Dark Matter (44 page)

“It’s a blackout,” he said finally, to
himself. He glanced sidewise at Dee. She gripped the wheel tightly, her face
set dead ahead, lacking expression.

“I’m sorry.”

She turned. A small smile escaped. “It’s
hardly your fault.”

He suppressed the urge to say it somehow
was. It would only provoke her.

Silence stretched out. The foothills became
more tightly rumpled together, the cloud bank loomed nearer. Soon they would
top the scarp.

When Dee spoke, her words lacked the proper
emphasis, as though they had sat on her tongue for hours. “Do you feel
different?”

His gaze flicked unwittingly to his cane.
He swatted the thought away.

“Yes... No.”

Dee waited in silence for an explanation.

“Ask me what the square root of two hundred
and fifty three is,” he said.

She played along. “What’s the square root
of two hundred and fifty three?”

“Beats me.”

He studied her face as she absorbed his
revelation. He saw reflected there his own mixed feelings.

“You’re normal?”

“Things seem familiar again. It’s like I’ve
moved back home after a decade overseas, back to the house where I grew up.”

“You really don’t know the answer?”

“No, it isn’t floating in the wind, or
congealing below to float into my consciousness.”

“But?”

“But my old house, the one I’ve come to
live in again, now has a basement.”

“A basement?”

“Yes. And its door might be stiff with age,
but I don’t think it’s locked.”

She frowned and took a moment to look at
him.

“You’ve carried that too long. Carried her
too long. You need to let it go.”

“My sister? Oh, no.” He smiled. “She’s not
down there, not any longer. I think, somewhere along the line, we made peace.”

Dee could not hide her relief, nor her
curiosity, but she said no more about it.

“What’s in the basement then?”

“The square root of two hundred and fifty
three, among other things.”

“Then nothing has changed?” she said in
alarm.

“It has. Like I said, I’m not drowning in
thoughts that seem like someone else’s. Deep down, the wheel still turns, but I’ve
come adrift of it. It’s as though I’ve been jolted from the hub, and the
machine’s motive power no longer flows through me. I don’t feel
harnessed
,
a cog in some colossal artefact.”

He paused, picking gingerly through
memories of being within the eye. They felt old now, stale like normal
memory-stuff...and yet. “But it’s still humming down there.”

“In the basement,” Dee said, like one
trying to share a joke not quite understood.

“In the basement.”

He wound the window down an inch. The air
was heavy with summer’s humidity, and larded with the smell of the sundried
leaf-litter of eucalypt and jarrah. From the corner of his eye he saw Dee
twitch.

“Too noisy? I can wind it up?”

“No, don’t,” she said. “I miss the bush.”

The car hurtled up a rise, its green shell
reflecting the gloaming. From a thousand feet up it was the carapace of a
beetle making a bee-line for the scarp’s crest.

They topped the scarp, but it was another
minute before the road curved to the right and the forest fell away to reveal
the bowl of Swan Valley, with Perth’s skyscrapers twinkling at its centre.

At the same moment, Rasputin’s phone buzzed
to notify him of a message.

They stared at each other for a moment,
comically frozen, before he lunged, spearing his arm into the rear passenger
foot well. His hand stabbed the side of a sports bag. He found the zip, opened
it and groped through its contents. After seconds that seemed like minutes, he
retrieved the phone.

He pulled the message up.

He read it aloud: “I need you. Come
quickly.”

“Who is it?” she said, breathless.

“Reim.”

The sun had left off their hemisphere
by the time Dee pulled the car over to the curb and killed the engine. All was
still bar the shape of a low-hanging branch that swept back and forth in the
wind, like a person tracing and retracing their steps in the night. The tick of
the car’s cooling engine punctuated the silence.

Reim’s house looked out of place. It was a
relic from an older Perth, when riverside suburbs had rambling lawns riven by
dirt driveways, cluttered with river-going paraphernalia. The small, single
storey house was set far back on the block, hemmed on three sides by brick
walls that seemed to lean off-plumb in the darkness. The neighbouring houses
were two or three storeys, and pushed to the front of their blocks to create
private spaces behind. As Rasputin opened his door, he heard water splashing
unceasingly, and guessed at fountains and manicured lawns behind the bordering
walls. The smell of putrefying nectarines wafted on the inconstant breeze.

The only light gleaming from within Reim’s
house came warped through bubbled-glass flanking the front door. They were
halfway up the dirt driveway, a lighter darkness twisting its way toward the
house, when the door opened, spilling the lone light in a bar down the steps of
the veranda.

The silhouette of a man appeared in the
doorway. It bent over something, and doused the light. Rasputin heard the door
shut and the jangle and scrape of a key being fitted to a lock.

A smaller light flared in the darkness. It
came bobbling down the stairs, its sharp beam strafing restless peppermint
trees, before tracing a path down the driveway.

Rasputin and Dee halted, waiting. As the
light drew near, Rasputin saw by its diffused glow a wild look in Reim’s eyes,
one he had never before seen. He saw also that what bent Reim’s right arm with
its weight gleamed metallic.

“Professor, why do you have a gun?” said
Rasputin.

“Rasputin. Dee,” said Reim, running his
words together. “Please, we must hurry. Jordan has been here. He has my entry
code to the lab. He means to steal the virus.” Panic had thickened his accent.

“What virus?” shrieked Dee.

“Why the gun?” said Rasputin.

Reim ignored Dee. “Jordan was not himself.”

Reim tilted the torch so that its light
enveloped his face. Rasputin heard Dee’s sharp intake of breath as his eyes
fell on a dark oblong smudge that ran down one side of his face. Its centre was
scored with a line of dried blood.

