Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “That woman is a menace, Norbert. I’m worried about the children.”

  Spillvagen rubbed his forehead. “I know. I’ll take care of her.”

  “But I’m interrupting,” Melissa said. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to your discussion.”

  “I’m here about a friend of mine,” Bernal said. “Muriel Inglis. Have you met her?”

  “Oh, Muriel.” Melissa gave her husband a frosty look. "She was here just yesterday, wasn’t she? She seems like a very nice lady.” She pushed the cart out, clipping the edge of the doorway on her way.

  Spillvagen had moved into the crowded depths of the garage, where old appliances and other yard-sale-ready items crowded gray metal shelves, and pulled out a framed astronomical print that showed a cluster of bright blue-white stars in a swirl of pink dust. He leaned it up.

  Bernal joined him. “What is that, the Pleiades?”

  “Nah. Pretty similar bunch, though. That’s actually a cluster called NGC 2264, associated with the Cone Nebula, in Monoceros, the Unicorn. Can’t see it with the naked eye. Can’t find the constellation either. Kind of a low-rent district next to Orion. Don’t know who came up with it.”

  “You take the picture yourself?”

  “Yeah. Dumb hobby now, right? You got the Hubble up there, giving us cosmic beaver shots, and I’m on a ladder trying to get a glimpse of panty through a sorority window.”

  “Sure.”

  Spillvagen sighed. “Yolanda MacParland. We had some trouble at Long Voyage. Yolanda’s uncle is a client, an she’s convinced that there’s something wrong, that something happened to him. Your friend Muriel was little on that. I think .. ” He glanced at Bernal, then returned his attention to his astronomical photograph “Don’t take Melissa too seriously. It’s weird. Muriel is way older, I mean, you wouldn’t think there would be anything to worry about, but Melissa took her as a kind of challenge. How to hold yourself together, you know.”

  “It doesn’t look like Melissa has any trouble holding herself together,” Bernal said.

  Spillvagen gave him an appraising glance. “I’ll let her know you think so. I guess she’d need to hear that sometimes. It would get things off Muriel, that’s for sure.”

  Spillvagen enjoyed Melissa’s jealousy of Muriel, but it looked like he was jealous of her too.

  On the shelf next to Bernal was something that looked like an igloo made of crumpled gold foil, and a tray of plastic ice cubes. He pulled one out. The cube had a tiny human form in it, lying flat, as if asleep. Something fun for the Long Voyage New Year’s party. Nothing you’d really want to show potential clients. Maybe he was only thinking of the gold thing as an igloo because of the fake ice cubes, because it seemed like he’d seen something like it before.

  “I kind of got left holding the bag,” Spillvagen said. “That’s why I’m now in business for myself. Long Voyage did have security problems, all kinds of stuff, but nothing to do with me. But I was kind of up front, dealing with intake, all that, so .. . But now, it’s just Yolanda. She won’t let things go. You should go talk to her.”

  “Why?”

  “She . . . Muriel. Your friend Muriel said Yolanda knew more than she was telling about what happened at Long Voyage. Talking to Yolanda was what put Muriel onto me in the first place. Yolanda knows something your friend was really interested in. That’s great. But that Yolanda . . . I’m trying to hold things together here, and it’s nothing but an endless campaign of harassment. I'm getting too old for this, Bernal. I really am.”

  9

  “We know you slept with him, you slut!”

  The voice came around the side of the house.

  “Why don’t you read your own subtitle? It’s right across your chest. You can read, can’t you?”

  A TV audience hooted.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s what you’d like to think, you pathetic wannabe studmuffin.”

  It was a woman’s voice, husky and irritated. No one had responded to the doorbell, so Bernal walked around the silver Lexus GS in the driveway and past the garage, pushing his way through overgrown hostas.

  A woman in a yellow bikini lay on a lounge chair on a patio. Despite her pose, there was no pool in evidence. She was protected from the cool spring air by a kerosene burner hissing overhead. A television stood on a round glass table, the extension cord snaking along the flagstones and into the house. An excited host was yelling at someone that she had to get her life together, while the studio audience stomped feet and applauded. A laptop, a bulky older model with duct tape holding on a loose cover panel, lay on the flagstones.

