Fire (7 page)

Ron thought about that. “Can’t say I know. I don’t suppose it does make a whole lot of difference.”

Luke lifted his coffee cup from the desk, saw that it was empty, and crumpled it. Threw it into the trash can. “Damned if I know. Here we are at the end of the world and I’m flying off tonight to testify in front of a bunch of half-wit congressmen. And the worst of it is that it’s beginning to look like they’re right. What in the hell kind of life is this, Ron, huh? Tell me that — what in the hell kind of life is this?”

Ron shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. If you don’t know, I sure don’t. — What are you doing flying out tonight for, anyway? Have they got you testifying on Saturdays, now? Or are you going to spend the night in the air and still try to testify tomorrow?”

“No, it hasn’t come to that. Not yet. Long as I’m going north I figured I’d visit a few friends who live in New York City. I’ll take the train down to Washington Monday morning. It only takes a couple of hours when it’s running right.”

Ron didn’t think it was especially wise for anybody to be going to a place like New York under the current circumstances. But Luke was a grown man, and where he went was his own business. He certainly knew what was going on. And there were those who’d tell you that New York wasn’t that dangerous a place, not if you knew your way around in it. No one would ever have been able to convince Ron Hawkins of that, but that didn’t stop them from trying on occasion.

Ron nodded in the direction of the test tube where the trilobite was still trying to work its way free. “What’re you going to do with that thing? You want me to haul it out to the incinerator and burn it?”

Luke blanched. “No. Thanks — really, thanks — but there’s no way I’m going to let this thing out of my sight. Not until it’s nothing but dust. Besides, your furnace isn’t hot enough to make me comfortable about this thing. We’ve got a little oven around here someplace that can cook at a few thousand degrees — and if that isn’t hot enough then we’re all screwed, and it doesn’t matter. Hell.” He coughed. “Why am I talking this way? I’m going to talk to Congress Monday; I’ve got to sound responsible at least.”

Ron shrugged, and reached over to empty the wastebasket. “I don’t know. You got to get it off your chest someplace. Better here than there.”

“Maybe so. Maybe so.” Luke stole a glance at his watch. “Damn. I’ve got to get a move on. My flight is sooner than I’d like it to be, and there’s still too much for me to do here before I can leave.” He stood up, brushed his hands against themselves. Picked up the test tube and started toward the door. “I can get you to close up in here, can’t I? Don’t bother to lock the door — I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“Sure. No problem.” Ron felt a little confused and off balance — even when he was busy Luke didn’t tend to make a habit of getting up and running off in the middle of a conversation — but sometimes, he thought, it was his job to feel ill at ease.

“Thanks. I’ll let you know how it works out before I take off. I owe you that.”

Ron nodded. He didn’t feel especially that the man owed him anything, but it didn’t seem sensible to argue. He reached under Luke’s desk to empty the trash, and when he looked up again Luke was gone, left so quietly that he hadn’t even made a sound.

The next laboratory was Phil Johnson’s right down the hall, and it looked as though it had been visited by a cyclone from hell. Phil Johnson always was a slob, but that wasn’t the whole problem — not even most of it. He had two assistants who cleaned up after him (necessarily so: Johnson didn’t work with anything especially dangerous, but there wasn’t any such thing as biologicals you could afford to be messy with). The mess itself wasn’t pleasant to the eye, but the real problem was the trash — two or three cartsfull of red-bag trash, drippy-looking stuff. The kind you couldn’t pile too high in the trash wagon, because too many of those bags on top of each other would make the ones on the bottom burst. Ron didn’t want infected trash bursting on him, not in a place where people spent their time cutting open germs and putting teeth inside them. Which meant that he had an hour’s work ahead of him, piling red bags one layer thick in the cart, running back and forth to the incinerator. Ralph Hernandez, out there stoking the fire, was going to love him when he saw this.

Not that there was any choice; the stuff had to be burned.

Ralph wasn’t anywhere to be seen when Ron got to the incinerator; he left the bags standing by the incinerator door and rolled the cart back inside for the next run. He had it parked in the hall outside Phil Johnson’s lab and half refilled when he heard Luke calling him from the far end of the corridor.

