Something to lift him out of the sure knowledge of the coming conflict, some moment of peace and elevation before whatever ugliness is to come.
He finds Green sitting at the telescope. Crouched in the driver’s seat, bent and positioned to thrust into deep space. Heller realizes it is akin to the thrill of speed, of racing into the colors and joy of the unknown, and yet it is that deep thrill coupled with stillness. A thrill of stillness.
He knows what he is doing here. He realizes it somewhere in his preparations to visit Green:
He doesn’t know if he’ll have the chance to look through the telescope again. He doesn’t know if anyone will.
Yes, Green is sitting there, in the driver’s seat, the jump seat to the universe, but he is not looking through it. He is not working at all, Heller notices. No paperwork. Just staring down. Staring out. He barely registers Heller’s entrance, it seems. But he proves that he is aware of it.
“Everything’s changed since your last visit, hasn’t it?” says Green. Listless. Unmoored. A new vacantness in his manner, in his eyes. “It’s no longer the stars, the heavens. It’s now survival. It’s going to be our basest instincts, isn’t it, Mr. Heller? The kinds of things you’ve seen your whole career. The kinds of things I’ve never had to think about. That now I’ll be forced to think about. That we’re all now forced to think about.”
“We don’t know that yet. It’s still too soon to be so demoralized. We don’t know what happened yet.”
“Something bad. Something very bad.”
Heller doesn’t want to violate the natural, unspoken trust that has built up between them. A thin but strong little string of connection that he wants to remain intact, so there’s no use prevaricating or being falsely cheerful. “Yes, probably something bad,” Heller admits.
“We’re idiots,” says Green, shaking his head. “We can explore the cosmos, we’re within inches of understanding our arrival on Earth, our presence here, our interaction with matter, and yet left to our own devices, left to our other, accompanying impulses, we’re idiots. We achieve the worst. We prove our idiocy, over and over. It rises to the top, quashes everything else about us.”
Heller is silent. There’s no use arguing with that—it tracks pretty well with Heller’s own darkest thoughts.
Green gestures to the gleaming telescope. “It was my object of desire. My lifelong passion. Now it’s as useless, as valueless as a pile of junk.” He looks at it disdainfully, turns away from it. “Hundreds of millions of dollars to build, Mr. Heller. A can of beans is now worth more.”
Green hangs his head. “What was the point of my sitting here in this chair, all my late nights focused on the sky, my absenting myself, devoting myself to something bigger, grander. What was the point? It’s all going to die with us. All this knowledge. All this effort. I’ve been wandering around this observatory in aimless circles, asking all these unanswerable questions. Thinking about my life. How a life dedicated—a life focused—became so suddenly a life wasted. How a life of intelligence became in an instant a life so foolish.”
The telescope. It’s magnifying man’s foolishness right now, isn’t it, thinks Heller. Amplifying it, clarifying it, bringing it close, painfully close, in all its vivid colors and hues, too bright to look at, too bright to put your eye to the eyepiece. So Green does not.
“I’d like to look,” says Heller.
“One last time?” asks Green dolefully. “Is that what you really mean? Look one last time?”
Heller nods. It is what he means. There’s no denying it.
He is looking for Trish. Looking for Amy. Looking for himself. Looking while he is himself, before the inevitable chaos and ending descent.
Green flips off the eyepiece cover. Spins several dials. Squints as he adjusts the view. He can’t help himself. He is still the ambassador of the universe. Ambassador to our best impulses, our better natures.
He gives a nod and a sad smile. “Take a look, Mr. Heller. Our universe, there for the taking. And now, it will slip past us. Slip past mankind, return to stasis without us. It was all ours. And now we’ll melt back into it in a different form of matter, I suppose, and the universe will hardly know and certainly won’t care.”
Green checks the eyepiece one last time, slides out of the seat, and gestures to Heller to slide into it.
“Remember, you asked about the feeling of insignificance?” Green says. “Well, now I feel it. But it’s not the multitude of stars that brings on the feeling for me. It’s mankind’s own failing, our own stupidity and avidity and greed that make me feel insignificant. Make me feel small and useless, like the lowest and most untrainable of creatures.”
