Aftermath

by Charles Sheffield

  "So how did you get out of there?" Dana asked. "I mean, if it was so dangerous."

  Seth grinned at her. "I'm not always the high-class gent you see today. I had to do a little slice-and-dice of my own before I was out of the city. No big deal, nothin' to get excited about. But I managed. That rice cooked yet?"

  Art nodded to Dana. She began loading it onto flat pieces of hardboard made by breaking a ruined painting into three parts. The kitchens had been emptied of all the plates, and the hardboard fragments were her best approximation. The original picture had showed a group of pirates burying treasure. Art, turning his piece over before Dana loaded it, found he was looking at a bearded bare-chested man, a sandy strip of beach, and the prow and foredeck of a sailing ship in the background.

  "So what's your answer?" he asked. "Where are the people?"

  Seth took a load of rice and went back to the window. "What do you think, maestro? I already said my piece."

  "I've not been close to things, the way you have, but nothing you've said surprises me. A lot of people are dead, maybe thousands, and everyone else is going to lie low until the government gets hold of things again, or folks become so starved and desperate that they think they have nothing to lose."

  "Not far off." Seth was eating rapidly, with no sign of reduced appetite at the thought of heaps of corpses within twenty miles. "But you're too optimistic. I'd say you got a few thousand dead where there's big food warehouses and the pressures are less. In the inner cities, though, it's more than that by now. And the starvation and disease are just startin', not to mention rats and flies and polluted water and no food. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better."

  Art glanced across at Dana, wondering how all this talk of death was affecting her. She was nodding thoughtfully and eating as heartily as Seth. When it came to the crunch, she in her own way was as tough as anybody.

  "From what I saw coming over here," she said, "you might both be optimistic. I must say, I didn't waste time stopping to look—the first sign of trouble, I was up to seventy miles an hour and long gone—but I saw plenty of dead bodies. And I passed through whole subsections in the suburbs where the smell was just awful. I only saw one cleanup group, and they were pulling a wheeled trailer by hand."

  "Not today, though." Seth laid his emptied makeshift plate on the broad windowsill. "This snow is the best thing that could have happened to us. Nobody'll be outside who doesn't have to be. How long 'til you're ready to leave? We don't know how long it's goin' to stay this way, might as well take advantage."

  "Two minutes." Art swallowed a final mouthful of rice, washed it down with coffee, and followed Dana out of the dining room.

  "I don't know how you felt," he said softly, when Seth was safely out of hearing, "but I think he may have more to do with the number of dead bodies back in the city than he wants to admit."

  She turned to him and dropped her voice. "I'd bet on it. There's something I ought to have told you last night, but I didn't because we've never talked about other group members before. Did you know that Seth was once put on trial for murder?"

  "He told you that?"

  "No, and I never asked him. When I first met him I remembered reading about it. He was accused of blowing up three of his partners on a boat off Cape May. They were planning to push him out of their business."

  "He was acquitted; he must have been."

  "Right. Good lawyer, tainted evidence. But that doesn't mean he was innocent."

  "I'm sure he wasn't. You heard that 'a little slice-and-dice.' Did you see the gun in his belt when he stood up and his coat was open? I've never seen him wearing clothes before that looked anything like that—and his coat's too big for him."

  Dana, who had reached the top of the stairs, turned to look down on Art. "Honey, you know my views on Seth. I'm not his number one fan, and I'll take you over him any day of the week. But last night he's not the one who arrived wearing somebody else's rubber boots. And I let you into my bedroom."

  "That's different. Those boots were loaned to me by Joe Vanetti." But her point was valid. Seth might have friends, too, though he had the guarded, watchful eyes of a natural loner.

  Dana, before she went into her room, added to that idea. "Forgetting the gun and knife and coat," she said, "I'll tell you one thing about Seth. I've never seen him look as much at ease anywhere as he does here and now. He seems right for this situation. He's at home. That's scary, but it may be just what we are going to need."

