by Paul Mceuen
She taped his eyelids open, pulling the lids straight up. A powerful technique on many levels. The physical discomfort was excruciating as the eyes dried, but ever more critical was the denial of one more form of resistance. The stripping away of another layer. Removing the ability to block out visual stimuli, to make the outside world go away.
She snapped a photo of him in this state, then opened her satchel, removed a laptop computer. She typed in a few commands and then held the screen up before his face. She could tell from the twitches of his cheek muscles that his eyes were beginning to burn.
“I’m going to read you a list of names. Just listen. Just watch.”
She opened a small flip pad and read the first name. “George Washington.” An image of the first president appeared. “Charles Darwin.” Darwin flashed up. His head was shaking. He could hardly see now, she surmised, his eyes drying inexorably.
She took a bottle of eye drops from the table, Murine, bought at a drugstore more than six hundred miles away. Never purchase anything local. No receipts. No remembered face.
Connor’s eyes darted back and forth between the computer screen and her face. She felt it coming off him: the fear of knowing. He saw the infrared lasers and photodiodes mounted along the edges of the computer screen. He understood. Smart man, Liam Connor. She had never tortured a Nobel Prize winner before.
The computer was her truth detector. Advertising firms had developed sophisticated programs to monitor human reactions as people watched commercials on a computer screen. They traced eye movements. Pupil dilation. The blood flow in vessels in the sclera, the whites of his eyes. The military used the same technology for interrogations. She had adapted the technology for her own needs. She had found it effective.
Darwin stared up from the computer screen. Test names, these were tests. Calibrations. To see how Connor responded to stimuli, developing a map of his responses.
She started in on his colleagues. “Mark Sampson.” A picture of his longtime scientific collaborator appeared. She had taken it from his website. No response. She continued reading, a new picture with each name. “Vlad Glazman.” Nothing.
“Jake Sterling.”
The little red indicator bar on the bottom of the screen flickered. A small signal but easily discernible above the noise. She made a note. Good. He was already high on her list—she had his home, his lab, his phone fully instrumented.
Now, she thought. To the heart of it.
NO, NO, NO, PLEASE, GOD, NO…
She worked her way through his colleagues, his friends, then finally his family. Block your thoughts. Stop thinking. Stop feeling.…
“Martin Connor.”
“Ethel Connor.”
“Arthur Connor.”
“Maggie Connor.”
The bar at the bottom of the screen jumped.
The woman glanced at him, then to the image of his granddaughter, Maggie, on the screen.
She made a note.
Liam was drenched in sweat. He shivered uncontrollably. He was freezing in his own sweat.
She leaned in until she was inches from his face. He smelled her. She smelled of wood and creosote. “Tell me where it is, Professor Connor. Quit fighting. You must already know how this ends.”
She tapped the screen. “Your granddaughter,” she said. “I will torture her right in front of you. Tell me or she dies.”
Liam wanted to kill her. He wanted more than anything in the world to rip his arms free and strangle her.
She pushed a button and a new picture appeared on the screen. The little red meter spiked.
Dylan.
“When your granddaughter is dead, I will start on her son. Do you think you can watch that? Do you think you can be brave then?”
No, he couldn’t be brave then. But he also couldn’t give her the Uzumaki. The choice was stark, binary: watch them die or tell her.
She moved in close. “One minute. Tell me. Then everything will be over. You die. They live.”
He refused to accept it. There had to be another way. He couldn’t save them, he knew that now. No more than he could save himself. But there was something he could do. With his suffering, he could buy them a little time. If he was stronger than he’d ever been, Liam could do this one small thing.
They would have to do the rest.
“Ten seconds,” she said. “Tell me now.”
Liam readied himself. With this suffering…
The clocked ticked down. She held up her right hand, wiggled her fingers. The Crawlers came alive inside him.
Liam Connor screamed.
DAY 2
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26
FUNGUS AMONG US
3
MAGGIE CONNOR DOVE DEEPER UNDER THE COVERS. “NO ONE’S home,” she mumbled.
The pounding on the door continued.
