A Slow Cold Death Read online

  It no longer mattered that she didn’t trust Lou or that Rose had a reputation of grinding his students and colleagues to hamburger: they seemed to share her vision for what the department had to become and were ready to move quickly and ruthlessly. Now that things were beginning to take shape, Sol had decided that it all must be done in the utmost secrecy. The LEPERs would never imagine that a tiny university like STI could make a bid to control the PIP, and they would submit their usual perfectly organized but scientifically weak proposal. STI’s proposal, if done right, would hit them out of left field and astound the reviewers with its simplicity, its lean science team, and its rock-hard data.

  They had an incredible amount of work to do and less than three months to do it in. Fortunately, Sol was good at reading through the mass of requirements and making a simple list of what had to go into the proposal. They had fifty pages maximum allowed of science description, twenty pages of management, the budget, and then all of the usual “bullshit parts”: facilities description, personnel and CVs, institutional signatures; the list was exhaustive and painful, including the final requirement of fifty copies to be delivered to Washington, DC by December 21 (how much would a package like that weigh?).

  But better to slog through it all themselves than to risk another Marybeth “mistake.” Lori’s role was both harder and easier than that of her two colleagues. She would be spared her share of the bullshit in exchange for handling ice cores under highly sterile conditions—the BSL-3—slicing them ultra-thin, and imaging them with electron microscopy.

  “You’re the only theoretical physicist in the world who can grow yellow fever,” Lou had said by way of explanation of why they had chosen her.

  “I had this in mind when I voted to hire you,” Rose elaborated. “In fact, I think I’ve had this in mind since you were an undergraduate. Physics departments have been in crisis for decades because they don’t want biology—but ‘astrobiology’ is physics, and the PIP will finally allow us to do real physics with a real experimental component again.”

  What that might mean for Kuzno, Lori didn’t know, and she didn’t really want to speculate. If she was going to do her part, she needed experimentalists and she needed them now. There was no way she could slice, image, process, and write everything in the time they had all by herself. Of course, she had to get the ice cores first—maybe that was what Lou was up to today; she could only hope. It would take a lot of discretion to be able to sneak something like that past the LEPERs.

  No one was touching the yellow fever cake. She was the only one who had taken a slice. “All right, back to work,” she announced, turning to the first-years. “When can you start?”

  Like true STImpies, they chorused “Now!” and that was good, but it remained to be seen what she could get out of them.

  “OK,” she declared, standing up. “The first thing to do is to start getting you guys trained on the microscope. The second is for me to beg, borrow, steal, buy, build, or conjure a microtome of the appropriate size.” How would they keep the identity of the samples a secret? She would have to talk to Dr. Rose about that. She wasn’t secretive by nature, which would make this even more difficult. “Also, if we’re not going to get our renovation money, we’ll have to renovate the bio lab ourselves. That’ll give you a chance to demonstrate your experimentalist skills. Sam, would you come downstairs with us please?”

  “I’m a theorist!” Sam objected plaintively. “You don’t expect me to touch the pus?”

  “No,” she promised. “I just want to ask you some questions.”

  She wasn’t sure why she had chosen Sam over any one of the others. She hoped it wasn’t because he’d played Lou in the skit, because she’d have to watch not to let slip things that were for his boss’s ears only. The secrecy was already weighing on her.

  Annoyingly, Marybeth also followed them down the stairs. “I can do experiments, too,” she insisted.

  “If so, I’m sure I can find something for you to do,” said Lori generously, thinking, Sweep the floor.

  “At least I’m not afraid to come down here any more,” wailed Marybeth in her piercing tone. “Now that he is gone.”

  “Who?” Lori asked quickly.

  “He stalked me for a year!” She paid no attention to the incredulous looks from the first-years. “He put a video camera outside my house! Every time I called the police, they said there wasn’t enough evidence.”

  Sam let out a low sigh of disdain, almost a growl. “She’s talking about Dim Bulb.”

  “Dim Bulb is creepy,” Lori affirmed. “He foamed at me like a mad dog. But what do you mean he’s gone?” She had been afraid she’d have to fire him.