  As Art went into his own room he wondered if he would be able to protect Dana from Seth if the need arose. He doubted it. He might be ruthless enough—he believed he could be—but Seth was better armed, younger, and fitter. Art pulled on the outsized boots. More agile, too. Could you walk through snow in these damned things, or would it all be hopeless floundering?

  He donned the purple raincoat and the blue baseball cap, but drew the line at tying the mohair scarf over it. Instead he knotted it around his neck under his coat. The handgun went into the raincoat pocket, baggy and shapeless enough that one more bulge made little difference.

  By comparison, Dana was a fashion plate. She wore a form-fitting jacket and pants of slick dark blue kevlon, black knee-high boots, and a jaunty black cap with built-in earmuffs. Art met her at the top of the stairs. He looked at her appreciatively but dubiously, until she said, "Fully thermal, though they don't look it. Don't worry, Grimaldi, I'll be a lot more comfortable than you will."

  Her words were reassuring. Seth Parsigian's expression, when they joined him in the dining room, was not. Art wondered what Seth would have done had he not been there. And then he knew. Until they had been to the Institute, and determined the status of the telomod treatment program, nothing would sway Seth—or Art himself—from pursuit of the main purpose.

  At stake was something more important than sex. At stake was life and death.

  8

  Seth led the way as they emerged from the inn. Since early morning a wind had arisen. Instead of falling vertically the snow formed drifts along the side of the building and had buried the hedge of flowering forsythia. Overhead, the sky glowed with a leaden, heavy light. If old weather patterns still meant anything after Supernova Alpha, more hours of heavy snow were on the way.

  The highway was deserted. Snow piled against the wheels and doors of abandoned cars, while smaller humps by the side of the road suggested more ominous possibilities. Art felt no urge to investigate. He noticed that last night's sickly odor had vanished from the air, cleansed for the moment by the snow cover.

  The bulk of the Institute for Probatory Therapies formed a faint gray outline through the swirling flakes. Its twenty stories loomed far above the surrounding buildings. Art recalled, with no pleasure at all, that the telomere research center was on the fifteenth floor. Even if they could find a way in, the elevators would certainly not be working.

  "We can try the ground-level entrances again, like I did last night," Seth said softly. "But I think it'll be a waste of time. Our best bet's a fire escape. Dana, you're the lightest and the nimblest. If the two of us give you a hoist . . ."

  "I get it. Then I'll be the one guilty of breaking into government property." But she sounded cheerful at the prospect, and as they approached the building she pulled a long, heavy wrench from the pocket of her pants.

  "You had that thing with you last night?" Art asked.

  "I certainly did." She gave him her sunniest smile. "Be prepared, as my old troop leader used to say. You only asked if I had a gun."

  They had all been speaking in near whispers, keeping sounds to a minimum. As they moved around the Institute, looking up for the black metal filigree of a fire escape, Art realized that the silence was about to end. Entering the locked building could not be done quietly. The sound of breaking glass would carry far across the hushed landscape. Their only hope was that no one would decide to come and investigate.

  The snow-covered bottom of the fire escape was at least ten feet above ground lev
el. Art planted his feet firmly and braced himself with his hands on the wall of the building. Seth stood by his side, using his own interlocked hands to provide Dana with a first foothold. She went up easily, first to waist level, then to place one foot on Art's shoulder and the other on Seth's.

  "I'm not quite high enough." Her voice came from above their heads. "I'll have to jump and grab. Are you ready?"

  Art grunted assent. There was a sudden and painful increase in weight on his shoulder and a shower of dislodged snow. He looked up. Dana was hanging from the bottom of the fire escape, which swung lazily downward under her weight. He and Seth grabbed it as it approached ground level. As soon as her feet touched the ground, Dana stepped around the descending ladder and started up it.

  "I'm past this," she complained. "You need a junior gymnast, not an old lady." But she was already two floors up.

