It all sounded highly improbable to me, yet, again, I didn't have the words to rebut Pinky's assertions. Something else occurred to me then. “What about the unlogged setups in your lab? What do they have to do with the cabbage?"
“Nothing,” Pinky said. “When I realized I'd been indiscreet about the Brassica, I threw together some apparatus to make it look as though I was distilling a compound from the leaves. Completely worthless."
I looked from him to Joy. “So Phil doesn't know you're eating the leaves? What does he think—what did you say to Phil that made him shut down your lab and drag you off the campus?"
“You have to understand, I was very distracted,” he said. For just a moment, this was the old Pinky, confessing to some gaffe he'd made in front of the brass. “I told him he had lung cancer, small cell carcinoma, which he already knew..."
“What?” I said.
“Yes,” Joy said, “Mildred knew, too, because she had to make his chemo appointments, but otherwise Phil played it very close to the vest."
“I feel bad—I got Mildred in trouble because he thought she told me about the cancer,” Pinky said. “Anyway, that wasn't what kicked over the termite heap."
“What did it?” I asked.
“I told him I cured him,” Pinky said. “I blurted it out without thinking. Naturally Phil thought I was stoned on something I'd either gotten my hands on or cooked up in the lab. And of course he'd already heard about the cabbage.... He's going to be very surprised at his next checkup."
I don't know if I believed Pinky in the moment, but certainly my ability to feel surprise had been cauterized. I looked over at Joyce: obviously none of this was news to her. I thought I sounded calm when I asked him how he'd cured Phil's lung cancer.
“Trivially easy,” Pinky said, dismissing it with a tired wave. “It's—"
He stopped, apparently lost for words. He looked at me and his expression was sad. I was getting tired of that look.
“You know,” he finally said, “when a student who doesn't have any mathematics asks a question that can only be answered mathematically? I can tell you how I did it metaphorically, but unless you know the way I know, it's just going to sound off the wall."
I was too numb and exhausted for even my pride to be stung. Either my wife and best friend were on the fast track to the paper slipper academy, or the world as I understood it had ceased to exist.
“I'll have to think about it,” I finally said. It sounded lame, even to me.
“I know,” Pinky sighed. “I'll say just one more thing. I don't want you to feel as if I'm pushing you into anything, but you can change your mind anytime. I have plenty more of the Brassica."
“I thought they took everything from your lab?” I said.
“Yeah, but I'm growing them in a few other places, and I have tons of seed—that's how we had them shipped to the company, as seed—it looks almost like beach sand. Ten grams is enough to plant two or three acres. Anyway, just ask, all right?"
I said that I would, and Pinky took that as enough of an answer. The three of us polished off the rest of the wine, and talked about getting lawyers and what would probably happen at the hearing.
When Pinky left, his convertible top still down, it was four in the morning and cold. The air was very still and clear, and outside the range of our porch light, the Milky Way was a white band across the sky. I stood outside as long as I could in my shirtsleeves, trying not to feel the Earth shifting under my feet.
* * * *
That Ihinger-Ibex had a corporate security infrastructure larger than a few uniformed guards on the edge of retirement was obvious, and unsurprising in retrospect: it was a huge company with profits in the hundreds of millions that depended heavily upon proprietary information. Until the knock came the morning after Pinky's visit, it never would have occurred to me that we were under surveillance.
The corporate attorney and security men were accompanied by a city marshal who was apologetic but businesslike: pursuant to a civil warrant, designees of Ihinger-Ibex were empowered to search the premises, blah, blah, blah...
“No one expects to find any corporate property here, at least none that isn't appropriate to your work for the company,” the attorney said, once we'd heard the judge's order. “But it's one of the steps we have to take, legally speaking, to make sure you and Dr. Sills are afforded due process at the professional standards hearing."
“So you're doing this for our benefit,” Joy said.
“Of course not,” the lawyer said, not missing a beat. “We all know I'm here to protect the company's proprietary interests. But frankly, I don't think we're going to find as much as a box of company paper clips; and that will only reflect to your advantage at the hearing."
“Well, that's a bit self-serving,” Joy said, “whether it happens to be true or not."
The lawyer flipped through a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “I'm not the cause of your problem,” he said distractedly. “But if you want to be mad at me because your colleague is irresponsible, and because you've given your division head reason to worry, then go ahead."
And the truth was, the whole process was as impersonal as hell. We were wearing the wrong uniform, and that was all the storm troopers cared about. We were now the other side.
They left, after turning our house, garage, and grounds completely inside-out. They left empty-handed, which didn't seem to surprise them, but surprised me a great deal. Some of the incriminating cabbages had been in our refrigerator that morning.
“Now what?” I said to Joy, once they were gone.
She gave me the kind of fey look I'd been seeing more and more lately. “Why are you asking me?” she said.
Her question, and more her tone, pierced a weak place in me, which is why I responded the way I did.
“Why? Because you and the genius started all this,” I said, gesturing around at the house turned upside-down by the search. “Because we are, very probably, going to lose our jobs, our careers, the house.... Because Pinky finally let his adolescent rebelliousness get the better of him, and you went along with him!"