“Go away.”
Silence.
“I’mmm stilll heeere.…” came the child’s voice through the door.
She slowly pulled herself out of bed, reluctant to leave her cocoon. Goose bumps broke out all over her naked skin in the cool morning air. She threw on jeans and a thick-pile shirt, pale yellow, comfortable and concealing. At thirty-three, she still had it. But she didn’t want her son to see it.
She shuffled to the door and cracked it open. Dylan peeked through.
“Fungus?” she said to her son in a mock-serious tone.
“Among us!” he answered back.
Maggie dressed and made her way down the long hallway, past Yvette’s bedroom (a complete disaster), past Cindy’s land of tie-dye, past Josephine’s ever-so-spotless pale green sanctum, to the heart of the house, the kitchen. She took in the rich smells, the warmth. Along one wall, two ancient refrigerators stood side by side, the right one boasting a hand-painted yellow sun, the left one the multicolored handprints of her housemates. And, of course, there were the elves. The biggest stood in the corner, hand-carved in dark wood and nearly four feet tall. Several smaller ones peered down from the tops of the refrigerators.
When she and Dylan had considered moving to Rivendell five years ago, it was the elves that had closed the deal. “They come in from the forest,” her prospective housemate Justin had told her son, then four years old. Justin was a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology, with an unruly dark beard and a shock of blond-brown hair that left the impression that he’d just emerged from the forest himself. “Be a good boy,” Justin had said to Dylan, “and they’ll watch over you, keep you in spices and glitter dust. But act badly—don’t listen to your mom, yell too much, or leave your dishes unwashed—and they’ll go back to the woods with the faeries, never to be seen again.” Justin had finished his degree and moved to Yakima, Washington, a year later. Yvette had replaced him, leaving Dylan as the one and only man of the house.
Almost ten now, her son stood at the stove on top of a milk crate while tending a simmering pot of oatmeal, just big enough to see over the rim of the stainless-steel vessel. He twisted the spoon back and forth, keeping the oats from burning on the bottom. Turtle, their black Lab mix, was asleep at his feet.
Cindy Sharp, one of their housemates, a fifth-year art and architecture undergrad specializing in printmaking, sat at the kitchen table. Her hands were cupped around a large mug of coffee, and she looked as though she needed it. Cindy was twenty-three, still lost in the hedonistic newness of adulthood. She had curly hair, a slight overbite, and an eclectic taste in men that Maggie couldn’t grasp.
“Out late?” Maggie asked.
“Visiting a sick friend,” she said, using their code.
Maggie suppressed a laugh. “I hope he feels better.”
Cindy grinned. “Oh, he does. He certainly does.”
Dylan stirred the pot with greater alacrity. He must have broken their code. Cindy pushed back from the table and wandered over. “That stuff ready yet?” she asked. “I’m famished.”
“Almost,” Dylan answered.
“This boy,” Cindy said, giving him
a hug from behind. “So handsome, and he can cook, too.” She looked to Maggie, chin resting on Dylan’s head. “When he’s older, he’s mine.”
“Hands off. There are laws.” She pulled her son away, mussed his hair. Full-on red hair, nothing like his father’s. More like Pop-pop’s when he was younger. She wanted to squeeze him until her chest hurt, but she held off. He was nearing that age when boys begin to pull back from their mothers. She felt it, the way he twisted away when she touched him.
She elbowed her son in the ribs instead. “Fungus?”
“Among us!” he answered back.
THE SNOW OF THE PREVIOUS NIGHT HAD LEFT A WHITE blanket almost an inch thick on the grounds of the sprawling estate. An abandoned farm, it had been purchased for a song in the early seventies by a collection of back-to-the-earth types. They’d cleaned up the house, added more bedrooms, and built a large greenhouse out back to grow vegetables during the harsh Ithaca winters. Legend had it that while clearing brush, they’d found a shovel, its handle carefully and ornately carved with Hobbit heads, elves, and an angry orc. The residents had taken it as their totem. From then on, the place was known as Rivendell.
