The Curiosity (13 page)

“Or to lose another inch,” I said.

“I don't understand,” Judge Rice said to Billings. “Have I put this woman in some sort of danger of losing her employment?”

“Yes,” Billings answered.

“No,” I said. “I am making my own choices here.”

Billings shook his head. “Don't do it.”

“Please step away from the door.”

“What about potential infection?”

“Judge Rice has an immune system just like us.”

“But, lovely, it's utterly unschooled in the hazards of this era.”

“Are you kidding? He was born in 1868, half a century before antibiotics. His immune system could probably kick our immune system's butt.”

Billings staggered. “1868? How do you know this?”

“He told me, Graham.”

“We brought back a man born in 1868?” Billings fell back against the wall, his mind grappling with this new fact. I rolled the wheelchair past him. The security door hissed closed behind us with Billings still in the chamber.

“I did not understand any of that conversation.”

“Don't worry, Judge Rice.” We cruised through the control room into the corridor. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“Could you tell me, please, where we are going?”

I grabbed both handles so we could roll faster. “To see the world.”

W
hen the elevator reached the top floor, I wheeled Judge Rice into the hallway.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“The door closed on one room, but opened on a different one.”

“Oh.” I laughed. “That's an elevator. We're on a different floor of the building now.”

“Brilliant,” he said. “How does it work?”

“Well, I don't know exactly. There's a motor on the roof, and cables down to the room we were riding in. It runs up and down a column through the center of the building.”

“Ha ha.” Judge Rice wagged his head side to side. “A great invention.”

I started wheeling him again. “I suppose it is.”

When we found the roof access, I discovered it was up a flight of stairs. This was a new experience for me, to see our destination in plain sight, yet not be able to reach it.

Judge Rice tilted his face, considering the stairway as if it were a mountain whose altitude needed assessing. “What is up there, Dr. Philo?”

“The rooftop,” I said. “Outside, there's a pretty good view of the city.”

“Which city might that be?”

“You mean no one has told you where you are? What do they do with you all day?” I shook my head. “It's Boston.”

“Ha ha.” His eyes brightened. “I
love
Boston.”

“I thought you might have been here before, since you're wearing boots from Lynn. You'll find the city considerably changed.”

Again Judge Rice cast an eye up the stairs. “I've observed how strong you are, Dr. Philo. Nonetheless, I don't imagine you could carry me.”

I locked the brakes. “How about a team effort? The old college try?”

“Excuse me?”

I laughed. “It means to do your best. Or something like that.”

“A man's reach should exceed his grasp—or what's a heaven for?”

“Did you just make that up?”

“Hardly.” He raised his arms toward me. “Browning.”

I used Nurse Emma's lifting technique, brought Judge Rice beside the railing, slid under his arm, pulled his hip against mine. “You were well read, in your old life?”

He took a hesitant step. “Not especially. I was weak on Homer, for example. Although I loved Shakespeare and Swift, I had no use for Milton whatsoever.”

I smiled. “I feel the same way. Milton and I have never gotten along.”

“You're teasing me.” He was smiling, too.

“More like laughing at myself. Ready?”

Judge Rice took a deep breath. He brought his hand down on my shoulder, gripped the railing, stared straight ahead. “Ready.”

I moved forward, he lifted his right foot, I hoisted, we rose one step. In that fashion we inched our way up, toward the rooftop and revelation.

T
he fire door was metal, heavy, and jammed shut. I leaned Judge Rice against the wall and banged the door with my shoulder. It moved about an eighth of an inch. “I did not expect this,” I said, banging it again.

“It's fine,” he panted. “Fine.”

I looked at the sheen of perspiration on his face, his lips white at the corners, and worried that I had made a terrible mistake. What his heart rate must have been, that poor muscle that had only been beating again for fourteen days. “Should we go back down?”

“Not when we've come this far. Assiduity always prevails.” He gestured with his chin. “You're hitting too high, Dr. Philo. Kick it like a mule, right near the handle.”

I stepped to the side and followed his advice. After two kicks the door swung wide. A gust of wind banged it hard against the outside wall. “Good advice, Judge Rice,” I said, turning in jubilation.

He was on the ground, clutching his throat. I bent beside him, my mind already halfway down the stairs to slap that red panic button. “Are you all right? Is it your lungs? What is it?”

He swallowed hard, as if he had a stone in his throat. “You can't smell it?”

I looked around. It was just a concrete stairwell, metal stairs. “Smell what?”

“The ocean.”