“Ron,” he shouted. His voice was elated — so full of relief that it made Ron uneasy. “The furnace worked fine. The damned bug is nothing but dust now.” When he got close to Ron he reached into the breast pocket of the sports jacket he wore under his lab coat and took out the test tube that had held the trilobite. There was nothing inside it now but grey, dusty ash.

Ron looked at the glass vial, and he looked back up at Luke’s too-cheerful face, and he said, “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” As soon as he heard himself ask the question he regretted it. It was the wrong thing to say; it was too pointed and too true and too real. Even if the damn thing was dangerous — infectious — the problem was Luke’s. It was his to cope with and his to worry about. Ron didn’t have any business making things any worse on the man than they already were.

Ron knew all that as he spoke, but still there was no way to stop himself. The damned thing worried him, too, worried him in a place that was so deep he didn’t have any control over what it did.

Luke was staring at the floor, distracted and afraid and ashamed.

“You’re worried,” Ron said, “that that bug is going to resurrect itself all over again, even though it’s nothing but a sift of ash.”

There was a long still moment where neither one of them said a thing. When Luke finally looked up and spoke his face was red with embarrassment. “Yeah. I’m afraid. I’m scared out of my goddamned mind. I’m taking this thing with me when I go out of town so that I can keep an eye on it. What in the hell am I supposed to be, happy? I didn’t ask for this thing to get out of hand. I didn’t ask for this kind of trouble.”

“I guess you didn’t,” Ron said. He was thinking that it was just the kind of can of worms Luke should have expected.

Luke tucked the test tube back into his breast pocket. “Yeah. Well. Look — I’ve got to get a move on. Plane leaves in an hour; I’m already pushing my luck as it is, as far as time goes.”

Ron nodded and looked away; two bags of trash later he heard Luke’s footsteps pacing away in the corridor, and looked up to see him heading toward the elevator, his briefcase in one hand, his suitcase in the other. By the time he had the cart loaded the elevator had come and Luke was gone. It was about then that the guilt began to sink in. What was he doing? Why was he saying things to make a man — a man who was clearly and truly his friend — so miserable? Even if he was right, even if Luke was being irresponsible with things almost as big and as dangerous as the nuclear missiles that the President kept threatening to fire off — even if he was right, was it really worth hurting a friend? It wasn’t as though Luke wasn’t concerned. Maybe he was working too hard to be easy about the situation, and maybe that easiness was something that scared the hell out of Ron, but it wasn’t like Luke was ignoring the problem. If there was anything else Luke could have done, Ron couldn’t imagine it.

Still. It was scary stuff, grave stuff that you had to take seriously, not try to laugh off. Yeah, Ron thought. That’s the way I feel about it. But what business do I have forcing that on my friends?

And besides — maybe Luke’s germs wouldn’t work on anything but trilobites.

Maybe.

He frowned and shook his head and pushed the cart away from Phil Johnson’s office, toward the freight elevator. There was too damned much to do for him to waste any more time ruminating than he already had.

Or so he told himself. It didn’t stop him from brooding all the way down the elevator, out the service door, across the parking lot to the incinerator.

Which was roaring — the fire inside it was so hot and fierce that Ron could hear it from half-way across the parking lot. So loud that Ralph Hernandez didn’t even hear him coming, even though the cart usually made a rattle loud enough to wake the dead. The supervisor didn’t even notice when Ron parked the cart and started stacking bags of trash beside his feet.

“Be careful, Ralph. I’m stacking bags here down by your feet. If you try to take a step in that direction you’re going to break —”

“What the fuck —” Ralph Hernandez, finally, realized that he had company, and the fact frightened him half out of his skin. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Whatever the fuck I’m supposed to be doing, I guess. Taking out the trash.”

It was about then that Ron noticed the wild, guilty-scared look in Ralph’s eyes. And noticed that the bags on the other side of Ralph weren’t red, but translucent brown plastic — and filled, by the look of them, with files. The man wasn’t out at the incinerator burning infected waste. And whatever it was that he was doing reeked worse than the waste shack behind them.

“You haven’t got any goddamned business here. Get yourself the fuck away from me, and get yourself back to work. And stay the hell out of my way, understand me? I don’t want to see you again tonight.” As he spoke his voice went from crazy-scared to crazy-violent, threatening. Which struck Ron as one of the strangest moments in a week that was strange altogether; he’d known Ralph for years, and in all that time he’d never have described him as a threat.

