by Susy Gage
“Oh yeah, he’s a LEPER,” said Lori, and dashed into the bathroom.
When she came out, Sam was still there. “A LEPER? A LEPER stole my paper? I thought LEPERs weren’t allowed to publish.”
“They’re not. That’s why the high-ranking LEPERs get associate positions down here. It’s something Professor Rose has been trying to stop because he thinks that they degrade the average quality of our research. I must say this will help his cause. They don’t get listed in our directory, and the LEPER directory is secret, so you won’t find him anywhere, but I’ve heard the name.” In spite of herself, she was becoming intrigued. “I have a friend at the LEPERLab. Let’s go to my office and give her a call.”
“OK. Want to see how Dr. Lou used to climb the stairs?” He took a running start, grabbed the banister, and flew up the four flights three steps at a time. Lori could barely keep up, and they arrived at the theory floor gasping. “Then,” Sam panted, “he would make fun of us for breathing hard.”
“Yeah, he makes me run seven-minute miles in the gym, and if I touch the handles, he yells, ‘triche pas’!’” Sam must have seen things, things she couldn’t imagine—the thought made her abandon all resolve and interrogate him right there in the dusty stairwell. “Why is he so broken-hearted about Marybeth?” she demanded rapidly. “Did she really save the group?” She wasn’t going to let him shrug and change the subject, either. “Come on, Sam. I saw you cry.”
“Not here, OK? Let’s at least go into your office. What’s triche pas?”
“‘No cheating.’ Remember it if you need to encourage me this afternoon.”
Lori did her best to grill him, but Sam didn’t seem to know anything special. He described the Marybeth she knew, the attention whore with the terrible stories that couldn’t be true.
“No idea why he hired her,” he conceded, rolling his eyes. “She worked for Dr. Kuznetsov at first, but he told her to go away when she only got eighty on the qualifying exam. She didn’t want to leave his group, but I guess Dim Bulb started harassing her—hey, do you think Kuzno was using Dim Bulb as a tool?”
“That’s sort of what I had in mind. Was this when she was filing the police reports and everything?”
“Oh no, this was long before. I don’t think Dim Bulb was doing anything serious then, just looking at her funny and giving her the creeps, but it was enough to make her leave Kuzno and start hanging around our group. Dr. Lou didn’t have tons of money at the time, but we were sort of a group already: he was helping us write fellowships, and I guess he told Marybeth she could be a part of the group if he won the proposal or she got a fellowship.”
“Why would he take someone with an eighty?”
“No idea. Pity?”
“Lou is the only person on earth more pitiless than I am.”
“Than you, Barrow? Not a chance. I’m sure you’ve clubbed baby seals.”
“Did you know,” Lori informed him meaningfully, “that every corner of Marybeth’s lab notebook had I love Louis punched into it in Braille? While I realize Braille himself was also named Louis, that seems a little excessive.”
“Well, for sure Marybeth had a crush on him.” Sam picked up a random pencil and tapped it on the desk, looking out the window. “But I don’t think he knew it, and obviously nothing was going on because no one was allowed to touch Marybeth. You couldn’t even shake her hand.”
“`You call yourselves lepers, but I have real leprosy!’” Lori mocked, cackling. “`All my fingers fell off, but they re-grew in Chernobyl!’”
“Why am I telling you anything? Obviously you already know more than I ever will. I won’t even ask why you read Braille.” Sam gave a short bark of mirthless laughter, but after that he spoke more freely, as if she were a fellow student. “She knew she had a problem. Once she even admitted it to me—`When I’m stressed, terrible lies come out of my mouth. It’s like puking.’ She tried taking drugs for it, but I guess they made her slow and foggy…”
“What did she take?” Lori demanded.
“Benzodiazepines.” Sam didn’t try to hide his snooping. “And a beta-blocker once. Always various pain pills, but that was more related to her made-up problems, I think.”
“So was she any good at physics at all?”
“I told you, I don’t really know. Dr. Lou must have had some reason to hire her, but you’ll have to ask him. All I know is she was always a freak.”
