“The lab.”
“Oh. Yes. Epstein.”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“The fire was set deliberately. It started near the lab. They did it when the wind was blowing east.”
“You know that? Know it for a fact? That it was deliberate?”
“Sure. Everybody knew it.”
“It never came out.”
“It didn’t become a story because they never caught anybody.” He got up, checked the coffeepot. “Almost ready.”
“How do you know it was deliberate?”
“Do you know what was going on at the lab?”
“I know what they were working on.”
“Eternal life.”
“Well,” I said, “I think they were talking about life extension.”
“ Indefinite. That was the term they were using.”
“Okay. Indefinite. What are we getting at?”
“There were a lot of people who didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“Like who?” I immediately began thinking about the White Clock Society.
He laughed again. His voice changed tone, and he began to sound as if he were talking to a child. “Some folks don’t think we were meant to live indefinitely. Forever.
We had a local church group, for example, thought what Dunninger was trying to do was sacrilegious.”
Now that I thought of it, I remembered having heard something about that. “The Universalists.”
“There were others. I remember people coming in from out of town. They were doing meetings. Writing letters. Collecting signatures on petitions. Getting folks upset. I always thought that’s why Dunninger took off.”
“You think he believed he was in danger?”
“I don’t know whether he thought they’d try to kill him or anything like that. But they were trying to intimidate him, and he didn’t strike me as a guy who stood up well to bullies.” He went back to the stove, moved the coffeepot around, decided it was okay, and poured three cups. “And religious types weren’t the only ones.”
“Who else?” I asked.
“Lamplighters.”
“The Lamplighters? Why would they care?” They were a service organization with outposts-that’s what they called their branches-in probably every major city in the Confederacy. They were a charity. Tried to take care of people who’d been left behind by the general society. The elderly, orphans, widows. When a new disease showed up, the Lamplighters put political pressure where it did some good and made sure the funding got taken care of. Several years ago when an avalanche took out a small town in Tikobee, the local government moved the survivors out and arranged to get everybody patched up, but it was the Lamplighters who went in long term, took care of the disabled, spent time with people who’d lost spouses, and saw to it that the kids got their education. Urquhart and Klassner had been Lamplighters.
“Yeah, they did a lot of good,” said Benny. “I’ll give you that. But it’s not the whole story. They can be fanatics if you get on their wrong side. If they decide you’re dangerous, somebody’s going to pollute the streams, or you’re fooling with something that could blow up, they could get pretty ugly.”
The coffee was good. The flavor was a little off what I was used to, a little minty, maybe. But it was better than the stuff I got at home. Benny shook his head at the sheer perfidy of the Lamplighters and how people like us could not know them for what they really were.
He had to be exaggerating. I thought of the Lamplighters as people who were forever arriving on disaster scenes to pass out hot beverages and provide blankets.
“They sent representatives to the lab to ask Dunninger what they were going to do to prevent the human race from stagnating when people stopped dying.”
“How do you know, Benny?”
“Because they always made sure everything they did got plenty of publicity. And the other side got put in the worst possible light. They thought death was a good idea.
Gets rid of the deadwood. So to speak. They actually said that. And when they didn’t get anywhere with the lab they got on the media. For a while we had demonstrators out there.”
“At Epstein.”
“Yes.” He rubbed the back of his head. “And then there were the Greenies.”
People who worried about the effect of population on the environment.
“Other people said they’d have to do away with the minimum subsistence payouts, because the government wouldn’t be able to afford to pay all the people who’d become eligible.
“It got so bad they had to hire security guards. At the lab.”
“Did you know any of them, Benny? The guards?”
He broke into a wide, leathery grin. “Damn, Alex,” he said, “I was one.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. I worked up there about six months.”
“So you knew Tom Dunninger.”
“I knew Mendoza, too. He was here a couple of times.”
“Did they get along?”
“Don’t know.” His face scrunched up while he considered the question. “My job was mostly outside.”
“How did Dunninger react to the opposition?”
“Well, he didn’t like it much. He made some efforts to reassure everyone. Gave interviews. Even attended a town meeting once. But it seemed as if it didn’t matter what he did, what he said, things just got worse.”
“How about Mendoza?”
“I don’t know that he ever got involved with the demonstrators. No reason for him to. I mean, he was just in and out a couple of times.”
“Were there any incidents while you were there? Anybody try to break into the lab?”
He swung his chair around, pulled a hassock forward, and put up his feet. “I don’t think anybody ever actually got into the lab who shouldn’t have been there. Not while I was there, anyhow.” He thought about it. “They got close. Right up to the doors a couple of times. People sticking signs under my nose. Making threats.”
“What kind of threats?”
“Oh, they were saying they’d close the place down. It got so that Dunninger wouldn’t go into town. We did his shopping for him. But conditions never really got completely out of hand. The idiots came and went. Sometimes for whole weeks we wouldn’t see anybody. And then they’d start showing up every day.”
“The police must have been involved.”
“Yes. They made some arrests. For trespassing. Or making threats. I really don’t remember the details.” He squinted. “People can really be sons of bitches when they want to.”
“What’d you think about it?”
“I thought the protestors were damned fools.”
“Why?”
“Because anybody who knew anything understood he wasn’t going to succeed.
We weren’t intended to live forever.” He thought about it. “On the other hand, if somebody actually figured out how to do it, I sure wouldn’t want to see anybody stop him.”
Twenty minutes later Alex and I were drifting over the Big River searching for the Epstein ruins that the marker said were down there. It turned out there weren’t any.
Benny had warned us there’d be nothing left, but we thought he was exaggerating, that there’d be something, a scorched wall, a few posts, a collapsed roof.
The trees came out to the river’s edge. They were relatively new growth, the older trees having been destroyed in the fire. There were still signs of destruction, fallen trunks, blackened stumps, but whether they were from the 1365 fire, or another one, there was really no way to know. Nor, I suppose, did it matter.
“Look for a bend in the river,” Benny had told us. “You can see a small island out there with a lot of rocks piled on it. The lab’s located just west of the bend, on the south bank.”
We found a few pipes sticking out of the ground, some buried paving, and the remnants of a power collector submerged in heavy brush. That was all.
The river was wide at that point. The island with the rocks would have taken a few minutes to swim to. I stood on the bank and wondered how the past sixty years might have been different had the fire of 1365 not happened.
SEVENTEEN
People seem to be hard-wired to get things wrong.