LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

step and heavy breathing, and I was thankful for an interruption until the round, wrecked face of Martha reappeared in the room. I read disaster in every nuance of the wobbling, shivering flesh on her face.

      “Jesus, Martha, what happened to you? You look like a squashed spider.”

      It was true. Every ounce of flesh on her face seemed to be sagging into a puddle and her skin was as white as milk. Martha took in a great deep breath and grew rounder, like a balloon. “It’s your lab, Cordi.” It came out in a screech that set my nerves to grinding.

      “What is it? What’s happened?” I asked, moving quickly around my desk, the pit of my stomach lurching like a tugboat in a jar full of hurricanes.

      “I think you’d better come see for yourself.” I took one last look at Martha’s face as it seemed to metamorphose into even greater doom and raced out of my office, taking the stairs two at a time. There was no one in the long corridor. The doors were closed on all sides and the institutional tiles on the floor sparkled in the overhead fluorescent lighting. My door was the sixth from the end, on the right.

      It was ajar, and even before I reached it, I smelled it. What is it about smell and disaster these days? I thought calmly, in that unreality before reality hits. I walked in.

      Everything seemed to be in its place, nothing wrong except for the heavy reek of insecticide. It was everywhere — the air was glutinous with it. “This isn’t happening,” I said, trying to will it so. “It’s not happening.” I moved in a daze from cage to cage. Insect after insect, dead. The mice and salamanders seemed okay, but who knew what the chemical would have done to my controlled conditions? All garbage now. Thank God I wasn’t in the middle of any mantid experiment.

      Nothing could stop the deadly work of the insecticide. I moved from cage to cage unbelieving, touching the cages, looking in. But at least my data was safe. The insects could be replaced. I turned to my laptop computer to boot it up, but I didn’t get far. The keyboard was drenched in some sort of fluid that had spread throughout the computer. A horrible feeling crept through me as I bent to sniff the keyboard. Formaldehyde. It was swimming in formaldehyde. Like an automaton I turned on the computer, but nothing happened. I remembered the death sentence handed out to the computer of a friend of mine, who had once spilled a glass of red wine on her computer. All my files gone. My raw data, gone. But I had backups. A pain in the ass to get them reinstalled, but at least I had them. Or did I?

      I turned from the room, took the stairs on the run, and raced into my office to the drawer where I kept my computer backup disks. I yanked it open and stared at the empty drawer. No disks. I pulled it all the way out and flung it on the floor, getting a precarious sense of relief from watching it splinter and shatter. Not very well made, I thought, in that strange displacing calm that disaster spawns. With a sinking heart, I remembered doing a backup the previous week and asking my grad student to put them in my office when the backup was done. But he’d lost his key to my office and had left the disks in the lab. I raced back upstairs and flung open every drawer and cupboard, but there were no disks. I turned in desperation to the computer and started madly pushing buttons, looking for a miracle I knew I wasn’t going to get. What can I say? I’m an indecisive fatalist. Sometimes.

      It was some time before I was aware that Martha was standing in the doorway, with a handkerchief draped decorously over her nose.

      “Who would want to do this to you Cordi?” she whispered. “In all my years here I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing exciting ever happens around here, and then suddenly, in the space of weeks, you find a dead body, nearly die, and have your lab gratuitously fumigated?”

      I kicked the drawer with my foot. “Whoever it was, I’ve got to find them. I’ve got to get those disks back.” After months of lethargy induced by one of my black moods, it felt good to feel so motivated, even if it was out of fear.

      “But, Cordi, what makes you think they’ll still have the disks?”

      I looked at Martha, giving the butterflies in my stomach a ride worthy of a sailboat in six-metre waves. I took a deep breath to calm the waves and swallowed hard. I thought I was a pessimist, but this horrible thought had miraculously eluded me.

      “Because if they don’t, I’m history.”

      “You sure are, my dear Cordi.”

      The voice grated every nerve in my body as I turned to face Jim Hilson. He walked in without being invited and casually picked up one of the fumigated cages.

      “Oh, Cordi, this is just dreadful. Now you won’t be able to publish any papers.” He looked at me ruefully. You’re going to need a bit of luck, Cordi, to get out of this mess.” He smiled then and replaced the fumigated cage. “Cheers,” he said. And then he was gone. Just like that.

       chapter six

      I spent the rest of the afternoon in the zoology building with the security people and police, bottling up my anger and panic and trying to appear stoic, when I actually felt totally destroyed. The harried diminutive blond female cop was very pleasant but not encouraging.

      “The lock on the lab door was jimmied, but whoever did this had access to the main door or came in during normal hours and hid somewhere until later.”

      “That could have been anyone,” I moaned. “All faculty members and grad students have a key to the main door, and people come in and out at all hours of the day and night to check on their experiments.”

      “So technically anyone on staff could have let themselves in without being noticed?”

      I nodded, but I realized it was worse than that. “The building is open from nine to five and there is no security guard at the main door.” I couldn’t help wondering how Jim had found out so quickly. Could he have done this? Was he that set on eliminating me as the competition, or had he coincidentally been in the hallway and smelled the insecticide? Odd, though, since his lab was one floor below mine.

      “So, anyone could have come in, waited until after hours, killed your bugs, stolen your disks, and then left at night. No note. No one’s claimed responsibility, no fingerprints. Is there any reason to suspect an animal rights group?”

      “With insects?” I asked incredulously. “Do you realize how much most people detest insects? You have to be cuddly, furry, soft, and photogenic before the animal rights activists get hot under the collar. If this is linked to them I’ll eat candied ants for breakfast.”

      Finally the police left and I reluctantly turned the lab over to Martha to clean out and get the cages ready for new material. What new material? I thought. All my research from the last month was gone because I had failed to print a paper backup for a month, and much of my raw data was lost going back years. I’d need months just to sort through my paper records and design more experiments to replace the lost data for the Animal Behaviour paper if I couldn’t find the disks. It would be at least a year, if I was lucky, before I could publish again. And I knew what that would do to my chances at tenure. I shuddered at the thought. I had no choice. I had to find the disks or go down trying. I started ruminating on all the things that could go wrong and then realized that I had to do something to keep my dark thoughts at bay or I wouldn’t get anywhere at all. But it wasn’t easy — it never is.

      I’d started sorting out what experiments I might be able to salvage from the paper records in my office when Martha poked her head in.

      “I was cleaning out the cages after you left and found something really strange.”

      My ears buzzed at the sound of her words. Martha and strange were anathema. I didn’t think the word was even in her vocabulary. God, what else could happen to me today? Let me count the ways, I thought.

      “I took all the dead insects and put them in separate jars according to their cage numbers, just as you’d asked me to do, but when I came to do the two mesh cages of larvae there weren’t any.”

      “No cages?”

      “No.

Скачать книгу