He makes a final adjustment as Heller ducks to put his eye to the cosmos.
To drink it in. To drown in it. To forget. To remember. To absent himself. To be himself fully.
As Heller is first looking through the eyepiece, a bright object passes surprisingly close across the lens’s field. Close enough, sudden enough to startle him, and he is about to ask Green about it, when he realizes—a satellite. Still in orbit. Unobserved, unmanned, circling uselessly, for hundreds more years. A symbol of their technological achievement. And of their ability to help themselves, to save themselves, remaining forever out of reach.
He doesn’t mention it to Green. Green has undoubtedly seen the satellites pass too.
He focuses instead on the sky beyond it.
Which takes his breath away once more.
Green knows it. Green can see it.
“We never got to the stars, Mr. Heller,” he says.
And then is silent, letting the thought hang there, simple and unadorned.
And after a moment: “It’s just us, now. So it dies with us, Mr. Heller. It dies with us.”
61.
Word spreads quickly about the locks on the food cabinets. It amplifies the undercurrent of anxiety. There’s enough food at the moment, plenty of food, but the fact that the food is now locked up indicates to many at McMurdo that there isn’t enough.
Manafort knows there’s enough food, thinks Heller. He knows it better than anyone. So locking the cabinets is only a way of accelerating the panic, accelerating the confrontation. Manafort is pretty clever. Making stews, cooking for hundreds year after year, brooding and plotting the whole time. Stirring up trouble, literally.
There are soon efforts to get into the locked cabinets. Silent night raids. People trying to jimmy the locks. Sawing and cracking the wood around the hinges. News of this only panics people further.
Food is found hidden in rooms. It indicates preferential treatment. It causes fights.
“Locking those cabinets has caused a host of problems,” says Simmons bitterly.
Just as Manafort knew it would, thinks Heller. But he keeps quiet.
“This is insane. We have plenty of food. We have to meet with everyone in the cafeteria to reassure them. To talk them through it,” says Hobbes.
It won’t do any good, thinks Heller. They won’t believe you. It will only make it worse.
“Meeting with everyone means Manafort will be there,” Heller points out. “Locking the cabinets was his doing. He’ll have something to say. It could come across as a standoff.”
“We’ve got no choice. We’ve got to get everyone together about the food. We’ve got to try to talk sense.”
Good luck with that, thinks Heller.
62.
The meeting is at 9:00 a.m. The cafeteria is full. Shoulder to shoulder. All 156 of them.
Hobbes faces the room. Manafort stands by a chair in the first row. Already standing, as if ready to speak, ready to defend, ready to lead.
They are surrounded by a nervous, anxious, agitated population.
No longer really a scientific community. Now, this morning, a community of survivalists. A town meeting against the approaching storm, thinks Heller. The approaching hurricane. Will we work together or duck and cover separately?
“There’s been an undue amount of
worry about the food supply . . . ,” Hobbes begins.
“Well, what do you expect? Suddenly all the food is locked up!” someone shouts.
“It was locked up because a sizable contingent here felt it was safer, more prudent to lock it,” Hobbes says, diplomatically.
“Maybe we should have a vote,” someone else shouts from the back.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” says Robert Manafort suddenly—confident, forceful—turning to the room. “Who says a democratic system is the best for us? That’s just the kind of system that may have finished everyone off north of us. Democracies, all over the planet. And when there was trouble, there were too many opinions on what to do. Too many voices. And it was too late, too fast. Let’s not make the same mistake twice. Mankind can’t afford that.”
“Bobby, we don’t know that’s what happened. You’re jumping to conclusions.”
“We better jump to some conclusions, Manny. We better start to. Or we could be finished. Finished forever.”
Hobbes and Manafort stand and stare silently at each other.
Heller can feel the room divide. Divide in two.
Divide evenly? He can’t say.
The old way—steady, stable, trust me, hang in there, everything will be okay—personified in Hobbes.
The new way—change, extraordinary times, heaven’s trumpets, humanity’s last stand, everything is NOT okay, don’t be fooled, this is serious, everything is different now—manifested in Manafort.
