by Susy Gage
Her fingers quivered with excitement as she logged in, but half an hour later she was bored to tears and making faces at the monitor. The database only reported cases that had been settled in court, and if it could be believed, STI and the LEPERLab combined had had only four cases against them in the past decade. Two of them were about parking.
She was about to give up and try to call Lori when she had the brilliant idea of searching through the newspaper archives instead. The problem was that “Marybeth Coleman” was a distressingly common name, and the database included every little local rag from Imperial Beach to Eastport, Maine. Even “Marybeth Coleman—obituary” gave her over one hundred hits.
The more obscure names gave less data but nothing of interest. Van Gnubbern had given a series of lectures on how everyone should be a scientist—whoop de do, no they shouldn’t. Maupertuis had been in a bunch of plays when he was in high school and undergrad, and had been valedictorian of the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Science at the Enemy School. Neither of them featured in the papers at all for the past three years, thanks to the powers of the STI coverups committee.
To Carol’s surprise, “Kuznetsov” returned thousands of hits, and at least one of these Kuznetsovs led an exciting, evil life. Her heart leapt into her throat when she saw “Kuznetsov named in wrongful-death lawsuit,” but it turned out to be an S. Kuznetsov from somewhere back East.
She continued reading some of the stories at random, until something occurred to her. Weren’t people named Alexander often called Sasha?
“S. Kuznetsov” was a physics professor and department chairman. And he had been sued after a female graduate student in his department disappeared, presumed killed. Her body had never been found, but the suit claimed that she had asked for protection repeatedly from the department head, who had “mocked” her.
It was either his brother or a coincidence too horrible to be true, but it still didn’t make sense. If that was their Kuzno, he had been at a state school—a top school, but still a big public university. Disgraced professors didn’t get traded to STI from places like that; it was the other way around.
That incident was seventeen years ago. Just to reassure herself, she looked through the campus directories for the beginning of the nineties.
And there he was. Sasha (Alexander) Kuznetsov, Principal Engineer, Lobo Peak Rocket Lab, September 1990.
It was before there were scientists, so he was an engineer. Continuing through the years in the hopes that something would emerge, Carol found that Kuzno had left the LEPERLab for campus right at the time that the Science Colony was formed—almost six years after he was hired. The person who was the obvious choice for physics department head, Walter W. Waddles III, had become a LEPER.
It was almost like an exchange of hostages—Kuznetsov for Waddles. But what could that possibly mean? And why hadn’t the campus known to keep him away from the children?
She was scribbling madly on a piece of paper, trying to put it all together, when the dusty old phone on the microscope began to ring.
Somehow, even though most of the time she couldn’t use a phone to save her life, Lori had found her. Not only that, but Lori knew that Carol was now the “leader” of electron microscopy at the LEPERLab. She even knew the make, model, and year of the poor instrument being used as a doorstop, and when it had last been plugged in.
Carol’s annoyance faded as Lori began to provide useful information. She said there was nothing wrong with the microscope at all, but that the wiring in the room wasn’t set up to handle it. It had apparently been sitting on the floor for nearly a decade, when all it really needed was to be plugged in.
“I can bring you the ice cores!” Lori suggested excitedly. “That way I don’t have to wait to have my lab reopened before we start.”
It was a good thing Carol was sitting down, because the audacity of that would have knocked her off her feet. “I can’t do that!” she cried. “I’d be in direct competition with the LEPER effort.” And now here she was, saying “leper” with the rest of them.
“Hogwash!” Lori scoffed, in a tone that made the euphemism worse than a swear word. “Carol, how many times do have to tell you that the LEPERLab does not exist? We are the same institution. I can give you a SLAP right out of my start-up funds. The only one we’re in competition with is the LEPER principal investigator.”
The thought of a SLAP nearly set Carol drooling. What a sad, Pavlovian creature she had become. “OK,” she admitted. “But just one more thing. What if the LEPER PI is a murderer?”
