by Susy Gage
“Probably less. You were an undergraduate here, you know what makes this place tick. Fuckin’ a, if anything happens to you I swear I will wring Solomon Rose’s neck myself.” They stopped for a traffic light on the border of campus, which allowed the students to catch up, and Lou changed the subject quickly. “I really don’t like the idea of you rollerblading up and down that hill while this is going on.”
“What am I going to do?” she asked. “Get Sam to follow me in a yellow go-cart?” She realized she was the one who was supposed to be paranoid and got an idea. “Actually, maybe you’re right. I know the RA at Pasteur House and I can probably get her to put me up in a dorm room for a while. Then I’ll be on campus to work day and night, won’t have to go up the hill in the wee hours, and might be able to actually do something.”
It actually was a good idea, she realized later that afternoon as she headed down to her old undergraduate dorm to ask if they had a spot for her. This way she wouldn’t waste any commuting time, and could sneak around and use facilities when Kuzno wasn’t around. The undergrads were all too young to know her personally, but some of the resident staff were sure to remember her. The brick path shaded by olive trees seemed so fresh and innocent—spattered with fallen fruit, crowded with hungry birds, and smelling of soil and leaves—that it made her skip like a little girl.
The House had been extensively remodeled, including losing the tree that had held their famous treehouse, but Lori had mourned enough for one day and tried to tell herself that the new rooms were clean and healthy instead of sterile and scary. There was a very nice spot for her, in a double where one of the students had dropped out after two months to transfer to UCLA, and she left some items on the empty bed and then went into the common room to call a meeting. It was time to recruit her army of little Buboes.
Eighteen: The Few, The Proud, the Buboes
Buboes didn’t have any particular costume, like the Ferrets who dressed in black, or the Thorns from Calvin House who went barefoot, or the Snodgrass Snots who wore green athletic clothes. Still, no matter where they might be, from downtown at the grocery store to stalking the streets of Boston, a certain impalpable je ne sais quoi gave them away.
They stood there wide-eyed and elbowing each other in their eagerness. More than a dozen had materialized in the common room the instant Lori had mentioned a secret meeting. “You wanted us, Dr. Barrow?”
“Right,” she said matter-of-factly. They looked so young; she felt a stab of guilt at the thought that she might be leading them into real danger. “As you know, we had a tragic accident in the cold room last week.”
There were solemn nods. The Buboes’ eyes started to glaze, no doubt as they anticipated a lecture on lab safety.
“Well,” Lori continued, “some of us are pretty sure it was not an accident.”
This woke everybody up, and she passed around some bad photocopies of Dim Bulb’s staff photo, and even worse copies of a fuzzy cellphone picture showing his mittens. “He’s supposed to work at the LEPERLab now,” she told them. “He has no business being here on campus. If you see him, find me and tell me immediately. Don’t try to confront him.”
They all nodded vigorously. A tall guy with taped-together glasses raised his hand. “Question! What do we expect him to do?”
Lori was about to protest that she didn’t know, but then she realized she did kind of know: a broken elevator cable. A freezer door that came off and fell. A bad latch on a cold room.
“Infrastructure crimes,” summarized another Bubo, clearly delighted with the concept.
They asked for video equipment, and Lori gave them the key to the departmental A/V room, Kuzno be damned. Then they went scattering off as if on a scavenger hunt, plotting and theorizing and giggling.
“One more thing,” Lori called them back. “Trust no one. Anything that happens, tell me and me alone. Everyone else is a spy. Especially Kuznetsov. Got it?”
They did. Or so they claimed.
Having delegated her pranks, Lori then went back to the department to delegate the real work. She called the “two who didn’t suck”—Chi-Ming and Walter—into her office and told them to figure out how to slice the ice cores.
“Go next door to biology,” she suggested. “Ask around. Tell people you need something cut very thin and mounted on a microscope slide. Once you’ve got that accomplished, let me know.”