  “Don’t you know?” Sam exclaimed. “He’s the one who got Dr. Lou’s money. He works at the LEPERLab as of this week.”

  “The prosecutor said he had already raped seven girls.” Marybeth stopped at the entrance to the basement and looked all around her before daring to head towards Lori’s lab.

  “It’s worth two hundred thousand just to be rid of him,” Lori muttered.

  Dr. van Gnubbern was at the microscope, which was lucky. She left Marybeth and the first-years with him for a tutorial and dragged Sam into the antechamber of the BSL-3.

  “I knew you’d make me touch the pus,” he shuddered, looking around at the biohazard signs, the autoclave, and the five fresh new lab coats she had hung in the entryway.

  “Get a grip, there’s no pus in here. I just have to ask some questions or my head will explode, and I want to be able to do it without traumatizing anyone. So don’t repeat this conversation.” She took a deep breath and put a hand against the autoclave as if for moral support. It was still warm from her last bags of horrible detritus. “I think my first question has already been answered. There’s no way Marybeth would have been in cahoots with Dim Bulb.”

  Sam seemed to realize they were going to talk conspiracy theories, and his face brightened. This was good; the students had to be speculating like crazy long before she ever came to STI. “Not a chance. You heard her. She sued him, and then she sued Dr. Kuznetsov for not taking her seriously. She tried to have them both arrested. This was all when Dr. Lou was in intensive care. When he got better, he made her stop.”

  “OK, number two: is everything Marybeth says a lie or just an exaggeration?”

  He was silent for a long moment, glancing at the door as if he intended to run. Finally he asked, “Did she tell you gnarly stories?”

  “She told me she was abused by her parents.”

  “Is that what she told you?” Sam looked repulsed. “Ew.”

  “Yeah, ew.”

  “No, I mean eeeew. She told me she had had cancer, and a friend of mine died of cancer. She told Dr. Lou she’d been a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic for two years until she miraculously snapped out of it. It’s all lies. It has to be.”

  “Ugh!” Lori’s shout resonated around the tiny room. “That is vile. She’s like some kind of twisted chameleon. I don’t want her to know the stories about me.”

  Sam laughed nervously. “You can’t help that. You’re a legend.”

  “I don’t want to be a legend!”

  “No? I thought everyone did. Dr. Lou sure does. I think he doesn’t even mind being a gimp if it contributes to a legend.”

  “Oh, really? Well, so you know, I didn’t murder my parents twenty-one years ago. They died in a random act of LA street violence. Which brings me to my last question.”

  Sam had grown pale and put his hand on the wall as if he were going to throw up or pass out. “Barrow,” he said finally, “I can’t take the smell in here.”

  “Would you rather be overheard?” Lori cracked the door and listened, but there were no spies, and she heard the murmur of van Gnubbern’s voice one room over. “OK, you must have speculated, all of you. Who shot Lou? Was it random or not?”

  Sam took deep breaths of the fresh air through the crack. “He thinks so,” he said finally. “He was just driving to his paren
ts’ in Malibu. He never saw the guy; police never caught him. Why?” he asked at last, clearly reaching for his last bit of courage. “Do you suspect something?”

  “I don’t know if I do or not,” Lori sighed. “That’s why you can’t mention this to him. It’s just that… people keep getting in his way, and he is kind of arrogant and overbearing—”

  “Ha!” Sam laughed too loudly. “Kind of! You didn’t even know him before. You didn’t even see him with that Beemer he had. Man, he still talks about it.”

  A Beemer and Malibu, Lori thought. That explains a lot. “Did he wreck it?”

  “Oh, no, there wasn’t a scratch on it. The ambulance driver said he’d pulled it perfectly off the road, downshifted and cut the engine, and the first thing he said when they got to him was ‘How’s my car?’”

  “That’s what I would have done. Not bad for a theorist.”

