A Slow Cold Death

by Susy Gage

  There was definitely a quaver in Radhika’s voice when she repeated, “Someone got frozen to death?”

  “Marybeth and Jim both got stuck in cold rooms, but Jim didn’t die. I think he was trying to cover up what he did to make himself look innocent. But then he died, too, playing around with electricity in my lab. We don’t know if he killed Marybeth or what he was planning when he died, or if he’d committed other crimes, like steal money from Maupertuis or even shoot him.”

  “Shoot him? What is the body count now? Dammit, Carol—this isn’t about a proposal or some stolen photos. Hang on, I can barely hear you with this pump, and we need some privacy. I’m going to go into my office and call you back.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and called, “Take the rest of the day off, guys—lie on the beach, get a tan, wade in the ocean. Don’t get a PhD, it will ruin your lives. Run away while you still can.”

  The last phrase echoed in Carol’s head while she waited for the phone to ring, and when she had Radhika back, she asked as casually as she could, “When you met Maupertuis at the March Meeting, was he normal?”

  “What do you mean, normal? He was a freak like Lori, obviously. Reminded me a lot of her, in that hyperkinetic geek way.”

  “No, I mean… I mean was he able-bodied normal?”

  Within fifteen minutes, Carol had Radhika exactly where she wanted her—on the verge of a heart attack. “All right. Let me get this straight.” Radhika took several deep breaths, no doubt of air scented with honeysuckle and jasmine. “Lori is sleeping in Pasteur House because she’s afraid to go home, even though the madman who maimed her colleague and killed his graduate student is dead, because they all think this is part of a larger plot centered around the proposal they are writing to bring down the LEPERLab?”

  Carol had always envied Radhika’s powers of synthesis. “That’s about it. Oh yeah, and her postdoc can’t enter the country for some reason related to the project as well.”

  “Carol, my boson friend, either you have been promoted to manager and experienced your first Executive Crack Hour, or Lori is telling me nothing.”

  Carol couldn’t help rubbing it in a little. “Well, obviously she’s not answering her phone since she’s living in Pasteur House.”

  “All she said was that the three of them were writing a big proposal and were very busy! I’m tempted to fly out there to slap her, except that I want no part of any more physics department psychos. That’s why I moved to Darwin in the first place.” There was some kind of noise—opening a window, maybe, to gaze out upon the sea. “What’s wrong with these maniacs? They’ll never have a faculty job no matter how many people they kill. Remember that creep in grad school? Abby’s lucky she wasn’t mutilated or slain.”

  “I’ll have to remind her of that,” Carol mused.

  “Yeah, is she still a bitch? Don’t answer that. I’m worried now.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” Carol agreed, letting the hint sink in. “The proposal goes in next Friday.”

  “Yeah, Carol—but I’m in Darwin. It’s forty-eight hours by donkey to the nearest town, and then we have to ride kangaroos across the desert to the airport.”

  “Really?”

  “No, of course not. I could be there tomorrow if I have to. Let me check, OK?”

  “Wait, Radhika—” Carol had almost forgotten her original aim. “Just a second. What do I do with the data that Bob wants?”

  Radhika’s recovery from her panic was marked by her ability to pfft again. “That’s easy enough. Fill them with errors, then give them to him. He’ll be the big hero with his purloined pictures, but any reviewer with half a brain will laugh his ass off and the LEPERs will lose like they deserve.”

  The phone buzzed and she was gone, back to her world of sun and sand and hundred-degree Christmas days. Adding the errors was easy, but Carol felt terrible delivering the material to Bob. Now she, too, was on the list of those who had betrayed him.

  She didn’t feel so bad when Ellis D. Tripp came storming in a few minutes later, demanding her hard drive. He was so stupid he didn’t even know how to take it out; Carol showed him because she knew that otherwise he would stay, trying to figure out how to humiliate her while they waited for IT support.

