Lucky

I’m lucky, or so I’m told. I don’t win lotteries or pick winning stocks. I live when others don’t.

My lucky streak began on my twelfth birthday. Then again, perhaps it started earlier and I just didn’t notice, but on the day I turned twelve it was hard to miss. The sky was clear, but the roads still were wet from a brief dawn rain. It was the day of a soccer match and the goalie’s mom picked me up at my house. She drove me, her son, and one other teammate toward the playing field. We three kids were in the back of the minivan with the goalie and one other teammate when a text came in on the driver’s cell phone. She diverted her eyes from the road to read the message and drifted into the path of a concrete truck. The truck driver swerved to avoid us, but that only cause the truck to skid on the damp concrete and roll. I was the sole survivor of the ensuing collision. The text, by the way, was from the team coach; the match had been cancelled because the grass was too wet. Though the van folded in a way you wouldn’t think possible, somehow it left me safely in a pocket. The EMS workers who pried open the van and let me out marveled that I didn’t have a scratch. To be on the safe side, they packed me into in an ambulance anyway. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance slid off the road on a sharp bend and hit a tree. I was the sole survivor.

Yeah, I’m just lucky as hell.

My luck struck again when my mom’s new boyfriend Bob took us waterskiing. He didn’t really like me, but he pretended he did to please my mom. After lunch, she wasn’t feeling well, so she didn’t join Bob in the boat for the next round of skiing, even though by law a pull boat always should have an observer as well as a driver. While glancing over his shoulder at me on the skis, Bob failed to notice a shallow water marker.  The boat struck a rock. He was flung forward out of the boat and hit his head on the windshield on the way, which must have knocked him unconscious. He drowned. I was unhurt.

As you can see, my good luck tends to be a little hard on the people around me.

Over the next several years, people dropped like flies in what for me were near misses. There was a lightning strike in the park, a shark attack at the shore, a rattlesnake bite in the woods, a tornado that obliterated the neighbor’s house, and many more. All just skirted me and struck someone nearby instead. I always had met the victim, or, in the cases where there were multiple fatalities, at least one of the victims. I never suffered an injury.

I hoped I would leave my cursed luck behind when I left home, but the pattern persisted at college. Only one month into the first semester, students smoking weed accidentally set fire to their dorm room, which was across the hall from mine. The fire spread rapidly. I had no trouble getting down the four flights of stairs and out of the building. By some quirk of air flow, an envelope of clean air surrounded me the whole way. Nine other students were not so lucky. They died of smoke inhalation. Scores of others coughed and wheezed around me on the lawn in front of the burning dorm.

“It’s all my fault,” I muttered to myself.

A sooty faced young woman overheard me and asked, “Did you start the fire?”

“No, but it’s my fault anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

I don’t know why I chose to answer, since I never had discussed my luck with anyone before. Maybe no one ever asked about it before. I described to her my history of escaping disasters unscathed. She listened patiently until I finished.

When she was sure I was done, she answered, “Total nonsense!”

I was surprised by her vehemence.

“It’s horrible you’ve been through so much,” she went on, “but none of it was your fault. I’m Margie by the way.  The universe just doesn’t work like that. There are no jinxes. Coincidences simply happen sometimes. That’s why there’s a word for them.”

“They happen around me a lot. I’m Dustin, in case I didn’t mention it.”

“You didn’t. Hi, Dustin. Look, all you’ve experienced are just random events. Pure chance. Nothing more.”

“But what are the odds against all those things randomly happening around me?”

“I’m not sure you understand odds. When we say the odds against something are a thousand to one, that means it definitely will happen one out of a thousand times. There are billions of people in the world. Some of them are bound to experience a series of narrow escapes. The odds don’t prevent it. They demand it. Remember that woman who won two state lotteries? There was nothing supernatural about it. Rare things happen. You seem to think you’re a jinx. You are not. There is no such thing. And don’t count on walking away from any future accidents. Maybe you won’t. You really aren’t charmed.”

“Only charming?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Margie made me feel much better. Everything she said was perfectly sensible. Perhaps to prove she wasn’t superstitious, when I asked her to go out with me, she agreed. Despite all that I had told her, she wasn’t afraid.

We grew close in the weeks that followed and she helped to keep me sane. Margie assured me it was not my fault when the bleachers collapsed under us during one of our team’s football games and killed several of our classmates. Both of us walked away unharmed. She said it was just one of those things. When I missed my flight back home for Thanksgiving weekend and the plane crashed with more classmates aboard, that wasn’t my fault either. It wasn’t my fault when we left a restaurant before being seated because we decided the line was too long, and a natural gas explosion then destroyed the building. It wasn’t even my fault when Margie’s roommate tripped on a curb in front of us and fell under the wheels of a bus.

By then I began to suspect that Margie was wrong. Whether you want to call it a jinx, fate, or an outlier point on a probability bell curve, I was hazardous to the people around me. I brought them ruin and walked away scot free. Margie didn’t deserve that. I cared about her too much to watch anything like that happen to her. So, one night, I steeled myself and broke up with her. Margie was furious.

“You’re crazy and hopeless and I give up on you!” she shouted.

She stormed out of the dorm. Less than an hour later she was killed by a mugger. The mugger took eight dollars from her pocket.

I should have realized. None of my closest friends or family ever had suffered harm around me. Only those who were more distant ever died. By breaking off our relationship, I had sealed Margie’s fate.

In a funk, I went downtown and sat on a bench in order to prove to myself that my luck was real. This was rather rude, of course, since the expected catastrophe would befall others, not me. A woman of about 30 caught my eye. She had pale skin, dyed black hair, and all black clothes. She appeared mad, or perhaps high. She twirled and skipped along the sidewalk touching the people she passed with a finger. A middle-age woman, distracted by the touch, failed to look at traffic when she walked out into the crosswalk; she was struck down by a taxi.

The madwoman, who now stood next to me, giggled as people gathered in the street around the accident. She reached toward me with a finger, but stopped before touching me.

“Hello, brother,” she said. She turned and smiled at me once more as she gamboled off.

Coincidence, you might say. A chance encounter with someone overdosed on meds. I don’t think so. I don’t buy it. I have a destiny, and, I’m not alone. The dark-haired woman truly is my sister. The universe has assigned us a job. Who is to say it is not for the best? Perhaps our victims need removal. Perhaps in our lethal touch we somehow alter the stream of events and thereby prevent something far worse. Who are we to argue with the universe? We have a duty. My sister is right. We shouldn’t fight our destiny. We should embrace it – even make an effort to perform our task exceptionally well.

My father still lives in the same town as my mom. He works at the Twin River nuclear power station. He has offered to pull some strings and get me a summer job there. I think I’ll take him up on it.

Soot

Donald dreamed that he missed the brake pedal. He stomped and missed again. The Jeep Cherokee surged through the closed garage door and took out a lally column. With a dreamer’s equanimity he watched the garage collapse around him. He felt pressed down to the seat as the collapsing roof crushed his car. He was annoyed because he had paid off the Jeep only a week earlier. His ex-wife had taken the Jetta. Now he needed a new car and all his bank accounts were empty.

Donald awoke. He wondered how he was going to extricate himself from the mangled vehicle. It took several seconds of coalescing consciousness for him to realize that he was not in his vehicle or in his garage. In fact, he had not bothered to garage his Jeep last night. He was in bed.

            Don’s relief was short-lived. Something was wrong. Something really did press down on him and the bed tilted at a crazy angle. Don slid an arm from under the weighted covers. He felt loose sheetrock on his chest. He reached straight up over his head; his hand encountered wood framing. A wall must have collapsed. Perhaps the whole house. Through the covers with his toes he could feel joists that had smashed down on the edge of the mattress. Yes, the house had collapsed. Don knew he was lucky to be alive in some random pocket, but he wished his dream about the Jeep had been true instead. He still owed $75,000 to his ex on the buyout of this house. He hoped the homeowner’s insurance was up to date and that it covered whatever had happened.

            He couldn’t see anything. People sometimes use the phrase, “so dark you couldn’t see your hands in front of your face,” but for once this literally was true.

Don wriggled from under the rubble-covered blanket and crawled out of bed. He hoped to find a hole to the outside. The sharp point of a snapped 2 x 4 stabbed into his side; his preference for sleeping in the nude was proving to be a disadvantage. Don reached for the wall next to the bed and felt cinderblock. He was in the basement. He stopped to think about the geometry of the house. The headboard had been against an exterior front wall. At the back of the house was a walkout basement with an exposed block foundation. The rear foundation wall, he reasoned, must have shoved outward causing the first floor, including his bedroom, to shift off the front plate and drop to the basement.

