A Slow Cold Death

by Susy Gage

  She had gone to visit Radi’s family just once. As a general rule, Lori disapproved of parents, but she knew the trip would make Radi happy. The volcano had forced the family from Kalapana, and they now lived at an even more remote southern point called Na’alehu. Radi’s now-teenage sisters had miles of remote trails to explore, and took them to a secret green-sand beach made of tiny particles of olivine. The silence was perfect, and every night displayed unpolluted black skies where Lori could see the Southern Cross. They avoided the usual “Where do we sleep?” awkwardness so often experienced by same-sex couples because all of the “kids” slept on a single mattress on the lanai. The scent of that pure air, filled with ferns and jasmine and grass and coconut palms, still sometimes came to Lori in moments when she least expected it.

  Radi’s family was poor but far from stupid, and they hadn’t made her go to public school, letting her learn from books at home—usually ones stolen from the library—and the occasional private math tutor paid in homegrown fruit and fresh eggs. Radi had immersed herself in the island’s richness, the same environment that had inspired Darwin, her back yard filled with beak-shaped flowers and flower-shaped beaks.

  At least their postdocs had sent them to warm climates—after California, St. Louis, and then Florida—until the fateful day when Lori decided that among her five tenure-track offers, the one in Canada was the most appealing. Canada’s best university was offering a great start-up package, a joint appointment in the Faculties of Science and Medicine, and a fun city where people spoke a mix of French and English that she found irresistibly charming.

  Radi had been furious. “Go back to Siberia if you want, but I’m not your Sonya,” she had raged, and she stayed in her industrial chemistry position in Miami until she managed to find a job in Darwin.

  Australia seemed more like exile than Montreal, but Radi was Radi, and of course Oz was closer to Hawaii than the Northeast was. She liked it there, and Lori hoped she had finally managed to lose the last of her wrath at being forced to play a Minnesotan for so long.

  Now Lori pulled the phone over to the bed so that she could nestle under the covers for a long conversation, but she found herself unable to say anything of substance. The Fiendish Plan was supposed to be secret; what would Lou and Rose think if it leaked out because Lori blabbed to her ex?

  All this time, and all this distance, and they found themselves talking about furniture. Radi had been an experimentalist for seven years now, and she knew things about equipping a lab that Lori had never even considered.

  “Do a group trip to one of those general stores for your office,” she advised, “but don’t skimp on lab furniture. It’s the one thing I always pay full price for. If you have a BSL-3, you want to make sure none of the material in the furniture is porous, or nasty things will soak into it and start growing. You need to get chairs that are comfortable and rise to all different heights since you’ll be spending long hours at different instruments. You can re-surface the benchtops yourself, but anything robust enough is going to be heavy. I’ll find you the catalog number for the marble we used in Miami.”

  “What about a cryoslicer?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.” Lori sighed and hung her head over the bed so as not to over-stretch the phone cord. “I need to be able to slice things thin but keep them cold at the same time.”

  “Why not use a regular microtome in a really cold room?” Radi suggested, cackling as if it were a joke.

  “That’s a good idea, actually, but it would have to be well below freezing.”

  “And it serves you right!”

  Lori laughed because that was true enough, but the thought of something serving someone right led her down another trail of thought altogether. “Tell me,” she said, apropos of nothing because Radi would never be confused, “do you know Kuznetsov and Maupertuis?”

  “Not off-hand.” Radi sounded a bit defensive; she had always been known for having the inside scoop on every physicist on earth. “I’m not so plugged in any more, way out here. Are they theorists?”

  “Kuzno is. He stopped being productive years ago. He seems creepy—married an undergrad. Maupertuis is an ordinary Standard-Model theorist who only got his PhD a couple of years ago.”

  There were some scratching noises, and typing. “I’m thinking,” said Radi. “What is it you want to know?”

  “Do they have any enemies?” Lori responded promptly.

