Aftermath

43

From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

Chance, as Louis Pasteur famously remarked, favors the prepared mind.

Actually, my hero among nineteenth-century medical researchers is not the Frenchman Pasteur, flamboyant and ebullient, but his methodical, painstaking, physically unprepossessing German contemporary and rival, Robert Koch. Koch it was, not Pasteur, who in rigorous Teutonic fashion established the procedural rules for modern bacteriology and virology, those tunes to which all serious research workers even today must dance.

However, Pasteur’s well-known comment encourages a converse statement: Chance can transform or undo the most careful planning.

I had proof of this when Seth Parsigian and I headed for the place where we were to meet his colleagues. He had provided the method of transportation, an ugly box of a car that in its distant heyday must have been a sports utility vehicle. There was something that looked like dried blood on the passenger seat, concerning which I made no comment.

I loaded into the rear compartment a dozen boxes, complaining of their weight and of my own physical weakness. He offered no sympathy. I expected none, even had the weakness been genuine. As I packed the boxes, I explained what they were. When I said “test kit” I did not mean some tidy package or sealed plastic unit, where the press of a button popped final results up on a display. For that type of innately digital analysis, microchips would be an absolute essential. What I could provide used old-fashioned chemical tests, with reagents and precipitates and the comparison of colors. The work was not difficult, but it could be messy. And as soon as we reached our destination (but not before) I promised that I would reveal to Seth and his colleagues the sequence of tests to be performed, and their interpretations.

We both knew the other significance of that coming revelation. Once Seth knew how to do the tests, my vulnerability would increase enormously. As the endgame began, I was in danger of losing my queen. I knew — and he knew — that I needed a countermove.

He stared at me strangely when, with the car loaded and ready to go, I went back into the garden and collected Methuselah. “I won’t have a chance to come back and get him later,” I explained as I placed the box tortoise, appropriately, in with the other boxes in the rear compartment.

You won’t have much use for turtles where you’ll be going, his look said. But of course, he could not suggest that to me. We were still playing the game of mutual trust and goodwill, assisted on his part by a loaded gun.

He told me to drive. He would navigate. That was when I learned he had never before visited our destination.

So whose house was it? As we drove north I became increasingly apprehensive. I saw everything with heightened senses. Remember, this was my first opportunity to observe the effects of Supernova Alpha in a normal setting. My experience to date had been the emergence from the syncope facility, a bizarre river journey, and days of confinement within my own house and garden.

I drove slowly and carefully. The antique car would not go fast, and Seth did not need to remind me that police interest in our vehicle, for whatever reason, offered worse dangers for me than for him.

Our stately progress offered plenty of opportunity for observation. Seth’s occasional descriptions of the past two months had suggested to me a world shattered and shaken by the supernova. I had no reason to doubt what he said, and certainly what I saw on the highway offered much evidence to support his view. Hardly a car or truck was familiar, and the changes were not those that I might have reasonably expected after five years in judicial sleep. The vehicles had a jerry-built look to them, things of rags and patches.

On the other hand, they moved. And their drivers, except for an air of antiquity that matched the cars, seemed perfectly cheerful. Their manner said, we have faced the worse effects of the supernova; they’re over, and we’re going to beat this thing.

Some, of course, would not make that statement. I saw burned-out wreckage of old accidents, still uncleared. Someone had placed wreaths at three roadside points, where blackened earth showed the first sprouts of new green. As we progressed farther north, off to the left of the highway I saw the tail of a crashed aircraft, jutting into the red afternoon sky like a giant silver memorial to the dead.

As we left the finished roads and began to ascend a gravel track, the evidence of death became more immediate. Our car passed three crosses formed from cut saplings. The soil of the graves that they marked was ruddy and newly turned. They could be no more than a few days old.

I don’t think that Seth even noticed them. His attention was on his map.

“Turn left at the top,” he said. “And that’s it.”

That’s what? My apprehension mounted. I drove at a snail’s pace along the rough dirt road, until a small wooden house came into view, set back into the hillside.

