by Susy Gage
It wasn’t really such a piece of shit, she reflected an hour later when they delivered it to her, cleaned and overhauled and fitted with a clamp on the back so it could be attached to the rear axle of Sam’s bike to get it up the hill. It would work in just a few inches of water and its plastic bottom wouldn’t dissolve in the toxic solvent pond the way a rubber raft was sure to do.
Sam had wanted to drive the boat to the parking lot above the LEPERLab, but Lori nixed that idea. It would take them longer to find someone to lend them a car, that person might talk, and LEPERs or LEPER guards might see them parking and taking things out of the car. As long as they were un-motorized, the guards were not likely even to notice them.
Besides, she enjoyed kicking his ass. “Quit whining,” she admonished, steadying the boat from behind as they started up the steepest part of the hill. “It’s not heavy, you’re just in too big of a gear. Shift down one and climb seated, it will handle much better that way.”
Sam gave her one of those All the rumors are true! looks. “The boss says ‘Hanging with Barrow is like rehab,’” he gasped. “At least you’re not making Dr. Lou do this on one of your arm-powered vehicles.”
“Oh, so you heard about those?” She skated up alongside. This was an easy hill. “I have at least two designs for him to try.”
“Just don’t get him killed,” muttered Sam, cresting the hill at last (“Now upshift!” Lori commanded). “He says you threatened to take him seventy-two miles in one day.”
“It’s not a threat,” Lori objected. “…Unless there are people lurking around trying to kill us, of course.”
“I’d stay out of the wilderness until Dim Bulb is locked up.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
They passed up through Christmas Tree Lane, the giant deodars decked with lights reminding them that the holidays were almost upon them. It would be wonderful to have a few days off after the insanity of this proposal, to go back to her own house where fuzzy things had probably taken over the fridge. Thinking about Christmas was inconceivable, though. Montreal was Christmas and Christmas was Montreal; it was the one time of year she could forgive the cold, the streets were festive and full of music even as people hurried by with their coats tugged up over their faces. Her favorite bakery sent out a special catalog of holiday breads, the pictures almost as delightful as the chocolate-cranberry or maple-walnut loaves that she would buy on Sunday mornings and carry home in one hand like a baton as she skated, pedaled, or skied.
“Any plans for the holidays, Barrow?” Sam wondered as they finally came out of the tree-lined corridor and onto the street that would lead them directly west to the LEPERLab.
“You’re assuming we’re going to live.” Lori felt exposed all of a sudden, on this wide street with the sun beginning to dip in the sky, even though there was very little traffic and no businesses except a Mexican grocery store and a poultry feed shop.
Sam started singing, pedaling with all his might. “Leper leper can’t catch me, I don’t wanna get your leprosy. Leper leper—” He froze as a black car pulled out of a hidden driveway on the left, came all the way across the road, and cut them off.
He slammed on the brakes. Lori tried to slow herself on the back of the bike saddle, missed, and fell butt-first into the boat. Sam looked back to see if she was OK, turned the bars, and dumped her and the boat out into the dirt.
The car roared away with a screech of rubber. It was a hearse.
“Oh no,” moaned Sam. “What have I done? This is a bad sign!”
“You got dirt in my bearings, that’s what.” Lori crawled out from under the boat and tipped it rightside-up again. The hook where it attached to the axle was bent, and it took some wiggling to get it back on. “I don’t think it’s an omen, though—I think it’s just the carpool going to get the zombie LEPERs to take them back to their graveyard for the night.”
Sam shook the bike slightly to make sure the boat was still attached and then continued on at a much more sedate pace. “If you die, I am in so much trouble,” he worried. “Why did you come on this yourself instead of sending a Bubo?”
“This is too important a matter for a little Bubo,” Lori told him solemnly. “My methods may seem frivolous, but my motivations are not. What Tripp did is the worst crime a so-called scientist can commit.”
Sam made as if to turn to look at her but realized it was a bad idea and kept riding. “Ah shit, Barrow, don’t get serious on me or I’ll start thinking we’re really going to die.”
