by Susy Gage
Radi put her arm around her. There was a faint, long scar along the underside of her arm—no doubt the souvenir of some horrid Australian jellyfish. “I do. You know I do, and I always will.”
“But you’re far, far away.”
“Not so far as all that, if I move to Honolulu.”
Lori sprang up, remembered the bunkbed just in time, and whacked her head only a little. “Not with the madman!”
Radi seemed to remember something, unzipped her fanny pack and rummaged around in what seemed to be an infinite supply of odd things. Then she handed Lori a letter in a small envelope, addressed in a shaky old hand to her and Lou. “He gave this to me this morning,” she admitted, trying to smooth out the fold down the center. “Just before I came to get you.”
Lori took the envelope and stuffed it under the mattress. She didn’t want to see the old man’s excuses—not now, maybe not ever. She just wanted to stay here with Radi and pretend she never had to go back to work. Wrapping her arm around Radi’s waist (how did she get obliques like that?), she murmured, “Thanks for coming out here.”
“It’s no problem, once you get past the kangaroo ride through the outback.” Radi shivered, planted a chilly kiss on top of Lori’s head. “I’m going to take a hot bath, and then we can figure out if there’s a way to survive without freezing in a cold place or being surrounded by maniacs.”
Lori nodded mutely, watching Radi go off and hearing her footsteps go first the wrong way, then the right way towards the Bubo communal shower. Unable to be alone with her curiosity for more than a few seconds, she tugged out Rose’s letter and began to read.
Dear friends and colleagues,
This is difficult but it must be said. I imagine that you are thinking that I have fled. Indeed I have, but not from your disappointment or wrath, as justified as those might be. When Walter Waddles (pl.) told me of the concerted hunt for a departmental killer, I feared for my life and for that of my wife, Chava, who is recovering from heart surgery. Rather than appeal to the police, we decided to take our retirement several days early.
Louis, you probably don’t know or recall all of the details of what happened the day he attempted to kill you. All I will say here is that I am now fully convinced the murderer tried to kill me that day as well, and that only chance kept him from succeeding. While I realize that my apology will in no way make up for all you have lost, please believe me when I say that I knew nothing until this very moment. I am sure that we will meet again someday, and I will tell you the entire story, should you wish to hear it.
We spend our lives fighting ignorance and insisting that it is no excuse, and I am no exception. When my scheming leads to actual bloodshed, it is time to admit I am a senile old fool and take my retirement. I am sure that you both will prove worthy of the principal investigatorship of this and many projects to come. I wish you all the best.
Yours sincerely,
Solomon A. Rose
Professor Emeritus of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy
Superior Technological Institute
Los Angeles, California
December 21, 2007
P.S. Let’s lick those LEPERS!
Thirty-Eight: Not When the Night is Darkest
The overdone luxury of Abby’s apartment building was pathetic. There was a doorman, chandeliers, and ornate wooden carvings in the walls, and it was above all perfectly accessible, but it was still just an apartment building and it made Lou sad.
Four hundred and six dollars and seventy-eight cents at the FedEx, and it was over. He’d call the office in DC the next day to make sure the proposal had made it, but their boxes were by now on a new, bomb-free truck making their way to the last-minute flight from LAX. The villain was locked up, Kuzno had slithered back into the woodwork, and Rose apparently didn’t give a damn about being removed from the proposal and was on his way to Hawaii.
Lou had been playing with ideas of how to thank Abby when she made the first move—she asked him over for a “midnight snack” at her place. It wasn’t really midnight, since they were both much too tired to make it that far, but he had a bit of time to round up a little Christmas present. Something he’d ordered a couple weeks ago and never had a chance to open, it was a one-of-a-kind, never before seen in America, first-release issue of Marybeth’s favorite French comedy. Silly, sure, but at least it wouldn’t send any wrong messages… unless she saw symbolic meaning in the blind incestuous cannibal dwarf scene.
