Flight

by Neil Hetzner

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Strikes Twice

  After the girl had left him, Dicky Baudgew had thoughtfully scratched his cheeks with the long yellow nails growing from his short pale pink fingers.

  Baudgew once had been quite rich. Unlike many twenty-first century scientists, who had accumulated great wealth because they had invented something useful and, somehow, despite the odds and all the lawyers, had been able to maintain their intellectual property, Dicky had made his money by being a manager and manipulator of scientists for Joshua Fflowers. Early on in his success, Joshua Fflowers had decided that it made more sense to make one corporate pit bull rich than to allow dozens of scientists to rob him blind.

  Fflowers had made Baudgew rich once, but he saw no need to repeat his largesse. Unfortunately for Dicky, a long life and a largish number of vices had greatly reduced his means. He still had nice things, but, he knew, that unless something changed, he wouldn’t be getting any more.

  The things he did have—furniture, art, rugs—meant too much to Dicky for him even to consider selling them. Instead, as his cash flow slowed to a trickle, he had moved from a ten-room Central Park West apartment with park and river views to six rooms in Spicetown with a fifth floor view of petty poverty and crime. Since Dicky was a realist, he had accommodated himself to his changed circumstances but, since he could not prevent the occasional dream, he had not accepted them.

  Before Dicky met them, Joshua Flowers and Elena Howe had been employed as post-doctoral researchers by Reiklein and Grammai, a team of Cold Spring Harbor primaries. At the time, much scientific research resembled investment banking. The people with lots of good ideas rarely had the money to carry them out. The people with lots of money rarely had good ideas. The principal researchers had gone to Grant Larkston, who had agreed to put up fifty million dollars to fund research into the possibilities of curing certain late-presenting hereditary diseases by insinuating a genetic splice into the patient during the bio-chemical turmoil that was present during puberty. The Reiklein and Grammai’s thesis was that hereditary diseases were a mutation, but of a very minor scale compared to the mutation that took place in pubescent teenagers as they were transformed from children to adults. Their strategy was to piggyback their defect-altering genetic changes onto the natural changes occurring during puberty.

  Within a year the team had made enough progress to be sure they were on the right path. Larkston was pleased at their rapid progress. It was in the second year that an outcome of one of Elena Howe’s experiments and an insight by Fflowers as to the commercial importance of that finding led those two to leave Cold Spring Harbor.

  In the following year, Reiklein and Grammai announced their breakthrough —thousands of lives could be improved by the techniques they had developed. The two researchers, Cold Spring Harbor, and Larkston shared ownership of the patented processes. The researchers would make millions, Cold Spring Harbor would make tens of millions and Larkston would make hundreds of millions. Everyone was very happy….

  …Until less than four years later, when Fflowers stunned the world by having fourteen-year old Brianna Brim fly above Cheney Stadium and land on the fifty yard-line during halftime of the Superbowl LI. The millennial dream, humans flying freely, was realized…could be realized…for a price not much more than the cost of a year’s college tuition…well, the cost at a very good college.

  Then, everyone was unhappy. Larkston and CSH sued. They argued that the meta-mutant techniques and procedures leading to flight should be theirs because Joshua Flowers and Elena Howe had derived the fledging process from the original research. It took three years, but Fflowers prevailed. Reiklein and Grammai got a footnote in some textbooks about meta-mutancy, a number of legal citations and a bitterness that lasted the rest of their lives. Larkston got a laboratory at CSH named after him. Fflowers got fame, fortune and Dicky Baudgew to make sure that no scientist ever did to Joshua Fflowers what he and Elena had done to Reiklein and Grammai.

  By the time Fflowers was thirty-nine, he was the richest man in the world. And one of the most benevolent. Despite being born poor, Fflowers did not hoard his wealth. He gave huge amounts to Bissell, much more than the already richly endowed school had ever received before from an alumni. He gave money to Yale and MIT, his alma maters, and even to Cold Spring Harbor. His fortune funded billions of eurollars of CE research. For the recipients of those grants, the only requirement was to take big chances. Those individuals and the organizations they worked for, usually universities were given all rights to whatever came from their efforts; however the story was very different at Cygnetics and its many subsidiaries. Dicky Baudgew’s job was to make sure that whatever the scientists at Fflower’s companies developed, that the financial benefits of those efforts stayed with Fflowers.

  Dicky had found that his snaky charm and well-honed manipulative skills were usually enough to keep productive scientists working for Cygnetics. When those skills weren’t enough, Dicky had added a certain subtle menace, which, because it was so subtle, got and kept people’s attention.