Maggie and Dylan bundled up before heading out the back door. The air was chilly cold, the skies relatively clear, a rarity for Ithaca this time of year. The sunlight was brilliant as they stomped a trail of footprints away from Rivendell, Turtle at their heels. Soon they were in shadows, beneath the canopy of a pine planted back in the 1920s, after the forests had been cleared for farming. Then the forest became more varied, more interesting. Larch mixed with hemlock; a grove of poplars surrounded a single, solitary oak. It was a stunning morning, a crazy superposition of fall and winter. Most of the leaves still clung to the trees, but they were giving up the ghost in droves, another batch cutting loose with every toss of the wind, falling to the bright snow.
Turtle stopped and sniffed near a log where the wind had scoured the leaves and snow. A late-season mushroom poked up through the exposed earth, the bright orange cap streaked with stains of brown. That’s strange, she thought. She knelt down, inspecting it more closely, feeling the texture of its skin with her finger.
“What’s that?” Dylan asked.
“I don’t know. It looks like Amanita jacksonii, but see there? The color of the cap is wrong.” She pulled a plastic Baggie from her pocket, along with a pocketknife. She dug the mushroom from the half-frozen earth and dropped it in the Baggie.
Dylan said, “Maybe another new species for the fantastic fungal forager?”
“You never know…,” Maggie replied, throwing an arm around her son. “If so, I’ll be sure to give the dog the credit.”
“Fungus turtulus,” Dylan said, smiling.
As they continued, the path was often obscured by leaves and snow, but Maggie and Dylan had no trouble finding their way. Nearly every morning, before Dylan went to school and Maggie to work at the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, they walked a loop though the forest, tending to their Fungus-Among-Us projects.
It had started almost a year ago, a few weeks before Dylan’s ninth birthday. On one of their off-trail jaunts through the woods, he had excitedly pointed to a patch of brown fungus on a tree, swearing that it looked just like Albert Einstein. Maggie hadn’t seen the resemblance, but it had given her an idea. For his upcoming birthday, she hatched a plan to spell out DYLAN—9! on a log using fungus as living paint.
A week later, she was in the hospital with multiple fractures to her leg, the victim of a horrific crash with a pickup truck. On their way home from a hike, Dylan had been strapped tightly in the backseat when the out-of-control pickup T-boned their Volkswagen. Dylan was shaken up but not hurt, but the Ithaca College senior driving the pickup had been propelled straight through the windshield. He didn’t make it to the hospital.
They talked about it many times afterward, the fragility of life. Dylan was having a hard time with it.
“You could have died, too, Mom,” he’d said.
She hugged him. “I know, sweetie. But I didn’t.”
Fungus-Among-Us proved to be a helpful distraction. Figuring out how to do it turned into quite a project. Ultimately, she’d taken her cue from the waxy coatings that plants use to ward off bugs and fungi, making a stencil in wax paper and attaching it to a log. She’d carefully made the wax paper’s edges flush with the surface of the wood, using candle wax to seal them. Then she’d liberally sprinkled on mold spores and left the whole thing alone for two weeks. The wax held, and the mold had grown on the exposed parts. The final result was striking, as if the woods themselves were wishing her son a happy birthday. Dylan had been giddy with delight, for the first time in too long. He’d started having nightmares a few days after the accident. They didn’t come quite as often these days, but still with some regularity he’d wake screaming in the night, terrified that everyone he loved was dying.
Maggie and son had gone on to develop other approaches. A few brushstrokes of potato broth and sugar on a log would yield a healthy patch of Aspergillus in a couple of days. Sugar water brought the textured black of a sooty mold. With a million species to choose from, the possibilities were endless. They had a wonderful time with their joint project while her leg healed. Dylan still awoke from nightmares, thrashing and sweating, but not quite as often. Maggie had hoped that once the cast was off her leg, the last reminder of the accident, everything might go back to normal.
But then Dylan had his first panic attack.