  "Go on." Seth gestured to Art. "It will swing back up as soon as we're off it. We don't want to leave anybody with a ready-made entrance."

  Dana was up at the third floor, crouched by a window. Art hated heights, but he knew he would get no sympathy from the others if he stopped to explain that. He climbed, approaching Dana as she swung her wrench. The sound of breaking glass was incredibly loud. It went on and on, ringing out into the distance as Dana broke away the jagged edges of the hole she had made. Art, just below her, turned to stare out through the falling snow. It had eased off a little. He could see for maybe half a mile. On all that white plain, nothing moved. He followed Dana, scrambling carefully past the jagged edges of the broken window to land on all fours on top of a metal desk. The surface was icy to his hands, and his breath frosted the air. It was as cold inside the building as outside.

  He climbed down, feeling his heart pounding. Was it relief at escape from outside danger, or fear of what they might find on the fifteenth floor? If the telomod treatment was no longer available, he and Seth and Dana were dead. Not dead immediately, not maybe for six months or a year, but dead.

  Without a word, they left the room. It had been some kind of administrative center, with cabinets and lifeless terminals and blank displays scattered in among the broken file trays and desks. Useless junk, Art thought. Objects from a past age, which looters hadn't even thought worth stealing. Would they ever have value again?

  No lights showed on the central bank of elevators, with their smashed-in doors. It was going to be stairs, then, twelve more stories of them. Art put his head down, ignored his knee, and climbed steadily in the lightless stairwell. It was a consolation, when they came at last to the fifteenth floor and emerged into the building's dim interior light, to see Dana and Seth panting as hard as he was. His daily walks on Catoctin Mountain were paying off.

  "Now we find out," Seth grunted, and hurried forward. Dana went after him. Art, much more slowly, followed. He had given up hope of finding Doctors Lasker, Chow, and Taunton, the three key members of the telomod research group, here at the Institute. Now it was a question of discovering where they had gone, following them, and persuading them to continue treatments.

  And then that was no longer the question. Art knew the truth before he entered the lab. Even in the freezing air, the scent of corruption filled his nostrils. He stepped forward, to where Dana and Seth stood in silence at the open double doors.

  The lab had always been messy, but with the organized messiness of a medical research facility. Now it was a chaos of broken glassware, smashed electronic equipment, and overturned furniture. A pitched battle had taken place here, in among the long workbenches.

  What had they been fighting over? Probably something as simple as food or fresh water. There were plenty of genome readers, scanning probe microscopes, and gas chromatography units, but the big jars of distilled water on the lab shelves had all vanished.

  In any case, the reason for the fight did not much matter. And the outcome had been inevitable. With fists and improvised clubs against guns and knives, the staff of the Institute hadn't had a chance. It had been a planned attack, too, with assistance from someone on the inside, because the doors and windows of the Institute showed no signs of an earlier break-in.

  Seth stepped forward and paced the cluttered space between two of the benches. He stopped halfway along. "Here's Dr. Mackerras," he said, softly and without emotion. "And here's Janina—she was the lab technician who gave me my treatment. I always liked her." He took two more steps and leaned over a body. "I think this is Dr. Chow, but his name tag's gone. And half his face has been blown away."

  Dana and Art, without a word, separated and began their own inspection of the space between and around the workbenches.

  "Dr. Rothstein," she said after a few seconds. "And Gil Senta—he was the first person to interview me, when I wanted to join the program. Here's somebody I don't recognize—probably from outside, he's dressed differently. Dr. Lasker is underneath Gil. Looks like she died of gunshot wounds. Three of them, in the head."

  Art seemed to be the lucky one, if that was the right word for it. The aisle along which he walked was a jungle of shattered glass and twisted metal, but he saw no people. Then he turned the corner, and wasn't lucky after all. Four bodies, ice-cold when he moved them to see their faces, lay tangled together.