            If the house had indeed fallen rearward, his best bet was to find a route directly up. He worked his way to the right and found a spot where he could stand full height. He stood on tiptoes and placed one hand over the top block. Sure enough, his hand reached into open air, but there was only a six-inch gap between the block and heavy framing. There was no way he could squeeze through. There seemed to be some movement in the framing when he touched it, however. Perhaps it was unstable enough to be pushed back a foot or two so he could escape. Don braced his back against the foundation wall, reached up, gripped hard on two joists, and pushed with all his strength.

            Snaps and cracks escalated suddenly into thunder. The joists ripped out of Don’s hands as the lumber gave way in an uncontrolled collapse. Soon quiet returned except for a single noise that Don recognized as his own scream. Embarrassed, he stopped shouting and cleared his throat which now was hoarse.

            Above him his hands now felt nothing. By luck he had survived again. He grabbed the top block. Employing all his strength, he pulled himself over the foundation and tumbled into English Hemlock. He lay there for some time without minding the minor assaults on his bare skin by the twigs of the bushes.

Something was still wrong and it said much about Don’s state of mind that that a full minute passed before he was sure what is was. He was outside but the dark was as deep as it had been in the basement. There were no stars, no streetlights, and no automobile headlights. Nothing. He seriously wondered if he was blind. The still air had a smoky taste to it. He scarcely felt motivated to leave the comforting bushes, but he knew the situation required more action.

            Once again he considered the geometry. He knew the Jeep Cherokee was somewhere in the driveway. He crawled in the direction of the driveway, keeping contact with the foundation even though this meant working through plantings. Irrelevantly, he noted that deer had eaten most of the plants but hadn’t touched the hemlock. At last he felt driveway gravel under his palms. Turning a 90 degree angle, he crawled away from the house. Gravel bit into his hands and knees. He stopped after what seemed too great a distance and thought some more. Did he miss the car and crawl right by it? He resolved to go a few feet further and then double back on a parallel course. He lurched forward and banged his head sharply on steel. Don had found his Jeep.

            He stood up unsteadily and reached forward. His hands grabbed a tire which spun under his weight and tossed him back to the ground. The Jeep was upside down. More carefully, he located a door. It refused to open even though Don knew he had left the doors unlocked. The roof must have crushed enough to jam it. He worked around to the opposite side, felt for the handle and tugged. It gave. The small ceiling bulb exploded light upward into the compartment. He had opened the driver side door.

            Happy to know he still had his sight, he entered and sat in the overturned vehicle. Don turned the rear view mirror toward himself. He was dirty but the cuts and scratches seemed minor. A twist to the headlight switch shot two highly defined shafts of light forward. They just barely extended through the murky air as far as what once had been the garage. The surrounding world was dark as ever. The heavy air was quiet and still. He might have felt cold had there been there any breeze at all. As it was, he actually felt warm. The exception was his posterior which was chilled by the Jeep ceiling. Only the absence of other sounds allowed him to hear a small muffled voice.

            “Help!”

            He opened the glove compartment in search of a flashlight. He bought a new flashlight every few months and always misplaced it immediately. Somewhere in his wreck of a house there must be a pile of them.

The contents of the glove compartment spilled onto the ceiling. He rummaged through the notes, candy wrappers, screwdrivers, manuals, and expired insurance documents. There was no flashlight but he found a mysterious set of keys. He couldn’t imagine what locks they fit. The key ring had a tiny penlight for illuminating key holes. It wasn’t much but it might help the caller to see him.

            The voice seemed to come from the neighboring property of Fred and Judy. Their house was 600 yards away. In this rural bit of New Hampshire lake country, that counted as close. Don kept the lighted Jeep to his back for reference and walked toward the voice. He clambered over newly fallen pine trees. He noticed all had fallen toward the east. He began to suspect a tornado. That didn’t explain the depth of the blackness though. Maybe there was a forest fire, he speculated, and smoke blocked out the sky. He walked carefully in the direction of the voice while waving the penlight.

            “Can you see me?” he called out loudly.

            “Yes!” a woman’s voice answered a little louder than last time. “Turn to the left! No! To YOUR left! Straight ahead! Keep coming! That’s right.”

            “Right?”

            “Stop joking!”

            Don hadn’t been joking.

“Keep talking so I can locate your voice,” he said. “Just keep saying ‘here’ or something.”

She complied. The voice now sounded close. His foot caught on a limb and he pitched forward into a fallen tree. A branch smacked his face and numbed his nose, but the penlight in his outstretched hand illuminated the chin of a young woman pinned by the tree. She apparently thought Don’s move was intentional.

            “Good navigating. Are there others or was that you hollering before?”

            “Just me.”

            “I’m trapped under this tree. I can’t quite budge it. Maybe the two of us can lift it.”

            “Yeah. I think maybe I can get enough leverage near the tree top.”

He was relieved to have thought of something modestly intelligent. Don had a way of sounding stupid in front of women. He was naturally shy, and his efforts to overcome this usually resulted in overcompensation and social blunders of varying enormity. He realized this wasn’t the moment he should be worrying about that.

            He worked his way toward the top of the tree and grabbed a good handhold. Don pulled hard and felt the tree lift slightly.

            “Can you move?” he asked.

            “I think so. Ouch!” she yelped as she slithered out. “OK. You can let go.”

            A branch scraped Don’s shin as the tree settled back on the ground.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

            “I hurt, but I don’t think anything is broken,” she said.

            Don sat down next to her on the grass and put a hand on her shoulder. He felt a flimsy nightgown. She reached out to return the touch but drew back when she felt skin.

“Thanks,” she said uncertainly.

            Don searched for words. “Do you have a name?” he ventured.

            “Yes.”

            Don tried a more direct phrasing. “What is your name?”

            “What name do you like?”

            This disconcerted Don which he presumed was the intention. Either that or she had other reasons not to tell him her real name. He covered his fluster with a deadpan response. He resorted to the alphabet, and picked the first name starting with “A” that came to mind.

            “How about Anne?”

            “I can be Anne.”

            “Don.”           

            “I prefer Anne.”

            “No. I’m Don.”

            “OK Don, do you have any plans beyond sitting in the dark? Shirtless.”

            Don gave this some thought. Without his conscious attention, as he thought his hand stroked her back and shoulder.

            With the detachment of an anthropologist observing a chimpanzee she allowed him to continue for several moments. “Do you have any other plans?” she asked at last.

            Don quickly withdrew his hand. “Uh, yes,” he said with embarrassment. “Maybe the two of us can rock the Jeep upright.”

            “We’d better hurry before the batteries wear down.”

            She was right. The headlights already were noticeably dimmer.

“Right. Let’s go.”

            “Wait! Don’t you want to check the house first?”

            “For what?”

“Survivors,” she explained patiently. “Your neighbors. My boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yes. He and I were visiting your neighbors. They’re friends. My boyfriend’s an asshole and I was planning to leave him, but we still ought to look for him. Fred and Judy, too. They’re nice.”

            They clambered over trees and debris to the remains of the house. The penlight illuminated only rubble. Remembering his own experience, Don leaned over and shouted downward toward the basement.

            “Hello! Hello! Can you hear me?! Are you down there?”

            There was no answer. Don pulled at lumber.

            “Forget it, let’s go,” said Anne suddenly and firmly.

            “But...”

            “I said forget it.”

            Don stumbled repeatedly over limbs on the walk back to the Jeep. This would have bothered him less had Anne the courtesy to trip just once. He justified his clumsiness to himself by attributing it to his bare feet. Anne had the protection of sandals. He could hear them flap as she walked. Soon they stood by the vehicle. Don closed the driver’s door, placed his hands on the Jeep, and experimentally pushed. He had not taken proper account of the center of mass, so the Jeep spun around 90 degrees on its roof. This was an improvement; the slope of the driveway now could be used to advantage. He let Anne think the spin was intentional.

            “Let’s rock it and try not to spin it further,” he said.

            They positioned themselves front and back; they began to rock. On the sixth push the Jeep rolled on its side, continued to roll, perched precariously for a moment on two wheels, and then landed upright with a thud. Don held his breath as it lifted up on the other two wheels. He breathed again when the Jeep tilted back and slammed on all fours.