And why shouldn’t the cook lead them now? Why not their cook, instead of some scientist? Why not the person who feeds them—for they have never had such a need of sustenance as now.
Heller realizes: Hobbes is the old system. The old system that by all indications finished them off. That didn’t work. Manafort is the outsider. Something new. At least a chance.
And Manafort of course has something else that Hobbes doesn’t. Manafort has God. And God would never have been such an ally, but the prospective end of the world has suddenly brought him back. Suddenly resurrected him. The prospect of nothingness—of an ending, of finality, of a void—has suddenly reignited the power of the concept of God. Brought about his renewed presence. Whether Manafort believes in God or not—still an open question—he is putting God on his side. He has invoked him. And God, apparently, has been waiting for this. Waiting as if patiently, or impatiently, for this.
Particularly clever because people need to believe in something beyond themselves. Heller realizes Manafort will win. Election or no election, process or no process, Manafort will win.
“The Lord is with us, Hobbes. I know you’re not a believer, but the Lord is with us, and he will see us through, as long as we acknowledge him, as long as we see him and feel him. I’m sorry it took this—this catastrophe—to bring him back to us, to bring him alive in each of us, to awaken us to his presence always in us, but it did, and for us, it is not too late. For whatever reason, unfathomable to us, we are chosen . . .”
“We are not chosen,” says Hobbes, red faced, irate, frothy, fulminating. “We happen to be here. It’s a random fate determined by the science of weather or wind pattern or the extremes of surface temperature or ocean current, some climatological effects either common or peculiar that science can eventually help us work out and comprehend. It’s the whim of the pathogen, the whim of the poison, that’s all. Let’s not let a different kind of poison get us, Bobby. Don’t let a different kind of poison, poison us. Let’s pull together. Let’s stay together.”
“I’m all for pulling together, staying together. But I have a different leader in mind. A more experienced, more trustworthy leader than you or me, that’s all. I think this takes someone and something bigger than us, Manny, don’t you? Don’t you think so?”
Heller senses again that Manafort truly believes. It’s not cynical on his part. He believes. He’s doing what he thinks is right.
Manafort and Hobbes stare at each other again. Silently. Balefully.
But it’s not a standoff anymore, thinks Heller. Manafort will win. And they will all lose.
And that is what he is thinking when Calloway leans up behind him and says, very quietly, “Can you come to the infirmary?”
Heller nods.
“Ten minutes.” Adding: “Make sure no one sees you.”
63.
Heller knocks. The infirmary door opens. Calloway is standing behind it, waves him in. Shuts the door quickly behind him.
He motions Heller to sit down. He looks at him. He allows the silence to descend on them. Heller detects a liveliness, a sense of irony, a sense of wistfulness and eagerness and wisdom in Calloway’s eyes. I’ve got something. Something to tell you, Heller, those eyes say plainly.
“I know this will not be pleasant for you, but it’s important.”
He opens a manila folder, fans the pictures out. Photographs of Trish Wong’s corpse. Calloway took them, as part of his effort to perform at least a partial autopsy there in the infirmary, with Sorenson’s help, when it was decided that Trish would be cremated. As they thawed the stored body, they had to at least try to learn what they could. In his preoccupation, in his grief, Heller hadn’t even considered the existence of such photos. There is, of course, no avoiding them now.
In the top photos, she looks very much like herself—herself distressingly transformed. Whiter, paler, immovable, eyes open, facing up, empty. An empty vessel. Although he tries, Heller finds he is not able to absent himself. He feels an instant nausea, visceral, his stomach muscles involuntarily reacting. He takes a breath to control it. Grips the edge of the desk.
Calloway shuffles to a close-up of the base of Trish’s neck. The little red mark left by the hypodermic. The needle never found, but the evidence of its pinprick right there. “That little red needle mark. The barely detectable way that a poison would have been injected. At the base of the skull. You said you couldn’t figure out how someone got it into Sandy Lazo-Wasum and then into Trish without their fighting it or reacting in some way, right? Could a poison be that fast acting? Mere seconds? So instantly paralyzing, let’s say, that you couldn’t even move to defend yourself? Obviously, they were somehow surprised from behind or were sleeping or otherwise preoccupied. And the base of the skull, a brutally efficient way of injecting poison, whatever it is, directly into the bloodstream, right at the neural cluster of the upper spinal column, maximally effective point of entry, right?”
