A Slow Cold Death Page 7

  On the other hand, if her suspicions were justified, it would be even crueler to say nothing.

  Well, she couldn’t save the world. The best thing she could do for the health of the campus community would be to put all of the tubes and liquids in the BSL-3 lab into autoclave bags and sterilize them. She spent several minutes feeling like a disgrace to her House for not having brought a camera, until she remembered the built-in webcam on her new laptop and snapped photos of the puddle, the freezer, the samples, and most of all the torn-up edge of the outer door.

  Biohazard bags were easily begged and borrowed from the building next door; the rest of the task took all day. The autoclave would only hold a single bag at a time, and there were hundreds of tubes, racks, and vials that were potentially pathogenic. She spent the down time between runs mopping the floors with a dilute bleach solution, testing the old equipment for functionality, and occasionally running down the hall to see if perhaps van Gnubbern—or, God forbid, Jim—had returned from quarantine.

  It was late afternoon before she finally had enough and went next door to the library to write her lecture. There was still no one in the physics building, which gave her the willies, and she suspected the theorists might be hiding in the library out of fear of yellow fever. Besides, she had always liked the library. Each subject was on a different floor, so each floor had a personality as distinct as the research field it represented. The couches were different (biologists seemed to actually sleep in the library on occasion), the décor was different (chemists loved posters with fancy graphics), and, of course, on the physics floor they had the best computers.

  They were all there. It almost looked like a party. At the long low table where the new journals usually were, Lou’s group and Rose’s two students had spread out all their papers and were discussing renormalization of the vacuum in loud whispers.

  “Day-um, Dr. Barrow,” said Sam-with-the-curls as she went by. “What happened to you?”

  Lori looked down at her clothes. Despite the disposable lab coat, which she had autoclaved, she was covered with dust, dead bugs, bleach, and the remains of things too horrible to mention. “Be grateful,” she said. “I just cleaned out the lab in the basement.”

  The table grew strangely quiet, and she met Lou’s eye an instant before he laughed so maniacally that the undergrad librarians screamed and hugged each other. “Hi, kids,” he called, giving them a little wave. “Physics is bad for the brain! Lori,” he whispered, “you are a fucking genius. Sol and I have just concocted a Fiendish Plan.”

  Sol? Professor Rose, of course. Was he on their side as well? Or was it an uneasy truce?

  “Of course, we were merely theorizing while you were working,” said Rose with a knowing smile. “Isn’t that always the way it works?”

  “How can it be that she’s only been here for a week, and already she’s a step ahead of me?” Lou exclaimed, sounding immensely pleased.

  “Because you don’t take steps at all, Dr. Lou,” Sam reminded him.

  “So she’s one gear development ahead, then, if you like. Barrow walks only slightly more than I do—she’s got quite the assortment of bizarre vehicles.”

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said Lori. “But how did you even know? Did you see me at the hospital yesterday?”

  “Of course, with your trailer and the rocket launcher. What was that thing?”

  She didn’t answer the question. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I was being discreet.”

  “Discrete as opposed to continuous?” asked Brian the dyslexic Brain.

  “Lori,” said Professor Rose, rising to take his leave with his hand on her shoulder, “you will own us all, body and soul. Just don’t waste any time,” he warned Lou. “You only have three months.”

  The delinquents lost all control the instant Rose was gone. “Eeeeew, he’s got yellow fever now!” said Alex, the HEAD.

  “Barrow,” groaned Sam, “take a shower.”

  Brian jumped up and did a little dance. “Ooh ooh ooh, yellow fever,” he sang in a whisper, drawing more odd looks from the volunteer librarians. Lori had been one once on this very same floor.

  She was going to take a seat and demand details of the Plan, but Lou was already putting his notebook and journal articles into his bag. “It’s time for me to go to the gym,” he said. “Lori, if you don’t mind walking across campus with me, there’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  The students elbowed each other and cackled suggestively, but Lori and Lou ignored them. They took the huge, slow-moving elevator down into the courtyard and crossed the campus, past the teaching labs with their marble sabertooth cat replica, and across the street to the path that led to the new gym. The sun was just beginning to set, casting long shadows in the shimmering heat.

  Right outside the pool fence, Lou spun around and pointed off to the east. “Here’s my question,” he said. “What do you see?”

  “Huh?” Lori saw foothills. “I see a habitat that, ten thousand years ago, supported sabertooth cats.”

  “Who’s there now?”

  She shrugged. “Dunno.”

  Lou grinned and snapped his fingers. “And that’s my answer. STImpies don’t even acknowledge the LPR Lab.”

  Was that what this was about? She finally realized there were a few white buildings dotting the hillside, the management center of the Lobo(tomy) Peak Rocket Lab. “Of course not!” He knew who she was from alt.tasteless, so she added, “They’re just a bunch of fucktards. Don’t say ‘L-P-R’: it’s the LEPERLab. Even faculty aren’t allowed up there any more without some kind of armed guard.”

  “Right. Closed, secretive, militaristic. But very powerful, and very rich.”

  “Rich only because they have a 250% overhead rate so their grants have to be big enough to cover it.”