  At the time, Baudgew took great satisfaction in the power he wielded as Director of Research. He was good at finding the scientists, usually young, with the most promise and matching them up so that a synergy was created.

  Dicky Baudgew loved a puzzle and keeping successes coming out of Fflowers lab had, for a long time, been the best puzzle of his life. Dicky loved everything about his job except for standing in Joshua Fflowers’ shadow. Fflowers wealth rankled, but what rankled more was the fact, and Dicky knew without a doubt that it was a fact, that he, Dicky Baudgew, was far smarter than Joshua Fflowers. Dicky coped by swallowing his anger when he was around Fflowers and spewing it about when he was not. As a result, Dicky’s power and wealth grew, although not as fast as his dissatisfaction. Then, when things turned bad in the aftermath of the Etruscan Project and the destruction of Centsurety, Fflowers swept Dicky Baudgew aside with all the care of a hash house waitress cleaning a table.

  Over the ensuing decades, Dicky spent his money, but hoarded his anger. His once broad ranging mind shrunk into the narrow focus of the obsessed until he was left with little more than wishes. Impossible wishes.

  Finally, despair had freed Dicky of those wishes. He had feasted on ash. Bitter ash. Until, whatever force ran the universe, a force that seemed to revel in irony, sent, with no warning, a girl to knock on his door. Suddenly, poor Dicky Baudgew thought that he might have a second chance to make a wish come true. The problem for Dicky was to understand just what opportunity Fate had thrown his way and how best to use it.

  There could be no doubt that the girl who had just graced his humble abode was flesh of Elena Howe’s flesh. She was too much a twin of Elena to be a granddaughter and too young to be a daughter. The girl was definitely a puzzle.

  Oh, how Dicky Baudgew loved a puzzle. He’d made his mark solving them. When he was very young, he had spent lots of summer days twisting Rubik Cubes and their cousins, setting up chess problems and playing puter games. As a teenager, anagrams and quadratic and chemical equations kept him busy. In college and medical school, he had been entranced with the limitless cryptic messages DNA liked to write using its limited AGTC alphabet.

  After medical school Dicky interned as an endocrinologist; however he soon found the puzzle of getting people and their conflicting egos to work successfully within an organization to be much more intriguing than why their organs failed.

  Dicky had started work at Cygnetics as a project manager for one aspect of feather patterning; however within a year, the high productivity and low turnover in his group had drawn the attention of Joshua Fflowers. Dicky had bounced his way up the organization fast enough to make lots of enemies—some angry, but most, and wisely so, fearful. When Fflowers’ manic hubris led him to start Centsurety, he picked Dicky Baudgew to be his main puzzle-solver.

  Dicky was an inspired choice because Dicky so loved a puzzle and Centsurety certainly was that. He had to find enough sincere and dedicate
d and, most importantly, closed-mouthed scientists to do the front of the house work on delayed fledging, while putting together two teams of brilliant renegades to do the back of the house work that Joshua Fflowers really wanted done.

  The loyal Dicky had done everything from lab design—cutting edge facilities with a physical layout that encouraged cross-talk and synergy(at least at the front of the house)—to talent scouting to walking the well-lighted halls of B-crats getting the necessary permits to allow Fflowers to play God using Dicky’s hires as his angels.

  Everything had gone swimmingly. The spotlighted front of the lab made minor progress on the exquisitely complicated process of delayed fledging. In the shadowy back of the lab, the Fallen Angel, Elena Howe and the Ugly Elf, Vartan Smarkzy, and their pup-filled wolf pack made astounding progress in solving the Greek problem. In the shadows beyond the shadows, the Twin Wizards, Glen Laureby and Roan Winslow, struggled and slipped and struggled and gained to solve the age-old old age question. Flitting between all three groups was Joshua Fflowers, the Mad Hatted Midas, with his chef’s toque, sticking his fingers in every pasty, pudding and pie. Thus poked Zarathustra.

  Then, in a way that ridiculously mimicked the dramatic traverse of a Greek tragedy, everything came together for one shining moment before plunging into disaster.

  Fflowers, fallen from Olympus, escaped some of Fate’s revenge. But, to pay for that undeserved mercy, a sacrifice to the governmental gods must to be made. Just like in a myth much younger than the Greeks, the lupine Dicky Baudgew donned the sheepskin and went to his doom.