            “Start her up,” Anne suggested.

            Don looked at the key ring.

“These aren’t the car keys.”

            In the dim light filtering back from the headlights, Anne took note of Don’s absence of pockets.

“I don’t suppose you have the right ones.”

            Only then did Don remember he had put a spare set in a magnetic hide-a-key box when he had bought the car 3 years before. He hadn’t looked for it since and had serious doubts that it had survived 50,000 miles of less than cautious driving. He felt beneath the car near the license plate. The box was there, held in place more by crusted dirt than by magnetism. He gave it a yank.

            With low expectations, he slipped into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition. To his surprise, the V8 caught on the first turn and rumbled healthily.

            “The door is locked,” Anne said from the outside the passenger door.

            “No, it’s jammed. Slide in this way.”

Don got out and let Anne slide over the driver’s seat and over the center console. He climbed back in. They looked at each other for a moment in the light from the overhead.

            Anne was a twenty-something brunette, pretty despite the dishevelment and sooty face. He couldn’t tell the color of the eyes since in the interior light of the car they reflected red. Anne began to speak but bit her lip instead.  Don realized she was reserving comment on his undress but that the silence was costing her. He shut the car door and the light went out.

            “Thank you,” she said.

 He tried the radio but got only static.

“Where to?” she asked.

            “Anywhere away from here. Something terrible has happened and we have to drive out of it. South or west maybe.”

            “Don’t you know?”

            “How would I know what direction is best?”

            “I mean don’t you know what happened?”

            “No.”

“Didn’t you hear the civil defense warning on TV?”

“No, I went to bed early. Civil defense? Is there a war?”

            “No, an asteroid.”

            “And no one saw it until last night?”

            “It approached from a south polar direction where they don’t look for them very much. They said last night there was a 20% chance that it might hit. They seem to have underestimated.”

            “Why didn’t NASA, the ESA, or the Russians blow it up or something?”

            “This isn’t the movies, Don. There wasn’t enough time to do anything effective.”

            “Well, our plan is still the same. Let’s drive out of the damaged area.”

            “This not local, Don. I went outside last night to see if I could see anything in the sky.”

            “Did you?”

            “No. There was just suddenly a loud noise. Then I blacked out and woke up under that tree. They said last night the impact site would be the South Pacific if it hit at all.”

            “We’re blacked out from something that happened on the other side of the world?”

            “It’s not that big a world.”

            “I guess not, Anne.”

            “Actually, speaking about the far side of things, you’re 25 letters out of the ballpark.”

            “What?”

            “Zoe. My real name is Zoe.”

Don hoped this revelation implied growing trust rather than diminishing respect.

            If Zoe was right, they still needed shelter, food, and personal defenses, none of which was here.

“OK. The first thing we need to do is protect ourselves. There are a lot of scumbags in the world. They’re as likely to have survived as anyone. There’s a gun shop in the mini-mall on 128.”

            “You’re suggesting we loot?”

            “I’ll mail the owner a check. Let’s pick up a few weapons and move out.”

            “Move out to where?”

            “To wherever there are buildings still standing. Steel framed buildings probably survived. Manchester maybe would be a good bet. There should be some emergency services, food stores, and other people.

            “Other people with guns?”

            “Do you have a better idea?”

            “What about Wolfeboro or Laconia? There will be other people but not enough of them to run riot. Schools and public buildings might be standing if you are right about the steel frames.”

Don felt a breeze from her hand as Anne/Zoe gesticulated in the grimy air enveloping them.

            “OK, we’ll try Wolfeboro, but we’d still better go to 128 first.”

            “Fine.”

            The trip was painfully slow because of downed trees. Don was able to drive around or over each blockage that he couldn’t move, but he knew his luck in that regard eventually would run out. He added “chain saw” to his list of necessary survival equipment. They neared their destination.

            “The gun shop is just around this bend,” Don said.

At that moment the windshield exploded.

            Not everyone eschews random violence only out of fear of the police. Some do, however, and in the newly lawless world, two such citizens had beaten Don and Zoe to the gunshop. One had tried out his new rifle on the Jeep windshield.

            Zoe crouched under the dash. Don, showing rather more sense than gallantry, slammed on the brake and rolled out the door. He tumbled into a drainage ditch, scraping his arm on the edge of a drainage pipe in the process. He scrambled up the other side of the ditch and into the brush. Greasy black snowflakes began to fall lightly on his shoulders and back.

            He heard shouts and peered through the brambles toward the lights of the car. A man carrying a flashlight and a Remington was silhouetted in the light of the open door. Another flashlight shone on the other side of the car.

Don didn’t seriously consider attempting a rescue and wasn’t sure Zoe would appreciate it if he did. In the current conditions the thug with the rifle might be a more sensible partner for getting on in the world.

A distant rumble could be felt before it could be heard. Coming from the west it grew to a roar. The flashlights froze in their positions. Don plunged through the brush, rolled back into the ditch and crawled into the drainage pipe. Don guessed a violent storm rapidly was approaching. The loudest noise he ever heard smashed over him. The air pressure dropped precipitously. He gasped for breath and his ears popped. His ears popped again and his lungs filled with air. The roar diminished into the east. It was some sort of shock wave. He stuck his head out of the pipe. The blackness overhead had lessened to a dark gray. High in the sky through the clouds or smoke he saw what he at first took to be the moon. He then realized with a start that it was the sun.

            He crawled out of the ditch. The Jeep was gone. So were the men and Zoe. The Jeep had been tossed somewhere out of sight. Nothing at all remained of the mini-mall but a slab of concrete and scattered bricks. Had the drainage pipe in which he had taken cover been facing the shock wave, he was sure he would have been blown out of it like a cannon shot.

            He called out, “Zoe?”

            There was no answer.

            Had another asteroid hit? Was the shock wave from last night’s impact going around the world a second time? Don knew he didn’t know. He owed his survival so far to pure luck – luck which evidently had run out for Zoe. His soon would too. He decided he needed help. His best bet was to join up with someone competent.

Don now knew where to go. The gun shop owner, von Kluge, lived only a mile distant up a long private drive. Don knew him from the local Rotary. For once those boring meetings would prove useful. They hadn’t helped with business connections as he had hoped. Von Kluge was a survivalist and the offspring of survivalists. He lived in his family estate, which had been built with a state of the art bomb shelter under his front lawn at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. It had been updated since. The “gun club” of which he was president was really a militia. The club held war games once a month. If anyone was equipped to survive disaster, von Kluge was. Don had to hurry. The sky already was darkening again and he expected it would revert to total blackness soon.

            A mile is a negligible distance in a car, but barefooted after a trying day it is a very long walk indeed. Don was exhausted by the time he approached the main house – or rather what had been the main house. It now was a hole in the ground. Everything above the basement was gone. The Doberman whose job it was to kill uninvited guests, however, was still on the property. The dog raced toward Don at a full run.

            Don was too tired to run or to fight anymore. He accepted the prospect of being killed by a dog. The Doberman stopped short, planted his front paws on Don’s chest, and licked his face. The frightened animal was in no mood to enforce trespass rules.

            “Hello, dog.”

Man and dog walked up to the foundation’s edge. Whatever had been in the basement, including the furnace, had been blown clean out of it. Don spotted concrete steps and descended them to the basement slab. Don wondered if von Kluge’s bomb shelter was accessed through the basement. The sky was darkening and walls were shadowed, but Don felt along the concrete. Soon he touched the cold steel of a door. He pounded.

            “Von Kluge! It’s me, Donald McCurdy! You know, from the Rotary? Don’t shoot! Please. I want to talk!”

            There was no response. Don banged on the door again. He tried the handle. The door swung open with a creak.

            The man who all his life had planned for disaster, who actually seemed to relish the prospect, apparently had slept through the asteroid impact as had Don himself. Don wondered idly if the security system had sounded an alarm before the upper house disintegrated.

            Don and the dog entered the bomb shelter. He clanged the door shut in back of him and slid in place a steel bolt, the simplest but far the best interior lock. For the first time since waking up he felt secure.

