Strontium-90 (7 page)

She gave me a sharp glance, her eyes peering over the librarian’s glasses perched on her nose.

I felt heat rise in my cheeks. In my inner turmoil,
with the fear and guilt roiling in me, I shrugged and gave a chuckle.

“You must set aside your worries, Paul. I’m not giving you an advance, and that’s final. Now I don’t want you thinking about money on a day as important as this. My life’s work is about to be proved this very morning. You must be alert.” She took off her glasses, a frown creasing her forehead. “You look awful. Your eyes are bloodshot. Have you been drinking?”

“No, madam, I—” I almost confessed. I almost poured out my woes, but I knew that Doctor Hiram might return Chuikov his soul. Boss Chuikov—I shuddered as I thought what he would do to me afterward.

“Are you sick?” asked Doctor Hiram, concerned now.

“I had a sleepless night, madam.” I smiled, as insincere as it must have looked to her. “I’m excited about the test. I can hardly believe that we might actually achieve success.”

She nodded slowly.

“Whose soul will you photograph first?” I asked.

“Why, Paul, you agreed several days ago to let me photograph your soul.”

“I must confess, madam, I think the honor should be yours.”

“Nonsense, I must monitor the machine.”

I licked my lips. “I suddenly find myself reluctant to do this.”

Her features hardened. “Now, Paul, I’m not going to put up with any silliness today. You agreed.”

“I’m sorry, madam. I withdraw my agreement.”

Anger flashed in her eyes. “If you think this will win you an advance, you’re mistaken. I will not be coerced into loaning you money.”

“I don’t want an advance,” I said. “Call my reluctance… latent superstition. I’m simply uncomfortable with the idea of having my soul photographed. What if there are complications?”

“Bah!” she said, waving her glasses in the air. “This is crass insubordination and the same delusional shibboleths Doctor Wesley propounded. You’ve never evidenced reluctance before. What’s really troubling you?”

“Fear,” I said.

Her features softened. “I hear the ring of truth in your voice, and for a fact your eyes are bloodshot.” She pursed her lips, and a moment later, she exhaled sharply. “Very well, it is my theory, my machine and it will be my ultimate triumph. Do you know what to do?”

“I believe so, madam.”

She nodded, and I heard no further objections. Shortly, Doctor Miriam Hiram sat in the chair. I turned on the machine. She screamed, a high-pitched wail, and moments later, I held her greenish, whirling soul.

***

After thoroughly quizzing a compliant Doctor Hiram, I learned the disturbing identity of her backers. I understood why they might have wished to photograph souls and wondered if they had realized the possible complications. No. I don’t see how anyone could have known.

I couldn’t get rid of such backers, hide for any length of time from them and found it unlikely that they would listen to my explanation and just let me go. I had to gamble. I had to bring their chief here… and have him sit under the machine.

It would certainly solve my gambling debts.

Thus, I went to work, and I had Doctor Hiram fly to Washington D.C. She phoned three days later.

“Just a moment,” I said. I had been watching the Packers play the Dallas Cowboys, having five hundred big ones riding on the outcome. I went to the drawer where I kept the Doctor’s soul, picking it up. “All right, he agreed?”

“…Yes.”

“When can I—can we expect him?”

“He’s flying back with me.”

“That’s on the fifteenth?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he seem impressed with the data
?” I frowned when she didn’t answer, and I squeezed her soul. “Doctor, are you there?”

“He asked if I was feeling well. He… he seemed troubled.”

This was bad news. “Very good, Doctor. Hang up and return home. You sound as if you need rest.” I didn’t like to talk about this via cell phone. Such communications were all too easy to eavesdrop upon.

The fifteenth rapidly approached, and I made certain that my guard worked that day and that Boss Chuikov donned a lab coat, keeping his .38 taped under the console. I sweated this more than any hand of cards I’d ever played. I gambled for high stakes now and dreaded failure.

I had impressed upon Doctor Hiram the need for secrecy, and thus felt queasy that morning when two Lincoln Continentals showed up bearing government plates. Athletic men in black suits, dark glasses and buzz cuts emerged from the parked cars, followed by an older man in a tan suit, together with small Doctor Hiram. The suits surrounded the older man, escorting him toward the building.

I had a wild impulse to run, but that was impossible now. I had to play the hand dealt me.