  “But the kind of physics I do, they control.” Lou spoke so softly that splashing from the pool and the boing of the diving board drowned out some of his words. “They determine access to the South Pole because they’re the only ones with the budget to support the trips. Because of that, it’s their fucktards who do the experiments, instead of smart people. And sure, I’m a theorist, but you can’t be a theorist with crap data. With their budget and our overhead, I could send six experimentalist graduate students to the Pole instead of one—you say LEPER? That’s good! —and get fifty times the data. We could say whether there is physics beyond the Standard Model, definitively, within five years. Whether the universe will die a slow, cold death or whether it will contract.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” Lori wondered. “Or yellow fever?”

  “Aha, well. That’s where Sol comes in. A true genius, and truly on your side. There were some people who didn’t want to hire you, you know…” A pair of undergrads—Ferrets, because they were all in black—had paused to listen to their conversation, but instead of lowering his voice, Lou raised it. “They said you were trouble, and he said, ‘I got the Nobel Prize for causing trouble!’ Solomon Rose, Physics, guess the year,” he added for the benefit of the audience.

  “Cool,” said the Ferrets, and they didn’t leave.

  In a moment of drama, Lou extended his hand and cupped it over a particularly vile stain on Lori’s T-shirt. “Sol pointed out that the LEPERLab’s mortal weakness is that there’s something it fears irrationally.”

  It was a sensual touch, and she was flustered for just a moment before giving a one-word answer that applied as well to the stain on the T-shirt as to what was under it. “Biology.”

  “Damn,” said Lou, letting his hand drop. “Between you and Sol, I feel slow. That’s right, they’re afraid of biology. But you’re not, and now the microscope lab and the BSL-3 are yours for the asking; van Gnubbern will never go down there again. I’ll pay for the renovations because Marybeth did make a mistake with the budget, so I’m richer than I thought.”

  “You’re doing so well for your age,” said Lori with mock condescension. “But we can’t
talk here.” She’d be surprised if those Ferrets hadn’t concocted a torrid affair by Monday, and even the mention of BSL-3 around STImpies was asking for trouble. “I’ll take my shower, and you go work out. But wash that hand first or we’ll have an epidemic.”

  She didn’t trust him. It was almost clear what he (and Rose?) wanted: she would take over the microscopy and BSL-3 lab and do something that had to do with rocket science and the South Pole. This would somehow lead to Lou being able to decide which experimentalists in his field went to the polar station to collect the data he desired. It was that last link that made no sense to her, but she had never known anything about the rocket lab projects. STI rarely, if ever, bothered with them.

  She had one more biohazard bag, into which she crammed all her stained clothes before taking a long, hot shower and changing back into her bike shorts and jersey from that morning. The gym was nice, she had to admit, even though it now had rules (No bare feet!) and assigned hours for different kinds of music to accommodate the different generations. Classical early in the morning, for the real geezers, rock and pop in the daytime, and “oldies” from the eighties and nineties for people like her who had nearly-standard working hours.

  It still nagged at her that the pink liquid incident seemed to have given her everything she wanted, or was supposed to want. She no longer had to expel van Gnubbern; he’d been grossed away. Surely Lou wouldn’t hot-agent his own co-investigators and lawyers?

  Why had he been so dusty yesterday, anyway? Was the elevator truly broken? She hadn’t checked. Or was he perhaps less disabled than he let on?

  That last was easy to check in the gym, and she put her suspicions to rest very quickly. Being paralyzed from the waist down was not something you could fake, and his legs really didn’t move at all. He had to pick them up with one arm to be able to move himself from his chair to the weight bench, which looked hard, and he lost his balance now and then, letting her know that his lower back and abs were pretty good but not perfect.

  She never had any qualms about staring, so she stared, only half-heartedly playing with the free weights. Lifting weights was dull.

  He was not at all offended by her curiosity, and after finishing his military press and hopping back into his chair, he asked almost playfully, “What’s my level? Can you guess?”

  It would have to be kind of a wild guess, since he was wearing a shirt and she hadn’t seen him do sit-ups or anything. “T10 or T11?” she hazarded, drawing her hand across her abdomen, right over her bellybutton.

  “Legends never lie! Barrow knows everything.” He reached for a pair of 35-pound barbells, which he lifted onto his shoulders and over his head. “T10 complete. I was very lucky, really. It could have been much worse.”

  Lori wouldn’t do that with any barbells—she’d be afraid of getting a concussion. “Yeah, it’s a good thing you’ve got nothing in your chest but a hard lump of basalt.”

  He acknowledged the comment with a raise of his eyebrow and continued lifting without dropping the weights on his head. She hadn’t noticed before, but his eyes were blue. “A useful trait to have,” he assured her. “Here’s another legend: can you still do fifty pull-ups?”

  “It was never fifty,” she objected, but finally let herself be talked into going over to the chin-up bar to see what she could do. At least he knew how to speak French, because for the last five years all sports were Quebecois and there was nothing that inspired her quite so much as a good cry of “Triche pas!”

  Eight: Jesus and Alexander

  It was the best birthday ever.