“Where’d she get the pain pills?”
“She’d have these episodes.” Sam’s olive complexion grew pale, and he grimaced. “Dr. Lou took her to the emergency room one night when he was only half alive himself. Can you imagine! He rolled with her to St. Vitus’s while she moaned about some bullshit. I went along because I was worried about him, and they refused to treat her, they said she was a drug-seeking hypochondriac and kicked her out. I just feel bad because she was right about Dim Bulb.”
“OK,” said Lori, wishing she’d been taking notes. Hadn’t the cops asked her something about Marybeth and drugs? She decided immediately that they had more important things to worry about. “Thanks for the info. Now let’s call my favorite LEPER and see if we can get your paper back.” She dialed Carol’s number, putting her on the speakerphone so Sam could hear everything.
They quickly established that Tripp was Carol’s (and Bob Drift’s!) “Colony Manager,” but the boson refused to see anything suspicious in that, protesting that there were only two LEPER Colonies in the whole place.
“Look, Carol,” Lori commanded, knowing that Carol was more logical under pressure, “this is a matter of scientific fraud. I don’t much care who is responsible or why as long as those who did the work get the credit. Right now, Tripp’s name is on the paper, and Tripp didn’t do the work. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to go into his office and look for a manuscript on his desk?”
Carol reacted as if she’d been asked to break out of Alcatraz on the backs of trained alligators. “And I can tell you,” she added after freaking out for a solid three minutes, “that his office doesn’t open with a key.”
“Good to know. Would you at least be willing to get me an expedited visitor’s pass? Or even one for Solomon Rose, if that’s easier?”
What Carol said next made Lori swear in new and interesting ways but left Sam gaping in confusion. “Hostie de motherfuck de tabarnak!” Lori raged. “How can they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know anything?”
That often worked on a boson. “I know his office opens with a passcode,” said Carol, “and that he’s a cosmologist.”
Lori slammed down the phone. “All right,” she declared, “I’m pissed now. This is your last chance to ask someone sensible for help. Otherwise, you’re in for a Barrow Adventure.”
Sam clapped softly. “Barrow, Barrow… What did she say? I didn’t get the acronym.”
“PNG—persona non grata. The LEPERs put me, Lou, Rose, and van Gnubbern on PNG status. We’re not allowed to visit, and we’re technically not even allowed to speak to LEPERs.”
“Oh boy!” Sam laughed sarcastically. “Poor you!”
“But that means we have to sneak onto the LEPERLab to get your manuscript back.”
“How?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea. But the days are getting short, so we’re going to have to move fast.” She stood up. “I’m going to go find some people, do a little research, and ask the Buboes what they know. Your task right now is to write down all of the constants that you think he may have used for his passcode. Do you have any non-motorized vehicles?”
“Huh?”
“Can you skateboard? Rollerblade?” He kept shaking his head. “You do have a bicycle, right?” Sam nodded sheepishly. “Good. Go get it, and oil the chain and pump the tires—there’s stuff in my office. I have a feeling it might come in handy.”
Twenty: The Infamous Coverups Office
“Tell me one thing.” Absinthe steered Carol towards a comfortable leather chair
in the legal office. “What do you know about killer deer?”
All Carol could think about is how high up you’d have to be on the LEPER ladder to get a chair like that. “Deer don’t kill people.”
“At the LEPERLab they do.” Abby slammed her briefcase onto the table, commanding attention. She turned to close the blinds, showing just how perfect her size 4 bottom was in its pinstriped pants.
They had sworn to each other in the first month of grad school not to let their bodies go the way the other first-years were doing, their lives nothing but studying and pizza. Every afternoon, before the rush began, they would walk through the tunnel that led from the physics building to the new gym. There they would change—Abby into tight shorts and a bra top, Carol into baggy sweatpants—and do forty-five minutes of cardio and a weight circuit (arms and abs twice a week, legs twice a week) or a class (aerobics, kick-boxing, yoga).