This time, when she finally settled at her desk to be a good little theorist, Lori’s heart was in her work. She knew that her rebellion was humming away invisibly down in the BSL-3, being carried by Lou and the Buboes, and slowly corrupting the latest generation of Walter Waddles.
She finished the paper on the Poincaré proof and sent it in. Then she sat down with Sam and tried to help him with his Feynman diagrams. Quantum field theory wasn’t like riding a bicycle, and she wasn’t sure how much she managed to accomplish. It did give her an idea of where Lou was going with his models, though, and an appreciation for why he needed data from the South Pole. She showed Sam how to submit to the Physical Review Letters on-line paper submission site, and suggested possible reviewers who would help him get accepted by the prestigious journal.
She took the theory students for coffee around nine o’clock, and as they came back to campus, two Buboes with flashlights and video cameras greeted them.
“All’s well?” Lori asked.
“Affirmative,” the Buboes replied. “Dr. K departed, nineteen-oh-five hours. Sworn enemy not sighted.”
Sam and his pals looked confused, but Lori didn’t bother to explain. The fewer people who knew the details, the better. Then the students left, too, leaving her alone on the theory floor to wait for news from her experimental cronies.
It was past midnight when a yawning Walter knocked on the door and brought her a tray full of labeled slides, each bearing a nearly invisible circle in the center, which was a thin section of part of their microbial community.
“The coverslips slide around,” he complained. “I can’t get them to be stable.”
“We need nail polish,” Lori mused, “but the pharmacy is closed.”
And so it was that in the name of science she rifled Marybeth’s desk the day of her funeral, not expecting to find anything of substance since the police would have already taken it. She did unearth a small bottle of clear nail polish that she handed to Walter. While he sealed the coverslips over the samples, she went through the desk one more time, sorting through hair clips and old photos for something interesting.
She was glad that Chi-Ming had given up and gone home, because Walter needed a little interrogating. While she rummaged she mentioned casually, “It’s funny, Walter… I know your grandpa, and I know your great-grandpa, but no one’s ever heard of Walter W. Waddles III.”
“My dad’s the black sheep of the family.” Walter concentrated on his task, painting meticulously. “We’re ashamed of him.”
“He’s a LEPER!” Lori accused abruptly, finding a small pencil bag and an old lab notebook underneath a drawer in Marybeth’s desk. She didn’t want to open them in front of him, so she threw them into her backpack for later inspection.
“In more ways than one,” Walter chuckled, blowing the nail polish dry. “He thinks he’ll get the Nobel Prize for finding life on Mars, but he’s wrong.”
“Just so long as he hasn’t asked you anything about what’s going on here,” Lori warned.
“He hasn’t, I swear.”
Lori tried her sternest possible look, but Walter’s gaze didn’t waver. “What on earth made him take a job at the LEPERLab, anyway?”
“Don’t you know?” Walter glanced over his shoulder. “He was promised control of the whole science Colony, and he got to…” he lowered his voice to an imperceptible whisper.
“He got to what?” Lori demanded.
“…To fire Kuzno,” Walter hissed.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Lori announced loudly. “Your dad started at the LEPERLab while I was an undergrad. Kuzno
’s only been here for eleven years.”
“Here on campus,” her student corrected, standing up with the boxful of slides. “He was a LEPER for a long time before that. I’m pretty sure my dad was hired to drive him out.”
Lori stayed seated in the rickety grad student chair, mind reeling. Kuzno had been here when Silverman died. Did a collapsing hiking trail count as an infrastructure crime?
Not wanting to rouse Walter’s suspicions, she jumped to her feet and led him downstairs. Buboes met them in the stairwell, reassuring them that the building was empty.
The padlock opened with her standard master key. Once inside the staging area, Lori made sure to follow all of the BSL-3 precautions so as to set a good example for Walter. They put on lab coats, hairnets, booties, and one pair of nitrile gloves. She then punched in the code for the second door, which Lou had set to the excitation and emission wavelengths of fluorescein, something that evil LEPER scullions who feared biology weren’t likely to guess.
