“Dacey Livingstone?” He breathed raspily, hefting a large case at his side.
“Yes?” She paused. Could this be the Deus representative? Somehow, she pictured a more dapper man; a fastidious, well-dressed gent who looked like the grants officer for an exclusive private foundation. “Lawrence Platt?”
“Yes. May I come in?”
She stood and shook hands, his large, meaty mitt enveloping hers. She asked if she could get him anything to drink, and he requested a glass of water. She left him sitting in her guest chair to get a glass and water from the department office. As she did the chore, she reviewed what she knew about the Deus Foundation.
Very little, it turned out. The university fundraisers told her it wasn’t listed in their reference books of foundations. They did a Google search for media mentions and found a few stories about research projects the foundation funded in physics, philosophy, medicine. But they assured her the lack of information wasn’t too unusual. There were dozens, probably hundreds of little foundations out there, set up with bequests from individuals, or with private money from some rich businessmen.
These foundations were often “unconventional,” the fundraisers had told her. Sometimes eccentric in what they funded. But they also were willing to write out checks based on a good idea, even if it was unproven. And they didn’t require the volumes of applications and the incredibly stringent reviews that government grants demanded. But even so, the two-page application and four-page research description she’d done for the Deus grant seemed incredibly perfunctory.
She found a nice glass and filled it with water from the cooler. She decided that, no doubt, Platt would more than compensate for the short form with a lengthy grilling and inspections.
She returned to find Platt sitting quietly, his bulk filling her guest chair, holding a slim folder on his lap. He accepted the water gratefully and downed half of it in one drink.
“Now,” he said fishing glasses from his coat pocket, opening the folder and peering at its contents. “We’ve looked over your application and it looks fine. Here’s our standard agreement. Fairly simple.” He handed her a single sheet of paper and waited for her to read it. Basically, it said that she would periodically report her findings to the foundation and would agree to work with other foundation grantees on projects of mutual interest. And it gave all patent rights to her and the university. There were no accounting requirements, no reporting, no requirement to even acknowledge the foundation.
“This is it?”
“Yes. Would you sign it?”
“Uh, sure.” She scribbled her signature on the paper and handed it back. The university lawyers normally wanted to go over such contracts with a fine tooth comb. But this one sure didn’t need a lawyer to protect the university’s rights. The university had all the rights, anyway.
“Fine, well …” Platt heaved himself out of his chair and handed her an envelope. “We’re pleased to have you as a grantee.” He reached out his large hand and she shook it, and turned and left.
She stood there a moment unbelieving, looking at the envelope. That was it! No grilling, no lab inspections? No seminar to describe her plans? No interviews with deans or department chairmen? No lawyers? She opened the envelope and pulled out a check. Her eyes widened in even greater disbelief.
It was made out to her personally, not to the university. And it was for $180,237.00! A hundred thousand dollars more than she’d asked for!
The scoreboard clock ticked off with inexorable authority the closing five minutes of the football game, and the crowd cheered in its collective teenaged soprano voice for the Tigers of Melville, Missouri. The cheers were especially deafening, because the team had made it to the five yard line, and were about to score a game-tying touchdown against the conference-leading Porter City Yellow Jackets.
But the lanky teenagers at the other end of the verdant green field leaned with calculated cool against the chain link fence. Out of the full glare of the tall lights, they practiced their indifference. They presented to the world a sharp contrast to the bright-eyed bouncy cheerleaders and the striving athletes dueling over an inflated pigbladder at the other end of the field.
Displaying multiple earrings, nose rings, tattered sneakers, funky-sculptured hair and a matching ultrahip attitude, they had labeled themselves the Zoners. They made it a resolute point to occupy at each game the deserted grassy area beyond the end zone opposite to wherever the action was. That is, if they could predict the flow of play, which required careful attention to the game without seeming to pay attention.