  But now she was officially forbidden to do anything for STI under penalty of being fired. When she told Tripp that she needed a SLAP, he said that this was a problem so far beneath him that he couldn’t possibly consider it. She needed to go through the ranks of “line management,” from a group supervisor to a deputy section manager and so on, three more layers before they got to the heights of such as he. The fact that her immediate supervisor, Kalb, was dead, did nothing to change the rules.

  Lori was always acting outraged at Carol’s stories, but it was hard to believe that there was a workplace that was genuinely free of abasement and humiliation. Grad students and postdocs certainly got treated like slaves; how could Lori forget that? Was it really so different when you were the star?

  Twenty-Seven: The Portals of Discovery

  Halfway through Lori’s Classical Mechanics class, the door opened discreetly and three men in black entered. They stood at the back of the classroom, wearing sunglasses, arms folded like geeky FBI agents.

  She dismissed the students immediately and ran forward, wondering if Sol no longer even walked across campus without Sam and Alex protecting him.

  “I got the signatures,” whispered Rose as soon as the last student had closed the door behind him.

  For any proposal, getting the signatures from all the institution’s responsible parties was always the most harrowing part. For a proposal of this magnitude, they had needed the department head, the legal office, and the President himself to sign. “No muggings?” Lori asked, only half joking. “No one tried to run you over or drop a piano from a window?”

  “I’ll let the kids come help me put it in the safe to be sure.” The Great Man winked, tipped his hat and was gone, and Lori knew that he considered his part of the PARIA project complete. It was now up to her and Lou to finish the data analysis—and then print, collate, copy, and ship before the deadline. They couldn’t come crying to Sol if they screwed it up.

  Taking a deep breath for courage and energy, she ran up the stairs and paused outside Lou’s closed door when she heard bangs, crashes, and shouting from inside. Finally she pushed the door open carefully, only to find a team of Buboes wrestling a beautiful new color laser printer onto the desk.

  “We’ll need fifty hard copies to submit,” Lou was instructing them while typing on his laptop, “one copy on CD, and one copy for each of the offices on campus.”

  Lori waited to hear if he was going to explain about the fake proposal being used as bait for psycho killers, but he didn’t breathe a word of that. No doubt that was wise, since anything known by two or more Buboes would immediately have its own website.

  “Lori!” he exclaimed when he saw her. “You need to help Walter a bit with the Materials and Methods. He’s doing his best, but he’s inexperienced and I know nothing about molecular biology.”

  “I’ll find him. What else?”

  “I’m finishing the Facilities description, trying to make your lab sound like Plum Island. Then that’s it apart from the color figures.”

  “We’ll have to go downstairs to check on the progress of that. I have to say, this is the most traumatic proposal-writing experience I’ve ever had.” Too late, she realized that this was kind of a tasteless comment.

  Lou, however, was laughing along with some of the Buboes. “I think it’s only my second-most. Although by a narrow margin.”

  “I’m not sure that’s funny.” Lori looked both ways before exiting his office, and they made their way to the creaky old elevator that seemed to have miraculously fixed itself since Dim Bulb’s demise. Maybe, Lori thought hopefully, Dim Bulb really was the only homicidal maniac on campus. “OK, prepare for a nightmare: six theorists trying to do molecular biology.”

  To their astonishment, all of
the students—Buboes included—had done an incredible job. They were busy plugging in their data as they got them, and someone had even drawn up a phylogenetic tree. All Lou and Lori had to do was watch like proud parents as the different teams put their individual pieces of the puzzle into place.

  Walter, armed with an array of slides and a half-dozen bottles of nail polish, had prepared a boxful of sections for fluorescence microscopy. Some were stained with a single dye or FISH probe, others with an array of combinations designed to separate and identify all of the different organisms in the sample. There were hundreds of slides, and they all knew that this was their last chance at identifying the organisms for the proposal.

  Walter was the only student permitted in the BSL-3, and he’d gotten the prep routine down: lab coat, booties, and first pair of gloves in the entryway, second pair of gloves at the microscope just before beginning work. There was barely room for one person in the tight spot between the bench and the autoclave, and while Lori was hopping with excitement, she reminded herself of her duty as an educator and let Walter do the honors.