            More by habit than by expectation Don reached for and found a light switch. He was rewarded by a dim light, apparently battery powered. This was an antechamber of some kind. Straight ahead was an inner door. On the wall to the right hung four full-body protective suits. Knowing von Kluge, Don was sure they were safe against radiation, bio-contamination and chemical weapons. Overhead, he saw unlit infrared and ultraviolet lights, possibly intended to assist decontamination. They would need more than battery power. In the wall to the left was another door; next to the door were a circuit breaker and a switch marked “generator.” Don threw the switch. Behind the door a mechanical growl began and then settled into a hum. Don opened the door, which was tightly sealed against air flow. Inside was a utility room with a diesel generator, a well pump head, and an electric water heater which already was making crackling expansion noises; the generator fed on outside air drawn through a pipe and vented exhaust back through another one. Don smelled no fumes, so he presumed the pipes to the outside were unblocked. Don assumed the generator was fueled by some underground tank. He hoped it was a big one. He closed the door to the utility room.

            The Doberman nudged him impatiently.

            “OK, OK, dog. Give me a minute.”

            Don opened the remaining door. LED lights lit promptly when he flicked the switch just inside the door. He walked inside. The room was bigger than many urban studio apartments. It contained four bunk beds, stereo, computer, TV, a video library heavy on westerns and war movies, a kitchenette, and 3 more doors. Don tried each. The first door opened to a walk-in pantry with enough canned goods to feed a family of four and a dog for a year. The second opened to a large closet that contained military-style clothing and gear, plus a variety of firearms and ammunition. It also contained art supplies. Don hadn’t known von Kluge was a painter. The third door opened to a bathroom.

            “This place would rent for a fortune in Boston,” Don muttered to himself.

            In the bathroom was a toilet, a shower, a sink and an apartment size combination washer/dryer. Von Kluge didn’t intend to face the apocalypse without a clean shirt.         

            The Doberman nudged his leg and again sat expectantly.

            “OK, dog, I get the idea.”

            Don removed a can of dog food from the pantry. He found plates in the kitchenette cabinets and an electric can opener on the countertop. The dog started eating from the plate before it reached the floor. Don warmed a can of ravioli for himself while the water heater did its job. He and the dog ate in silence.

            The hot shower felt wonderful. Black grime and soapsuds spiraled down the drain. Hardly a square inch of his body was unblemished by bruises, abrasions or scratches. As he became cleaner these began to sting. Quite a lot of superficial damage had been done to his feet. After toweling dry, he wrapped his feet in gauze from a med kit. He put on underwear and a forest camouflage uniform from the closet. Dressed for the first time that day, Don felt warm, cozy and secure.

            He looked through the selection of CDs on a shelf. They were far from his taste. Maybe he would learn to like Wagner, but he doubted it. He put one by the Vienna Orchestra into the stereo CD tray anyway and lay back on a lower bunk. The dog jumped on top of him. Don was too tired to argue about it. He drifted out of consciousness to the sounds of violins and horns.

            Don was startled awake when the dog used his stomach as a launch pad and bounded to the antechamber door. The music was louder now. Don got up and opened the door of the antechamber. Someone was banging on the outer door. Don ran to the weapons closet. At first he reached for an AK-47, but he had never fired an automatic rifle. This was no time to experiment. So, he picked out a simple twin barreled shotgun instead. He checked the barrels. They were loaded.

Don approached the door and pondered what to do next. He was surprised that von Kluge hadn’t installed some sort of video security camera outside for just this situation. The man dropped a few notches in his esteem. On the other hand, maybe he had and Don didn’t know how to work it yet.

            “Donald, are you in there?” a voice sounded through the door.

            “Who are you?” he called back.

            “Who do you think? Zoe!”

            “Are you alone?”

            “Yes!”

            “Wait!” Don did not entirely trust this assurance. She might be under duress by those thugs. He turned off the lights except for the dim battery bulb by the entrance. He quietly slipped back the steel bolt on the outer door and retreated into the dark back room. He lay on the floor and leveled his aim at the outer door. He doubted anyone would get an aim on him before he could fire both barrels accurately. The Doberman stood in back of him. He apparently knew to stay in back of guns.

            “OK! Come in slowly and close the door behind you!”

            Zoe pushed open the door and walked into the antechamber. Don still expected the gang members to burst in.

            “Close the door and throw the bolt!”

            She slid the bolt into place. Don stood up and turned on the main lights. By chance he stood under the light in an arrogant posture just as the climax to Rienzi blared and clashed.

            “Very dramatic,” she said. “I see you got the gun you wanted. And your fashion sense has improved. Slightly.”

            “Where are the others?”

            “You’ve got me. I was thrown clear into a ditch as the Jeep went sailing through the air. I’m guessing the guys went flying with it. I’ve been trying to catch up with you.”

            “Why didn’t you answer me when I called?”

            “I had the wind knocked out of me! And then you just took off down the road like you were on some marathon. You might have looked for me, you know. Put away the shotgun, by the way; you’re making me nervous. And turn that crap down!”

            “Oh. Yeah, OK.”

Don returned the weapon to the closet. He walked over to the stereo and turned down the volume. The Doberman approached Zoe and sniffed her thoroughly.

            “Is he friendly?” she asked.

            “Seems to be.”

            “What’s his name?”                                                

            “Dog.”

            “Easy to remember.”

            It occurred to Don that, despite her affected insouciance, she was as at least as battered as he was. She was covered in mud and had lost her sandals.

“Look, I’m sorry. Get comfortable. There is hot water. Take a shower. I’ll warm up some ravioli and coffee. Since you admire my clothes I’ll get you something matching.”

            “Sadly, that’s the best offer I’ve had today.”

            Showered and clad in camo, Zoe sipped coffee.

            “Still planning on going to Wolfeboro?” she asked.

            “No. I’m staying put. We have plenty of supplies. We probably can scavenge more from other basements. There is lots of fuel in the area in other oil tanks and under old gas stations. Besides, I’m not feeling competent enough to face post-civilization.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I’ve messed up everything I’ve touched. I lost my house. I lost my car. I abandoned you. Twice. The only time I met anyone else besides you I nearly got killed. My only talent is running and hiding. That worked out OK so I think I’ll stick to it.”

“That’s a little harsh. Pretty much everyone lost his house. As for the guys you encountered, so you weren’t Rambo. You’re alive and they’re not. Sometimes you have to have the sense to know when you are outgunned. That is a survival skill too. Now that you’ve had some practice, maybe you’ll do better the next time an asteroid strikes.”

            “I can hardly wait.”

            “You are right about staying put though. The snows will start getting heavy.”

            “It’s only September.”

            “No sunlight. We’ll have a really bad winter. Maybe a lot of them. Most survivors will go south. That alone is a good reason to stay here until things straighten out some.”

            “Do you think we can manage a bad winter?” he asked.

            “Eskimos do it.”

            “I once saw a T-shirt that said something like that.”

            “What did it say?”

            “‘Eskimos do it cooler.’“

            “We’re going to have to work on your humor.”

            “It looks like we have time, Zoe.”

            “You can call me Anne if you prefer. You picked it.”

            “Let’s not start that again.”

            Don looked at the bare white walls. With lots of time to kill, maybe they could do some murals with the paint supplies. What would future archaeologists make of their shelter art?

They heard a rumble and felt a slight decrease in air pressure as another but smaller shock wave passed overhead. It didn’t cause even a ripple in their coffee.

Unravel

 “Dilettante!” sneered Professor Zee, my Biology 51 professor at Rutgers and author of the textbook Biology from A to Zee.

She was angry with me for having deviated from the assignment. Instead of dissecting a frog I had assembled one from pieces scrounged from my classmates. It was more fun that way: sort of like a jigsaw puzzle.

The professor was right about me, of course. I have some talent, if I may say so myself, but I don’t have the temperament for serious science. All the same, I may have altered the course of evolution on this planet – not entirely intentionally, it is true. Only time will tell.

“See me after class, Mr. Bathory,” Zee ordered.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Professor Zee sat behind her desk with her hands folded. I stood. This common office geography is intended to express the authority of the person behind the desk. It works only on those who take authority seriously anyway.

“Mr. Bathory.”

“Yes, Prof.”

“Not Prof. Professor or Doctor.”

“OK, Doc.”

Dr. Zee sighed. “What kind of a name is Bathory?” she asked.

“Hungarian.”

“Do you speak Hungarian?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Pity. Since you plainly don’t understand English, I had hoped we could communicate in some other language.”

“Ma’am?”

