A Slow Cold Death Page 6

  “That I’m locked up in the hospital with yellow fever? Less than a week after she’s back in town!”

  “You don’t have yellow fever,” Carol reminded her. “It’s just a precaution. My husband is down there too, remember. I have to figure out how to get his car home—”

  “We’re all down here!” howled Abby. “She manages to slime the whole department, practically, then walks by and smirks at us like we’re in the pound! Remember how her parents died under mysterious circumstances when she was only twelve? And her least favorite professor washed up in the arroyo the day she graduated. Remember that? Silverman, the department head. And we were there when her worst enemy just happened to die in grad school. And now Roger!”

  “Lori loved Roger,” Carol objected, before she remembered that she didn’t really want Abby to know that their old classmate had come to visit her. Even though she’d only spent a year in their program, Abby had established the friends Carol was allowed and forbidden to have. Admiring Lori from afar was grudgingly accepted, talking to her had to be done in secret, and having her over for brunch and landscaping would have been no less than a scandal.

  Abby was too mad to pick up on subtleties, though. “Oh yeah, that’s why he’s fine till she comes to town, then BOOM! What was that song I made up in grad school?”

  Carol winced. Most of Abby’s cruel songs had been about her. “I don’t know. Not ‘Death and Lori’?”

  “Ha! That was a good one! But I was thinking of—” she began, and then from her room in St. Vitus’s, Abby burst into what had to be the cruelest of her songs: “The Freaks in Our Class.” Resonating through Carol’s LPRL phone, to the tune of “My Favorite Things,” came the old forgotten words

  “Lori’s a killer and Roger is crazy

  I’d transfer out if I wasn’t so lazy

  The students have scurvy, the profs smell like pus

  Tell me, why’s grad school so vile and heinous?”

  “I don’t really want to be reminded,” protested Carol, who was feeling guilty about gabbing on the phone at work. “I’m the one who spent eight years there.” Even though in principle she was the one who succeeded, Carol was still intimidated by Abby, who had always been everything that was more perfect: taller, thinner, blonder, smarter, fitter, and more social. She had not “dropped out” of grad school—she had left in disgust to do better things.

  “I don’t know how you did it.” Abby was not in the least envious. “I should just refuse to have anything to do with the physics department! Last week I did a contract for the new animal facility. STI has gone totally bio, and they have monkeys and all kinds of terrible things. The vivisectionists were creepy as all get out, but at least they knew how to dress and talk. I’m telling you,” Abby was calming down a bit, no longer shouting, “I was having flashbacks the instant I stepped in that building. These mutants came running at us out of the basement, a guy in a puke-jacket dragging this girl by her pigtails, holy guacamole! Then they make us walk through the basement and start screaming that we all have a disease. They called an ambulance, for Pete’s sake! I had to ride here in an ambulance with the mutants!”

  Carol found herself unable to suppress a laugh. It was an awful lot like some of the things that had happened in grad school. “So it really is physics,” she mused, “not just the school we went to. I kind of like the idea of refusing to work with the physics department. Say you were traumatized as a child by a physicist.”

  “As soon as this one is over, believe me.”

  Carol was taken aback. “I thought it was over. My husband said it was over. He got his contract through to hire the guy.”

  “Huh?” Abby sneered. “We didn’t have our meeting, stupid. We didn’t even make it upstairs.”

  “I don’t know!” Carol was not being a boson this time. “I spent all morning running around with the paperwork so Bob could hire this guy. He’s supposed to start on Monday.”

  “If you didn’t get the principal investigator’s signature,” said Abby casually, “it’s illegal. But,” she added brightly, “I so don’t care! He’s a mutant too!”

  Carol really needed to get back to work, but long experience had taught her that blowing off Abby was not allowed. Containing her impatience, she promised to go to the gym and day spa with her friend the moment the victims were released, and then finally hang up and sprinted out the door to the All-STUMPs Meeting about the Polar Institute Proposal.

