Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  And then of course there was the cold; they had stepped off that plane into a stiff wind that brought the temperature well below –40 Celsius. And yet, as he had retrieved the truck that his family had left for him for the two-hour trip to Chersky, she had simply smiled and held his hand.

  As the truck’s headlights jerked fitfully across the blackness, he wondered what she was thinking. If it had been daylight, the place might have felt very different; the vistas could be incredible, tens of thousands of miles on either side of unpopulated tundra with areas of thick forestation, low shrubs, moss, lichen, and weeds.

  A true and empty wilderness.

  Ten thousand years ago, it would have looked very different. The terrain surrounding them would have been made up of vast pastures populated by an incredible density of animals. Herds and super-herds, with a biomass rivaling the biggest cities of modern times. Millions of oxen, bison, horses, and even bigger herbivores, living together, harmonic, symbiotic.

  But now there was nothing.

  “It’s still hard for me to believe,” Anastasiya said. “You grew up out here, by yourself. It’s like something out of a novel. Such a harsh place for a child.”

  “I didn’t know any different. In the summer, it’s actually quite beautiful. Fishing, hiking—it’s everything that a little boy could wish for.”

  “But the winter.”

  “Yes.”

  In this part of Siberia there was no sugarcoating the winter. Temperatures that regularly reached –60°, that averaged –40° Celsius. And three months of complete darkness, with winds that could tear the frozen skin from your cheeks.

  “My father brought me here when I was two years old. And I was here until I left for high school.”

  Nikita’s sister had gotten out first. As soon as she was old enough, she had left for St. Petersburg, and a world that was not locked in ice. Nikita had followed her lead. Novosibirsk might still have been in Siberia, but with a population of 1.3 million, it was a veritable nation of its own compared to Chersky. The university was first-rate, and Nikita had planned to pursue math and computer modeling, then one day end up in a big city like his sister. He might have had the heart of a scientist in him, but he was not his father. He didn’t think, at twenty, that he was willing to give up everything just to save the world.

  “But then he came to the dorms four months ago and asked if I would come back.”

  Anastasiya looked at him. He kept his eyes on the road. She wouldn’t understand yet, but it really had been as simple as that. His father had asked him to come back, and he hadn’t been able to say no.

  “You think I was alone here as a child, and in some ways it certainly was lonely—but I was a part of something much bigger than myself.”

  They took another corner in the makeshift road, and through the darkness he could just barely make out the squat building that composed part of the Northeast Science Center. The front lights were on, casting a dull cone through the swirls of snow, and in the center stood a figure draped in a heavy winter coat. The fur-lined hood was up, revealing the man’s chiseled, weathered features, above his long, flowing dark beard. He was grinning into the cold.

  Sergey Zimov was the strongest man Nikita had ever known. He had built the Northeast Science Center with his bare hands, starting off with little more than a wooden hut in 1980, almost thirty years earlier. Eleven years after that, when the Soviet Union collapsed, his superiors in Moscow had ordered him back to Vladivostok to continue his work. He had refused, instead using whatever resources he could find to store enough food, gasoline, and materials to continue his work through the chaotic governments that followed. Over that time, he’d built the Science Center into a state-of-the-art Arctic research hub, with multiple biological labs, atmospheric data collectors, and tools for geo-engineering. More significant than any of that, thirty miles down the Kolyma River he’d begun working on a dream: a glimpse into both the past and—if they continued what he’d started—the future.

  Nikita had no doubt that his father would spend the rest of his life fighting for that dream. He wasn’t just the strongest man Nikita knew, but also the most determined. And one of the smartest.

  Nikita had never been able to refuse him.

  “The family business,” Anastasiya said. “You couldn’t walk away.”

  Nikita glanced at her and to his surprise, she didn’t look terrified or miserable or angry. She didn’t look as if she was ready to turn right around and head back to the little airport, back to the safety and comfort of Novosibirsk.

  She looked as if she, too, was coming home.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Early Spring 1964

  CLEARWATER BAY, FLORIDA.

  It was one of those rare Saturday afternoons when George Church somehow found himself alone in the house.

  Finished with his chores, well ahead of his schoolwork—although at ten years old in the swampy suburbs of a place like Clearwater, that wasn’t saying a whole lot. The public middle school Church attended was basically a holding pen, a corral for children. It was simply a place to keep the little hellions all in one place while their parents went on with the business of life.

  Certainly, by this age, George’s teachers knew about his affinity for numbers. His mother would tell her friends that little George could do math like the wind. But Clearwater wasn’t the sort of place where anyone had any expectations. As with most schools in the area, his public school didn’t even have a science teacher before seventh grade. And none of George’s classmates or friends had any desire to go to school beyond the legally prescribed limits; the idea of college was as foreign as snow.

  On the surface, there had been a fair deal of change in George’s young life over the past seven years. His mother had replaced his previous stepfather with Dr. Gaylord Church, an educated and worldly pediatrician who had taken an immediate liking to his precocious stepson. The elder Church often carted his stepson with him on trips to conferences in far-flung places, and unlike his classmates, George had become quite cosmopolitan by the beginning of his second decade. He had explored solo the streets of Dubrovnik, Plitvice, Rome, Cuzco, and, with company, Bogotá, Lake Titicaca, Rio di Janeiro, and São Paolo.