I was shaking with anger and fear that I didn't realize I'd been holding in. I was enraged at the way my house had been casually and impersonally violated, and terrified about what was coming next.
“Another thing,” I said, warming to my anger, “what did you do with the cabbages? How did you know to hide them? Where did you hide them?"
“I didn't hide them,” she said. “I ate them. This morning."
“All of them? Are you kidding?"
“Of course all of them,” she said. “They didn't find any, did they?” Joy tossed the cushions back on the living room sofa, then sat down. “Don't worry about the hearing."
“What?"
“If you're worried about the hearing, don't be,” she said. “You'll be fine unless you incriminate yourself. You didn't eat any of the leaves; you were against the whole thing. You can say that truthfully."
“Why do I get the impression you're angry about that?” I said. “You're asking me to take a lot on trust—"
“It's not that you didn't trust me,” she said, cutting me off. “Not mostly. It's that you want to be right more than you want to be with me."
That stopped me cold. Wherever my wife, and Pinky, had gone, I didn't want to follow. It didn't matter whether the end of the trail was a locked ward or a world I couldn't imagine, nothing was going to make me step across that threshold. Not even Joy.
She looked at me, and she knew: her expression miserable and guileless as a little girl's. It was the worst moment of my life.
I put my arms around her while she cried. I thought about how bitter it was that the only connection we seemed to have then was pain. In that moment of heartsickness and grief maybe I grew a very little, and I knew what I had to do.
* * * *
We hired lawyers for the hearing because the company expected it. In the week beforehand, we packed up what Joy would need in her new life—
very little in the way of material things, as it turned out. Lots of Brassica seed, though. As far as I know, Joy didn't speak directly to Pinky all week, but at 8 o'clock on the Friday before the hearing, he showed up at the door: two days would be more than enough lead time for them to make their getaway. They didn't take a car, and whoever was watching the house, if they still were, didn't see Joy and Pinky climb over our back fence and disappear into the night.
I couldn't have been the only one who wasn't surprised that they didn't show up for the hearing. I know I was the only one who was surprised by my arrest.
My lawyer had me out in a few hours: according to her, the trumped-up corporate theft charges would go away as soon as Ihinger-Ibex was convinced I couldn't lead them to Joy and Pinky.
I took polygraphs. The detective tried, in an embarrassingly familiar man-to-man way, to insinuate that Joy and Pinky were lovers, and that I owed neither of them any loyalty. I was threatened with prison: “Forget what you heard about country club prisons, Doc. All prison time is hard time."
After a month, the charges were dropped. The company hearing, rescheduled, rescheduled again, and rescheduled a third time, was finally cancelled altogether. Everyone, it seemed, was more concerned with returning to the status quo ante bellum than in looking too closely at what had happened.
Phil left the company about the same time his lung cancer went into “spontaneous remission.” If any further work was done on Pinky's cabbages, no word of it reached me. After four months in a kind of caretaker position in my own lab, I applied for and received early retirement.
If retirement is slow, it has its compensations. I have time to think and read and follow my own informal lines of research. The newspapers deliver interesting items almost every day: a sixteen-year-old in Albuquerque who published a brilliantly original paper on neutron decay in her high school newspaper; a San-Francisco waiter who's become a millionaire investing tip money in the stock market; two college athletes from Boston who, within a week of each other, set new international records in the hundred and six-hundred meter times; a Florida woman whose homemade herbal tea appears to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's Disease.
For every article that appears, I'm sure there are dozens, maybe hundreds of other micro-revolutions in human events taking place, springing up in the wake of a non-descript, middle-aged couple's travels.
I'm relatively young, and in good health. It is possible I'll live long enough to be the last Neanderthal.
Copyright (c) 2005 Robert J. Howe
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
A Christmas in Amber
by Scott William Carter
Desperate times call for desperate measures, but people have ways of getting through them....
The snowflakes barely touched the glass before they melted, the moisture swept aside by his humming windshield wipers, but Alan was still mesmerized. Not a word had been said about snow on any of the Evacuation Updates. Rain had been the forecast. Lots and lots of rain. It had been many years since he had seen real snow—twenty or thirty at least, back when Janis was still alive. And that had been at a ski resort, not Los Angeles. The last time he could remember it snowing in Los Angeles was when he was still in his twenties, some fifty years back, and he could never remember it snowing on Christmas Day.
The snowflakes wafted through the golden halos surrounding the streetlights before they vanished on the glistening pavement. He was amazed at how deserted the streets were. That never would have happened if not for the evacuation. There'd be gobs of kids outside trying to make snowballs. Every house in the subdivision looked the same, with gabled windows and brick facades, posh and expensive in every respect, so identical Alan was surprised when the autopilot turned the van into a driveway. He had been to the house lots of times, but still he couldn't tell it apart from the others. Only when he saw Michelle's face pressed against the bay window, hands cupped on either side, did he know he was in the right place.
She wore the purple A's baseball cap he had bought her when they attended the game the previous year. The blinking holiday lights around the window made her face green one moment, red the next. When she saw him, she waved excitedly and disappeared through the part in the curtains. So they hadn't told her. If they had told her, he doubted she would be smiling.
