by Susy Gage
“Yes,” said Carol more bitterly than she wished, “Abby says that happens all the time. The harassers stay and the victims are forced to leave.”
“Unfortunately, this is generally the case. However, Marybeth did not leave after filing her suit. Instead, she tried to find a new advisor.”
“Maupertuis?”
“You know Lou?”
“Not personally.”
“Ah, well, he was a phenomenon. We don’t often get professors his age nowadays, what with the demands of grant proposal writing and publication. Unfortunately for everyone involved, he seemed to take Marybeth as his personal project.”
“Like a pound puppy,” said Carol.
“Like a pound puppy,” echoed van Gnubbern. “He and Sasha disliked each other from the start. It began as a professional rivalry, but Lou seemed to think that if he could make something out of Marybeth, it would reveal Sasha as a misogynistic bastard not worthy to be an advisor. It didn’t help that Sasha always felt as though Lou had stolen all of his students. Kuznetsov hadn’t had any money to hire anyone that year, so Lou got essentially the entire first-year class, and I must admit the whole bunch of them put on quite a show. They had group meetings on the beach in Malibu, and rumor has it that he paid them all out of his own pocket until he got a grant.”
“Was Marybeth part of this?” Carol remembered the picture of Marybeth with the horse and the BMW.
“For a while she was, but I think Lou eventually realized he wasn’t going to get any work out of her. I tried to help out, but to tell you the truth, she wasn’t much use to me, either. It was one excuse after another: she was too scared, or too blind, or too weak to do what I asked her to do. I think she was afraid to try, maybe afraid to risk failure or to face her true limitations rather than her imagined ones. Who knows?”
“So you kicked her out of your lab, too,” said Carol bluntly.
“Yes, I did,” van Gnubbern affirmed matter-of-factly. “Things escalated from there. Jim became more horrid to poor Marybeth, she became more hysterical, and Lou and Sasha downright hated each other. Then, as you may know, Lou was injured.”
“I didn’t know, until recently,” Carol admitted.
There was a bench around the next bend, giving a view over the city and fully exposed to the half-shrouded moon. “This may have been enough climbing for me tonight,” puffed van Gnubbern and Carol, relieved, went to sit beside him. The clouds quelled the city noises and shielded the Westside and the ocean from their view. “Where was I? Yes. Lou was gone off and on for months, and Marybeth, well, she just lost her mind. It seemed she was at the police station every week, filing a complaint against Jim or, more rarely, Sasha.”
“Did she say that Jim had shot Lou?”
Carol regretted her brutal question as soon as she spoke, because van Gnubbern seemed to clam up. He said nothing for a long while, rocking back and forth, looking at the city. “Yes,” he admitted at last, “but we could scarcely believe her. She was incoherent and histrionic. But I must admit, although we may have suspected such a thing, we all agreed on some level that it was better if this did not get out.”
“What?” Carol had heard Lori speak of the infamous STI coverups, but this was ridiculous. “You had a dangerous maniac in your department!”
“Yes—but imagine how Lou would feel if he knew it. He was trying to get his life back.”
“But Marybeth ended up dying!”
“I know,” van Gnubbern admitted, “I know. But we had no way of knowing this would happen. We thought that if we shuffled him out, quietly, to a new position, he would think of it as a triumph and essentially disappear.”
“You were rewarding him for being a killer!”
“It wasn’t a particularly desirable position—” van Gnubbern began, but then he stopped suddenly, no doubt recalling that she was a LEPER too.
“That’s OK, Dr. van Gnubbern,” said Carol. “I hear from Lori all the time that being at the LEPERLab is worse than being in San Quentin. Now I realize she means it literally. But if he got away with what he had done, and got the position he wanted—” she shuddered to think of them planning to palm this guy off on her husband— “why did he kill her? Unless it wasn’t Dim Bulb who killed her—maybe it was Kuzno all along.”