  “Why?” Radi would never be confused, but she would never be fooled, either. “What are you involved in?”

  “A Fiendish Plan,” Lori admitted.

  “And you’re plotting with Maupertuis and Kuznetsov?” Radi wondered dangerously.

  “With Maupertuis and Rose against Kuznetsov.”

  “All right. Kuzno, as you call him, appears to be your run-of-the-mill skanky slut. He knocked up his undergrad and married her, but then apparently she had a miscarriage or an abortion.”

  “That’s a relief. Imagine baby Kuznos!”

  “I’ve never met him personally. Maupertuis, though, I saw the last time I went to the March Meeting—but he’s just a baby. He was still in grad school.”

  “Don’t you think he might have pissed people off to get where he is at his age?” Lori hinted.

  “I can find out,” Radi promised. “But why?”

  “No reason,” Lori sighed, playing with the blanket. “Tell me about this non-porous furniture.”

  As Radhika babbled on, Lori thought back to her days with van Gnubbern. He had boasted then, back when he gave her the parka, that his lab was not just over-air-conditioned but perfectly climate controlled between negative ten and positive thirty degrees Celsius. If she set it at its lower limit, she would be able to sort, slice, mount, and photograph the ice cores without them vanishing to nothing in her hands.

  It would be uncomfortable—downright dangerous if you stayed inside too long. But since she had no experimental students, she was the only one who would be in there.

  And, as Radhika said, it served her right. Conversation over, she hung up the phone and lay staring at the ceiling for a long time, impatient for morning to come so she could put the next phase of her plan into action.

  Ten: Grand Theft Ice Core

  “Oh my God, I’m going to Gitmo.” Lori put her elbows on Solomon Rose’s desk and buried her head in her hands.

  The Great Man had a great office, the whole east corner of the fifth floor with a view of the new gym out one side and the foothills out the other. Photos of the good ol’ days dotted the walls: his appearance in STI’s last football match against California Bible College in 1937, a visit from Einstein, one of himself with a much younger but already miniskirt-clad tutu-man. Not even a Nobel Prize, though, made him able to offer anything better than a plastic chair for his guests to sit on. Apparently infrastructure grants had ceased paying for furniture many years before.

  “No, no, no,” chuckled Rose. He had just turned eighty-seven and was quite spry if rather wizened. Tiny and bald with a scabby head, he reminded Lori somehow of the flower whose name he shared, an old rose apple left to bake in the sun. “We are not stealing the ice cores. They are the legitimate property of my close personal friend Ben Gerson, who collected them, labeled them, and just happened to store them in the cold room in a lab that LEPER has recently consigned to—”

  “To the enemy! To Bob Drift and Dim Bulb.”

  “Bob Drift isn’t really the enemy.” Lou’s voice carried from over in the corner, where he was inspecting one by one the theses of the students Rose had graduated over the decades. “Even if he did embezzle a couple hundred K from me. But of course he can’t know what we’re up to.”

  “And how about Dim Bulb?” Lori wondered.

  “She means Jim Kalb,” Lou explained to a puzzled Rose, “that idiot from the basement. Beneath contempt. He was kicked out of Chicago the year I started—had to finish his degree somewhere in the frozen north, Fairbanks or something. It took him eleven year
s to get his PhD.”

  “Nevertheless, I don’t want him spewing Lyssavirus at me. How are we going to make sure he’s not there? And how big and heavy are these ice cores, anyway? We’re not the most physically imposing group of conspirators, you have to admit.” The others laughed. Lori did not think it was all that funny.

  “My role,” said Rose, “is to act as a diversion. The LEPERLab was of course quite pleased that someone of my stature offered to give a talk on quantum gravity at their, ahem, institution this Friday. The institutionalized will thus be required to attend. A single guard will probably deliver the three of us to the lecture hall and then should leave. All you kids need to do is to make yourselves scarce, stroll casually across the lab to the cold room, and load as much sample as you can into a small and innocuous-looking cooler, something that might pass as a lunch box. Ben has sliced the cores into ten-centimeter sections and has marked the most interesting with a star. Then we shall run back to campus and install them in your lovely little Arctic lab.” Rose beamed, as if the idea of cooling a room to miserable temperatures had been his own, rather than a sarcastic suggestion from someone skulking in the tropics.