Abby had clearly spent her time showering, smelling nice, and braiding her hair. She answered the door in a cherry-patterned party dress (how Freudian was that?) and quickly gave the tour of her seventeenth-floor one-bedroom. It was well laid out, with a view of the foothills, and everything was in good taste if not particularly clean. She apologized for the bare Christmas tree propped against the wall and the needles all over the floor, and the fish tank without any fish that smelled of recent floating tragedy. Everything was light-colored: the sheepskin rug, the linen couch and matching drapes, the cute little pine storage cubbyholes, and the upright piano. There was a ficus in a pot attached to one end of the couch, and it was only after wondering how it possibly got enough light that Lou realized it was fake. There were also stuffed animals, books, and papers and documents scattered everywhere. He wondered idly if any of the folders held terrible secrets.
She asked if he wanted a drink, and came back from the kitchen with two glasses of a cheap red wine so vile that Lou wouldn’t use it to decolorize stains. He took a polite mini-sip and set it under the ficus. “Why don’t we finish your Christmas tree?” he suggested.
“Oh, sure.” She didn’t seem all that enthused, mainly because the poor thing was almost dead. She filled the tray underneath anyway, and tugged a box of decorations out from under the couch. Last year’s tinsel, some bulbs, homemade ornaments he thought she might have made as a little kid until he saw the themes on some of them.
“Grad B = 0?” he demanded, laughing. “Even I don’t have Maxwell’s equations on my Christmas tree.”
“Oh, honestly.” She snatched it away. “That must have been Lori. We always had parties together, you know, back in first year. Once we had an ornament-making party.” She gazed back and forth between the ornament and the tree, as if trying to decide what it deserved, and finally gave it a central location.
That was even more symbolic than the cherries, Lou thought, and hung bulbs and slung tinsel for a few minutes until the tone of Abby’s voice made him pause.
“So,” she began. “…Are you leaving?”
“Why?” he asked, alarmed. “Do you think I need to?”
“I don’t want you to,” she blurted in the same strange voice.
Lou was confused. He had been expecting terrible tales of killers in upper management. Maybe he was just too tired to make sense of anything. “If I leave, I’ll never get a job in science again. You heard them all—I was completely unqualified for this position. Rose only hired me because everyone else was dead, and now I’ve accomplished sweet fuck-all in the past two years.”
He tried to say it lightly, but belied his emotion by squeezing too hard on the bulb he was holding, which shattered into thousands of green-and-silver fragments.
“Stay still!” Abby commanded, running to the closet where she took out a small hand-held vacuum with a funny nozzle like a tapeworm’s mouth. She sucked the fragments off his hand and the carpet, not looking at his face and making an exaggerated effort not to touch his pants. “It’s hardly your fault if you haven’t been as productive as possible lately.”
“In this business, it doesn’t matter.” He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but didn’t think he’d succeeded. “It’s OK to touch me, you know.”
“Oh! I’m sorry… I wasn’t sure.”
“I know. It’s OK.” He sighed. “It freaks me out too, not knowing where my feet are unless I look at them.”
Abby cautiously put the vacuum onto his leg. “Honestly… I don’t know why
anybody stays in academia. The whole business is just sick.”
“Sure, but what would I do if I quit? Lie around idle and rot. Working has been the only thing that’s kept me sane.” He took a deep breath and continued right away, before his sanity could be called into question, “I was so excited when the committee voted to hire Barrow—they let me vote even though I’d been out for the interviews—because it’s a chance to do something really new. More theoretical physicists should do biology, but not as theorists, as experimentalists touching the pus.”
I’m preaching, he realized, and she doesn’t give a damn.
Abby’s attempt to use the tiny vacuum on pine needles ended in a sputtering mechanical cough, and she threw it to the ground. “It’s worse than the Blue Code of Silence,” she raged. “No one wanted to you know what was going on because they just wanted you to keep working. No one cared about Marybeth because she wasn’t one of the brilliant ones.”