The entourage entered and Doctor Hiram introduced Chuikov and me as her assistants.

“I thought you only had one assistant,” the older man said. He was bald, but big, a suspicious man with a mashed nose. Long ago had been a tackle for the UCLA Bruins.

“We had trouble with the Montesquieu Refractor,” I said. “It proved to be Mr. Chuikov’s area of expertise.”

At a soft nod from the older man, the suits checked the room and soon gave the all clear.

“Who will be the test subject, Doctor?” I asked.

The older man pointed to one of his bodyguards. I nodded as my insides seethed. I couldn’t see anyway around this. It depressed me, but I had told the Doctor to make sure he came alone. This wasn’t going to be my fault.

The suit sat in the chair as Doctor Hiram assured him of its harmlessness. Then she went to the console, switched it on and the suit screamed horribly, the others whirling around to see why, several of them drawing heavy automatics.

“Now,” I told Chuikov.

Without any emotion, Boss Chuikov ripped his .38 from under the console and shot the surprised bodyguards. Then Chuikov charged the old UCLA tackle. It was a good fight, but Chuikov had forgotten none of his wrestling moves. With the first suit’s help—I held his soul—they wrestled the older man onto the chair as I turned on the machine.

He screamed.

I ran to the machine and popped out the soul of the head of Homeland Security. I had always thought this country needed a few changes.

No, I decided, there were going to be many changes.

Thule

The toll of time doth beat for all.

Even the gods at last must fall.

So when each man shall surely die,

What but his fame shall reach the sky?

-- From:
The Lament of Ulfer Aufling

GREENLAND A.D. 1126:

Henri fled across the ice from baying Irish wolfhounds
. He’d gotten greedy again at dice and won too much. He clutched a long, spiral-fluted horn. Blood dripped from its ivory tip, the droplets freezing into tiny red pearls. His painful breath—each frigid gulp felt as if raspy sharkskin rubbed his throat.

A monstrous glacier loomed before him, a mountainous heap of artic frost
. The reflected sun-glare was blinding. Henri squinted as he ran. Then the ice-shelf shifted, it rumbled beneath him. Henri lost his footing and plowed face-first into the crystalline snow. At a great splintering sound, his head whipped up. He spat hoarfrost from numbed lips and in horror witnessed jagged cracks ripping across the ice. The mountain before him, the glacier trembled like an old man. White rimy boulders, frozen balls of ice, shook loose from the sun-dazzled cliffs. They rolled, cracked against ledges and sailed into the frigid air. One rock splintered into icy shards and hurled icicles that plunged into the snow around him. Terrified, Henri clutched his head.

The land seemed alive with a malignant will
. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the quake quit, and the air was cold and still again.

Stretched as he was on the snow, Henri shivered
. The ice sucked at his heat like a leech. And to think that for this time and place it was unseasonably warm, that it had been warmer here for the last three years than anyone could remember.

The wolfhounds bayed anew and Henri scrambled to his feet, sprinting
. If those he’d cheated caught him…. His breath steamed misty-white and his ears stung. He was a small man with dark hair and said by many to have sly features. Usually he smiled. Usually he composed poems and love ballads. In the past and with a laugh he had often told tavern wenches that he preferred wine and ink to sword and blood. Few paid a farthing however for his poems, so he survived in the end because he had an unnatural knack at dice. Oh, why had he cheated the hunters?

Fool
! Fool!

He glanced back.

The shaggy hounds streaked across the ice, baying savagely, with mist smoking from their fanged maws. The horn clenched in his fist—he might spear one and inadvertently snap the flawless ivory. Then what would he tell Margot? He thrust the spiral-fluted horn through his belt, and he threw himself upon the forward slopes and ledges of the glacier, scrabbling for height.

Margot, sweet Margot
, if only she could see him now.

Then an odd sensation of malice filled him
. It was malice hoary with age, malice vast and brooding.

He frowned as he heaved and levered himself higher
. His leather mittens scratched against the ice that numbed his hands. His boots slipped three different times. The wolfhounds lunged up the glacier after him, their claws digging for purchase. With terrible swiftness they leaped and climbed, using the same speed they had earlier shown killing walruses.

Henri rolled onto a freezing ledge.

The hounds scrabbled after. By a valiant effort and a flying leap, one of the brutes thrust his front paws onto the ledge. Those paws bled.