Ron stooped down, took the last bag of trash out of his cart, set it by Ralph’s feet. “Sure. I understand. Don’t have to tell me twice.” He turned and started rolling the cart back in the direction of the institute’s main building.

“And if you saw something — if you know something you shouldn’t — you keep it to yourself, you hear?”

“Sure, Ralph.”

He probably ought to have wondered exactly what Ralph was up to. Certainly he ought to: the man’s behavior was genuinely suspicious. It would have been good for Ron’s health if he had wondered. But the man’s hostility threw him off balance; it didn’t even occur to Ron that he was in any danger. Not until it was already too late for him to do anything at all about it.

There were two other strange things that happened before that night came to an end for Ron. The first happened as he was filling his cart with the last of the mound of trash from Phil Johnson’s office. (He hadn’t quite decided what he was going to do with it if Ralph was still out at the incinerator; park the cart outside the loading dock, come back and take care of it later, maybe. Or maybe he’d go ahead and take it out anyway; he wasn’t all that thrilled about letting Ralph intimidate him out of doing his job.)

Ron came out of Phil Johnson’s office, dragging the last, heaviest bag with both hands, and as he came through the door he saw the door to Luke’s lab peek open. He’d already seen Luke leave for the night. Hell, he thought, maybe he forgot something and had to come back for it. He wasn’t up to seeing Luke again right then. He still felt too angry, and all at the same time too guilty about the anger, and he was sure that if he talked to the man he’d just say something that’d make the both of them feel worse. So he ducked back into Phil Johnson’s lab, to avoid the conversation he didn’t want to have.

The sound of a man stepping out of the lab, locking the door behind him.

Ron poked his head out the door a moment later, when he heard the sound of footsteps receding toward the elevator; more out of reflex than because he had any need to see the back of Luke’s head —

And what he saw wasn’t the back of Luke’s head at all.

It was Herman Bonner — Dr. Herman Bonner — who had no imaginable business in Luke Munsen’s office. The two didn’t share projects, and they didn’t care much for one another. In fact, Ron recalled, Luke didn’t approve in the least of the way Bonner cared for the Bestial creature in his laboratory, and he’d said as much, in no uncertain terms, to the institute’s administrators. And Bonner hated him for that. Hated him quite publicly.

Herman Bonner ought to have no business at all in Luke Munsen’s office. And if he was poking around inside it at odd hours of the evening when he presumed he’d go unnoticed, then it meant that he was up to nastiness.

Ron knew that he was going to have to do something about it. There was no choice. Mixed as his feelings about Luke were at that moment, he couldn’t in good conscience look the other way. Luke was his friend; if a creep like Bonner was prowling around among Luke’s projects, Ron had to put a stop to it. Never mind the fact that the things Luke worked with were too dangerous to be tampered with by unfriendly hands.

It meant that Ron had to talk with the institute’s administrators, as soon as possible. First thing in the morning.

Shit.

It was the first thing that had happened all night that genuinely threatened to leave Ron unemployed. Janitors were unimportant enough that they were hard to fire under ordinary circumstances — Ron had worked with enough lazy janitors to know that from experience — and the fact that Ron had showed up at all on a night like this would make him enough of a hero that he’d be just about impossible to fire for a month or two. Ralph Hernandez would have a hell of a time getting rid of him, even if Ralph was feeling crazy. And the harsh words with Luke weren’t likely to do Ron any harm; Luke was a friend. But when Ron went to speak to administration — and he had to; if he was going to live with himself he didn’t have any choice — the minute he went to the administrators he was putting himself in the middle of a very nasty fight among the professional staff. Which would leave Bonner with a powerful need to get him.

And, sooner or later, the man would get him, too. And when he did it’d cost Ron his job.

Shit.

When Bonner was clear of the hallway, Ron checked Luke’s lab to see if whatever mischief Bonner had done was obvious or fixable. The doorknob didn’t turn when he tried to open it; when he checked it he found that it was locked. Which meant that Bonner had a key to Luke’s office. Where in the Hell would he have got a key? The sinking feeling in Ron’s stomach grew strong enough to make him feel ill.