“Oh, yes, the salt air. The wind must be from the east tonight.”

“Poison,”
he gasped. “It's like poison.”

I searched his face. “How could it be? I don't understand you.”

He tapped the end of his nose. “It wasn't just water I breathed in, Dr. Philo. It was
salt
water. Salt water that killed me. It feels like someone is scouring my sinuses.”

The wind banged the fire door again. It was early April, but a late winter storm was heaving itself against the city. A gust swirled in on us, part snow, part dust.

“Come on, Judge Rice.” I hooked him under one arm. “We did this too soon. I'm taking you back down.”

“No,” he said, his face gone hard. I had a feeling the judge was in charge now, the authority from the bench. “If I am to experience a second life, mystery though it remains how such a thing could be possible, I must live it. I must see this place where the battered ship of my existence has come into harbor.”

“Are you sure?”

He set his jaw, raised his arms toward me.

“Well, then,” I said, “only a few more steps.”

As I lifted him that time, he leaned heavier into me. I could feel the heat of his body, his exertions. We turned the corner, reached the threshold. Then he took his hand from my shoulder, shuffling the last few steps on his own. I let him go, hovering in case he stumbled, as he moved himself forward into the dark.

I am not a praying person. But I had a moment then, when I wished very hard for him. That he would not be overwhelmed, that he would not get sick, that he would not go crazy. I wished on his behalf, then followed to where he stood.

Judge Rice covered his mouth with both hands, staring with eyes wide. Below lay the streets of Boston, its edges softened by an inch of fresh snow. Streetlamps cast amber down the avenues. Smoke rose from chimneys and pipes near and far. Cars followed the paths of their headlights. A taxi honked twice. Pedestrians crowded the nighttime sidewalks, headed to friends' apartments perhaps or home from a movie. The protesters had departed the green across from our building, leaving a small snowy park. To the right rose the spire of the North Church, to the left stood the sixty-story John Hancock Building, its glass skin reflecting the surrounding lights. A jet came roaring into view and Judge Rice startled at that, bending his knees as if to bolt, then followed the aircraft with his gaze as it banked east and out to sea. A police car brought his attention back, chirping its siren just long enough to cut through an intersection.

I stood beside the frozen man, seeing the city with new eyes. It was complex, it was beautiful, I felt a compassion for its people almost like pity. He lowered his hands, any pain from the salt air now anesthetized by the luminous spectacle at his feet.

“Well, your honor,” I said to him. “What do you think?”

Judge Rice shook his head. “Humanity,” he said, “you've been busy.”

CHAPTER 13

On the Record

(Daniel Dixon)

T
hat's what he said? We've been
busy
?”

“I told you that already,” Dr. Kate said.

I dutifully wrote it down. “And again, the reason you took him up there?”

“He was grieving. Look at the tape. He'd been crying. Being restrained had depressed him.” Unconsciously, she pulled her hair back. “After fourteen days, it would depress anyone.”

She wore snug jeans, a white top that looked like it would be soft to the touch. She had a tired look, from working all night and then having to stay for this meeting. Dr. Kate slipped off her shoes, turned in the chair, and tucked her feet under her butt. What a kitten. I had to scan my notes for a second, just to collect myself.

“What else?” she asked, sounding about as enthusiastic as colonoscopy patient.

We were waiting outside Carthage's office, summoned by Thomas that morning. Billings was there, too, sitting apart and keeping his nose in his notes. The door was closed, a murmuring from within. Who would Carthage be meeting with, this early in the day? I was always first, to review the previous day and discuss the highlights tape Gerber pulled together for morning release. Today Carthage had put me off twice, and now this. The security guys downstairs called Thomas away, which gave me a few private minutes for reporting. “How did you plan to get him back down the stairs without assistance?”

“I do not think that calling a couple of techs in for fifteen minutes constitutes a capital offense. Besides, what about Judge Rice? Now we know his name, his profession. The doors of his history are just beginning to open.”

“Look, Dr. Kate.” I chewed a second on the end of my pen. “How do I say this without making it a leading question?”

She did a slow blink. “Lead away.”

“Well, this project is Carthage's baby, is what it is. He made the whole deal happen here. No Carthage, no ice ship, no Jeremiah being woken up. And the good doctor could not have been clearer about what he sees the purpose of this project to be. Research, so that many more people can be reanimated down the road. I've heard him go on about this till my ears had blisters. Yet you blew all of that off. Took the guy out of the chamber, risked infection, exposed him to the dirty Boston air without so much as a surgical mask. That bails fairly completely on the scientific angle, wouldn't you say?”