Henri shouted in fear
. He scooted backward and jarred against a frozen wall. The wolfhound rose up. He had a black tongue. Henri thrust the sole of a boot into death’s teeth. With a yelp, the hound lost its balance and tumbled out of sight.

Frantic, his heart thudding, Henri scrambled to the edge
. The wolfhounds glared up at him. They leaped and scratched in an effort to sink their fangs into his flesh. Instead, they slid back down. After several tries, they whined in frustration and sat on their hairy haunches, baying.

A horn wailed in response.

Henri squinted. Hunters dared the shelf ice. He was surprised. Before he’d cheated them the hunters had warned him how in this unseasonable heat the shelf ice was treacherous and deadly. They wore leathern greatcoats and hefted iron-tipped harpoons. They were burly and blond, the sons of Vikings who had come from Iceland and colonized this wretched land. Eric the Red had led them more than a hundred years ago, calling this the Green Land so more would come to this waste at the end of the world.

Oh, why had he promised Margot a unicorn’s horn
? He should have stayed in Normandy and won her heart by the usual means.

He was rational and romantic, an impossible combination
. So when he’d heard from a Dublin-born seaman that hunters harpooned unicorns in the frigid waters of the Uttermost North, that Henri had to see. He’d gone to Iceland and then Greenland, joining the summer hunters as they sailed north beyond where the sea turned sluggish with floe. Small, troll-like primitives,
Skrealing
, hunted seals in this forbidden land from tiny skin-stretched kayaks.

On a pebbled shore farther north than any Normandy-born man had surely ever been, Henri had witnessed the shock of his life
. The shock had been a small and beautiful northern whale. Out of the narwhal’s head had grown a spiral-fluted unicorn horn! With iron-tipped harpoons and wicked cunning, the blond hunters had slain the creature and dragged it ashore. There they’d sawn off the ivory horn.

The offense to Henri’s sensibilities had been profound
. He was no superstitious peasant, no ignoramus. Comets weren’t dragons. Elves never drank from an overnight milk-bucket. Dwarves didn’t labor under the Earth. Those were fairy tales, myths. But unicorns had evidence of their existence. Their horns were sold in a hundred different marketplaces. Now to realize the base trickery in those sales… his own duping and the witnessing of that profane act… it had enraged him.

Yesterday at supper, he’d drawn out his dice, suggested to the hunters that they win back what he’d won at their farm at Brattahild of the East Settlement
. At midnight in this place, a strange light had gleamed from under the horizon. It had been a haunting brightness over the endless expanse of sluggish sea. The iceblink had kept the stars from appearing and had aided his unnatural knack. By morning, he’d won their catches, their shirts and their ship. He imagined that’s when they’d decided to kill him.

Henri now leaped to his feet and looked down from his icy ledge as the hunters started up the glacier
. They shouted threats. If he didn’t come down, they were going to strand him here.

Henri climbed
. If he must, he planned on buying or stealing a
Skrealing’s
kayak and paddling all the way back to the East Settlement hundreds of leagues away.

The hunters argued among themselves and then followed
. Surely, they wanted vengeance, the hot kind where they smashed his bones and watched him drop dead. It was too ethereal for them the thought of rowing home while the little poet from Normandy froze to death in this forsaken land.

Henri rounded a blue-whitish bend, scrambled up a freezing embankment, slid down twenty feet on the other side and gaped in disbelief.

Out beyond the glacier poked up ruins, things of stone, not ice. There was a headless statue and two sides of a temple perhaps, some sort of building. The hunters had never said anything about ruins. Perhaps only in this unseasonable warmth had the ice retreated enough to reveal this olden rubble. Henri slid and then jumped toward the stones. As he gulped icy air, he wondered who would build here. How could they build in a land of eternal ice? Or was there some distant past when it had been warm enough here for grass, cattle and fields of grain?

Drifting voices bade him to glance back
. The hunters pointed at the ruins. Did dread fill their superstitious souls? Christianity had come to Greenland in the 1000s, but Henri had heard the hunters curse before, calling out to Odin and Thor.

He stumbled against the headless statue
. The head lay at the monument’s base, with the face pressed against snow. He saw by the cleaner surface of the neck that it had only recently been broken off. Had the earlier rumble done that?