  The woman looked up at Bernal through her sunglasses, then raised her remote and muted the show.

  “Excuse me,” Bernal said. “Do you know Norbert Spillvagen?”

  Instead of answering, she turned and picked up a cocktail shaker from the rolling bar next to her chair. She reached underneath, pulled out a cocktail glass, and poured something into it. She handed it to Bernal. She was in her mid-forties, maybe older. Her skin had lost some of its elasticity, and veins showed on her pale legs. But she wore maroon toenail polish and had some clear muscles in her shoulders. Her bobbed hair was the pale zoo-polar-bear yellow of a porn star. She tilted her sunglasses up to look at him. Her blue eyes were expertly outlined with eyeliner, her pursed lips outlined in a pencil darker than her not-too-vivid lipstick.

  Bernal took a sip: slightly watery sour-apple martini. He gazed up at the sun. It was moving into late afternoon, so maybe this wasn’t as decadent as it looked.

  “Come sit next to Momma.” She patted a spot on her recliner. There was a stack of white resin chairs on the other side of the table, so he had a choice of wrestling rudely with the stack or perching ridiculously on top of it. He sat down next to her knee. She tilted it away, but he still felt it, as if it radiated like the heater overhead. "Spill complain about me? Are you here to administer some discipline?”

  “I just talked to Norbert Spillvagen.”

  “And he complained. Stalking. Harassment. He’s such it whiner. Spiritual types like him often are, you ever notice that?”

  “I’m not so interested in Spillvagen himself. But he said you had been talking with Muriel Inglis. In fact, that you had sent Muriel to him. It’s Muriel I want to talk about.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any Muriel.”

  Bernal described Muriel Inglis to her and showed her a picture on his phone, the only one he had of her, taken at some charity event as she listened earnestly to someone accepting an award, a china coffee cup at her elbow. Looking at it, Yolanda shook her head slowly. “No. Might be someone I’d like to know, but . . . I’ve never seen her before.”

  Bernal was stunned. “But... Norbert said Muriel had gotten some information from you.”

  Yolanda laughed. “Oh, oh. You’re so cute when you look betrayed. What, you thought Spill cared about your little mission or whatever? He’s a little snake. The one good thing about him is that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He sent you to harass me, because he’s scared of me. But, no offense, you’re not really the heavy type.”

  “None taken.” Bernal couldn’t have said why that perfectly reasonable observation nettled him.

  “Though those bruises on your face do make you look a little scary.”

  “You don’t have to flatter me. You’ve really never seen her?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die. So now you go back to him and tell him you scared the hell out of me and I will never bother him ever again, no matter how he ruined my life.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “Don’t get me started.” Yolanda leaned over and poured the last of the green apple martini. But Bernal found himself looking at the bumps of her spine as it curved. She brushed her hair back and smiled slightly as she poured.

  “No, I’m curious.” He had to think about what to do next. He’d been more than half hoping that Yolanda would tell him exactly where Muriel was.

  “My uncle died a coup
le of years ago. Uncle Solly. I always liked Uncle Solly. When I was little, I used to go play with all that space stuff he had in his house. Telescopes, star charts, little Revell models of spaceships. All that stopped once I hit puberty, of course, and got to find that stuff kind of boring. Poor Uncle Solly. I ignored him for quite a while. I got interested in other things.

  “Solly didn’t have kids. His wife, my aunt Helga, died quite a few years before him. I never really knew her. Solly had worked hard his whole life. Nice house, nothing too big. But when he died, it turned out he had a lot of money stashed away. And aside from a branch of the family that moved to Colorado, I was it as far as relatives was concerned.