  First he installed one of Lou’s multiple bandpass filters, which seemed to take him an eternity of fumbling with latches and screwdrivers. He was nervous, no doubt afraid of looking inept, and spoke to them with that first-year shyness where he wasn’t sure yet if profs were normal people or if they would bite his head off.

  Lori finally told him he could take his second pair of gloves off, and Lou tried to put him at ease by talking about flying. “Did you get your instrument rating yet?” he wondered, wordlessly pointing out the metal tab that had to be lifted to insert the filter.

  Walter nodded eagerly, peering into the microscope’s innards and feeling around where Lou had put his hand. “Yeah, just last month! I haven’t done any real approaches yet, you know, ones with weather. Maybe over Christmas if we have fog but not too much rain.” He eventually got the filter snapped into place, then sat on a stool and placed a slide on the stage, reaching to open the shutter to the mercury lamp.

  Lori had heard Water mention a glider, but she didn’t know he flew airplanes, too. “Do you want to be an astronaut?” she wondered, thinking of all of her undergraduate friends who had tried out for the astronaut program. Most had been turned away for bad eyesight, but Walter didn’t seem to wear glasses or contacts.

  “Not since I rode in the Vomit Comet,” he replied, scanning across the section at increasingly higher magnifications. “Besides, astronauts are crazy and kill each other wearing diapers. But my dream is to have something I built land on another planet.”

  Lou and Lori exchanged a glance in the scattered light. “Win this one for us, and that’s practically guaranteed,” they said together.

  “Really?” he murmured doubtfully, clearly not too encouraged by what he saw. “I dunno, Dr. Barrow. I see some bright spots.”

  She could stand it no more and all but elbowed him out of the way. Bright spots there were, spots of green and yellow and red through the magic filter, spheres and rods and footballs of color. “Oh my,” she breathed. “Oh my God. This is amazing.”

  Lou was a patient guy, but even he had his limits. “Come on, Lori, let me see.”

  She scrolled one more time through the visual field just to confirm what she had seen before stepping out of the way.

  “Well, the filter works,” said Lou, as skeptical as Walter had been, “but help me out on the biology here. The red are the fungi. The green are bacteria. These orange ones with the annoying wavelength to resolve are archaea?”

  “They’re archaea,” Lori confirmed, “and they’re the footballs. Gerson told me that it’s a huge controversy. If they’re archaea, it changes the entire evolutionary model for the region. Many people say they’re not organisms at all, that they’re just minerals. In the first version, I said they were minerals. So we have a provable error.”

  “And Walter has a paper that will bring him fame and fortune.”

  Walter had stepped back to a respectful distance. “I do?”

  “You do,” agreed Lori. “It’s one step away from life on Mars, but don’t say that to your dad. Go upstairs and start printing, and do a happy dance on your way out—it might bring us luck.” She leaned her elbow on the bench. “I’m exhausted and starving,” she admitted after Walter had gone. “In principle the fluorescence is stable for days. What do you think?”

  Lou remained glued to the eyepieces. “I think if we turn off this lamp, we’re fucked. I’m going to stay here until we’re done even if you need to feed me through a straw slipped under the door.”

  “I might at least try a thin-crust pizza,” Lori promised.

  They were there until dawn, taking turns imaging now and then to give the other a chance to eat or pee. At dinnertime Lori bolted a burrito at her desk while finishing the Materials section with Walter, staining everything with cholula sauce. Then she gave Lou a break and tried some tricks with the filters while he was gone, photographing one color at a time and merging the channels in software program.

  They finally came to the last slide, a control with nothing on it, snapping a single blank image for comparison. The desktop was littered with slides, rolls of film, used gloves, lens paper, and filter parts. Afraid to take the precious film to their respective residences, they wrapped them in paper towels and hid them in a scary-looking biohazard bag by the containment hood. Everything looked blue in front of Lori’s eyes, and she was infinitely grateful that she didn’t have to face the hill.