But they were satisfactorily out of the action now, so they practiced air-guitar, capered about, and performed adolescent boy-girl play that involved teasing, touching, and occasional voluptuous girl-boy embrace.
Suddenly, the area was enveloped by an eardrum-tearing shriek that seemed to rip open the black sky, south to north. The entire crowd simultaneously clasped its hands to its ears and gasped in distress, except those whose hearing had been sufficiently deadened by rock music.
Ironically, when the sound struck, one Zoner member in baggy shorts and black high-tops had just twanged off a silent chord from his imaginary guitar. He stared at his remarkable hand in foggy amazement for a moment, then realized that he was not the cause of the noise from the heavens.
The game stopped as everyone searched the offending sky, but it remained silent, coal-black and anonymous beyond the lights. The players milled about on the field, and the crowd chattered about the possibility that the sound blast came from an airplane, a missile, or even a UFO. But the mysterious sound had died and seemed to result in nothing more phenomenal, so the play resumed. The third down began and the crowd quickly restored its full concentration on the players.
But the real celebrity from the night’s events would belong to the motley Zoners. As they arranged themselves along the fence for the final minutes of indifferent loitering, an object plummeted silently from the dark sky. It flashed into the bright lights of the field, bounced once on the thick turf beyond the ten-yard line and came to rest. A long-haired boy in a tie-dyed t-shirt and knee-torn jeans first spied the object, narrowing his eyes in puzzled concentration, since it was too far away to be instantly recognizable. He nudged his five-earringed comrade, who also brought his attention to bear on the identity of the object.
“Man, is that a hand?” asked Tie-dye.
“Like, an arm, too, maybe!” exclaimed Five-earrings.
“Dummy arm, man. Somebody threw a dummy arm on the field.”
“Looks real.”
They dared each other to run out and fetch the arm, foreseeing great fun with the fake appendage. It was concluded that, since Tie-dye had seen the object first, he was under primary obligation. So he let himself through the gate at the end of the field and to the raucous cheers of the other Zoners, sprinted raggedly under the goal posts to the one yard line, the five, the ten and beyond. He reached down to pick up the arm. Then he stopped, looked closer, straightened up and stood staring, shocked out of his cool.
“C’mon, man, bring it back!” shouted Five-earrings.
The boy merely shook his head in frightened puzzlement and continued to stare. By this time, he had attracted the attention of the referees at the other end of the field, who yelled and waved at him to get off. He looked at them, pointed down, shrugged, and stood there, not knowing what else to do. Finally, two angry referees began the laborious slog down the field, their bellies shaking. They arrived puffing and aggravated, berating the boy, who jabbed his finger down at the arm.
“Damn,” observed the line judge, looking down.
“Yeah,” agreed the umpire.
Lying on the green turf was a grayish pink arm, with the hand partially closed, the fingers pointing up. But it was more than just an arm. It had been severed from the body of its owner beyond the shoulder joint, including a section of collarbone and chest muscle. The severed appendage wore the remains of a white short-sleeved shirt, which was stained with blo
od. Clots of dried blood covered the broad stump, but the appendage had been largely exsanguinated, hence its grayish color.
The referees angrily accused the boy of a ghoulish prank, but he shrugged his shoulders and insisted upon his innocence. Other Zoners quickly came to his rescue, running onto the field, pointing skyward and asserting the truth of the event. The two referees with capped heads and striped shirts stood stolidly amidst the Zoners, and after initial skepticism, abandoned their initial theory that a cadaver had been scavenged and the limb put there as a joke.
“Aw, man, gross!” said one of the Zoners, reaching down to touch the arm. One of the referees slapped his hand away. Reminded of their oversight duties, the referees pushed the Zoners back away from the grisly object, as if to give it air. By this time, the football players had abandoned any thought of their game and had sprinted down the field for a look, so an outer circle of green and yellow helmets surrounded the inner core of long hair, with the two white caps in the center.