White lights would ruin their visual sensitivity, so they avoided turning them on. The only light in the small inner room came from the scatter of the powerful blue beam of the mercury lamp that would excite their fluorescence. All Lori could see was the outline of Lou’s head as he peered into the microscope, and a small green circle on the slide he was inspecting.
He didn’t even bother to turn around, keeping his eyes on the eyepieces as they passed him one of Walter’s carefully-prepared slides.
Even without magnification, Lori could tell immediately that it was a disaster. A hazy green shot out in all directions from the slide, much too bright and not the color she had expected.
“Ugh,” said Lou. “What is this?”
“I screwed up,” said Walter hastily. “The sections are too thick.”
“So did I,” Lori added. “The dye is the wrong color.”
“And me too,” argued Lou. “The filter is too wide.”
They all contemplated in silence for a moment, united in the disappoinment of a failed experiment.
“But hey,” Lori reassured quickly, “at least it’s a start. We’re here, Kuzno doesn’t know, and we’re going to make this work. Right?”
The others nodded, seemingly without conviction. Walter yawned, and she screamed at him not to touch his mouth in the BSL-3. Then Lou reached around and snapped off the mercury lamp, plunging them into total darkness.
It was hot, cloying, and stinky. Lori fought panic, feeling with her feet along the edge of the wall, then slapping around for the light switch. “Why’d you do that, you bastard?”
“Huh?” Lou sounded asleep. “It didn’t occur to me. Sorry. The light’s right by the autoclave.”
Lori found it at last and switched it on. The bulb was weak and yellow, but it clearly revealed all of the effort Lou (and his students?) had put into the lab since she had last been here. Everything was spotlessly clean. The drawers were all labeled—Optics, Tools, Pipettes, and even Batteries. On the bench by the microscope was a collection of microscope filters and mirrors in various stages of assembly; laminated sheets gave their specifications.
“This is amazing,” she breathed.
“We’re not there yet.” Lou’s eyes were red and looked unfocused, with creases around them where the rubber eyepieces had pressed. “I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve been staying up reading this stuff, but…” He gestured at the optical components. “It’s bedtime.”
As if on cue, Walter’s phone started to tinkle a few bars of Macarena. “No phones!” Lori yelled.
“Oh, OK,” Walter shrugged, letting it play. “It’s just my grandpa coming to pick me up. You know… in case it’s not safe.” He waited for them to nod permission, then dashed out through the inner door.
“Lab coat!” Lori called, in case he’d forgotten.
“Oops!” said Walter. There were more bangs and clicks, and he was gone.
Lou and Lori met each other’s eyes, not needing to say it aloud: Walter Waddles Jr., endowed professor of physical chemistry, thought his grandson might be in danger on campus.
“Did you find yourself a place in Pasteur?” Lou asked, seemed very relieved when Lori nodded. “Good. Let me walk you back, I’m going that direction too.”
She was going to object that it was only five hundred meters, but as she tugged open the door she remembered the gouges on the bottom caused by Dim Bulb’s fingernails and was grateful for the company.
Nineteen: I Will Come Like A Thief
It ordinarily would have been funny to see Sam waiting outside of her office, tearing his massive amounts of hair, but they really didn’t have time for another crisis. “Barrow,” he whispered, glancing around, “help.”
She sighed and beckoned him in. She still didn’t have any furniture, so Sam settled himself on the edge of her desk. “Our infrastructure grant specifically excluded furniture, mouse pads, and chalk,” he explained.
“I figured something like that. What’s the problem?” Lori opened her laptop and started scrolling through the image files. They were getting better with the fluorescence microscope, but the slices were still too uneven and thick. Whatever the microtome was that Walter had found in the biology building, it wasn’t doing the job.
Sam took a deep breath. “Phys Rev Letters rejected my paper and they’re accusing me of fraud. They say an identical manuscript was submitted the day before by a different group.”