  “You should have at least an hour to operate,” Rose continued. “Make a couple of trips if you like, just don’t let them pick you up.

  “Oh, the go-tards,” Lou scoffed. “You can hear them coming from a mile away.”

  Lori listened in slack-jawed skepticism as they explained that the LEPERs were no longer allowed to walk from building to building, under pretext of safety, but had to be shuttled around on some sort of horrible yellow leafblowers on wheels. She just plain didn’t believe it when they told her that the safety issue was killer deer.

  “I feel like Bigwig going into Efrafa,” she groaned. She was reminded by Lou’s laughter that they were about the same age and had thus both been warped as little kids by the tyrant bunnies and the terrible, terrible Woundwort. “Which obviously makes you Hazel.”

  “Hazel-rah,” Lou corrected with an air of bunnylike superiority.

  “A good enough analogy,” Rose agreed, “since your goal will be to blend in as much as possible and not give our secret away. Lori, if you don’t own a business suit, which I suspect you do not, buy one. It can be cheap, but it must be black. Try to look a little older, and study this carefully.”

  Lori took the sheet of paper he handed her: it was a hand-drawn topo map of the LEPERlab showing its rugged terrain, with the Drift lab perched at the top of the largest hill in between a clump of trees and a rocket-fuel lab marked Abandoned. She turned around to show it to Lou, but the way he smirked at her over Unitary Theory of Two-Dimensional Quantum Gravity made her realize that he had drawn it, that the past two days had been a mission of reconnaissance.

  “If we make several trips with our coolers, how do we keep the cores cold?” Lori wondered. “Do we need a refrigerated truck?”

  “Try driving one of those on lab, and you will go to Gitmo,” Rose warned. “No, we want a perfectly innocuous California car, which we will pack with dry ice. What do you drive, Lori?”

  “What, me? My disapproval of internal combustion isn’t part of legend yet?”

  “Hm. Lou, your vehicle doesn’t have a lot of room.”

  “And I sold it to pay for the set of wheels I’m sitting on now.”

  Rose looked as if he was finally beginning to understand how sorry his accomplices were. “One of you at least has a license, I hope? I haven’t driven in many years.”

  Lori raised her hand. “A Quebec license, if that counts. But I assume a rental car would attract suspicion?”

  Lou gave a deep sigh. “Let it go down for the record that, in the interests of science, I am willing to speak to my parents and borrow their accursed SUV.”

  Lori had never eaten at McDonald’s or been to Disneyland. She didn’t have a cell phone, barely knew how to make one dial. She mowed her lawn with a little push mower from the ‘50s that she sharpened herself. It was with a sentiment of eternal corruption, then, that the very next day she heaved herself what felt like ten vertical feet into the driver’s seat of a monstrous white SUV.

  The road seemed a hundred miles away. The cars around her looked like ladybugs. She had no idea how Lou was going to get into the passenger seat until she realized the dashboard had a huge handle, like one of the best holds at the climbing gym. It was still quite a pull-up, and he sprawled in the seat and looked around the interior of the car with disgust. “I need to learn to drive again,” he muttered, “but being in this thing makes me physically ill.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  “You, because you’re a budding ecoterrorist.” He put one hand on her shoulder for both solidarity and balance, trying to position all body parts correctly into the seat. “Me, because someone tried to kill me in it.”

  “What?” Lori squealed, recoiling from the door and steering wheel as if they would be spattered with blood. “Everyone says you were in the Beemer.”