“See if you can follow this. I’m taking the trouble to speak to you because hidden inside your irresponsible head is a very good mind. You show innovative thinking. Despite your tendency to perform everything but the assigned tasks, you inadvertently have revealed to me a solid grasp of chemistry, biology and physics. When Miss Benson asked you about Heisenberg a few weeks ago, for example, you lost her completely with your sample probability equations. Incidentally, you lost me too. You must know that you belong in more advanced classes, so why are you here?”

“There are prettier girls in this class.”

“I see. Thank you for being honest. Judging by what I have witnessed, however, that won’t be much benefit to you. Young women, pretty or otherwise, are outside your skill set. Perhaps I should tell you that Miss Bensen didn’t care about Heisenberg, Mr. Bathory. She was giving you a chance to show off.”

“Really?”

“Forget her. She doesn’t like you now because you showed off too much and made her feel like an idiot. Getting back to the things you do understand, is your major a science?”

“I haven’t decided. May I be honest again?”

“Please.”

“I plan to get a Bachelor’s degree. I don’t know what kind yet. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really wish to work too hard at it.”

“I can see how that would be a problem for you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I am not attending college as part of a narrow career path. My plan, you see, is to collect my inheritance as soon as possible.”

“Should I warn your parents?”

“No need. They died in an accident years ago. According to the terms of their wills I don’t get full possession of my trust fund until I graduate college or turn 30, whichever comes first. I don’t want to wait until I’m 30. I am impatient for one thing, but also I don’t want to give the fund administrators another decade to rob from me. So, basically I’m just taking whatever classes I enjoy that put me on a swift track for a degree. Any degree. After that I plan a life of cheerful dissolution. Perhaps that sounds lazy.”

“No ‘perhaps’ about it.”

“Nevertheless, it is the truth.”

“I don’t doubt it. So, you have no real interest in science or, for that matter, the humanities.”

“On the contrary, Doc. I have an interest in them all. But I have no wish or need to be a drudge in the service of any of them.”

“Well, that is a shame and a waste. You have potential. But it appears you have no discipline as a scientist or, from what I can see, as a human being. Everything worthwhile in life requires drudgery, Mr. Bathory. Dabbling carelessly in anything is at best useless and at worst dangerous.”

Zee paused for a full minute while staring at the ceiling.

“Our discussion is over, Mr. Bathory,” she said at last.

Professor Zee was right, of course. The world is built on drudgery. Don’t get me wrong.  I respect the tenacity of a donkey. All the same, I have no desire to be one.

It happens that I myself am something of a dilettantish experiment, so perhaps that contributes to my way of looking at things.

My father was a brilliant mathematician who made a fortune in the stockmarket by applying formulas originally developed to analyze turbulence data from a Boeing 777 wing. My mother was a geologist with an interest in volcanism. It is fair to say that neither of my parents was socially adept. From all accounts they were barely presentable in public. It is not surprising that by age 40 both were single. Yet, both were egotistical enough to believe their genes were too precious to be discarded, so, when they met at a Mensa convention and compared IQ test results, it was love at first data compilation. They married the very next week and I was output one year after that. They hardly looked at me again. Their true interests lay elsewhere.

One may ask if their eugenics exercise was a success. Well, my IQ test scores are high. On the other hand, I apparently have character shortcomings upon which others often feel obliged to remark. Did I inherit these, too? I don’t have an answer to that one.

When I was 11, my parents planned a trip to Columbia. My mom had predicted an eruption there by applying my dad’s turbulence formulas to information from seismic stations and from satellites. The two flew to Columbia and climbed the mountain to examine the crater first hand. My mother’s calculations were right on the money. The mountain exploded while they stood at the top. After that I lived off an allowance from the estate.

The frog a la Mary Shelley led indirectly to the affect on evolution I mentioned. A few hours after my chat with Professor Zee, I was still thinking about her words and that frog that evening when an online article in National Geographic caught my eye. It described Antarctic fish with a natural anti-freeze solution. These fish can lie trapped in ice for months. When the ice melts, they thaw out and swim away with no apparent harm done. How marvelous. I wondered if it would work on a frog. What about higher animals? I figured the antifreeze would need to be modified significantly to work on anything but fish.

On my own over the next few weeks I attempted to synthesize a substance that would work on mammals. If the antifreeze could be modified to work on humans, true suspended animation would become possible. Surgeons could take their time on tricky operations such as transplants without losing the patients. The old sci-fi fantasy of sleeping though deep space missions would be a real option.

I used the college’s facilities whenever possible. If you look like you belong someplace, few people question your right to be there, and I always looked like I belonged in the labs. After numerous concoctions and even more numerous lab rats, I had a promising antifreeze cocktail. I tried it on four rats named Dean, Sammy, Peter and Frank. I injected each and tossed all four in a freezer for a week.

The results were mixed. Dean was a qualified success. I removed him from the freezer, unthawed him in warm water, and gave him a few jolts from a battery in order to start his heart. He revived. He had a disconcerting tendency to follow his own tail in mindless circles, but he revived. Frank’s heart restarted, but he was otherwise unresponsive. Sammy and Peter refused to cooperate at all after being thawed.

My brew plainly needed adjustments before it was ready for rats, much less humans, but I had confidence I was on the right track. I decided to try the formula on lizards just to be sure. These have, in many ways, a more robust biology. On them, the anti-freeze worked splendidly. Once thawed out, they scurried around as though nothing had happened.

It was at this point that an assistant lab instructor, himself a graduate student, interfered. He demanded to know who authorized me to use the labs. He didn’t accept my “independent project” explanation and said he would report me to administrative officials if he caught me in there again. So, I put my antifreeze project aside. Graduation arrived before I ever returned to it. Diploma in hand, I immediately took full possession of the trust and fired its administrators, whose depredations, it turned out, had amounted to no more than $10,000,000 of the original $22,000,000. I considered the loss acceptable.

So, I’m lazy. I can afford to be. I’m not superrich, mind you. $12,000,000 is not as much money as it used to be. Nevertheless, I have enough for my needs. I live alone in my parents’ old house in suburban NJ. It is not pretentious, but it is comfortable, and it has a cottage behind the main house. The rent from the cottage covers the property taxes. I set up a laboratory in my basement where I like to dabble in my dilettante fashion. A dilettante has one advantage over both the forest viewing generalist and the tree counting specialist: the leisure to pick fruit. One day last year, a particularly ripe apple fell in my lap.

A tenant had moved out of my rental cottage, so I posted it on Craigslist. A fellow named Darren Konelly responded almost at once. We exchanged e mails and set up an appointment. When he showed up at my door, he proved to be a nervous fellow who looked as though he expected a stranger to jump out of nowhere at any moment and shout “Boo!” at him.

“Good afternoon, I’m Andre Bathory,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bathory.”

“Andre.”

“I’m Darren Konelly. No Bewitched jokes, please.”

“Good, because I really can’t think of any. So, Darren. Tell me. Before we look at the cottage, can you afford the rent?”

“Would I tell you if I couldn’t?”

“I try not to prejudge another person’s honesty.”

“Are you joking with me?”

“A little.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you have a flippant air that discourages trust in you?”

“Yes, and that is unfortunate, because I’m actually rather honest.”

“As opposed to being honest without qualification?” Darren asked.

“That condition is as unlikely as it would be socially objectionable. Count your silverware when someone tells you he is honest without qualification. He is a liar on a grand scale.”

“OK, OK. Can we look at the cottage?”

“Sure. Follow me.”

We walked to the back of the property. The four-room cottage is small but it has some charm. There are pine paneled walls, oak plank floors and a fireplace. Spruce trees offer privacy both from the road and from the main house. Darren liked it.

“It’s cute. How far are we from Route 10?” he asked. “I work at Nucleicorp.”

“I know where it is. It’s 15 or 20 minutes away. Are you new there?”

“Yes. I just transferred from the company’s Delaware labs.”

“So you are a biochemist or some such thing?”

“Yes, some such thing.”

“Does it pay well?”

“Not spectacularly. I wouldn’t be looking to rent instead of buy if it paid spectacularly, would I?”

“Once again, I don’t like to pre-judge. Nucleicorp does genetic engineering, doesn’t it?”

“Among other things, yes, but that brings a false image to mind. We don’t make goats with wings or anything like that. Mostly we work with E. coli bacteria. We tease useful new substances out of them. Or sometimes useful old ones.”

“What do you mean by useful old ones?”

