The Lost Island

15

Very late the following night, Eli Glinn sat in his wheelchair, alone in the silent vastness of the central EES laboratory, thumbing through a tattered, burned, and half-destroyed book of poems by W. H. Auden. It was almost five o’clock in the morning, and his entire body ached with the old ache that never left him.

Tucking the book into a pocket, he directed his wheelchair out of the laboratory and to the elevators. The doors opened, and he placed his hand on a digital reader; a moment later the doors closed again, and an LED display indicated the elevator was ascending to the penthouse.

When the doors reopened, Glinn rolled out. Three years earlier, finding that his infirmities made commuting difficult, Glinn had turned the uppermost floor of EES headquarters into a small penthouse and roof terrace, designed to accommodate his physical limitations. The apartment allowed him to retreat when he felt like it, and to reappear at the most unexpected moments, day or night, to supervise or review what was happening in the various labs and offices. He rarely left the building — it was too taxing. More to the point, Glinn no longer felt comfortable with strangers. There were too many pitying glances, too many people who spoke to him in a certain gentle tone of voice, too many small children who hid behind their mothers’ skirts and pointed when he appeared.

The wheelchair whirred into the apartment over polished slate floors. A soothing array of cool gray walls met the eye, the space Zen-like in its spareness and asceticism. There was virtually no furniture; Glinn was wheelchair-bound and he almost never had visitors to his private space, eliminating the need for sofas or chairs.

Glinn brought the wheelchair to one of the apartment’s few tables, picked up a remote control festooned with dials and various-colored buttons, and turned on the gas fire. Gesturing again with the remote, he aimed it at a pocket door, which slid open with a hiss, leading to his master bedroom. Another click of the remote started the water in the whirlpool bath, and a fourth click caused a row of scented candles to flicker on.

With great economy of movement and the help of two powered platforms and a robotic arm, Glinn undressed and was lowered into the churning, steaming whirlpool. This was not a luxury; it was a necessity in dealing with his broken body, to soothe away the pain that accumulated over the course of the day.

As he lay back in the water, he once again picked up the well-worn collection of W. H. Auden and began to read the famous poem titled “In Praise of Limestone.” After another moment, he put the book aside. It had been recommended to him by a woman: the only woman in his life. Or rather, almost in his life, as their relationship had terminated prematurely with her brutal death in the sinking of the supertanker Rolvaag.

That had ended forever any possibility of romance.

Not that there had been much emotional content before that, either. He had been orphaned at two when his parents were killed in a fiery plane crash, the cause of which was never properly determined. It was the first secret project he had undertaken at EES, the results of which were banal — the plane had suffered a fuel-line rupture — but at least it had afforded him closure.

After his parents’ death, a string of foster families had followed, and Glinn closed himself up as tightly as a bud on a frozen tree.

In the military, he’d had little need for friends, lovers, family, birthdays, Thanksgiving dinners, presents under the Christmas tree, or Friday-night parties. A loyal team that would obey his every command was enough. It satisfied his modest needs. The only thing he needed in life — which he needed absolutely — was the challenge of solving extremely difficult problems. He had a thirst for great challenges, the more demanding the better. As an intelligence operative, he could blow up almost any bridge or structure, he could break into just about any computer, he could design the most complex op and pull it off. Once, in an advanced cryptanalysis class at the academy, the professor assigned them a problem. It was a nasty sort of trick: unbeknownst to the students, the problem, known as the Michelson Conjecture, had never been solved. Glinn worked on the problem for forty-eight hours straight and brought in the solution at the next class.

The challenge of the impossible was the fuel that drove him through the military, the founding of EES, and life itself.

And then came the Lloyd Museum catastrophe, which killed the only woman he could ever imagine loving, and put him in a wheelchair.

With a sigh, Glinn picked up the book again and resumed reading the poem:

I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;

That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;

There are only the various envies, all of them sad.

Finishing the poem, he lay back in the bath, his thoughts gravitating to that strange phrase on the ancient map. Respondeo ad quaestionem, ipsa pergamena: “I reply to the question, the very page.”

Was it the key to the nature of the mysterious “physic”? It would do them no good to find Phorkys and then not know what to look for.

I reply to the question, the very page. The answer to the riddle was there, on the page itself — it had to be. Lying in the bath, visualizing the map in his mind’s eye, Glinn searched it, then searched again, roving over the lovely miniatures, the dotted lines, the tiny inscriptions.

The answer was there, and he would find it. Of that he was sure.