He started to say something, then stopped because no argument was possible. “Marybeth was actually very talented,” he managed.
“That’s even worse!”
“I suppose it is. I just feel responsible because if I hadn’t been in so much denial, I would have figured it out.”
“We still don’t know—” Abby stopped herself and gave him a funny look.
“If Tripp himself tried to kill me? No, I suppose we don’t. And honestly, I don’t care if I ever know. I just want to put it all behind me and live my life.”
“But how do you forget something like that?” Abby cried. She nudged the vacuum out of the way and went to sit on the pale couch, sinking deeply into the soft cushions. Lou made a mental note to fear that couch.
“It’s a work in progress,” he admitted, finding himself unable to look her in the eye. “I had to fight very hard to stay alive, and I realized how precious life was, and how short, and how the important thing is to focus on the things you love.”
“So do you think it made you a better person?” Abby wondered.
“Jesus Christ, no!” It came out as a yell before he could stop it. “I feel as if someone has ripped out my soul and thrown it in the trash.”
“Good,” said Abby. “There’s no need to be fake with me.”
“OK,” he admitted, “there are times that I hate everyone and wish I were dead. But you have to make a point not to indulge that kind of attitude if you want to do anything else. Anyway.” He shrugged. “Maybe I’m all wrong and a fool. If I’d become a paranoid psycho and bought a gun, I could have saved Marybeth.”
Abby gave a small mirthless laugh. “But then you would have been just another one of the bad guys.”
Lou lost himself in memory, almost forgetting Abby’s presence. “She came out to my parents’ place once,” he recalled. “Just once. I got her up onto a horse and she was silent all day—I couldn’t tell if she was enjoying herself or terrified. After we got home she whispered that it was a perfect day, the best she’d ever had in her life. Then…” He shrugged. “Then she refused to ever go anywhere with the group again because it would `spoil the memory.’ But I like to think that… that maybe I did something to make her happy.”
Abby didn’t appear to be listening any more. “You have horses?” she cried in a little-kid voice.
“My parents do.” He looked at her feet, planted in front of the couch. For someone six feet tall, she had very tiny ones, with high arches and little nails painted red. “They’re in France for the holidays. If you’re free, we could…”
Oh, I’m so dumb, he realized. Of course she’s not free—she’s a Lutheran. He imagined a large pale family around a large pale table piled with white food, bowing their heads for grace.
To his surprise, she moaned, “Oooh… Oh yes, I would want to. How do you get on?” she asked bluntly.
“From an extension we built on the porch,” Lou explained, grinning. “It’s one of the first things we did—I can’t live without my favorite mare. We’ve had her since my freshman year in high school.”
“Aw, Louis, that’s so sweet,” said Abby. “I couldn’t live without horses either.”
“Don’t you go home to your family for Christmas?”
“Oh, God no,” she spat with surprising vehemence. “It’s cold out there, and they all treat me like a slut since the divorce.”
He laughed, and reached for the glass of vile wine. It was worse than lab ethanol, but he needed the liquid courage and it took a blessedly tiny sip to have an effect through the fatigue and two years of abstention. “I’m going to stay,” he declared. “After all, we’ve manged to purge all the villains.”
“Except Lori and Wigbert,” Abby reminded him, but even she appeared to be laughing now.
“And if you win this thing, you’ll run the show for seven years.”
“If we win.” The possibility seemed too remote even to consider. “I guess I’d better go in to the office tomorrow—at least long enough to call Headquarters about our proposal.”
“Right,” said Abby, businesslike. “You might want to make sure it’s the only one with your names on it, if you know what I mean.”
“I sure do. Look, thanks for having me over,” he said with his best manners. “I should go before I become incoherent.”
They gave each other a chaste hug in the doorway, and Abby didn’t seem sorry to let him go. No doubt she was exhausted too, and maybe if the stories Barrow told about the creepy men always after her, she was happy when someone played a bit hard to get.