“Stop a few yards short.” Seth was studying the house, but at the same time managed to keep one eye — and his gun — on me. “Then we’ll go take a look.”

“What about the telomere monitoring materials?”

“They can stay in the car. They’ll keep awhile, an’ I don’t see raccoons an’ deer takin’ too much interest in ’em.”

Which meant that Methuselah had to stay there, too. I made sure the doors and windows were closed before at Seth’s bidding I stepped out of the car and walked in front of him toward the house.

I mentioned that my sense of observation had been heightened from the moment we left my home. Now I saw Seth in the same super sensitive mood. In front of the house, he made me stop.

“No car tracks. Nobody has driven this way. But lots of boot marks. Recent. And both ways.” He motioned me forward again.

I noticed that one set of imprints was identical to those of the boots I had been wearing when I awoke at the syncope facility. That didn’t tell me much, and I did not mention it to Seth. In any case, I could see three different sizes and style of footprint. Not one of them looked like a woman’s shoe.

It was at this point that, as I remarked, chance seemed ready to undo my plans. I had been prepared for three people: Seth, and his two still-anonymous colleagues. My hope was to dispose of them, and to vanish. No one else would have any idea where to look for me.

Now I faced an uncertain number of adversaries. At a minimum there were three men and one woman, plus Seth. Disposing of all of them, however desirable, seemed impossibly difficult. That was even more the case since the woman had not been at the house, and she could be anywhere. She would be able to direct others here. My earlier hope, for their death and my disappearance, had been destroyed.

Chance favors the prepared mind. I looked even more closely at everything. We entered the house, me a step ahead of Seth.

“This gets a bit annoyin’,” he said, when we were both in the dim interior. He had a gift for understatement. “They’ve been here, sure as shootin’. Door not locked, footprints all over the place outside. But where the hell are they? It’ll be dark in another couple of hours.”

He did not expect an answer from me, so I was free to form my own impressions of the house. As Seth said, there were footprints outside, and not inside. But in places near the entrance, the wooden boards of the floor were slightly damp. Someone had recently been cleaning there. At the same time, the interior had the clammy, unused feel of a building unoccupied for weeks or months. A plate sat on the table, and the cup next to it contained a dried-out brown material. I bent over and sniffed. “Coffee,” I said to Seth. “But not made today — or yesterday, either.” When I straightened up I held hidden in my hand a little paring knife from the table. It was sharp enough but of no use as a weapon. The blade was barely an inch long.

“I don’t think so,” Seth said. “Put it back.”

Apparently he saw everything, even when he didn’t seem to be looking. I laid the little knife back on the table. Then I walked in front of him as we carried out an inspection of every part of the house.

“Not a thing,” Seth said at the end of it. “Not a sign, not a note, not even a callin’ card — not that I’d expect them to leave one, because for all they know, you might have arrived without me.”

Not a sign, he said, meaning not a sign of the owner, but I very much disagreed with that. I saw many signs. The house was sturdy and built of wood throughout. Although it was furnished with electric power, I also saw propane tanks, an oil stove, and kerosene heaters. The little bathroom had an old-fashioned hand razor and men’s aftershave lotion. The pantry was amply stocked with dried foods. The owner, whoever he might be, had apparently been rehearsing for Supernova Alpha long before the star exploded.

We ate a quick and simple meal, lighting the gas stove with matches that Seth found in a kitchen cupboard and using it to cook rice. The combination of boiled rice and canned sardines tasted execrable, but neither of us complained. As we finished eating, Seth stood up.

“Sorry about this, but I got no choice. I need to take a look around, see if I can find out where they are. I wouldn’t recommend you take off an’ run while I’m gone, though, ’cause if you do I’ll be after you ’til I find you. I really need to know how to use them telomod kits. But just in case you did feel like runnin’, we’ll rule out any crazy ideas like that.” He walked across and picked up a coil of rope from a storage cupboard in the corner, came back, and gestured to me. “Go on through there.”

We went into the bedroom. It faced east, and already the room was dark and gloomy. The bed, as I had already noted, had solid iron rails at foot and headboard. While he tied me, hands and feet, I waited for a moment when I might be able to grab the gun. It never came. Seth was too smart and too wary.