A sharp sadness stabbed at his heart. For a moment, he wondered if this was a good idea.
“Open all doors,” he said.
The van's computer beeped in acknowledgement. The two front doors, the sliding side door, and the back doors all popped open. In his haste to get to his son's house on time, he had forgotten his jacket, and the chill wind sliced right through his thin cotton sweater. If Janis were still alive, he knew what she would say. Stepping out onto the pavement, he could hear her voice.
You trying to get pneumonia, Alan? Is that what you want?
“It's not like it matters now, dear,” he said, catching himself when he realized he was speaking out loud. He had been hearing her a lot lately, and he had been trying hard not to answer. If the kids heard him, they'd worry.
The driveway was lit by two lamps, one on either side of the garage. The air smelled like the old pines that lined the street. The front door to the house slid open and Rick emerged, bulging brown leather suitcases under each arm. His hands were covered with thick mittens. He was dressed in the type of heavy blue parka somebody on an expedition up Mount Everest might wear, as well as bright red ski pants, a brown wool cap with earflaps, and yellow rain boots, all of which looked brand new. Under all that garb his face was tanned a deep bronze, which Alan knew was a requirement of the part Rick had been playing—a professional surfer on that soap opera. This amused Alan to no end; as far as he knew, Rick had never been surfing. He hated both swimming and the ocean.
An image of Rick surfing in his current outfit flashed through Alan's mind, and he chuckled.
“What's so funny?” Rick asked, breath fogging. His curly black hair ruffled in the breeze. Janis had always called him muffin head because of his dome-like hair.
“Nothing,” Alan said.
“It's cold."
“Yes, it is."
He made a motion to take the bags, but Rick shook his head and walked past. Katherine came out next, also dressed in a heavy coat and pants, also carrying bulging suitcases. The difference was that her clothes matched: they were solid white, hugging her model-thin body, and stylishly designed. Her blond hair was pulled back into a braided ponytail, sticking out the side of her Russian-style fur hat. Michelle came out right behind her, dressed in the same coat as her mother, but otherwise in rumpled jeans faded in the knees, dirty tennis shoes, and of course, the baseball cap. He knew her hair was as blond as her mother's, but it was cut so short you couldn't see it underneath the hat. A black backpack was slung over her shoulders, and he saw the eyepiece of her microscope jutting out the top.
How her parents had ever ended up with a child so dissimilar to them Alan couldn't say, but he was glad for it. She was more like him than his son had ever been. She was even saying she wanted to grow up to be a paleontologist. The thought of that made his chest tighten, and he forced it away.
“I'll help you,” he said to Katherine, taking one of her bags.
“Oh, thank you,” Katherine said, breathing a sigh. Up close, he saw that she was perspiring, her cheeks pink. Alan wondered if she had lifted anything that heavy in years. It must have been hard being without servants, he thought sarcastically, and then felt guilty for thinking it. He and Katherine had never gotten along great—hell, he and Rick had never gotten along great—but he needed to be positive now.
"Dear,” Rick said from behind the van, “think of his back."
“I'm fine,” Alan said, but he did feel a twinge. Damn thing had been bothering him for years.
Rick made a noise that sounded like hummmph. It was a sound Janis used to make, a sort of disgusted resignation. Janis had been in the business, too, a television director. The
y had always been close, Janis and Rick. They had a bond that Alan could never understand.
Kind of like him and Michelle.
“Hey, sport,” he said to her.
She beamed up at him, smiling with sealed lips. He knew she was embarrassed about the gap in her teeth. She had lost them a few months earlier, a couple of days shy of her sixth birthday. He also remembered that her parents, obsessed with the preparations they needed to make after they received winning lottery numbers, had forgotten to put money under her pillow. Grandpa had given her a ten, telling her the tooth fairy had come to his house by mistake. She was a smart kid, too smart to believe this, but she had nodded just the same.
The snowflakes dotted the brim of her cap before turning into dark watermarks.
“You all packed, huh?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Hey, Grandpa, guess what? We get to go on a spaceship!"
“I know,” Alan said.
As if Alan might drop the bag at any moment, Rick quickly snatched the bag from him, scooting it into the van. Then he helped Katherine with her other bag. Alan helped his granddaughter take off her backpack, all while she chatted nonstop.
“Mommy says only a few people get to take a ride on the spaceship and we're lucky,” she said. “She says we're going to be gone a while so I better take all the stuff I want to play with, so I made sure to bring my microscope."
“I see that,” Alan said. “You bring any of your fossils?"
“No,” she answered glumly. “Mommy says they're too heavy."
“Well, she's probably right."
“But I do have this!"
She reached into her pocket and pulled out an object that fit into the palm of her hand. When the lamps shone on the yellowish plastic, he knew what it was. He had bought it for her when they visited the California Academy of Sciences in June. The plastic looked more yellow than honey-colored; it was meant to look like amber, a facsimile of a new species of termite that had been found in Colombia, encased in amber, perfectly preserved after sixty million years. He had offered to buy her a t-shirt, but she had insisted on the little keepsake.
Analog SFF, December 2005 Page 17