  “Yeah, but you know, theorists don’t shoot people. We can’t—we would miss, or push the wrong button, or whatever. Besides, my boss might be an asshole, but the rest are ten times worse. Look at Kuznetsov. Dr. Lou never dated any nineteen-year-olds, and he always supported the people he hired, almost too much, if you know what I mean.”

  “So I’m paranoid,” said Lori. “That’s good. But just so you know, the elevator cables were on the point of breaking, just about five feet above the top of the box—where people have a tendency to stand and spray-paint `Fucking Ferret Freaks.’ I don’t think any undergraduate would cut them, but I think someone did, and they’ve now been fixed with a video camera placed in a strategic location. That’s my contribution, but if anything else funny happens…”

  “I’ll come running to tell you,” finished Sam.

  He continued to stand there until she realized he was waiting, like a kid, for permission to leave, which she dutifully provided. Mind still not at ease and annoyed about having missed the training session, she went to see if she could at least tell something about the capabilities of the new students. She still needed to see Rose and try to get some idea about a microtome and about the diameter of those ice cores.

  The students had gone. That was the trouble with first-years—they had classes and had to study. So she went next door to the biology building with a vague memory of something called a cryoslicer that kept things cold while sectioning them with a retractable blade.

  It was here that she finally appreciated how much STI had changed, and how the mutation of her own research interests was a reflection of something much bigger. At this school where three-quarters of entering freshmen were physics majors, it was biology that had a whole new annex with four buildings. The Imaging Center housed an opulent computer lab containing two poster-sized color printers, all inside a glass atrium opening onto a square lined with transplanted palm trees, so new that their leaves were still tied in ponytails. One floor down was fluorescence of every kind, and the sub-basement boasted a microscope facility for new and experimental types of microscopy that hadn’t even been theoretically conceived when Lori was a student.

  No one knew her—all of the professors were her age. No one knew what she was talking about when she said “cryoslicer”; she finally found an old guy who told her to try the mouse house. That was another new building, with its own private parking lot. The door to was key-carded and had an alarm, but she waited until someone came out so that she could slip in.

  Everything was shiny, new, and smelled of paint or varnish or mice; students milled around with rodents in plastic breadbox cages. The corridor was wide, as if for gurneys, and in one room there was an operating table with an overhead light that was almost exactly one-third of the expected size.

  She was just wondering what that could be for when she saw it: two tittering grad students in lab coats and gloves with a wide-eyed monkey strapped to a stretcher held between them. A metal probe the size of a carrot protruded from the poor animal’s brain, surrounded by a bloody and poorly stitched wound, and for the brief instant that Lori looked into its eyes she saw hatred for herself and all of her species.

  Not caring that it made her look like an intruder, she turned and ran, back to where the walls were crumbling and the freezer doors fell off and dead crickets piled up in the corner. Dashing up to the fourth floor, she stopped dead in the hall when she saw her own horror mirrored in the wide-eyed gape of Solomon Rose.

  “Is something wrong, Professor Rose?” she wondered.

  “Every morning,” the Great Man began in a labored voice, “of every day, the university should hold a moment of silence in which we all bow our heads and say, ‘Thanks be to God that I don’t work at the LEPERLab.’”

  Nine: I’m Not Your Sonya

  Lori risked destroying both her circadian rhythm and her bank account by returning Radhika’s birthday phone call in Darwin, Australia, catching her on her lunch hour by calling just before eleven at night in California. She felt guilty for how little they seemed to share lately, but the absurd time difference and the amount they both worked made weeks and months go by without any real communication.

  It was only now, five years after they’d broken up, that Lori was beginning to appreciate how much Radhika had meant to her. In grad school, she had almost resented her for always being around, ruining Lori’s hard-earned reputation as a cold-hearted, asexual physics robot and forcing her to feel emotions when all she wanted was to do some homework. But they had kept each other sane, and in all the time that had passed since, Lori hadn’t found a single other person with the patience to share her life. She and Roger had never moved in together, never even seriously considered it, but she and Radhika had spent twenty-four hours a day together for a total of over six years without ever growing sick of each other’s presence.

