The Curiosity (6 page)

“Some other person raised from a tomb? In the New Testament?”

Thomas steps back. “I'm sorry, sir. I wasn't raised in any religion.”

“Nor I. Find out. There was someone, I'm sure of it.”

“Right away, sir.”

But you raise one hand to stay his departure. Below, they appear to be chanting something. Through the glass, you cannot make out what it is. Those not holding signs clap along with the chant.

“Is there something more, sir?”

“Dismiss the good doctors. Give them each five thousand dollars and my thanks for their time.”

“Yes, sir.” Thomas scribbles on his clipboard. “Anything else?”

“Bring me that midwestern physician, the heart transplant man.”

“Dr. Borden?”

“Exactly. Bring me Christopher Borden. And then we must rename the institute.”

“Really, sir?”

“We are no longer seeking. We have found.”

“Pardon the question, sir, but isn't the Carthage name enough?”

“We need a name that is an irritant, Thomas. Like the grain of sand in an oyster.” You point out the window. “Do you know what I see down there?”

“Malcontents, sir?”

“No.” You sigh, as contentedly as if finishing a fine meal. “Money.”

CHAPTER 7

The Lazarus Project

(Kate Philo)

W
here did I come from? I don't know. Why was I put on this earth? I don't know. Where will I go when I die? I don't know. What an intrepid woman scientist I am. Everything that really matters is something I don't know.

As I walked through the city that morning, the tang of spring sharpening the air, multitudes on their way to work, I could not shake the feeling that marching beside me was one beast of a don't-know. What were we going to do that day? What were we daring to attempt? Sometimes I couldn't decide if I wanted us to succeed or fail.

By then I lived in Cambridge, in a tiny side-street apartment. Though I strolled past Harvard every day, my only affiliation was with Carthage, who had become more freelance than ever. Tolliver at the National Academy e-mailed me, told me to be careful not to ally myself too much with one enterprise. He was probably right, but there were so many directions this research could go, I felt like I had lots of options.

So did my commute. The T could get me to the lab in minutes. I preferred to walk: crossing the Charles River, wending through Back Bay. Work was intense enough; I needed the decompression of the walk home, too. It takes time to regain a relaxed attitude about all the don't-knows.

We put our eye to a microscope and there's a universe we never knew existed. We do the same thing with a telescope, same realization. There are ideas, too, from Darwin and Gauss, from Pasteur and Newton, that reveal universes as clearly as any instrument.

That morning, an otherwise ordinary day in April, I was marching to the main lab, now known as The Lazarus Project, for possibly the biggest day of my life. Ever since I'd aligned my fate with Carthage's, there had been a steady sequence of biggest days.

The morning of the find, back in August, that had been huge. Within hours Dixon had called the story in from the ship to his magazine, which immediately sold it to the international press. By the next morning the whole saga was in print, from the midnight wake-up call on the ship to everyone on the team eating ice cream. My name made papers worldwide before we'd reached landfall. Strangers found my online address. Three offered me jobs. One decided I was Satan. My sister, Chloe, took it upon herself to send a snarky e-mail about me falling for another cold guy. Apparently she also could not resist the opportunity to urge me to make sure no one stole my limelight—provided that I had actually done something significant.
Thanks, Chloe, for being you
.

When we docked in Halifax, TV cameras waited on the wharf. They pounced before the engines were off. We had our gear to haul, not to mention moving our frozen friend, but they insisted on a statement. I nearly asked them:
What do you want me to say?
Fortyscore and seven years ago some unknown guy got iced? Did you know Dixon has already named him Frank, as in Frankenstein? No? Too dehumanizing? Then how about this: We have a frozen body. We have a technique. It works on creatures an inch long, for about two minutes. Beyond that, we'll get back to you.

Besides, with all those cameras pointed at me, I looked about as put together as any woman would after ten weeks at sea. Skin like leather, hair like a hurricane. My fifteen minutes.

But Carthage was there, Carthage took charge. For the first time I was glad for his overbearing ego. He made sure we received royal treatment: a nice hotel, warm meals, a hot shower so long my skin pruned like a baby's. His insistence that Billings and I accompany the body by train, that was showy for my taste. There were trawlers right there in port equipped to haul tons of frozen fish. There were refrigerated air-freight carriers at an airport just miles away. Carthage maintained that his method would guarantee temperature consistency, but we knew he had another motive.

That meant twenty hours with Billings on the trip south. On the overnight we did the proper, correct, appropriate thing: we got smashed.

“Don't worry, lovely, I'm not going to attempt some tawdry seduction on you,” he said, wobbling in the aisle against the sway of the train. “Altogether too much the scientist, don't you know.” He flopped into the seat beside me. “Socially spastic, few deep allegiances, suspected of borderline Asperger's. You know the lot. My brother aside, you're the closest thing I have to a friend.”

“Excuse me?”

“We've nine hundred miles to cover.” He held up a large bottle. “This seems like the best way.”

“Bourbon?”

“Yes, I drink like a Yank now, blast it.” He flashed his crooked-toothed grin at me. “But it does the trick.”

I was won over completely. “At the risk of being too formal on you, Billings, could I go get us a couple of glasses?”

“Brilliant.”

We sipped and supped, we told old tales, we laughed ourselves weak.

The following noon we chugged into customs to learn that Carthage's slow train had been a masterstroke of media manipulation. Just over the border, American cameras stood in a line, reporters shouting questions. Anticipation had brought them to a froth.

That meant my face appeared on a national magazine cover three days later, looking not scientific but hungover. Billings was pale as a frog's belly. He even asked one reporter if he knew where a poor soul could get some tea.