Henri pressed his mittens against the stone as sweat trickled under his collar
. The statue wore marble garments of a type he’d never seen before. He squinted at the ice underneath his boots. In the crystalline depths, he saw paved streets.

He shuffled his feet
. The creak of frozen leather was an ominous sound. He climbed a frosty bank and saw a dark opening, a jag in the ice. He stumbled to it and felt heat waft up against his cheeks. He hesitated but a moment. Then he slid onto his belly and swung his legs down into the opening. He dropped into the warm trench and saw ancient walls embedded in the ice. There were serpentine images chiseled upon those ruins, some of which spewed what seemed to be imaginary fire.

Henri thudded onto dirt
. It was iron-hard, permanently frozen. He tripped over an old cobblestone, and he ducked into an icy-white cavern. The heat was greater here, a steady draft. It darkened as he advanced. He slid his feet as a precaution. Then he came upon a hole. Heat billowed upward from it, welcome warmness. This heat had no fetid odor like a polar bear’s den. He probed carefully and found steps that led down. In the darkness, he took one stair at a time. He came to a landing and blindly followed the waft of heat. There were other passages. In the murk, he felt dark openings. Those were frigid. He followed the warmth and in time heard a hiss, a faint plop.

Did he come upon a dragon’s den
? The idea was preposterous. Then he noticed faint red light. His heart thudded, and the heat that he breathed, instead of icy air, added to his fear. He took turns in the dark passageway, twists in the corridor and heard from far behind the voices of men.

He plunged ahead
. The red glow increased, and from it came burbling sounds. With the added illumination, he saw that he wasn’t in ice but a cavern of stone. A last turn brought him before a high-ceilinged vault. He halted in astonishment.

In the center of an immense area was a hole from which glowed redness and from which heat waves hazed
. He’d seen the volcanoes in Iceland and heard of their eruptions. This appeared to be a shaft into a lava bed. Around the glow and scattered about the cave lay vast bones, colossal and titanic. Henri wandered past heaps of what appeared to be ancient breastplates and swords rusted beyond use. He saw great earthen jars mossy with age. Other jars rose above him and were made of a shiny substance that showed lovely beings with pointy ears. What most astonished him were bowls of green brass in which lay heaps of rubies, sapphires, emeralds and opals. Beside them were broken shields and rags.

He seized a ruby as big as a robin’s egg
. It gleamed with a strange light. It fired his soul as awe mingled with avarice.

Henri cocked his head
. He heard voices, the scuffle of boots!

He hurried to the far edge of the vault and crouched behind a huge jar, trying to devise a stratagem.

In time seven hunters tramped into the cavern of lava-light.

“By Odin’s beard!” one cried.

“It’s a dragon hoard,” another said.

“Like Sigurd and Fafnir,” a third said.

“Evil treasure then, brothers. Nothing but ill comes from cursed dragon gold.”

“Bah
! Why can’t this be a dwarf’s hold? It’s under the Earth isn’t it? Look at that light. Dwarfs would build a fortress in such a place as this, yes, so they could fire their forges.”

“This is neither a dragon’s lair nor a dwarf’s hold,” the oldest said, Thorfinn by name
. “Have you never listened to the bishop? Don’t you understand how old this place must be? Surely, this is an antediluvian city from before Noah’s time. Those are a behemoth’s bones.”

A giddy laugh bubbled from another
. “Odin or Noah, dragon or behemoth, what matters are the rubies and opals heaped around us, yes?”

A tapping noise commenced
. “There’s wine in these jars!” the youngest shouted.

“Pry it open, Leif
. I’m thirsty after such a long run.”

From his position crouched behind a different man-sized jar, Henri glanced up at the jug’s mouth
. It was sealed. The wax seemed as solid as stone and upon it had been carved strange runes.

One of the hunters shouted a similar find.

“Use your axe and smash the neck, Leif!”

Henri peered around his jar in time to see a hunter swing an axe
. Across the wide room pottery shattered. Strange fumes wafted upward.

“Smells like spices,” Leif said.

A man sniffed loudly. “This is olden wine, heavy with age. It must be rich and potent. Perhaps it is dangerous.”

Leif dipped a thick finger, drawing out a purple-colored digit that he thrust into his bearded mouth
. Leif smacked his lips, reached in a cupped hand and slurped. “It’s wonderful, my brothers!”