Men’s jaws would hit the floor as Absinthe walked by, and not a single workout passed in which someone didn’t say, “Is that your friend? She’s gorgeous.”
She still was. And now she was successful on top of it. She’d made Carol leave her ridiculous “technician” position in the middle of the day to come down here to campus to answer questions. It wasn’t as if she was missing any work by leaving, but she still worried that the LEPERs would find a way to punish her.
Talking about killer deer was a sure way to invite retribution. “Oh, my,” she murmured. “I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about this.”
“Carol, let me be the first to inform you that legally, the LEPERLab does not exist. You are managed by STI, you are technically STI employees, and the legality of your appointment and dismissal is handled by the STI legal office. Me,” she added, just to underline precisely how thick she thought Carol was.
Carol never imagined the “killer deer” were anything besides a LEPER ploy to oppress the employees. She wasn’t going to say that in so many words, but she did admit, “There was an accident, and after that the safety committee told us deer were dangerous and we had to avoid them. It became this big thing for a while, but now people have mostly forgotten it, I think.”
“Uh huh,” snorted Abby, not at all amused. “Just who is this `safety committee’?”
“I don’t know, but they made videos and everything, showing deer chasing and trampling people.”
Without a word Abby sprang up, leaving her computer on the table, and pulled Carol by the hand through the door and down the hall.
This little Victorian building seemed too small and quaint to hold what they all only imagined existed, but here it was. In a small room in the back that looked like a psychologist’s office were row upon row of rickety, overloaded filing cabinets containing the generations of STI Infamous Coverups. Carol sighed with an odd sense of pleasure, not hearing what Abby was asking her.
“Earth to the Dugong!” said Abby, snapping her fingers. “What got into you?”
“Are these it?” Carol breathed. “The Infamous Coverups?”
Abby laughed airily. “Oh, no, these are the things no one considers infamous, or at least not yet. The real infamous coverups are in another—don’t get any ideas,” she corrected herself suddenly. “Now, I want you to look at something.”
She was clearly a pro riffling through the file folders, and Carol wondered how the coverups were classified. Did van Gnubbern have his own file? Did Kuzno? Did Lori? Were they sorted by degree of secrecy? She could spend days in here, she thought wistfully.
Abby crouched down and opened a drawer at the very bottom of one of the cabinets. “I don’t know the name,” she told Carol, “but I thought you might. Read these and I’ll run back and get my computer so we can figure out who the guy was.”
The files were definitely coverup territory, because the guy killed by a deer had been a young new-hire and his parents had sued the LEPERLab—or, since the LEPERLab didn’t really exist, they sued the university—for all sorts of terrible things, including wrongful death. The deer seemed to have played a minor role. It had been a baby fawn, and the poor guy had crashed into it because his eyes were on the unmarked car chasing him as he left the lab on his bike.
Carol shivered in sympathy. She’d been chased by a go-cart, and that was bad enough. Then it seemed that the guards had deliberately avoided calling the ambulance or giving the guy any first aid at all until he was well and safely dead. His parents had asked for nine million dollars in a civil suit and she hoped they got every penny.
She had to agree that she would call that a murder. But what did it have to do with anything else…? She kept reading, skimming without full comprehension until Abby reappeared.
“Recognize the name?” Abby sat cross-legged on the floor of the tiny room, opening her small red laptop. When Carol shook her head, she smirked sharkishly. “Oh, really? Not keeping up with your theorists, are you? Before he went to the LEPERLab, he did his PhD in Chicago. Then he was a postdoc here on campus. With Kuzno.”
“Kuzno?” Carol gasped. “So Kuzno is the one—?”
“I didn’t say that.” Abby took a deep breath, then dropped her bombshell cold in Carol’s lap. “What I am saying is that everyone who’s interested in astrobiology has had an attempt on his life. Or hers.” Her perfectly-controlled bun had come loose, spilling strands of hair over he face that she tugged at nervously as the talked. Locked in the closet and sitting on the floor, she was no longer a high-powered IP lawyer, but Carol’s old friend from grad school.