By the time they pulled into a
deserted car park at the university, the harried look had left Reim’s face. In
its place was one of frank appraisal: Rasputin caught Reim looking at him in
the rear-view mirror more than once.

Reim turned in his seat as far as it and
his ageing joints would allow, and, with the ghost of a smile, said, “I was
right.”

Dee had told Rasputin of Reim’s call the
morning after he had passed out in the field, of his talk about hibernation.
Now, Rasputin sensed a hum of excitement beneath Reim’s mien―not even bodily
assault, it appeared, could whip the academic bent from the old man.

The campus looked altogether different in
the dead of night. It appeared empty, and the dark obscured familiar landmarks,
and caused the outlines of buildings and trees to take on new relationships.

The foyer of the biology faculty was imbued
with a faint fluorescent glow from a handful of afterhours lights. In the
penumbral gloom, portraits of dead and retired academics floated, insubstantial
as wraiths.

Reim shuffled ahead of Rasputin and Dee.
Rasputin guessed he had received a harsher beating than he was letting on.

They descended a flight of stairs that
squeaked beneath their shoes. The stairs made a ninety-degree turn and
terminated in the small foyer of the bio-toxicology lab.

Reim produced an identity card from within
his cardigan. (Rasputin smiled, despite everything―the temperature had to be above
20 degrees Celsius, and the Dutchman was wearing a woollen cardigan.) He sliced
a box on the wall nimbly with the card, and the large single-plate glass door
swept open.

“The C4 lab?” whispered Rasputin.

Reim turned and for a moment seemed
confused. Then: “Yes. Just the card. Next is the honey pot.” He was silent a
moment, listening. “And perhaps Jordan has not been here after all. Nothing
seems amiss.”

They walked single file between benches
strewn with microscopes and other machines whose function Rasputin could not
discern. The room was lit with faint green light, as though the ceiling burned
with foxfire. Rasputin and Dee were alike glancing about. Reim’s head was
thrust forward of his shoulders, and his gait had steadied into the purposeful
walk Rasputin knew so well.

“Don’t people sometimes work here at
night?” Dee said.

Reim replied without turning, “Not in the holidays.”

In the welter of events, Rasputin had
forgotten it was New Year’s Eve.

They passed a series of partitions that
served to baffle the view to another room whose signage designated it to be for
virology. The benches in this room held containment hoods, and more specialised
equipment. Rasputin noted that though the room was within the confines of the
C4 facility, only staff whose work touched on viruses would have a reason to be
there. All others would be sifted out by the baffles guarding its approach.

At the back of the virology lab was another
partition that looked to be a set of cubicles for book and computer work. They
delved past this, turned, and were confronted with another plate-glass door.
Reim swiped through this, and they entered a dim corridor. Rasputin’s cane
tapped on the tiled floor, echoing. It smelt of cleaning agent.

At the far end of the corridor was a thick
door that reminded Rasputin of the freezer room doors he had seen working one
summer at an abattoir. Those doors had been stainless steel. This was
transparent.

A camera sat in the left corner above the
door. Set into the wall below was a keypad. The keys glowed with that same
green light.

Reim stooped over the keypad and said:
“Reim De Groot.”

A speaker set into the wall above the
keypad gave out a desultory bleep. The door remained shut fast.

Reim repeated the phrase, with the same
result.

He muttered, “This Brave New World,” then
turned to Rasputin and Dee. “Every time I get the slightest flu.”

He adjusted his glasses, peered first over
them, then through them, and began to laboriously key in a ten-digit number.
Rasputin noted only the first three digits, before, belatedly, some instinct of
politeness caused him to look away.

Reim finished and as he straightened up,
the door hissed slightly, withdrew a fraction of an inch, and slid open.

Light burst over the room, startling Dee.

Jordy was nowhere in sight.

Perhaps this is all madness
, thought Rasputin.

As the door shooshed closed behind them,
Rasputin took a quick mental inventory of the lab. It was much smaller than he
had imagined―a square perhaps 40 feet to a side. It was rimmed with a wide,
white bench, which was spartan compared to the clutter in the outer lab. One
corner of the room held a room within the room, a cube that did not reach quite
to the ceiling. Silver taps with instruments protruded from one side, and were
connected to hoses made of a silver and white woven material.

Reim caught Rasputin’s glance. “That’s the
wet section.” He winked. “The virus vault.”

Reim strode over to a computer and brought
it out of hibernation. Over his shoulder, he said: “Jordan is not here now, but
it is imperative I make sure he hasn’t been here.”

He logged into the computer and accessed a
program.

“The refrigerated vault is tied to this
software. It logs all accesses. I will check nothing has been tampered with,
and then”—he swivelled on his chair—“we’d best call the police.”

Rasputin winced voluntarily. The bruise on
the old man’s face seemed more gruesome in the harsh, fluorescent lighting.

Rasputin caught Dee’s stance out of the corner
of his eye. Her shoulders were slumped, her head hung pendulously on her thin
neck.

Shit
, he
thought,
I’ve been thinking of myself again.

He edged toward her and rested his hand on
her shoulder. She acknowledged the touch without looking up.

Reim grunted to himself. “Found it,” he
said. He hunted in his shirt pockets and drew out a folded serviette and a pen.
He began to copy something from the screen.

Rasputin smiled. Here Reim was, at a
computer in a lab that pushed at the envelope of man’s understanding of the
deadliest biological agents ever known, and he was scribbling with ink on an
old napkin.

Rasputin watched. He watched Reim’s shaggy
head bent over the paper, which glanced up now and then to check the
information he was copying. He watched the cardigan bunch a little as Reim’s
arm moved. He watched the purple veins bulging beneath his brown, patterned
skin. He watched ink leave the pen and stain the paper.