  He’d also developed a new hobby—going through his stepdad’s medical bag to play with the various instruments he found inside. Eventually, he had made his way to a collection of his dad’s hypodermic needles. When his stepfather noticed his interest, he taught George how to use one and had George inject him from time to time. George didn’t realize until he was much older that his stepfather had been addicted to painkillers, like many doctors of his era.

  George could only guess what his friend Charlie might have done with ready access to needles and various classes of opiates; sadly, Charlie was long gone by that time, shipped off to a foster home where he would have to continue his rebellions on his own. In Charlie’s place, George had gained a pair of stepbrothers who had come along with Gaylord Church, and two additional siblings as a signing bonus from his third father’s first marriage.

  Consequently, George had gotten adept at changing diapers, warming bottles, and dodging familial drama. One of the sons of his third father was particularly impressive; the unfortunate teenager had been institutionalized after an accident involving a Frisbee and a high-voltage telephone wire, which had led to a fall down a fire escape, a pair of broken arms, and hands and body covered in burns. Whenever he visited the Churches’ house, he reminded George of Frankenstein—arms in matching casts, scars all over his face, and a penchant for never wearing a shirt, the better to reveal the patches of new skin sewn all over his chest.

  So, for once, it was a nice surprise to find himself alone in the house at the peak of a Saturday afternoon. Resting against the couch in his living room, Church had instantly lost himself in that place between awake and asleep. Although his mother had yet to officially diagnose him, Church was narcoleptic as well as dyslexic. At that age, it wasn’t something he had entirely come to t
erms with—at some level, he was aware that people noticed his constant sleepiness, but he’d assumed that everyone was sleepy, but most were better at hiding the problem. Teachers would sometimes throw chalk at him, but it had never really sunk in—here was another way he was different. When he wasn’t moving, he could instantly fall into a deep sleep. This would happen in the classroom, on the playground, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation. To combat the disorder, Church had developed numerous tricks—bouncing the balls of his feet against the floor, drumming his fingers against any hard object, shifting his head on his neck. But sometimes, he just allowed it to happen.

  His mother had assumed his sleepiness was the natural result of a brain that seemed to work twice as fast as everyone else’s, but Church doubted that was true. After all, his mind didn’t slow when he was asleep—sometimes it seemed to spin even faster. At the moment, his head against the couch pillow, his long legs curled beneath him, he was thinking ahead to the science project that had consumed much of his recent days.

  A week earlier, he had been leafing through a science fiction novel in the public library and had stumbled upon a story about giant, man-eating plants. He had immediately decided to try to make one of his own. He had previously learned about Venus flytraps—plants that could trap insects, survive on protein, and were indigenous to the Carolinas—and had begun to study what might make a plant like that grow.

  In some old science books, he’d found a chemical that could significantly exaggerate the size of bean sprouts, and he intended to apply them to a crop of flytraps he was growing in the front yard. His goal wasn’t to terrorize the neighborhood—though that would yield a certain satisfaction—but simply to prove that it could be done. A new mental exercise, like blowing up plastic cowboys with fireworks.

  But today, his thoughts of massive, toothy greenery were interrupted by a sudden knocking that cut through the fog of his sleep. He was halfway off the couch before he realized that someone was at the front door.

  Crossing the living room and opening the door, he was surprised to find one of his neighbors standing on the porch—a middle-aged man in jeans and work boots, with a baseball hat pulled down over his eyes.

  “George,” the man said by way of a greeting. His southern accent was so heavy, his syllables extended themselves so long, that Church had to employ his physical tricks to keep his focus.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Just wanted to congratulate you,” the man replied. “I see that you’re finally taking care of that jungle behind your house.”

  Church raised his eyebrows. One of his main chores from age ten was yard maintenance. The house Gaylord Church had moved them into was set on about an acre of land. Although the neighbors had mostly beautiful, well-manicured lawns that looked like golf courses, Church’s yard was covered in an angry species of weed called sand spurs. Church’s mother paid him a penny for every plant he ripped out, but clearing the lawn of the vicious spurs was a Sisyphean task.

  At some point in the past few weeks, he’d come up with the idea to go after the spurs with science. He’d gotten hold of a magnifying glass and discovered that, by focusing the intense Florida sun at the spurs, he could burn them to the root. That very morning, he had cleared a good quarter of their backyard.

  “Doing my best, sir,” Church said, pleased with himself.

  The man nodded, then turned to leave. Over his shoulder, he said, “Oh, and nice fire.”

  Church didn’t show any emotion until the man had stepped away from the porch. Then he slammed the door shut, turned, and ran across the living room toward the back of the house. Even before he reached the back door, he could smell the smoke. Throwing open the door, he immediately saw that he’d set half the yard on fire. The flames were high in the air, spreading outward from the gnarled trees toward the area that separated his lawn from the neighboring community.