“Our office knew something was up,” Abby admitted in a shaky voice. “We thought it was a joke that everyone Solomon Rose tried to hire or promote ended up dead. We called it the `Rose Blight.’ Here, look at this one.”
Carol took another folder. This one hardly counted as a STI coverup, since the person hadn’t even made it to the interview—he’d died in a commuter van that flipped on Highway 2 from Palmdale. “You really think…?”
“I don’t know,” Abby groaned. “I’m not sure about anything any more. All I know is, Lou Maupertuis got the job because this guy died. And here’s one more.”
The next folder Carol didn’t even understand. It was full of legalese and something about visas, and certainly didn’t look as if it dealt with someone dying. But then she recognized the name: Fang Li. “Lori’s postdoc!” she exclaimed. “STI is keeping her out of the country? Why?”
“Because Solomon Rose told me it was imperative,” Abby whispered. “And look at what I found at the library archives.” She clicked on her trackpad a few times, then turned the computer around for Carol to see. “Nobel Laureate Says Physics Must Change,” said the pixelated old scan:
Solomon Rose, STI Nobel-prize-winning theoretical physicist, claims that the days of “pure” physics are over. “Rutherford once said that all science is either physics or stamp collecting,” Dr. Rose, 84, began at a recent symposium on the future of STI. “Today, all science is either biology or not funded.” Rose was instrumental in the recent appointment of the Lobo Peak Research Laboratory’s new Colony Manager, Jacob A. Silverman. Many refer to the appointment as a “regime change” as it replaces hard-line rocket specialist Ellis D. Tripp, who has served in the position for thirteen years. The LPRL currently has a budget of five million dollars for the recruitment of an “astrobiologist” to examine the possibility of detection of traces of extinct life on Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System.
“Jacob Silverman lasted a total of ten days after accepting that postion,” said Abby. “Someone has been killing people in the physics department since 1991.”
Twenty-One: A Face-Off at the LEPERLab
It was wonderful to have an army. The Buboes made a map of the LEPERLab, showing possible points where unauthorized personnel (or killer deer) might sneak in. There were two high on the hillside by Lobo Peak, the ones that had been reinforced after the Twin Towers attack. The third was across the drainage pond, which was too shallow for a canoe and too toxic to wade in.
Another student took L
ori’s weight and maximum power and compared them with those of a go-tard, calculating the speed differential expected between her and the go-tard at different topographical points on lab. His conclusion was that she couldn’t out-run them, so she needed her skates and she preferably needed to head uphill—she’d be four miles an hour faster than a go-tard on a 6% grade.
“That’s assuming I can generate three hundred watts in the presence of the horrible fumes,” she reminded him. “I’m not too sure about that one.” But she packed the skates anyway, along with an assortment of hex and star wrenches, a lock-picking set, and a small crowbar, tucking the tools into tiny pockets inside her beloved orange backpack.
Yet another Bubo had plotted the projected trajectories of the go-tards with an estimated arrival time on lab of four o’clock and departure time between four-thirty and five. He didn’t think that Lori would have any trouble sneaking into the buildings because the go-tards were expecting people to be leaving—the problem would be getting out. Around four o’clock, the go-tards all lined up outside the buildings, engines running, to shuttle employees to their cars. The yellow go-carts were actually for the plebes only, and headed to East Lot; the silver ones took the managers to STUMP parking. Lori didn’t even drive and the whole idea pissed her off.
“Thanks be to God that I don’t work at the LEPERLab,” she declared as she pushed open the door to the HPV club, now carefully renamed the Human-Powered Transport Association to avoid any gross acronyms. Back in her day, no one had heard of human papilloma virus.
“You should thank God!” Mike the carbon-fiber guy was there, surrounded by a glob of Snots. “They banned bicycles from lab—it’s like banning feet! Kids, Lori Barrow, former Bubo, holder of the California women’s hydrofoil speed record, tester of all of my new creations, and—and what else?”
“And builder of the piece-of-shit pedal boat that you’ve been using to prop up your framesets. Think we can get it to work?”