Capitol Reflections (9 page)
For the next fifteen minutes, the room was absent of all speech. A far older, universal language was spoken as sheets and blankets were pushed into disarray by eager arms and legs.
Jamie didn’t know any women like this in Scranton. Tonight, all of his experiments would be on a decidedly different life-form.
Henry sat up in bed and looked around. The only lights in the dorm room emanated from the eerie glow above Jamie’s plants. He climbed carefully over Carol’s limp body and crossed the room to inspect Heather and Jamie.
Perfect. All unconscious, thanks to the Quaaludes he ground up and put into the liquor earlier that afternoon. His little bacchanal had finally wound down, and the two girls slumbered on either side of Jamie like babes after their favorite bedtime stories. Since Henry’s vodka bottle contained only water, he was as fresh as a new day.
Henry Broome smiled like a man about to open a bank vault. He slipped the chain with the computer key over Jamie’s head, unlocked the computer, and hit the “ON” button. The Apple’s motor hummed as the monitor screen glowed bright green. The words next to the cursor requested a password. Henry laughed and typed in “d23&if5#al@2r.” He’d glanced over Jamie’s shoulders a dozen times during the semester, pretending to do other things when his roommate was booting the computer, but he knew that a password alone wouldn’t unlock any files. He studied Jamie for weeks before he finally knew what he needed to know—the drill for making the machine surrender its knowledge.
He lifted the strawlike body of his roommate—the kid couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds—and dropped him on the desk chair facing the Apple. He then placed Jamie’s right thumb firmly against the recognition pad until the computer screen flickered twice and displayed what appeared to be a directory. Henry replaced Jamie next to Heather and sat down, inspecting the column of files.
“Jesus Lord Almighty,” Henry said lowly, shaking his head. “What the hell is all this crap?”
Having observed Jamie’s fingers carefully while the geek nightly tapped the keyboard like a mini-piano, Henry knew which keys would scroll through the files. The list was extremely long and the scientific names would normally have put Henry to sleep faster than a keg of beer. The first few lines read:
Adenosine
Agrobacterium Tumefaciens
Alpha Helix
Arganine
Beta sheets
Carbon Rings
Chiral Compounds
Climatology
Cyclic Hydrocarbons
Cysteine
Ethylpropane
Glutamic Acid
Isomers
Farther down, one file in particular caught Henry’s attention. It said, “Experiments, spring thru fall, 1977.”
Henry was happy to see familiar words. Though he was not well-versed in science, he immediately recognized the names of two molecules listed in the file that were, in fact, household words.
“Interesting,” he said. “Very interesting. I think the little weasel is actually on to something here.”
There was no need to copy the information by hand. Jamie had hooked the computer to a daisy wheel printer. It was a noisy contraption—it spit out words like a typewriter on speed—but it wouldn’t wake his companions thanks to the booze and the ’ludes. They would remain in the drug- and alcohol-induced black hole until the following morning, when they would awaken feeling like they’d been run over by a Peterbilt.
Despite his considerable knowledge of potent spirits and pharmaceuticals, however, even Henry Broome sometimes miscalculated where the threshold of consciousness lay.
“Hey, wuss goin’ on?” asked Carol, trying to lift herself on wobbly elbows. “What ya typin’ on that … that … con … smuter?”
No response was necessary, as Carol quickly fell back onto the bed in a stupor.
Having been spooked for a second, Henry relaxed. “Now that’s just a pity,” Henry declared to himself. “A real pity. All you had to do was stay asleep and you would have lived out your little cheerleader life in suburban bliss.”
He looked back at the computer as it printed out the file and several others that Henry thought might be related. Though often underestimated by the likes of Bruce Merewether, Henry Broome was quite thorough.
Jamie opened a bleary, bloodshot eye—the other felt as if it were glued shut—and surveyed his room. Trash littered the floor—empty liquor bottles, textbooks, crumpled chip bags, and a half-dozen foil condom wrappers, all opened.
“Gotta clean up this place,” Jamie mumbled, sitting up.
That was when the first wave of nausea hit. In an attempt to stagger to the communal bathroom four rooms down, he got as far as the hallway before he threw up on the tile floor.
Henry emerged from the bathroom as Jamie straightened up, weak and pale.