  Of all of the STUMPs—Science, Technology, Upper Management, Principals—everyone but Upper Mangement was on “soft money,” meaning that they had to find a project or projects that would agree to cover their salaries. They said it had been a fine system when there were billion-dollar missions, but Carol hadn’t ever seen that era, and now it was a lot harder. Their overheads, which paid the managers, were so high that the average project couldn’t even support a full person.

  In the six years she’d been here, things had gotten noticeably worse. When she was hired, she had been split fifty-fifty between two charge accounts, called SLAPs for Science Lead Authorization for Project. Now she had eight SLAPs, and it was hard to do the accounting—she spent at least an hour every Thursday afternoon trying to make sure she was charging each project fairly. She still always felt guilty, thinking she really wasn’t contributing anything to anyone because she was split too many ways.

  Of course, it was different if you had your own money. Anyone lucky enough to win a proposal could choose how much time he or she worked on that project, up to full-time if there was enough to go around. She didn’t know anyone of her generation in that situation, though. Writing a proposal at the LPR Lab was an organization-wide effort, and you had to have influence with upper management to get a science role. People like her made copies, typed out the “compliance matrix” so the investigators would know if their proposal contained everything it needed, and proofread it if they were lucky.

  She was hoping for a proofreading SLAP, since two of her current projects were probably going to disappear. Drop below 80% coverage and you’d be laid off after a week. That was another thing that changed since she’d been hired—it used to be a month.

  The Polar Institute Proposal was huge. Six hundred million dollars, and control over not just the big experimental physics projects but the new Polar Astrobiology Center as well. The managers presenting at the meeting spent over two hours giving the proposal requirements to a packed room, and between the heat and the excess carbon dioxide, Carol was practically asleep by the time the excitement began.

  Then the lab’s chief scientist stood up. He looked too much like a teenager, skinny and platinum blond with a pointy nose and a squeaky voice—it was hard to take him seriously. He actually tried to argue in front of all the employees that LPRL was not a credible leader in astrobiology, the search for life on other planets. “We don’t do biology here!” he squealed. “We’re not allowed to do biology here! We had an astrobiologist, and he left without even starting his experiments. He abandoned a hundred pounds of Antarctic ice cores in the freezer. If we could analyze them, we’d win this proposal hands down, but we can’t because of our own rules and bureaucracy!”

  Everyone sat up straight, waiting to see what would happen. There were intakes of breath. But it ended as quickly as it begun—he was shuffled off the podium by two men in turbans, and various other managers tried to make things right.

  “We will win,” declared Carol’s Colony Manager, Ellis D. Tripp, “because of our organization. No university has the time, the resources, the people to respond to this proposal the way the LPRL can.”

  This was apparently not enough because the Lab Director stepped in. He was a tiny olive-skinned Iranian with thick glasses and an even thicker accent, named El-Something or Something El-Something… Carol could never remember, it seemed the Director was changed monthly under directions from Washington.

  “We will win,” declared El-Something, raising his hands for silence, “because we are the best. I wouldn�
�t trade all the resources of STI for one single LEPER!” Balling his hands into fists, he started them on the chant, “Four three two one, send a rocket to the sun….”

  The noise became unbearable as the room took up the cry. Carol hated this kind of thing. It was pathetic to see chubby middle-aged engineers in cheap suits acting like they were in the Marines. Having just spoken with Abby didn’t help, Abby who parodied everything and would no doubt be whispering something like, One two three four, I’m a fat and sweaty bore…

  All she’d wanted was a SLAP, but it looked like she’d be stuck here for the rest of the day and probably end up with nothing. Five six seven eight, see the mutants froth with hate.

  When the meeting finally ended, it was not yet four o’clock and her boss told her to go ahead and go home. Knowing she would be spending the evening alone, she took advantage of the remaining daylight to head off lab to the foothills, where there was a four-mile jogging trail up Lobo Peak. There weren’t any wolves that she’d heard of, but there were definitely bobcats and mountain lions.