That welcome marked the beginning of a media avalanche. By the time we'd stowed the frozen man at Carthage's Boston lab, we were nonstop with talk shows, radio interviews, meetings with reporters over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was more exhausting than fun, to tell the truth. More spectacle than substance. I felt like a magician, wiggling my hand over here so no one notices my deception over there.

A week along, I was in a hotel pulling off a blouse before bed when I encountered an unfamiliar odor. I put the shirt to my face and discovered the sour scent of stress. Imagine declaring on TV with certainty things you harbor huge doubts about. I stuffed the blouse into the lower suitcase with my shoes. I had enough to contemplate besides the smell of my own fear.

The science, to begin with. We ought to have been in the lab, not the TV studio. We were delaying all the potential discoveries, while traipsing around and proclaiming the extremely little that we knew.

Something else also made me nervous. This was not some mute creature we'd found, some oddity like an oversize lobster or a giant squid. This was a human being. The research imperatives had to be ethically different. We found too many familiars.

The boot, for example. Soon after settling in the Boston lab, we'd done a preliminary scan through the shell of hard-ice, and learned that the frozen man was wearing boots with the maker's faded imprint on the heel. This wasn't just any guy, I realized. It was a particular guy, with a particular life he'd died out of. He had a shoe size, there had been a place where he bought boots. Carthage saw only the media potential, or the possibility of funding from the boot company, if it still existed. Thus it became my job to find out everything I could about our frozen man. Even with two inches of ice encasing his body, there were many indicators: the clothes, muttonchop sideburns, height, and yes, boots. I remembered a friend's cadaver dissection in medical school, how she was fine with all of it until she got to the hands. Then she encountered fingernails, ring marks, a thumb whose callus came from some unknown lifetime friction. The humanity of her assigned body was no longer deniable. That is what the frozen man's boot did to me.

I discussed it with Billings. We'd begun having lunch together every Monday to review findings and generally gossip. “My advice, lovely, is to be careful,” he said. “We serve at the king's pleasure, and all he sees in that block of ice is Subject One.”

“That's my whole point. We're dealing with a person in that ice.”

“There are about three thousand assays we might conduct with materials at hand, none of them possible without Carthage's goodwill. And, lovely, I needn't tell you that our man is more intent on fame and glory than on ethical particulars.”

“That's why I think my job is to raise these questions.”

“Thus do I repeat: careful.”

Good advice that I was unable to follow. Instead I found myself daydreaming in the control room, imagining the frozen man's former life when I ought to have been watching the monitors. During my tasks in the sterile, chilly observation chamber, I found myself pausing to study his whiskered face through the blur of ice. Hello in there.

Later, Carthage told the press he thought in those weeks that I'd gone soft, lost sight of the goal, that sort of thing. Actually, after the boots, I felt the goals becoming clearer. They just weren't the same as his.

Carthage treated the frozen man like a diamond. He had the doors at the Lazarus Project's Boston office, now our headquarters, changed to bulletproof glass. Guards stood at both entries, and it took the swipe of a security badge to get into the control room, onto the elevators, even into the bathrooms. It made me nervous. I often checked my bag multiple times on the way to work to make sure I hadn't left my badge at home.

The walk each morning crossed the park where sometimes as many as twenty people gathered to condemn us. Carthage won a court order to keep them from the front door, but truthfully the security goons scared me more than any protesters did. One Friday, back in March, it was chilly and raining, so I brought down an urn of coffee. The guards turned away, didn't even take their shades off. The chanters thanked me, however. One even God-blessed me. An old man offered me cookies. I took one, too. Why not?

Not all were so pleasant. One tired-looking woman was there with her kids every day, a permanent sneer on her face. Was this vigil a part of some kind of homeschooling? If so, it was hard to say what the children were learning. She was the one who snarled at me the day before Halloween, when I brought over some candy corn.

“Keep your poisons, you sick monster.”

Trick or treat to you, too, sister.

That was six months ago. Yesterday the protesters lost their final court challenge, which sought to prevent us from attempting to reanimate the frozen man. I was relieved, but the ruling had troubling aspects. The judge agreed to let the project continue, fine. But in his decision he called the frozen man “salvage goods,” meaning that he was our property, and no protester could determine how we treated our property. Not so fine.

Though I knew we'd have a crowd later, that morning only the woman with her kids was there. She looked haggard, like that photo of a migrant worker in dust bowl days. As I approached, her kids seemed happy enough. The boy drove a toy truck along the sidewalk's edge, making engine noises. The girl sat on the bench reading, her feet swinging.

Still I was anxious walking past. The girl didn't look up but the boy noisily reversed his truck so I could pass without stepping over him. I gave them all a smile. The mother caught my eye and it was like being slapped. No words were necessary. Her look was pure, cold hate.

I hurried over the crosswalk to the front doors. A guard looked at me with as much expression as a mannequin. He wore a flak vest and rested his right hand on a gun.

“Good morning,” I chirped, lifting my ID into his line of sight despite passing him every morning for nearly eight months now. He nodded without speaking.

I noticed something new in the atrium, a digital counter of some kind. The numbers were two feet tall, so anyone outside could see. At the moment they read 00:00:00:00.

A media crowd loitered in the normally empty foyer, though it was only eight-thirty and we were not initiating till ten. Still, I was part of the nine-thirty briefing, so I signed in at the security desk, hustled to the elevators, swiped my badge, and grabbed the next car. The reporters spotted me, rushing over to shout questions as the doors closed.

Like that, the morning's calm evaporated. So the course of the day took shape: my main task would come before the reanimation attempt, turning my collected observations of the frozen man into a profile. My job was to tell everyone who this Subject One was. I'd gathered a few clues, researched several more, believed I had a fair idea of the man and his time.

Time would reveal that I had only the barest inkling.