Hard to get, I can do, he thought bitterly, noting that complete strangers in the supermarket often had no problems asking if he could still have sex, but Abby had skipped over that question straight to the suicide one.
Well, she was Lutheran. Maybe she’d never ask. But in that case, he would never tell. He didn’t want her to know or even infer all the terrible things that were wrong with his body. From about an inch below the bellybutton down, he was some kind of alien creature with its own tiny piece of nervous system, unconnected to his brain. It did reflex lizard things, peed and pooed and kicked and thrashed around, and there wasn’t anything he could do to control it. Was it even fair to ask a partner to accept that?
As if in revenge for his thoughts, his body suddenly responded with a swift, jabbing pain right under the breastbone. He paused for a rest, brushing his hand across his eyes, breathing shallowly and taking a long moment to realize the pain was nothing but hunger. All he had eaten today was the toast and coffee from the diner at seven o’clock Mountain Time.
If he were lucky, his crazy Swiss cleaning lady would have left some cheese in the refrigerator, Lou hoped as he accelerated for home. Like Abby, she was inordinately fond of dairy products, bringing over bottled milk and cheese of all descriptions that Lou often had to share with the grad students next door.
He winced as he entered the apartment, seeing it through a girlfriend’s eyes. It was repulsive, and even the Housing Office hadn’t pretended otherwise, saying it was the “most historic” unit—which probably meant Einstein had once upchucked in the corner. Most of the appliances, paintings, and books he’d brought over when he moved out of Juju’s place had never been unpacked; a plump spider hung between the two largest boxes. The old couch had a few sketchy stains and sagged in the middle in an obvious pattern of dog. It looked like the apartment of someone who had died months before, probably of scurvy.
But the kitchen was clean, and there was cheese, a fresh baguette, and some nice red tomatoes. Lou made himself a long sandwich and chewed it slowly, feeling his thoughts de-fuzz as the energy trickled to his brain. The only thing to do was to be honest with her, he decided. She might be Lutheran and he might be squeamish, but they could still have an adult conversation. It wouldn’t be the hardest thing he had ever done; hadn’t he just usurped six hundred million dollars from a Nobel Laureate?
With that thought he went off to get ready for bed, the day that would never end over at last. As he flossed he watched through the window cloud
s fly past the waxing gibbous moon as the sky became black and clear. They would have a full moon for Christmas.
Thirty-Nine: Five Hundred MilliCoulombs of Happiness
They finally allowed Carol to board the plane with all of her proposals and no damage except to her already well-battered pride and dignity. She held back tears, wanting desperately to have a drink and a Benadryl but knowing she’d need all her energy and wits once she got to DC. The flight was supposed to get in at six-thirty in the morning California time, or nine-thirty EST, giving her in principle plenty of time to drag the proposals through the terminal, find a taxi, and make it to the government office. But given how everything else had been going, she was sure to encounter delays and other obstacles.
She wasn’t being fair. The STI team was even worse off, if her suspicions were right that their proposal was on the truck that exploded. They probably wouldn’t get to submit at all.
Carol knew it was mean, but the best way to describe her thoughts in their regard was Cry me a river. They could always write another proposal, whereas she was on the track of losing her job and her marriage.
There were a lot of things Bob wouldn’t tell her, but he had said enough that she could infer the rest. He had let himself be controlled and manipulated by a criminal, acting like a coward—or, worse, letting his vanity blind him to the fact that he was being used.
Carol would never imagine that a Colony Manager would address her for any reason except maybe to assure her that a punishment she’d received was proper. But Bob had been so flattered that Tripp showed an interest in Jim Kalb, way back almost two years ago, that he’d never allowed himself to ask why. So many things were wrong: Kalb wasn’t really a student of van Gnubbern’s or a student at all. He hadn’t gotten his degree from Chicago as he claimed. He had no one willing to write him a recommendation.