“Do you really want to know or are you just feigning interest out of politeness?” Darren asked.

“I’m genuinely curious. The subject interests me.”

“Are you some anti-GM food activist or something?”

“Not at all. I have no political agenda.”

“Well, OK. The best source of pharmacologically active chemicals is a living cell thanks to interactive evolution. Many researchers collect exotic species of plants and animals and test any new compounds they find. But there is another approach. Every cell has ancestral DNA that no longer is put to use. It is cordoned off by markers which say, in effect, ‘Start reading here and stop reading there.’ But the unread parts are not just gibberish. Many of them were once active in ancestral cells when the folds and markers were in different places. Evolution stuffed these sections into the inactive file so to speak. So, even well known species have a wealth of unexploited data.”

“Enter Darren.”

“Right. I use a chemical mix that shuffles the markers. In this way we can recover a lot of paleobiological compounds.”

“Do you shuffle the DNA markers in large plants and animals?”

“Not directly. Instead, we transplant genes from large organisms into E. coli.”

“Then you mess with them to see what happens.”

“We’re more rigorous than you make it sound, but, yes, basically.”

“I see. So, what about the rental?”

“The cottage? Oh. Yes. It’s fine. I’ll take it.”

“See, you’re beginning to trust me already.”

A week after renting the cottage to Darren I was perusing Scientific American on my laptop. One article was about genetically altered cows that produce antibiotics in their milk. Another article was the electrical properties of graphene, which is, in essence, a sheet of carbon.

I pondered the role of fashion in science. There are fads even in chemistry. Immediately after they were discovered late in the 20^th century, molecules of carbon called buckminsterfullerenes (colloquially, “buckyballs”) were all the rage. Consisting of 60 or more carbon atoms, they are in the shape of tiny soccer balls. For a while, it seemed everyone was trying to find commercial applications for buckyballs. Then along came the discovery of carbon nanotubes, sometimes called “buckytubes,” which have interesting structural qualities. Suddenly everyone seemed to forget about the balls. Now the tubes in turn were being overtaken by graphene.

A dilettantish idea formed in my mind. I punched numbers into my cell phone.

“Hello, Darren?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Andre.”

“Hello, landlord. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the water pressure.”

“Never mind that now. I have a question for you. Those chemicals you use for DNA manipulations. Why don’t you use them directly on large animals and plants?”

Darren paused before answering. “Because they are toxic. A tiny amount delivered directly to a bacterium is one thing, but any useful quantity injected into a bloodstream would be lethal.”

“I figured as much. I would like to propose an experiment. I need your help with it but the pay-off could be substantial. Have you got plans for tonight?”

“Nucleicorp has plans for me. They want me to work overtime. I’m on my way out the door now. I probably won’t be back before midnight. Maybe another day.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday. Do you have plans tomorrow?”

“What do you have in mind?” Darren asked warily.

“Let’s go into New York for a bite tomorrow evening.”

“New York? Why not someplace closer?”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ Trust me, you’ll like the place, and it’s on me. We’ll talk.”

“OK,” he answered without enthusiasm.

“I should have taken Park Avenue. I think the backup is for the 57^th Street Bridge,” I complained.

“You would know better than I” Darren answered.

We broke through the clot of traffic at long last. I left the car at a parking garage on East 63^rd Street. The hourly parking rate was four times the minimum wage, which is about average for Manhattan.

The Manhattan Grill on 1^st Avenue is a landmark steak house. It is heavy on woodwork, heavier on service, and heaviest of all on serving platters. The restaurant serves chops, seafood, and vegetables, all in heaping portions and assisted by a solid wine list. The fare is worth the tab, which is proportionately heavy.

There is nothing like a table piled with food to produce fellowship, so I allowed alcohol and cholesterol to worked further attitude adjustments on Darren before I sidled into the business at hand.

“So, how is the genome business, Darren?”

“Pretty good, but mapping genomes is not exactly what I do.”

“Tell me, is it true that we humans share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees?”

“Yes, but that number is deceptive. We also share a huge chunk of our DNA with turtles and houseplants. There is a lot of information packed into the differences. All eukaryotic organisms have commonalities. I suspect you know more about this than you pretend.”

“What do you know about buckyballs?”

“Buckminsterfullerenes? What have they got to do with anything? Pass the sour cream please.”

I passed the sour cream. “Are the molecules of those chemicals you use to alter the expression of DNA small enough to fit inside buckyballs?”

Darren hesitated before answering, “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. Possibly. Why?”

“Buckyballs could protect them in the bloodstream of a large animal, couldn’t they?”

Darren looked thoughtful.

“Maybe. But what would that accomplish?”

“Suppose we were to tweak the structure of buckyballs in just the right way…”

“We?”

“... so that they could protect those molecules in bloodstreams or in sap, and deliver the molecules in the right quantities to target cells where they could unzip.”

“Those are a lot of ‘coulds’.”

“OK, but suppose we did it. If we injected, say, a cow with the stuff, what would we get?”

“A dead cow.”

“Suppose it lived.”

Darren toyed with his spoon in a bowl of creamed spinach before answering.

“Well, we wouldn’t turn it into some extinct species of bison suitable for some Pleistocene Park, if that’s what you are hoping. Could you pass the sautéed onions, please?”

“Yes. More wine?”

“Sure. Look, an adult plant or animal isn’t going to change into anything radically different. All we can do is make it sick.”

“What if the organisms are not adult?”

“Well, now that is a more interesting question. If any survive at all I suppose they might develop abnormally.”

“Joint venture? The investment shouldn’t be all that much and the returns could be huge.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Assume I’m not.”

“Well, to humor you for a moment, this is very long term research you are talking about. The investment actually would be enormous. We don’t know anything about the potential dangers. We need a lab where we safely can isolate biohazards. This could take decades.”

“I think we can do the research much more cheaply and quickly than that, and without elaborate precautions. The risk is minimal. After all, we’re not whipping up anything new; as you explained, we’re just re-expressing things that are old. The planet survived their presence the last time they were active. Maybe we’ll make a hardier strain of some over-domesticated food crop. Maybe our modified plants and animals will make natural antibiotics or antibodies for useful vaccines. Who knows?”

“Don’t forget the problem of getting past the FDA if we did turn up anything useful,” Darren warned.

“Don’t worry about the FDA. We ignore them and produce in Mexico. That is what Mexico is for. If we have a product the buyers will find us.”

“I don’t even know if that whole buckyball idea of yours is at all possible. Did that just pop into your head? You seem to understand the basics but you don’t think in a disciplined way, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“You are not the first to say that. OK, whether we use buckyballs or not isn’t the point. The point is to deliver your DNA modifiers without killing the host. Can we do it with organisms larger than bacteria?”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“I know just a place to help you think. Dessert?”

Darren patted his stomach with both hands.

“You must be kidding.”

“Here comes the selection.”

The waiter rolled a tray to the table full of sugared artery cloggers.

“Well, maybe just one of those.”

As Darren plunged his fork into a Mount Everest on a plate called Death by Chocolate, I changed the subject to something more personal, “Tell me about your social life, Darren. Any girlfriends?”

His answer was no surprise. “No. I wasn’t really a ladies man in school or college, and I don’t have the time or money for a social life right now anyway. I’m just trying to get grounded.”

“I understand. I never was adept at the dating game either – another thing Professor Zee was right about.”

“Who?”

“Someone who was more perceptive than I like to admit. Never mind. Anyway, I found a way to bypass the game. A very old way, and you are all about old ways, aren’t you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“There is a club about a dozen blocks from here.”

“I’m not much of a nightclubber, Andre.”

“It’s not what you think.”

The bill arrived. Darren gasped when he it.

“Close your mouth, Darren. This is mine.”

Actually it belonged to American Express for the remainder of the month.

“Do you mind walking a dozen blocks or so?” I asked.

“No, it’ll do me good after that meal.”

We walked south to the East 40s. I entered the outer doors of an apartment building and buzzed an apartment on the fourth floor. I waved at the security camera. A return buzz unlocked the interior doors. I held one open for Darren and followed him into the foyer. In the elevator, I poked at the “4” button. It rose in an unsteady motion.

“What kind of nightclub is this?” Darren asked. “This is just an apartment building.”

“Trust me.”

“You really should stop saying that. It just reminds me that I don’t.”