“I have been saying all along that Jim was not acting alone,” said van Gnubbern proudly. No doubt having a captive audience for his crackpot theories was the highlight of his evening. He lowered his voice, making his British accent more pronounced somehow, and placed his hand on her knee to whisper into her ear. “I am sure he was the tool of someone more desperate than himself, someone who is trying to stop both Lou and Lori from doing what they are doing. Because you do understand that they are changing the department irrevocably, and that the manner in which Marybeth was killed was… symbolic. Lou made his reputation saying the universe will expand forever without re-contracting—that is, that it will die a slow, cold death.”
“Doesn’t that have to make it Kuzno?” Caroli wondered. “Who else would care all that much about the direction the physics department takes?”
He didn’t answer. The bank of clouds coming over the hill suddenly seemed menacing. As they got up to go, Carol took van Gnubbern’s arm for some purchase on the slippery granite, and he lurched and fell backwards against her. Pinned under him by the edge of the cliff, she screamed once in shock, then again as he raised his walking stick up over her head.
She managed to slither out from under him, still screaming as he grabbed at her,
and ran away down the hill in the darkness with the moon covered by clouds. A heavy rain began to fall.
Thirty-One: The Bubo Tank
The fake proposal was safely in the hands of Walter Waddles, Jr., Professor of Chemistry, Bubo class of 1967. The real one was still being printed and collated, just twenty-eight and a half hours before the 10:30 pm FedEx truck that was the last guaranteed on-time delivery to Washington, DC.
The Buboes and Walter Waddles IV were in charge of all of the black-and-white pages. Lori, locked in Lou’s office with Buboes standing guard outside, was using the new printer to spew out all twelve of the pages that had to be in full color. Their months of work were condensed down into two eight-panel figures with light micrographs, three with electron micrographs and spectra, and one foldable pull-out showing a phylogenetic tree.
She was only about half done when two fat cops burst in and arrested her.
The charge was idiotic: they were arresting her for taking Bob’s hard drive from the LEPERLab. It was petty theft, and they intended to lock her up.
The problem was, they only had to hold her for one day and all would be lost.
“Keep printing!” she cried to the Buboes as she was led away. “You know what to do!”
They gave her blank looks. Of course they didn’t know what to do, and neither did either the junior or senior Waddles. The only person who knew as much as she did was trapped in a rental Jeep in a snowstorm somewhere between Albuquerque and Denver.
Lori couldn’t believe that Lou and Abby had both been so foolish as to go chasing after Kuzno. They should have known that bad things would happen here. They were the only ones she could think of who were respectable enough to bail her out—except maybe for Solomon Rose, who was supposed to be guarding the University President to make sure he didn’t skip town on them, too.
She was starting to feel abandoned and forgotten when dinnertime came and went and she was still here, staring at the tiles and clutching a scratchy old blanket to keep warm.
Some Buboes showed up, just to inform her that Wigbert’s mattress full of money was a myth, so there was nothing they could do. Typical behavior, which was why she hadn’t sent them to fetch Sam’s paper in the first place.
The old Lori knew perfectly well how to get out of the Bubo Tank with a 2.5 mm hex key. The new Lori had forgotten her hex keys in her office, had rich friends, and was worried about her tenure review. So she sat sitting on the bunk like
a good girl, counting the tiles in the floor, listening to the rain, and trying not to sniffle.
She very nearly used her one phone call on Ben, knowing he was in town and could put the proposal together, but at the last second she changed her mind and called Abby.
In response she got horrible heavy breathing and little moans of pain. She immediately envisioned the worst—Jeep flipped, trapped and dying in a snowbank.
But then there was a clink of silverware and a glugging noise. “Oh oh oh!” said Abby finally. “It’s sooo spicy!”
Lori’s stomach rumbled, and a 3D vision appeared in front of her of the last meal she had had in New Mexico: huge chicken enchiladas, smothered in green chile and a blanket of cheese that stretched across the plate.
Lori interrupted the gastronomic orgy with a flat, “Dammit, I’m in jail.”
“Mmmph mmph…” Abby kept swilling some liquid, probably a glass of milk. “Call the legal office and ask for Jim.”