There was a momentary surprised pause—but Lori would never be nonplused for long. “Then I’ll give you a few video cameras to catch him with,” she promised with a conspiratorial chuckle.
Seventeen: Fire and Ice
It wasn’t exactly the kind of theory she was supposed to be doing, but by the end of the week Lori had made real progress on the astrobiology project. She was just now starting to get what she thought was a good conceptual grasp of what was important about the microorganisms—”microbial communities”—in the ice cores.
Ben Gerson had been a godsend in helping her formulate the questions to be answered. There were key ways to image the traces of life in the ice in a way that astrobiologists could understand and appreciate. The students were useless to her at this point; Lori realized that what her infinitely long education had taught her was how to dig through the scientific literature for jargon, techniques, and open questions, adjusting what she did and how she did it so that the experts in the field could interpret the results at a glance.
The trouble was, she knew exactly what images she wanted, but the actual data collection was still out of reach. A few days ago, Carol had been assigned the old LEPER microscope that had once been van Gnubbern’s, but Lori didn’t have a lot of hope for that. That scope had always been delicate to handle, which was why van Gnubbern had given it to the LEPERs in the first place—and face it, Carol was a boson. It was more likely that any progress there would infuriate Dim Bulb and make him do something stupid, and that his arrest would exonerate Lori.
But so far, no luck. Besides, if Dimmy was only a henchman for Kuzno, then the real problem was right down here on campus in Lori’s face.
She didn’t even know what level of evil she was dealing with. If Kuzno had just been trying to get Lori into trouble and had killed Marybeth by accident, a simple murmur of I know what you did might be enough to scare him straight. But if he had shot Lou, and set up the falling door, and then deliberately wiped out Marybeth just to keep Lori from doing experiments—well, she wasn’t going to confront him.
Mysterious employee deaths tended to stay out of the papers, so Lori did some research another way. She pulled up directories of everyone from her undergraduate years onward, looking for obituaries.
She was disappointed. Everyone since Silverman had lived to at least 80, and died “quietly,” “at home,” or “after a long illness.” Even if she’d wanted to see something suspicious in Silverman’s death, she couldn’t pin it on Kuzno—it had happened five years before Kuzno was hired.
The department was back to its ghostly appearance. The students were lying low, and Lou hadn’t been in since the meeting with Ben. Lori couldn’t blame any of them, but wished they’d at least send her an e-mail to let her know what was going on.
They didn’t. It wasn’t until after her class on Friday morning that Sam came into her office wearing an even cheaper black suit than her own, and told her to hurry up, they were going to Marybeth’s funeral.
Fortunately she still had the suit crammed into a drawer, and figured no one would notice or care about her sandals. “Betcha we’re the only ones there,” she grumbled, as they crossed the campus and headed up the busy street that would take them past the community college, the Mongolian barbecue, and the dentist to the Shadow Valley Funeral Parlor with its little sign that read “Drive carefully! We can wait.”
It was a tatty little room with a few pews, a divider down
the middle to accommodate two ill-attended funerals at once, and practically no one in attendance except Lou, his student Alex, and Kuzno and his teenaged wife. No one seemed related to Marybeth except possibly a couple of aging Angelenos sitting stiffly in the back row. The woman easily had ten years on Absinthe but had managed to prolong her trim blondness by means that left traces of pain on her made-up face; the man was nearly as perfect and seemed manicured like a hedge, two tiny scars on his nasal bridge hinting at rhinoplasty.
A Catholic priest was already delivering the sermon and eulogy when Lori and Sam arrived. Lou was in a pew in the front row, sitting with his elbows on his knees and looking so dejected that Lori braved the glares of the priest and went to sit next to him. He turned his head slightly when he saw her, giving her a watery smile.
It was hard to imagine what he must be going through. He had survived hell by clinging to his work, but it turned out the one place that was a refuge had harbored the killer all along.
Even worse, the killer—or killers—was still running around free.