  Part of the fun of working here was the contrast, the real wilderness right by the rocket science lab where you could still get mauled by a bear. Of course, they’d had a lot of problems since 9/11—the reinforced fences would let the deer in but not let them out. The generation of deer born on campus was excessively tame and aggressive, stealing food off people’s tables while they were eating lunch and once even tripping a cyclist and killing him. Now no one was allowed to bicycle on lab.

  Officially they were supposed to get around on little yellow go-carts driven by trained personnel, but Carol didn’t like them. They were noisy and stinky and the brakes didn’t work on hills. She could usually get away with walking (not jogging), so she held her head high and tried to look official as she strolled past the guard gate and out into the park.

  During her run, she realized that her husband’s car gave her an excuse to try to get the other side of the yellow fever story. Sitting on an outcrop looking over the valley, she took deep breaths of the clean air above the smog and then dialed Lori’s office number on her cell phone. She told her to pedal up from campus and wait outside the guard gate, where the guards wouldn’t see her, and Carol would come by with Bob’s car and then walk back for her own.

  Then in a moment of inspiration, she asked if Lori would like to go out for Mexican food and dancing afterwards. Not only did Lori accept, but she suggested a club where the last band of the night was their old classmates in 500 milliCoulombs of Happiness.

  Kurt, the band’s drummer, and Andrew, who played the bass, had not been among Carol’s closest friends in grad school, but they had had boson status in common. They had spent many long hours on the steps of the physics building discussing the relative merits of dropping out or seeing things through. Although fate had drawn them all to the West, she found it hard to go to see them play now that their dreams had come to fruition. Kurt had rejected her in grad school to pursue Absinthe, who loathed him, and it still hurt to imagine him ignoring her when he found out Abby too now lived in town.

  In some deep uncharitable part of her mind, Carol knew that things would be different with Lori. Men reacted badly to her, since she had a way of making them all feel clumsy, hopeless with tools, and all-around stupid. Even if a guy ever did think Lori was cute, she would remain blissfully unconscious of the fact or make puking noises like a ten-year-old. Of course Carol was married, and had no intention of ever doing anything to hurt Bob, but it might be fun to spend just one evening with her own private wingman.

  Seven: Rose to the Occasion

  Lori’s undergraduate House took nothing more seriously than a good prank, and everyone knew that once a Bubo, always a Bubo.

  If pressed, she might try to argue that this wasn’t so much a prank as an investigation. After all, she wasn’t a kid anymore. She had a mere twelve months to go before her tenure review…eleven months and three weeks as of tomorrow. Nevertheless, her heart skipped excitedly and she cackled to herself as she flew down the hill on her road bike, Goldstein bumping on her back in case it turned out the building was quarantined and she was forced to study in spite of herself.

  Naturally the building was wide open. University biohazard committees were notoriously lax, and STI’s was one of the very worst. Where else could a thirteen-year-old freshman practice electron microscopy on live viruses left behind by a tropical disease expert who hadn’t even labeled the racks? So there were six people in quarantine at St. Vitus’s hospital right now, waiting out the three- to six-day yellow fever incubation period while the mystery liquid lay untouched and potentially virulent in the basement hallway.

  No one had tried to mop it up; probably no one had even passed this way since the incident. It was a remote corner of the basement, and she would imagine that the only ones ever around were van Gnubbern and the horrible Jim, and even they probably never went into the virus room. The group of lawyers and LEPERs would have had absolutely no reason to pass this way unless someone (Marybeth) had lured them here.

  The BSL-3 lab itself was very secure. It had a double entryway with an autoclave built into the inner door as regulations required. Lori made a quick dash to the pharmacy in town, returning with latex gloves, a makeshift lab coat, a bucket of bleach, and rubber boots. She poured just enough bleach into the puddle to neutralize anything horrible, then prepared to look inside the room. The outer door opened with a key and the inner door with a passcode. Keys, of course, did not stop Buboes since lockpicking was the first Pasteur House initiation rite, one that she had taught with glee as an upperclassman. The passcode was even less of a problem: she had set it herself to the reciprocal of the base of the natural logarithm many years ago.