“What's your question?”

“Well, I guess it would be this: what were you thinking?”

“There is a balance to be struck here, Dixon. I would think you'd understand that already.” She scooted forward in her chair, just an inch or two of her sweet backside still on the seat. “I am a scientist by profession and inclination, which means I care deeply about what we learn here. But I am also a human being, mindful that Judge Rice is a human being, so I also care about
how
we learn.” She rubbed her forehead. “When I was in grad school, we injected mice with cancer cells so we could try possible cures on them. We bred rabbits just so we could take their blood for testing new drugs. If you are really generous, and keep in mind the lofty larger goals we were after, still you could say we were in a morally gray area. Now that we have a person, this . . . this
guy,
in my view we have moved totally out of the gray. I no longer work for Erastus Carthage. I work for the Lazarus Project, which includes taking the best care I can of Judge Rice.”

Billings made a faint cough. I looked sidewise and the guy was definitely eavesdropping. It had been a long time since he turned a page. Oh well, no skin off me.

“What about the hug, though? Not quite so freaking scientific, Dr. Kate. Did you forget the cameras were on?”

She pursed her lips. “The right thing to do is also the right thing to do in front of a camera.”

“Even if it gets you fired?”

“I have only been thinking about that all night long.”

“You can't do old Frank much good if you get canned.”

“Judge Rice, you mean.” She smiled. “Actually he helped me prepare for this meeting. He offered excellent advice for keeping my job. The judge's legal mind remains quite sharp.”

“Even so, your termination may be what is happening next, right?”

“Well.” Dr. Kate sat back in the chair, crossed her legs, folded her arms over her breasts. The body language equivalent of a turtle retreating into its shell. “Isn't that what we're both here to find out?”

Right then I had to admit it, plain and simple: yours truly just could not figure this one out. You don't see a lot of hotties in a lab, first of all. She was still at a decent baby-making age, too, yet I'd never seen a guy within two miles of her. No ladies calling either, so it's not Plan B. She works for maybe the world's most controlling boss, yet she refuses to kiss his pompous ass like everyone else. An idiot would know that the hug, unstrapping, leaving the range of the cameras, any of that would make Carthage pop his clogs with rage. Dr. Kate did it all anyway.

She's not stupid, though. Back in August, while she brought the body back through Canada, I tracked down her grad school adviser, now a geek beyond salvation at the National Academy in D.C., and he said she was a bona fide genius, smarter than Carthage and Gerber combined.

Sure. And she owes it all to him, right? Perhaps we are committing a slight overstatement, Herr Professor? But his praise did lead me to track down her dissertation, on monoclonal antibodies and T-cell lymphocytes, and I curled up with it for a nice evening's education. Can't let a title scare you off, right? If you give these papers a chance, the stuff inside often makes a distant version of sense.

Not hers. I mean, I have digested my share of opaque research documents over the years at
Intrepid:
bending light, gravitational fields, evolutionary shortcuts in worms. And I often came away understanding more than I get from an overhead announcer in a train station. Dr. Kate's? Not a chance. For all yours truly could comprehend, it might as well have been written in Cyrillic.

“I notice you're not answering me,” she said.

I came back to the present. “I don't know anything. I'm just the scribbler.”

There was a bark of laughter from inside Carthage's office. Who could possibly be in there? My job is to know, yet here I was in the dark. Pissed me off. But I got my answer about three seconds later.

“Great, then, Dr. Carthage, terrific.” Out stepped Wilson Steele, damn it to hell. Senior science reporter at the
New York Times,
all six foot four of him. He'd authored two books on cryogenics, too: a scientific treatise titled
Margin of Possibility
and a popular one called
On Ice,
which I'd read years back—and loved, too, blast it all. In other words, the real thing is back in town. There goes my exclusive access, my global bylines. I guess the moment was bound to arrive eventually. But damn.

“You have my direct line,” Carthage was saying while Steele worked his hand up and down like an old water pump down on the farm. “Don't be a stranger.”

“No, sir,” Steele said. He turned to go, spotted me, and made his giant hand into an imaginary pistol so he could shoot me as he passed. “Nice work you're doing, Dixon.”

Right. Pat me on the head on my way down. The bastard.

Carthage had already retreated into his lair. “Come in, come in,” he called after. Of course I stepped back so Dr. Kate could go first. Billings stood and snapped his notebook shut, when all along I'd figured he was the meeting after us. I hung back half a second, and Wilson Steele leaned toward me with a whisper.