  Dicky’s doom included taking a large chunk of Flower’s fortune and going to Macao for a year, then spending two more in Beijing, four in Kuala Lumpur, before completing his penance, if not his rehabilitation, in Montreal. He returned to a quiet and ineffectual life in Manhattan. By the time Dicky was back home, quite a bit of his fortune had been transmuted into things—silk and ivory, jade, rice paper, nacre, alabaster, gold and porcelain things—and other pleasures and arts of a more transitory nature.

  All of the things which Dicky Baudgew had brought back him from his exile still surrounded him as he sat scratching his face. Dusty now, and rarely noticed, the things gave their owner much less comfort than they once had. A deteriorating body and unrequited revenge had shouldered them aside like a hungry piglet its littermates on the way to milk and mother.

  Dicky looked around his apartment and then out a black-streaked window. New Harlem, once the choicest address in Manhattan, had become Spicetown, a hell-hole of poverty and a stewpot of people. Dicky sat, scratched and pondered how he was rich with objects, but so very poor with satisfaction…except, now, for his little puzzle.

  Dicky Baudgew surely loved a puzzle.

  The tiny geri let his head drop back against the oily spot it had made over the decades on his favorite deerskin suede chair. His hands dropped down to his neck. He picked at the sparsely bristled thin folds of skin and hummed a long forgotten song.

  Fflowers, like Lear, the faltering king. Elena—the abdicated queen. The girl—a pawn. A few more pawns, a less than shining knight or two and…and, an interesting puzzle was born.

  The ancient scratched and thought of what to do and whom to use as the morning sun wheedled its way through the once very good, but now very faded, Braunswig & Fils curtains.

  The sun was in the west and Baudgew had a tremor in his hands, which he couldn’t decide came from hunger or excitement, before he decided that the very first step was to determine just what the girl was. Why did she look like Elena Fflowers, but think that Roan Winslow might be her great aunt? That thought knocked Dicky out of his chair. He had so enjoyed being clever with the girl that he had not thought to get her mother’s name. How could he not have asked? That was minor, but stupid. Dicky took a pinch of skin on his arm. Stupid people didn’t solve puzzles and people who didn’t solve puzzles needed to be punished. Dicky squeezed until tears ran from his eyes.

  After he got his breath back, Dicky pushed himself up from the stained chair to ogle a name and make a call.

  As he waited for the man and his science to arrive, Dicky thought hard about the girl who had passed his portal. Was she a clever, or, a lucky girl? Was she a clone of Elena Fflowers, a suppressed X embryo, or an exceedingly rare accident of genetic fate? What would the best answer be? Surely, at first glance, a clone, essence of Elena, would be the most valuable. The rumors were that Joshua Fflowers was fading fast. How Dicky would like to dangle that bauble before his enemy’s failing eyes. What could be more painful to a man facing his mortality than to be briefly teased with the physical form he once had loved, or more accurately, idolized since Dicky wasn’t sure Joshua Fflowers had ever loved anything in all the world during his long life.

  Dicky thought and scratched.

  But the taste of revenge, despite how sweet, could not linger.

  He already had taken the first step. The next in the puzzle was to compare the DNA of Elena and the girl. The girl’s DNA was easy. The man, when he arrived, would sample the lip and handle of the cup shel had used. Finding Elena’s DNA would be more difficult. It might still be on record at Cygnetics, although that was not very likely. However, if it were there, getting something out of that bee-hive shouldn’t be too difficult. Alternatively, the Juvenal Institute, which had done her transplant, would definitely have it; however there would not be many fissures in the firewalls of that august edifice.

  Unfortunately, Dicky Baudgew’s thinking had to take a turn.

  Less than five hours after the guileless girl had announced herself at his door, Dicky heard from the tech doing the work on the tea cup that there was no DNA to be found. The cup had been wiped clean. Dicky didn’t know if she was lucky, but the girl appeared to be clever. Dicky abhorred clever girls…of any age.

  Dicky had always told himself that when one door closed, another must open. He would get what he needed. The tracker he had planted in her feathers as she left his apartment would insure that. It would just take a little longer. Dicky made another call. Afterwards, the little man paid his dues.

  For being stupid a second time, Dicky’s sense of justice demanded he pinch the skin on the back of his knee with the tweezers he usually used on his eyebrows. After cleaning up the blood from that bit of retributive drudgery, Dicky made himself a cup of adreno tea, sat, pondered, and scratched and scratched and pondered and scratched and pondered until his cheeks leaked lymph like a tapped maple tree.