  She sloshed through wetness all the way through the entryway. The first thing she did when she entered the room was sneeze three times. The room was hot and it smelled. The second thing she did was bash her nose against something that shouldn’t have been there. The third thing she did was leap back in a surge of pure instinct, scrabbling backwards through the inner door as a crash shook the room.

  She felt the vibrations dampen slowly under her feet, and after a long minute of standing in the dark reached one arm back into the room and switched on the lights. What shouldn’t have been there was the door of the ceiling-high cryogenic freezer, which had come loose from its hinges and made a valiant attempt to crush her. It now lay on its side, still unstable, so she cautiously rolled it over until it rested harmlessly against the wall.

  It took a few minutes for her heart to stop pounding, but there were no other heavy loose items to be seen, so she continued her inspection. The puddle arose from rack upon rack of tubes of all sizes filled with liquids of various pastel hues, mostly pink and yellow but with a sampling of blue and a couple that were green. Only the far corners of the room had escaped the flooding, and they were littered with dirt, plastic tubes, and dead crickets. To the left was a bench with the same fluorescence microscope she had used as a student to check the quality of her samples before bringing them to the electron microscope. On the far wall was a biosafety containment hood bearing an inspection sticker from her senior year of undergrad.

  It was impossible to tell if anyone had been in there recently, since the liquid and the falling door would have erased any traces. It also didn’t look as if the freezer had suffered any catastrophic failure; it had simply come unplugged and the door forced off by a quarter-century of accumulated frost. She turned off the lights and left the inner room as she’d found it.

  It remained to see what had allowed the liquid to escape under the outer door. To be honest, she wasn’t expecting much—rotten wood, decaying rubber, broken hinges, or any sign of the decades of neglect that had made the rest of the lab such a shambles.

  But she saw, when she crouched all the way down by the outer door, that the bottom inch of it was clean. The rubber seal had been recently torn away and the paint was covered with scratches as if attacked with a dull pocketkn
ife or sharp nails. Even if the freezer failure and falling door had been an accident, the release of the puddle into the hallway had not been.

  There was a scuffling behind her in the inner room. Lori hunched into a ball and covered her head, expecting to be struck or kicked or shot. After several minutes passed peacefully, she got up and abruptly flicked the inner-room lights back on.

  A huge rat gave her a peevish look before scurrying away under the biosafety cabinet. She laughed nervously with relief, unable for a long moment to appreciate the irony that she was less afraid of a rat lapping yellow fever juice than of her own colleagues.

  She had no reason to be scared, she told herself over and over while trying to slow her heart. So far as she could tell, no one in the department had committed or even threatened an act of violence. She shouldn’t let Lou’s students and their creepy skit go to her head, or Marybeth’s wretched stories, or that rabid Dim Bulb. The falling door had been the inevitable result of decay, and the scratches no doubt were made by rodents.

  But why was it that Lou seemed incapable of starting his research project, of holding that one meeting that would open the subcontract and turn on the grant money?

  The old Lori would have burst into his office, no doubt giggling, demanding gleefully whether all the times he had been sick matched up with when he was trying to schedule the meeting. The new, grown-up Lori, this stranger in her own body, knew enough about loss to realize that this would be too cruel. By all accounts, Lou had handled a devastating injury with almost superhuman strength. After getting out of the ICU he had spent only three weeks in a rehabilitation center in Downey, sending e-mails to his students every day, and had come back to work right after. He asked for no special treatment, no teaching relief, no re-set of the tenure clock. More than one person had seen him sneak off to cry, and everyone had seen him pee his pants—including Absinthe, who concluded that he was retarded. If he had gotten sick a lot, it was no doubt because he hadn’t let himself heal, body or spirit, and insisted upon doing everything as before despite physical challenges that she couldn’t even imagine. She couldn’t even find words to think about it since all the terms had either been tainted by PC (call me special and die!), were utterly meaningless (exceptional was her favorite, referring to both ends of the curve; it gave her visions of the two tails of the Gaussian looking over the big hump and waving to each other), or were tasteless and crude (she thought of her alt.tasteless days with a pang of guilt).