  The same thing brought them together that drove them apart: snow. They had been recruited to Minnesota by fancy theory fellowships when neither had been above latitude thirty-four North in her life. Lori walked into class the first day and spotted, among a sea of six-foot blondes, a wide-shouldered brown girl in a flowered camisole whose only signs of nerddom were her glasses and the fact that she wrote with her left hand. Thinking she had to be foreign—Indian, probably, with a name like that—Lori had gone to sit next to her and asked where she was from.

  As Lou had done last week, Radhika replied with nothing more alien in her voice than the San Gabriel Valley. “Dude! I’m from Kalapana, Hawaii. But I did my undergrad at UC San Diego.”

  Lori had been somewhat disappointed by how un-exotic that sounded, not realizing that Kalapana had been destroyed by a volcano and that Radhika had, for all intents and purposes, been raised by savages. It didn’t take her long to learn, as over the next two weeks Radhika demonstrated that she was utterly incapable of dealing with Scandinavian-Americans or with any of the basic assumptions of civilization that made up the American Midwest.

  The Minnesotans never knew what to make of her. They didn’t know what race she was, they didn’t know what sex she was, and they alternately treated her like a retarded child and a royal savage. They thought she was cruel and violent because she said things like “Kill the motherfucker!” and was immune to political correctness, but nothing could have been farther from the truth. They thought she had to be a lesbian because she cut her hair short, carried heavy things, and studied physics, and so she was forced to date Lori because the men were afraid of her. They thought she was angry and bitter about life, but what she wanted was more for herself and for them than they could imagine, something far outside the boundaries of three kids, an SUV, and Lutheran church hot-dish suppers.

  She had survived five years there only because she had so much work to do. With an undergraduate degree in chemistry, she hadn’t been prepared for advanced classical or quantum mechanics and had had to check out beginner-level texts from the library and study them alone in secret. In the summer she would swim miles across the local lakes, braving algae and swimmer’s itch; in the winter she would brood and grumble and sulk, walking through the cement tunne
ls to do laps in the gym pool that she hated for its crowds and its powerful bromine smell.

  Lori hadn’t appreciated then that Radhika had taken the fellowship in order to support her family. Their twenty-thousand-dollar a year stipend was more than their family of five had ever seen, and she managed to send at least half of it, sometimes more, back to her parents and her two young sisters so that they could eat well and the girls could think of college. Even without knowing this, it was obvious that Radhika was generous to a fault, that she placed no value whatsoever on material things, and that if you were her friend, everything she had was yours. One night they had worked late and emerged from the building to find Radhika’s bike had been stolen. She said simply, “I hope whoever it was needed it more than I did,” and came to school on a skateboard until she could afford a used ten-speed.

  She had a temper, though, especially with anyone she considered stupid or small-minded, and there were an awful lot of those in Minnesota. It was refreshing to see her hate with an idealist’s fervor those whose “truth” was a collection of platitudes about men and women, life and death, freedom and oppression. But she was always in trouble for telling people off, for “threatening” them by using “bad words,” or for tearing up the creationist pamphlets left in everyone’s mailbox.

  Her few friends—it was Roger who started it—teased her that she had a Raskolnikov complex and called her Radi to emphasize the point. Usually this just made her grumble that there was no fucking way she was spending eight years in this Siberian hell-hole. When Lori adopted a marmalade-colored cat, they called her Sonya (Sonya had died last year at the age of nineteen, a month before Roger, giving one farewell mew in her sleep at the foot of Lori’s bed).

  When Lori left Minneapolis after finishing her degree, Radi spent her last six months there completely alone. Then she fled to a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Cruz and never looked back. The move brought her reasonably close to Lori, who was at Berkeley, so they got back together more or less simply because neither one ever really found anyone else. Lori never even had a fling; she knew Radi had had a couple, always with men, but they didn’t talk about it in detail and didn’t consider it cheating because they never called themselves a couple. Each had been forced to move again at least every two years, sometimes closer and sometimes farther, and they both knew that a relationship forged in graduate school was more based upon shared adversity than anything else and that they couldn’t force being together because one or the other would always be short-changed.