  “There wasn’t really a funeral, just a kind of ceremony at Long Voyage, that cryobank over toward Prescott, where that charlatan Spillvagen worked. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that Solly wanted to get himself frozen. Just his kind of thing. His little statement that they read at the ceremony said that he wanted to live to see human beings on other planets. A lot of stuff like that. Very inspiring. But it was a little room, hot, and he had a lot of people read stuff, and someone even played a video of the first man landing on the Moon. Don’t you think that flag on a stick was kind of silly? I mean, if you don’t have wind, think of something else. You should be able to. Those space types tend to be unimaginative.

  “Okay, fine. He’d set up his accounts in a variant of a dynasty trust called a ‘personal revival trust.’ Seems to be legal, though it hasn’t been tested in court. Dynasty trusts let you leave stuff to remote descendants. A personal revival trust lets you leave it to yourself, when you’re revived. And, of course, there’s rental. On the facility. There’s a fund for that too, otherwise there’s a chance they’d just dump you at some point, when you couldn’t pay to keep the liquid nitrogen cold or something. And that’s the way things stood, for a couple of years. I’d go visit Uncle Solly, now and again, just to see how he was getting on.”

  Bernal thought two things. One was that she had done a fair amount of research on the structure of her uncle’s trust. And two, that there was no way she had ever struggled over to Long Voyage to visit her frozen uncle.

  “Then, things went kablooie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Of course, if Uncle Solly had picked a classier cryo-bank, one housed in a black glass pyramid or something, none of this would have happened. ‘And we pass the savings on to you!’ just wasn’t the most comforting marketing positioning for a cryobank, even though it actually makes sense. Somebody has to pay for keeping that damn black glass pyramid clean. That stuff really shows marks.

  “Long Voyage was in an abandoned mall along with lot of other low-rent places. Well, something went wrong, and there was a fire. It was a pretty serious fire, and there were all sorts of power failures, the works. And their security was down for who knows how long.”

  “Do you think your uncle was . .. defrosted?” he said.

  “Of course I do! Why else would they stonewall that way? They screwed up, let the nitrogen boil off. It’s just horrible, thinking of Uncle Solly ending that way, Is that murder, do you think?”

  “Defrosting someone who could potentially be revived? In some kind of potential way, maybe.”

  “Well, I think someone should pay.”

  There really wasn’t anything for Bernal here. He thought Yolanda was right about why Spillvagen had sent him. He’d just wanted to yank Yolanda’s chain.

  He started to get up. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time. . . .”

  “Wait, wait. Hand me that computer.” She flipped open l the laptop and, after a few clicks, opened a photo. She held it on her lap, forcing him to lean over her to look at the picture. It showed solemn people sitting in folding chairs, with some pictures of rockets taking off on easel stands behind them. Bernal pretended to examine it as if it was important.

  “That’s the funeral,” she said. “Uncle Solly’s. See all his friends.” She shook her head, and there were tears in her eyes. “Even that lady from that other company, the space probe place, she came by. Nice of her. One space nut honoring another.”

  He should have seen it right away A blond head popped out of the group of faces. Here, too, her vaguely distracted expression made her look like she wasn’t a part of what was going on around her.

  “This one?” He pointed to Madeline Ungaro.

  “Yes. That’s the one. She wasn’t invited, but who was going to keep her out? It’s not like you had to show ID or anything.”

  “I’m glad you remembered this.”

  “I lose a lot of stuff, nowadays. You’re lucky my days are empty enough that it was worth my remembering.”

  For a moment, she looked bleak. Bernal admired her romantic melancholy, her knees, and her use of the gerund.

  10

  The road went around a field, past an old farmhouse, over a slight rise, and down into a patch of woods. Ahead, the trees opened out on a power line right-of-way. One arm out, one akimbo, pylons carried their delicate triple skein of high-voltage power off toward Boston. A track down the slope marked where mountain bikers and trail runners found their entertainment.

  Bernal pulled the van into a spot under an overgrown hedge, at the location Muriel had specified in her note, and waited. He was a bit early. He’d grabbed some Inidian takeout and settled himself into Ungaro’s lab. He had decided to make that his base of operations here in Cheriton. His plants in Boston would just have to rely on his downstairs neighbor’s services for a few more days. If anything happened, he figured, it would happen here.