  Church went right for the garden hose curled beneath the back garage. Luckily, he had developed an extensive knowledge of compression and water pressure, and knew exactly how to turn his regular hose into something that resembled a crop duster.

  Even so, it took a good forty minutes before he’d gained control of the conflagration. He was finishing rolling the hose back into place when he heard his mother’s car pull into the front driveway. He made it back inside just as she reached the front porch—then caught sight of himself reflected in a picture frame above the couch. His face was covered in soot, burnt spurs sticking out from his hair like a demented crown. He dived into the bathroom as his mother got her keys into the door, then jammed his head under the faucet.

  As his mother entered the living room, he was still shaking water out of the wild locks of his hair. His mother gave him a curious look, but didn’t say anything. Eventually, Church knew, she was going to glance out the back door and see their scorched trees, but for the moment he was in the clear.

  Which was a good thing, because his mother had a surprise for him.

  “George, you’re going to miss school next week.”

  “Are we going somewhere?”

  Missing school was far from a big deal; the most important thing on his schedule for the week was a violent game of dodge ball in PE.

  “Not so much where,” his mother responded, “as when.”

  And as the smoke from the backyard fire rose past the windowpanes behind him, she opened an envelope containing a pair of two-dollar admission tickets to the 1964–65 World’s Fair.

  * * *

  In real life, time travel wasn’t as simple a process as comic books and sci-fi B movies had led Church to believe. It didn’t involve Plexiglas tubes and blinking neon lights, faraday cages spitting electricity, control panels leaking swirls of colored smoke.

  Instead, time travel began with a three-day drive up Interstate One, trapped in the passenger seat of his mother’s ’62 Buick. Along the way, Church had hung his head as far out the side window as decorum and the proximity to surrounding traffic allowed. He’d suffered from extreme motion sickness for as long as he could remember, so it was a good thing that time travel also included frequent stops at the homes of various cousins, uncles, and aunts up and down the eastern seaboard, a copious amount of fast food from highway restaurants, and a four-hour traffic jam on the Queensboro Bridge—after which the chaos of the vastly overwhelmed parking lot at Flushing Meadows seemed almost civilized.

  Even so, hours after leaving the parking lot, Church was still fighting the tail end of an almost continuous bout of nausea as he wriggled out from underneath a polished safety bar, and away from the caterpillar of moving chairs that had taken his mother and him on a tour of Futurama, an exhibit located within the General Motors Pavilion. Riding in his chair, Church had just gotten a glimpse into life thirty years into the future, with inventions that included brightly colored concept cars—sleek, slick vehicles with bubbles of glass for cockpits and fins that looked as if they had been pulled from the tails of a jet—moving sidewalks, even moon colonies and underwater hotels.

  No amount of motion sickness could have dampened Church’s excitement. The 1964–65 World’s Fair had surpassed what he’d imagined during the long trip up the East Coast, from the moment he’d entered the fairgrounds and caught sight of the massive, 120-foot-tall globe, the Unisphere. Made of crisscrossing curved bars twisted into a perfect sphere, the Unisphere was the focal point at the end of a long avenue lined with flags from every country on the planet. The fair’s theme was “Peace through understanding,” and it was dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.”

  This was the future, as imagined by a collaboration of automobile, oil, manufacturing, entertainment, and even computer companies. They had hired the world’s most prominent architects to build impressive pavilions that filled Flushing Meadows from one end to the other. And within some of those pavilions, many visitors had their first encounters with the new world of computing.

  To Church, everything at
the fair seemed shiny and brilliant. In the IBM Pavilion, he’d had the chance to see a mainframe computer up close. In the Ford Motor Pavilion, he’d taken a ride in a quad of Ford convertibles along a skyway whose scenery traced the history of life on Earth, from the dinosaurs through the present to an imagined future not unlike the one depicted by their competitors at GM in Futurama.

  Walking next to his mother past a domed car that looked more like a grounded jet airplane, with fins supporting what looked to be rocket tubes and wheels that might have twisted flat for takeoff, Church felt his mom’s hand on his shoulder. He knew she could feel that he was trembling, and he half expected her to diagnose him with some new neurosis or disease. He wanted to put her at ease, but excited as he was, he also felt a strange anxiety growing in the pit of his stomach.

  “It’s not real,” Church finally said. “I mean, I know it’s not supposed to be real. It’s supposed to be what’s coming. What’s possible.”

  His mother looked at him. Church shrugged his wide shoulders. He was already twice as tall as most of his classmates, and his growth showed no signs of slowing.

  “This future—this is where we ought to live,” he said. “But we don’t. We can’t.”

  At the Disney Pavilion, he’d seen an animatronic President Lincoln. At first glance, it had seemed so impressive, a machine of gears and levers that looked and talked like a person. But when he’d leaned in close, he’d seen that the paint was faded and the screws’ heads stripped. He compared that worn robot to the ride he’d just taken, to the imagined cities of the future, deep underwater, in space, on the moon. These were the imagined results of the atomic age come to life, the harnessing of energies well beyond present understanding. Everything at the fair was so incredibly smooth, bright, and shiny compared with the present, which felt so broken down. Unwieldy. Rough and busted.