Pushing their way through the crowd came two sheriff’s deputies, who next assumed responsibility. They covered the arm with a towel and waved for a stretcher, which was all the deputies could think to do. Two emergency technicians joined the growing crowd. One undraped the object and examined it, declaring that it had been recently severed. However, since it had fallen onto the field, this was not a crime scene, so he ruled that the object could be safely removed.
He donned rubber gloves, knelt and lifted the rigid, severed appendage onto the stretcher. He covered it with a red emergency blanket and he and his partner carried the stretcher to their waiting emergency van, which roared away, siren blazing, lights flashing.
The referees stood and looked with puzzlement at each other amidst the dispersing crowd, then walked away and huddled alone. There was some gesturing among them and a few raised voices. After a long while, the head umpire returned and with a decisive tweet of his whistle, announced that since there was only five minutes to play, the game would be finished. The players clapped their hands heartily and sprinted bulkily down the field to the line of scrimmage. The cheerleaders tentatively began a cheer, quickly gathered confidence and rose to full girlish throat. A continuing low chatter among the crowd indicated that gossip about the event still occupied their collective mind. But they began to cheer nevertheless and the Tiger Band struck up a fight song.
The Zoners retired back behind the chain link fence and wondered at the weirdness of it all and how the dumb game could possibly go on after what had happened.
And the Tigers scored on two carries, finally winning by a field goal when they subsequently recovered an on-side kick to the Yellow Jackets.
Gerald had driven all night to make it to Columbia, Missouri, the next day, but he had to see the arm. He had to talk to the man who was to autopsy it. It was something that had inexplicably “appeared,” and was thus of great interest. He drove the van slowly through the neat grid of streets, following the instructions periodically announced by the GPS receiver suction-cupped to his windshield. Taped to his dashboard was a printout of an Associated Press article describing how an arm had fallen from the sky in Melville, Missouri.
He took a corner particularly fast, and cans clattered about in the back of the van. It was time to do a housecleaning, but he didn’t know where he would find a steep hill in this flat area of the Midwest. He knew that if he accelerated up a steep hill and maybe let the van roll back down and hit the brakes a few times all the cans and much of the other trash would shift to the back. So, he could just open the rear door and sweep it into a garbage can — after, of course, sifting through it to make sure he wasn’t throwing away any valuable data or printouts.
Maybe he’d get the van tuned up, too. Or whatever was needed to quiet the uncharacteristic engine noise. He also needed to put more air in the air mattress.
He knew his wandering was weird. But when the compulsion came, he knew he had to leave his research at the Center and go wherever was necessary to gather data. At first, the compulsion had been a mere tickling at the edge of his conscious, a feeling that things were happening out there beyond his little office that just weren’t quite right. He knew from experience not to dismiss such tickles. In the past, even while he was working on the most difficult theoretical problem — for example, the mathematics of accretion disks around black holes — his unconscious was always taking in information, processing it, deciding whether it was significant. His unconscious had caused the tiny uneasiness that had exploded into this year-long journey of data-gathering.
He’d found all these anomalies to be really significant. They were beyond usual physics and they were concrete. Not like UFOs or Bigfoot, where the physical evidence was not quite there, not really something that a scientist could gather and analyze.
But nobody had put them together. They were just separate, strange phenomena, reported with passing interest by the media, but which so far only he had believed were connected … somehow.
So, he had left his job, his research, his family, his girlfriend. Fortunately, Lisa had already begun to pursue other interests. She didn’t seem to like being called his girlfriend, which was one sign, and she’d taken to going home at night, sometimes early, leaving him searching through news sites on the computer.
The other scientists at the Center for Astrophysics had been tolerant. They had seen such instances before, when one of their physicists veered off onto a strange tangent. Sometimes it proved incredibly important, sometimes a quirky dead-end.