“You're not really buying any of this place's crap, are you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don't be coy, man. You hanging in till you can expose the whole fraud?”

I chuckled. “I used to think that way. But this place is legit.”

“Sure it is, Dixon.” He winked on his way to the corridor. “Sure it is.”

“Daniel?” Carthage called from inside his office. “Anytime now.”

I hustled right along. Was Steele gaming me? What was he up to?

Carthage sat at his desk, splooging some of that cleaning goop onto his hands. Apparently even a
New York Times
reporter counts among the unwashed. The head honcho waved us toward three chairs. “Be seated please.”

Dr. Kate complied, quick and quiet. Billings sat as slowly as an undertaker meeting with the bereaved family. I'd never given the guy much thought, because I pegged him early on as a lousy interview, but right then he gave me a creepy feeling. I shook it away. Time to cast for bigger fish.

“Dr. C,” I said, all brass tacks, “I thought I had the exclusive for the press pool on this story.”

“Excuse me?” Carthage jerked his head back as though I'd spat on the rug. “What are you talking about?”

“We had a deal. I give you glory ink, you give me sole access. But here's Wonder Boy Wilson coming out of your office. A change in direction, is what it is. I'd just like to know if we're in a new game now.”

Carthage shook his head. “Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.”

“That doesn't sound good.”

“On the contrary. You need to have confidence. I called you to this meeting precisely because I trust you, and wanted you to witness something. Likewise you need to trust me. The Lazarus Project is your story, no one else's.”

“Then what about Steele?”

Carthage dropped his shoulders, as if to say,
How can anyone be so dumb?
“The
New York Times,
Daniel. Even the president of the United States gives them special treatment. Am I to consider myself superior to the president of the United States?”

You already do,
I thought. I checked Dr. Kate to see if she had the same opinion, but she was studying her feet. Billings was reading diplomas on the far wall, all but whistling to show his lack of interest. “Of course not,” I said.

“You have enjoyed weeks of stories, published in newspapers around the world. What more could you want? Tell me.”

I looked at Dr. Kate again, then back at him. Carthage gave a sick smile. “Oh, don't you concern yourself about her anymore, not one molecule.”

I studied my notebook a second. What the hell, right? I'd already had a good ride out of this story, from one stupid Arctic assignment for
Intrepid
. What did I have to lose?

“I want the book.”

“The book?”

“Eventually there has to be a book about this project. The whole chronicle, from hard-ice to wherever the rainbow ends. And it ought to be written by someone who was present for the whole shebang.” I spread my hands wide. “This book will document work that makes history. It will give a layman's view of how amazing the project is. And I would guess, given the Web traffic, that it would be hugely popular.”

“Making the author both famous and wealthy?”

“Every writer wants to be read. If someone's going to tell this story, why not me?”

Carthage stood. “Why not indeed?” He paced a moment, then retreated behind his desk. “Once again you are two steps ahead of me, Daniel.” He sniffed. “You are perfectly correct about the need for a book. It could serve many useful purposes, for this project and the people it employs.”

“What about the person it reanimates?” Dr. Kate interrupted.

Carthage lowered his eyebrows. “You I will deal with momentarily.” He nodded at me. “I hope you will commence work on this book immediately, Daniel, and write it simultaneously with your news reports.”

“Thank you, Dr. C.” I slouched in relief. “Thanks a ton.”

He sat again. “Now.” Carthage rubbed his hands together like a gambler about to roll hot dice. “Daniel, I wanted you to be present so you might convey to the public the standards of professionalism the Lazarus Project strives to maintain.”

I waved my notebook, not really following him. “Ready when you are.”

He turned his full attention to Dr. Kate. And when I tracked his stare, I understood. He wanted me to watch him fire her. Talk about perverse. She was not quite as indifferent to his power as she pretended to be either. Her face had gone white, her eyes narrowed like she was facing into a strong wind. It was eerie, though, because Dr. Kate maintained this weird internal calm.

“Dr. Philo, why do we have cameras in the animation chamber?”

She considered a moment. “Science, publicity, and voyeurism.”

“You are mistaken. I could not care less about the peccadilloes and peculiarities of Subject One. It is all about documentation.”

“All?”

“Likewise, your job is science, not social work. When Subject One cries, you do not hug. You take notes, you interrogate.”

“Interrogate? Judge Rice is not some talking maze mouse.”