Heller nods. “Right.”
Calloway looks at Heller. “Take a breath, Joe. Sorry to have to show you this, but as I say, it’s important. With what’s going on at McMurdo right now, maybe real important.”
He fans out some new photos of Trish.
Further into the autopsy effort. Photos where the skin at the base of her neck is peeled back, her ligaments and muscles and spinal cord exposed. Photos civilians aren’t subjected to, not even in court.
Heller’s whole chest heaves. He feels like retching. He swallows. Holds it down.
“The pinprick that so obviously indicates the injection of poison, right? And the obvious conclusion about that injection site—poison injected highly efficiently. But when I looked at these photos again, looked really closely, I saw that the path of the needle doesn’t penetrate to the bloodstream. It goes only as far as the surface tissue and ligaments. There’s no damage to the muscle and the nerves at the point of release. In normally warm, ambient temperatures, there’d be no path indicated, the needle would be withdrawn, and the tissue would close around it. But luckily for us in this climate, the tissue is slow to close over, slow to respond to that kind of intrusion, even one as slender as a needle, and all the tissue kind of freezes in place for a little.” He looks up from the photos at Heller. “There was never any poison in that hypodermic. That hypodermic was injected only to leave the mark on the skin’s surface. Only to have us think it was poison. We thought the killer was trying to hide it, hoping we wouldn’t find it. But the killer was hoping we would find it. And assume it was an injection of
poison. And head any investigation in that direction.”
Calloway taps one of the photos of the red mark. “I think that pinprick mark was left after Lazo-Wasum and Trish were dead. And that’s how someone got to the base of their skulls, and that’s how they never responded. You were right, Joe Heller. Your crazy instinct was right.” He begins to put the autopsy photos back in the manila envelope. “This is a killer who is incredibly careful and calculating.”
“But, if it wasn’t poison . . .”
“Oh, it was still poison,” says Calloway. “But the killer is trying to point us to an injectable poison. A certain kind and class of poison. And point us away from something else.” He looks at Heller and allows himself a tiny smile.
“You have something you want to tell me.”
“There is a species of snake we have here at the base, in one of the research labs. Its venom has enormous potential medical and pharmaceutical value, and interacts with the cold interestingly, so a couple of the scientists—Tallent and Blevins, I’m sure you met them—have been doing research with that venom here for several years. Their research is sponsored by two big pharma companies. It’s proprietary and potentially hugely lucrative, so they don’t share their findings, even between themselves. Anyway, the species’ venom is among the deadliest toxins in nature and very fast acting. Of course Tallent and Blevins are modifying the venom—distilling and reconstituting and reprocessing—but the pure poison can directly penetrate the pores of your epidermis, and go undetected until it’s too late. Which is only a minute later, at most. Asphyxiation due to respiratory paralysis. For generations, that’s how certain Amazonian tribesmen have used the venom for their spear tips, to incapacitate local prey, which is how these powerful toxins were originally discovered.”
Heller is silent. Motionless. McMurdo, the world to the north, all of it has momentarily fallen away.
“Tallent and Blevins’ supply of snakes is shipped each season from the Amazon, and after the venom is extracted, the specimens are euthanized. Because of their toxicity, and because this is a scientific community, the original specimens are all accounted for when they come into the labs and destroyed immediately after they’ve made their contribution to science, but . . . someone could have gotten ahold of a couple, and been breeding them. It wouldn’t take much to steal a specimen or two, feed them, mate them—not all that hard, and not that hard to keep anyone from knowing. Someone who’s very careful, obsessive, like this killer seems to be. I could see a certain kind of person, a certain kind of scientific mind getting very excited about these snakes. Excited about the prospect of killing in this way. And fooling and misdirecting the investigation—the so-called experts—with a pinprick.”
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