a thing, Caol wondered, and what brain hemorrhage possessed her to wear it in public? Eyes half-closed, Marybeth was giving the group of guys a sideways glance of hope, envy, and fear.
Maupertuis’s personal link was a bandwidth hell of photographs of all kinds. Carol’s LEPER connection was too slow to deal with most of it, but she did find a couple pictures of Marybeth. There was one of her in the passenger seat of a black BMW in a parking lot with palm trees, where she looked terrified. There was another of her on a horse, wearing a helmet and foam pads on her knees and elbows but actually smiling in a way the other pictures would not have suggested was possible. Carol was staring at that image, trying to penetrate somehow into her mind, when she recalled that the library had a legal database accessible only from campus computers.