Lori’s left skate now made crunching noises as it rolled. “Leper, leper, can’t catch me…”
They stopped singing when they got to the dirt parking lot on the hill overlooking the LEPERLab. As the Buboes had predicted, there were bikers and joggers milling around all over the place, so they were invisible to any prowling LEPER guards even with their boat. Lori eyed the trails up Lobo Peak and Mt. Hansen with envy and thought, I’ll take Lou out here on the off-road handcycle as soon as the PIP is in.
No, I’ll try it myself first, she corrected her thoughts. It might fall apart halfway up the mountain. Or worse, down.
She was getting soft in her old age. “Can you pedal down that?” she asked, pointing to the sandy ravine that led through the bushes directly to the drainage pond. It was at the very end of the East Lot; no one could possibly see them except the poor LEPERs forced to park there.
Sam looked at his skinny tires, at the boat with its bent hanger, and at Lori as if she were mad. “No!”
“Then walk, and I’ll sit in the boat and take my skates off.”
She was still fighting with the laces when they got to the bottom. Sam refrained from asking how she expected to make a fast getaway on a vehicle that took her five minutes to get on and off, but she could tell he was worried. If only the Canadian national sport had been skateboarding.
They hid Sam’s bike in the bushes so he could leap out of the boat and grab it as quickly as possible. Before starting across the pond, she checked her backpack pockets for the tools and re-read the map the Buboes had prepared. The only piece of paper she was going to bring was the suggested list of passcodes—there was no way she would remember them: they were weird things like the controversial value of the Hubble constant.
Skates in her bag, wearing the stupid blazer and what she thought was a pretty fake-looking LEPER badge—made by one of the Buboes and labeled with the name of Louise Pasteur—she got in alongside Sam and put her feet on a set of pedals. “On y va?”
“Triche pas,” said Sam, and they started across the pond.
The plan was for Lori to infiltrate LEPERLab while Sam waited in the boat to make ready their escape, and it was amazing how easy it was. There were no LEPERs anywhere near the pond or in the sandy area on the other side. A few hundred meters away, she saw the first string of yellow go-carts taking employees back to the East Lot, but some scraggly prickly pears and manzanita hid her from their view.
Once onto the paved area by the cafeteria, she was just another LEPER. The few others that she crossed on her way to the Colony Manger’s building looked equally furtive, probably because they were supposed to be riding in go-carts. It wasn’t really necessary to sneak in behind the building through the rosemary, but she did it out of some sort of nostalgia, sticking a few sprigs in her bag just because.
No one was in the building. Three days remained until the PIP was due, and there was no one there. Was this place really so huge that no one had to work very hard? Maybe Tripp wasn’t really involved in the writing, but in that case, what was his interest in Sam’s paper?
Just to make sure, she knocked on Tripp’s door before pulling on a pair of nitrile gloves and starting on the list of passcodes. It was the fifteenth one that did it, just as she was starting to panic, and it wasn’t even a physical constant that she recognized.
No manuscripts on the desk. No manuscripts in the drawers. Username and password were both admin, and there were no files in the computer containing a
ny of the title or keywords from Sam’s manuscript. There were hundreds of megabytes of Powerpoint slides, spreadsheets containing budgets and budget reports, and a photo of him and his wife that confirmed that Ellis D. Tripp was none other than the fat man she had seen twice: once in St. Vitus’s over the yellow fever, once in the guard shack as they tried to leave with their ice cores.
This last thought made her check his internet browser history, which contained enough to get lesser LEPERs fired but nothing that would embarrass any straight man. He had tried to erase the record of his visits to a racist forum and some kind of anarchist site; Lori thought both were childish.
Finally she gave up. Leaving a small branch of rosemary between the G and H keys of his keyboard, she cautiously exited the office (still no one) and peeked out the front window to assess the go-tard situation. This had to be a management building because there was only one silver go-tard parked outside, idling in a cloud of fumes.