The elevator door slid open. The black and beige hallway carpet was worn but not ragged. The off-white walls were smudged but not filthy. I knocked on the door to 4A. All six apartments on this floor were leased by the same Moscow corporation. A tall woman of about 30 years opened the door. She had light blonde shoulder length hair and wore a black pullover top.

“Hello, Andre. Who is your friend?” she asked.

“Hi, Vicky. This is Darren.”

“Hello, Darren.”

Darren nodded. Vicky smiled.

“Well, come on in boys and have a seat. Would you like a drink?” she asked.

“No thanks, Vicky. You know I don’t like to mix my vices.”

“I wasn’t asking you.”

“Oh. Uh, no, but thank you.” Darren stammered.

We headed for an L-shape sofa in a deep and narrow room with windows at the far end. The architect had intended it as a linear living room/dining room combination, but all of it was occupied by chairs and couches. A rather overweight and very pale 50 year old man sat in one chair and watched the Yankees play Toronto on television. Otherwise the furniture was empty.

“Quiet night, Vicky?”

“Yeah, you never can tell with Saturdays. Sometimes we’re jammed and sometimes it’s nothing. Fridays are always crowded. Wednesdays too for some reason.”

“Mid-week stress.”

“I suppose. Do you want a line-up or are you going to wait for Lana?”

“When will she be available?”

“In a few minutes, I think.”

“Good. I’ll wait. Hold off on the line for Darren until she comes out.”

“Sure. Excuse me one moment.” Vicky walked down a hall and went into a room in the back.

“This is what I think it is?” whispered Darren in my ear.

“What do you think it is?”

“A brothel?”

“Congratulations. Would you care to wager your winnings on the next question?”

Darren looked uncomfortable, but he didn’t suggest we leave.

Darren studiously avoided eye contact with the other customer. I waved at the fellow, but he was too engrossed in the baseball game to notice.

After a few minutes a buxom dark-skinned woman in a ponytail came in the front door and approached the middle-aged man on the couch. “Thanks for waiting, sweetie. Are you ready?” The man nodded. She led him by the hand out the front door and down the hall to another apartment.

“Uh, Andre, what does this cost?”

“$300 per hour.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Plus whatever you tip the girl. And Darren?”

“Yes?”

“Tip the girl.”

“I can’t afford it, Andre. I don’t have that much cash on me. I never do.”

“Tonight is on me. Just handle the tip.”

“Why are you spending your money on me this way?”

“Let’s say I’m investing in you.”

Lana, a petite red head with a winsome smile, entered the room. She wore a red and white checkered dress that matched the tablecloth to my picnic table at home. It gave her a wholesome look.

“Hi Andre!” she exclaimed cheerily. “I told you to call first so I can be ready for you!” she admonished without rancor.

“I was playing it by ear tonight.”

“Totally wrong organ.”

“This is my friend Darren.”

Lana smiled.

“Hello, Darren.

“Hi.”

“This is his first time here, Lana. Could you help make it special for him?”

“You want me to make tonight special for him?”

“No, no. I mean, whom do you recommend for him?”

“There are seven girls here tonight. Don’t you want to let him choose for himself?”

“No.”

Darren’s mouth opened wide at my presumption.

Lana laughed. “OK. Paula is in back. Men like her.”

They liked her for good reason. I knew Paula. She was a stunning longhaired brunette with spectacular upper body attributes.

“Vicky!” Lana called. “Send Paula out please!”

Paula emerged from the back room. She wore a deep blue low-cut cocktail dress which she overflowed. The dress matched her eyes. Her heels brought her up to six feet. Straight near-black hair hung around her waist. Darren’s mouth opened again.

“Paula,” said Lana, “this is Darren. He’s a first-timer.”

Paula nodded at Lana and smiled acknowledgment at me. She sat down next to Darren, made eye-contact, and asked him quietly, “So Darren, what do you do?”

“Well, uh… I work for…a company in Jersey.”

“Doing what?”

“Biochemist.”

Darren failed to expand on that, so, after a few moments, Paula rubbed his knee.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

Darren seemed not to understand the question.

“Say yes,” I prompted.

“Oh. Yes.”

I reached over and handed Paula an envelope with $300. She looked at me curiously, but gave her shoulders a barely visible shrug. She took Darren’s hand and led him out the front door. Darren looked as though he were going to the guillotine but he put up no resistance.

“So what is your game, Andre?” Lana asked me with a smile.

“Game?”

“Come on. I know you. You are that generous only when you want something. What do you want from Darren?”

“His skills. I want him to have an addiction so that he needs my money enough to work for me. He isn’t a druggie or alkie. It had to be something else.”

“I figured it was something like that. You think Paula will be an addiction?”

“I’m pretty sure of it. There isn’t anyone else in his life.”

“You are incorrigible, Andre.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.” Lana smiled again. “It’s OK. You have your quirks, but I like you Andre. I always did. You’re my favorite customer.”

“Really? What makes me so lovable?”

“I said nothing about love. I like that you don’t have the attitude.”

“The attitude?”

“Most guys who come in here have a real attitude. It is hard to explain. But you don’t have it.”

I chose not to mention that it wasn’t possible for me to treat her differently from non-professional girlfriends because, like Darren, I didn’t have any of those.

“So, have you got another envelope in there?”

“Of course.”

Darren was quiet on the walk back to the parking garage. He was quiet in the car until we were ten miles west of the Lincoln Tunnel. At last he said, “We don’t need to custom design protective buckyballs if we don’t use the circulatory systems of plants and animals. I can introduce modifiers directly into seeds and single cell embryos.”

“Yes, of course.”  It was such an obvious solution that I had missed it. “That is the easy way, isn’t it? Then we just watch them grow. Tell me what you need and I’ll set you up my in-house lab.”

“I can do this better at work. Nothing about it will look unusual to my bosses.”

Darren was developing a sense of larceny. This encouraged me.

“Too dangerous. Nucleicorp will claim ownership to anything we make, and the courts will back them. We set it up my lab, I’ll suspend your rent, and I’ll give you an extra stipend that will allow you to see Paula every week.”

Darren stared at me a while. Then he said, “I’ll give you a list of equipment and supplies to buy. It won’t be cheap.”

“What is?”

  

A month passed. My money market account shrank as my lab grew crowded with devices, not all of which I could identify. I gave Darren some breathing space, and I agreed not to enter the lab without him. Another month passed. Then a few more. I began to grow concerned. One day I called Darren at work.

“Darren. How is the garden growing?”

“Not great. Look I can’t talk about this now. I’ll get back to you.”

Two days later Darren called me.

“I’ve been putting off talking to you, Andre. I’ve been working on this day and night, but we are at a dead end. The animal embryos won’t grow properly after I treat them. They divide a few times and die. The seeds are the same. They begin to germinate and then die. It’s no good.”

“Well that is disappointing.”

“I’ll say.”

Darren, of course, was contemplating an end to his visits to Paula. I considered the matter.

“The changes to the DNA are too extensive,” I hypothesized. “It messes up the seeds and embryos too much. What about our original idea? Treat juveniles with gene modifiers wrapped in buckyballs. Maybe if the organism is far enough along it can tolerate some tinkering with its genes better.”

“Way ahead of you. But forget about those damn carbon balls, will you? A form of E. coli works better as a delivery method.”

“Fine. Whatever works.”

“Not so fine. ‘Works better’ doesn’t mean that it works. Remember that the chemicals are toxic. When carrying useful quantities, he bacteria aren’t surviving long enough to deliver the molecules where they need to go. My colleagues here think I’m deliberately developing a new anti-biotic. It sure looks like it. All my Petri dishes are full of dead bacteria.”

I chose not to comment on Darren’s violation of our agreement not to pursue this research at work, and simply said, “Let me think about that one.”

“Be my guest.”

As soon as I hung up the phone I thought about my experiments at college. In one of my laboratory refrigerators remained after all these years a bottle of the rat anti-freeze I had made years ago. I hoped it hadn’t degraded.

In light of Darren’s violation of our pact, I had no compunction about entering the home lab alone, not that I would have had any in any case. Darren was more organized than I ever have been, so I had no difficulty finding a well-labeled beaker full of the strain of E. coli he had mentioned. I poured some into a second container, mixed in my anti-freeze, and put the batch in my upstairs refrigerator between the pastrami and the leftover potatoes.