  After about ten minutes, headlights played across him. He sat still, waiting for the car to pass. Instead, the car cut in ahead of him and parked a dozen yards or so farther up.

  _______

  The Plymouth Voyager had its parking lights on, organic ambient music with instruments from a dozen tribal cultures playing soothingly. Scorch marks had been painted on the side, as if it had recently endured reentry.

  Bernal walked up to them. “Glad you guys could make it tonight. My name’s Bernal. I’m a local.”

  Two long-haired men in microfiber windbreakers peered around the back of the van. They had already set up cameras and netlinks, and one had optic cable looped over his shoulder. Brightly colored fast-food wrappers, souvenirs of their road trip, drifted out onto the gravel as they yanked out more equipment. One of them knelt and shoveled everything back into the car.

  “Hey.” The driver, a girl with a square jaw but surprisingly beautiful lips, swung open her door. “My name’s Oleana. These guys are Len and Magnusen.” The two men nodded, but didn’t say anything. “Len’s from Baraboo. I’m from LaCrosse. Magnusen here’s a bit of a ringer: New Ulm, Minnesota.” Magnusen nodded again, embarrassed. “Hesketh is supposed to be along pretty soon. That your understanding too?”

  Hesketh? “Pretty much.”

  On the back of Oleana’s windbreaker was a blue-green alien planet with the words ENIGMATIC ASCENT around it. She wore a scent that was more floral than seemed right for her.

  And that was that. They settled down to wait. Magnusen sat hunched over a laptop. In response to a question from Bernal, he said, “Hesketh has a predicted route. Sometimes we get that, sometimes we don’t. But aren’t you guys the source of the data?”

  Bernal had to think fast. “Not my side of it. I do support work. The main source is supposed to be along pretty soon. You can meet her.”

  Magnusen smiled. “I’d like to, finally. We’ve been all over the country, chasing rumors and sightings. Around here’s the first real stuff we’ve found. The device has stuck to pretty much the same route for the past couple of runs, so our first guess is that it will again.”

  “I wish they’d just stop testing the thing and move on to the next phase,” Len said. “It’s ready to go. We all feel it. Ready to take on the stars. We’re getting kind of worried that it will be stuck here on Earth, just like us, for the rest of its existence.”


  “We’ve been all over,” Oleana said. “We all saved our pennies one year and went to Tyuratam, watched a launch. The Russians still have the largest launch vehicles. Shakes you right through. Everyone’s got to run to the bathroom right after. Out in the middle of Kazakhstan. Miserable, miserable. But we found fans there, right, Len? Guy named Yuri had hitched all the way from Kiev to watch a Proton booster. Just a comm satellite for a Japanese company. And Yuri was a young guy. Didn’t even remember the Soviet Union. And there he was, standing in the scrub grass, watching the flames come out of the concrete base, because he wanted to reassure himself that maybe it was possible to get the hell off this dustball after all.”

  “They’re selling off all those boosters.” Len was mournful. “Even the experimental stuff. Those little high-thrust things. Different countries use them for ICBMs, force projection, that kind of thing. And not just countries. Private consortia of all sorts.”

  “Private’s better anyway.” Magnusen snorted Red Man, neatly folded the top of the bag and put it in his boot. “Hey, remember that Ariane launch we got to see in French Guiana?”

  Bernal had to endure a number of stories of difficulties surmounted in pursuit of watching routine rocket launches. These guys were fanatics. Nuts.

  Len kept peeking out of the window.

  “See anyone?” Magnusen asked.

  “Not tonight. But, God, it gets crowded out here sometimes. .. .”

  “Other teams searching for Hesketh?” Bernal said.

  “Nah. But other fans of other things.”

  “Like what?”

  Len made a face. “You got a serial killer out here, I hear.”

  “Yeah. The Bowler.”

  “Some of his fans wander around. We’ve run across a couple of them.”

  “Weird people,” Oleana said with distaste. “Looking for bodies. Looking for someone who might well behead them. We stay away from them. As far as I’m concerned, they’re as dangerous as what they’re looking for.”