“Now?”
“No, of course not tonight, but first thing tomorrow.” Crunch, crunch—tortilla chips. “And I mean first thing, seven-thirty. The LEPERLab does not legally exist, and all STI faculty have the right to be there at all times. Do not post bail, don’t risk your time or money. Jim will get you out in half an hour.”
“But I did steal Bob’s hard drive,” Lori admitted.
“Pshaw. I’d get you out tonight if we weren’t stuck in Bumblesnore, Colorado.”
“Why did you both have to go? There’s no one left here with a clue.”
“There’s a terrible storm in the mountains—neither of us wanted to be alone.”
Great, Lori thought, so you’ll die together. “No one here can even post bail. Rose is hiding, and the Buboes tried to find van Gnubbern, but he’s disappeared too.”
Abby swallowed a few times, and her voice lost its eternal anger, sounding—if such a thing were possible—even pitying. “Lori… I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry I thought bad things about you all these years. I know now that it wasn’t you.”
“Huh?” Lori’s first thought was that Lou had somehow convinced Abby during their long drive that Lori was merely a victim of circumstance, a feral child who knew no better. She was completely unprepared for what came next.
“You were always there because you were his student,” Abby continued, in the same strained, almost weepy voice. “It’s van Gnubbern. He killed all those people. He just attacked Carol in the woods, and now he’s taken off.”
Lori pulled the Bubo tank receiver away from her ear, noticing that it was filthy and sticky. Without bothering to listen for any more, she hung up and prepared to go back to her cell. One of the cops suggested food, but she robotically waved him off, her hunger at the enchilda vision seeming universes away.
They led her back to the Bubo tank and she lay down, wrapping herself tightly in a blanket. The cops made fun of her—she didn’t have any friends who could come up with a thousand bucks, she was acting like she had been booked for murder instead of petty theft, maybe they should look her up to see she hadn’t done anything more serious.
She ignored them, lost in the horror of what she had always suspected but couldn’t accept. Of course it was obvious. She had been wilfully blind for more than sixteen years.
Infrastructure crimes: all of the infrastructure had been van Gnubbern’s. The door that fell on Lori, Marybeth’s freezing, and the microscope that zapped Dim Bulb were all his, all structures that he alone had touched for decades. The only part that wasn’t his was the LEPER cold room, and that hadn’t killed anyone. He had been right there when Lori found Marybeth, and had himself “found” Dim Bulb’s body—and maybe even the LEPERs had seen something fishy, putting him on PNG status so he couldn’t come back. Lori had been led astray by her own PNGing at the hands of that stupid Bob.
Van Gnubbern’s motives were painfully obvious. Everyone was always trying to get rid of poor old Wigbert—he was barely a physicist at all, just a guy who took pictures. Silverman ranted about “cleaning out the deadwood,” and that’s what led to van Gnubbern’s lab being mostly abandoned in the first place, as the department heaped administrative tasks on him.
Wigbert had been forced to hire Marybeth, the department’s most hopeless student, because his work was considered worthless and easy. She had been incompetent, even worse than she would have been as a string theorist, filing complaints against him for making her do microscopy when she couldn’t see.
Then there was Lori, blithely showing up to take both of his labs away forever.
She’d been oblivious to it all because she didn’t even want to consider the possibility. Even more horrible than the thought of van Gnubbern the killer was the thought that he would be caught—arrested, tried, sentenced, off in San Quentin a memorial to what academia could do to the soul. When his appeals ran out, they would all have to protest his execution, camped out in front of the prison with banners and candles.
Maybe he was gone, across the border in Mexico where he’d shave his beard, ditch the lederhosen, and live out his years in a cabin on the beach. He could grow fruit and catch fish and regale the locals with made-up tales from his native Groningen.
Run, Wigbert, run, Lori thought, as she drifted off into a fitful sleep on the cot of the Bubo Tank.