Taking a deep breath for both courage and oxygen, she strode purposefully out the front door and past the go-tard, whose driver ignored her completely.
Right. Louise Pasteur didn’t have a management badge. The Buboes had told her that managers’ badges were colored bright blue to indicate their right to STUMP parking and silver go-tards. Thanks be to God that I don’t work at the LEPERLab.
She headed up the hill as discreetly as possible, not liking the idea of having to escape from the Drift lab. This descent would be terrifying on skates, and on foot she was at best two miles an hour slower than the carts, which could go twelve miles an hour before they became unstable. At least there were two doors into the building: the main one where all the go-tards were parked, and the one she had come in last time by the loading dock. A good flying leap off the loading dock might be preferable to facing the two-stroke horrors.
Breaking into his office would pose a variety of problems, primary among them the fact that she had no idea where it was. She started in the cold room because she knew it was there and that it wasn’t locked. It was too scary to latch the door behind her, so she left it cracked but used her Bubo-provided flashlight instead of the overhead light.
All of the ice cores were gone. It was hard to tell what might have been disturbed by Tripp, since Dim Bulb had come first, apparently removing everything he could find. Only one shelf held office supplies, a pile of paper next to a very small laptop computer.
It was Sam’s manuscript. The original with only his name on it, but that wasn’t going to prove anything. She needed to have Word files showing changes. She started up the laptop, shivering due to both cold and impatience. It was dangerous to stay here so long—Bob might come by—but it would be no use coming all this way if all she got was something they already had. At least she had the crowbar so nobody could lock her in.
Opening his document files one by one, she felt a broad grin spread across her frozen face. They were all there, time-stamped, from the first scanned copy of the paper to the one where Sam’s name had been crossed out and replaced with a handful of LEPERs, Bob Drift in first place and Tripp in last.
There were other things too. Lori’s breath grew quicker as she saw her own name—it was a file of all the emails she had exchanged with Carol since she arrived. Then there was another file…
…But there was no time. Pulling out the star screwdrivers, she went to work removing his hard drive, leaving some rosemary in its place.
When this was done, she was feeling pretty cocky and decided to put on her skates and cruise out of the building off the loading dock and face the gnarly downhill. Hard drive safely in her bag, she pulled out her rollerblades and sat on the floor to lace them up.
She was in the worst possible position, one skate on tightly and one foot bare, when the door burst open.
The light flicked on just as she stepped away from the computer. Bob Drift stood there, nodding knowingly, saying nothing.
If I were a real Canadian, she thought, I’d know skate fu and hop on one foot while knocking him out with my ultralight chassis.
There were footsteps in the hall, and it quickly became clear that not even skate fu would help her. Tripp the Colony Manager came in, and towering over him was the chilling figure of Alexander Kuznetsov. “My, my, my,” hummed her department head, “it appears you were right, Ellis. Barrow, or shall I say, Pasteur,” his laugh was unutterably vile, “could you kindly tell me what you are doing at LPRL, unauthorized, in Dr. Drift’s lab?”
She felt ridiculous, balancing on one skate and wielding a tiny flashlight, but she gave it her best shot. “I certainly can, Dr. Kuznetsov. These people are thieves of the very worst sort. They stole Samuel Roth’s manuscript.”
They all exchanged a Yes, as we expected glance. “Tell me, Dr. Barrow,” purred Kuzno, “did you see Mr. Roth write this manuscript?”
Her mouth fell open like a carp’s. They were going to try to pretend Sam was the thief? “Of course, I—” She couldn’t tell them what she knew, or they would know she’d opened the computer and then might guess she had the hard drive. “I worked with him on it all last week.”
“Yes,” Tripp nodded smugly. “That was about the time Dr. Drift says it disappeared. You were right to be suspicious, Dr. Kuznetsov. Clearly no one would take responsibility for this manuscript at STI. There isn’t even a senior author.”