Lori half sneered. There had to be some mistake. “It isn’t me you should be telling this, it’s Lou and Rose. They need to call the editor and find out what’s going on. Who’s the corresponding author?”
Sam’s big brown eyes grew very round; she could see the edges of his contact lenses. “Me. I’m the only author.”
“Their names aren’t on—? Wow. You have a good advisor, Sam. You should call the journal yourself and find out as much as you can, but Lou needs to know what’s going on pretty damn quick.”
Sam leapt up and paced around the room. “I just know I did something wrong. How can this happen?”
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know. I posted a pre-print to the Los Alamos site.”
“That’s fine, we all do that. That’s how the Internet was invented.”
He looked at her as if she’d just claimed to be Al Gore. “It is? Have you ever heard of someone stealing a manuscript?”
She thought long and hard. “More often it’s grant proposals because they never go public, so it’s easier to get away with. Manuscripts—yes, actually, once or twice, but the culprits got found out. Once the person was caught because it was sent to the original authors for review. The second time it went to press and then had to be withdrawn. Who all had copies? And were they hard copies or a electronic copies?”
“The only people I gave copies to are you and Dr. van Gnubbern.”
“My loyalty is above suspicion, and so is van Gnubbern’s. Call the journal. Talk to Lou.”
Sam shook his head in despair. “He’s going to kill me.”
“He’s not going to kill anyone. He wouldn’t even kill Dim Bulb.”
“Really?” Sam stopped pacing and looked hard at her as if inspecting her statement for irony. “Did he say that? He’s got to be lying. I would kill Dim Bulb.”
“So would I. With my bare hands. And fingernails.”
“Yeah, but you, Barrow…. It doesn’t take much.”
“Despite rumors to the contrary, I’ve never killed anyone in my life. I just happen to be around when—”
“When people you don’t like drop dead? Remind me to stay in your good graces.”
With that he was gone, and she hoped not to see him again for the rest of the day. She couldn’t help thinking about him, though, when Lou wheeled in a few minutes later with a bulging canvas bag on his lap. “Uh oh,” she worried. “Severed head?”
“Yes,” he replied with utmost seriousness. “They told me in rehab that I could do everything I did before. The serial-killer thing’s stil
l a bit tricky though, the heads keep rolling onto the floor.” He dumped out what had to be a hundred boxes of prints and slides onto her desk, and they both stared at them for a long moment. “Actually, a severed head would be less daunting.”
Lori fought panic. This whole approach was just so analog—and Kuzno was sure to catch them using the slide scanner.
“Can you tell if any of the pictures are any good?” she wondered.
“No,” Lou admitted, “not really. All of the samples have these elongated, football-shaped things in them. I can’t tell if they’re organisms or minerals.”
“Did you do a DNA stain?”
“Of course, but I couldn’t see what it was stuck to.” He shuffled through a box of slides, picking one and holding it up to the window for her to see.
It was more of that green haze. Green haze wasn’t going to win them six hundred million dollars. “What does Ben say?”
“He says the answer will reveal the evolutionary history of the region—so keep trying.”
“Oh. I see.” Lori thought hard. Lou was staring at her, waiting expectantly like a graduate student or a puppy dog. “Well…” she tried, “what if they are organisms with a thick wall? You could try bursting them open and then using the DNA stain.”
Lou’s eyes lit up. “That’s a great idea!” Abandoning the deskful of prints, he went off humming to his secret lab in the basement.
Lori was horribly jealous, especially since she couldn’t even go downstairs for a pee without being collared by Sam.
“Is it safe?” he whispered.
“It depends on who’s the enemy,” she replied impatiently. “Did you call the journal?”
“Yes, and I’m totally confused.” He glanced all around, but the second floor was empty. “They finally gave me the name of the senior author on the stolen paper, and they say he’s from STI, but he’s not in any of the directories and I’ve never heard his name. Ellis D. Tripp?”