  You weren’t supposed to high-five someone in a BSL-3, but they did anyway. For the first time since the project began, it was starting to seem as though they could win it.

  Chilly without their gloves and lab coats, they exited the lab into the first light of morning. All of the Buboes were safely in bed, so Lou accompanied Lori across campus to Pasteur house. As they passed the library, descending down the narrow path past a large pond croaking with bullfrogs, she asked bluntly, “Lou, are you afraid to die?”

  “I don’t want to die,” he replied, then admitted with a catch in his voice, “I want to see everything. All of the scientific discoveries, social upheavals, climate change. I want to see evolution.”

  “We are about to, in a way,” Lori mused, waiting until they had entered the canopy of olive trees to elaborate. “Ben’s ice-core organisms ruled the world for billions of years and survive essentially unchanged. Do you realize there are no pathogenic members of the kingdom Archaea? They evolved without us.”

  “I would have liked to see that world, too,” he remarked, stopping just before the short brick path to the dorms. “Imagine how alien the colors would have been without photosynthesis: no grass, no moss, no trees, no green, just mats and plaques and towers of microorganisms.”

  “You should draw a picture of it,” she suggested.

  “I wouldn’t do it justice.” He shook his head. “There’s so much to learn. Good night, Barrow, and take care of yourself.”

  Safely inside the colorful halls of her old House, she realized he had been lying about his place being in her direction—there was nothing east of Pasteur but the botanical gardens and a few movie-star mansions. It was all too much for her tired brain to process, the death and the data and the hope and the fear, and she hoped he didn’t have too far to go because they would have another long day tomorrow.

  Twenty-Eight: The Wicked Flee

  Grandpa Waddles was a bit different from the others. His hair was actually white, not just platinum blond, and he was a few inches shorter than both his son and grandson. He was also dressed in a FedEx uniform.

  “You don’t actually have to make fifty copies of the fake proposal,” he lectured pedantically, approaching Lori’s desk. “We don’t expect them to open the box.”

  “I know—but it’s hard to stop the Buboes,” said Lori, trying not to pause in her rapid collating of the massive pile of papers on her desk. “I certainly don’t want them to know what we’re up to.”

  “No one
knows?”

  “No one apart from us, Lou, Abby, and Walter—er, your grandson,” said Lori, wondering what the Waddleses called each other since they all had the same name.

  “Hm,” Granpa Waddles sniffed. “Perhaps that’s as it should be. But I would like to get started as quickly as possible with the lure.”

  Lori was unclear on all of the details of the “fake proposal” scheme, which had been worked out by Abby and apparently the Waddles clan. “What do you expect the bad guys to do?”

  “There’s no telling,” Waddles Jr. muttered. “They might try to steal the box. They might try to have it removed from the truck, claiming it’s suspicious-looking. They could even hijack the driver—who knows?”

  He hushed up quickly as the door opened, but it was just Lou, with an armload of prints. Lori was about to ask him questions when she noticed he was talking on a Bluetooth. “Not yet,” he advised solemnly. “We’re not sure… will give you the word. That was Ben,” he told the others, unplugging the device. “He’s ready to tie up traffic between here and the airport in case we need to intercept a FedEx truck for any reason.”

  “Excellent.” Grandpa Waddles rubbed his hands.

  “How are the wildlife?” Lori asked Lou.

  “Oh, they’re just great.” Lou grinned broadly, looking happier than she’d ever seen him. “Exotic and colorful.”

  Waddles Jr. couldn’t resist. “May I?” he asked suddenly, sweeping down on the photos. “Aha! Phycoerythrin, isn’t it? I spent much of my early career studying dyes, you know…”

  That was the problem with faculty. Waddles Jr. seemed to have completely forgotten his task as he rambled on about his patents on special dyes for pens and paints and microscope slides, developed back in the seventies “and still used everywhere!”