Lori wanted to smack that hierarchical leper upside the head with anything available. “It is not our procedure to put the ‘senior’ person on as a guest author,” she practically spat. “He who does the work gets the credit. I was the sole author on at least half of my papers in graduate school, as was Louis Maupertuis—he’s just following an honorable and honest tradition.”
Tripp and Kuzno snorted derisively at her last two adjectives. Bob Drift finally spoke, though in a voice that sounded cowed. “Is it really honest to come into someone else’s lab and play with their computer?”
Tripp took a step towards Lori. “We’d better let Security take it from here. Bob, make sure she didn’t damage your laptop.”
Lori staggered backwards on her one rollerblade and one frozen foot, almost tripping over her backpack. Her stomach was tied in knots and she wondered fleetingly if she could projectile vomit in self-defense. She should have sent a Bubo or anyone not on PNG status (why van Gnubbern? How could they PNG van Gnubbern?). She should have done anything but pedal across the drainage pond in a boat that she built in 1988.
You’re a pathetic loser, Barrow, said her brain unhelpfully. Thirty-three years old, and you still wish you were a little Bubo. Those days are over. Get a life!
“It’s not booting,” mumbled Bob. “Just a second—”
Everyone clustered around the computer. Lori thought she was doomed, especially when the door banged open and four burly security guards tromped in. She cringed, expecting to be slapped in handcuffs as they intoned, “We need you to come with us.”
But it wasn’t her they wanted.
It was Bob. They took him by the elbow, ignoring her completely. They murmured into his ear, words like, “Your employee,” “second incident,” and “electric shock.”
Dim Bulb ex machina! Lori thought, mentally slapping herself to tear herself away. Slowly, quietly, behind everyone’s back, she bent over and started lacing up her skate.
Security led them all out of the building. She followed as far behind as she could without attracting attention—but when Kuzno turned to look at her, she spun around and started down the hill as fast as her dirty bearings would carry her.
The Buboes had been wrong that her greatest speed advantage was on an uphill. She could go much faster than the go-tards on a downhill, she just couldn’t stop at the bottom.
Now they were after her, with that tyrant Tripp screaming at them that she was a criminal who must be stopped. Her life as a false Canadian flashed before her eyes: Pousse avec le talon! they always said, and Poids en arrière!
She chanted the mantras aloud, thighs shaking as she descended in a seated
pose.
Halfway down the hill, a silver go-tard was parked across the road. Her choices were to turn left and crash into the arroyo, which was a twenty-foot drop full of cacti, or to turn right.
There was a hard right turn in the Ottawa marathon. Every year she missed it, and every year she crashed into the grass, getting up to cries of “Ça va?” to start a humiliating and futile chase after the group that had dropped her. Every year she told herself that all she needed to do was hop, lift both feet up and once and turn them ninety degrees to the right.
Both she and the go-tard were astonished when that worked, and she sailed cheerily over the sidewalk. “Can’t catch me!” she called. “I’m Canadian!”
Now there was a left turn back to the boat. This she could handle. She descended as far as she needed to and then crossed over carefully, hip into the turn. It was nearly dark by now, but she could make out the blue of the boat and a small red light where Sam’s head should have been.
“Barrow!” he screamed. “Triche paaaaaas!”
He had a video camera, the little twerp. She was no more than ten meters from the boat, but if she didn’t slow down, she was going to die.
Suddenly she remembered the sandy region through which she’d sneaked earlier. She could cut through the sand and the manzanita, scrub speed and destroy her bearings, and fling herself headfirst into the boat. This turned out to be a good choice—she could no longer see the go-tards puttering along on the paved road, but she could hear them coming closer, along with a good deal of shouting.
Manzanita was surprisingly sharp, but her wrist guards covered most of her arms, letting her clutch at every available branch without too much damage. At the last moment she decided to try feet first into the boat, but this was a mistake, and she crashed into Sam’s outstretched right arm—the left still held the camera—and sprawled across the front of the boat. It swayed dangerously, toxic sludge lapping at their feet.
“Oooh, this is going to be Pasteur’s most popular video,” he rejoiced.