“Steady there, little buddy,” said Henry, sounding like the Skipper addressing Gilligan. “You and Heather had a pretty wild time last night. You have to kind of ease into the day. Come on back to the room and let ol’ Henry fix you up.”
“Ol’ Henry” couldn’t have been more in the pink—freshly shaved, towel wrapped around his neck, hair combed, and whistling Oklahoma’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Jamie’s head throbbed with each cheerful note passing through Henry’s oval-shaped lips.
Heather and Carol were starting to rouse, their smudged make-up giving them the appearance of two very hungover raccoons.
“Good morning everyone,” proclaimed Henry, beaming. “Time for Dr. Broome’s wake-up special, complete with a little hair of the dog.”
“Hair of the what?” asked Jamie.
“The dog that bit ya, sonny boy Jim. Sit down until you get your sea legs, pal.”
Jamie stumbled to his bed and sat next to the disheveled Heather while Henry removed the top from a blender and poured in tomato juice, two raw eggs, powdered ginseng, and vodka from a two-ounce airline bottle. The appliance’s buzzing sound caused Heather and Jamie to flinch and they covered their ears.
“Jesus,” Heather complained. “Sounds like a fuckin’ swarm of bees.”
Henry noted with interest that Carol, while a little haggard-looking, was perking up faster than the others. That little episode last night while he was at the computer might very well be sitting in her pretty little head waiting to be revealed at the least propitious time.
“Okay, everyone,” Henry said. “Drink ye of this potion and the cobwebs in your brains will be blown away like a piece of trash in the hands of a nor’easter.”
Fifteen minutes later, Henry’s party companions were standing and stretching. “Quite a party we had last night, eh?” Henry said, elbowing Jamie in the ribs.
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” Jamie blushed profusely. He looked at Heather and added, “I mean yes, it was great. Really great. Thanks.”
It took all Henry could do not to laugh in Jamie’s face. “I’m going to escort our guests to their car. You just relax.”
“Okay. Think I’ll grab a shower.”
Henry chuckled as he led the girls out of the room. Down in the dorm lobby, he gave each a hundred-dollar bill, patted their rear ends, and told them he’d be calling them in the next day or two. Squinting, they walked into the sunlight toward Carol’s Ford Mustang. Carol turned around and blew Henry a kiss.
“What a shame,” Henry sighed. “A prize piece like that. A damn crying shame.”
“What’s eating you, kid?” Henry asked Jamie when he returned to the dorm room. The athlete’s face was more businesslike as he addressed a clearly disturbed Jamie Robinson. He pulled a rugby shirt over his shoulders and began lacing up a pair of cleated sneakers as he spoke. “Hell, didn’t I show you a good enough time, or do you need more airheads to screw?”
“It’s my computer. It shows one more access than I have in my computer log.” Jamie scratched his head, brows knit. “But that’s impossible. My records are never wrong.”
Henry stood and rolled his outstretched arms in circles. “Listen, kiddo, you were pretty messed up last night. You ever drink that much before?”
Jamie paused. “I’m not sure how much I drank, to tell you the truth.”
“Well, there you go, Jim-boy. You probably hit that whatchamacallit button and turned on the thing by accident. May have been right after you and Heather did some horizontal cha-cha. For the record, you also howled like a wolf. You ought to cut loose more often. All work and no play, as the saying goes.”
“Dancing? Howling?”
“Take it to the bank, kiddo. Anyway,” Henry said offhandedly as he headed for the door, “it’s not like you have the secret for the A-bomb in there. It’s just an undergrad thesis, right?”
“Thesis? Yeah, that’s all.”
“So long, Casanova,” said Henry, his trademark grin reappearing. “You behave yourself. See ya later.”
12
At nine-fifteen, Jamie pedaled home in the dark after putting in three hours of research at the library. He was trying to find out if anyone else had successfully produced any of his mutations. After searching several databases, he came up empty, which was most definitely a good thing, especially in the case of one of the little beauties he’d produced in his room. He was really pumped and in a hurry to get back to what he’d come to regard as the seat of his soul—the desk chair in front of his Apple.
Jamie stood up, straddling the ten-speed’s crossbar, waiting for a break in the traffic on Washington Road, a Princeton municipal street that cut straight across campus. He was about to jump up on the narrow seat and resume pedaling when a large hand gripped his left shoulder. Jamie cringed, a cry of fright escaping his throat, and his entire body shivered from the unexpected touch.
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