He stepped back, studied his efforts, and retied a couple of the knots. “There. That should do us. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but I’ll come back soon as I can. I told you, it won’t do no good to get loose an’ run, even if you can. I’d be right after you ’til I found you. I need to know how to run them tests. An’ don’t go callin’ for help, neither. Other people won’t look after you near as good as I do.”

I forced myself to wait for three minutes after he left. Then I stretched. It would do no good to pull directly on the ropes, that would only make the knots tighter. I had to get my hands around the top bed rail and pull on that directly.

Chance favors the prepared mind. I must stop repeating that cliche, or I will become a bore.

However, in this case it is relevant. The exercises that I had performed at night, quietly, locked away in the subbasement of my house, were both boring and unpleasant; now they also proved to have been necessary.

I stretched, grabbed, and heaved until my joints cracked. A bed, even a well-constructed one, is not designed to withstand such deliberate force. The headboard bent toward me, giving at the place where bolts secured it to the bed frame.

It did not come loose at a first effort; nor did I expect it to. I alternated pulling and pushing, relying on the fact that the bed was an old one. I did not know if the frame was wood or metal. If the former, the bolts would chew their way through it; if the latter, the bolts would themselves weaken from continued bending.

Both my vocation and my avocation had taught me patience. The ten minutes of hard work that it took before the headboard came free of the bed frame were rather less than I had expected.

I could not do the same thing with the foot of the bed. What I could do, with some effort, was lift the headboard, my hands still bound to it, right over my body, so that I could bend far enough to get my fingers to the knots on the ropes at my ankles. Seth had tied them tightly, but I had plenty of incentive. After another five minutes I could walk, still dragging the headboard, through to the kitchen where the paring knife lay on the tabletop.

Half a minute of awkward work, and I was free. And now came the hardest moment of all. My instincts told me to grab Methuselah from the car and run, far and fast. It was night, and the chance that Seth or anyone else would be able to catch me was small.

My instincts said that, but they were animal instincts. They were not the correct response for a thinking, analytical mind. I needed not only immediate freedom, I needed freedom from later pursuit.

That called for the use of valuable time, during which Seth might return, alone or with an unknown number of others. It also required that I perform a task both slightly distasteful and physically demanding.

I examined the garden tools in the lean-to by the house. I selected two, either of which could do the job. Then I headed to the car, opened it, and removed Methuselah. It was important to make as little noise as possible, so I pushed the door to but did not slam it. Carrying Methuselah and tools, I set off down the dirt track toward the main road.

Methuselah proved to be easy. The remains of a rusted barrel sat by the track, a couple of hundred yards from the house. I put Methuselah down inside it. The rim was only six inches high, but box tortoises are not given to athletic feats. He would make no effort to leave until he became hungry. I walked on.

It was two more hours before I could return to the house. By that time I was truly as tired as I had pretended to be earlier in the day. This had been a period of unrelenting and continuous effort, sustained by adrenaline and driven by the need to finish as quickly as possible.

The house was silent and empty as I crept through into the bedroom and thankfully placed my burden on the bed. Then the headboard went back to its original position. Finally, I had to make one more decision. Gas, or oil?

Gas has the disadvantage that it calls for judgment. I might easily blow myself up, along with everything else. So it was oil that I poured liberally onto the floor.

While I allowed time for the boards to saturate, I made one more trip to the car. I reached into one of the boxes in the rear compartment, removed half a dozen sheets of paper, and placed them prominently where no one looking into the car could possibly miss them.

Then it was back into the house, for one final brief act. I paused before I performed it. Had I omitted anything? If so, I certainly could not think what it might be.

True, I had not managed to dispose of Seth, an aspiration of mine since our first meeting. But as Longfellow remarks, life is real, life is earnest. It cannot all be simple pleasures.

I made my way down the hill again to collect Methuselah. It was beginning to rain, and I felt weary. All the same, there was joy in my heart and a spring in my step.