Most of the bacteria died, as I expected, but some survived. After repeating the process and culling survivors over and over, I had E. coli that not only thrived in my antifreeze but required it. More importantly, the anti-freeze slowed the cellular metabolism of the bacteria in a way that I hoped would make them live longer when loaded with Darren’s DNA modifiers.

I walked over to Darren’s cottage before he left for work in the morning. He opened his door unshaven and half-dressed. I handed him a box with Petri dishes and a vial of my antifreeze.

“Here, try these.”

“What are they?”

“Just try them. You’ll need to keep the E. coli supplied with a few drops from the vial. It’s an essential nutrient for them. I wrote a note about it.”

“OK.”

That very evening he called me.

“Andre! What did you do to the E. coli? How did you make the stuff in the vial”

“With a little of this and a little of that. Did it help?”

“Yes! The bacteria survive long enough now. I’m trying out the bacteria on the juveniles of advanced animals.”

“That is good news. What animals?”

“Rotifers.”

“Rotifers? Those microscopic things? You call those ‘advanced’?”

“They aren’t really microscopic. You just about can see them with the naked eye.”

“Maybe you can, but I can’t. Why not lab mice?”

“Oh, we’re not ready for those yet.”

“Darren, have rotifers changed much in the past few hundred million years?”

“Not really.”

“Then perhaps they are not the best subjects for uncovering archaic biochemistry. They are archaic biochemistry.”

“I explained the reasons for moving cautiously when we first started this. We shouldn’t let this strain of E. coli get into the general food chain until we know it’s safe.”

“I don’t think it’s a big risk. The bacteria can’t survive without that organic antifreeze in the vial, and they won’t find it in nature, so they’ll just die outside the lab.

“Maybe. OK, I’ll move up to tadpoles tomorrow.”

“I’ll think we should keep the experiments out of Nucleicorp at this stage, don’t you?

“Perhaps you’re right. I feel like celebrating. Want to go you-know-where?”

“Sure.”

  

I parked my car on 50^th we walked the couple blocks to “you-know-where.” There was a new jauntiness to Darren’s step.

Babs was the night manager that evening. She opened the door for us and waved us to the sofa.

“Are you going to let the girls know we’re here?” I asked her.

“They know,” she answered.

Paula entered the room and stood in front of Darren. She took his hand and wordlessly led him out the front door to one of the apartments.

Lana appeared soon afterward.

 “Stand up and turn around,” she ordered.

I complied. She clamped her arms around my neck and pulled herself up piggyback.

“Out the door and down the hall to your left,” she said.

I went where directed and opened the door to the empty studio apartment. Closing the door behind us with a foot, I hurried across the room and let Lana tumble over my head onto the bed.

Our session was as pleasant as usual.

“Lana?” I spoke up afterward.

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Would you like to have dinner with me?”

“We’re not allowed to date customers.”

“Does that mean no?”

“No. That means don’t tell anyone about it.”

“Deal.”

“I’m pretty busy for the next couple weeks. Some of the girls are away. I have to cover them.”

“When are you free?”

Lana smiled.

“I mean when are you available?”

“How about two weeks from next Friday?” she suggested.

“Date. Where shall I pick you up?”

“I’ll meet you someplace.”

“Manhattan Grill on 1^st?”

“Fine. Eight o’clock. How about bringing Darren? Paula actually likes him,” she said.

“Really? Well, OK, if Darren is agreeable.”

“He will be.”

  

Darren was slow and methodical in his methods, so I decided to accelerate matters by conducting some experiments of my own. I bought lab mice, pilfered some of his DNA modifiers from the basement lab, set up a secondary rudimentary lab in my kitchen, and injected juvenile mice with laced E. coli.

The next day, I discovered that my cat, Boss, had gotten into one of the cages and eaten two of the mice.

The results on the surviving mice at the end of two weeks were encouraging. A few became notably aggressive. Two lost so much fur that they looked like little opossums. The rest looked and acted fairly normally.

My cat was acting strangely by this time. He seemed healthy enough but had a wild look to his eyes that hadn’t been there before. One night he somehow managed to kill a goose and pull it through the cat door.

I chose not to reveal my experiments to Darren yet.

  

On the night of our double date, Paula, Lana, Darren and I shared a table at the Manhattan Grill. Darren, in between mouthfuls of pork, talked at length about abnormalities in the rotifers and tadpoles which he found exciting. Paula worked her way through an enormous lobster. Lana had a notable fraction of a cow on her plate. I was the lightest eater with lamb chops larger than my hands. A Himalayan range of fried zucchini, creamed spinach, onions and potatoes occupied the remainder of the table.

“How can you stay so thin with your appetite?” I asked Lana.

“The Bernanke diet.”

“Hmm?”

“I eat only when someone else pays.”

“Good diet,” observed Paula. She had acquired an increasingly distinct frown throughout Darren’s ramblings.

“Now let me get this straight,” she said. “You and Andre here are trying to make money with Roto-what?”

“Rotifers.”

“Rotifers,” she intoned.

“And tadpoles.”

“Tadpoles! You two are the worst excuses for criminal masterminds I ever met!”

“Well, ‘criminal’ is a harsh and, I hope, inaccurate description.”

“You don’t think your employer would object to you working for Andre?”

“They might, if they knew, I’ll concede, but that is civil, not criminal.”

Paula gave Darren a surprisingly hard whack to the side of his head.

“Ow!”

“If you want to make money with potions and powders and don’t mind not playing by the rules, there are far simpler ways for a competent chemist. What does the word Ecstasy mean to you?”

“Happiness?”

Paula put a hand to her forehead. “Let’s try again. How about methamphetamine?”

“Jail?”

“Only if you get caught. Come here, genius!”

Paula grabbed Darren by the arm, pulled him up from the table, and led him out of the room. A moment later through the window I saw them on the sidewalk as Paula hailed a taxi.

Lana and I looked at each other. She shrugged, smiled, and scooped potatoes into her plate.

More for us.”

I suspected my partnership with Darren was over. I stuffed myself morosely.

After eating as much as I could manage, I sat back and unconsciously licked my left thumb. Lana playfully grabbed my right hand and licked the other one. It was then that I wondered how thoroughly I had washed my hands after working with the E. coli a few hours earlier.

  

Darren moved out of my rental house soon after and told me to keep the security deposit.

I learned through Lana a few months later that Darren had quit Nucleicorp. Paula also had quit her job, though Lana still talked to her on the phone. Lana said Darren and Paula bought a condo in Manhattan. For whatever reason, they have no shortage of cash.

In my basement lab, Darren kindly had left of list of recommended procedures in case I wanted to pursue our project on my own. However, as Professor Zee pointed out, I am a dilettante. Despite the interesting results I already had produced, without a collaborator to do the donkeywork, I wouldn’t produce anything valuable or publishable. I terminated the project. I don’t have compunctions about using experimental animals and I am an untroubled carnivore; nonetheless, I prefer not to kill animals without any cause. So, I released the mice into the back yard. I dumped the tadpoles into the small stream bordering my property. I disposed of the E. coli by spilling them onto the grass. I figured it was safe to do so. I figured without a supply of antifreeze the bacteria would die and without a supply of DNA modifiers they couldn’t infect other plants and animals.

It turns out I was wrong about that. About six months after these events. My cat Boss charged through the cat door into the house and hid behind the couch. I heard a growl outside. I looked through the glass in the door and saw a cat that was too large to fit in the cat door. Some people say there are still are a handful of wildcats in New Jersey, and I guessed that this was what it was. It saw me and sauntered away. I can’t swear to it, but it sure looked to me as though the back legs were slightly shorter than the front; I thought I saw saber-like teeth overlapping the lower jaw.

Out of curiosity, I decided to sample the grass where I had dumped the E. coli months earlier, just in case there was some connection. To my surprise, the bacteria were still present. They somehow had evolved to synthesize my antifreeze and Darren’s modifiers out of substances in the natural environment.

How many changes will the bacteria effect on local fauna and flora? I’m hoping not many. Most changes are likely to be unhealthy and therefore self-limiting. We’ll have to wait and see. Will the effects spread beyond the immediate locale? We’ll have to wait and see about that, too.

Neither Lana nor I have been adversely affected by our accidental exposure to the E. coli. True, she has developed a wild look to her eyes that reminds me of my cat and she seems somehow more feral. I rather like it. I have noticed no change in me other than something that I’m sure is just psychological. Every now and then I have an overwhelming urge to climb a tree.