A short spur trail led them to their major task this morning—the removal of the wax paper from their latest Fungus-Among-Us project. There were now bits of mycological art on trees and stumps all over Ithaca, thanks to the mother-and-son Connor team. They both loved the idea of unsuspecting travelers happening upon their creations, certain that forest sprites had been at work. Today’s project was a triquetra.
It was as large as a pumpkin and chest-high on the trunk of a decaying spruce. The wax paper was still affixed to it. “You do this one,” she said to her son.
“Really?”
“Go for it.”
Dylan scrunched up his face and went to work, delicately tugging at the edges, peeling it bit by bit. Maggie had always loved the design, the interlocking strands. The triquetra was of Celtic origin, and only later was it appropriated by Christians as a symbol of the Holy Trinity. To the Celts, it represented the three phases of the feminine life cycle: the maiden, the mother, and the crone.
The removal step was tricky; sometimes pieces of the fungus would rip off and give the work a flawed, torn-edged look. But this time the wax paper came off perfectly, and the result was stunning. The ancient symbol melded elegantly with its surroundings, life growing out of the dead. She gave her son a squeeze. “It’s beautiful.”
“I don’t know. There’s a little spot at the bottom.…”
She mussed his hair. “It’s perfect. Just like you. Now come on.” She looked around. “Turtle?”
They met up with the dog at the top of a small rise. With the leaves half down, you could see the sharp lines of Rivendell in the distance. They started back, but they hadn’t gone more than a few steps before Turtle stopped, cocked his head. Maggie picked it up a second later. Panicked voices.
“Maaaagggiiieeee!!!!!”
“Dylan!!!!!!!”
THEY WERE BREATHLESS BY THE TIME THEY MADE IT BACK.
Cindy was on the back porch, arms wrapped around her chest. Beside her stood the county sheriff, a shiny star of metal on his chest.
Cindy had tears in her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m so, so sorry.”
4
TWO HUNDRED STUDENTS WERE PACKED INTO SCHWARTZ AUDITORIUM for the nine a.m. lecture of Physics 1205, “Physics for Presidents.” Jake Sterling was twenty minutes into the lecture. He’d gotten off to a slow start—the long night before had seen too much honesty, and the subsequent three a.m. end of a four-month relationship—but now he was hitting his stride.
The premise of “Physics for Presidents” was simpl
e: assume your audience was composed of future presidents of the United States. You have them for one semester. What lessons would be of optimal utility? Jake’s answer was simple: he taught them the rules of the world. What could and could not happen. We could build a nuclear submarine but not a nuclear airplane. There was enough sunlight to power the United States by solar, but only if we carpeted a good chunk of Nevada with solar cells. His was an Army man’s approach, a presentation of options. Jake hadn’t worn the uniform for well over a decade, but he still had the no-nonsense attitude of a soldier.
“Isaac Newton was the tipping point—a solitary man standing at the transition between the ancient world and the modern. Before Newton, we were a civilization of superstitious craftsmen. We could make plows and crossbows and trebuchets, but our understanding of the world—and our ability to control it—was something that we learned by experience, by trial and error. Or we were guided by ‘experts’ that had a line to a deeper truth. Religious leaders. Shamans. People who spent their lives waiting for the gods to reveal the mysterious forces at work in the universe. But no more. After Newton, you just sat down with pencil and paper and worked it all out. No magic. No mumbo jumbo. And no special training required, except a decent knowledge of mathematics.”
Jake had taught this course three semesters in a row, a record for him in the eight years he’d been at Cornell. He typically switched teaching assignments as often as he could, preferring to wander the entire curriculum instead of digging deeper and deeper into the same hole. But he loved this course. His colleagues in other departments made noise about how art, politics, or the pen was a hammer to shape the world, but in Jake’s estimation, technology was the biggest hammer out there.
Jake continued. “People wasted little time putting Newton’s laws, and those of Maxwell, Einstein, and Schrödinger, to productive use. And since we had laws for everything, no matter how big or small, they allowed us to move beyond everyday human scales. The first great push was toward the ever bigger: mighty dams, great oceangoing vessels, and—perhaps the high-water mark of the big—venturing to the moon. Now we are in a second revolution. Question: what is it?”