Thirty-Two: Mightier Than the Sword
The same Denver hotel had been hosting the Particles conference for years. Lou had been here twice in years past, but never managed to score the business suite on the thirty-first floor. There were two bedrooms separated by a living room with an entertainment center, a full-sized bath, a separate shower, and a Jacuzzi surrounded by mirrors. On the coffee table in the living room were an espresso machine, a jar of pretzels, a box of chocolates, and a fancy ice bucket.
It was kind of a shame they only intended to stay for six hours, the last four of which he had spent staring at the ceiling and tossing with insomnia. He finally gave up and got out of bed, rummaging through the stuff they’d bought in Albuquerque so he could shave and floss his teeth. He didn’t quite dare trying to get into the bathtub, instead just filled the sink and held cold towels over his eyes until they could open properly.
Then he tried the espresso maker, which wasn’t bad at all, the grounds black and fresh. By the third double he was almost out of his zombie-like state, and realized that thanks to Barrow, he knew exactly what Abby had for breakfast every morning. The data had been delivered with a layer of snark—All that Nutrasweet’s going to give her a brain tumor—but the facts were: plain bagel, diet cream cheese “half as thick as the bread,” and coffee that was one-third warm skim milk with two packets of Equal. He made the coffee in the room, then went down to the lobby cafeteria for the rest. Abby had eaten almost nothing in the New Mexican restaurant the night before, and Lou knew from bitter experience how skinny girls acted when they didn’t eat.
“Rise and shine,” he called cheerily, knocking on her door.
After a minute she stumbled out, hair sticking out in all directions, seemingly incapable of speech. She reached for the coffee cup, found it warm, and cradled it for a minute before taking a tentative sip. Her eyes lit up when she saw the bagel and she reached for the upper half, still seeming dazed. “What time is it?”
“Just past eight. I thought we could nab him as he comes in to breakfast.” Abby was cute in her morning disarray, Lou thought in spite of himself. If she were a physicist, she’d come to work like that, instead of groomed and made up and scary-looking. Her eyes were definitely absinthe green, and he wondered if it was just a coincidence, since surely babies weren’t born with green eyes?
“Mmm,” Abby mumbled, chewing on her bagel. A strange mix of emotions flashed onto her face—fear, pity, guilt. “Are you OK?”
“I’m all right,” he replied, embarrassed. “Do you think I’m nuts?”
“Hardly. I feel like I am the one person who can even begin to imagine wh
at you are going through. In fact, I had the same kind of episodes you seem to be having now. I’d forget about what had happened, sometimes for days at a time, and then I’d have these flashbacks. And I’d go to the police with my new `information’ that I was sure would lead them to the killer. They were kind enough, in a distant sort of way, but I could tell they thought I was just hysterical and a pest. It was horrible, and it didn’t get better until they caught the killer.”
She sounded insincere and full of shit—but maybe he was just grouchy, after twelve hours of driving through the snow and a night with no sleep. Not even the exhaustion of the trip had been enough to let him forget. He stared at the bottom of his empty coffee cup so he wouldn’t have to see that unnerving expression that probably mirrored his own. “At least it will be easier to confront Kuzno knowing he’s not a mass murderer.”
“That’s right!” Abby exclaimed with false cheer. “Regular buttheads, we can handle.” She drained her coffee without saying anything, reached for the second half of the bagel, pretending to be lost in chewing. “I just never would have thought…”
“No,” Lou said firmly, “never.”
“They haven’t caught him yet, either.”
“I know.”
Abby popped the last bite into her mouth and sighed. “This was perfect. How did you know?”
“I’m psychic,” he replied with just enough irony so that she’d figure out what that meant. He wondered how she would react if he asked her to dinner—at a restaurant, obviously, since he couldn’t have anyone visit him in that hovel in Postdoc and Visitor Housing. There was only one burner that worked and the stove had a tendency to explode. Abby had probably even heard the story of him almost burning the place down trying to make chocolate chip cookies.
Someday I’ll need to buy a house, he told himself without much enthusiasm. Just another task that needed to be done to return to the land of the living.