  “Well, you know STI and its stories. After what I’d heard about you, I was expecting—”

  Lori really wanted to hear the end to that sentence, but Rose interrupted them. “Happy thoughts, kids! Think happy thoughts!” He buckled himself into one of the passenger seats. The interior was so cavernous that it swallowed without a trace their two industrial-sized coolers filled with dry ice. They were covered with a blanket for some semblance of discretion, and the lunchbox-style coolers were scattered over the top along with some old clothes and a couple of random items of sports equipment Lori had grabbed from her office.

  She must have been nervous, because she took two wrong turns on her way up the hill. Rose chuckled approvingly as she cursed and swore her way out of a dead-end street of which both lanes were narrower than the SUV. “It’s good to be a bit late,” he mused. “They might let us park right behind the building. Whatever you do, don’t park in Visitors. You’d have to sneak past the guard gate with your samples—curtains for sure.”

  The first big mistake she made was to take the right-hand lane into the control area. There were two lanes, separated by orange cones, and this was apparently the wrong one. The size of the SUV kept her from noticing right away that there were guards running towards them, and she had to brake suddenly. They all winced as they heard the coolers in the back slide around.

  The guard looked at her, put his foot up on the SUV’s step, and started screaming into her face. She couldn’t even understand most of what he said, something about a punishment memo and her “Colony Manager,” and it took all of her courage to remember the coaching she’d got from Rose: she slowly pointed to her STI faculty ID from her lapel. As much as the LEPERs hated to admit it, STI managed them, and she knew that the university President had more than once told the LEPER Director that he could treat his people any way he wanted, but that students and faculty were not to be abused.

  Then she spoke, as calmly as possible. “I’m sorry, I’ve never been here before. We are all faculty from the Physics Department at STI.”

  “We are delivering Professor Rose to his lecture, where he is going to tell the institution about his Nobel-Prize-winning work on quantum gravity,” added Lou, who seemed to have a better understanding of how to talk to arbitrary authority than Lori did.

  The guard peered in the windows but wasn’t satisfied. He called for backup, and a second guard appeared holding some kind of poster. They opened the passenger door to reveal the great physicist.

  Lori turned around in her seat and nearly screamed, thinking Solomon Rose had had a stroke. He was nodding his head slowly and the tip of his tongue protruded from a corner of his mouth. “Oh my goodness,” he murmured, as if he had been asleep, rolling Lou’s wheelchair towards himself. “Yes, my talk. Where do you say we have to park? Not sure if I can walk in the hot sun….”

  The guards consulted the poster, which Lori guessed was some kind of VIP guide. There was nothing written on it, just photos of people among whom were all of STI’s No
belists. They seemed to find Rose among the pictures, and glancing a few times at him, waved them through to park behind the building.

  “Christ, Sol,” said Lou, “you wanted to look infirm, not gaga. Skip the slobber next time.”

  Lori couldn’t believe he could talk that way to Rose. She couldn’t even do the first-name thing yet. “It worked, anyway. Professor Rose, why weren’t you a Bubo?”

  “Because I’ve always preferred to dress in black.” All traces of his senility had evaporated. “Besides, in my day, Pasteur House embarrassed itself by having a most egregious French grammatical error painted right on the door.”

  “An s on an imperative for a verb in –er,” Lou agreed meaningfully, shaking his head. “Quelle horreur.” Lori couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

  Being allowed to park on lab meant they were halfway there. Lori quickly lost sight of Rose and Lou in the crush of LEPERs pouring through the auditorium doors, but she wasn’t worried about them; they knew what they were doing much better than she did.

  There was no side door to sneak out of that she could tell except an emergency exit with an alarm, so she just walked backwards through the crowd, row upon row of zombies who didn’t so much as look down to acknowledge her. They were all wearing suits and had their IDs clipped to their lapels, so thanks to Rose she blended in, even though she felt confined in the jacket and dress pants. It always made her nervous to wear something she couldn’t do a backflip in.