  "Dr. Taunton is here," he said. He did his best to keep his voice neutral, as Seth and Dana had done. They would realize, without histrionics or explanations on his part, that his words spelled doom for all of them. Dr. Taunton was the third member of the triumvirate. The three leaders of the telomod treatment group were all dead, and telomod therapy still had a big experimental component. Even if living members of the Institute's support staff could be found, they lacked the knowledge needed to adapt treatments to changing circumstances.

  Art kept walking the aisles. The damage to equipment, when you looked at it more closely, was not so bad as at first sight. Given good technicians—and electrical power, and spare parts, and working microchips—it might be made to work again. None of those things was available; but nothing was so complete a disaster as the loss of the top brains of the program.

  Seth Parsigian had given up on his own inspection. He climbed on top of one of the workbenches and sat cross-legged amid the mess. His arms were folded, and he hunched forward with his head bowed.

  "All right," he said as Dana and Art walked over to join him. "We got us a setback. Question is, where do we go from here?"

  "They're dead," Dana said. She clutched Art's arm, hard. "All of them. Even if some technicians got away, they don't know enough to help."

  "Maybe in some other city, on the West Coast . . ." Art said. But as he spoke he knew he was offering false hope. The telomod treatment group had drawn its members from all over the country. There were even a couple from Asia and Europe. Why would they come all the way to the Institute if the same thing could be found anywhere?

  Seth picked up a long splinter of glass and fingered its edge. "No, no. It's hard enough to travel locally. We'd be chasing rainbows lookin' for another group someplace. Anyway, we don't have time for that."

  Finally he raised his head, to stare at the other two. "We're down to long shots. How much risk are you willing to take?"

  "Anything," Dana said at once. Art nodded agreement, but he was thinking: Down to long shots? Wasn't this trip to the Institute already a long shot?

  "Any amount of risk," he said. "If I knew what to do. Do you have something in mind?"

  "Oh, yes." Seth acted amused—there was a smile on his face, no matter how little it seemed to belong there. "How long since you joined the telomod program?"

  "Nearly three years," Art said, and Dana added, "Closer to four for me—my anniversary is next month."

  "That right? Me, I'm one of the old-timers—in the program near five years, started when they didn't hardly know what they was doin'. Got scars to prove it. And I got a lot more years to go, touch wood." Seth slapped the black bench top, which was hardened plastic. "I'm not about to give up."

  Dana glanced at Art, a look
that said, Is Seth losing it? What's he talking about?

  "Back then," Seth went on, "Lasker and Taunton were already involved. Dr. Chow arrived four months after I had my first shot of telomerase inhibitor, two months after my tumors started shrinking and I began to think I might have some kind of chance. Old Chinaman Chow was a new boy compared to me. And 'cause I was one of the first, I heard some of the old history, back before my time. See, Lasker and Taunton knew what they were doing, but the techies round the labs told me they weren't the brains behind the project. The real genius, the spark who started things going here, he was somebody else."

  "I never heard of anybody like that," Art said slowly. "And I think I've met most people around the Institute."

  "Yeah. See, he was never at the Institute. He was a big-brain research scientist, doing his own thing at some ol' college. He never had a hands-on role in the application of telomod therapy, but he knew more about the basics than anybody. And I'd bet money—if money meant anything now—that you did hear of him."

  "I'm sure I didn't."

  "Me neither," Dana added.

  "Ah. Neither of you ever heard of a man called Guest?"

  "Never," Dana said, while Art stood staring.

  "Oliver Guest? Doctor Oliver Guest?" Parsigian laughed aloud at the expressions of understanding and disbelief on their faces. "Ah, now you're gettin' there."

  "Grisly Guest," Dana said.

  "The child murderer," added Art.

  "One and the same." Seth nodded casually. "From around these parts, too. Local boy makes good."

  "But he worked on clone research, not telomod therapy," Dana objected. "The clone king. He knew more about cloning than anybody. At least, that's what they reported during the trial."