  Lori had not liked being a kid, and even now, nearing her mid-thirties, she had never been in a situation where she was considered too old instead of too young. Each year brought her more accomplishments, more success, and fewer people who could tell her what to do.

  Until Roger’s death, she would have said that each year had brought more happiness. Now she was just confused: she still didn’t know whether coming back to California was a humiliation or a victory, whether she was a failure as a Quebecoise or a resounding success as an Angeleno. It was as if she had lost her connection to Quebec when she lost him, no longer cared about integrating into that small, closed yet warm community of French-speaking Canadians where she had for a while thought she felt so at home.

  But could she ever feel so at home as she did at STI? She had all the keys. She knew all the passwords and the underground passageways. She was enough of a legend that new Buboes pointed her out and first-year graduate students didn’t dare approach her unless they were introduced by those older and more jaded.

  Her thirty-third year had also brought her something she had never had before: an experimental lab. Not just any experimental lab, but one where she could, if she wanted, grow yellow fever, rabies, and HIV. Dr. van Gnubbern presented her with a door plaque reading “BARROW LAB” and another for indicating biohazards and chemical hazards.

  “I’m so glad you came back,” he said, clearing his throat as if he were going to cry.

  “Of course, you’ll be the senior author on any electron microscopy work,” Lori promised.

  “Oh, Lori,” sighed van Gnubbern, “I’m tenured, I don’t need it. If I take the pictures myself, you can put me on.”

  Lou’s delinquents, accompanied by two of the first-years and Marybeth, went all out. They gave her a home-made watercolor for the lab entryway showing a bunch of plague bacteria framed by her all-time favorite Pasteur quote: Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout. They even brought a cake. They couldn’t eat it in the biohazard lab, of course, so after hanging the picture they all trooped upstairs to the conference room. Alex let the two first-years take seats first so that he could point at their heads from behind, and mouthed at Lori, “The ones who don’t suck.”

  The ones who didn’t suck were a tall, broad-shouldered Chinese guy named Chi-Ming and a skinny, long-nosed platinum blond whose exact likeness adorned every wall of honor at STI. It was as if the University’s first president had reproduced by binary fission, spawning generations of clones of whom the last was the twenty-two-year-old in front of her: Walter W. Waddles IV. You could never go wrong with a Walter W. Waddles; his grandfather, Junior, was in Applied Physics and in Lori’s day had been the most beloved of all the professors.

  She was grateful for Lou’s students’ efforts. It appeared that they had learned as painfully as she had that a professor couldn’t just hire anyone and let attrition do its work. She’d had her own share of Marybeths early on, one of whom had submitted a paper to a major journal before Lori had had a chance to realize that whole sections of the article were plagiarized. She caught it just in time; twenty-four hours later, and there would have been a scandal that might have cost her job. Her next hire was picked with extreme care and was first-rate, but so far any attempts to bring Fang Li to California had been futile—she seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.

  Lori cut herself a slice of cake and was about to take a bite when the significance of the lemon-yellow cake with extra dark devil’s food frosting hit her. “This color scheme is not a coincidence,” she announced.

  The problem children, who had been restraining themselves, shrieked with laughter and danced around. “I looked up yellow fever on the internet,” said Brian, “and it said when you have it, you turn bright yellow and throw up black, so I thought…”

  “Mmmmm,” sighed Lori, spooning the black frosting into her mouth. “Thanks, guys. I can’t believe I’m having a lab-warming already. This was really nice of you.”

  “The Boss’s idea,” Sam admitted. “You should have heard him laugh as he painted that quote. The cake was an afterthought. Tolja she’d figure it out and eat it anyway,” he cackled, accepting the dollar bills that Alex and Brian slipped him.

  Lori hadn’t seen Lou in a couple of days. “So where is Le Grand Méchant? Being discrete again?”

  All heads swiveled to point at Marybeth, who scowled and sulked and twisted her face into a toddler-sob
bing grimace but without tears. The first-years looked appalled, but Lou’s students snorted in disgust. “Tell her, Marybeth.”

  “So I made a mistake in the proposal budget,” Marybeth snapped, still with this horrible look. “I accidentally put someone from this department as part of the LEPER subcontract, and the LEPERLab took the money last week, somehow, when they were all being quarantined. It’s not my fault. If it wasn’t for me, the proposal never would have gone in at all!”

  “So he’s at the LEPERLab trying to get the money back,” Alex explained. “He never signed off on the budget, so it’s totally illegal, but LEPER is such a morass of bureaucracy that once they have the money, you’re hosed.”

  “How much did they steal?” Lori wondered.

  “Two hundred thousand,” chorused the guys, with a glare for Marybeth.

  “But—” Lori stopped herself. Two hundred thousand dollars sounded like a lot to the kids, but it was nothing compared to six hundred million. Surely Lou wouldn’t waste days— days!—up there just on a slim chance to get such a pittance back.

  But of course the students didn’t know about the Fiendish Plan. The Plan had sprung into existence within the last twenty-four hours, and best birthday present of them all was having been picked by the two most ambitious members of the department to join their plot to upset the LEPERLab. The three of them were going to submit—and win!—a six hundred million dollar Polar Institute Proposal, giving them control over physics and biology at the South Pole for the next seven years.