Either way, they had all judged his explorations peculiar, but he was certain his compulsion wasn’t as mystical as it seemed on the surface — especially when he kept encountering other people who were puzzling over a weird phenomenon they had encountered. He would gather as much information as he could from them, connect them with the Deus Foundation, and move to another mystery. Someday soon, he knew a theory would crystallize itself out of all these multifarious happenings.
He returned from his reverie. There it was. The GPS’s last instruction had brought him to an anonymous, windowless, tan brick building with an ambulance entrance and a sign that said Boone County Morgue. He found a parking place, grabbed a new spiral-bound notebook and pushed through the front door. The guard at the front had his name and gave him a visitor’s tag, directing him to the basement examining room.
As he pressed a big black button that took the aging elevator down, he became aware of the strong smell of formalin and a disconcerting organic odor that he took to be the smell of cold, dead bodies. He found George Voigt sitting in a small, cramped office, shuffling papers about, peering down at them through rimless bifocals.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Meier. From the foundation. I did get the call from Massachusetts, from my colleague there. You’re interested in the arm.” George Voigt was a spare, small man in his late seventies, with a bald head encircled by wispy white hair. He was affable, easygoing, but Gerald’s contacts had told him that “Curious George” Voigt as he was known, was a legend in Missouri and, indeed, among pathologists. He was expert and he was thorough. His counterpart in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, had told Gerald that Voigt was famous for snooping incessantly around crime scenes and deeply annoying some police, especially when he proved innocent one of their prime suspects.
Voigt offered him coffee, tea or lemonade, but Gerald declined, given that he was about to see a part of a dead body. Voigt then buttoned his clean, starched lab coat, picked up a gray notebook and led Gerald into the aging, but meticulously clean, white-tiled examining room. Two stainless steel autopsy tables occupied the room’s center, and one wall was covered with stainless steel doors with refrigerated containers for bodies.
“I thought at first that maybe I should wait for the rest of this gentleman to turn up,” said Voigt, opening one of the steel doors and sliding out the body-sized tray that held only a small cloth-draped object. “But the police said they needed as much information as they could get PDQ, so I examined it. Most strange, Mr. Meier
. Indeed, this is most strange.”
He undraped the object, and Gerald found himself staring at a grayish, lifeless arm that looked almost like a clever fake. The stubby-fingered hand was upturned and the fingers were curled into the kind of grip one might use to hold a violin bow. The fingertips were stained with ink. The bloodied stump was sliced clean through. Very cleanly through, even such that the bloodstained white shirt looked as if it had been sliced with a razor.
“Are you okay?” Voigt asked solicitously, and Gerald nodded. He was so fascinated with the arm, he forgot to be queasy.
“Well, let’s see now,” said Voigt opening his notebook. “Subject is a left arm and hand belonging to a white adult male …” he began describing in detail the hand, the arm, the few distinguishing birthmarks and scars, the amount of muscle and fat, the status of the nail beds, and the multitude of other factors that constituted a thorough autopsy. He went on for a few minutes, saving the most interesting part for last. “The arm is severed from the body above the shoulder joint, cutting through the clavicle and scapula and the pectoralis major muscle, and …” He paused and smiled at Gerald significantly over his glasses. “… the severing incision is remarkably clean, even cutting through parts of the fourth and fifth left ribs.” Gerald looked closely. Sure enough, embedded in the dry gray muscle were segments of rib that had been sliced so cleanly through that they looked polished.
“Actually, I’ve been waiting for your arrival to finish. I decided to take a closer look at this sliced bone. It could be a centerpiece to this mystery.” Voigt took up a scalpel in his small wrinkled hand and with deft, delicate strokes carefully sliced away at the muscle until he freed one of the rib slivers, wrapping it in gauze and placing it in a small plastic sample box. He handed the box to Gerald while he covered the arm and slid it back into the refrigerator.
Shortly, the sliver was under his microscope, where they saw a perfectly clean slice, with no discernible cut marks. After examining the sliver from all possible angles, Gerald sat on the old metal stool and stared at it.
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