Lori hoped he’d just been hiding out in his parents’ mansion in Malibu—taking pictures, writing screenplays, maybe hiring a private investigator to tail Kuzno.
One thing was obvious: along with whatever else he’d been doing, he had planned Marybeth’s funeral. The only input to the eulogy had come from school, as it contained no dear daughter, dear friend, dear sister, but only words about how she had contributed to and “brightened” her group at the university. Wasn’t that couple her parents, and hadn’t they had anything to say?
From this close up, she could see that the coffin was little more than a cardboard box and that the flower arrangements were professionally respectful yet minimal. More people had mourned Lori’s evil, evil parents.
Certainly more people had mourned Roger, who had had at least four people there besides his mother who loved him deeply. It was hard to imagine now that he had ever existed, he was so linked in her mind to the cold and the snow and the twang of joual French, all now so remote and far away. The heavens had wept for him the way California skies could never weep, a wintry mix of rain that froze and snow that melted and thick fog boiling up from the icy canals. Radhika had flown out all the way from Oz to stand by the grave in her too-short black skirt (Radhika in a skirt!) and flip-flops under the horrors of a Montreal February, as out of place as a hibiscus at the South Pole. She had refrained from comments on the weather, or Canadians, or the omnipresence of Catholicism in the service, just took Lori’s too-pale hand in her warm brown one and let their tears mingle with the elements.
Lori reached for Lou’s hand now, and they both cried in silence for all they had lost, and for the vagaries of fate that could make someone otherwise so young and gifted be blighted with a personality that made her unlovable.
She wondered if Marybeth would have anything on her tombstone. If chosen by her group, it would probably read ΔS > 0. Or not—perhaps they would get as maudlin as Lori and Roger’s sister had, somehow in the depths of their grief settling on Au revoir, cher ami, even though they were both atheists and knew there was no au revoir, there was no adieu, there was just bye-bye.
“Are those her parents back there?” Lori whispered. “Because that might explain—”
“Shhh,” Lou murmured patiently, interlacing his fingers with hers. “Those are my parents.”
It would have been idiotic to get up to pay respects, since they were practically all in the same department, so she stayed seated next to him and watched the students mill around hypocritically. At least the casket was closed; Lori couldn’t imagine having to see Marybeth’s pigtails arranged carefully on a funeral pillow. Lou’s parents came up and sniped at him a bit in annoying snobby French, telling him he was a fool to have paid for all this and to sit up straight. Then they left.
After that he spoke, disengaging his hand from Lori’s so he could point incriminatingly at the coffin. “Things would have been different if we had listened to Marybeth. I can’t express the profoundness of my regret. Please try to remember her for how she helped each and every one of us—this group would not exist without her.”
To Lori’s astonishment, the students looked immensely guilty, even tearful. She herself felt a pang: he had paid for Marybeth’s funeral, but she was such a lousy advisor that she let her own people rot in Gitmo.
Guilt wasn’t productive. Roger had spent his entire life feeling guilty, which had got him nothing but scars on his wrists and tardive dyskinesia. No, she should focus on trying to get Dim Bulb and Kuzno caught and convicted of their crimes. What had Marybeth claimed in her complaints to the police? Was it just her sexual-hysteric stuff or was there anything about blackmail or violence?
Why had Kuzno come to the funeral? Maybe just to make sure Marybeth wasn’t faking her death, like her blindness and quadriplegia and child abuse and melanoma and irradiation and scurvy and black plague.
“Ready to go, Dr. Lou?” Alex asked at last, waiting for Lou to nod before bringing him his wheelchair from a far corner of the room (hiding it from his parents? she wondered. Bastards!). Lou climbed in, still seeming melancholy, rolled up to the priest and thanked him warmly, and then spoiled it by saying “Goddammit.”
Lori wanted to laugh at the priest’s expression; he’d never heard a good hostie de tabarnak! “What is it?”
“I just want to do some experiments. Let’s go.”
They and the two grad students left together and paused for a moment at the door, dazzled by the sunlight. Alex sneezed, and Lou and Sam both brushed locks of unmanageable, uncurling hair out of their eyes. Their run of Santa Ana weather was continuing with all of its slightly-surreal atmospheric phenomena—December highs in the nineties, the smog pushed from the city into an ochre smudge above the ocean, and the air so dry that every sound was amplified and every spark caused a forest fire. The fan palms rustled and buckled in the wind, and fronds rolled and danced down the street, where leafblowers continued their infernal task that nature made futile.
It was too beautiful a day for Marybeth to miss, but not too beautiful a day to scheme in the basement with an electron microscope. “What do you mean?” she asked Lou as soon as they were out of earshot of the building. “Did you say experiments?”
“Not quite real ones,” Lou admitted, trying to sound apologetic but clearly bursting with eagerness to tell her. “Not yet. It was supposed to be a surprise…You know the old fluorescence microscope in that creepy virus lab?”
“Sure I do. I used to use it every day, and I checked it last time I was in there. It still works, but it doesn’t have a digital CCD camera yet, just an old 35 mm that takes film.”
“Precisely,” said Lou. “And where you are a phonophobic Luddite, I’m that way with photography. The camera you saw in the park is my first digital. I still have a darkroom at my parents’ place.”
“And so?” Lori urged, walking quickly to leave the students behind.
“And so, the microscope is almost ready to go. The camera wasn’t parfocal with the eyepieces, so I fixed that with a test pattern. We’ll need a bunch of optical filters to separate the wavelengths, but I think I can find the parts right on campus. Give me samples when you have them.” He laughed at her amazement, doing a wheelie over a giant palm frond. “What, Barrow? Thought I was a p-brain, did you?”
“I—I thought you were off-campus,” Lori managed. “Hiding.”
“What could be safer than the BSL-3? There’s a double entryway with a padlock and then a keycode. And Kuzno never told me not to go in there.”
“So the project is still on?”
“Of course it’s on! It has to go on—otherwise they’ve all won.”
He’s been talking to Ben, Lori thought. “OK. I’ll get you samples. We can start with dyes, so you can check the wavelength. Because I’m not sure what colors—” She stopped herself, realizing she was starting to babble. “I’m kind of behind the curve here,” she admitted. “Carol has a microscope, now y
ou do, too. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,” said Lou, “I was hoping you’d knock off Dim Bulb.” His bravado finally failed, and he reached for a tissue too late to hide the tears that had filled his eyes.
It was upsetting to see a grown man burst into tears—especially when he appeared to be wiping them away with a Kimwipe from the BSL-3. Now we’ll have a real lab accident, Lori thought. She had nothing to say, so they stood there outside the Mongolian barbecue—the gale-force winds blasted them with odors of meat and oil—and shed a few tears that may have been more sincere than those at the funeral but which dried instantly on their faces in the Santa Ana air.
“It’s my fault,” Lou sobbed. “I feel as though I killed her.”
Sam, behind them, caught up and started to sniffle, too. “No, it’s mine. I’m the one who made fun of everything she said.”
“It was so cheap and abject.” Lou wiped his face and hands on the Kimwipe and tossed it into a garbage can. “I wanted to give her a nice funeral, but Sol and Wigbert said it would be inappropriate. Why would they say that, Lori, why?”
They were just being sentimental and providing no information. “The real question,” interrupted Lori, “is whether they suspect what we suspect.”
There was a moment of silence, more thoughtful than emotional. “I don’t have the slightest fucking clue,” Lou said at last, making a retard-face at some people who were staring at them and then continuing rapidly down the street, with Lori jogging after. “It just seems too good to be true that Rose and Gerson have this great project they want us for. It seemed like such a great opportunity, but we’re their cannon fodder.”
“So you don’t know any more than I do,” Lori exclaimed, dismayed, trying to tug off her stupid uncomfortable blazer as she ran. They had left the students some distance behind, perhaps deliberately.
